The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 366
"It isn't a joke," she said, desperation making her speak the first few words aloud. "I'm suffocating. Every time I breathe out I don't know if I'll be able to breathe in again. I can't stand it. My head is bursting and ... and I'm drowning in here. I'm going to die, George."
"No you won't," said Corrie quietly. "Try to think of something pleasant, like that time I stuffed the snowball down your neck. The heat is bad, but the suffocating sensation is all in your mind. We have plenty of air, remember—think of what it must be like in a pod with three or four people in it."
He broke off, gasping for breath and with big black splotches jerking across his field of vision. It had been too much to say in one breath, but he had tried to do it because it had seemed the best way of proving to her that they were not short of air.
A little later he went on, "Mercer has been talking to Pod Sixteen and nobody else for the past twenty minutes, so he will soon be finished. When he stops talking we can get some sleep. Try to relax. We have nothing to worry about and plenty of air."
"Thank you. Sixteen. That completes the exercise, ladies and gentlemen. We shall meet again at the rendezvous area in approximately six and a half days."
We hope, thought Corrie, then went on aloud, "Why don't you shut up and go to sleep?"
"That was good advice, whoever it was who gave it. I agree; all of you try to sleep. With one exception, Come in. Pod Four."
Startled, Corrie said, "Pod Four."
"We have been considering the incident—the only one of its kind to be reported—which you mentioned during retro fire, when your pod became uniformly deformed while thrust was being applied. We think you have a problem. Four."
"We care pretty sure that you have been punctured by one or more small particles of the ship and that you have suffered a drastic, but obviously not lethal, pressure drop. The drop has been so gradual that you may have attributed your difficulty in breathing to the heat, but the sooner you repair the leak, or leaks, the better.
"You will find a tube of sealing compound, clearly marked, in a recess in the services panel. If you can't read or understand the instructions for any reason—anoxia, impairment of vision, anything like that—ask me. Otherwise do not waste time or oxygen acknowledging my instructions.
"The punctures in the transparent section of your pod will appear as patches of condensation. Closer examination will show that they are actually small clouds of water vapor boiling off into space. Punctures in the opaque area will be harder to find. Use empty food tubes, torn open and flattened. Cover the opaque area systematically, using the opened tubes. The tube plastic is thin and will stick to any point where air is escaping.
"Don't try to take a shortcut by covering a larger area with a piece torn from a plastic screen. You could easily miss a leak that way, and the screen plastic is tough—you must avoid wasting energy when the oxygen level is low or you will pass out. Work carefully and thoroughly and with minimum effort. If you haven't asphyxiated already, there should be ample time to plug the leaks before you do, and then, of course, you won't."
Corrie was busy long before Mercer had finished talking, and he did not have to ask for clarification or further instructions. He spoke only briefly to give directions to his wife, and although they used minimum effort on the job, they completed it feeling that they had been boiled in their own body fluids. Corrie looked at their handiwork—six small blobs of sealing compound where three tiny pieces of Eurydice had come and gone—and wondered what it would have been like to have been hit by one of those tiny, radioactive bullets. One of them, if he remembered his position correctly when the explosion had occurred, must have passed within inches of his head.
"Pod Four," he said. "Finished."
"Thank you. Four. Pressure will come up fairly quickly now, but I'm afraid the news isn't all good. You have lost a lot of air and no longer have the fifty percent safety margin which you started with. If you'll pardon the expression, you are in the same boat as the other, three-passenger pods. But don't worry about it. Rest and sleep as much as possible. That goes for everyone."
Corrie drifted, eyes closed and feeling fractionally more comfortable than he had been for days, thinking about Mercer. The medic had known for hours that Pod Four was leaking air—the pause when Corrie had complained about the sudden flexibility of the walls during thrust had been Mercer reporting to the other officers, no doubt. But he had not mentioned it to Corrie until the very end, after the pods carrying four and then three people had been turned around—the pods that would reach the rendezvous very short of air indeed. If they got out of this, Corrie did not know whether he should compliment Mercer or punch his face.
"The next time you tell me you're dying, dear, he said, "I'll believe you."
The voice of Mercer kept him from hearing his wife s reply.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. The radio interference caused by the ship blowup is beginning to fade, and we have had a signal from Eurydice Control. The recovery ship took off three hours ago; it is on course and estimating the pick-up point in a little over a week. Now I'm going to sleep."
Chapter Seventeen
HE WAS monitoring the pod frequency with the volume turned down, and all he could hear was the faint hiss of interference and, very occasionally, a very quiet voice complaining about the heat, the smell, the hunger, or the other people in the pod. If something happened in the survival capsules, which needed his attention, the quality and tone of the voices would change enough to worry his subconscious into waking him up. Mercer had never felt so tired in all the thirty-two years of his life.
But his fatigue was mental rather than physical—the only muscles that he had used had been those controlling his tongue—and his brain did not have enough sense to go to sleep easily. He had to go through it compartment by compartment, switching off, powering down, forbidding it to worry or feel guilty or responsible for situations and people over which he had very little influence and no direct control. And he, too, had to try to forget the heat and the hunger, when it was within his power to ease both conditions where he personally was concerned.
Prescott, without actually forbidding him to use the individual air-conditioning systems and stores for the bunks, had reminded him that he would need to save as much power and consumables as possible for the transfer of passengers to the recovery ship.
He tried not to worry about what might happen at the rendezvous—if his segment reached it, or if the recovery ship reached it. There was nothing he could do for the Captain, either—Collingwood's treatment was palliative rather than curative. He could be of no real help to the passengers, either, except as an eavesdropper who could head off a panic or potential fight by giving the offending parties something else to think about. They were simply names and voices to him, for the most part, because apart from the Mathewsons, Stone, and Miss Moore, there had not been enough time to fix everyone in his memory as individuals.
As Mercer drifted loosely above his couch, with the soporific hiss of interference and the occasional murmuring of passengers' voices reinforcing the humming of his own life-support equipment, it became increasingly difficult to separate the real sounds from the ones he dreamed, and almost impossible to tell them apart when his dreams began to use real sound effects. But he could recognize the voices, even when they were slurred with fatigue, distorted by anger, or segmented and separated by long, gasping pauses for breath.
Dreamlike, the remembered voice of Prescott built itself up from the background noises, telling him that the passengers could not possibly be as short of air as they sounded—not even the ones who were four to a pod—and that the gaspings were due to unnecessary exertion, heat, and thinking too much about a shortage of air that had not happened yet. That, of course, was before Mercer had reported the deformation of Pod Four during thrust and Prescott had decided that the Corries' shortage of breath was actual rather than imagined.
Mercer had wanted to tell Four's occupants as soon as possible about their trouble. Prescott had objected, saying that doing so would unsettle the passengers who had not been turned around by delaying their retro fire and making them wonder if their own pods were not just a little bit soft. Telling the Corries too soon could quite easily have brought on another six emergencies just like theirs. When Mercer had continued to argue, Prescott had ended by asking him to wake the Captain for a second opinion.
"No," said Mercer, because the Captain, dressed only in sweat-soaked bandages, was feeling his way around the segment. Where Collingwood's spacesuit had not pressed tightly against his skin, the decompression had caused capillary bleeding and the blood had congealed, so that his face and neck were like one great, livid bruise, and the same angry discoloration marched along his body and limbs in broad, regular bands. He kept looking straight at Mercer with his eye bandages and smiling and asking for a report and offering to help.
Mercer said "No" again, because it did not much matter what he said to the Captain in a dream. He told Collingwood that he could do nothing to help if he could not see, because Mercer's greatest fear was that he had misdirected the segment so that they would never make rendezvous, and that the Captain's instructions and those of Prescott would probably be in conflict. In any case, the Captain was a patient, and doctors were not supposed to worry patients with their physician's personal troubles when they had plenty of their own.
The Captain replied that he was dying from radiation poisoning even though neither of them would admit it while they were awake, that he was so full of sedatives that he was walking in someone else's sleep, and didn't Mercer want company? Mercer insisted that the Captain would worsen even his dream condition by moving around and talking, and that the radioactive material he had inhaled could easily be dislodged and start burning another area of lung tissue.
But the Captain remained hanging there, talking politely and refusing to return to the bunk, which he could not possibly have escaped from in the first place. Mercer wondered if he could dream him back into the bunk, or if he would have to dream himself awake and push Collingwood into the thing. But if he dreamed himself awake he might really wake up.
Mercer did not want to wake for as long as possible. Sleep was infinitely precious—it short-circuited a few of the boring, anxious, sweating hours of waiting for rendezvous and rescue, or for the realization to come that he was off-course, with no hope of rescue. He would allow the Captain in his dream provided Collingwood did not become too unpleasant—it would be a small enough price to pay for sleep. But he could not help wishing that his dream did not take over where his waking life left off.
Gradually, Collingwood's intent, bandaged face began to fade away, as did the bunks and the segment structure behind it, and Mercer was hanging in emptiness, rendered even more empty by the crowding stars. Voices were coming out of the emptiness from a ring of tiny plastic globes, which hung like effluviant bubbles in a black ocean.
"I can't. You know I never could sleep properly without you beside me—no, George, you're too hot. Just ... just hold my hand until I'm asleep."
"Your tiny hand is sweating, let me—"
"You can't sing, George, and you're wasting oxygen."
"I agree," murmured Mercer, "on both counts."
"It's supposed to be cold and dark, they told us. But this ... it's like a black inferno. I keep wanting to tear a hole in the plastic and climb out—it would be worth asphyxiating just to be cool for a few seconds."
"Take it easy, Sampson. If you did that you wouldn't even have time to feel cool. You would decompress, swell up and burst like a balloon stuffed with porridge. You wouldn't look or feel nice at all."
"And you only have to look at Kirk herself to see what she means about overstuffed—"
"There's no need for cracks like that, Moore—I was simply trying to keep her from killing herself and us into the bargain. But maybe you would like to die, too, because you have nothing left to live for. Even when you nudge against Eglin he just pushes you away now. You must be getting desperate. Your cheek-bones stick out, and as for your gorgeous figure, we can count every rib. You're skinny, Moore, and you can't take it. That's the trouble with beautiful and unstable creatures who live only for love—"
"Listen, Fatso, an overweight hog like you has no reason to talk about psychological instability. You're not exactly an attractive sight yourself. You've three times more skin than you need, and it flaps around like a—"
"You bitch. You can't leave me alone, can you? Well, just remember that three can live and breathe more easily than four, and the next time you're drifting about trying to nudge Eglin and you come near me, I'll—"
"Shut up, all of you! You're wasting air, and even getting angry generates physical heat, so cut out the squabbling, ladies. If you want to do things, lie quiet and think about doing them when we get back on the recovery ship, where there will be enough food and cool, clean air to let us do them without killing ourselves, right? If you think about it quietly, you will let me go to sleep and dream about it. You might even go to sleep yourselves. As for you, miss, I don't really believe that you would tear a hole in the skin, but your long nails worry me. Why don't you chew them like I do. It's a good way of augmenting your diet."
"Sensible man," said Mercer. "Always leave them laughing." He wondered sleepily if biting the nails was in itself a mild form of cannibalism.
"Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. Whi-i-n-n-g-g-g. Blam-blam-blam, Kerpow. Eh-eh-eh- bo-o-om. Charge!"
The Mathewson boy's capsule was having another war. It did not sound like Indians this time, or bug-eyed monsters—arrows. Mercer knew from recent experience, went whizz-thunk, and ray-guns simply hissed. This sounded like a group of assault commandos of Second World War vintage in the process of establishing a bridgehead on Pod Fourteen. Mercer did not object either to the noise or the occupation, because it was much better than listening to the boy trying not to cry for his mother, and the visitors were not using up any of the food or oxygen. Besides, a battle of this magnitude would soon make him hoarse, and the imaginative effort involved would put him to sleep.
"He hasn't spoken for over four hours. Do you think our radio has packed up?"
"You worry too much. Saddler. He's probably sleeping. After all, he's only human."
"You don't really believe that, do you? I wonder where they found such a cold, unflappable, unemotional iceberg for a medical officer—"
"Poker, anyone? Whist?"
"We just finished a game. Can't you think of anything else, like what it would be like if we had a girl in here?"
"We might not be able to do anything. I mean, that's a game that only two should play."
"Not always. It has been practiced as a group exercise on occasions."
"No dice. Saddler—Mercer would deliver a sermon, a much stronger than the one he gave somebody three days ago, warning us about abusing the energy reserves of our restricted worlds in the thoughtless pursuit of pleasure, and the doll herself would probably remind us that she had a husband—seven feet tall and broad in proportion—in another pod."
"But nobody could actually stop us, could they? I'm thinking about that paragraph on page twenty-three of the emergency instructions where it says, in effect, that any actions taken by survivors while adrift in a capsule are beyond the jurisdiction of any planetary government. We could get away with anything."
"Like cheating at cards?"
"Don't be ridiculous; some sins are unforgivable. But he might be right, Saddler—we could be luckier than some of the others. A pack of cards doesn't use oxygen, and if things get really bad we can always eat them."
"Gin rummy, then?"
"Try patience," said Mercer in his sleep. "That's the name of this game."
"I don't dislike either of you. Try to believe that and stop arguing over what I probably think about you—I'm thinking none of those things. It doesn't make any difference to me that one of you is fat and the other thin, even less that one is polite and apparently thoughtful while the other is less so. I'm a PC widow with a wide experience of being loved, hated, tolerated or ignored by a man who changed personalities at will. The only good thing about you two, so far as I'm concerned, is that neither of you change."
"That might not always hold true, m'am. In the grip of strong emotion, such as love, even the most stable personality can undergo—"
"Say what you mean, Stone. Given the chance, you would be as much an animal as any other man."
"That kind of personality change is normal in those circumstances and doesn't worry me."
"I should think not. My wife wouldn't complain if I came home a different man every night. What happened to him? Was he institutionalized, or did he get airborne without a airplane?"
"Shut up. Kirk."
"It doesn't matter. You probably think it was fun. It was, in the beginning; then he took PC only occasionally, when he had to meet an important client and he thought it would help him swing the deal if he put on a complimentary personality. But then he started taking them more and more often, and experimenting, and for the last four years his personality was so fragmented that it made him impotent. But he kept taking more, several different kinds at once, trying to shock his mind back to normal. They told him that it didn't work like that, but he wouldn't believe them. That was how he died. At a party, after taking five, one of which was a hallucinogen—it was that kind of party. But he didn't commit suicide. Three of them got impatient to experience the drug under free-fall conditions. They were holding on to each other all the way to the pavement."
"Tough."
"Yes, indeed."
"It doesn't bother me now. But you see why 1 don't like or dislike either of you, and why it is a waste of time fighting over me. Nothing could happen here anyway, but perhaps if 1 came to know both of you better on the ship—"
"Stone might get to know you better on the ship, but I wouldn't—my wife would be there. And I'm not all that sure that we'll ever make the ship. That sanctimonious medic is conning us, and you are likely to be the last woman I will ever meet. My personality isn't very nice, but I'm likely to be the last man you will ever meet. For obvious reasons I'm discounting Stone, who probably couldn't—"
