One minute-two minutes-went by. Surely he had made the trip by now!
“Peter-have you found anything?” Bowman called at last.
There was no answer. He called again, and again.
Then he began to wonder. Perhaps something had gone wrong-but if so, was it really an accident this time?
Once more he called out into the unreverberant silence, but already he was certain that he would never know the answer.
There were times when the greatest heroism consisted of dying quietly, without making a fuss. This Peter Whitehead had done; no one could ask for more.
And two months from now, a million miles ahead of his comrades, he would be the first of all men to reach Jupiter.
THE SMELL OF DEATH
Hours ago, Bowman knew very well, he should have awakened his back-up. But while Whitehead was still alive, he had not the heart to do so; it would have been too final an admission of hopelessness. Now he would delay it no longer, for his own peace of mind as much as for the safety of the ship. He felt a desperate need to hear a human voice again; never before had he realized so dearly that man was a social animal, and could not long survive in isolation. And no man before, since the beginning of history, had known such isolation as this.
Bowman made his way slowly through the silent passageways; somehow the ship already seemed empty, like a deserted house. He drifted down the axis of the carousel, and when he was gripped by its centrifugal field the sudden return of weight almost made him collapse. Though he wanted to lie down and rest, if he gave way to this impulse he did not know when he would wake again. He was the ship’s only human guardian now; he could not sleep while he was still on duty.
Luckily, the revival procedure was automatic, there was nothing he had to do, no stages where he could make an error through tiredness. Once he had given Athena her orders, she would carry them out with superhuman infallibility.
In Kelvin Poole’s room all was cold and silent, as it had been for the last five months. The biosensor display was normal; respiration, body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat were all inside the safety limits. And according to Athena, who alone could interpret it, the EEG was also satisfactory for a hibernating man.
Bowman broke the seal on the REVIVAL switch, pressed the button, and waited. First, the electronarcosis current would be switched off. There was no apparent physical change in the sleeping man, but at once the dancing waves of the EEG display increased in amplitude and became more complex. Slowly, and perhaps reluctantly the brain of Kelvin Poole was turning back from the world of dreams.
Two minutes later, Athena triggered the hypodermic strapped to Poole’s forearm; Bowman could hear the tiny hiss as high-pressure gas forced the stimulants through the skin. Now he should see the first reaction, normally it came in about thirty seconds.
He was not worried when nothing happened for well over a minute. Then Poole’s eyelids started to flutter, and he gave a slow yawn. His diaphragm began to heave with normal respiration, and he rolled his head slightly to the side.
A minute later, he opened his eyes, and stared vacantly through Bowman, like a newborn baby still unable to focus upon the external world. But presently awareness came into his gaze, and his lips began to move. It was impossible to hear what he was saying, if indeed he had enunciated any words at all
“Take it easy, Kel,” said Bowman. “Everything’s O.K.” He only wished that this were true.
Again Poole’s lips moved, and now his voice was just audible as a faint sibilation, producing no intelligible sounds. At the same moment, Athena spoke.
“Poole cardiogram abnormal. Recommend injection H.6.”
Bowman grabbed the hypodermic from the emergency medical kit. He fired it into Poole’s arm, then anticipating the worst, broke out the autorespiration mask and its attached oxygen cylinder.
But the shot seemed to be working. Poole was obviously quite conscious, though his chest was heaving erratically. He looked straight at Bowman, and his lips began to move again. At last he spoke-only two words, laden with sadness and regret, banishing all hope with their finality.
“Goodbye, Dave.”
Bowman’s paralysis lasted little more than a second: it was broken when Athena’s calm, impersonal voice announced:
“All systems of Poole now No-Go. It will be necessary to replace him with a spare unit.”
“Shut up, damn you!” yelled Bowman, as he clamped the mask over Poole’s face and switched on the oxygen. The gas began to pulse through the plastic tubes, the noise it made sounding like a horrible parody of human breathing. Though he knew that it was no use, he continued until the oxygen was exhausted, and all the biosensor displays showed flat, featureless lines.
Kelvin Poole lay calm and quiet again; it was impossible to tell that he was no longer in hibernation. But to David Bowman, commander of the only ship beyond the orbit of Mars, it seemed that the gently circulating air around him already carried the smell of Death.
ALONE
Bowman did not remember leaving Poole’s spinning tomb in the carousel, but now he was back on the Control Deck, looking out at the unchanging stars. He was in a state of shock, going about his business like a machine, and hardly aware of any emotion. Though he felt unutterably tired, it seemed that he could carry on forever, as sleepless as Athena, while there was still work to be done and decisions to be made.
Tragedy had snowballed into disaster; what had now happened could be far more serious than the loss of Whitehead. Poole’s death might be another accident, or a piece of sheer bad luck that would never occur again. But if something was fundamentally wrong with the revival process, his sleeping shipmates were already doomed. And he with them; for he could not handle Discovery alone, when the time came to steer her into her final orbit.
This was not a situation anyone had been pessimistic enough to imagine; no procedure had been laid down to deal with it. When some utterly unexpected problem arose, his orders were to consult with Earth, if time permitted. He had the time; no one had ever dreamed that he would lack the ability. For if any part of the radio equipment failed, it could always be repaired or replaced; the only item that had not been duplicated, because of its size and weight, was the antenna assembly. Who would have imagined that anything could ever demolish that system, short of wrecking the ship itself? It was not, in the jargon of the designers, a credible accident; but it had occurred.
The loss of the antenna had not only made it impossible to obtain medical advice from Earth; it had endangered the whole purpose of the mission. Whatever they might discover when they reached Jupiter, they would have no way of reporting it home.
There was one slim chance of saving the situation. The antenna was not many miles distant and traveling away from the ship at a relatively low speed. He might be able to retrieve it and effect temporary repairs; even if he could not do so, perhaps Kimball and the others would succeed-as long as he recaptured the lost equipment before it was forever out of reach.
He took careful measurements of speed and velocity with the ship’s radar, then made estimates of the mass that was now drifting away into space. He fed the information into Athena, set up the problem, and watched the answer flash on the display before he could even lift his finger from the keys.
Yes, a fully fueled and provisioned pod could do it, if he acted now and if everything went smoothly. But time was fast running out; the chance of success diminished with every passing minute. If he did not leave within the next few hours, the operation would be impossible.
Like most space missions, it involved subtle trade-offs between time and speed and payload, and the answer was not at all obvious. Merely to get to the drifting antenna was easy enough; the pod could make the round trip in four or five hours-if it had nothing else to do. But Bowman had to hold in reserve a substantial portion of his total fuel for the task of slowing down the runaway equipment, and then turning it back toward the ship. This drastically reduced the overall performance of his little vehicle, by limiting the speed it could obtain. The outward trip would take five hours, the return run another five- and the capsule carried oxygen for only twelve hours.
Two hours to grapple the antenna and reverse its velocity; that seemed an adequate margin of time, though he would have preferred more. He was well aware of the risks, but they were not so great that a reasonable man would be deterred by them. Whitehead’s mishap would not occur again in a million hours of operational time; the worst dangers were those of carelessness, for space was pitilessly unforgiving of mistakes. And though he would be leaving the ship without a human watcher at the controls, Athena could handle the situation. If he did not come back, in a few hours she would awaken the next man. He was not endangering his sleeping colleagues; indeed, he was increasing their chances of life, and of completing the mission successfully.