The Space Trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke Page A

apprentices had designed gadgets they wanted to try out, and were seeing if they worked in practice before they took them any further. Karl Hasse, our mathematical genius, was trying to build some new form of navigational device—but as he always hid it as soon as anybody came along, no one knew just what it was supposed to do.
    I learned more about spaceships while I was crawling round inside the Morning Star than I ever did from books or lectures. It was true that she was nearly a century old, but although the details have altered, the main principles of spaceship design have changed less than one might expect. You still have to have pumps, fuel tanks, air-purifiers, temperature regulators, and so on. The gadgets may change, but the jobs they must do remain the same.
    The information I absorbed aboard the Morning Star was not merely technical, by any means. I finished my training in weightlessness here: and I also learned to fight in free-fall. Which brings me to Ronnie Jordan.
    Ronnie was the youngest of the apprentices, about two years older than myself. He was a boisterous, fair-haired Australian—at least, he'd been born in Sydney, but had spent most of his time in Europe. As a result, he spoke three or four languages, sometimes accidentally slipping from one to the other.
    He was good-natured and light-hearted, and gave the impression that he'd never quite got used to zero gravity but still regarded it as a great joke. At any rate, he was always trying out new tricks, such as making a pair of wings and seeing how well he could fly with them. (The answer was—not very well. But perhaps the wings weren't properly designed.) Because of his high spirits, he was always getting into good-humoured fights with the other boys—and a fight under free-fall conditions is fascinating to watch.
    The first problem, of course, is to catch your opponent, which isn't at all easy if he refuses to cooperate—he can shoot off in so many directions. But even if he decides to play, there are further difficulties. Any kind of boxing is almost impossible: the first blow would send you flying apart. So the only practicable form of combat is wrestling. It usually starts with the two fighters floating in mid-air, as far as possible from any solid object. They grasp wrists, with their arms fully extended—and after that it's difficult to see exactly what happens. The air is full of flying limbs and slowly rotating bodies. By the rules of the game, you've won if you can keep your opponent against any wall for a count of five. This is much more difficult than it sounds, for he only has to give a good heave to send both of you flying out into the room again. Remember that as there's no gravity, you can't just sit on your victim until your weight tires him out.
    My first fight with Ronnie arose out of a political argument. Perhaps it seems funny that, out in space, Earth's politics matter at all. In a way they don't—at least, no one worries whether you're a citizen of the Atlantic Federation, the Panasiatic Union or the Pacific Confederacy. But there were plenty of arguments about which country was the best to live in, and as most of us had travelled a good deal everyone had different ideas.
    When I told Ronnie that he was talking nonsense he said, 'Them's fightin' words,' and before I knew what had happened I was pinned in a corner while Norman Powell lazily counted up to ten—to give me a chance. I couldn't escape, because Ronnie had his feet braced firmly against the other two walls forming the corner of the cabin.
    The next time I did slightly better, but Ronnie still won easily. Not only was he stronger than I was, but I didn't have the technique.
    In the end, however, I did succeed in winning—just once. It took a lot of careful planning, and maybe Ron had got over-confident as well.
    I realized that if I let him get me in a corner I was done for—he could use his favourite 'star-fish' trick and pin me down, by bracing himself against