Still, things might have been worse. Star Queen was fourteen days into her trajectory and had twenty-one days still to go to reach Port Hesperus. Thanks to her upgraded engines she was travelling much faster than the slow freighters, the tramp steamers of the space-ways who were restricted to Hohmann ellipses, those long tangential flight paths that expended minimum energy by just kissing the orbits of Earth and Venus on opposite sides of the sun.
Passenger ships equipped with even more powerful gaseous-core reactors, or fast cutters using the still-new fusion drives, could slice across from planet to planet in as little as a fortnight, given favorable planetary alignments —and given a profit margin that allowed them to spend an order of magnitude more on fuel—but Star Queen was stuck in the middle of the equation. Her optimal acceleration and deceleration determined both her launch window and her time of arrival.
Surprising how long it takes to execute a simple computer program when your life depends on the outcome.
Grant entered the pertinent numbers a dozen different ways before he gave up hoping that the bottom line would change.
He turned to McNeil, still hunched over the engineering console across the circular room. “Looks like we can shave the ETA by almost half a day,” he said. “Assuming we blow all the holds within the next hour or so.”
For a second or two McNeil didn’t reply. When at last he straightened and turned to face Grant his expression was calm and sober. “It appears the oxygen will last us eighteen days in the best case—fifteen in the worst. Seems we’re a few days short.”
The men regarded each other with a trancelike calmness that would have been remarkable had it not been obvious what was racing through their minds: there must be a way out!
Make oxygen!
Grow plants, for example—but there was nothing green aboard, not even a packet of grass seeds—and even if there were, despite the tall tales, when the entire energy cycle is taken into account, land plants are not efficient oxygen producers on much less than the scale of a small world.
The only good it would have done them to have those pine seedlings aboard would have been the greater volume of air in the pressurized hold.
Electrolyze water then, reversing the fuel-cell cycle, getting from it elemental hydrogen and oxygen—but there was not enough water in the undamaged fuel cells or in the water tanks, or even in the two men’s bodies, to keep them breathing for an additional seven days. At least not past their deaths from dehydration.
Extra oxygen was not to be had. Which left that last standby of space opera, the deus ex machina of a passing spaceship—one that conveniently happened to be matching one’s course and velocity exactly.
There were no such ships, of course. Almost by defi- nition, the spaceship that “happened to be passing” was impossible. Even if other freighters already were skidding toward Venus on the same trajectory—and Grant and McNeil would have known if there were—then by the laws that governed their movements, the very laws propounded by Newton, they must keep their original separations without a heroic sacrifice of mass and a possibly fatal squandering of fuel. Any ship passing at a significantly greater velocity—a passing liner, say—would be pursuing its own hyperbolic trajectory and would likely be as inaccessible as Pluto. But a fully provisioned cutter, if it started now from Venus . . .
“What’s docked at Port Hesperus?” McNeil inquired, as if his thoughts had been on the same trajectory as Grant’s.
Grant waited a moment, consulting the computer, before he replied. “A couple of old Hohmann freighters, according to Lloyd’s Register—and the usual litter of launches and tugs.” He laughed abruptly. “Couple of solar yachts. No help there.”
“Seems we’re drawing a blank,” McNeil observed.
“P’raps we should have a word with the controllers on Earth and Venus.”
“I was about to do just that,” Grant said irritably, “as soon as I’ve decided how to phrase the query.” He took a swift breath. “Look, you’ve been a great help here. You could do us another favor and do a personal check on possible air leaks in the system. All right with you, then?”
“Certainly, that’s all right.” McNeil’s voice was quiet.
Grant watched McNeil sidelong as he unbuckled his loose straps and swam down, off the flight deck. The en- gineer was probably going to give him trouble in the days that lay ahead, Grant mused. That shameful business, breaking down like a child . . . Until now they had got on well enough—like most men of substantial girth, McNeil was good-natured and easy-going—but now Grant realized that McNeil lacked fiber. Obviously he had become flabby, physically and mentally, through living too long in space.
X
The parabolic antenna on the communications boom was aimed at the gleaming arc lamp of Venus, less than twenty million kilometers away and moving on a converging path with the ship. A tone sounded on the console, indicating that a signal from Port Hesperus had been acquired.
The physical convergence would not occur for a month, but the three-millimeter waves from the ship’s transmitter would make the trip in under a minute. How nice, at this moment, to be a radio wave.
Grant acknowledged the “go ahead” and began to talk steadily and, he hoped, quite dispassionately. He gave a careful analysis of the situation, appending pertinent data in telemetry, ending his speech with a request for advice.
His fears concerning McNeil he left unspoken; the engineer was doubtless monitoring the transmission.
And on Port Hesperus—the Venus orbital station—the bombshell was about to burst, triggering trains of sympathetic ripples on all the inhabited worlds, as video and faxsheets took up the refrain: STAR QUEEN IN PERIL. An accident in space has a dramatic quality that tends to crowd all other items from the newsheads. At least until the corpses have been counted.
The actual reply from Port Hesperus, less dramatic, was as swift as the speed of light allowed: “Port Hesperus control to Star Queen, acknowledging your emergency status.
We will shortly forward a detailed questionnaire. Please stand by.”
They stood by. Or rather they floated by.
When the questions arrived Grant put them on printout.
The message took nearly an hour to run through the printer and the questionnaire was so detailed, so extremely detailed—so extraordinarily detailed, in fact—that Grant wondered morosely if he and McNeil would live long enough to answer it. Two weeks, more or less.
Most of the queries were technical, concerning the status of the ship. Grant had no doubt the experts on Earth and Venus station were wracking their brains in an attempt to save Star Queen and her cargo. Perhaps especially her cargo.
“What do you think?” Grant asked McNeil, when the engineer had finished running through the message. He was studying McNeil carefully now, watching him for any signs of strain.
After a long, rigid silence, McNeil shrugged. His first words echoed Grant’s thoughts. “It will certainly keep us busy. I doubt we’ll get through this in a day. And I’ve got to admit I think half of these questions are crazy.”
Grant nodded but said nothing. He let McNeil continue.
“ ‘Rate of leakage from the crew areas’—sensible enough, but we’ve already told them that. And what do they want with the efficiency of the radiation shields?”
“Could have something to do with seal erosion, I suppose,”
Grant murmured.
McNeil eyed him. “If you were to ask me, I’d say they were tryin’ to keep our spirits up, pretendin’ they have a bright idea or two. And meanwhile we’re to keep ourselves too busy to worry about it.”
Grant peered atMcNeil with a queer mixture of relief and annoyance—relief because the Scot hadn’t thrown another tantrum and, conversely, annoyance because he was now so damned calm, refusing to fit neatly into the mental category Grant had prepared for him. Had that momentary lapse after the meteoroid struck been typical of the man? Or might it have happened to anyone? Grant, to whom the world was very much a place of blacks and whites, felt angry at being unable to decide whether McNeil was cowardly or courageous.
That he might be both never occurred to him.
In space, in flight, time is timeless. On Earth there is the great clock of the spinning globe itself, marking the hours with whole continents for hands. Even on the moon the shadows creep sluggishly from crag to crag as the sun makes its slow march across the sky. But in space the stars are fixed, or might as well be; the sun moves only if the pilot chooses to move the ship, and the chronometers tick off numbers that say days and hours but as far as sensation goes are meaningless.
Grant and McNeil had long since learned to regulate their lives accordingly; while in deep space they moved and thought with a kind of leisure—which vanished quickly enough when a voyage was nearing its end and the time for braking maneuvers arrived—and though they were now under sentence of death, they continued along the well-worn grooves of habit. Every day Grant carefully dictated the log, confirmed the ship’s position, carried out his routine maintenance duties. McNeil was also behaving normally, as far as Grant could tell, although he suspected that some of the technical maintenance was being carried out with a very light hand, and he’d had a few sharp words with the engineer about the accumulation of dirty food trays following McNeil’s turns in the galley.