Breaking Strain

by Артур Чарльз Кларк

  Even the ultimate emergency had been considered, for there behind its retaining elastic bands was the tiny bottle he had been seeking, the image of which had been lying hidden far down in the unknown depths of his mind through all these days. It bore a white label carrying a skull-and-crossbones, and beneath them the words: Approx. one-half gram will cause painless and almost instantaneous death.

  The poison was painless and instantaneous-that was good. But even more important was a fact unmentioned on the label. It was also tasteless.

  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. McNeil had done this long ago.

  To Grant, on the other hand, eating was one of those necessary but annoying jobs which had to be got through as quickly as possible. His cooking reflected this opinion. McNeil had ceased to grumble about it, but he would have been very interested in the trouble Grant was taking over this particular meal.

  If he noticed any increasing nervousness on Grant's part as the meal progressed, he said nothing. They ate almost in silence, but that was not unusual for they had long since exhausted most of the possibilities of light conversation. When the last dishes-deep bowls with in-turned rims to prevent the contents drifting out-had been cleared away, Grant went into the galley to prepare the coffee.

  He took rather a long time, for at the last moment something quite maddening and quite ridiculous happened. He suddenly recalled one of the film classics of the last century in which the fabulous Charlie Chaplin tried to poison an unwanted wife-and then accidentally changed the glasses.

  No memory could have been more unwelcome, for it left him shaken with a gust of silent hysteria. Poe's Imp of the Perverse, that demon who delights in defying the careful canons of self-preservation, was at work and it was a good minute before Grant could regain his self-control.

  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, for the engineer's had the letters MAC painted boldly across it.

  At the thought Grant nearly relapsed into psychopathic giggles but just managed to regain control with the somber reflection that his nerves must be in even worse condition than he had imagined.

  He watched, fascinated, though without appearing to do so, as McNeil toyed with his cup. The engineer seemed in no great hurry and was staring moodily into space. Then he put his lips to the drinking tube and sipped.

  A moment later he spluttered slightly-and an icy hand seemed to seize Grant's heart and hold it tight. Then McNeil turned to him and said evenly, "You've made it properly for once. It's quite hot."

  Slowly, Grant's heart resumed its interrupted work. He did not trust himself to speak, but managed a noncommittal nod. McNeil parked the cup carefully in the air, a few inches away from his face.

  He seemed very thoughtful, as if weighing his words for some important remark. Grant cursed himself for having made the drink so hot-that was just the sort of detail that hanged murderers. If McNeil waited much longer he would probably betray himself through nervousness.

  "I suppose," said McNeil in a quietly conversational sort of way, "it has occurred to you 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 that hypnotic cup. His throat seemed very dry as he answered, "It-it had crossed my mind."

  McNeil touched his cup, found it still too hot and continued thoughtfully, "Then wouldn't it be more sensible if one of us decided to walk out of the airlock, say-or to take some of the poison in there?" He jerked his thumb toward the medicine chest, just visible from where they were sitting.

  Grant nodded.

  "The only trouble, of course," added the engineer, "is to decide which of us will be the unlucky one. I suppose it would have to be by picking a card or in some other quite arbitrary way."

  Grant stared at McNeil with a fascination that almost outweighed his mounting nervousness. He had never believed that the engineer could discuss the subject so calmly. Grant was sure he suspected nothing. Obviously McNeil's thoughts had been running on parallel lines to his own and it was scarcely even a coincidence that he had chosen this time, of all times, to raise the matter.

  McNeil was watching him intently, as if judging his reactions.

  "You're right," Grant heard himself say. "We must talk it over."

  "Yes," said McNeil quite impassively. "We must." Then he reached for his cup again, put the drinking tube to his lips and sucked slowly.

  Grant could not wait until he had finished. To his surprise the relief he had been expecting did not come. He even felt a stab of regret, though it was not quite remorse. It was a little late to think of it now, but he suddenly remembered that he would be alone~ in the Star Queen, haunted by his thoughts, for more than three weeks before rescue came.

  He did not wish to see McNeil die, and he felt rather sick. Without another glance at his victim he launched himself toward the exit.

  Immovably fixed, the fierce sun and the unwinking stars looked down upon the Star Queen, which seemed as motionless as they. There was no way of telling that the tiny dumbbell of the ship had now almost reached her maximum speed and that millions of horsepower were chained within the smaller sphere, waiting for the moment of its release. There was no way of telling, indeed, that she carried any life at all.

  An airlock on the night-side of the ship slowly opened, letting a blaze of light escape from the interior. The brilliant circle looked very strange hanging there in the darkness. Then it was abruptly eclipsed as two figures floated out of the ship.

  One was much bulkier than the other, and for a rather important reason-it was wearing a space-suit. Now there are some forms of apparel that may be worn or discarded as the fancy pleases with no other ill-effects than a possible loss of social prestige. But spacesuits are not among them.

  Something not easy to follow was happening in the darkness. Then the smaller 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 one could see that strapped to its back was a small gas-cylinder from which a fine mist was jetting to vanish almost instantly into space.

  It was a crude but effective rocket. There was no danger that the ship's minute gravitational pull would drag the body back to it again.

  Rotating slightly, the corpse dwindled against the stars and vanished from sight in less than a minute. Quite motionless, the figure in the airlock watched it go. Then the outer door swung shut, the circle of brilliance Vanished and only the pale Earthlight still glinted on the shadowed wall of the ship.

  Nothing else whatsoever happened for twenty-three days.

  The captain of the Hercules turned to his mate with a sigh of relief.

  "I was afraid he couldn't do it. It must have been a colossal job to break his orbit single-handed-and with the air as thick as it must be by now. How soon can we get to him?"

  "It will take about an hour. He's still got quite a bit of eccentricity but we can correct that."

  "Good. Signal the Leviathan and Titan that we can make contact and ask them to take off, will you? But I wouldn't drop any tips to your news commentator friends until we're safely locked."

  The mate had the grace to blush. "I don't intend to," he said in a slightly hurt voice as he pecked delicately at the keys of his calculator. The answer that flashed instantly on the screen seemed to displease him.

  "We'd better board and bring the Queen down to circular speed ourselves before we call the other tugs," he said, "otherwise we'll be wasting a lot of fuel. She's still got a velocity excess of nearly a kilometer a second."

  "Good idea-tell Leviathan and Titan to stand by but not to blast until we give them the new orbit."

  While the message was
on its way down through the unbroken cloudbanks that covered half the sky below, the mate remarked thoughtfully, "I wonder what he's feeling like now?"

  "I can tell you. He's so pleased to be alive that he doesn't give a hoot about anything else."

  "Still, I'm not sure I'd like to have left my shipmate in space so that I could get home."

  "It's not the sort of thing that anyone would like to do. But you heard the broadcast-they'd talked it over calmly and the loser went out of the airlock. It was the only sensible way."

  "Sensible, perhaps-but it's pretty horrible to let someone else sacrifice himself in such a cold-blooded way so that you can live."

  "Don't be a ruddy sentimentalist. I'll bet that if it happened to us you'd push me out before I could even say my prayers."

  "Unless you did it to me first. Still, I don't think it's ever likely to happen to the Hercules. Five days out of port's the longest we've ever been, isn't it? Talk about the romance of the spaceways!"

  The captain didn't reply. He was peering into the eyepiece of the navigating telescope, for the Star Queen should now be within optical range. There was a long pause while he adjusted the vernier controls. Then he gave a little sigh of satisfaction.

  "There she is-about nine-fifty kilometers away. Tell the crew to stand by-and send a message to cheer him up. Say we'll be there in thirty minutes even if it isn't quite true."

  Slowly the thousand-meter nylon ropes yielded beneath the strain as they absorbed the relative momentum of the ships, then slackened again as the Star Queen and the Hercules rebounded ' toward each other. The electric winches began to turn and, like a spider crawling up its thread, the Hercules drew alongside the freighter.

  Men in space-suits sweated with heavy reaction units-tricky work, this-until the airlocks had registered and could be coupled together. The outer doors slid aside and the air in the locks mingled, fresh with foul. As the mate of the Hercules waited, oxygen cylinder in hand, he wondered what condition the survivor would be in. Then the Star Queen's inner door slid open.

  For a moment, the two men stood looking at each other across the short corridor that now connected the two airlocks. The mate was surprised and a little disappointed to find that he felt no particular sense of drama.

  So much had happened to make this moment possible that its actual achievement was almost an anticlimax, even in the instant when it was slipping into the past. He wished-for he was an M*curable romantic-that he could think of something memorable to say, some "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" phrase that would pass into history.

  But all he actually said was, "Well, McNeil, I'm pleased to see you.))

  Though he was considerably thinner and somewhat haggard, McNeil had stood the ordeal well. He breathed gratefully the blast of raw oxygen and rejected the idea that he might like to lie down and sleep. As he explained, he had done very little but sleep for the last week to conserve air. The first mate looked relieved. He had been afraid he might have to wait for the story.

  The cargo was being trans-shipped and the other two tugs were climbing up from the great blinding crescent of Venus while McNeil retraced the events of the last few weeks and the mate made surreptitious notes.

  He spoke quite calmly and impersonally, as if he were relating some adventure that had happened to another person, or indeed had never happened at all. Which was, of course, to some extent the case, though it would be unfair to suggest that McNeil was telling any lies.

  He invented nothing, but he omitted a good deal. He had had three weeks in which to prepare his narrative and he did not think it had any flaws.

  Grant had already reached the door when McNeil called softly after him, "What's the hurry? I thought we had something to discuss."

  Grant grabbed at the doorway to halt his headlong flight. He turned slowly and stared unbelievingly at the engineer. McNeil should be already dead-but he was sitting quite comfortably, looking at him with a most peculiar expression.

  "Sit down," he said sharply-and in that moment it suddenly seemed that all authority had passed to him. Grant did so, quite without volition. Something had gone wrong, though what it was he could not imagine.

  The silence in the control room seemed to last for ages. Then McNeil said rather sadly, "I'd hoped better of you, Grant."

  At last Grant found his voice, though he could barely recognize it.

  "What do you mean?" he whispered.

  "What do you think I mean?" replied McNeil, with what seemed no more than mild irritation. "This little attempt of yours to poison me, of course."

  Grant's tottering world collapsed at last, but he no longer cared greatly one way or the other. McNeil began to examine his beautifully kept fingernails with some attention.

  "As a matter of interest," he said, in the way that one might ask the time, "when did you decide to kill me?"

  The sense of unreality was so overwhelming that Grant felt he was acting a part, that this had nothing to do with real life at all.

  "Only this morning," he said, and believed it.

  "Hmm," remarked McNeil, obviously without much conviction. He rose to his feet and moved over to the medicine chest. Grant's eyes followed him as he fumbled in the compartment and came back with the little poison bottle. It still appeared to be full. Grant had been careful about that.

  "I suppose I should get pretty mad about this whole business," McNeil continued conversationally, holding the bottle between thumb and forefinger. "But somehow I'm not'. Maybe it's because I never had many illusions about human nature. And, of course, I saw it coming a long time ago."

  Only the last phrase really reached Grant's consciousness.

  "You-saw it coming?"

  "Heavens, yes! You're too transparent to make a good criminal, I'm afraid, And now that your little plot's failed it leaves us both in an embarrassing position, doesn't it?"

  To this masterly understatement there seemed no possible reply.

  "By rights," continued the engineer thoughtfully, "I should now work myself into a good temper, call Venus Central, and denounce you to the authorities. But it would be a rather pointless thing to do, and I've never been much good at losing my temper anyway. Of course, you'll say that's because I'm too lazy-but I don't think so."

  He gave Grant a twisted smile.

  "Oh, I know what you think about me-you've got me neatly classified in that orderly mind of yours, haven't you? I'm soft and self-indulgent, I haven't any moral courage-or any morals for that matter-and I don't give a damn for anyone but myself. Well, I'm not denying it. Maybe it's ninety per cent true. But the odd ten per cent is mighty important, Grant!"

  Grant felt in no condition to indulge in psychological analysis, and this seemed hardly the time for anything of the sort. Besides, he was still obsessed with the problem of his failure and the mystery of McNeil's continued existence. McNeil, who knew this perfectly well, seemed in no hurry to satisfy his curiosity.

  "Well, what do you intend to do now?" Grant asked, anxious to get it over.

  "I would like," said McNeil calmly, "to carry on our discussion where it was interrupted by the coffee."

  "You don't mean-"

  "But I do. Just as if nothing had happened."

  "That doesn't make sense. You've got something up your sleeve!" cried Grant.

  McNeil sighed. He put down the poison bottle and looked firmly at Grant.

  "You're in no position to accuse me of plotting anything. To repeat my earlier remarks, I am suggesting that we decide which one of us shall take poison-only we don't want any more unilateral decisions. Also"-he picked up the bottle again-"it will be the real thing this time. The stuff in here merely leaves a bad taste in the mouth."

  A light was beginning to dawn in Grant's mind. "You changed the poison!"

  "Naturally. You may think you're a good actor, Grant, but frankly-from the balcony-I thought the performance stank. I could tell you were plotting something, probably before you knew it yourself. In the last few days I've deloused the ship pret
ty thoroughly. Thinking of all the ways you might have done me in was quite amusing and helped to pass the time. The poison was so obvious that it was the first thing I fixed. But I rather overdid the danger signals and nearly gave myself away when I took the first sip. Salt doesn't go at all well with coffee."

  He gave that wry grin again. "Also, I'd hoped for something more subtle. So far I've found fifteen infallible ways of murdering anyone aboard a spaceship. But I don't propose to describe them now."

  This was fantastic, Grant thought. He was being treated, not like a criminal, but like a rather stupid schoolboy who hadn't done his homework properly.

  "Yet you're still willing," said Grant unbelievingly, "to start all over again? And you'd take the poison yourself if you lost?"

  McNeil was silent for a long time. Then he began, slowly, "I can see that you still don't believe me. It doesn't fit at all nicely into your tidy little picture, does it? But perhaps I can make you understand. It's really quite simple.

  "I've enjoyed life, Grant, without many scruples or regrets-but the better part of it's over now and I don't cling to what's left as desperately as you might imagine. Yet while I am alive I'm rather particular about some things.

  "It may surprise you to know that I've got any ideals at all. But I have, Grant-I've always tried to act like a civilized, rational being. I've not always succeeded. When I've failed I've tried to redeem myself."

  He paused, and when he resumed it was as though be, and not Grant, was on the defensive. "I've never exactly Eked you, Grant, but I've often admired you and that's why I'm sorry it's come to, this. I admired you most of all the day the ship was holed."

  For the first time, McNeil seemed to have some difficulty in choosing his words. When he spoke again he avoided Grant's eyes.

  "I didn't behave very well then. Something happened that I thought was impossible. I've always been quite sure that I'd never lose my nerve but-well-it was so sudden it knocked me over."