The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 365
"No."
"You understand ... a first approximation and that ... more accurate attitude checks later. Is there any other information you need?"
"No, thanks," yelled Mercer, and added, "you seem to have a photographic memory where my segment is concerned. Were you a patient in it?"
"Detailed structural data ... in the Captain's segment. Prescott worked out the sighting arrangements. But now you must get your segment lined up with ... me know when you're ready for the first attitude check."
"I'll give you a shout."
"That's very good. Doctor."
"Prescott. Stop chattering, you two. MacArdle, Neilson next. Mercer, you know what you have to do."
While Mercer sweated at changing the attitude of his segment he could not help looking at the locked control panel set above his couch. Like the other crew segments, there was provision for making rapid and accurate changes of attitude, but anyone who was not a trained astronaut could very easily send his vehicle spinning helplessly out of control if he tried using anything but the pre-measured A and B thrusters. Prescott had not even mentioned the possibility of his being able to fly the vehicle, much less forbidden him to do so.
The radio interference had faded a little as he worked. When Mercer turned up the volume on the pod frequency he could make out a babble of voices through the static. Apparently they were now close to the center of the expanding sphere of interference, and signals could get neither in nor out. But the sphere was hollow, and the people inside it could talk to each other and would be able to do so with less and less trouble as time went on.
He heard every word that MacArdle spoke while he made the tiny movements which placed the segment into its pre-burn position. He held himself still as instructed, making sure that the segment was not drifting off the line. But when MacArdle spoke again he could not move at all, and for several minutes he could not even speak.
"MacArdle. Acknowledge, Mercer. Have you got trouble?"
He could actually feel the globules of sweat growing on his skin, making his hands slippery and his back skid along the lock seal. He shook his head violently, and the newly-dislodged perspiration drifted before his face and tasted salty when he breathed it in. The stars burning coldly though the canopy were suddenly a mass of incomprehensible lights with no recognizable order or meaning, the imaginary lines which linked them together gone, so that he did not know what he was seeing.
Mercer had thought that he could not feel more afraid than he had in the howling, steam-filled chaos of the passenger compartment of Eurydice, but he had been wrong.
"I ... I don't think I've got this right," he said finally.
There was a silence which stretched for an eternity, but which could only have lasted a few seconds. Mercer wondered if MacArdle would speak, or if Prescott would cut in with some pointed and abrasive comment. He could just imagine what the First Officer was thinking about him now.
"MacArdle. You seemed to be doing fine until a few minutes ago—I mean, the Pleiades and Sirius and Orion are pretty distinctive referents. But just try to relax, drift forward to the canopy, and have a good look around to make absolutely sure that you have the right constellations. Make sure you shield your eyes from the Sun or you'll waste a lot of time waiting for your night vision to come back. But take your time. Don't let me rush you, and don't push the button because you're afraid or ashamed or because you want to put yourself out of your agony. You must get it right first time."
Mercer's voice wouldn't work.
"Maybe the Captain can help you."
"The Captain is under sedation," said Mercer sharply, "and he can't see, anyway. I would only be giving him something more to worry about. I'll go forward and have another look around."
"1 was going to ask you to do that in any case, Doctor. We all have to double-check on something as important as this. And remember, when you start your burn give me a ten-second countdown so that I will know the exact time of firing and the time you will have to fire your B thrusters at the rendezvous point—otherwise you might go sailing past. And don't worry if there seems to be nobody there when you arrive—we may be too widely scattered to see each other without flares."
When the burn came, the sensation of weight was so strange that Mercer thought he would drown in the softness of the bunk. In a few seconds it was over, and he coiled and stowed the cable and remote-control switch, which had enabled him to fire the thruster from his position opposite the Captain.
"Prescott. The sooner the pods are turned around the better. Mercer. You have done most of the talking to them so far, and you may as well continue. How will you handle it? Numerically?"
"Yes," said Mercer. "Taking them in numerical order will stop any argument about who gets their instructions first—but there are exceptions. Two of the pods are carrying four people and will run out of air before the others, one of the threes is a potentially explosive situation, one may have a leak, and nobody will object to the Mathewson boy jumping the queue—"
"I do. Mercer. Bringing back the pods that are in hazard first is a good idea, but the boy can comfortably wait his turn, or even come in last. He will not, repeat not, run out of air and food."
"I understand," said Mercer.
"Good. Now go to work on the passengers. Don't waste time, but don't appear to be rushing them, either. MacArdle will give you the referents for each pod as you need them, and you will translate them to your passengers. I, ah, know that you will appreciate their problems."
Chapter Sixteen
"ONE OF us," said Stone, "is considerably heavier than the other two. Will this swing us off course when we apply thrust?"
"Not very much. Three, but you may as well get it absolutely right and seat the two lighter passengers closer together and facing the heavy one. But make sure that your movements have not set up a drift away from your marker stars."
"You never miss a trick," muttered Kirk.
"Don't be so blasted sensitive," returned Stone. "I deliberately did not say which of us was the fat one, and I very much doubt if Mercer remembers us. Relax, Kirk—it was a purely technical question. Or is the thought of me sitting close to the lady bothering you?"
"Don't tell me to relax in that tone of voice," said Kirk angrily. "You're deliberately giving Mercer the impression that I'm ready to go berserk and that all I can think about is women."
"You certainly haven't thought much about repositioning this thing," Stone replied. "And don't move or we'll have to spend another half-hour getting the right stars lined up. Be a good man and wait until after the burn before you take a swipe at me."
"I didn't have to think about it, with a cool scientific mind like yours directing the operation," Kirk said. "Or maybe you are just pretending to know it all so that she will think you are some kind of scientist champion who deserves, and intends to claim, his prize—"
"Shut up, Kirk."
"In a minute. I just want to remind you of a scientific fact. This overweight body which you are always making cracks about, and which she tries not to look at, has lived on Earth for fifty-two years. It has developed muscles to lift and move itself around under one Earth gravity—pretty big muscles, though they don't show—and in weightless conditions they will not be hampered very much by the fatty overlay. Just remember that before you start claiming any prizes."
"Stop it," said Mrs. Mathewson, speaking for the first time that day. "Stop fighting, and stop talking about me as if I was one of the food packs. You're both old enough to have more sense. Besides, the lucky winner could not claim his prize—if he tried we would all die of heatstroke."
"Attention, Pod Three. Are you stable and ready for thrust? Do you want to recheck your attitude?"
"We have rechecked our attitude four times," said Stone, glaring at Kirk, "and we're as stable as we're ever going to be. And anybody with half a brain knows that if we haven't got it right, then we've no hope of reaching the—"
"Relax, Stone," said Kirk nastily.
"We're firing ... now," said Stone.
"Thank you. Three. I shall pass you the repositioning information in plenty of time for you to fire the braking thrusters at rendezvous. Pod Four, come in, please ..."
The operation was smooth and fast on Pod Four, because Corrie had been listening to Mercer's instructions to the other capsules and had already worked out a close approximation of his pod's firing attitude, so that only a few minutes spent on minor corrections were needed to position it accurately. The relationship between Mercer and the astrophysicist during the exchange of information was that of a pupil and a rather irascible teacher—and Mercer wasn't the teacher. Corrie did most of the talking until the moment when he pushed the thrust button and his wife made a sound that would have been a scream if she had not been breathing in at the time, and pointed.
"Don't wave your arm about, dear," said Corrie, "or you will cause a deviation in course. But I see what you mean."
"Having trouble. Four?"
"Just an unpleasant surprise," Corrie replied. "When we applied thrust the sidewalls bulged outwards and the lock-section forward looked for a moment as if it would come down on our heads. Actually, it approached by only a few feet, and now that thrust has ceased, it and the sidewalls have returned to normal. But you might have warned us that this would happen. That was inconsiderate of you, Mercer."
Corrie waited for more than a minute, then said testily, "Mercer, did you hear me?"
"I hear you. Four. Sorry about that. Was there any indication of a swing off course when it happened?"
"No deviation," said Corrie.
"Good. Thank you, Four. Pod Five, come in."
As Corrie drifted away from the services panel, he wondered if he had detected a note of strain in Mercer's voice. He was becoming very familiar with the sound of the medical officer's voice because, like the occupants of all the other survival capsules, it was the only outside sound that they heard. He wondered why Mercer had waited before answering him. Was Mercer irritated because a passenger had made a legitimate complaint at a time when he was very busy? Was he feeling as hot and uncomfortable as was Corrie, and panting in the stinking, humid air as if he had just run a mile? Or was it simply that Mercer had been talking so long, repeating the same instructions over and over again, that he was going hoarse?
But there was no way of escaping Mercer's voice, so Corrie panted and sweated and listened to the medic being patient with the stupid ones, and reassuring with the frightened ones, and both at the same time with the majority of them. The only consolation was that Mercer seemed to be speeding up the process—while one pod was lining itself up on its marker stars, he had taken to giving the next two pods their attitude instructions.
He ran into a slow patch between Pods Ten and Thirteen because the Sun occupied the sky close to their markers on one side and the passenger wearing the goggles could not see the stars clearly, while the others dazzled themselves trying and had to wait until their night vision returned. Mercer's voice was very loud during this period, probably because the pods concerned were at extreme range for his radio.
Corrie wondered why the other officers were not helping him, but then decided that Mercer's radio was probably designed for this kind of work, and that it was his duty to look after the survivors while the other supermen did what they had to do about organizing the recovery. He had not spoken to any of the other officers, and had seen two of them only briefly ... but he recognized the type. They were the kind of men who were tops at their job—highly trained and even more highly intelligent misfits who did not communicate easily with normal people.
Corrie understood them very well because he was that kind of person himself, a refugee in a do-it-yourself ivory tower.
Possibly the injured Captain had been less aloof. Corrie had heard a few words which Mercer had not intended the passengers to hear before the medic had remembered to switch off, so he knew that Collingwood was unfit for duty. Which was a pity, because Collingwood, judging by the way he had chatted with the passengers as they were coming aboard, might have been able to mix socially during the voyage. Or it might be that the crew were not allowed to have anything to do with the passengers—especially female passengers—in the interests of discipline.
Except for the ship's medical officer, that is, who had acted like a glorified steward and not at all like a superman until the disaster had occurred. He could imagine the feelings of the other officers toward the one who had free access, professionally and otherwise, to the passengers. They must have been knotted up with envy, with people like the Moore girl undulating about the ship. Or did they sympathize with him instead, looking down on him from their control room monastery as a kind of worker-priest whose duties placed him in the greatest danger of all, that of being blackballed out of the club if he made a slip?
"Pod Fourteen, come in, Mathewson. Twelve and Thirteen will need a little time to check their attitudes, and you may need even more because of your small mass. I shall read your marker stars so that you can start lining up your vehicle now and save time when I come back to you for the final checks. Ready to copy?"
Corrie cursed the heat, and the air that would not stay in his lungs for more than a second, but not loudly enough to interfere with the conversation going on between Mercer and the boy. When he was physically or mentally uncomfortable he had a tendency to lash out at people or, if they were not within lashing distance, to think nasty thoughts about them.
It was quite possible that Mercer was passing on instructions from a book. The medic's treatment of the boy was, on the surface, completely unsympathetic. But Corrie knew that he was judging the situation by only one half of a conversation. If he could hear the other half, he would know how thoughtless Mercer was being towards the boy, or otherwise. Certainly there was no indication, in the half which he could hear, that the boy was frightened or hysterical or unable to handle the job properly. Perhaps Mercer's half of the conversation was simply a ruse to fool the boy's mother into thinking that everything was going well with her son. Maybe the majority of the instructions to the passengers were like that; maybe most of the pods had actually been unable to take up their proper pre-burn attitude and would never reach the rendezvous point. Not everyone was as well-informed as Corrie, after all, and even he could not be absolutely sure that he had done the job properly.
Corrie tried to bend his mind onto a more pleasant line of thought, an almost impossible task with Mercer's voice dinning in his ear every few minutes. If he could not close his ears, at least he could look out of this hot, stinking hell at the cold, clear beauty of the stars. But the transparent plastic was smeared with condensation in several places—the first time he had known that to happen—and the only heavenly body he could see clearly was that of his wife.
Viewed objectively, it was not a heavenly body in any sense of the word, but then Corrie had been unable to regard it objectively in the thirty years he had known it. In the beginning, when it had been rounded and firm and very much younger, he had loved it so much that it had been impossible to feel any objectivity about it, and when the years began to pass and the structure changed and thickened as it adapted to the changes brought about by childbirth, he had not wanted to be objective. Neither could he be objective when the muscle tone began to diminish and his heavenly body had begun to sag and wrinkle and grow lined under the triple forces of age, gravity, and grief.
He thought of their daughter on the way to that dance, impaled like a beautiful butterfly on the steering column of her car—and decided that it was much more pleasant to think about his wife and their present predicament. He had gone after, and gained, a very important post on Ganymede Base so that his wife would be able, if not to forget, at least not to be constantly reminded by well-meaning friends of the tragedy. She would keep herself busy teaching in a technologically advanced village school with a dome over it, and the prospect had already made her begin to relax. The absence of gravity had smoothed out a lot of her wrinkles as well, and she was certainly looking much better than she had for years.
Corrie reached out to touch her, then stopped. It was not simply that putting his hot, moist hand on her would be uncomfortable for her and cut down the area of evaporation; there had always been this hesitancy about the first touch, the initial invasion of privacy. From the very beginning there had been this shyness about wanting each other and an awkwardness about expressing their feelings—as if some hypothetical listener would make scathing remarks if they called each other by pet names. And so what had started as a joke to cover his shyness had gradually become for them the language of love.
Like a dedicated astronomer taking up a lifelong study specialty, he had made a close study of his heavenly body until he knew it thoroughly inside and out, knew its powers of attraction and the serious perturbations it caused when, as frequently happened, it made a very close approach and variations of the two-body problem had to be worked out. But no matter what he did, or how coldly scientific was his language at the time, the result was invariably the same—two close binaries going nova together with the release of considerable energy and heat.
"Heat," he whispered angrily, "is the newest four-letter word."
She opened her eyes and saw his hand a few inches from her face. Suddenly she gripped it and pulled him towards her. They bounced softly together, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his back before she spoke.
"I'm hot and sticky and not nice for you," she whispered between gasps for breath. "I'm bothering you and it isn't fair, but I'm afraid. I can't breathe, George. I'm ... I think I'm going to die."
"Don't cry," Corrie whispered, smiling, "you'll increase the humidity. And you aren't bothering me—it's too damned hot to be bothered."
