Futures Past

by James White

  There were few rules to the game other than the main one which stated that the two-hour period must not be exceeded. For twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours when they were not trying to sleep, the passengers lay silently framing their arguments and polishing their delivery in readiness for those two glorious hours when they would be allowed to talk. And when the verbal flood-gates were opened the result was very often bedlam. But there were occasions when the debates soared and scintillated and other times when, had Herdman not known that they were all strapped into their bunks, he would have been sure that they were tearing each other to pieces.

  Although he was no longer under sedation, Captain Ramsey spoke very little. Herdman himself was not invited to join the discussions, but he could not help but hear everything from his position in the cone.

  On the second day of the eighth week Ramsey hung midway between a sapphire called Earth and a dull-looking ruby that was Mars, and half of the voyage was over. The rest, the passengers told themselves repeatedly, was all downhill. But soon afterward the talking among each other diminished sharply, became listless and sporadic. When Herdman mentioned it to the doctor he was told that talking constantly for two hours had become too much of an effort for him.

  Herdman was ragingly hungry all the time, and Forsythe kept telling him that he was getting just enough food to make him aware all the time that he hadn't nearly enough, while everyone else had reached the stage where their stomachs had begun to shrink so that they felt weak rather than hungry. He said that he felt sorry for Mr. Herdman. But there was no way of telling whether the doctor was sincere or indulging in a little irony because his voice had weakened so much and the skin was so tightly stretched across his face that reading tone or expression were impossible.

  Wallace and Brett were terribly weak and emaciated also, and Captain Ramsey had shrunk until the cast around his broken arm and shoulder became useless and had to be cut away. The arm was strapped to his side now, and Ramsey was so thin that Forsythe said he could almost see the damage without benefit of X rays and that the prognosis was very favorable provided the patient received the proper treatment.

  Very little effort was needed to move about the ship. The push of a finger was enough to send a body drifting in the direction of the heads or the tank or wherever one wanted to go. But by the tenth week Herdman thought it better to accompany the men when they visited the tank. The daily dunk in the tank was about the only pleasure remaining to them, but they were so weakened physically that there was danger of them not being able to secure their masks properly and drowning.

  When he was helping them in and out of the tank lock they rarely spoke to him, with the exception of the doctor, and did not seem to want to look him in the eye. But they always stared at, and seemed to gain reassurance from, the tiny circles tattooed on his neck, chest and back which had been the markers for the space medics' electrodes taped to him during training orbits. And as the days passed more and more often they complained of feeling cold, although the internal temperature of the ship was comfortably high. He increased it several times but still they complained of feeling cold. Finally he wrapped blankets around them and they stopped complaining, even when he lowered the temperature again.

  He didn't have to ask Forsythe to know that it had been a psychological thing, that they felt warmer and more secure when wrapped in blankets like children....

  And gradually he could see their feelings changing toward him, softening. He was the person, Herdman realized suddenly, who washed them, fed them and wrapped them up warmly for the night. When he was doing these things, or even when he was simply moving through the passenger lounge; their eyes followed him trustingly—he even caught Ramsey doing it.

  But their trust was misplaced, Herdman told himself angrily, because he was making very little progress in adapting himself to Ramsey's ship. And he was terribly, agonizingly hungry. When the job of distributing rations fell to him because the doctor had become too weak— in spirit as well as flesh, Forsythe insisted—the effort to keep from increasing his allowance took everything he had.

  But the passengers did not always behave like frightened, trusting children. There was the occasion when Wallace unstrapped himself from his bunk while Herdman was busy in the cone and made himself violently ill by trying to eat the contents of one of the trays of green goo in the air unit—a highly specialized, nauseous but not poisonous species of plant life which was responsible for recycling their air. On that occasion he reminded them all quietly that they could eat the stuff or breathe but not both, that to get any good from the stuff they would need four stomachs like a cow, and that henceforth he would strap them into their bunks in such a way that only he could let them out.

  Then there was the time when he was bringing Brett from the tank, and Brett began whispering urgently to him, suggesting a way of saving weight and helping the food situation at the same time. His idea was that they eat somebody and discard the inedible remains. At present it looked as if they were all going to die of starvation with the exception of Herdman, and this way at least three of them would survive for sure. Brett didn't care much who the somebody was, although he expected that it wouldn't be himself because he had suggested the idea...

  Later, when he was dunking Forsythe, Herdman told the doctor about it.

  Forsythe's lips drew back in a grimace that looked horrible but was probably meant for a smile. He said weakly, "Surprised it wasn't suggested sooner. To be expected ... in the circumstances. Don't see why you're ... so angry about it."

  "I'm angry," said Herdman grimly, "because the damn fool made my mouth water."

  "Oh," said Forsythe.

  Several minutes later he said, "A person who talks about doing these things ... rarely does them."

  His tone seemed lacking in confidence.

  At fourteen weeks out, Earth was a tiny blue jewel far astern and Mars hung in the blackness ahead like a big orange ball that had been slightly smudged with handling. The passengers and Ramsey were incredibly emaciated. They had no inclination to speak, they scarcely seemed to breathe and only their eyes moved when Herd-man passed them. With just their faces showing above the blankets, faces that were little more than skulls covered with skin and hair, it was becoming difficult to tell them apart. He was no medical man, and in the circumstances he couldn't very well ask the doctor but he very much doubted if they could last another two weeks.

  He wondered if he could pare down his own rations enough to help them, but reminded himself how thin his own body had become and how he had grayed-out momentarily a couple of days back when he had moved his head suddenly. Then he wondered if it really made any difference, because he wasn't doing well in the control room anyway.

  Then ten days out from Mars, when Herdman was running through his fourth simulated landing in a row and trying desperately to coax a fraction more speed and accuracy out of hands which felt like two left feet, he became suddenly aware of Forsythe hanging over him.

  "How the blazes did you get out?" he snapped, then at once softened his tone. "Sorry, Doctor. I'm not angry —at you, that is. And now you're here maybe you can help me. Basically it is a problem of psychology . . ."

  "You forgot to strap me in," Forsythe broke in weakly, but with an undercurrent of pleasure or excitement in his voice. His lips made a death's head smile and he added, "Or maybe, considering what you've just said, you used a Freudian slip-knot...,"

  Cracks at a time like this ... thought Herdman, ashamed at the comparison with his own manner and feelings.

  ". . . But you're getting on top of it now, Mr. Herd-man," he continued, slowly but enthusiastically. "Piloting Ramsey, I mean. I was watching you. I've never seen anyone's hands move so fast!"

  "Slow, Doctor," Herdman said soberly, "for a pilot."

  Sighing, Herdman tried to explain what fast meant to a spaceship captain and what an approach and landing entailed. Even captains in charge of their own vessels had to practice constantly to keep their hands in, he exp
lained, and used taped data fed randomly into a panel which was otherwise dead. The dry runs were always difficult, always unexpected in the problems they threw out. And very often the problems had to be solved faster than thought. They had to be solved automatically, instinctively, without thought.

  In the old days a bird could be thrown into space and, with all systems Go and an incredible amount of luck all around, it could be soft-landed with a small instrument package on another planetary body. Five hundred tons of rocket and associated electronic gadgetry to land fifty pounds of instruments. But when manned space-flight arrived, economies of weight, fuel and mechanisms became necessary. The people on the ground were no longer responsible for everything, they merely hoisted the bird aloft and pointed it where it was supposed to go. They didn't load it down with telemetering devices—if anything went wrong there was a pilot to tell them all about it. Neither did they use ninety percent of the available pay-load fitting automatic, and often fallible, landing equipment. There was a pilot to take care of that, too. A pilot was a hundred times lighter and more dependable than any servomechanism ever built, and his rigorous training and deep-level conditioning enabled him to operate at very nearly the same speed.

  As one of his instructors had told him during training, a man was not simply fitted for space, he was physically and psychologically machined to fit both space and his spaceship. Exactly. The way a nut fitted a bolt. . . .

  ". . . And this nut," said Herdman grimly, tapping him-self on the chest and nodding at the panels surrounding him, "does not fit this bolt."

  "This nut . . ." began Forsythe, and coughed. He went on, "Your instructor was not without a sense of humor. But can't you force the thread a little? After all, man is the most adaptable machine there is, and you've done very well so far. In another ten days ..."

  Again Herdman tried to explain that Ramsey wasn't his ship—it wasn't even his old ship's sister, there was no family resemblance at all. The instruments were in the wrong places, at awkward angles and distances from his hands. She was different in a hundred more subtle ways. Even her paintwork was wrong—a cold, unfriendly combination of white and cool green. Herdman's control room had been warm gray with the main panels done in a deep, rich brown—those colors were keyed to his personality, the psychologists had told him, and were very important to his emotional stability.

  The doctor was following every word that he said, and probably thought that he understood. But Herdman knew that he didn't.

  "I'll do another run," said Herdman suddenly. "You watch. You'll see that I move fast, but with a certain jerkiness—I'm having to stop and think...."

  The forward vision screen remained blank but all the other instruments—approach radar, hull temperature, atmosphere density and turbulence and a dozen others-— were sending him a picture plainer than any screen could show of a planetary surface swooping up to meet him. His controls were not many for a reactor landing—jet deflectors and thrust control, mainly, but it was a matter of anticipation and feel more than anything else. There wasn't time to look at the instruments and then think what to do. So his hands moved fast, faster. Sweat popped on his forehead and hung stubbornly in the air before his eyes. He groaned and tried to move faster still. and suddenly all the instruments were at zero and he joined his shaking hands across his chest in a gesture that was almost one of prayer.

  "Well," said Forsythe admiringly, "we're down. That seemed fast, and smooth enough, too. I only saw you fumble once."

  Herdman grunted and a few seconds later began questioning the doctor about Ramsey's condition. He didn't have the heart to tell Forsythe that he had still been correcting for wind deflection at twenty thousand feet when the instruments said they were down. They would have been down, all right, in a thirty-foot-deep grave they had just dug for themselves.

  Five days out Herdman began preparation for lightening ship, tracking down each item of cargo or movable equipment and carefully estimating its weight. All of the cargo could be jettisoned, also all the personal possessions of everyone aboard, much of the water and air regeneration gear—including all the precious greenery when every last drop of moisture had been squeezed from it and transferred to the fuel tank. That would be one of the last things done, of course, because he would first have to replenish the ship's emergency air tanks and those of the passengers' suits. When he had totaled all the disposable weight he went over Brett's figures again.

  There still wasn't enough fuel, but what they had fell so little short of the minimum requirement that he had to try for a landing.

  The thought came that he might jettison a passenger —he had the figures of their respective weights as well as those of their baggage and the cargo. But he thrust the thought firmly out of his mind and began busying himself with lightening ship.

  All the small stuff he tossed out of the airlock in different directions. He did this because a ship in distress was supposed to give all possible information regarding the cause of its trouble in the hope that a similar accident could be guarded against. When ground radar on Mars picked him up that debris would have traveled so far that Ramsey would show as a point of light surrounded by a large, fuzzy trace—a clear indication that he was short of fuel. Because they would already have been trying unsuccessfully to raise him, they would know that Ramsey had no radio. It wasn't much data he was giving them, but it was the best he could do. The larger stuff—heavy machinery, the pressure containers which the manifest said contained paint, the spare spacesuits—he let drift outside the ship. They would fall ahead immediately when he applied thrust and there was no point wasting energy in pushing them away.

  He was supposed to be saving his strength for the landing.

  With two days to go the food ran out. All of the food, including his own. Herdman's allowance had been calculated to last him until the final day of the voyage— he was supposed to take a meal a few hours before landing, in fact. But Ramsey and Wallace had seemed to be dying a couple of days earlier and he had increased their ration. This had been a very stupid thing to do; but it had been just after a particularly unsuccessful session at the controls and Herdman had felt that it didn't matter much whether he was physically fit during the landing or not when he was going to kill them all anyway.

  And now all the passengers looked as if they were dying. Their white, skeletal faces were turned outward from their bunks and their eyes were open, but they didn't seem to see him when he passed. Some of them didn't move even when he disturbed their blankets to feel for the fast, incredibly weak pulse at their wrists.

  It was later on the same day that he discovered an error in their flight path. Considering the distance they had come the error was trifling, but it required five seconds' thrust at one-quarter G to correct it and they were already on a negative safety margin of fuel....

  One effect of the course correction was that the passengers, feeling the ship under power again, began to show some interest in things again. Herdman used the period of increased awareness to explain the landing drill as it would affect them. How at minus eighteen hours he would perform the prelanding checks and put everyone into spacesuits with the helmets left open. This was so that they would be on ship's air for as long as possible. At minus three hours he would seal them up, blow all the moisture which might be locked in the air purifiers and plumbing into the fuel tank, and dump everything that was movable out the airlock. The fuel and food situation being what it was there would be no stooging around in orbit. They would drop straight in.

  All the time he talked loudly and reassuringly, as if it were a simple matter of time before they were down on Mars being cared for.

  He wanted them to die as happy as possible. Herd-man thought he owed them that much at least.

  After dragging its feet for so long, time began suddenly to race by. He practiced dry runs every chance he got, and his chronometer told him that he was doing steadily worse instead of better. Forsythe had said that a human being was the most adaptable machine there was, but Her
dman's ability to adapt seemed to have been trained, conditioned, out of him. He had been fitted to operate in a spaceship, Ms own spaceship. The things which the psychologists had done to him were basic and beyond the influence of logical thought processes. He was trying to force himself to fit a ship which was not his own, and he felt that the ship hated what he was doing as much as he hated doing it. But he had to make friends with this cold, hostile, awkward ship. For a few hours he had to make her do what he wanted.

  The prelanding checks took longer than he had expected. Herdman felt very weak and he seemed to be fumbling a lot, and it was minus fourteen hours when he started the long, heart-breaking job of putting the passengers into their suits. The first thing he discovered was that he would have to leave off their gauntlets temporarily as well as the helmets—he had forgotten, because the process had been so gradual, how long their fingernails had become. The gauntlets wouldn't fit until he trimmed their nails.

  All at once Herdman felt revolted by these brittle, dry, horribly emaciated bodies and the empty, staring eyes-most of them seemed too far gone to know either hope or fear or even hunger. Yet he had had to do much worse things than cut their nails for them. His revulsion changed suddenly to anger and then guilt. It wasn't fair that they should be unknowing and uncaring of what was going to happen to them. He should have told them all long ago, and insisted that they listen and understand. Now his load of guilt was too heavy. He had to unload it on somebody if only to ask forgiveness.

  He began to shake Forsythe's suit, hearing and feeling the doctor's body moving loosely inside it, talking softly and earnestly into the open face plate. He wasn't sure what he said exactly except that his guilt and his helplessness and his dilemma with the controls figured largely in the passionate monologue, and that after a long time he stopped because the doctor was trying to say something.