One in 300

by J. T. McIntosh

  Perhaps I was to blame as much as she was. I watched stupidly as she did things to her dress, and then became angry when there was no reason to be. After all, what was wrong in wanting to live? Why shouldn't people try anything and everything?

  I knew too much about her, and not enough. If it had been Pat . . . well, if it had been Pat it would have been quite different. All I knew was that Leslie wasn't the kind to give herself casually to a near stranger. And that, instead of improving things, made them worse.

  "You brought me here for this?" I asked furiously.

  "Suppose I did?" she said defiantly.

  I was wildly, unreasonably angry. I was also, quite irrationally, disappointed. "You think you could buy any lieutenant that way?" I demanded. "We could all of us have screen stars and princesses and models every night, no obligation, without having to bother about small-town teachers. What I should do is take you, and strike you off the list."

  She became very still. It was all melodramatic, cheap, and stupid. She had been very clumsy in her effort to seduce me, not knowing how it was done. If she had known how to pretend to be in love with me, or at least attracted by me, the cheapness would have gone. But only someone who was ashamed of herself could make the horrible mess Leslie made of it.

  "Hadn't you even the sense to see," I said bitterly, "that any of us could have any woman we wanted? Don't you think I've had enough silly offers and proposals? People who promise to do everything I say on Mars, who offer me the equivalent of ten years' salary in whatever currency we use out there, if they have to sweat for twenty years to pay it . . . men who contract to do my killing for me in the colony, help me to set up a state of my own. Damn it, Leslie, isn't it obvious that I must have decided long ago on the only possible thing to do about such proposals -- and that's to leave the people who make them behind?"

  "You said . . . something that implied you'd picked me to go."

  "Yes, I had."

  Her head came up sharply and she laughed in my face. "I heard the same thing often when I was a child," she retorted. "'I was going to give you something, but now I won't.' We all said it. It . . ."

  I lunged away from her, back to Simsville. The blue silk dress still lay about her as if she were sitting in a sparkling pool.

  8

  It was hours, not days now. Very soon the ten who were going with me would be told. Whether they ever reached Mars would depend, among other things, on how well they could conceal their knowledge.

  There was another fight in the square. I saw it from my window this time, keeping well hidden, for I didn't want it too definitely known where I was. Nobody wanted to fight, but nobody could help it. Everybody in the town was going to die, except eleven. The temperatures all over Earth were still normal, and the sun looked the same. It seemed incredible that there was nothing to see, hear, or feel.

  I looked down from the sun to the square just in time to see Jack Powell die. Someone got him down and crushed his neck with his boot. With a sick feeling I saw it was Mortenson. Mortenson! In that moment something clicked into place and I began to understand Mortenson.

  Favored. Fortunate. Strong, good-looking, healthy. He had so many things, how could he help but have everything he wanted? Like the beautiful girl who told him, in effect, and went on telling him, "Do what you like with me -- I love you." People would forgive him for anything. Men liked him, women loved him.

  He had hurt Pat. I had known that, but hadn't made any real effort to understand it. She had only talked once about her relations with Mortenson. Of course he had hurt Pat. She had asked for it -- the whole world asked for it. Everybody was ready with forgiveness, eager to pardon the magnificent Mortenson.

  In four words: he had too much. He had more than he could handle. Overnurtured, he had gone bad.

  I didn't care about the rights and wrongs of the fight, or what had led to Mortenson's snuffing out Jack Powell's life. I would always remember the picture of Mortenson stamping on a man's neck, howling with joy. Mortenson was finished, as far as I was concerned.

  Now Marjory would die alone, in sorrow and fear and hate. I would never see her again.

  Betty and Morgan appeared, saw what was going on, and ran off down a side street. That was good. They hadn't compelled me to strike them off the passenger list of my lifeship. Sammy was there. He had a gun. Could he have been one of the three masked men? No -- they were fools, and Sammy was no fool. Besides, he had been with Pat. Where was Pat?

  I must have said it aloud, for she spoke behind me. "Come away from the window, Bill," she said. "It's like dope. It gets you in the end. You're not tough enough."

  I brushed my hand over my eyes. She was right; I didn't really know what was going on. At least, I recorded it faithfully enough, but it didn't mean to me what it should have meant.

  The list was complete. Mortenson out, the Powells out, Leslie out. She had done something, I forgot what it was, but I remembered that she was off the list. Miss Wallace, Harry Phillips, Bessie Phillips, the Stowes, Jim Stowe, Betty Glessor, Morgan Smith. But that was only eight. Oh yes, Sammy and Pat.

  "Pat," I said. "Did I ever tell you? You're going to Mars."

  She wasn't surprised, as I had half thought, and she certainly wasn't delighted. She was very calm and serious.

  "You really mean that?" she said.

  "Of course. I wouldn't joke about it."

  "No. That's what I thought. It's not just that you . . ."

  I didn't know what she meant, and probably she didn't either. "It's not just anything," I said. "Of the population of Simsville, I don't know anyone who has more right to live than you."

  I hoped it was taken as calmly in each case. I wouldn't know. I wasn't going to tell any of them myself, except Sammy and Pat.

  The fight seemed to have stopped, or at least moved somewhere else. There were no shouts or screams as I waited, wondering how the other eight were taking it.

  Pastor Munch was visiting the Stowes. That, of course, was the way. I couldn't visit the people I had chosen, I couldn't write or phone or telegraph, and I couldn't send anyone who had been close to me. The three clergymen had offered to help, and this was the way in which they could. No one would interfere with them as they went about visiting people; and I had not been in touch with them often enough or publicly enough for anyone to guess that they were my messengers.

  Munch only knew about the Stowes. He hadn't wished to know more.

  Father Clark was taking care of Harry Phillips. Harry would be incredulous, I guessed. I had thought all along that, left to himself, he would refuse. But mention of Bessie would shut him up. He would be afraid that if he said anything about himself Bessie might lose her chance.

  Miss Wallace was another who might be dumfounded. Father Clark would tell her too.

  I didn't know how Betty Glessor and Morgan Smith would react when MacLean told them they were going. They were the gamble of the group. But when it came to couples, one had to gamble. It seemed unfair to give half the available places to one family, but families wouldn't be split. That meant either couples who hadn't started to have their children, like Betty and Smith, or couples with only one child, like the Stowes.

  There would be plenty of children on Mars. There always were when life for a group began anew. I would marry, naturally. I looked at Pat.

  "Can you tell me now who else is going?" she asked. I told her.

  "You've done a good job," she said.

  I was inordinately relieved. Pat would know. So I had picked on roughly the right people.

  "But . . ." she said, suddenly frowning.

  "But what?"

  "What about Leslie?" she demanded.

  "I always meant to take a cross section. It was always you or Leslie. Not both."

  Now she did look surprised. "But why me?"

  "Pat, you always had a low opinion of yourself. You were quite right. You're nothing to write home about. Except maybe for your looks. But the sad thing is, other people rate even lower than yo
u. So you go."

  "Lower than me?" she murmured, in strange humility. "That's a pity."

  The commonplace nature of her comment seemed the funniest thing I had heard for months. I was close to hysteria, and I laughed until I was sore. A pity that people were such heels. A pity that the sun was going to radiate just the fraction more heat that meant the end of all life. A pity that only ten people from Simsville had a chance of life.

  Sammy came in. I took control of myself.

  "Glad to see you, Sammy," I said. "You're elected. You're going to Mars."

  He nodded. He was another who wasn't surprised. "I thought that might happen," he admitted, "now Mortenson's dead."

  "Dead?" I exclaimed.

  "You didn't know? I thought you'd be watching from the window."

  "Who killed him?"

  "I did. If you didn't see what he was doing at the time, please don't ask me to describe it. I always had a weak stomach. And Pat?"

  "She goes too."

  He nodded again. But he was still thinking of Mortenson. "You wouldn't think that even something like this could change people so completely so quickly," he said.

  Pat laughed, unaffectedly this time. "You should know better than that, Sammy," she said. "People don't change. Never. They may be changed, or they may reveal themselves, or we may have seen them wrong the first time. That's all."

  "Never mind that," I said. "There isn't much time. Listen. You may have heard a rumor that a plane will pick up the selected people at the park."

  Sammy nodded. "Well, there will be a plane," I said, "but that's only a blind. The plane is the escort for a helicopter that'll land here in the square about the same time. Everybody should be at the park. The people who mean to make trouble, anyway. The other eight who are going with us will know by now. They just have to get to the square, that's all. They should be safe so long as they don't give themselves away."

  Sammy began to make objections, but I waved them aside rather petulantly. "Don't you think I've had time to see what's wrong with the plan in the last few weeks? It isn't mine. Anyway, what else could have been done? Nobody has more than a few hundred yards to go anyway, except the Stowes, and they'll come in their car. I know . . ."

  Faintly but clearly we heard a plane.

  "It's early," said Sammy.

  "No. It's got to fly about and circle so that everyone believes it's the plane they've heard about, and they've only got to see where it lands -- in the park or anywhere else. There's going to be no trouble, Sammy, unless too many people are smart and realize they're being fooled."

  "But they've got a pretty good idea where you are."

  "That was always the difficulty. We can't do anything about that -- only hope the plane will be a greater attraction."

  For long, tense minutes we waited. Then -- because there had to be a little time in reserve -- I got up. "Come on," I said.

  The hotel had had no staff for a long time. The manager had no imagination at all, and he clung grimly to his job and his duties. There were no unauthorized people in the hotel.

  We got down to ground level without seeing anyone. Naturally no one would come into the hotel, where they might miss us, when they only had to watch the exits.

  The plane was still circling. Once or twice we heard it swoop to land, then climb again. The pilots of those planes had a big job. They had to be psychologists as well as heroes -- for, of course, theirs was liable to be a suicide job. Mobs wherever this plan was adopted would tear these pilots to pieces when they learned they were just decoys.

  The point was, the people were pretty certain I was at the hotel. Would anything make them leave? Only the conviction that I had somehow eluded them. All I could do about that I had done -- have flares lit at the pavilion, flares that would be visible anywhere in Simsville, and would surely make people think that I was at the park, signaling to the plane. The suspense was the cruelest, most effective part of it. People who at first had been grimly determined to wait in the square in the belief that I must appear there must have felt that belief waver and diminish as the plane swooped and flares lit the sky and people hurried past on their way to the park. The grim watchers must have panicked at the thought: Some of these people must be going to Mars. And here we are watching them go!

  We heard the plane actually land. That, I thought, must break the last resistance of anyone who must now guess he had no chance of life on Mars.

  We stepped boldly into the square. It was getting dark -- deceptively dark. Even we, expecting it, didn't see the helicopter until it dropped in the square.

  There were bodies in the square. It settled among them. I saw Mortenson lying outstretched, his hand straining for a gun he had never reached. He might have lived fifty years more, on another world.

  Then shadows moved. We rushed for the helicopter, and I saw Harry Phillips carrying Bessie in his arms, Betty and Morgan running hand in hand.

  Then Pat screamed.

  Whether Mortenson had been all but dead or merely stunned didn't matter. He wasn't dead, and he had the gun. I saw Sammy go for his to make another try, and knew he would be just too late. Mortenson knew the time he had, and took careful aim. He could have had any of us -- Sammy, who had shot him; or me, without whom no one from Simsville would live, and all would be brought down with Mortenson, who couldn't go himself.

  But he chose Pat. Something in his twisted mind made him go for the girl who had loved him.

  Mortenson and Pat died together. They were both good, clean shots. There were no last-breath speeches. Pat fell and Mortenson lay still.

  I can't explain what I did. I never thought of Pat at all. I merely worked out that Leslie wouldn't be watching the plane, but at home, and I darted across to a phone booth. I dialed and got her at once. "The square, quick," I said, and slammed the phone down. That was all.

  9

  We didn't see much at Detroit. The organization was magńificent. The whole area was a vast clearing house, the few people who were running things there handling us like so many cans of beans. We had no gear; someone else was looking after that. There was a supply organization which took care of not only the essentials, like the problem of how we were going to live on Mars, but also the comparative luxuries, like how much of our literature and history and art we could afford to take along. But that wasn't our affair.

  We got to Detroit late on Thursday night, were given a meal, and swept into cots, all in the same room. We were then cheerfully informed that our meal had been drugged. We saw only two people. Two who would handle . . . how many lifeships' complements? Presumably the people who were keeping things running at Detroit would be collected later by a regular ship.

  We slept until eleven in the morning -- Friday morning. When we awoke, the world was still the same. We all wondered -- I expect everyone did who looked at the sun that morning -- whether the whole thing wasn't a mistake after all and life wouldn't go on the same as ever. But the fact was, of course, that we were approaching the last second that scientists knew was safe. Nothing would happen, if they knew what they were talking about, for quite a while after that -- minutes, hours, even a day or two. Even when it did happen at last, on the sun, it would still be eight minutes before Earth knew anything about it. . . .

  We had breakfast together, and then with no more than a glimpse of the feverish activity in the hundreds of square miles about us, and the thousands of tiny, gleaming lifeships in the State Fair grounds, Palmer Park, and wherever else there was an open space or one could conveniently be blasted clear, we were aboard. One after another the ships got the signal.