At last it was our turn. I grinned at Sammy as we came unstuck, remembering his fear that the lifeships were a cruel hoax.
Before we were clear of the atmosphere I knew the truth. Fortunately no one else did. I knew it by the way the ship handled, by the amount of fuel I was using, the amount I would still have to use, the amount I had left.
Sammy, in a way, was right. The governments of the world that was to die could have given, say, a million people a sixty per cent chance of life. It was all a question of the time and labor they had. What could be done in so long? But the multiple wasn't big enough. Not if they were to keep the multitudes quiet enough for them to have control of things at places like Detroit to run them as they had, without yelling, screaming millions fighting for life.
In the end they'd calculated to give a ridiculously small chance to a comparatively large number of people. One in 324.7, in fact. Enough to keep the world almost sane in those last few weeks.
I had sufficient fuel left, certainly, to shove us past Earth's gravitational pull, but I needed a lot more than that. Some where, sometime, I wanted to land. And there aren't any filling stations in space.
I thought of Father Clark and Pastor Munch and the Reverend John MacLean, still alive, still with their flock -- or had their flock, the mob, found out that they had been running errands for me and torn them to pieces? They had trusted me, accepted me -- but perhaps they didn't fully realize that I wasn't Simsville's instrument of God only for the three weeks of selection, but beyond that along every inch of the millions of miles of nothing between Earth and Mars.
But they could still trust me. I had promised Sammy and Leslie and all the others life, and it wasn't going to be my fault if they didn't get it.
One in a Thousand
1
Somewhere between the surface of Earth and Mars, well on the way or just about to take off, there were seven hundred thousand-odd lifeships. And believe me, the operative word was "odd." It took about a year to build a spaceship, and each and every one of these lifeships had been thrown together in eight weeks.
Problem: If two thousand skilled men can build a lifeship in a hundred days, how long will it take a thousand unskilled men to do it? Answer: 56 days. If your math's as good as mine (and mine isn't so hot) you'li get a pretty good indication of the standard of workmanship in the lifeships.
I was lying in the pilot's acceleration couch, controlling the ship with my fingertips, as far as it was being controlled at all, and hearing, seeing, and feeling the moluone fuel drain away as if it were my lifeblood. I had a simple enough choice. I could stop the blast now, and crash back on Earth; or I could let it roar out of the tanks the way it was doing, and crash somewhere else, if I ever reached anything to crash against.
When I say "in" the couch I mean just that. The couch was constructed so that I was half sitting, half lying, knees up to assist the circulation. That was a better position in which to withstand the acceleration than lying flat. I was strapped up like a mummy with imprex tape supporting my muscles. And though the couch wasn't particularly soft -- it felt like solid rock -- I was almost submerged in it.
But that was unimportant. What mattered was this -- somehow the lifeship had to escape from Earth's gravity, and sometime it had to land on Mars. There wasn't enough fuel to do it. I could see that now, only a matter of seconds from takeoff. Ten people, lower down in the lifeship, were depending on me and on the ship for life that the ship and I weren't going to be able to give them.
I was thinking like a prairie fire, though I was practically certain there was no solution. Soon I had a little piece of an answer. My fingers moved and the blast mounted. Anyone below who had thought nothing could be worse than 6G found his mistake as the acceleration went up and up.
The ship was designed for four minutes' blasting, but if I were to save fuel there was only one way to do it. That was to get off more quickly, reach escape velocity, and stop blasting sooner, saving the fuel which would have been needed to hold the ship up during the extra time.
I refused to think about the jet linings. They were designed for four minutes' blast, presumably, and now they were being asked to take the same thrust in less time.
I nearly blacked out. I screamed and hardly heard myself. You won't understand how I felt physically unless the same kind of thing has happened to you -- when you must and do remain conscious but you're so near unconsciousness that perceptions sent along the nerve channels to your brain simply don't leave any record there. You have to notice them as they happen or you've lost them forever.
I strained my eyes at the dials in front of me, trying to make them mean that I could cut the drive. They persisted in telling the truth, which was no good to me. I saw why people sometimes strain to believe something they know is false. There are times when hopeful fantasy is much more attractive than hopeless fact.
At last I was able to cut the drive. It had been on for hours. The chronometer said it was only three minutes or so, but I knew better. It didn't stop cleanly, as it should, it eased off gently. The couch gradually rose, and I floated off, weightless.
You never quite get used to free fall, no matter how often you experience it. It's a surprise every time when up and down disappear from the environment and the normal way of getting about ceases to be beetlelike and becomes birdlike. It's amusing or frustrating, depending on how you're feeling at the time, when you want to go one way and find yourself going the other, impelled by some tiny movement of air you can't see and normally wouldn't notice at all.
The body adjusts to the new conditions more quickly than the mind. The lungs and heart and stomach, puzzled for a few minutes by the absence of gravity, soon learn their new job and do it as well as they did the old one. Clothes and hair are inconveniences, though. Practically every garment of civilization except riding breeches and bathing costumes depends to some extent on gravity to hold it in place. Whenever I moved, my jacket began to ride up about me like water wings, and my trousers gradually worked themselves in untidy folds up my legs, showing the imprex tape underneath.
I found Mars through the tungsten glass ports and began to check on the old space navigators' Irishism -- whether it would be where we were when we got there. But I wasn't allowed much grace. Sammy Hoggan came in, his face grim.
"Mary Stowe's dead," he said briefly.
I couldn't understand that at first. Somebody dead -- already? It interfered with my long-term calculation that we were all going to die. It jammed the works for a moment, this curious, irrelevant intimation that someone hadn't waited for the execution that appeared to be planned for us all.
"Acceleration?" I asked.
"That and her couch collapsing. It couldn't take the strain. Bill -- didn't you accelerate more than you were supposed to?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then that killed her," he said bluntly. "The extra weight came on -- and the couch broke. That was -- "
I had heard enough about Mary, and it was too late to do anything about her. "Go away," I said.
Sammy swore. "Dammit, Bill," he said hotly, "you're responsible for all of us. You're the man in charge. Is that all you have to say? If you had to do it -- "
I turned and looked coldly at him. "I'm responsible for getting this ship to Mars," I said curtly. "I'm not leaving here until I'm satisfied about that -- not if the whole lot of you die. If this room had a door, I'd lock it to keep you all out. Now go and leave me alone. I'm sorry, Sammy, but I haven't time to be civil."
I went back to my calculations. I didn't notice Sammy going.
The first check was encouraging, as far as it went. There could be no precision about flying a lifeship -- navigation with mass-produced instruments, and very few of them at that, was little more than an affair of pointing the ship's nose in roughly the right direction and praying.
And on this basis, it looked as if I could leave the course as it was and not waste any of my precious moluone making corrections. I wasn't too sure of our velocity --
that would take days of checking by the planets -- but it seemed that in about a hundred days the lifeship, in free fall, and Mars, in its orbit round the sun, would have reached about the same spot.
Then, more carefully, I worked out how much fuel I'd need for a safe landing on Mars, how much I had, and tried to close the gap. Mathematically it couldn't be done. I just couldn't land safely on Mars, according to my quadruple-checked figures.
I covered sheet after sheet with laborious calculation. The best I could produce, the most favorable extrapolation, crooked, weighted mathematics though it was, was still a very slim chance indeed.
Drugged with figures, working more and more from sheer obstinacy, stubbornly trying everything I could think of to try, I came up with the conclusion that our chances of getting to Mars, when we left the soil of Earth, had been about a thousand to one against. And they weren't very much better now.
True, we were clear of Earth and on a good course for Mars. We were over the first hurdle. We had accomplished what, at a guess, only two or three hundred thousand of the seven hundred thousand lifeships had been able to do.
And of those two or three hundred thousand, many must have used all their fuel in tearing themselves free of Earth. Those ships were utterly helpless. Some of them would be shooting off in all directions, every moment getting farther from Mars, and utterly incapable of doing anything about it. Some of them Would be pointed at the sun, or close enough to the sun to be captured by it. Some would move on and on past the planets into space . . . those ships would go on forever if they weren't captured by some star or planet.
I didn't swear or curse at anyone. I just doggedly worked out problem after problem, as if I could set everything right by my high school mathematičs.
On the basis of our own experience I worked out how much fuel the lifeships really needed. Then, since they would have to be so much bigger and stronger, how many lifeships there would have been instead of seven hundred thousand. How many people they could have taken.
Allowing a very small safety factor, it came out at ninety-seven thousand. A chance of life for a million people instead of nearly eight million. Not one in three hundred of the people of Earth, but one in twenty-two hundred.
I tried to imagine the job I might have had then, the job of picking out ten people from a town of over twenty thousand. As it was, I knew hardly anything about some of the people I'd chosen from a mere three thousand or so. Sammy, Leslie, Betty, and Morgan were all last-minute choices, because someone else had had to come off the list. On the whole I was prepared to gamble on the first two, but Morgan and Betty could be my best choice or my worst for all I knew. What sort of guess could I have made if I'd been confronted with twenty thousand people and told to pick ten?
I shook my head wearily. The questions were too big for me. I had juggled too long with figures of life and death -- a little life and a lot of death. They weren't anything but figures to me. Perhaps that was why I had done it -- to reduce humanity's most frightful disaster to a few real figures, like four and seven and three, with a lot of incomprehensible zeroes after them.
I would come again, no doubt. But meantime I had reached a mental dead stop.
2
I gave myself a push against the wall, guided myself with my arms, and swam out into the main room of the lifeship, which Sammy had already christened, ironically, "the lounge."
Lifeships were simply moving barns. There was nothing to be seen in the so-called lounge except white paneling, steel floors, ten couches, and nine people floating about, with something on one of the couches covered by a sheet.
Little Bessie Phillips, unrepressed by tragedy, was flying about in the air, delighted by the absence of gravity. Jim Stowe, dry-eyed, was sitting with his father, one leg curled around the frame of the couch to hold him down. Betty and Morgan were in a corner, whispering. Sammy, Leslie, Harry Phillips, and Miss Wallace formed another group, holding the edges of a couch to keep themselves still.
They couldn't help becoming suddenly silent when I came in. They knew, all of them, how I'd been supposed to take off -- I'd told them myself what it would be like -- and it hadn't been like that. It hadn't been as I'd said it would be. Unless something had gone wrong, unless somehow I had been forced into it, I had done something on the spur of the moment and as a result Mary Stowe had died. That was how they were all figuring it.
Maybe I had tried to be clever, they were thinking. I could see it in their faces. They were waiting for me to explain, hoping I could, pretty sure I couldn't.
I went over to Mary Stowe's couch. Nobody moved. The sheet was tied at the four corners to the frame. I untied one corner and saw what had happened.
When Mary's weight went up to half a ton or so, one of the steel supports under the couch had snapped. Then another. The couch became a switchback -- and, quite naturally, Mary's back was broken.
I averted my eyes from the dead woman's face. She had not died pleasantly, and her face showed it.
"Someone help me to get the body outside," I said.
They realized that had to be done. Sammy pushed against the couch he was holding, and floated over to me. We took hold of the limp body and clawed our way to the base of the ship, to the only air lock. The eyes of the others followed us silently.
I knew I should save the dead woman's clothes, for cloth, trinkets, leather, and particularly the imprex tape which still bound her broken body might be useful in the bare, empty lifeship.
But any suggestion of stripping the body before throwing it into space would clearly heighten feeling which was already too high. I'd be regarded as a grave ravisher as well as a man who had made a mistake that killed Mary Stowe.
So Sammy and I left the body in the air lock, just as it was, closed the inside door, and turned the wheel that opened the outer door. There was no sound, but the air in the lock shot out into space, sweeping all that was left of Mary Stowe with it.
The body had the same velocity as the lifeship and would travel on with it. The small additional thrust imparted by the violently escaping air, however, would carry it off on a tangent. Soon the lifeship and the body of the woman who had left Earth, alive, in it would be miles apart. Then hundreds of miles. Perhaps, eventually, millions of miles.
We went back silently to the main room of the ship. Nobody seemed to have moved.
"All right," I said. "Since you're all so concerned about this thing -- let's talk about it."
Harry Phillips looked up. His eyes were as kindly as ever. "Wouldn't it be better not, son?" he said gently. "You did what you thought was right. We don't doubt that."
He didn't, perhaps, but Miss Wallace didn't meet my eyes. Leslie seemed to shrink away from me, without actually moving. John Stowe, sunk in his thoughts, probably wasn't even hearing what was going on.
"Does anyone doubt," I asked, "that I had to do what I did?"
"Did you?" asked Miss Wallace bluntly, looking at me steadily. "Did you have to? Did you really have to?"
I cast one swift glance at her. I hadn't thought this out. But it was obvious that I couldn't explain to them all exactly what the fuel situation was. Sammy, perhaps -- I'd have to share it with someone. Not anyone else, for that would mean a voyage of even greater tension, a hopeless voyage, a voyage in the course of which it would be difficult to make anyone do anything hard or unpleasant, since there would seem to be no purpose in it. So I said:
"Do you believe that I chose ten people from over three thousand and then started off by murdering one of them?"
"No," said John Stowe, dragging himself into the present with an obvious effort. "There's no question of it being deliberate, Lieutenant Easson. But my wife" -- his voice quivered -- "my wife is dead. Did it have to happen? Or was it . . . unnecessary?"
I understood perfectly what he meant. It would be easier to bear if it was an accident, something that couldn't have been avoided. What was torturing him was the thought that Mary might have died because of a small, careless miscalculation. My
miscalculation.
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