So did the Flying Dutchman have guts-but at last report he was still trying to round the Cape and not succeeding.
The Captain-Captain Swenson, I corrected-would not have been that bullheaded.
Or would he? According to Urqhardt, the last thing the Captain had said had been to remind Urqhardt that it was up to him to carry out the mission. All of us had been very carefully chosen (except us freaks) and probably the skipper and the relief skipper of each ship were picked primarily for bulldog stubbornness, the very quality that had kept Columbus going on and on when he was running out of water and his crew was muttering mutiny. I remembered Uncle Steve had once suggested as much.
I decided to go talk to Uncle Steve … then I remembered I couldn’t and I really felt bad. When my parents had died, two peaks back, I had felt bad because I didn’t feel as bad as I knew I should have felt. When it happened-or rather, by the time I knew about it-they were long dead, people I had not seen in a long time and just faces in a photograph. But Uncle Steve I had seen every day-I had seen today.
And I had been in the habit of kicking my troubles around with him whenever they were too much for me.
I felt his loss then, the delayed shock you get when you are hit hard. The hurt doesn’t come until you pull yourself together and realize you’re hit.
It was just as well that somebody tapped on my door then, or I would have bawled.
It was Mei-Ling and her husband, Chet. I invited them in and they sat down on the bed. Chat got to the point.
“Tom, where do you stand on this?”
“On what?”
“This silly business of trying to go on with a skeleton crew.”
“It doesn’t matter where I stand,” I said slowly. “I’m not running the ship.”
“Ah, but you are!”
“Huh?”
“I don’t mean quite that, but I do mean you can put a stop to the nonsense. Now, look, Tom, everybody knows what you told the Captain and-”
“Who’s been talking?”
“Huh? Never mind. If it didn’t leak from you, it probably did from everybody else present; it’s common knowledge. What you told him made sense. What it comes down to is that Urqhardt is depending on you and you alone to keep him in touch with the home office. So you’re the man with the stick. You can stop him.”
“Huh? Now wait. I’m not the only one. Granted that he isn’t counting on Unc-how about Mei-Ling?”
Chat shook his head. “Mei-Ling isn’t going to ‘think-talk’ for him.”
His wife said, “Now, Chet; I haven’t said so.”
He looked at her fondly. “Don’t be super-stupid, my lovely darling. You know that there is no chance at all that you will be any use to him after peak. If our brave Captain Urqhardt hasn’t got that through his head now, he will … even if I have to explain to him in words of one syllable.”
“But I might stay linked.”
“Oh, no, you won’t … or I’ll bash your pretty head in. Our kids are going to grow up on Earth.”
She looked soberly at him and patted his hand. The Travers’s were not expecting again, but everybody knew they were hoping; I began to see why Chet was adamant… and I became quite sure that Mei-Ling would not link again after peak-not after her husband had argued with her for a while. What Chet wanted was more important to her than what the Captain wanted, or any abstract duty to a Foundation back on Earth.
Chet went on, “Think it over, Tom, and you will see that you can’t let your shipmates down. To go on is suicidal and everybody knows it but the Captain. It’s up to you.”
“Uh, I’ll think it over.”
“Do that. But don’t take too long.” They left.
I went to bed but didn’t sleep. The deuce of it was that Chet was almost certainly right … including the certainty that Mei-Ling would never patch in with her telepair after another peak, for she was beginning to slip even now. I had been transmitting mathematical or technical matter which would have fallen to her ever since last peak, because her linking was becoming erratic. Chet wouldn’t have to bash her admittedly-pretty head in; she was falling out of touch.