One in 300

by J. T. McIntosh

  As Sammy and I unscrewed more panels on the sides farthest from the sun, there was even laughter and a suggestion of horseplay. Miss Wallace wore sensible underwear, of course. While it didn't positively deny sex, it made it look improbable. John Stowe grinned fleetingly as he looked at her -- the first time he had smiled since Mary died. Morgan was flushed with embarrassment until he realized that there was no need for it, and he grinned too. Old Harry was quite unconcerned. He, at any rate, had held out for so long only because he saw no need to do as I suggested. Betty took off her slacks, but felt it necessary to explain, embarrassed, that she couldn't take off her sweater because she wasn't wearing anything underneath.

  For some reason everyone thought that was very funny. Betty went redder and redder, then impulsively caught hold of her sweater to tear it off. I watched with interest that had nothing to do with sex. If Betty, the shy, nervous, self-conscious Betty, could do that, something had really happened.

  But she didn't, of course.

  5

  There was a slightly different attitude among us after that. For one thing, Mary Stowe's death no longer seemed to be hanging over us. We all, even John Stowe, found it easier now to think of her as one of the casualties of the disaster. There had always been a lingering doubt about the truth of the scientists' predictions. We might be making fools of ourselves, and Mary might have died for nothing.

  Now that was gone. We could tell from the conditions in our own little ship that all the scientists had said was justified.

  The casual marriages of Morgan and Betty, and Leslie and me, were now accepted completely. Miss Wallace made a point of telling me that she was satisfied I was right. In fact, she said a little wistfully, if there was any question of the situation arising in her case -- which, of course, there wasn't -- she would gladly marry in the same conditions. Or even, she said stoutly, have children without marrying.

  It was the knowledge of what had happened on Earth that did that. There is a feeling for race survival in every human being, and not only survival, but strong survival. The thought of the tiny proportion of the human race which would be left stimulated this feeling in everyone. The way people casually mentioned having children showed how their thoughts had been directed.

  Morgan and Betty asked me -- rather late, I suspected -- when we would be safely down on Mars at latest, and whether it was all right to start children. I reassured them. Miss Wallace observed in some surprise, after long calculation, that she could still have nine or ten children. I thought that was rather an overestimate, myself. Sammy dropped a remark or two about things he was going to tell his children. Harry Phillips wondered if old people could get together on a one-child basis, so that a woman who might have another child could be partnered by a man who was past his best, and neither could be a drag on the reproduction of the younger folk. John Stowe remarked that Mary wouldn't have been able to have any more children anyway.

  The attitude of the people on the lifeship still wasn't all it might be, however.

  "It will be different on other lifeships," I told Leslie once. "Some crews will be finding their lieutenant turning into a little dictator."

  She grinned. "I can't see you as a dictator. Your way's right, Bill."

  "No, their way's right," I said. "Suppose I had to get everyone to do something in a hurry. Would they do it? Only if it suited them. They'd argue. They'd complain. Some would do it, some wouldn't."

  "And I still think that's right," Leslie declared. "You must too, Bill."

  "How do you work that out?"

  "You picked us. If you wanted slaves you'd have picked slaves."

  I had to admit that.

  But I still had a point, I felt. I didn't want to give the example of the attitude I thought was right, not to Leslie.

  I had married Leslie, but she didn't matter to me. She didn't figure in my calculations. That didn't mean that later, if there was a later, I wouldn't love her and cherish her and build my whole new world about her. Meantime, I was in charge of a spaceship, and having a girl was an irrelevance. If something dangerous had to be done that only Leslie could do, I wouldn't hesitate an instant before telling her to do it.

  It wasn't a question of not having time for her. I had plenty of time. If it hadn't been for the fact that she still spent a lot of time in the hydroponics plant, she'd have been with me twenty-four hours of the day. What I couldn't afford to give her was attention.

  We didn't get the temperature in the ship as low as it had been before, not for a long time. The hull was absorbing more heat, conducting it around, and couldn't radiate away as much from inside.

  I don't know whether suggestion came into it, but apart from that possibility we proved to the hilt how much health depends on air circulation, temperature, and humidity. The water purifier's condensation unit went on strike for a day or two, and by the time we had it working again we were all like limp rags and would have lost pounds in sweat if there had been any way to measure that.

  Morgan drifted all over the ship with the air current as he slept one night. He woke with a headache and fever, and for five days he had the works -- cold, sore throat, headache, cough, fever. There may have been other causes, but the high temperature and absence of air movement (since he went with the air) seemed to cover it.

  It was Jim who suggested something I should have thought of long since. One day as he and I were in the control cabin, companionably silent, he said:

  "Why can't we see any of the other ships, Lieutenant Bill?" He always called me that.

  "The other lifeships, Jim?" I asked.

  "Yes. There's millions of them, aren't there, all going the same way?"

  "Not quite millions, Jim. Why can't we see them? Well, look. Remember all those ships at Detroit? They all took off more or less together, going from the same place to the same place. Yet I'll bet there wasn't one collision. At the end of ten seconds each ship's done about two miles. Even if you point another ship after it then and try to ram it, you can't do it."

  I waited while he worked that out for himself. He was an intelligent kid, more intelligent than any of the adults except Sammy and Leslie. Then I went on: "Between Earth and Mars now there should be hundreds of thousands of lifeships. But the volume of space in which they may be is about -- oh, say fifty million million miles. I'm sure I could make it a lot more if I tried."

  I grinned at him. "So if you think of it," I said, we're not likely to see many of the others, are we?"

  "That's a pity," said Jim thoughtfully. "If there were others close, we might be able to get fuel from them."

  I jerked convulsively. "How do you know we need fuel?" I demanded.

  "Saw it on the meters," he said simply.

  I hadn't thought there was the slightest risk of that. It wasn't a simple story that could be read from the meters at a glance. The boy must have done a lot of thinking and calculation before he could have worked out for himself what I had been careful never to hint to him.

  "Have you told anyone?" I asked quickly.

  "No," said Jim. "I guessed you would tell them if you wanted them to know."

  I nodded. "Jim," I said, "you're going to be a useful man in the colony. When the rest of us are old, you'll be helping to run things. Just keep thinking things out as you've been doing, and you won't find much that'll beat you."

  The boy flushed with pleasure. Naturally enough, I was his hero, and anything I said was worth something.

  "Fuel from other ships," I mused. "I wonder."

  The thought, or a germ of it, had occurred to me before and had been abandoned. Perhaps I had given it up too soon.

  "I did think of that, Jim," I said. "Know why I gave up the idea?"

  "Because we can't see any other ships and there may not be any in millions of miles."

  "That and one or two other things. Even if there was another ship, we'd have to use fuel getting to her. At least, just now, we're not using any."

  Jim nodded seriously.

  "And ap
art from that, this other ship wouldn't have much fuel either. Certainly none to spare. What would we do, fight for what it had? Take the people in the other ship aboard? If lifeships could hold twenty, there would be twenty in them. Anyway, how would we transship them? Each ship carries only one space suit . . ."

  But as I went on detailing the objections it seemed more and more that we should at least look into the matter.

  "Jim," I said, "go and get Sammy and Leslie."

  He came erect excitedly. "Can I come back with them?" he asked.

  "Sure -- you're the assistant pilot, aren't you?" I stopped him as he was about to dive through the doorway. "Don't let anyone know there's anything going on," I warned. "Be casual."

  He went more slowly.

  Leslie and Sammy were in the control room with us in two minutes.

  I hadn't told Leslie about the fuel situation, but she didn't turn a hair when I did tell her.

  "I guessed it," she said.

  "I wonder if anyone else has?" I said. "Here's four of us who know about it. That only leaves six who don't. Do you think I'm right to try to keep it secret?"

  "As long as you can," said Sammy. "But when you can't, the others may as well know the truth. I don't think things would be as bad as you believe, Bill. They're good people. They wouldn't go to pieces."

  We discussed Jim's suggestion. I asked him to state it himself, and it was obvious how proud he was to be included in our council.

  "That's all very well," said Sammy. "But since we can't see any other ships . . . ?"

  "We haven't tried," I said. "We only have an angle of vision of about 150° here. The first step is for me to go out at the air lock in the space suit and scan space behind us. There may be a ship within a hundred yards."

  "Not you," said Sammy definitely. "Me. There may not be much risk, but if anything should happen to the man who goes out, he'd better not be the one man who can operate this ship."

  I nodded. "No time like the present," I said. "Let's go now."

  The others didn't pay any particular attention to us as we went through the lounge. Sammy and I or Leslie and I were always working on something. There was no indication that there might be anything special about this occasion.

  We started to put the space suit on Sammy. The hydroponics plant was between us and the other six; they might see us, but we couldn't help that.

  "You'd be more comfortable with your clothes on for this," I said. "But you needn't stay out long."

  He had the whole suit on except the helmet when we discovered something that had been missed when we checked the suit.

  The helmet wouldn't fit on the suit -- not with Sammy's head in it. It was flawed, like the acceleration couch that had broken, like hundreds of other things, probably, in thousands of other lifeships. The outside was perfectly machined, the heavy steel base and the tungsten glass face plate were perfect. Everything was perfect, except that inside the dome was a jagged, irregular lump of metal that rested on the top of Sammy's head and wouldn't let the base of the helmet meet the ring on the suit. There was a gap of four and a half inches all the way.

  Sammy, who had been quite even-tempered for a long time, forgot Leslie and Jim and swore long and bitterly.

  We should have tried the helmet on our heads before, of course, instead of deciding it was all right because it looked all right. But there wasn't any more we could have done about it than we could do about it now.

  I tried it on my head. The space between base and ring was even bigger.

  We had hopes of Leslie -- the gap was smaller and it seemed for a moment that if we padded her shoulders so that all the free space was at the top of the suit we could force the ring on it high enough to meet the base of the helmet. The arms were the trouble. Some suits have mechanical arms operated from inside the suit, but not this one. True, we could get the suit on Leslie with her arms pinned at her sides. Then, however, she would be completely helpless, unable to operate even the air lock, and certainly not the propulsion unit. If she went out like that she would fall into space and be lost.

  "I don't know," I said, "whether to laugh or cry."

  "I do," said Sammy gloomily. "You three cry, and I'll laugh."

  Sammy had the misfortune to be a tragedian with all the gestures and expressions of a comedian. Leslie and I grinned, and Jim gave a surprisingly adult chuckle. Both Jim and Bessie always found Sammy a great joke.

  I felt better for a moment, but only a moment. I hadn't taken the matter as seriously as Sammy at first. I was something of a handy man; the thought of a little metalwork didn't disturb me in the slightest. However, as I ran over in my mind everything we had in the empty, naked lifeship, my face changed, and Leslie noticed it.

  "Isn't there anything we can do?" she asked.

  With even a hammer and chisel we might have chipped the flaw away in time. We could improvise a hammer, but what could we use as a chisel?

  "You don't need to do anything," said Jim earnestly. "The suit will go on me. I'm sure of it."

  I looked at him thoughtfully. "That's probably true, Jim," I said slowly. "But you don't mind if we try a few other things first?"

  "Oh, I don't mind," Jim said confidently. "But it'll be me all right. You'll see."

  Sammy and I scouted around the whole lifeship, looking at everything, picking it up and trying it. Practically all the loose metal objects were thin aluminum.

  We abandoned all idea of secrecy. We showed the helmet to the others and asked for ideas. A host of impracticable suggestions were immediately forthcoming. We laughed at some of them -- it was all great fun, a sort of parlor game in which we all joined, not Hunt the Slipper but Who Can Wear the Space Suit? We tried it on everybody, with much hilarity.

  With Betty we nearly made it. The helmet and its fitting actually met. However, that was the limit -- tightening it down could only drive the metal in the dome through the top of her head. We thought of an airtight collar above the ring, but there was no way to make one. We chipped at the metal with all the substitutes for a hammer and chisel we could find, and managed to scratch it, no more.

  Someone suggested acid, and by pooling our knowledge we found that hydrochloric acid was hydrogen and chlorine, that you could make it with salt and sulphuric acid, and that you could make sulphuric acid with sulphur trioxide. Which was very interesting but didn't help, since none of us really knew how to do it, and we couldn't risk tampering with the hydroponics chemicals and the water purifier to get the stuff.

  "It looks," I said at last, after we had tried everything we could think of, "as if you're right, Jim. It's got to be you or little Bessie."

  "What's that?" asked Stowe sharply.

  And it wasn't a joke any more. As Sammy had said, though there wasn't much danger in going outside a ship in a space suit, there was always a risk. A score of things that we couldn't check any other way might turn out to be wrong with the suit. Jim might be blown out with the air. The lock might stick. The little things that might happen would be nothing to a spaceman, but they might well be fatal to a thirteen-year-old boy.

  Theoretically I could give any orders I liked, and they had to be obeyed. But I couldn't let Jim go out unless his father agreed. After all, Stowe had already lost Mary.

  I told them we needed fuel. Though I didn't say how serious it was, I made it clear our chances would be much better if we could get some from somewhere. And we had just demonstrated that any space-suit work that had to be done, Jim Stowe would have to do.