One in 300

by J. T. McIntosh

  "But -- "

  "Remember when he was out before? Remember how he took his time, making sure?"

  "I'm going to the air lock," said Stowe abruptly.

  "Oh, all right. I'll come with you."

  I had told everybody to stay away from the air lock because I was afraid someone would do something wild like trying to open it to see if Jim was coming. Some people can never comprehend a vacuum -- they know they can't stick their heads out in space because they've been told, but they never see why. They have some vague idea that if they hold their breath it will be quite safe.

  No one needed to be at the air lock, anyway, because if Jim could reach it he could certainly operate the doors. But inevitably, very soon after Stowe and I went there, we were all crowded in the cramped spaces at the stern of the ship. It was cold there. That was where the air circulation was strongest, and where most of the cooling of the air was done. I realized that it had been quite cool for days. The hull must be absorbing less heat from the sun, allowing more to radiate away, and gradually the temperature was dropping again.

  Morgan and Betty were with us again. Morgan was silent and withdrawn. Betty was shivering. There was something pathetic about Betty; it was partly her youth, partly her helplessness, partly her slightness. She had made herself a bra long since, not to be different from the others by going on wearing her sweater. Clad as she was, her small body was thin and fragile. Her ribs showed plainly, her legs were too thin, and her shoulder blades stood out sharply in her back. She wasn't unattractive, but beside Leslie, who was as slender as a beautiful girl could be and still be called beautiful without reservations, Betty was thin and bony.

  I didn't see how Morgan could possibly lit her. It was like hitting little Bessie. Leslie was different. There could be physical rivalry with a girl like Leslie.

  God, it was time Jim was back.

  I knew that if I had to go through the whole thing again I wouldn't let Jim go. I searched desperately for something to say, anything that wasn't about Jim.

  "I think we could put a couple of the panels back, Sammy," I said. "There and there. The radiation isn't so -- "

  The wheel that closed the outer door began to turn. Stowe jumped to spin it. I grabbed his arm.

  "Let Jim do it himself," I said thankfully. "He may have a leg in the doorway or something."

  When we saw that the outer door was tight shut, however, I threw back the inner lock. Air whistled past us and filled the empty lock.

  There's not much that can change faster than human beings' moods. It took us only about half a second to transfer our concern from Jim back to the fuel question. We saw through the face plate that he was all right; instantly all of us except Stowe forgot our anxiety and began to babble excitedly about what he might have found, while Sammy and I started to unscrew the nuts that secured his helmet.

  "He's back -- it must be all right," said Betty, with baffling logic.

  "I knew he'd do it," said Stowe, wildly distorting the truth in his relief.

  "Maybe we'll have our nineteen children after all," Leslie told me, grinning.

  "But if there is fuel, how are we going to get it here?" asked Harry, seeing that problem for jhe first time.

  "Easy," I said. "It doesn't weigh anything, and in space it hangs together by surface tension. All we have to do is -- "

  "Get on with your job, Easson," grunted Sammy, "and don't count your chickens before you've got any eggs."

  We got the helmet off and looked expectantly at Jim.

  "I'm sorry, Lieutenant Bill," he said. "There's nothing in that ship -- no air, no fuel, no people, no anything. It's empty!"

  We stared at him, the excitement and expectancy slowly disappearing from our faces. It had always been a wild hope, but we had let ourselves believe in it. When I saw Jim back, I too had allowed myself to think, for no reason at all, that he must have been successful.

  I forced myself to say calmly: "Oh well, we'll have to do the best we can." Jim was almost in tears, as if it was his fault -- no wonder, with everyone looking at him in silence, all hope and pleasure in his return wiped off their faces and nothing left but blankness and despair. Somehow we had worked out, as Betty had, that if only Jim came back safely there would be nothing to worry about. "Cheer up, Jim. You did very well. You couldn't find fuel if there wasn't any there."

  Betty, more from strain than anything else, burst into tears and threw herself into Morgan's arms.

  "I always saw myself as a tragic hero," said Sammy, not very helpfully; But he made amends by ruffling Jim's hair and telling him: "Bill's right, Second Lieutenant. It's not your fault the tanks were empty, not fuel."

  Jim, whose sense of humor wasn't as adult as most other things about him, chuckled involuntarily. And if we still felt despair at Jim's report, at least we didn't force it on everyone else. We came to life again, smiled and talked and pretended the whole incident was merely a welcome break in the monotony of our existence.

  But it was our lowest point on the trip so far, worse than when Mary died, worse than when we knew Earth was burning. You never know how black things can look until your hopes have been raised and then dashed again.

  7

  I left Jim with his father and the others for a few minutes, to let them all realize that he was safe and had done his job well, even if he hadn't been successful. Then I set Stowe, Harry, and Morgan on the job of refitting two of the neutralex panels and took Jim, Leslie, and Sammy into the control room.

  Jim couldn't understand what had happened to the other ship, and neither could I. He had noticed long before he came to it that there were no lights in the control room, but that wasn't surprising. When we were all in the lounge there were no lights in our control room either.

  The first shock was when he found the outer air-lock doors open. He closed them and opened the inner door. There was no rush of air. Everything was black. He had to shine his torch to find the lights. They went on at once.

  The ship was almost as empty as if there had never been people in it. Not quite; he found a handkerchief and a girl's stocking. The log hadn't been opened -- there wasn't a line in it.

  The plants in the trays were dead; the water purifier seemed to be working. Nothing was broken except one of the meters in the control room. The fuel register was at zero. There was no space suit on the ship.

  "I wondered," said the boy tentatively, "if they hadn't already transferred to another ship. With two suits, theirs and the one in the other ship, they might have ferried people across one at a time

  "It's the only reasonable explanation, Jim," I said, "but I'd like a better one.

  Where was the other ship? Why had they left the ship that was on a perfect course for Mars, when they could have transferred fuel from the other?

  "How about supplies?" I asked.

  "They hadn't been touched," said Jim. "Vitamin tablets, concentrates, synthetic protein . . . I left them, because we have enough, haven't we?"

  "Quite right, Jim." But that made it even more incomprehensible. If they had transferred to another lifeship, they would need their own supplies.

  "Could they have been picked up by a regular ship?" Leslie asked.

  "It's possible. That would explain a lot. But the regular ships would be packed with all the people they could carry."

  We had to leave it at that. Every one of those seven hundred thousand ships had a story, some merry, some tragic. And we had hit on one of the mysteries.. What seemed to me most likely, after considering the possibilities, was that one of the regular spaceships had had to take off in a hurry, half empty. Perhaps, in the center of a riot after the lifeships had gone and the people of the world were one crazed mob left behind to die, a spaceship had had to blast off in a hurry or not at all. Naturally enough, if that was so, it would match velocities with lifeship after lifeship, taking off people who otherwise had a much smaller chance of reaching Mars safely.

  And if so, we had been just one ship too late. With the one Jim had
examined the regular ship had reached its limit and blasted on toward Mars. It would probably be there now, safe. It's difficult to imagine the difference between the regular ships and the lifeships if you don't know it. The regular ships could take three hours, if they liked, to reach a thousand miles up from Earth; they could maneuver in space better than an airplane in an atmosphere; they even, some of them, had artificial gravity of one sort or another -- magnetic or centrifugal, mostly -- so that people could go from Earth to Mars as comfortably as from New York to London. Only it had never been necessary to transport more than a few hundred people a year between the planets.

  Sammy, of course, realized that this was what had probably happened and that we had just missed rescue. "Our usual luck," he said morosely.

  "I checked that all the fuel was really gone," said Jim. "I climbed into the firing chambers. The blast had never been cut at all. It was just left till all the fuel was gone."

  "Well done, Jim," I said. "I can't think of any more you could have done."

  "There was something else," he said hesitantly, not wishing to appear to be boasting. "I was a long time in space both ways, and I spent most of the time looking for other ships. The sky is full of pinpricks of light, and it's difficult to pick out anything for sure. But I saw that both our ship and the other lifeship had a bluish tinge. I looked for any other spots of light with that blue tinge about them . . . there weren't any I could be really sure about."

  He looked at Sammy a little nervously, perhaps expecting him to explode in bitter fulminations against somebody or Fate. He gulped, aware of his responsibility in positively denying something that none of us could check, or affirming something that might be wrong.

  "There was one little speck that might be a lifeship," he said at last. "I could hardly be sure it was there. Away out toward Saturn."

  "Could you get to it, Jim?" I asked.

  "I might. But . . . I don't think I could get back. If this ship behind us is six miles away -- and I think it's probably quite a lot more than that -- the other ship must be at least a hundred miles away." He added, apologetically again: "I'm not really sure it's there at all."

  Then contacting other lifeships was out of the question. I could use our fuel to get nearer the second ship Jim mentioned, but it was too big a risk, and not worth it.

  "We may as well forget other lifeships," I said. "It was a chance, that's all. Never mind, Jim. It was worth it anyway."

  The days slipped past. Sammy really had very little to complain about. I could think of a lot of unpleasant things that might have happened to us that didn't, and a lot of respects in which we were fortunate.

  The course was one thing. I wasn't responsible for that. The men at Detroit who had set up the ship and trimmed the jets had done a magnificent job. Every new calculation I made showed more clearly that we were going to hit Mars fairly and squarely, without a single blast for course correction. That isn't precisely what you'd expect. The wildest optimist would hesitate about suggesting that you could set up a ship on the surface of Earth so accurately that mere blasting free into space would send it directly to Mars -- or where Mars would be when it got there.

  If we did get through, if we did land safely, the real credit would go to the men who had trimmed the ship. Even if we didn't, it was already clear that they had done all they could for us. And if we didn't get through, who would? Certainly not the ships that had had to correct their course just clear of Earth's gravitational pull, again on the way, and a third time as they neared Mars.

  I haven't mentioned the things that went off pretty much as expected. The air inevitably became a little stale; we couldn't wash it out thoroughly. There were grouses about that. Food from a hydroponics plant is all very well, but there was a sameness about it that made some of us want to scream. Potatoes, water, synthetic protein, vitamin tablets, tomatoes, sugar, lemon juice, carotene, and all the rest of it -- eating on the lifeship wasn't interesting or enjoyable, and we all felt permanently unsatisfied and dreamed of steaks and fried chicken. But all the same, food was never a problem. There were no signs of malnutrition. All the hydroponics plant and our meager supplies were meant to do was keep us alive and reasonably healthy, and they did that perfectly efficiently.

  Some of us missed tobacco. I didn't -- I had been a smoker, but I saw so clearly before the trip started that living was more important than smoking that I hardly thought of it after that. Not smoking was part of life on the lifeship, like the weightlessness.

  Exercise wasn't missed as much as we'd have thought. You don't need as much exercise when you can relax utterly, and we all learned that. We became capable of floating so limply in the air that a mere hint of a draft would roll us over, bend our limbs, wag our heads. Relaxation like that just isn't possible when gravity is present.

  For the exercise that was necessary we instituted a sort of sports day that was held regularly. The purpose wasn't competition, it was primarily to use muscles that otherwise wouldn't be used at all. The sports became more complicated every time as we adapted ourselves more and more to the conditions.

  There was Four-five-bump, for example. You had to start out from one wall, touching five walls with left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot, and head, and bumping on the last with what Harry Phillips called your Sunday face. The whole thing was timed, and the winner was the person who could do it most quickly. The usual winner was Bessie, presumably because she was the most adaptable among us. None of the rest of us could get the trick of doing the whole thing as a concerted action the way she did.

  There was the arm race, a race across the lounge without a push-off, using only the arms to propel you through the air. Again strength didn't count. It was Miss Wallace who made the best use of arms and air resistance, pulling herself rapidly along with slow, strong strokes.

  There was wrestling, in which a fall was a touch against any wall. Sammy and I would wrestle, then Leslie and Miss Wallace, Betty and Jim, and so on until we all ganged up on Bessie, to her delight.

  I think generally we must have been one of the happiest lifeship crews among the seven hundred thousand. And it made me proud, for I felt I had chosen well. Only after Morgan Smith's name was there any sort of question mark.

  As we were nearing Mars Stowe married Miss Wallace. The rest of us were faintly surprised, but realized when we thought about it that it was a good thing. Stowe was a little defiant, in case anyone suspected he had forgotten Mary, or that she hadn't meant much to him. But I think we all knew better. After all, it was a long time since Mary died.

  Miss Wallace was really rather young for Stowe, but she didn't look it. We had always called her Miss Wallace; now, when she became Mrs. Stowe, we began to call her Caroline. It was only then that we learned her first name.

  Her marriage was no more formal than those of Betty and Morgan, Leslie and me. But one automatically made the change and thought of her as Mrs. Stowe. That wasn't the case with the rest of us. Betty was just Betty, and I had never thought of Leslie as Mrs. Easson. If this casual marriage became common, I could see the custom of the woman taking the man's name dying out altogether. Miss Wallace wanted to be Mrs. Stowe, but Betty preferred to remain Betty Glessor, and Leslie, when she once signed her name in the log, signed it "Leslie Darby."

  "Now I'm left all alone," said Sammy. "Will you marry me, Bessie?"

  "Yes," said the child instantly, "if you'll stop looking so black."

  8

  Mars was big in the forward window now. The first of the three big questions was already settled.

  The three questions were: Would the ship miss Mars? Would it take up an orbit around it? Would it crash plumb into it? I wanted them settled, if possible, before I did anything at all.

  It was clear that the ship wasn't going to miss Mars. I had been spending hours in the control room looking at it and wishing I was a better pilot.