Lastly, there was Dr Francis. He didn’t belong to any of the three clans. Sometimes Abel asked himself where Dr Francis had come from, but his mind always fogged at a question like that, as the conditioning blocks fell like bulkheads across his thought trains (logic was a dangerous tool at the Station). Dr Francis’ energy and vitality, his relaxed good humour — in a way, he was the only person in the Station who ever made any jokes were out of character with everyone else. Much as he sometimes disliked Dr Francis for snooping around and being a know-all, Abel realized how dreary life in the Station would seem without him.
Dr Francis closed the door of his cabin and gestured Abel into a seat. All the furniture in the Station was bolted to the floor, but Abel noticed that Dr Francis had unscrewed his chair so that he could tilt it backwards. The huge vacuum-proof cylinder of the doctor’s sleeping tank jutted from the wall, its massive metal body able to withstand any accident the Station might suffer. Abel hated the thought of sleeping in the cylinder — luckily the entire crew quarters were accident-secure — and wondered why Dr Francis chose to live alone up on A-Deck.
‘Tell me, Abel,’ Dr Francis began, ‘has it ever occurred to you to ask why the Station is here?’
Abel shrugged. ‘Well, it’s designed to keep us alive, it’s our home.’
‘Yes, that’s true, but obviously it has some other object than just our own survival. Who do you think built the Station in the first place?’
‘Our fathers, I suppose, or grandfathers. Or their grandfathers.’
‘Fair enough. And where were they before they built it?’
Abel struggled with the reductio ad absurdum. ‘I don’t know, they must have been floating around in mid-air!’
Dr Francis joined in the laughter. ‘Wonderful thought. Actually it’s not that far from the truth. But we can’t accept that as it stands.’
The doctor’s self-contained office gave Abel an idea. ‘Perhaps they came from another Station? An even bigger one?’
Dr Francis nodded encouragingly. ‘Brilliant, Abel. A first-class piece of deduction. All right, then, let’s assume that. Somewhere away from us, a huge Station exists, perhaps a hundred times bigger than this one, maybe even a thousand. Why not?’
‘It’s possible,’ Abel admitted, accepting the idea with surprising ease.
‘Right. Now you remember your course in advanced mechanics — the imaginary planetary system, with the orbiting bodies held together by mutual gravitational attraction? Let’s assume further that such a system actually exists. Okay?’
‘Here?’ Abel said quickly. ‘In your cabin?’ Then he added ‘In your sleeping cylinder?’
Dr Francis sat back. ‘Abel, you do come up with some amazing things. An interesting association of ideas. No, it would be too big for that. Try to imagine a planetary system orbiting around a central body of absolutely enormous size, each of the planets a million times larger than the Station.’ When Abel nodded, he went on. ‘And suppose that the big Station, the one a thousand times larger than this, were attached to one of the planets, and that the people in it decided to go to another planet. So they build a smaller Station, about the size of this one, and send it off through the air. Make sense?’
‘In a way.’ Strangely, the completely abstract concepts were less remote than he would have expected. Deep in his mind dim memories stirred, interlocking with what he had already guessed about the Station. He gazed steadily at Dr Francis. ‘You’re saying that’s what the Station is doing? That the planetary system exists?’
Dr Francis nodded. ‘You’d more or less guessed before I told you. Unconsciously, you’ve known all about it for several years. A few minutes from now I’m going to remove some of the conditioning blocks, and when you wake up in a couple of hours you’ll understand everything. You’ll know then that in fact the Station is a space ship, flying from our home planet, Earth, where our grandfathers were born, to another planet millions of miles away, in a distant orbiting system. Our grandfathers always lived on Earth, and we are the first people ever to undertake such a journey. You can be proud that you’re here. Your grandfather, who volunteered to come, was a great man, and we’ve got to do everything to make sure that the Station keeps running.’
Abel nodded quickly. ‘When do we get there — the planet we’re flying to?’
Dr Francis looked down at his hands, his face growing sombre. ‘We’ll never get there, Abel. The journey takes too long. This is a multi-generation space vehicle, only our children will land and they’ll be old by the time they do. But don’t worry, you’ll go on thinking of the Station as your only home, and that’s deliberate, so that you and your children will be happy here.’
