by Ben Bova
Flight of Exiles
( Exiles - 2 )
Ben Bova
A group of scientists and other space travellers face life and death decisions after their spacecraft is damaged by fire.
Flight of Exiles
by Ben Bova
To the Pratt family, with thanks for fine times.
1
“Fire… it’s on fire!”
“EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY.”
“Attention everyone. Emergency in cryonics area six. Damage Control and Life Support groups to cryonics area six immediately. Emergency.”
“The whole area’s a mass of flames! The standby equipment is out! Get more men up here, quick!”
The starship had no name. The people aboard merely called it “the ship.” It had originally been a huge artificial satellite orbiting around Earth, a minor city in space, hugging close to the Mother World. Then it was made into a prison for thousands of the world’s best scientists and their families. Now it was a starship, coasting silently from the solar system toward the triple star system, Alpha Centauri.
Inside the main control center, things were anything but quiet.
“There are fifty men and women in cryosleepers in number six area. If you can’t get that fire under control they’ll die.”
Larry Belsen was standing up on the ship’s bridge. It was actually a long curving row of desk consoles, where seated technicians worked the controls that watched and directed every section of the mammoth ship. Larry’s job was as close to a ship’s captain as any job on the ship; he was in charge of this Command and Control center, he had a finger on every pulsebeat in the ship.
The technicians were hunched over the keyboards, fingers flying over the buttons that electronically linked all of the great ship’s machinery and people. In front of each of their desks were viewscreens that showed them pictures, graphs, charts, every kind of information from each compartment and piece of equipment aboard engines, computers, life support, living quarters, work areas, cryonics units, power systems, all on view in the hundreds of screens.
Normally, Larry thought of the curving ring of screens as the eye of a giant electronic insect, multifaceted to see into all the areas of the ship. He had studied about Earth’s insects briefly in a biology course, on the learning tapes. But now his attention was riveted to one particular screen, where the fire was raging in cryonics area six. There wasn’t much he could see smoke obscured almost everything.
He put a hand on the shoulder of the girl working that console.
“Can’t you get the emergency equipment functioning?”
She was a thin, dark-skinned girl, with close-cropped hair. Glancing up at Larry. “It should’ve gone on automatically. But it won’t respond at all. I’ve tried.” Her eyes were wide with fear, anxiety.
“It’s not your fault,” Larry said calmly “Don’t blame yourself.”
“But there are fifty sleepers in there!”
Larry shook his head. Without bothering to go across to the life support displays, he said, “They must be dead by now, Tania. No sense tearing yourself up over it.”
He took a step to the guy sitting at the next desk console. “You in touch with the Damage Control group?”
“Yes they’ve plugged into a wall phone out in the main corridor, just outside area six.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“It’s Mort Campbell’s unit, but he’s not the one on the phone.”
“Let me talk.”
“Is it cryonics six?”
Larry turned to see Dan Christopher at the door down at the far end of the bridge. For an instant, everything seemed to stand still people frozen at the console desks, communications speakers quiet, viewscreens stilled.
The two of them looked almost like brothers, at first glance. Larry was tall and slim with dark hair that he kept clipped fairly short. His eyes, though, were a cold gray, like a granite rock floating in space far from the warmth of a star. Dan was the same height and also youthfully slim. His hair was a lighter shade, and almost shoulder length. It curled slightly. His eyes were fiercely black, deep and flashing. Both of them were wearing workshift coveralls, Larry’s the blue-gray shade of the ship’s Command and Control personnel, Dan’s the howling orange of the Propulsion and Power section.
“Is it six?” Dan demanded, his voice rising.
Larry didn’t answer, he merely nodded slowly.
“My father’s in there!”
By now Larry had crossed the plastic tiled floor of the bridge and was within arm’s reach of Dan. He took him by the arm.
“So is mine! There’s nothing you can do, Dan. The Damage Control group’s already there, but…”
“My father!”
Dan pulled loose and yanked the door open. Larry stood there and watched him disappear down the corridor running, until the door automatically slid shut again.
With a sad shake of his head, Larry went back to the control desks and viewscreens.
“You still in contact with the Damage Control party?”
The fellow nodded and pointed to the main screen over his desk, in the center of a group of seven screens. A scared-looking teenager was in view. He was looking somewhere off camera, coughing in the smoke that was drifting past him.
“What’s going on up there?” Larry asked sharply.
The kid in the screen seemed to jerk with surprise. Then turning full face toward the screen, he said:
“Mr. Campbell and the crew are in there I saw flames coming through the main hatch a few minutes ago, but there’s only smoke now.”
“Is anybody hurt?”
“I don’t know. They’re all inside; there nobody’s come out.”
“Did they have smoke masks?”
“Yeah “
“Where’s yours?” Larry asked.
The kid looked startled again “I—uh—yeah, it’s right here. I got it.”
More gently, Larry said, “Don’t you think it might be a good idea to put it on? It can’t protect you while it’s zipped to your belt.”
Larry found that he was bending over the shoulder of the seated technician. He straightened up and glanced at the life support screens on the next console. They were blank, dead.
Fifty people in there. Dan’s father… and my own.
“Larry… look.”
He turned his attention back to the viewscreen. The Damage Control group was trudging wearily back into the corridor. Their faces’ were smudged, their coveralls blackened. The foamers and other fire-fighting equipment they dragged seemed to weigh tons.
There was hardly any smoke coming from the hatch now. The last man to step out into the corridor slowly unclipped his smoke mask. Larry recognized him as Mort Campbell stocky, slow-moving but always sure of himself, one of the oldest men working on this shift—nearly thirty.
Then Dan Christopher came dashing into view. He pushed wordlessly past the first few men of the Damage Control group, his eyes wild, his mouth open in silent frenzy.
Campbell stopped him at the hatch. Dan tried to dodge around him, but Campbell grabbed Dan by his slim shoulders and held him firmly.
“Don’t go in there. It’s not pretty.”
“My father…”
“They’re all dead.”
Watching them in the viewscreen, Larry felt his insides sink. You knew he was dead, he told himself. But knowing it in your head and feeling it in your guts are two entirely different things.
He knew all the technicians, all up and down the long row of consoles, were staring at him now. He stood unmoved, his face frozen into a mask of concentration, and kept his eyes on the viewscreen. Inside his head, he was telling himself over and over, You never knew him. He was frozen before you were old enough t
o remember him. There’s no reason for you to break up.
Dan’s reaction was very different.
“NO!” he screamed, and he twisted out of Campbell’s grasp and darted into the still smoky cryonics area. The older man slipped his face mask back on and went in after him.
“The cameras inside the cryonics area aren’t working now,” the girl tech said quietly, her fingers still tapping on her keyboard, trying to coax life back into the dead machines.
“Never mind,” Larry said woodenly. “There’s nothing in there that we should see.”
2
Larry sat in his living quarters, in the dark. It was a single compartment, barely big enough for a bunk, a desk, and a chair. The bunk and desk were molded into the curving walls of the compartment. Drawers and sliding partitions to the closet and sanitary blended almost invisibly with the silvery metal of the walls.
In the darkness, as he sat in the only chair and stared at nothing, there was only the residual glow of the viewscreen at the foot of the bed and the faint fluorescence of the wall painting that Valery had done for him years ago, when he had first been assigned a compartment of his own.
So you’ve lost a father you’ve never known, Larry still argued with himself. You’re not the only one. Every one of those fifty frozen people was a father or mother to somebody aboard the ship. Look at Dan; it’s hit him a lot harder.
But as he thought about it, slowly Larry began to realize that something else was bothering him. It wasn’t the deaths. Not really. That left nothing but a cold emptiness inside him. It was something else—
What caused the fire?
According to the ship’s computer records, they had been crawling through the huge gulf of space for nearly fifty years. Twenty-some thousand human beings, exiles from Earth, on their way to Alpha Centauri in a giant pinwheel of a ship. Nearly fifty years. Almost there.
But the ship was starting to die.
The men and women who had started on this long, long voyage were exiles. They had been scientists—molecular geneticists, most of them. The world government had rounded them up and placed them in a prison, this ship, which was then only a mammoth satellite orbiting Earth. Earth was overcrowded, it needed peace and above all it needed stability. The scientists represented the forces of change, not stability. The geneticists and their colleagues offered the ability to alter the human race, to make every baby into a superman or a slave, into a genius or a moron. On demand. Pay your money and take your choice.
The world government was humane. And very human. Its leaders decided such power would be too tempting, too easy to corrupt. So, as humanely as possible—but with thorough swiftness—they arrested all the scientists who were involved in genetic engineering and exited them to the satellite. Their knowledge was never to be used to alter the precious, hard-won peace and stability of Earth.
It had been Dan Christopher’s father—with the help of Larry’s father—who worked out the idea of turning their satellite prison into a starship. The Earth’s government agreed, reluctantly at first, but then with growing enthusiasm. Better to get rid of the troublesome scientists completely. Let them go toward Alpha Centauri. Whether they make it or not, they will no longer bother the teeming, overcrowded Earth.
But the ship itself was overcrowded. Twenty thousand people can’t be kept alive for year after year, decade after decade, for half a century or more. Not on a spacecraft. Not on the ship. So most of the people were frozen in cryogenic deepsleep, suspended animation, to be reawakened when they reached Alpha Centauri, or when they were needed for some special reason. The ship was run by a handful of people—no more than a thousand were allowed to be awake and active at one time. All this Larry knew from the history tapes. Much of it he had learned side by side with Dan, his best friend, when they were kids studying together. Both their mothers had died of a virus infection that killed hundreds of people before the medics figured out a way to stop it. Their fathers had handed the infant sons over to friends to be raised, and went into cryogenic sleep, to be awakened when they reached their destination. If they made it. The people who had built this ship were engineers of Earth.
The people who lived in it, riding out to the stars, were mostly scientists and their children. The ship had to operate far more than fifty years, if they were all to stay alive. The time was almost over, and the ship’s vast intricate systems were starting to break down, to fail. Youngsters trained as engineers and technicians had all the learning that the tapes could provide. But could they keep the ship going indefinitely?
A month ago it was the main power generator that failed, and they began to ration electrical power. Last week it was a pump in the hydroponics section; if they hadn’t been able to repair the pump they would have lost a quarter of their food production, plus the even more important oxygen-recycling ability of the green plants that grew in the long troughs of chemical nutrients. And now the fire. Fifty people dead.
Will any of us make it?
A soft tapping at his door. Fingernails on plastic. Valery.
“Come in,” Larry said, getting up from his chair.
The door slid open and she stood there framed in the light from the corridor.
Valery looked small, but she was actually almost Larry’s height, and he had known since their childhood together that she was as tough and supple as plastisteel. Her face was broad, with high Nordic cheekbones and wide, always-surprised-looking eyes. Changeable eyes; sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes something else altogether. Very fair skin with a scattering of freckles. Very, very pretty.
She was wearing a simple white jumpskirt and blouse. Like most of the girls aboard the ship, Valery made her own clothes.
“I heard about your father,” she said, her voice low.
Without waiting for him to say anything, she stepped into the compartment. Automatically, the door slid shut behind her. The room was suddenly plunged into darkness again. In the faint glow from the fluorescent painting, he started to reach for the light switch.
“No—” she said. “It’s all right like this. We don’t need lights.”
“Val—”
She was standing very close to him. He could smell the fragrance of her hair.
“I saw Dan. They took him to the infirmary. He collapsed.”
“I know,” Larry said.
He wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her and let her warmth engulf him. But he knew he couldn’t.
“You’d better… sit down,” he said.
Valery went to the plastic chair in front of the desk. She sat on it and tucked her feet up under her, as simple and feminine as a cat. Larry could see her in the darkness as a gleam of white, like a pale nebula set against the depths outside. He sat on the edge of the bunk.
“I wish there was something I could say,” Valery began. “I just feel so helpless.”
Larry found himself gripping the edge of the bunk hard with both hands. “Uh… how’s Dan?”
“Asleep. The medics have sedated him. He’s… he’s not strong, like you.”
“He does his thing, I do mine,” Larry said. “He shows his grief on the outside.”
“And you keep yours locked up inside you, so nobody can see.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can see it,” Valery said, her voice soft as a star-cloud. “I came over to tell you. I know what’s going on inside you, Larry. I…”
“Stop it!” he snapped. “You’re going to marry Dan in two more months. Leave me alone.”
Even in the darkness, he could sense her body stiffen. Then she said, “But I don’t love Dan. I love you.”
“That doesn’t make any difference and you know it.”
“You love me, Larry, I know that too.”
He shook his head. “No… I don’t. Not anymore.”
Her face was lost in shadow, but her voice smiled. “Larry—remember when we were just six or seven and we snuck into the free-fall playroom… you and Dan and me? And we were playing tag,
and you got racing so fast that you flew smack into a wall—”
“It was the ceiling,” he said.
“You hurt your shoulder, but you kept telling us it wasn’t hurt. But I could see your pain, Larry. I could see it.”
“Okay, so I broke my shoulder.”
Suddenly she was beside him, kneeling alongside the bunk. “So don’t say you don’t love me, Larry Belsen. I know you do.”
“It’s no use,” he said, his voice as cracked and miserable as he felt inside. “The computer selection was final. Not even the Council can revoke it. You can’t have people just flying off and marrying anybody they feel like marrying! That’s what happened to old Earth. The genetics went from bad to worse. We’ve got to live by the rules, Val… there’s no other way.”
“And the rules say I have to marry Dan.”
“He loves you, Val.”
“And you don’t?”
He couldn’t answer. Instead, he stared down at her for an infinite moment, then pulled her up to him and kissed her. She felt soft and good and loving. She clung to him hard, warmly. Everything else left his mind and he thought of nothing but her.
When he finally surfaced for air, she asked sleepily, “You don’t have a duty shift, do you?”
Shaking his head, “No. Excused from duty until after the funeral services.”
“Oh.”
He sat there on the bunk, loving her and hating himself. This is all wrong. What I’m doing…
“Larry?”
“What is it?”
“If the Council would allow it, would you want to marry me?”
“Don’t make it worse than it is, Valery.”
“But would you?”
“Sure.”
She sat up beside him. “We can do it, you know. If you really want to.”
“You must be…”
“No, we can,” she insisted. “The Council’s due to vote on the new Chairman in two days, right? The Chairman and the permanent Council members are Class A, aren’t they? Their genetic options are much wider than B’s, aren’t they?”