It was now three days since the meteoroid had struck.
Grant kept getting “buck up” messages from traffic control on Port Hesperus along the lines of “Sorry for the delay, fellows, we’ll have something for you just as soon as we can”—and he waited for the results of the high-level review panel convened by the Board of Space Control, with its raft of specialists on two planets, which was running simulations of wild schemes to rescue Star Queen. He had waited impatiently at first, but his eagerness had slowly ebbed. He doubted that the finest technical brains in the solar system could save them now—though it was hard to abandon hope when everything still seemed so normal and the air was still clean and fresh.
On the fourth day Venus spoke. “Okay, fellows, here’s what we’ve got for you. We’re going to take this one system at a time, and some of this gets involved, so you be sure and ask for clarification if you need it. Okay, first we’ll go into the cabin atmosphere system file, locus two-three-nine point four. Now I’ll just give you a moment to find that locus. . . .”
Shorn of jargon, the long message was a funeral oration; the thrust of the instructions was to insure that Star Queen could arrive at Port Hesperus under remote control with its cargo intact, even if there were two dead bodies in the command module. Grant and McNeil had been written off.
One comfort: Grant already knew from his training in high-altitude chambers that death from hypoxia, near the end, anyway, would be a positively giddy affair.
McNeil vanished below soon after the message concluded, without a word of comment. Grant did not see him again for hours. He was frankly relieved, at first. He didn’t feel like talking, either, and if McNeil wanted to look after himself that was his affair. Besides, there were various letters to write, loose ends to see to—though the last-willand- testament business could come later. There were a couple of weeks left.
At supper time Grant went down to the common area, expecting to find McNeil at work at the galley. McNeil was a good cook, within the limitations of spacecraft cuisine, and he usually enjoyed his turn in the kitchen. He certainly took good enough care of his own stomach.
But there was no one in the common area. The curtain in front of McNeil’s cabin was pulled shut.
Grant yanked the curtain aside and found McNeil lying in midair near his bunk, very much at peace with the universe.
Hanging there beside him was a large plastic crate whose magnetic lock had somehow been jimmied. Grant had no need to examine it to know its contents; a glance at McNeil was enough.
“Ay, and it’s a dirty shame,” said the engineer without a trace of embarrassment, “to suck this stuff up through a tube.” He cocked an eye at Grant. “Tell you what, cap’n— whyn’t you put a little spin on the vessel so’s we can drink ’er properly?” Grant glared at him contemptuously, but McNeil returned his gaze unabashed. “Oh, don’t be a sourpuss, man—have some yourself! For what does it matter?”
He batted a bottle at Grant, who fielded it deftly. It was a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Napa Valley of California— fabulously valuable, Grant knew the consignment—and the contents of that plastic case were worth thousands.
“I don’t think there’s any need,” Grant said severely, “to behave like a pig—even under these circumstances.”
McNeil wasn’t drunk yet. He had only reached the brightly lit anteroom of intoxication and had not lost all contact with the drab outer world. “I am prepared,” he announced with great solemnity, “to listen to any good argument against my present course of action. A course which seems eminently sensible to me.” He blessed Grant with a cherubic smile. “But you’d better convince me quickly, while I’m still amenable to reason.”
With that he squeezed the plastic bulb into which he’d off-loaded a third of the bottle’s contents, and shot a ruddy purple jet into his open mouth.
“You’re stealing company property—scheduled for salvage,”
Grant announced, unaware of the absurdity but conscious as he said it that his voice had taken on the nasality, the constriction, of a young schoolmaster, “and . . . and besides, you can hardly stay drunk for two weeks.”
“That,” said McNeil thoughtfully, “remains to be seen.”
“I don’t think so,” retorted Grant. With his right hand he secured himself to the bulkhead, with his left he swiped at the crate and gave it a vicious shove that sent it soaring through the open curtain.
As he wheeled and dived after it he heard McNeil’s pained yelp: “Why you constipated bastard! Of all the dirty tricks!”
It would take McNeil some time in his present condition to organize a pursuit. Grant steered the crate down to the hold airlock and into the pressurized, temperaturecontrolled compartment it had come from. He sealed the case and replaced it on its rack, strapping it securely into place. No point in trying to lock the case; McNeil had made a mess of the lock.
But Grant could make sure McNeil wouldn’t get in here again—he would reset the combination on the hold airlock and keep the new combination to himself. As it happened, he had plenty of time to do it. McNeil hadn’t bothered to follow him.
As Grant swam back toward the flight deck he passed the open curtain to McNeil’s cabin. McNeil was still in there, singing.
“We don’t care where the oxygen goes If it doesn’t get into the wine. . . .”
Evidently he’d already removed a couple of bottles before Grant had arrived to grab the case. Let them last him two weeks then, Grant thought, if they last the night.
“We don’t care where the oxygen goes If it doesn’t get into the wine. . . .”
Where the hell had he heard that refrain? Grant, whose education was severely technical, was sure McNeil was deliberately misquoting some bawdy Elizabethan madrigal or the like, just to taunt him. He was suddenly shaken by an emotion which, to do him justice, he did not for a moment recognize, and which passed as swiftly as it had come.
But when he reached the flight deck he was trembling, and he felt a little sick. He realized that his dislike of McNeil was slowly turning to hatred.
XI
Certainly Grant and McNeil got on well enough in ordinary circumstances. It was nobody’s fault that circumstances were now very far from ordinary.
Only because the two men had shown wonderfully smooth personality curves on the standard psychological tests; only because their flight records were virtually flawless; only because thousands of millions of pounds and dollars and yen and drachmas and dinars were involved in the flight of Star Queen had the Board of Space Control granted the ship a waiver of the crew-of-three rule.
The crew-of-three rule had evolved during a century and a half of space flight and ostensibly provided for a minimally sound social configuration during long periods of isolation—a problem that had not been pressing in the 20th century, before occupied spacecraft had ventured farther than the moon and the time delay for communication with Earth was still measured in seconds. True, in any group of three, two will eventually gang up on the third— as the ancient Romans learned after several hard political lessons, in human affairs the least stable structure is the tripod. Which is not necessarily bad. Certainly three is better than two, and two is much better than one. And any group larger than three will soon enough degenerate into sub-groups of diads and triads.
A man or woman alone will almost certainly go mad within a relatively short time. It may be a benign madness, even an exemplary madness—taking the form of an obsessive writing of romantic poetry, for example—but no form of madness is encouraging to spacecraft insurors.
Experience shows that a crew of one man and one woman will experience a crisis within days. Their relative ages do not matter. If the text of their conversation is power, the subtext will be sex. And vice versa.
On the other hand, two men alone together or two women alone together, provided their sexual vectors are not convergent, will dispense with the sexual subtext and will get down to the nitty-gritty of power every time: who’s in charge here? . . . Although in the case of two women the resolution of that question is, for cultural reasons, somewhat less likely to lead to fatal violence.
With three people of whatever sex, everybody will try to get along for a while and eventually two will gang up on the third. Thus the power question resolves itself, and depending on the make-up of the crew, sex will take care of itself also, i.e. two or more may be doing it together and one or more will be doing it alone.