by Hank Davis
“This one does,” Holt said. “I want to get back where I belong.”
“Sure,” Swanberg said. “Don’t misunderstand me, Jim.” A grin stretched his mouth, less a smile than a baring of teeth. “I’m scared worse than you are.”
“Wanna bet?”
Silence closed in again. Holt tried frantically to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound too stupid. Speculation on what the trouble with the rocket was . . . but that was being computed, not guessed at, down on Base, where they had not only the data Swanberg sent but information telemetered from the entire ship . . . Continue the God argument? No, he and Bill had left their sophomore years behind them . . . . Sentimental reminiscences about wives and kids? Cannonballs! Laura and Janie—oh. Janie gal—
“Canaveral to Aeolus. Canaveral to Aeolus.”
The voice was dim, wavering across the scale, nearly drowned in hoots and squeals and buzzes. So fierce was the ionic current beyond this hull that a tight, hard-driven FM beam could barely get though. But Swanberg leaped in his chair to switch on the transmitter. Holt beat him to it.
“Do you receive me, Aeolus? Cana—”
“Aeolus to Canaveral,” Holt rattled through a mouth full of cotton and pepper. “We read you. What’s the word?”
The voice dropped formalities. It shook. “We’ve identified your trouble. I’m afraid—the—your main discharge valve is stuck. Probably a thin seal of ice, due to condensation last night when the air was so damp. A, a little water vapor in that cranny—you know?—normally the rocket exhaust would flush it out, but in this case—”
“Get to the point!” Holt screamed, for the voice was fading away every second. “What do we do?”
“Can’t cut out the safety circuits and blow the valve open with a minimal jet,” came the remnant of answer. “Ordinarily you could, but—” Static sheeted.
“I know that,” Swanberg barked. “The rad screen’s in the same hookup, to save weight. We’d fry. I helped install the blinking thing, you! What can we do?”
A gulp: “Someone . . . got to go out the airlock . . . crawl around behind, into the tube, bust the ice loose by hand—one of you—” Then there was only the seething.
Holt stared at a meter face for an indefinite while. Eventually, he glanced at Swanberg. The big man was finishing a slide rule calculation.
“I suppose you know the magnetic deflection effect drops off on a steep inverse square curve,” Swanberg said without tone. “If a guy went outside here in the middle of the Van Allen, even hugging the hull, he’d get a lethal dose in something like ten minutes. How long would he need to free the valve and get back inside?”
“Half an hour, at least,” Holt heard himself answer. “It’s a clumsy business, working in free space.”
They fell silent again.
Tom Zellman looked straight into the pickup. As soon as the news arrived, he had ducked out to change his sports shirt—although it was his trademark—for a dark suit and sincere tie. Now he spoke in measured cadence.
“You have just seen an interview with General Buckler, commander of Cape Canaveral Base, the man on whose shoulders has fallen the agonizing responsibility of choosing who shall live and who shall die,” he said. “General Buckler did not, of course, have time to explain the situation in detail.” (General Buckler, in point of fact, had retreated so far into his military shell that getting a dozen words from him had been like milking a constipated cow. Hysterical reaction; this kind of publicity could crumple a career. But Zellman would cover for him; such IOU’s were always collectible later.) “So let me try, Mr. and Mrs. America. You want to know what faces your boys out there. Savage cold, blazing heat, whizzing meteorites, weightlessness, raw vacuum . . . and now the deadly, blasting radiation of the charged particle zone in which they are trapped.
“Because one valve has stuck, the main jet on their capsule won’t fire. The side jets are only for steering. Their small separate motors can’t burn long enough to bring the capsule down out of orbit. It won’t be hard to get that vital part unstuck. Half an hour or less, and the third stage rocket is free to come home again. But—that half-hour must be spent outside the hull. The force screen that protects Billy and Jimmy from the radiation inside the cabin cannot protect the man who goes out. He will get such a searing blast through his spacesuit that no medical science can save him. In a few days he will be dead. But his comrade,” (oops!) “his friend will come down to Earth unharmed.” Zellman dropped into the upper bass register. “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.”
The teleboard behind the cameras had been forming words for some seconds. Zellman crooked a finger beneath his desk. A boy came running and handed him a sheet of paper. Zellman unfolded it and spent thirty seconds letting emotions play across his face. Then he lowered the paper—carefully, so the audience couldn’t see it was blank—and raised the pitch and speed of his delivery.
“Flash! Three more tracking stations have locked onto the capsule. This means that continuous two-way contact can be maintained. Billy and Jimmy can’t see us, but our voices, our prayers, can come to them. By special arrangement, this network will have the honor of preparing the unofficial messages they can now receive. Do you hear me, Jimmy and Billy? You are not alone. One hundred and ninety million of your fellow Americans are with you, fighting, suffering, praying with you.” The teleboard wrote: standing by with janie still can’t get laurie. “But you don’t want to hear me talk,” Zellman said, venturing a gallant smile. “We have contacted Jimmy’s wife, Janie Holt, and his four children, Pete, Hughie, Susie, and little Gail. The engineer is signaling me that we can go on the air, Jimmy, direct from your own home to you. Do you hear me?” Faintly, scratchily, as if it were a midge caught somewhere inside the blackness of a telephone receiver, there came: “Holt speaking. I read you.” The engineer scowled and twiddled knobs in his cage. The sound wasn’t going onto the TV frequencies very well. But his assistant nodded, and a monitor unit came to life beside Zellman’s desk. The visual transmission across the country would be split-screen, one side showing himself in the blockhouse TV booth on Base, the other side showing the scene in the monitor: Holt’s family in their house downtown.
Jane Holt was small and dark like her husband. The plain black dress showed her figure to advantage, and the makeup man had done a good job on her and the kids. They were well posed too, the boys on either side of her chair, the girl at her knee and the baby in her arms.
“Hello, Janie,” said Zellman with his Undertaker’s Special smile.
“Hello . . . Tom.” He wished she wouldn’t speak quite so thinly.
“In a minute, Janie, we’ll put you through to your Jimmy. But first, wouldn’t you like to say a word to the rest of your family? Your family and his—the great, warm, wonderful family of America, hanging on the edge of their television screens, hoping, loving, and praying. Their hearts are with you at this moment. Believe me, they are; I know those wonderful people so well. Just a word, Janie?”
Whoever had set up the idiot board behind the camera in her place knew his job; her eyes seemed to look straight from the screen, into the viewer’s. There hadn’t been time to rehearse her, so her delivery was rather mechanical—
“—Thank you so much, each and every one of you. I, I know how much Jimmy thanks you too—”
—but on the whole, Zellman thought, she was effective. Harry had always been able to whip out a fast script with zing in it.
The teleboard said: still can’t get laurie stop doors locked and curtains drawn stop doesn’t answer phone stop hodgkins and burr camping on her porch with other networks men and reporters.
“—God’s will be done. But oh, we do hope Jimmy comes back safe!”
Having finished, Jane sat at a loss. Her kids stared woodenly into the camera, and the baby started to cry. Zellman said hastily, “Thank you, Janet. Have you been in touch with Laurie Swanberg yet? You know her well, don’t you?”
“Yes. No, I mean, I haven’t heard from her. I . . . I tried to phone . . . we ought to be together, oughtn’t we? . . . but—” Jane drew a deep breath and flung out: “She’s probably off by herself, with her two children.”
“I’ll switch you over to your husband now,” Zellman said before a crisis was precipitated.
“Jimmybuck,” Jane said like a sleepwalker.
“Hi, kid,” said the voice torn by static.
“How . . . how are you?”
“Okay so far. Sweating out the Old Man’s decision.”
“Jimmy—come back. Tell your daddy to come back.” Hughie began to blubber. “We need you so.”
“Hey, wait—” Holt’s response was lost in the crackling.
“Jimmybuck, I love you,” Jane said. She began to cry, too.
“Same here, kid. All youse kids. But—” The static chose that exact moment to let up, so the harshness came through. “This is no place to say it, huh? We’ll do whatever the Old Man tells us, Bill and me. So long, darling.”
“Jimmy!” she called, once and again. Only the static answered. Until Swanberg said, recognizable as himself: “I think we better cut off transmission for a while.”
“Is that you, Billy?” Zellman asked.
“This is Swanberg, yes.”
“Billy, we’ve been trying as hard as we can to get your Laurie for you, but—”
“Aeolus to Canaveral,” Swanberg said. “Over and out.” There was a distinct snick. The static went off the air.
That bastard!
Zellman turned to Jane in the screen. She was weeping, quite prettily. But beyond a certain point in affairs like this, you risked a public squawk. “I think we had best leave you for a while, Janie,” he said, sweet and low. “Not alone, of course. You will never be alone again; our hearts will always be with you.”
She whirled on him and screamed: “I’ve played your game! Why not? It might get him back. And we’ve got four children and she only has two!”
Luckily, Zellman and the camera crews had seen that coming, and had a delay circuit to help them. None of her outburst went onto the air.
The teleboard said: billy’s mother contacted in twin falls and consents to interview but no script. Zellman signaled “Stand by” and his order was phoned to Idaho. Better space the tear-jerking scenes further apart. He switched to outside views of the Holt and Swanberg houses, with his own commentary. The state police were breaking up the traffic jams.
Whoa! Laurie herself came out on the porch. She swatted three reporters aside and yelled for a cop and got him to chase everybody off her grounds. There was no chance for closeups; her door slammed again before a telecamera could arrive. But even from a distance—what a scene, what a scene!
Of course, she wasn’t doing her husband’s chances any good. Buckler wasn’t dumb enough to sentence the more popular man to death . . . Trouble was, though, Swanberg was a big, good-looking, outdoors type and not just any slob rocketeer, but a co-inventor of the rad screen. Popularity . . .
The teleboard awoke. Zellman surged from his chair. He almost didn’t find words, this was so big. He actually did forget to signal for a sheet of paper.
“Flash! Here’s the word from Base headquarters. General Buckler has issued an announcement. Quote: ‘Not only are Mr. Holt and Mr. Swanberg both valuable members of our project and citizens of our community, they are both civilians. As such, they lie beyond my authority to give more than normal orders, and this is not a normal situation. I have therefore sent a special request to the President that he decide which of them should perform the task in question. A reply is expected shortly.’
“Unquote. That was General Buckler’s decision: to let the President of the United States choose, in the name of all America. While we wait, anxiously and prayerfully, here is a word from—”
Falling and falling, Swanberg thought. And now the silence had begun to press inward. Still he heard click, buzz, whirr, whuff; lately he had been hearing the blup-blup of his heartbeat. (Maybe that was because it had gotten irregular, sometimes skipping so that he jerked in his harness and tried not to gasp.) Yet the silence grew.
Imagination, he understood irritably. Silence wasn’t a thing, it was an absence of sound, just as the void was an absence of matter. His sensation of black nothing eating in toward the core of himself was purely subjective, based on no more than . . . well, reality. The universe was in fact a trillion light-years of emptiness wherein a few sand grains were lost.
No, now you’re thinking like Jim. Size hasn’t got anything to do with importance. Vacuum and gamma radiation are real, sure. But so’s the sunlight on a mountain lake, and Laura, and—He shook his weary head and turned to Holt. The pilot had tuned radio reception so far down that they could hear only a murmur; but he was alert for anything important. “What’s being sent us now?” Swanberg asked.
Holt put his ear close to the receiver. “The Reverend Norbert Victor Poole, author of the best-selling book The Strength in Confident Living, will deliver us a message of hope shortly. And the Emperor of Abyssinia has added his official best wishes to those of other governments.”
“Yeah,” Swanberg mumbled.
Presently: “If they don’t get off their dead ends and reach a decision soon, we’ll have to toss a coin.”
“Can’t toss a coin in free-fall, even if we had one,” Holt said. “Gotta match fingers. You know, odd or even number of fingers spread at the same time. If you match me, you win, otherwise I do. Unless you’d rather it was the other way around.”
Swanberg checked the odds. “Makes no difference.”
“Maybe we should’a done it that way in the first place,” Holt said. “Instead of asking Base for orders. But I just automatically figured—or didn’t I have the nerve? Better this way. Let an outsider give the word, backed by public opinion if not by law, and the unlucky one has got to go, period. But if we matched, and I lost . . . dunno what I’d do.”
“Scared?” Swanberg asked, forcing a smile.
“Christ, yes. Worse every minute. Why don’t those sods decide?”
“Would you like to make a choice like that . . . for somebody else?”
“I’d get it over with. I would! Judas, Bill, you aren’t human, sitting there so quiet and—Why won’t Laura talk to you?”
“With a planetful of morons listening in?” Swanberg snapped. “We know what we’re thinking right now, she and I. It’s nobody else’s business.”
“Hey!” He saw Holt stiffen in the spacesuit. The pilot reached a fist toward him. “Do you mean Janie—What’re you getting at? Spit it out!”
“Sorry. I’m awfully sorry,” Swanberg exclaimed in dismay. “I didn’t mean anything. Honest. Your arrangements are your own affair. She’s got to do what she thinks is right.”
Holt unclenched his fist. The hand drifted limply between them. “I’m sorry too,” he muttered. “I blew my top. She did embarrass the hell out of me.” Suddenly he laughed. “What are we doing, being embarrassed? One of us is going to die in an hour or so.”
“No, he’ll take several days to die, on Earth,” Swanberg said, stolidly, since that was his best defense against panic. “They’ll send him wherever he asks.” He paused. “They might even let him alone.”
“Fat chance,” Holt said.
Swanberg fumbled for words. “If . . . if you’re the loser, Jim . . . I’ll see to it that your family—”
“Oh, they’ll be left well off, moneywise,” Holt said. “Yours too, I suppose. Bill—”
“Yes?”
“Are you scared like I am?”
“Worse, probably.”
“Thanks for saying so, anyhow. It’s this sitting and waiting. I’d almost rather go out and do the job now, myself!” Holt started. “Hey, isn’t that a call from Base?” He turned the receiver to full volume. The mellow baritone rolled forth:
“—Oh, my brave brothers, be happy, be confident. There is no death. God is waiting to call you home.”
S
wanberg reached out a long arm and switched on the transmitter. “Aeolus to Earth,” he said, loud and clear. “Horse manure.” He switched off again and Holt turned the receiver back down.
The President of the United States left his desk and went to a window. Outside, the White House lawn stretched dazzling green—What a beautiful planet we have, he thought. Why do men go away from her to die?—until it ended at the fence. Beyond, sidewalk and street were packed solid. The police had stopped trying to make the crowd move on. It wasn’t physically possible. The latest word was that one man had had a fatal heart attack and one women of less than average stature had suffocated out there. Not that the crowd was disorderly. The President thought he had never seen one more quiet.
“Death watch,” he said aloud.
“Sir?” asked his press secretary. They were alone together.
“Nothing. You know,” said the President, “it’s funny how a person keeps thinking of irrelevancies at a time like this. Anything to postpone the main issue. I keep wondering whether Buckler pulled me such a scurvy trick that I ought to have him transferred to the Aleutians . . . or did the only right and honorable thing under the circumstances.”
“He could have told Holt and Swanberg to make their own decision,” said the press secretary.
“No. That would have been shifting the burden onto them. And they have enough to bear.” The President sighed. “There isn’t any basis for decision. I’ve spent an hour with their dossiers. Both are fine, decent, outstanding citizens. Both have dependents who’d be cruelly hurt.”
“Holt has two more kids than Swanberg does, Mr. President.”
“That cuts very little ice with me. Especially remembering that Holt has no close kin alive, while Swanberg’s got a mother and two sisters.”
“Last time I had Tom Zellman on the phone, down at Canaveral, he said calls coming in to his station were running about five to three in favor of Holt. Of Holt getting back whole, I mean.”