The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 351
"It's hot."
"Yes."
"About the captain, Mercer. I should have told you earlier, but the passengers were so interested in his troubles that I didn't want to spoil things for them. We reported what you said about his condition before Eurydice blew and the recovery ship will be carrying the special instruments you need to operate on him and withdraw the radioactive materials."
"That's great."
"Prescott will be acting captain for the rest of the trip out and back—Collingwood won't be able to assume command again until he has passed the Earthside medical. Prescott should have been captain anyway, but the company thought that he lacked charm for a passenger-ship skipper and put Collingwood in with Prescott to keep him right. The captain was strictly a station shuttle man—a nice person, but the situation wasn't fair to Prescott. He is tops in this profession, but he needs something—"
"A good PR man?"
"Yeah. But we shouldn't waste air talking all the time."
"You are doing most of it."
"Listen, Mercer, are you asking for a punch in the—"
"Prescott. The remaining pods seem to be in no immediate danger with the exception of one. There is a life-support system failure with toxic wastes escaping into the living space. This is an urgent one, Mercer. Can you squeeze in three more?"
THE THREE survivors were sedated just as soon as Mercer was sure that they were still alive. Then he burrowed and pushed until he found spaces for them and returned to the canopy to rest for the effort of burrowing in again a few minutes later to make sure that nobody was smothering. That effort increased the heat being generated inside the segment and the precaution did not seem to be really necessary. Twice he nearly passed out and once he almost panicked. Only the thought of Kirk as he had last seen him saved Mercer from tearing and kicking at the bodies pressing in all around him.
In a way Kirk's reaction had been normal. He had known that he was going to die and had decided to enjoy himself first. But the hot, intimate contact of flesh did not stir Mercer even though, like Kirk, he was sure that he was going to die shortly. He began to wonder why—was something wrong with him? But then he began to realize that all there was wrong with him was a recently contracted and serious case of monogamy—the only close contact he wanted or would enjoy would be with the patient in bunk Three.
He did not go among the passengers again, but stayed close to the canopy, fighting for every breath and sweating from every pore. This atmosphere is unsuited to human life, he told himself, so why don't we all die? But they did not die and some of the passengers seemed to be moving, waking up—but it was only Neilson pushing his way through to the canopy.
"I thought it might be cooler here," he said. "It isn't."
Mercer wiped at the plastic without speaking.
"I feel like a living fish in a can of sardines," said Neilson, then added: "Sorry, I'm talking."
The silence stretched for a sweating, stifling eternity and when it was broken the voice was not using the segment's precious air.
"Pod Fourteen, Mathewson. Come in, Mercer."
The voice was without expression, just like that of a real spaceman in an emergency. Mercer wondered what had gone wrong in Fourteen and if he could squeeze in one more. It would have to be a bad emergency for the medical segment to be a sanctuary, but it was only right that a mother and son should be together at the end.
"Mercer," he said.
"I—I have visual contact with the recovery ship, Mercer."
"Prescott. Confirmed. MacArdle will have the figures for you in—"
They lost Prescott for a few minutes then because the Mathewson boy had lost control and was whooping like an Indian, and Neilson and Mercer were joining him.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE RECOVERY ship differed from Eurydice in that it had two passenger locks aft instead of one, a feature designed to speed the reembarkation of survivors. Neilson nudged Mercer's segment against one and used the other to dock his own vehicle, but it was a very close thing. Mercer's head was pounding and throbbing and black splotches were blotting out his vision when he hit the quick-release on his seal. Then the hot, putrid air was rushing past him and cool, dry air began seeping back. He crawled out, shivering, to find Neilson already waiting for him.
"We'll have to go after the others as soon as possible," Neilson said briskly. "Do you mind if I don't help you unload this bunch? If I can concentrate on replenishing your segment with power cells, air tanks and fuel cartridges we could be ready to go in thirty minutes."
Mercer nodded. He began moving out the sleeping passengers and floating them carefully into the main compartment, which now seemed to be enormous. He began with the people in Neilson's segment because it had to be jettisoned to allow Prescott, who was estimating contact with the recovery ship in twenty minutes, to dock. MacArdle and his passengers were due a half-hour later, by which time Prescott's segment would have been turned loose. Mercer's vehicle was the one designed for fast rescue work as long as there was at least one trained astronaut aboard to fly it.
The last two people he moved out were the captain and Mrs. Mathewson—these he took up to sick-bay. The place gave him the strangest feeling of disorientation because it was exactly the same as the place he had just left except for its fresh, newly minted look. On his way he saw the people drifting about the passenger compartment showing signs of animation. He checked his dive, letting Mrs. Mathewson and the Captain fall slowly ahead of him, while he spoke to them.
The manual had told him what to say. He had read that particular section over and over again during the past two weeks as he might have scanned a fairy story he had never expected to come true.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "As you can see, your couches are already arranged in cruising mode and numbered as were the positions in Eurydice. In the usual compartments you will find food and fresh clothing. Will you please go to your original couches, strap in, talk as much as you want to, but keep the center of this compartment clear. For the next few hours the ship's officers will be bringing in the remaining survivors and doing other necessary jobs and you may feel that you are being ignored, but things will soon return to normal.
"By the day after tomorrow," he added, smiling, "I may even be able to arrange a swim in the tank."
When he had completed his check on the captain, he replaced the blankets removed during the superheated period in the other segment and immobilized Collingwood with webbing. The bunks were not cold, but the feel of blankets would give a sense of security and Mrs. Mathewson certainly needed that.
She came to just as he was about to slide back her bunk. She began to struggle against the webbing and blanket with increasing violence. Instinctively he put out his hands to restrain her—then he remembered the position and severity of some of her bruises and reached for the hypo instead.
"Take it easy, ma'am," he said gently. "You're safe now."
She stopped struggling and asked, "Mercer?"
"Yes, ma'am."
He knew that he should sedate her quickly before she had a chance to think, to remember. But she could not go through the rest of her life under sedation and it was important that she should try to face those ugly memories as soon as possible—not completely, of course, but in easy stages. He desperately wanted to see her reactions, to get some idea of whether or not she would be able to handle it, before he used the hypo. Neilson hadn't called him, so there was still a little time before he had to leave.
"Bobby?"
"He's safe, too, but still in his pod. You must understand that having it to himself means he won't run out of air as quickly as the others. We have to bring him in last, ma'am."
"I know. You could give him no preferential treatment. You acted as if he were a man."
"He did a man's job, ma'am, and when he cried like a frightened little boy for his mother I pretended not to hear."
"And you brought him back. I'm grateful. I might not sound it—but I am. You treated him exactly right, said all the proper things—to all of us, not just to Bobby. You were always cool, calm and—and nothing seemed to touch you or change you in any way. I suppose I should be glad—we should all be glad—that you weren't an overly-sympathetic character—"
AS SHE fell silent Mercer thought that clinically he was very pleased with her reactions, but that on the personal level he was coming off very badly. He wished that he could relax and stop radiating the composure he most decidedly did not feel.
"I'm not supposed to display signs of weakness in front of the passengers," Mercer said irritably, "and especially not before my patients, but if you knew me better you would realize that I could be quite bad tempered at times—and jealous and very, very angry in certain circumstances—"
"I'm sorry, Doctor," she broke in. "I don't know why I'm picking on you like this." She put her hand out of the blanket and gripped his, the one that wasn't holding the hypo. "Don't put me out again just yet. I'm picking on you because I can't get nasty with myself—at least, not out loud. When you were talking to us back there I could tell that you were sometimes angry and that you couldn't afford to show it because everybody else was listening and would have known what was going on in Three. But you knew and you made Kirk and Stone mad at you because you were like an amplified voice of conscience. You kept heading them off, talking sense, lecturing them. If it hadn't been for you it would have happened much sooner. Are they both—both—"
Her grip was so tight that his fingers were turning white. He nodded.
"Maybe I should not have been so hard to get," she went on, but pleading with him with her eyes to argue and disagree with everything she was saying. "These days nobody would have worried, would they? And you would not have talked about it. But they were strangers, just like my husband was several different kinds of stranger before he died and all the different strangers wanted to make love to me. And it was so open out there, so clean and bright and empty that I couldn't—it would have been like sinning in heaven." She paused, looking away from him. "But I could have forced myself and once I almost did. If they had had me they might not have started fighting."
Mercer shook his head. "Then I would have had to lecture you—at very inconvenient times—about the need to avoid generating heat."
Still she would not look at him as she said, "After he knocked me out—what happened?"
"Nothing much," said Mercer. "He became angry and frustrated—very angry and extremely frustrated from what I could hear—and I was listening very carefully, you understand. Then he collapsed and died from heat-stroke a few minutes later, leaving just enough air to keep you alive until I arrived. But you should try to forget all about it, you know. It's over. And you've a grip like a wrestler, ma'am. If I'm to perform any more miracles of surgery you'd better not break my fingers."
"You aren't telling the truth," she said angrily, still without letting go. "You know it is important to me and you just want me to think—"
"It's important to me, too," Mercer broke in quietly. "Not vitally important, you understand, but still important enough to make me glad that I'm not lying."
"I'm not sure that I understand you," she said, but her expression said that she did and her grip on his hand eased. She added: "Will I have to tell people about it? Will there be an investigation?"
"Not unless you want one," said Mercer. "As far as I'm concerned I don't really know who did what to whom. Both men were unrecognizable when I got to them and once I knew that they were dead and you weren't, I couldn't waste time reconstructing the crime. If you like I can say, quite truthfully, that one died from asphyxiation and one from heat-stroke. That isn't the whole truth, of course, but I'm thinking about Mrs. Kirk's feelings as well as yours and Bobby's and even you don't know for sure what happened at the end. Nobody has jurisdiction in space-wreck incidents like this, so there is no point in talking about it if you don't want to. The only people who would be interested are the news media folks, and they—"
"No," she said firmly.
"I didn't think you would want that," he said, bringing up the hypo. "So just try to forget the whole thing for the time being and sleep. And let go of my hand. You'll be in this bunk until your cracked ribs mend, so you can expect to see a lot more of me—"
He stopped because she was laughing and wincing because laughing must have been hurting her ribs.
"Is that possible?" she said.
Mercer smiled in return. "I can't answer that, ma'am, until you are completely recovered. There are rules about doctor-patient relationships, you know."
Before she could reply he had tucked her bare arm under the blanket and closed the bunk.
She had made him aware for the first time in two weeks that he was improperly dressed, that he was not even wearing a cap like Neilson and that they were no longer in an emergency situation in which such lapses could be excused. He still had a few minutes to spare before the engineer needed him, so he shaved, climbed into a set of clean uniform coveralls and used the canopy plastic to check that his cap was straight. The sooner everything returned to normal the better, he thought as he turned to go.
"NEILSON. I will need you in ten minutes, Mercer—this took a little longer than expected. Prescott is back on board and wants to see you in the control-room."
"Mercer. Ten minutes."
The first officer was in Neilson's position, going over the engineering telltales. He looked at Mercer slowly from head to toes and shook his head.
He said, "Before you leave to pick up the rest of the survivors I want you to remember that there will be an inquiry when we get back to Earth into the Eurydice disaster and the proper functioning or otherwise of its survival equipment. Neilson, MacArdle and myself will be responsible for the technical evidence and you will deal with questions regarding the effects on passengers. You will also have to give medical evidence regarding the deaths of Kirk and Stone."
"Heat-stroke, asphyxiation and heart failure," said Mercer.
Prescott nodded. "Mrs. Mathewson's story might not agree with yours and, while I realize that she will not be returning to Earth, it could be awkward if—"
"She wants to forget about it and so do I," said Mercer firmly. "That was my professional advice as well. There is also the fact that the media, if they got their hands on it, would be sure to imply all sorts of things which did not in fact happen. You see, both men were in such a mess that I don't know, from my very brief observation of their bodies, who killed whom. It is possible, although not likely, that Stone made a comeback after Mrs. Mathewson was knocked out—so even she can't be sure. Then there are the possible effects on the boy of reading that sort of stuff about his mother—or finding out about it in later life. She won't talk about it, you can be sure of that."
Prescott looked relieved, but not completely. He said, "That's good. I told Mrs. Kirk about her husband on the way in—I said that his death was due to excess weight making him vulnerable to the heat and low oxygen content of the air. She could suffer, too, if it got out that he died fighting over a woman. But I'm more concerned about you, Mercer, and what you may say when we get back. We are all going to be heroes, you especially. You could earn a lot of money from the media simply by telling the truth as you know it. And I couldn't really blame you—especially since you only wanted space experience to land a good research job on Station Three—"
"If you don't mind," said Mercer, "I would like a little more space experience—of a less dramatic nature, of course. And in any case I am more interested in a job on Ganymede Base now. I don't want to embarrass the Mathewsons—or Mrs. Kirk—so if I can stay with the ship and toe the company line during the inquiry—"
"I'll be captain," said Prescott.
"You almost dissuade me."
"I wasn't trying to do so," said Prescott quietly. "Just trying to give you fair warning that I am a consistently nasty person who is unlikely to change anything but his uniform."
"Neilson. We'll be ready to go in three minutes, Mercer."
As he turned to go Mercer wondered if he would change very much. He was thinking of a boy who had played spaceman for two long and dangerous weeks and of his mother who would soon have him with her again. He had helped to save the lives of both and he was beginning to feel responsible for them in an oddly possessive way and the voyage was less than three weeks gone. It was a silly question because he had already changed in many ways.
The End
Commuter
New Writings in SF-21 – 1972
Author James White makes a break from his "Sector General" stories with this fascinating account of a dying old lady and a young man who apparently had more than a passing interest in her health.
THE SUSPECT was dishevelled and, if he was contused as well, the Sergeant had left his marks in places where they did not show. Never a very pleasant man at the best of times. Sergeant Greer was completely lacking in charm when he was angry. One of the things which made him very angry was the kind of crime which this suspect had almost certainly been intending to commit, and another was suspects who tried to be smart when they had been caught trying to commit them.
In this instance Inspector Michaelson agreed with his Sergeant.
"This could be a very serious charge," said Michaelson. "Why wouldn't you give the Sergeant your name and address?"
Michaelson kept his tone firm but friendly, suggesting that the other's lack of cooperation had been due to an understandable dislike of the arresting officer which need not, however, include the Inspector. If the other did not give his name at once he should at least begin to talk—if only to demand details of the charge he was being held on, or to make formal complaint about his rough handling or to ask for a solicitor. But the suspect remained silent.
Irritated, Michaelson said, "I take it he speaks English?"
"Fluently," said Greer.
"I see."
"No, sir," said the Sergeant, "not four-letter fluent. When I was sure he wasn't armed I eased my hold on him—that was when he became fluent. When he saw that I wasn't believing any of the stories he was trying on me he said that he wasn't carrying much money but that I was welcome to it if I let him go and that he had not intended harming the old lady, just watching her. I told him that attempting to bribe a police officer would get him into worse trouble and since then he hasn't said a word."
