Atomic Station by Frank Belknap Long

It was incredible and a little frightening. The rocket ship was within a half million miles of the Station, but as yet no reply had come to the frantic signals which Roger Sheldon had been sending out at ten second intervals.

He sat before the observation glass in the control room, a big man with the competent hands of an experienced navigator, and a curious mobility of expression which seemed out of keeping with the precise movements which those hands were making on the board.

His face was that of a man who had gazed on great unfathomable star fields smouldering in the depths of space and then—had deliberately curbed his exaltation and turned back to concern himself with the little affairs of Earth.

In three months and two days Roger Sheldon had passed completely beyond the Sun's gravitational tug into the utter darkness, the chill bleak immensity of interstellar space. To have accomplished more he would have bartered all the years of his youth. He had hardly dared hope to accomplish as much.

Now he was returning to the Station with his thoughts in a turmoil. His nerves were so taut he was afraid to relax even for the brief instant it would have taken him to shake a few grains of amytal into his palm and inhale the fumes.

For two generations the Station had encircled the Earth, an outpost of security bright with promise, the concrete embodiment of humanity's determination not to destroy itself.

While atomic research had remained in the uranium fission stage, the vast laboratory facilities of Earth had not endangered humanity. Even the first atomic bombs had not placed an intolerable strain on man's capacity to survive the hazards of working together toward a shared goal.