by Paul Preuss
He wondered how McNeil was spending his time, now that he’d run out of booze. The engineer had a large library of books on videochip, for he read widely and his range of interests was unusual. Grant had seen him delving into Western philosophy and Eastern religion and fiction of all kinds; McNeil had once mentioned that his favorite book was the odd early-20th century novel Jurgen. Perhaps he was trying to forget his doom by losing himself in its strange magic. Others of McNeil’s books were less respectable, and not a few were of the class curiously described as “curious…”
But in fact McNeil, lying in his cabin or moving silently through the ship, was a subtler and more complicated personality than Grant knew, perhaps too complicated for Grant to understand. Yes, McNeil was a hedonist. He did what he could to make life comfortable for himself aboard ship, and when planetside he indulged himself fully in the pleasures of life, all the more for being cut off from them for months at a time. But he was by no means the moral weakling that the unimaginative, puritanical Grant supposed him to be.
True, he had collapsed completely under the shock of the meteoroid strike. When it happened he’d been passing through the life support deck’s access corridor, on his way back from the hold, and he understood the seriousness of the violent explosion instantly—it happened hardly a meter away, on the other side of the steel wall—without having to wait for confirmation. His reaction was exactly like that of an airline passenger who sees a wing come off at 30,000 feet: there are still ten or fifteen minutes left to fall, but death is inevitable. So he’d panicked.
Like a willow in the wind, he’d bowed under the strain—and then recovered. Grant was a harder man—an oak—and a brittler one.
As for the business of the wine, McNeil’s behavior had been reprehensible by Grant’s standards, but that was Grant’s problem; besides, that episode too was behind them. By tacit consent they’d gone back to their normal routine, although it did nothing to reduce the sense of strain. They avoided each other as much as possible except when meal times brought them together. When they did meet, they behaved with an exaggerated politeness, as if each were striving to be perfectly normal—yet inexplicably failing.
A day passed, and another. And a third.
Grant had hoped that McNeil would have broached the subject of suicide by now, thus sparing him a very awkward duty. When the engineer stubbornly refused to do anything of the sort it added to Grant’s resentment and contempt. To make matters worse he was now suffering from nightmares and sleeping very badly.
The nightmare was always the same. When Peter Grant was a child it had often happened that at bedtime he had been reading a story far too exciting to be left until morning. To avoid detection he had continued reading under the bedclothes by flashlight, curled up in a snug white-walled cocoon. Every ten minutes or so the air had become too stifling to breathe and his emergence into the delicious cool air had been a major part of the fun. Now, thirty years later, these innocent childhood hours returned to haunt him. He was dreaming that he could not escape from the suffocating sheets while the air was steadily and remorselessly thickening around him.
He’d intended to give McNeil the letter after two days, yet somehow he’d put it off again. This procrastination was very unlike Grant, but he managed to persuade himself that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. He was giving McNeil a chance to redeem himself—
—to prove that he wasn’t a coward, by raising the issue first. It never occurred to Grant that McNeil might be waiting for him to do the same…
The all-too-literal deadline was three days off when, for the first time, Grant’s mind brushed lightly against the thought of murder. He’d retired to the flight deck after the “evening” meal, trying to relax by gazing at the starry night through the wide windows that surrounded the flight deck, but McNeil was doing a very thorough and noisy job of cleaning up the galley, clattering around with what must surely be an unnecessary, even a deliberate, amount of noise.
What use was McNeil to this world? He had no family, no responsibilities. Who would be the worse for his death?
Grant, on the other hand, had a wife and three children, of whom he was moderately fond, even if they were no more than dutiful in their perfunctory displays of affection for him. An impartial judge would have no difficulty in deciding which of them should survive, and if McNeil had had a spark of decency in him he would have come to the same conclusion already. Since he appeared to have done nothing of the sort he had surely forfeited all further claims to consideration…
Such was the elemental logic of Grant’s subconscious mind, which of course had arrived at this conclusion days before but had only now succeeded in attracting the attention for which it had been clamoring.
To Grant’s credit he at once rejected the thought. With horror.
He was an upright and honorable person, with a very strict code of behavior. Even the vagrant homicidal impulses of what is misleadingly called a “normal” man had seldom ruffled his mind. But in the days—the very few days—left to him, they would come more and more often.
The air was noticeably fouler. Although air pressure had been reduced to a minimum and there was no shortage of the canisters that were used to scrub carbon dioxide from the circulating atmosphere, it was impossible to prevent a slow increase in the ratio of inert gases to the dwindling oxygen reserves. There was still no real difficulty in breathing, but the thick odor was a constant reminder of what lay ahead.
Grant was in his cabin. It was “night,” but he could not sleep—a relief in one way, for it broke the hold of his nightmares. But he had not slept well the previous night either, and he was becoming physically run down; his nerve was rapidly deteriorating, a state of affairs accentuated by the fact that McNeil had been behaving with a calmness that was not only unexpected but quite annoying. Grant realized that in his own emotional state it would be dangerous to delay the showdown any longer. He freed himself from his loose sleep restraint and opened his desk, reaching for the letter he had intended to give to McNeil days ago. And then he smelled something—
A single neutron begins the chain reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives, the toil of generations. Equally insignificant are the trigger-events that can alter a person’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of the future. Nothing could have been more trivial than what made Grant pause with the letter in his hand; under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed it at all. It was the smell of smoke—tobacco smoke.
The revelation that McNeil, that sybaritic engineer, had so little self-control that he was squandering the last precious pounds of oxygen on cigarettes filled Grant with a blinding fury. For a moment he went quite rigid with the intensity of his emotion. Then, slowly, he crumpled the letter in his hand. The thought that had first been an unwelcome intruder, then a casual speculation, was now finally accepted. McNeil had had his chance and had proved, by this unbelievable selfishness, unworthy of it.
Very well—he could die.
The speed with which Grant arrived at this self-justifying conclusion would have been obvious to the rankest of amateur psychiatrists. He had needed to convince himself that there was no point in doing the honorable thing, suggesting some game of chance that would give McNeil and him an equal chance at life. Here was the excuse he needed, and he seized upon it. He might now plan and carry out McNeil’s murder according to his own particular moral code.
Relief as much as hatred drove Grant back to his bunk, where every whiff of tobacco aroma salved his conscience.
McNeil could have told Grant that once again he was badly misjudging him. The engineer had been a heavy smoker for years—against his better judgment, it’s true, and quite conscious that he was unavoidably an annoyance to the majority of folk who did not care to breathe his exhaust. He’d tried to quit—it was easy, he sometimes quipped, he’d done it often—but in moments of strain he inevitably found himself reaching for those fragrant paper cylinders. He envied Grant, the sort of ma
n who could smoke a cigarette when he wanted one but put them aside without regret. He wondered why Grant smoked at all, if he didn’t need to. Some sort of symbolic rebellion…?
At any rate, McNeil had calculated that he could afford two cigarettes a day without producing the least measurable difference in the duration of a breathable atmosphere. The luxury of those six or seven minutes, twice a day—one late at night, one at mid-morning, hidden deep down in the central corridor of the ship—was in all likelihood beyond the capacity of Peter Grant to imagine, and it contributed greatly to Angus McNeil’s mental well-being. Though the two cigarettes made no difference to the oxygen supply, they made all the difference in the world to McNeil’s nerves, and thus contributed indirectly to Grant’s peace of mind.
But no use trying to tell Grant that. So McNeil smoked privately, exercising a self-control that was in itself surprisingly agreeable, even voluptuous.
Had McNeil known of Grant’s insomnia, he would not have risked even that late night cigarette in his unsealed cabin…
For a man who had only an hour ago talked himself into murder, Grant’s actions were remarkably methodical. Without hesitation—beyond that necessitated by caution—Grant floated silently past his cabin partition and on across the darkened common area to the wall-mounted medicine chest near the galley. Only a ghostly blue safe-light illuminated the interior of the chest, in which tubes and vials and instruments were snugly secured in their padded nests by straps of Velcro. The ship’s outfitters had provided tools and medicines for every emergency they had ever heard of or could imagine.
Including this one. There behind its retaining strap was the tiny bottle whose image had been lying far down in the depths of Grant’s unconscious all these days. In the blue light he could not read the fine print on the label—all he could see was the skull and crossbones—but he knew the words by heart: “Approximately one-half gram will cause painless and almost instantaneous death.”
Painless and instantaneous—good. Even better was a fact that went unmentioned on the label. The stuff was tasteless.
Most of another day went by.
The contrast between the meals prepared by Grant and those organized with considerable skill and care by McNeil was striking. Anyone who was fond of food and who spent a good deal of his life in space usually learned the art of cooking in self-defense, and McNeil had not only learned it but had mastered it. He could coax a piquant sauce from dried milk, the juices of rehydrated beefsteak, and his private stash of herbs; he could coax flavor from the deep freeze with his flasks of oils and vinegars.
To Grant, eating was one of those necessary but annoying jobs that was to be got through as quickly as possible, and his cooking mirrored this attitude. McNeil had long ago ceased to grumble about it; imagine his bemusement, then, had he seen the trouble Grant was taking over this particular dinner.
They met wordlessly, as usual—only the constraints of habit and civility kept them from grabbing their trays and retreating to their own lairs. Instead they hovered on opposite sides of the little convenience table, each perched in midair at a careful angle, not quite looking at or looking away from the other. If McNeil noticed any increasing nervousness on Grant’s part as the meal progressed, he said nothing; indeed they ate in perfect silence, having long since exhausted the possibilities of light conversation. When the last course, succotash, had been served in those bowls with the incurved rims, designed to restrain their contents, Grant cleared the litter and went into the adjacent galley unit to make coffee.
He took quite a long time, considering the coffee was, as always, instant—for at the last moment something maddening happened. He was on the point of squeezing boiling water from one container into another, looking at the two hot-liquid bulbs in front of him, when he remembered an ancient silent film he’d seen on a chip somewhere, featuring a clown who usually wore a bowler hat and a funny mustache—Charlie somebody—who in this movie was trying to poison an unwanted wife. Only he got the glasses accidentally reversed.
No memory could have been more unwelcome. Grant nearly lapsed into psychopathic giggles. Had the erudite McNeil known what was going on in Grant’s mind (assuming he could have retained his equanimity and humor), he might have suggested that Grant had been attacked by Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” that demon who delights in defying the careful canons of self-preservation.
A good minute passed before Grant, shivering, managed to regain control. His nerves must be in even worse condition than he had imagined.
But he was sure that outwardly at least he was quite calm as he carried in the two plastic containers and their drinking tubes. There was no danger of confusing them now: the engineer’s had the letters M A C painted boldly around it. He pushed that one toward McNeil and watched, fascinated—trying hard to disguise his fascination—as McNeil toyed with the bulb. He seemed in no great hurry; he was staring moodily at nothing. Then, at last, he put the drinking tube to his mouth and sipped—
—and spluttered, staring at the drinking bulb with shock. An icy hand seized Peter Grant’s heart. McNeil cleared his throat, then turned to him and said evenly—
“Well na’, Grant, you’ve made it properly for once. And very hot, too.”
Slowly Grant’s heart resumed its interrupted work. He did not trust himself to speak, but he did manage a non-committal nod.
McNeil parked the bulb carefully in midair, a few inches from his face. His fleshy face settled into a ponderously thoughtful expression, as if he were weighing his words in preparation for some momentous pronouncement.
Grant cursed himself for making the coffee so hot. Just the sort of detail that hanged murderers. And if McNeil waited any longer to say whatever he was going to say, Grant would probably betray himself through nervousness.
Not that it would do McNeil any good now.
At last McNeil spoke. “I suppose it’s occurred to you,” he said in a quietly conversational way, “that there’s still enough air to last one of us to Venus.”
Grant forced his jangling nerves under control and tore his eyes away from McNeil’s fatal bulb of coffee; his throat seemed very dry as he answered. “It … it had crossed my mind.”
McNeil touched the floating bulb, found it still too hot, and continued thoughtfully: “Then it would be more sensible—wouldn’t it?—if one of us simply decided to walk out the airlock, say—or take some of the poison in there.” He jerked his head toward the medicine chest, on the curve of the wall not far from where they were floating.
Grant nodded. Oh yes, that would be quite sensible.
“The only trouble, of course,” McNeil mused, “is deciding which of us is to be the unlucky fella’. I suppose we could draw a card … or something equally arbitrary.”
Grant stared at McNeil with a fascination that almost outweighed his mounting nervousness. He never would have believed the engineer could discuss the subject so calmly. Obviously McNeil’s thoughts had been running on a line parallel with his own, and it was scarcely even a coincidence that he had chosen this time, of all times, to raise the question. From his talk it was certain that he suspected nothing.
McNeil was watching Grant closely, as if judging his reaction.
“You’re right,” Grant heard himself say. “We must talk it over. Soon.”
“Yes,” McNeil said impassively. “We must.” And then he reached for the bulb of coffee and brought the drinking tube to his lips. He sucked at it slowly, for a long time.
Grant could not wait for him to finish. Yet the relief he had hoped for did not come; indeed, he felt a stab of regret. Regret, not quite remorse. It was a little late now to think of how lonely he would be aboard Star Queen, haunted by his thoughts, in the days to come.
He knew he did not wish to see McNeil die. Suddenly he felt rather sick. Without another glance at his victim he launched himself toward the flight deck.
12
Immovably fixed, the fierce sun and the unwinking stars looked down on Star Queen, which o
n the grand scale of cosmic affairs was as motionless as they were.
There was no way for a naive observer to know that the tiny model molecule of a spaceship had now reached its maximum velocity with respect to Earth and was about to unleash massive thrust to brake itself into a parking orbit near Port Hesperus. Indeed, there was no reason for an observer on the cosmic scale to suspect that Star Queen had anything to do with intelligent purpose, or with life—
—until the main airlock atop the command module opened and the lights of the interior glowed yellow in the cold darkness. For a moment the round circle of light hung oddly within the black shadow of the falling ship; then it was abruptly eclipsed, as two human figures floated out of the ship.
One of the two bulky figures was active, the other passive. Something not easy to perceive happened in the shadows; then the passive figure began to move, slowly at first but with rapidly mounting speed. It swept out of the shadow of the ship into the full blast of the sun. And now the cosmic observer, given a powerful telescope, might have noted the nitrogen bottle strapped to its back, the valve evidently left open—a crude but effective rocket.
Rolling slowly, the corpse—for such it was—dwindled against the stars, to vanish utterly in less than a minute. The other figure remained quite motionless in the open airlock, watching it go. Then the outer hatch swung shut, the circle of brilliance vanished, and only the reflected sunlight of bright Venus still glinted on the shadowed wall of the ship.
In the immediate vicinity of Star Queen, nothing of consequence happened for the next seven days.
PART
4
A QUESTION
OF HONOR
13