Every six yards down the corridor he stepped through a bulkhead, and idly touched the heavy control boxes on either side of the doorway. Deliberately unfocusing his mind, Abel identified some of the letters above the switches M-T-R SC-N but they scrambled into a blur as soon as he tried to read the entire phrase. Conditioning was too strong. After he trapped her in the store-room Zenna had been able to read a few of the notices, but Dr Francis whisked 321 her away before she could repeat them. Hours later, when she came back, she remembered nothing.
As usual when he entered the store-room, he waited a few seconds before switching on the light, seeing in front of him the small disc of burning light that in his dreams expanded until it filled his brain like a thousand arc lights. It seemed endlessly distant, yet somehow mysteriously potent and magnetic, arousing dormant areas of his mind close to those which responded to his mother’s presence.
As the disc began to expand he pressed the switch tab.
To his surprise, the room remained in darkness. He fumbled for the switch, a short cry slipping involuntarily through his lips.
Abruptly, the light went on.
‘Hello, Abel,’ Dr Francis said easily, right hand pressing the bulb into its socket. ‘Quite a shock, that one.’ He leaned against a metal crate. ‘I thought we’d have a talk together about your essay.’ He took an exercise book out of his white plastic suit as Abel sat down stiffly. Despite his dry smile and warm eyes there was something about Dr Francis that always put Abel on his guard.
Perhaps Dr Francis knew too?
‘The Closed Community,’ Dr Francis read out. ‘A strange subject for an essay, Abel.’
Abel shrugged. ‘It was a free choice. Aren’t we really expected to choose something unusual?’
Dr Francis grinned. ‘A good answer. But seriously, Abel, why pick a subject like that?’
Abel fingered the seals on his suit. These served no useful purpose, but by blowing through them it was possible to inflate the suit. ‘Well, it’s a sort of study of life at the Station, how we all get on with each other. What else is there to write about? I don’t see that it’s so strange.’
‘Perhaps not. No reason why you shouldn’t write about the Station. All four of the others did too. But you called yours "The Closed Community". The Station isn’t closed, Abel, is it?’
‘It’s closed in the sense that we can’t go outside,’ Abel explained slowly. ‘That’s all I meant.’
‘Outside,’ Dr Francis repeated. ‘It’s an interesting concept. You must have given the whole subject a lot of thought. When did you first start thinking along these lines?’
‘After the dream,’ Abel said. Dr Francis had deliberately sidestepped his use of the word ‘outside’ and he searched for some means of getting to the point. In his pocket he felt the small plumbline he carried around. ‘Dr Francis, perhaps you can explain something to me. Why is the Station revolving?’
‘Is it?’ Dr Francis looked up with interest. ‘How do you know?’
Abel reached up and fastened the plumbline to the ceiling stanchion.
‘The interval between the ball and the wall is about an eighth of an inch greater at the bottom than at the top. Centrifugal forces are driving it outwards. I calculated that the Station is revolving at about two feet per second.’
Dr Francis nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s just about right,’ he said matter-of-factly. He stood up. ‘Let’s take a trip to my office. It looks as if it’s time you and I had a serious talk.’
The Station was on four levels. The lower two contained the crew’s quarters, two circular decks of cabins which housed the 14 people on board the Station. The senior clan was the Peters, led by Captain Theodore, a big stern man of taciturn disposition who rarely strayed from Control. Abel had never been allowed there, but the Captain’s son, Matthew, often described the hushed dome-like cabin filled with luminous dials and flickering lights, the strange humming music.
All the male members of the Peters clan worked in Control — grandfather Peters, a white-haired old man with humorous eyes, had been Captain before Abel was born — and with the Captain’s wife and Zenna they constituted the elite of the Station.
However, the Grangers, the clan to which Abel belonged, was in many respects more important, as he had begun to realize. The day-to-day running of the Station, the detailed programming of emergency drills, duty rosters and commissary menus, was the responsibility of Abel’s father, Matthias, and without his firm but flexible hand the Bakers, who cleaned the cabins and ran the commissary, would never have known what to do. And it was only the deliberate intermingling in Recreation which his father devised that brought the Peters and Bakers together, or each family would have stayed indefinitely in its own cabins.
