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"No!" exclaimed John Stowe, as I expected. "Mary's dead -- now you want to risk Jim!"
I waited. I saw Stowe struggling with himself. "I'd go," said Stowe at last. "But not Jim -- please, not Jim."
"You can't," I told him. "If it were possible, we'd do it ourselves. Only Jim can do it -- or Bessie. Do you want it to be Bessie?"
It was Jim himself who swayed the balance in the end. "Please, Dad," he begged. "Can't you see I've got to do it? But I won't if you say no."
I wasn't quite honest about all this. I couldn't afford to be. There was small risk in sending Jim out to have a look back the way we had come. But if he did happen to see another ship, and if we decided to contact it, Jim would have to do it. And that would be very dangerous indeed.
I knew that if Stowe said yes once he'd have to say it twice. This wasn't just his permission for Jim to do a simple, fairly safe job. It was his agreement for Jim to do any space-suit job that was needed, no matter how dangerous.
He didn't know that. He said, "Yes." And we began to get Jim ready.
There was no trouble. Jim was out a long time, but he battered on the hull occasionally, as I'd told him to do, to let us know that all was well and he was just taking his time. I was as impatient as Stowe, asking myself what Jim could be doing all this time, and wondering, unworthily, whether he wasn't just playing, pretending to be a spaceman doing a dangerous repair job on a damaged ship.
But then I remembered how careful Jim was and realized that he wouldn't come in until he felt absolutely responsible for what he had to say, and could tell us, not "I think," but "I know."
I said this to Stowe when he spoke anxiously. He seemed comforted.
"You like Jim, don't you?" he said.
"I'd rather risk Leslie than him," I told him. Leslie heard that. She smiled at me approvingly, but I saw she didn't believe it. Leslie wasn't an anxious, jealous wife. She wasn't unsure of herself, or of me. I might not love her as some men had loved some women, but there were already strong ties of affection between us, and she knew it.
What I said was true, nevertheless. I'd rather risk Leslie than Jim. Leslie would play her part in the new colony, if we reached it, and play it well. She would never be, however, the asset Jim might be.
Jim came in at last. His teeth were chattering as we helped him out of the suit -- the big suit, apparently, absorbed less heat from the sun and radiated more than the hull of the ship.
"There's a lifeship not more than a few miles behind us," said Jim clearly. "I waited till I was sure it was moving the same way and at the same speed as us. I couldn't see any- thing else anywhere that could be a ship."
I almost refused to believe him. This had just been something to try, and when it duly failed we'd be no worse off.
"You're sure?" I asked foolishly -- obviously he was sure. The others began to chatter excitedly, glad to know we weren't as alone in space as we'd thought. I grinned at Sammy. "What has the voice of doom to say now?" I asked.
"Nothing. It's his day off," said Sammy apologetically.
"The sun," Jim told us, puzzled, "looks very small and far away. I thought it would be big and bright, Lieutenant Bill. But it's not."
6
There was really something to think about now. Did we want to contact the other ship? How was it to be done? Should we try to communicate with it first?
If we were going all out for contact with other lifeships, I could try to turn ours so that it was facing back to Earth but flying on in the same course. Then we could spend hours in the safety of the control room scanning space for other ships. We might easily find some. Space is clear -- vision without the impedance of atmosphere is so sharp and exact that we might see the pinpoint of reflected light that meant a lifeship hundreds of miles away.
That course of action was almost out of the question, however. The regular ships have gyros and jets that can turn a ship without interfering with its line of flight, but not the lifeships. Anyway, sooner or later I'd probably have to turn it back.
"Seriously," said Sammy, when he and I were alone, "has Jim much chance of getting to that other ship and back in the space suit?"
"Oh yes," I said. "That's easy enough. Depends on who's in the suit, of course. If it had been Betty, say, I don't think I'd have let her try it. But though Jim's young, he's got guts and brains. That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
"The other ship. There're people on it, alive or dead. Another lieutenant. People who want to get to Mars. Suppose they have no fuel left at all. Suppose their hydroponics plant isn't working, or their water purifier. Or suppose they have illness aboard. Suppose -- "
"Don't suppose any more," said Sammy bitterly. "I see. It's like everything else since this impossible trip began. Nothing right, nothing as it should be. Nothing but difficulty, trouble, things going wrong -- "
"Hold on, Sammy," I said, laughing. "Count ten, and if that's not enough, count a hundred. We've been very lucky indeed. We had a perfect takeoff, so perfect that I didn't have to do any course correction -- it was never wrong. No trouble with the hydroponics plant, nothing we couldn't put right on the water purifier, no leaks, no failures, no illness to speak of, no fights, no quarrels, nothing we couldn't solve except this thing that we may be solving now. Then even when the space suit was wrong for the people who would have used it, we had an excellent spaceman to take over. And whenever we think of contacting another ship, we look out the back door, and there she is!"
"Maybe," said Sammy morosely, "but you didn't mention Mary Stowe dying and . . ."
"And what?"
"Oh hell," said Sammy with a reluctant grin. "Get on with it."
We discussed the problems painstakingly. Sammy, his pessimism gone for the moment, agreed that despite everything against it we had to contact the other ship.
Leslie agreed too, when she came into it. "But have you worked out just what you're asking of Jim, Bill?" she asked gravely. "He's got to deal with a whole lifeship complement alone -- speak for us, decide for us. I mean, he'll be there, and we won't. He'll have no one to ask, no one to help him. And if for any reason at all he doesn't come back, we can't do a thing. We haven't another suit. He could get back to the air lock and suffocate there, for all we could do to help him."
Sammy looked a little ashamed of himself. That was the crux of the matter, not the objections he had made.
"Let's put it to Jim," I said.
"No," Leslie objected. "We know what he'll say. He'll do it. But he's only a child, Bill. We have to be careful what we ask him to do. Little Bessie would walk trustingly out of the air lock without a space suit at all if you asked her, but the fact that she did it willingly wouldn't relieve you of any responsibility."
"I know," I said. "But from the standpoint of pure reason there's only one answer. If Jim doesn't go, we haven't much chance. If he does, the chances of all of us, including him, may go up a lot. We've burned our boats by telling the others we need fuel. As you say, Leslie, we know how Jim himself will feel about it. Let's call Stowe into this, shall we?"
Poor Stowe was in a terrible state. We couldn't conceal from him any of the dangers. He tried to speak, but didn't know what to say. As I'd known at the time, I'd hamstrung him when I got him to say yes before.
"I wish there hadn't been a ship near," he muttered at last, not looking at us. "Then we'd have had to make the best of it. But now . . ."
I knew he felt it too. We had gone too far in this matter to go back. After all, the other ship was there. We could almost feel it behind us, following us; we couldn't forget it or pretend it wasn't there.
"Look on the other side," I urged, wishing Leslie wasn't watching me, knowing I was raising hopes which might never be realized. "Suppose Jim finds fuel. If he does, if there's enough -- our worries are over. Ships don't crack up in space, you know that. All they ever have to worry about is taking off and landing. More fuel, and we're safe. Jim too."
"If he was your son," said Stowe with an ef
fort, "would you let him go?"
"Yes," I said without hesitation.
"I believe you. We need this fuel?"
Oh, let it go, I thought. "We have to have it," I told him.
Stowe squared his shoulders. "Then there's nothing more to say, is there?" he said, trying to smile.
We packed Jim up in warm clothes, checked every part of his suit, the tiny propulsion unit, and the air tanks. I made sure that he knew what to do in every emergency I could think of, told him all about the moluone fuel we needed -- what it looked like, how we'd handle it, how much we needed; I impressed on him again and again that he was on his own and that anything he tried he had to manage himself, without help from, us.
I stopped at last when I saw that, though he was excited, he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing, and any further instructions would only be an encumbrance to him.
I knew from the way Stowe said good-by to him that he was certain Jim would never come back. He was fighting the idea for all he was worth, but it had taken a firm hold on him.
I'd never believed there could be so much tension among us as there was when he was gone. Normally our life was easy, lazy. Some of us who didn't want to get out of condition or fat -- Sammy, Leslie, Harry, Miss Wallace, and I -- exercised as much as we could in the absence of weight. But for the most part we relaxed and slept or dreamed or thought or merely drifted about. All of us had found hours passing in the apparent space of minutes. Tension didn't exist as a normal part of existence.
But whether we were concerned about Jim himself, about what he was trying to do, what he might find, or what might happen to him, the result was some surprising things.
When Bessie pulled at Leslie to tell her something, Leslie snapped: "Don't bother me just now." Bessie wasn't hurt -- she merely stared at Leslie in wonder. Leslie made a gesture as if to caress the child and tell her it was all right. Then she remembered Jim and frowned anxiously again.
Sammy, who rarely clowned, was swimming about grotesquely in the air. He pulled faces at Bessie, and she forgot the strange impatience of Leslie and laughed delightedly.
"I wish I could have gone," said Betty.
"What could you have done, poppet?" asked Morgan teasingly. "It's not a job for a pretty little baby like you."
"It's a job for anyone who can do it," said Betty warmly. "That's why Jim's gone."
"Might have asked him to go on back to Earth while he was at it, and see what it's like there now," said John Stowe, and laughed as if he had made a very good joke and had only just fully appreciated it.
Sammy swirled around the whole group, his face screwed into a fiendish mask, and Bessie screamed with pleasure.
"I didn't want one of those hard, capable girls who do things like men, honey," said Morgan affectionately.
"You wanted someone like me, someone who's no use for anything?" asked Betty with a tinge of resentment.
"Oh, I wouldn't say you're no use for anything," said Morgan meaningly.
"That's all you care about me."
"For heaven's sake! I only said -- "
"I heard what you only said. And I know what you only meant. I'm just someone to sleep with."
"Oh, go chase yourself."
"Hold it, kids," I said wearily.
"I'm not as useless as you think," Betty said.
"Well, it seems to me you re being pretty useless at the moment, darling. When you go on about something I never said you're about as useful as a sick headache."
"It's nice to know what you really think of me, anyway. It's nice to get at the truth. I should be glad I'm useful for something, I suppose."
"Even at that," said Morgan, "you're not so damned hot."
I don't know who hit whom first. I wasn't watching them. We stared for a moment -- they were so close, so quiet that we couldn't imagine them fighting, even after the build-up they'd been giving themselves. But they were certainly fighting. Morgan slapped Betty's face with savage force that sent her flying across the lounge and him back against the opposite wall. Betty, instead of bursting into tears as we immediately expected, threw herself at him and struck at his face ineffectually. Morgan hooked his foot in the frame of one of the couches and raised his arm high, a maniacal expression on his face. I dived from the wall and butted him in the midriff with my head as his arm came down. He spun crazily in the air, nursing his ankle, and I bounced back from him.
Betty burst into tears then. There was an immediate reconciliation, and no one said much about the incident.
But I looked on Morgan with some suspicion after that. Back on Earth, if a man tried to interfere with a girl and her escort killed him with a bottle he happened to be holding in his hand, he might get off with a light sentence. But if he waited to light a cigarette, then pulled out a gun and shot the other man, it would be a death sentence.
It seemed to me there was that essential difference in what Morgan had done. If he had thrown himself at Betty and battered her, I could forget it. There was something unpleasant, however, about the way he had anchored his foot so that he could smite the girl with all the power of his body unhampered by weight. I didn't know where he was going to hit her, hut he could have killed her with a blow like that. The presence of mind he had shown in his act made it startlingly sadistic.
And then Leslie started looking for a fight too. "You shouldn't have let Jim go," she snapped at me. "A child like that . . ."
So I was the only one responsible. I had thought we all agreed that Jim had to go. "Can it, Leslie," I said as pleasantly as I could. "Suppose -- just suppose -- he's finding us more fuel? Try thinking of that, will you?"
"Fuel, fuel -- you've got fuel on the brain."
"So I have. People need it, you know, to fly spaceships. Even me. And that's what I'm trying to do at the moment."
"The man with one idea. I believe you'd sell me, too, for this precious fuel of yours."
"Sure I would. Who are you that you shouldn't be sold?"
"For the love of God!" Stowe shouted, his nerves worn raw.
"Sorry, John," said Leslie quickly. "Sorry, Bill. Let's all shut up, shall we, before we start wringing each other's necks."
"Amen," said Sammy, and looped the loop. We fell into an uneasy silence.
No, it wasn't pleasant waiting. I knew Jim would be gone a long time anyway -- the most economical way to use his little propulsion unit was merely to put himself in a slow drift toward the other ship and wait patiently till he got there. But that didn't prevent us from worrying, long before he could have reached the ship.
Morgan and Betty went out of the lounge together. I looked after them, frowning -- if they fought again, and no one was around to stop him, Morgan in his wild rage might do something we should all regret. It was unlikely, however, that their reconciliation could last such a short time.
The first moment when Jim might reasonably have returned came and went. I wished there was something I could have set everyone to do. I thought of Morgan and Betty, and wished I could go away with Leslie and pass the time in her arms. I looked at them, smooth and cool, and ached for her. Leslie wanted it too, I saw. But any moment now Jim should be back. He was approaching the limit of his air supply.
John Stowe said as much, suddenly admitting his anxiety.
"You know Jim," I said reassuringly. "He'll wait as long as he can, making sure the job's done."
"How long are we going to wait, before we admit he isn't coming back?"
I answered calmly, "We needn't start thinking along those lines for quite a while yet. He doesn't need as much air as an adult, and for the most part he won't be active."