The Space Trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke Page B

natural to have no weight, and I had almost forgotten the meaning of the words 'up' and 'down'. Such matters as sucking liquids through tubes instead of drinking them from cups or glasses were no longer novelties but part of everyday life.
    I think there was only one thing I really missed on the Station. It was impossible to have a bath, the way you could on Earth. I'm very fond of lying in a hot tub until someone comes banging on the door to make certain I haven't fallen asleep. On the Station you could only have a shower, and even this meant standing inside a fabric cylinder and lacing it tight round your neck to prevent the spray escaping. Any large volume of water simply formed a big globe which would float around until it hit a wall. When that happened, some of it would break up into smaller drops which would go on wandering off on their own—but most of it would spread all over the surface it had touched, making a horrid mess.
    Over in the Residential Station, where there was gravity, they had baths and even a small swimming-pool. Everyone thought that this last idea was simply showing off.
    The rest of the staff, as well as the apprentices, had come to take me for granted and sometimes I was able to help in odd jobs. I'd learned as much as I could, without bothering people by asking too many questions, and had filled four thick notebooks with information and sketches. When I got back to Earth, I'd be able to write a book about the Station if I wanted to.
    As long as I kept in touch with Tim Benton or the Commander, I was now allowed to go more or less anywhere I liked. The place that fascinated me most was the observatory, where they had a small but powerful telescope that I could play with when no one else was using it.
    I never grew tired of looking at the Earth as it waxed and waned below. Usually the countries beneath us were clear of cloud, and I could get wonderfully distinct views of the lands over which we were hurtling. Because of our speed, the ground beneath was rolling back five miles every second. But as we were five hundred miles up, if the telescope was kept tracking correctly you could keep an object in the field of view for quite a long time, before it got lost in the mists near the horizon. There was a neat automatic gadget on the telescope mounting that took care of this: once you'd set the instrument on anything, it kept swinging at just the right speed.
    As we swept round the world, I could survey in each hundred minutes a belt stretching as far north as Japan, the Gulf of Mexico and the Red Sea. To the south I could see as far as Rio de Janeiro, Madagascar and Australia. It was a wonderful way of learning geography, though because of the Earth's curvature the more distant countries were very much distorted and it was hard to recognize them from ordinary maps.
    Lying as it did above the Equator, the orbit of the Station passed directly above two of the world's greatest rivers—the Congo and the Amazon. With my telescope I could see right into the jungles and had no difficulty at all in picking out individual trees and the larger animals. The great African Reservation was a wonderful place to watch, because if I hunted around I could find almost any animal I cared to name.
    I also spent a lot of time looking outwards, away from Earth. Although I was, for all practical purposes, no nearer the Moon and planets than I had been down at home, now that I was outside the atmosphere I could get infinitely clearer views. The great lunar mountains seemed so close that I wanted to reach out and run my finger along their ragged crests. Where it was night on the Moon I could see some of the lunar colonies shining away like stars in the darkness. But the most wonderful sight of all was the take-off of a space-ship. When I had a chance, I'd listen to the radio and make a note of departure times. Then I'd go to the telescope, aim it at the right part of the Moon, and wait.
    All I'd see at first would be a circle