His feet had hardly cleared the deck when he grabbed a ladder rung and yanked himself to a halt. Immediately below the flight deck was the house-keeping deck. Unlike the curtains of the other two cabins, the curtain that partitioned McNeil’s private cabin from the common areas stood open. And inside was McNeil, doubled up and turned toward the bulkhead, his face hidden, his fists knotted around the bulkhead grips.
“What’s the matter, McNeil? Are you sick?”
The engineer shook his head. Grant noticed the little beads of moisture that broke away from his head and went glittering across the room. He took them for sweat, until he realized that McNeil was sobbing. Tears.
The sight repulsed him. Indeed. Grant was surprised at the strength of his own emotion; immediately he suppressed his reaction as unworthy. “Angus, pull out of it,” he urged. “We’ve got to put our heads together.” But McNeil didn’t move, nor did Grant move to comfort him, or even touch him.
After a moment’s hesitation Grant viciously yanked the curtain closed, veiling his mate’s display of cowardice.
In a quick tour of the lower decks and the hold access corridor, Grant assured himself that whatever the damage to the life support deck the integrity of the crew’s living and working quarters was not threatened. With a single bound he leaped through the center of the ship back to the flight deck, not even glancing at McNeil’s cabin as he passed, and hooked himself into the command couch. He studied the graphics.
Oxygen supply one: flat. Oxygen supply two: flat.
Grant gazed at the silent graphs as a man in ancient London, returning home one evening at the time of the plague, might have stared at a rough cross newly scrawled on his door. He tapped keys and the graphs bounced, but the fundamental equation that produced a flat curve did not yield to his coaxing. Grant could hardly doubt the message: news that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth, and only good reports need confirmation.
“Grant, I’m sorry.”
Grant swung around to see McNeil floating by the ladder, his face flushed, the pouches under his eyes swollen from weeping. Even at a range of over a meter Grant could smell the “medicinal” brandy on his breath.
“What was it, a meteoroid?” McNeil seemed determined to be cheerful, to make up for the lapse, and when Grant nodded yes, McNeil even assayed a faint attempt at humor. “They say a ship this size could get hit once a century. We seem to have jumped the gun with ninetynine point nine years still to go.”
“Worse luck. Look at this”—Grant waved at the videoplate showing the damaged panel. “Where we were holed, the damned thing had to be coming in at practically right angles to us. Any other approach and it couldn’t have hit anything vital.” Grant swung around, facing the console and the wide flight deck windows that looked out on the starry night. For a moment he was silent, collecting his thoughts. What had happened was serious—deadly serious —but it need not be fatal. After all, the voyage was forty percent over. “You up to helping out?” he asked.
“We should run some numbers.”
“That I am.” McNeil made for the engineer’s work station.
“Then give me figures for total reserves, best and worst cases. Air in Hold A. Emergency reserves. Don’t forget what’s in the suit tanks and portable O-two packs.”
“Right,” said McNeil.
“I’ll work on the mass ratios. See if we can gain anything by jettisoning the holds and making a run for it.”
McNeil hesitated and muttered, “Uh . . .”
Grant paused. But whatever McNeil had been about to say, he thought better of it. Grant took a deep breath. He was in command here, and he already understood the obvious —that dumping the cargo would put the owners out of business, even with insurance, and put the insurance underwriters into the poor house, most likely. But after all, if it came to a matter of two human lives versus a few tonnes of dead weight, there really wasn’t much question about it.
Grant’s command of the ship at this moment was somewhat firmer than his command of himself. He was as much angry as he was frightened—angry with McNeil for breaking down, angry with the designers of the ship for assuming that a billion-to-one chance meant the same as impossible and therefore failing to provide additional meteor shielding in the soft underbelly of the command module. But the deadline for oxygen reserves was at least a couple of weeks away, and a lot could happen before then. The thought helped, for a moment anyway, to keep his fears at arm’s length.
This was an emergency beyond doubt—but it was one of those peculiarly protracted emergencies, once characteristic of the sea, these days more typical of space—one of those emergencies where there was plenty of time to think. Perhaps too much time.
Grant was reminded of an old Cretan sailor he had met at the Pavlakis hangar in Heathrow, some ancient relativeof- a-relative of the old man’s, there on a courtesy invitation, who had held an audience of clerks and mechanics in thrall as he recited the tale of a disastrous voyage he had worked as a young man, on a tramp steamer through the Red Sea. The captain of the vessel had inexplicably failed to provide his ship with sufficient fresh water against emergencies. The radio broke down, and then the engines. The ship drifted for weeks before attracting the attention of passing traffic, by which time the crew had been reduced to stretching the fresh water with salt. The old Cretan was among the survivors who merely spent a few weeks in hospital. Others were not so lucky; they had already died horribly of thirst and salt poisoning.
Slow disasters are like that: one unlikely thing happens, and that’s complicated by a second unlikely event, and a third puts paid to somebody’s life.
McNeil had grossly oversimplified matters when he said that the Star Queen might expect to be hit by a meteoroid once in a century. The answer depended on so many factors that three generations of statisticians and their computers had done little but lay down rules so vague that the insurance companies still shivered with apprehension when the great meteoroid swarms went sweeping like gales through the orbits of the inner worlds.
Otherwise desirable interplanetary trajectories were put out of bounds by the insurors if they required a ship to intersect the orbit of the Leonids, say, at the peak of a shower—although even then the real chance of a ship and a meteoroid intersecting was, at worst, remote.
Much depends on one’s subjective notion of what the words meteor and meteorite and meteoroid mean, of course. Each lump of cosmic slag that reaches the surface of the Earth—thus earning the moniker “meteorite”—has a million smaller brethren that perish utterly in the noman’s- land where the atmosphere has not quite ended and space has yet to begin, that ghostly region where Aurora walks by night. These are meteors—manifestations of the upper air, the original meaning of the word—the familiar shooting stars, which are seldom larger than a pin’s head.
And these in turn are outnumbered a millionfold again by particles too small to leave any visible trace of their dying as they drift down from the sky. All of them, the countless specks of dust, the rare boulders and even the wandering mountains that Earth encounters perhaps every dozen million years—all of them, flying free in space, are meteoroids.
For the purposes of space flight a meteoroid is only of interest if, on striking the hull, the resulting explosion interdicts vital functions, or produces destructive overpressures, or puts a hole in a pressurized compartment too big to prevent the rapid loss of atmosphere. These are matters both of size and relative speed. The efforts of the statisticians had resulted in tables showing approximate collision probabilities at various radiuses from the sun for meteoroids down to masses of a few milligrams. At the radius of Earth’s orbit, for example, one might expect any given cubic kilometer of space to be traversed by a onegram meteoroid, travelling toward the sun at perhaps forty kilometers per second, just once every three days. The like- lihood of a spacecraft occupying the same cubic kilometer of space (except very near Earth itself) was much lower, and so was the calculated incidence of larger meteoroids— so that McNeil’s “once in a century” collision estimate was in fact absurdly high.
The meteoroid which had struck Star Queen was big— likely a gram’s worth of concreted dust and ice the size of a ball bearing. And it had somehow managed to avoid striking either the upper hemisphere of the crew module or the large cylindrical cargo holds below, in its nearly perpendicular angle of attack on the life support deck. The virtual certainty that such an occurrence would not happen again in the course of human history gave Grant and McNeil very little consolation.