by Jerry
The bravado was still his only defense when he was known as the boy who’d flunked out of MIT. His whole attitude seemed to say, “So what? I’m still a smarter better engineer than all the rest of you clods combined, and that goes for you fourth-rate teachers, too.” As a result, he had plenty of time for studying. No one at school was particularly anxious for his company.
The funny part of it was that he was right. As a child, the other kids couldn’t make him cry.
As an engineering student, he was better than anyone else in his class. After two semesters, with a string of ‘A’ marks to his credit, he re-applied at MIT and was accepted on a probationary basis. He graduated seventh in his class—held back only by his poor freshman marks—and was immediately snapped up by Interplanetal Business Machines.
Interplanetal ran him through the normal engineer trainee courses, familiarizing him with the company’s line of equipment. He sailed through, fascinated by this actual concrete usage of what had been only theoretical knowledge at school, and since he finished first in his class he was given his choice of geographical area of assignment.
By now, bravado was an ingrained characteristic of Harvey Ricks. Interplanetal maintained a Moon Division, which built computers and office equipment for lease to the other Moon industries, and all personnel there were volunteers on a two-year contract. It was inevitable that Harvey Ricks would volunteer.
THROUGHOUT his life, bravado had made him do what he could but didn’t want to do. He could hold the tears back, though he didn’t want to have to, and his attitude had forced him to prove it, time and time again. He could buckle down and study, though he’d have preferred to loaf, and his own challenge to his classmates had forced him to do it. He could spend two years on the Moon, though he would much rather have lived that time in New York or San Jose, and so here he was on his way to the Moon.
He tried to stop himself from being such a wise guy, but he always failed. Before he knew what was happening, he’d have his mouth wide open and his foot in it up to the knee. Like with this Cargomaster, Blair. He hadn’t wanted to bait the man, he hadn’t wanted to show off and act the smart-aleck, but he’d done it just the same. If, at any time in the next month of the journey, he felt himself slipping, he’d have no one to stiffen his backbone for him but himself. If he’d only kept his mouth shut and minded his own business, he could have relaxed, knowing that an older and wiser hand was always there, ready and willing to help him keep his balance. This way, as usual, he had put himself in the position where he had to rely totally on himself.
Lying face down in the bunk, chin on the squarish foam-rubber pillow, he eyed the three lights in front of him grimly and silently cursed himself for forty-seven kinds of fool. He was the reverse of the boy who cried wolf too much. He cried wolf too seldom. One of these days he would send all the hunters away and a wolf would come along too big for him to handle by himself. That day, Harvey Ricks would have his reckoning.
He wondered if the day was coming sometime in the next month.
The orange light flashed on.
Behind him, the voice of the Cargomaster came softly, talking to them all. “You fellows take it easy now,” he was saying. “Breathe deep and slow. Don’t get all tensed up. Don’t hold on to those handles so tight you bunch your shoulder muscles all up. Don’t try to kick those foot bars right off the bunks. Just relax. If you tense your bodies all up, you’ll take a lot worse licking than if you just lie easy. You can get yourselves a broken bone just by being too tense when we blast. Inhale slow and easy, now. Exhale slow and easy. Just keep a light grip on the handles, lie easy and relaxed, like you were going to doze off in a minute.”
The voice droned softly in the small room, and Ricks knew the man was trying to relax them just by the sound of his voice. But for Ricks, with his perverse bravado, it had just the opposite effect. His body kept tensing up and tensing up, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. His hands, gripping the chrome-plated handles as though they would snap them in two, were sweating already, and his shoulders were aching with strain. His feet pushed so hard against the bar that his knees were completely off the bunk.
I’m going to panic, he thought, I’m going to scream. I’m going to jump up off this bunk and get myself killed when we blast.
Only shame kept him in the bunk, only shame kept the scream unsounded in his throat. He had acted the bigshot with the Cargomaster, acted the know-it-all. He couldn’t give in, he couldn’t turn around and show himself a phony and a weakling.
The red light flicked on.
Sweat ribboned down his face. The back of his shirt clung to him, soaked through with perspiration. His collar w7as too tight, cutting off air, and his belt buckle was grinding into his middle.
He pushed his chin down into the pillow, and stared at the red light. He had to swallow, his mouth was full of saliva. But he was afraid to. If he was swallowing when the blast came, he could strangle. That had happened in the past, more than once. Perspiration stung his eyes, but he was afraid to blink. He had to keep staring at the red light, staring at the red light.
A heavy iron press slammed into his back, grinding him down into the bunk, stomping his feet down off the bar, shoving his face into the pillow. His mouth was full of saliva, dribbling out now between his lips, staining the pillow, mixing with his perspiration. The bunched muscles of his shoulders whined in agony, and his hands, numb now, slipped from the handles and lay limp, fingers curled, before his eyes.
THE red light was still on, waving and changing as he tried to keep watching it. His eyes burned and, despite himself, the lids came down, as though weighted with heavy magnets.
With closed eyes came nausea. He had no equilibrium any more, no balance. There was no longer any up or down, there was only himself, crushed between the bunk and the heavy iron press.
He held his breath, closed his throat, kept it down. Breakfast swirled and lumped in his stomach, wanting to come up, but he kept it down. He couldn’t have it, he couldn’t stand it, to have the Cargomaster see him lying in his own sickness. He kept it down.
The iron press went away, with a suddenness that terrified him. He could breathe again, he could swallow, he could move his arms and legs, he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes and look at the blessed green light.
The Cargomaster was on his feet in the middle of the room, by the ladder, saying, “Okay, fellows, that’s it for a while. We’ll be at a steady one-G for a while now. There’ll be another little jolt in maybe twenty minutes, when we come into phase with the Station. In the meantime, you all can rest easy.”
One of the other two, Standish, said timidly, “Excuse me, are there any—do you have any, uh, bags?”
“Sure thing. Right in that little slot under the light panel.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t feel bad. You haven’t really been initiated into space till you’ve lost at least one meal. How are you other two doing?”
“Okay, I guess,” said Miller, the third one.
“Fine. And you, Ricks?”
“I’m doing just lovely. This is a great little old roller-coaster you’ve got here.”
Blair grinned. “I thought you’d like it,” he said.
Harvey Ricks had proved himself again.
STATION One was leaving perigee, hurtling around the Earth on the long elliptical curve that would take it, fifteen days from now, eighty-four thousand miles towards the Moon. The lighter came curving up from Earth into the path of the Station’s orbit and fifty miles ahead. As the Station overtook it, it slowly increased its speed, until the two were neck-and-neck. Slowly, the lighter pilot maneuvered his ship closer to the station, until the magnetic grapples caught, holding the ship to the curving grid jutting out from the hatchway in the high center of the doughnut. A closed companionway slid out along the grid, attached itself to the airlock in the side of the lighter, and formed a hermetic seal. The lock was open, and the Station cargo handlers came aboard for the unloading.
Glenn Blair and the Station Manager, Irv Mendel, oversaw the unloading, making the appropriate row of checkmarks as each item was transferred from lighter to station. Blair then went back up and got the three engineers, all of whom seemed a little shaken by this first stage of the journey, though Ricks was doing his best to hide it. “Don’t worry,” Blair assured them, “the worst part of the trip is done with. From now on, it’s quarter-G all the way.”
Standish, who had so far been sick twice and who was now holding tight to the nearest support as though afraid he might float up and out of sight any minute, grinned weakly and said, “I don’t know which is worse, too much gravity or too little. Do people really get used to this?”
“In a couple of days,” Blair told him, “you’ll be running around as happy as a feather in an updraft. Once you get used to it, there’s nothing in the universe as much fun as weighing only one-quarter what you’re used to.”
“I hope I get used to it soon,” said Standish, “before I starve to death.”
Blair led the way down the ladder and through the companionway to the Station. The three passengers were introduced to Irv Mendel, who told them how much they’d enjoy quarter-G in a couple days, and then they were shown their cubicles, in Section One, which would be their home for the next fifteen days. Their luggage—thirty-eight pounds permissable—had preceded them into the rooms, which were small but functional. There was, in each room, a bed and a chair and a small writing table, a lamp and a narrow closet and a tiny bathroom complete with shower stall and WC. The floor was uncarpeted black plastic and the walls and ceiling were cream-painted metal. It took the engineers a while to get used to the idea that the floor was not what they would have thought of as the ‘bottom’ of the Station from the outside. The floor of their cubicles was, on the outside, the outer edge of the Station. The center of the Station was not to the left or right, it was directly overhead.
The outer ring of the Station was divided into twelve sections. Sections Nine, Ten and Eleven housed the permanent Station personnel, including the weathermen and television relay men and so on. Sections Five, Six and Seven were cargo holds, and Sections One, Two and Three were transient quarters. (The three engineers were in Section Two.) Sections Four, Eight and Twelve contained the utilities, the sources of light and heat and air, as well as the chow hall and food storage. At the bulkhead separating each Section, floor and ceiling met at an angle of thirty degrees. A man could do a loop-the-loop simply by walking dead ahead down the main corridor until he came back to his starting point.
Once the three engineers were safely settled in their cubicles, Blair took the elevator back up to the center of the Station, where Irv Mendel was waiting for him in his office. Blair went through the same sort of paperwork as he’d done with Cy Brad-
dock, and when they were finished Mendel said, “How are these three kids? Going to give us any trouble?”
“I’m not sure. Standish has a pretty weak stomach, it may take him a while to get adjusted, but I think he’ll just grin and bear it. Miller’s all right. I’m not too sure about Ricks. He’s pushing himself a little hard, one of these guys who wants to be an old salt before he ever gets into the water. If he cracks, he may do it in style.”
Mendel leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head. “You know,” he said, “when I was a kid, all I ever wanted was to get out here in space. I grew up reading about Moon-shots and orbiting satellites and I thought, ‘By Golly, there’s the frontier of tomorrow. There’s where the adventurers are going to be, the explorers and the prospectors and the soldiers of fortune. That’s the place for me, boy.’ Romance and adventure, that’s the way I saw it.” He grinned and shook his head. “I forgot all about the twentieth century’s most significant invention: Red tape. It never even occurred to me that space would be a job like this. Paperwork all over the place, schedules to meet and financial reports to make out, young fuzzy-faced kids to be nursemaided. It never even occurred to me.”
“If you hate it so much,” Blair told him, “why not go on back to Earth?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what I weigh down there? Two hundred and fourteen pounds. Maybe more by now, I’m not sure. Besides, it’s even worse down there. Paperwork up to your nose. It’s only half that high up here. If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. Lighter gone?”
“Long gone. Halfway back to Earth by now. Left while you were with your Boy Scouts.”
“So we’re on our way again.” Blair got lazily to his feet, and stretched. “After a couple days on Earth,” he said, “quarter-G feels like a good quiet drunk. Think I’ll go lie down in the rack and think about philosophy. See you later.”
“Right. Hey, by the way.” Blair turned at the door. “By what way?”
“This is your last round trip, isn’t it? Your two years are up.”
“It was up last trip. I re-contracted.”
Mendel grinned. “Member of the club now, huh? I thought you’d do that. Welcome aboard.” Blair shrugged self-consciously. “You know how it is,” he said. “Every time I go back, Earth gets a little heavier. Besides, I like the soft life.”
“You want it really soft,” Mendel told him, “you put in for station duty. All we do is float around and around, draw our pay, and look at the pretty scenery.”
“If that boy Ricks blows up,” Blair said, “we’ll both have plenty to do. I’m going to rack out, I’ll see you later.”
“See you, nursemaid.”
Blair took the elevator down to the outer ring, and went to his cubicle in Section Two, next to the one occupied by Ricks, across the corridor from Standish and Miller. He stretched out on his bed and half-dozed, as his body gradually got reoriented to quarter-gravity.
Twenty minutes later, the meteor hit.
IT SHOULD never have happened. The Station had full radar vision, and so the meteor should have been seen long before it struck. The Station was powered, and should have been able to goose itself out of the meteor’s path. So it should never have happened. But it did.
It was one of those million-to-one shots. The meteor, a chunk of space-rock about six feet in diameter, had come boiling across the Solar System, past the sun and the two innermost planets, headed on a near-collision course with Earth. It had actually dipped into the Earth’s atmosphere, which slowed it somewhat, but not enough for it to be captured by Earth’s gravity. It had shot out of the atmosphere again, moving more slowly than before, now red-hot from atmospheric friction, and shortly thereafter it plowed into the Space Station from behind.
From the moment it had first become a potential danger to the Station, it had been unseeable. It was directly between the Station and the massive ball of Earth. It was the one thin segment of space where the radar’s vision was unclear, and it was out of that segment that the juggernaut had come.
The impact could have been worse. In the first place, the meteor was not now traveling at its normal top speed. In the second place, the meteor and the Station were traveling in approximately the same direction, so that the Station, in effect, rolled with the punch. The space-rock broke through the outer hull. Whether or not it penetrated the inner hull no one was immediately sure.
The strike was in Section Five, containing the cargo, with it the seven aluminum crates for QB. At the instant of impact, even before the meteor had ground to a halt, an alarm bell rang in Section Five. The bell meant that the bulkhead doors to that section would be closed in ten seconds.
There was only one person in Section Five at the time, a crewman named Gilmore, who’d been checking the security of the lashings on the cargo. Constant strike drills had made his reaction immediate and instinctive: he ran for
the nearest door. He made it, too, all but his left shoe. The bulkhead door neatly snicked off the heel of the shoe as it slammed across the doorway and sealed shut. Gilmore’s shoe was ruined and his sock slightly grazed, but his foot was untouched.
Throughout the rest of the Station, another bell was ringing, this one with a deeper tone and a two-beat rhythm. Harvey Ricks heard it and leaped up from his bunk, forgetting the discomfort that hadn’t yet abated, despite the cheery words of the Cargomaster and the Station Manager. The bell rang on, and Ricks stood quivering in his cubicle, body tensed for fight or flight, mind bewildered and frightened.
The cubicle door jolted open and Blair’s face stuck in long enough for him to shout, “Suit up! It’s under your bunk!” Then he was gone again, and Ricks heard him delivering the same call to Standish and Miller, across the corridor.
Ricks, incredibly grateful for any excuse to be in motion, lunged across the cubicle toward his bunk. He misjudged the force of his leap, with the lesser gravity, and tumbled head over heels across the bunk and into the metal wall. He lay crouched on the bunk, gripping his knees, and whispered desperately to himself, “Take it easy, take it easy, take it easy.”
When he could move without trembling, he got to his feet and dragged the spacesuit out from under the bunk. In the company course, preparatory to leaving on this trip, he’d learned how to don a spacesuit, and he clambered rapidly into this one, closing the inner and outer zippers, and then searched under the bunk again and dragged out the helmet. As he got to his feet, the bell stopped.
RICKS bit down hard on his lower lip, willing himself to be calm. Carefully, he donned the helmet and went through the series of safety checks he’d been taught. Faceplate open, he put his fingers to the row of buttons at the suit’s waist. First finger, left hand; helmet lamp: It worked, he could see it shining against the opposite wall. Click off. First finger, right hand; air intake: It worked, he could hear the faint hissing below his right ear. Cautiously, he closed the faceplate and inhaled. The oxygen mixture was rich, but good. Click off, faceplate open. Second finger, left hand; heat unit: It worked, he could immediately feel the suit warming against his legs and arms. Click off. Second finger, right hand; water intake: It worked, a thin dribble of lukewarm water emerged from the tube in the corner of his mouth. Click off.