by Mike Ashley
There were a few large chunks of the station tumbling close to him, dimly visible in the starlight. He made out one of the three-meter rockets he used to send the day’s output back to Pluto. For a wild second he thought he saw a way out of his predicament. Maybe he could work out a way of using it to propel him over to Treemonisha. Then he remembered he had worked all that out on the computer during one of his lonelier moments. Those rockets were designed for accelerating a pea-sized transmitter up to a tremendous velocity, and there was no provision for slowing it down again, or varying the thrust, or turning it on and off. It was useless to him. Even if he could rig it some way such that it would move him instead of drilling straight through his back, the delta-vee he could get from it was enough to let him reach Treemonisha in about three weeks. And that was far, far too long.
He started over to it, anyway. He was tired of hanging out there in space a billion kilometers from anything. He wanted to get close to it, to have something to look at.
He clanged onto it and slowly stopped its rotation. Then he clung to it tightly, like an injured monkey to a tree limb.
A day later he was still clinging, but he had thought of a better metaphor.
“Like a castaway clinging to a log,” he laughed to himself. No, he wasn’t sure he liked that better. If he cast loose from the rocket, nothing at all would happen to him. He wouldn’t drown in salty seas or even choke on hard vacuum. He was like the monkey: very scared and not about to let go of the security that his limb afforded him.
“. . . calling. Treemonisha calling Jordan, please answer quickly if you can hear me, because I have the radio set to . . .”
He was too astounded to respond at once, and the voice faded out. Then he yelled until he was hoarse, but there was no answer. He abandoned himself to despair for a time.
Then he pulled himself together and puzzled out with what wits he had left what it was she might doing. She was scanning the path of strewn debris with a tight radio beam, hoping he was one of the chunks of metal her radar told her was there. He must be alert and yell out the next time he heard her.
Hours later, he was trying to convince himself it hadn’t been a hallucination.
“. . . hear me, because – ”
“Treemonisha!”
“ – I have the radio set to scan the wreckage of your station, and if you take your time, I won’t hear you. Treemonisha call . . .”
It faded again, and he jittered in silence.
“Jordan, can you hear me now?” The voice wavered and faded, but it was there. She must be aiming by hand.
“I hear you. I figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“Your painless way of committing suicide. But you were wrong. It’s true that if I had stepped outside the station wearing my suit, I would have died of CO2 poisoning eventually, but you were wrong if you thought I could take this isolation. I would have jetted back to the station in just a few hours . . .” His voice broke as he forced himself to look again at the bottomless depths that surrounded him.
“You always take the hard way, don’t you?” she said, in a voice so gentle and sympathetic that she might have been talking to a child. “Why would you have to step out?”
“Aaaaa . . .” he gurgled. One step ahead again. Why step outside, indeed? Because that’s what you do in a spacesuit. You don’t wear it inside the station, sealed off from the fail-safe systems inside unless you want to die when the oxygen in your tanks runs out.
“I’m not that dense, and you know it. You want to tell me why I didn’t see that? No, wait, don’t. Don’t outfigure me in that, too. I’ll tell you why. Because I didn’t really want to kill myself, right? If I had been sincere, I would have thought of it.”
“That’s what I finally hoped was the case. But I still didn’t want to take the chance of telling you. You might have felt pressured to go through with it if you knew there was a way.”
Something was nagging at him. He furrowed his brow to squeeze it out in the open, and he had it.
“The time-lag’s shorter,” he stated. “How far apart are we?”
“A little over two million kilometers, and still closing. The latest thing I can get out of my computer – which is working in fits and starts – is that you’ll pass within about 1.5 million from me, and you’ll be going five thousand per, relative.”
She cleared her throat. “Uh, speaking of that, how much reserve do you have left?”
“Why bother yourself? I’ll just fade away at the right time, and you won’t have to worry because you know how long I have to live.”
“I’d still like to know. I’d rather know.”
“All right. The little indicator right here says my recyclers should keep right on chugging along for another five days. After that, no guarantees. Do you feel better now?”
“Yes, I do.” She paused again. “Jordan, how badly do you need to talk to me right now? I can stay here as long as you need it, but there’s a lot of work I have to do to keep this place running, and I can’t afford the power drain to talk to you continuously for five days. The batteries are acting badly, and they really do need constant attention.”
He tried not to feel hurt. Of course she was fighting her own fight to stay alive – she still had a chance. She wouldn’t be Treemonisha if she folded up because the going got rough. The rescue ship would find her, he felt sure, working away to keep the machines going.
“I’m sure I can get along,” he said, trying his best to keep the reproach out of his voice. He was ashamed at feeling that way, but he did. The bleak fact was that he had felt for a brief moment that dying wouldn’t be so hard as long as he could talk to her. Now he didn’t know.
“Well, hang on, then. I can call you twice a day if my figures are right and talk for an hour without draining too much power for what I have to do. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’m sure,” he lied.
And he was right. He wasn’t all right
The first twelve-hour wait was a mixture of gnawing loneliness and galloping agoraphobia.
About half one and half the other he commented during one of his lucid moments. They were rare enough, and he didn’t begrudge himself the luxury of talking aloud when he was sane enough to understand what he was saying.
And then Treemonisha called, and he leaked tears through the entire conversation, but they didn’t enter into his voice, and she never suspected. They were happy tears, and they wet the inside of his suit with his boundless love for her.
She signed off, and he swung over to hating her, telling the uninterested stars how awful she treated him, how she was the most ungrateful sentient being from here to 70 Ophiuchi.
“She could spare the power to talk just a few minutes longer,” he raged. “I’m rotting out here, and she has to go adjust the air flow into her bedroom or sweep up. It’s so damn important, all that housekeeping, and she leaves me all alone.”
Then he kicked himself for even thinking such things about her. Why should she put her life on the line, wasting power she needed to keep breathing just to talk to him?
“I’m dead already, so she’s wasting her time. I’ll tell her the next time she calls that she needn’t call back.”
That thought comforted him. It sounded so altruistic, and he was uncomfortably aware that he was liable to be pretty demanding of her. If she did everything he wanted her to, she wouldn’t have any time to do anything else.
“How are you doing, Rock Rogers?”
“Treemonisha! How nice of you to call. I’ve been thinking of you all day long, just waiting for the phone to ring.”
“Is that sincere, or are you hating me again today?”
He sobered, realizing that it might be hard for her to tell anymore, what with his manic swings in mood.
“Sincere. I’ll lay it on the line, because I can’t stand not talking about it anymore. Have you thought of anything, anything I might do to save myself? I’ve tried to think, but it seems I can
’t think in a straight line anymore. I get a glimpse of something, and it fades away. So I’ll ask you. You were always faster than me in seeing a way to do something. What can I do?”
She was quiet for a long time.
“Here is what you must do. You must come to terms with your situation and stay alive as long as you can. If you keep panicking like you’ve been doing, you’re going to open your exhaust and spill all your air. Then all bets are off.”
“If you were betting, would you bet that it matters at all how much longer I stay alive?”
“The first rule of survival is never give up. Never. If you do, you’ll never take advantage of the quirks of fate that can save you. Do you hear me?”
“Treemonisha, I won’t hedge around it any longer. Are you doing something to save me? Have you thought of something? Just what ‘quirks’ did you have in mind?”
“I have something that might work. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because I don’t trust you to remain calm about it. And that’s all you’re getting from me.”
“Haven’t you considered that not knowing will upset me more than knowing and worrying about it?”
“Yes,” she said, evenly. “But frankly, I don’t want you looking over my shoulder and jostling my elbow while I try to get this together. I’m doing what I can here, and I just told you what you have to do out there. That’s all I can do for you, and you won’t change it by trying to intimidate me with one of your temper tantrums. Go ahead, sound off all you want, tell me I’m being unfair, that you have a right to know. You’re not rational, Jordan, and you are the one who has to get yourself out of that. Are you ready to sign off? I have a lot of work to do.” He admitted meekly that he was ready.
Her next call was even briefer. He didn’t want to remember it, but he had whined at her, and she had snapped at him, then apologized for it, then snapped at him again when he wheedled her for just a teeny tiny hint.
“Maybe I was wrong, not telling you,” she admitted. “But I know this: if I give in and tell you now, the next phone call will be full of crap from you telling me why my scheme won’t work. Buck up, son. Tell yourself a story, recite prime numbers. Figure out why entropy runs down. Ask yourself what The Humanoid does. But don’t do what he does. That isn’t your style. I’ll see you later.”
The next twelve hours marked the beginning of rising hope for Jordan, tinged with the first traces of confidence.
“I think I might be able to hold out,” he told the stars. He took a new look at his surroundings.
“You aren’t so far away,” he told the cold, impersonal lights. It sounded good, and so he went on with it. “Why, how can I feel you’re so far away when I can’t get any perspective on you? You might as well be specks on my faceplate. You are specks.” And they were.
With the discovery that he had some control of his environment, he was emboldened to experiment with it. By using his imagination, he could move the stars from his faceplate to the far-away distance, hundreds of meters away. That made the room he was in a respectable size, but not overwhelming. He turned his imagination like a focusing knob, moving the stars and galaxies in and out, varying the size of space as he perceived it.
When she called again, he told her with some triumph that he no longer cared about the isolation he was floating in. And it was true. He moved the stars back to their original positions, light-years away, and left them there. It no longer mattered.
She congratulated him tiredly. There was strain in her voice; she had been working hard at whatever mysterious labors had kept her from the phone. He no longer believed the story about maintenance occupying all her time. If that was true, when would she find time to work on rescuing him? The logic of that made him feel good all over.
He no longer clung to his bit of driftwood as an anchor against the loneliness. Rather, he had come to see it as a home base from which he could wander. He perched on it and looked out at the wide universe. He looked at the tiny, blinding spark that was the sun and wondered that all the bustling world of people he had needed so badly for so long could be contained in such a small space. He could put out his thumb and cover all the inner planets, and his palm took in most of the rest. Billions of people down there, packed solid, while he had this great black ocean to wallow around in.
Jordan’s time was down to five hours. He was hungry, and the air in his helmet stank.
“The time,” Treemonisha stated, “is fourteen o-clock, and all is well.”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s you. What is time?”
“Oh, brother. You’re really getting into it, aren’t you? Time is: the time for my twice-daily call to see how things are in your neck of space. How are you doing?”
“Wonderful. I’m at peace. When the oxygen runs out, I’ll at least die a peaceful death. And I have you to thank for it.”
“I always hoped I’d go kicking and screaming,” she said. “And what’s this about dying? I told you I had something going.”
“Thank you, darling, but you don’t need to carry on with that anymore. I’m glad you did, because for a time there if I hadn’t thought you were working to save me, I never would have achieved the peace I now have. But I can see now that it was a device to keep me going, to steady me. And it worked, Tree, it worked. Now, before you sign off, would you take a few messages? The first one is to my mother. ‘Dear mom . . .’”
“Hold on there. I refuse to hear anything so terribly personal unless there’s a real need for it. Didn’t I find a way for you to kill yourself after you had given it up? Don’t I always pull more gold out of those transmissions than you do? Haven’t you noticed anything?”
The time-lag!
Panic was rising again in his voice as he hoarsely whispered – “Where are you?”
And instantly:
“A thousand kilometers off your starboard fo’c’sle, mate, and closing fast. Look out toward Gemini, and in about thirty seconds you’ll see my exhaust as I try to bring this thing in without killing both of us.”
“This thing? What is it?”
“Spaceship. Hold on.”
He got himself turned in time to see the burn commence. He knew when it shut off exactly how long the burn had been; he had seen it enough times. It was three and five-eighths seconds, the exact burn time for the first stage of the message rockets he had launched every day for almost a year.
“Ooh! Quite a few gees packed into these things,” she said.
“But how . . . ?”
“Hold on a few minutes longer.” He did as he was asked.
“Damn. Well, it can’t be helped, but I’m going to go by you at about fifty kilometers per hour, and half a kilometer away. You’ll have to jump for it, but I can throw you a line. You still have that rocket to push against?”
“Yes, and I have quite a bit of fuel in my backpack. I can get to you. That’s pretty good shooting over that distance.”
“Thanks. I didn’t have time for anything fancy, but I . . .”
“Now you hush. I’m going to have to see this to believe it. Don’t spoil it for me.”
And slowly, closing on him at a stately fifty kilometers per, was . . . a thing . . . that she had off-handedly called a spaceship.
It was all rough-welded metal and ungainly struts and excess mass, but it flew. The heart of it was a series of racks for holding the message rocket first stages in clusters of ten. But dozens of fourth and fifth stages stuck out at odd angles, all connected by wire to Treemonisha’s old familiar lounging chair. All the padding and upholstery had frozen and been carelessly picked off. And in the chair was Treemonisha.
“Better be ready in about fifty seconds.”
“How did you do it? How long did it take you?”
“I just asked myself: ‘What would Rock Rogers have done?’ and started whipping this into shape.”
“You don’t fool me for an instant. You never cared for Rock. What would Maryjane Peters, superscientist, have done?”
He ould hear the pleased not
e in her voice, though she tried not to show it.
“Well, maybe you’re right. I worked on it for three days, and then I had to go whether it was ready or not, because it was going to take me two days to reach you. I worked on it all the way over here, and I expect to nurse it all the way back. But I intend to get back, Jordan, and I’ll need all the help I can get from my crew.”
“You’ll have it.”
“Get ready. Jump!”
He jumped, and she threw the line out, and he snagged it, and they slowly spun around each other, and his arms felt like they would be wrenched off, but he held on.
She reeled him in, and he climbed into the awkward cage she had constructed. She bustled around, throwing away expended rocket casings, ridding the ship of all excess mass, hooking him into the big oxygen bottle she had fetched.
“Brace yourself. You’re going to have bruises all over your backside when I start up.”
The acceleration was brutal, especially since he wasn’t cushioned for it. But it lasted only three and five-eighths seconds.
“Well, I’ve lived through three of these big burns now. One more to go, and we’re home free.” She busied herself with checking their course, satisfied herself, then sat back in the chair.
They sat awkwardly side by side for a long twenty seconds.
“It’s . . . it’s funny to be actually sitting here by you,” he ventured.
“I feel the same way.” Her voice was subdued, and she found it hard to glance over at him. Hesitantly, her hand reached out and took his. It shocked him to his core, and he almost didn’t know what to do. But something took over for him when he finally appreciated through all the conditioned reflexes that it was all right, he could touch her. It seemed incredible to him that the spacesuits didn’t count for anything; it was enough that they could touch. He convulsively swept her into his arms and crushed her to him. She pounded his back, laughing raggedly. He could barely feel it through the suit, but it was wonderful!
“It’s like making love through an inflated tyre,” she gasped when she calmed down enough to talk.