Two men, not close friends, both of them heterosexual and of comparable age and status but fundamentally different in temperament, are the worst possible combination.
* * *
Three days without food, it has been said, is long enough to remove the subtle differences between a socalled civilized man and a so-called savage. Grant and McNeil were in no physical discomfort, nor would they be in extreme pain even at the end. But their imaginations had been active; they had more in common with a couple of hungry cannibals lost in a log canoe than they would have cared to admit.
One aspect of their situation, the most important of all, had never been mentioned; the computer’s analysis had been checked and rechecked, but its bottom line was not quite final, for the computer refrained from making suggestions it had not been asked to make. The two men on the crew could easily take that final step of calculation in their heads— —and each arrived at the same result. It was simple, really, a macabre parody of those problems in first-grade arithmetic which began, “If two men had six days to assemble five helicopters, how long . . . ?
At the moment the meteoroid destroyed the stored liquid oxygen, there were approximately forty-eight hundred cubic feet of air inside the crew module and twelve hundred cubic feet of air in the pressurized compartment of Hold A. At one atmosphere a cubic foot of air weighs one and two-tenths ounces, but less than a fourth of that is oxygen. Adding in the space-suit and emergency supplies, there were less than seventy pounds of oxygen in the ship.
A man consumes almost two pounds of oxygen a day.
Thirty-five man-days of oxygen . . .
The oxygen supply was enough for two men for two and a half weeks. Venus was three weeks away. One did not have to be a calculating prodigy to see that one man, one man only, might live to walk the curving garden paths of Port Hesperus.
Four days had passed. The acknowledged deadline was thirteen days away, but the unspoken deadline was ten.
For ten more days two men could breathe the air without endangering the chances of the one who might survive alone. Beyond ten days one man only would have any hope of reaching Venus. To a sufficiently detached observer the situation might have seemed highly engaging.
Grant and McNeil were not detached, however. It is not easy at the best of times for two people to decide amicably which of them shall commit suicide; it is even more dif- ficult when they are not on speaking terms.
Grant wished to be perfectly fair. Therefore, as he conceived matters, the only thing to do was to wait until McNeil sobered up and emerged from his cabin; then Grant would put it to him directly.
As these thoughts swirled over the surface of his mind Peter Grant was staring through the windows of the flight deck at the starry universe, seeing the thousands upon thousands of individual stars and even the misty nebulas as he had never seen them before. He was moved by a certain conviction of transcendence— —which mere speech would surely betray.
Well, he would write McNeil a letter. And best do it now, while they were still on diplomatic terms. He clipped a sheet of notepaper to his writing pad and began: “Dear McNeil.” He paused, his ballpoint poised above the paper.
Then he tore that sheet out and began again: “McNeil.”
It took him the best part of three hours to get down what he wanted to say, and even then he wasn’t wholly satisfied. Some things were damned difficult to put on paper.
At last he finished; he folded the letter and sealed it with a strip of tape. He left the flight deck, taking the letter with him, and closed himself into his cabin. The business of actually handing the letter to McNeil could wait a day or two.
Few of the billions of videoplate addicts on Earth—or the additional thousands on Port Hesperus and Mars and in the Mainbelt and on the colonized moons—could have had any true notion of what was going on within the minds of the two men aboard Star Queen. The public media was full of rescue schemes. All sorts of retired spaceship pilots and writers of fantasy fiction had been dredged up to give their opinons over the airwaves as to how Grant and McNeil should comport themselves. The men who were the cause of all this fuss wisely declined to listen to any of it.
Traffic control on Port Hesperus was a bit more disreet.
One could not with any decency give words of advice or encouragement to men on death row, even if there was some uncertainty about the date of execution. Therefore traffic control contented itself with few emotionally neutral messages each day—relaying the newsheads about the war in southern Asia, the growing sector dispute in the Mainbelt, new mineral strikes on the surface of Venus, the fuss over the censorship of “While Rome Burns,”
which had just been banned in Moscow. . . .
Life on Star Queen continued much as before, not withstanding the stiffness between the two men that had attended McNeil’s emergence—classically hung-over—from his cabin. Grant, for his part, spent much of his time on the flight deck writing letters to his wife. Long letters. The longer the better. . . . He could have spoken to her if he’d wished, but the thought of all those news addicts listening in prevented him from doing so. Unhappily, there were no truly private lines in space.
And that letter to McNeil. Why not deliver it, get it over with? Well, he would do that, within a couple of days . . . and then they would decide. Besides, such a delay would give McNeil a chance to raise the subject himself.
That McNeil might have reasons for his hesitation other than simple cowardice did not occur to Grant.
He wondered how McNeil was spending his time, now that he’d run out of booze. The engineer had a large library of books on videochip, for he read widely and his range of interests was unusual. Grant had seen him delving into Western philosophy and Eastern religion and fiction of all kinds; McNeil had once mentioned that his favorite book was the odd early-20th century novel Jurgen. Perhaps he was trying to forget his doom by losing himself in its strange magic. Others of McNeil’s books were less respectable, and not a few were of the class curiously described as “curious. . . .”
But in fact McNeil, lying in his cabin or moving silently through the ship, was a subtler and more complicated personality than Grant knew, perhaps too complicated for Grant to understand. Yes, McNeil was a hedonist. He did what he could to make life comfortable for himself aboard ship, and when planetside he indulged himself fully in the pleasures of life, all the more for being cut off from them for months at a time. But he was by no means the moral weakling that the unimaginative, puritanical Grant supposed him to be.
True, he had collapsed completely under the shock of the meteoroid strike. When it happened he’d been passing through the life support deck’s access corridor, on his way back from the hold, and he understood the seriousness of the violent explosion instantly—it happened hardly a meter away, on the other side of the steel wall—without having to wait for confirmation. His reaction was exactly like that of an airline passenger who sees a wing come off at 30,000 feet: there are still ten or fifteen minutes left to fall, but death is inevitable. So he’d panicked.
Like a willow in the wind, he’d bowed under the strain—and then recovered. Grant was a harder man—an oak—and a brittler one.
As for the business of the wine, McNeil’s behavior had been reprehensible by Grant’s standards, but that was Grant’s problem; besides, that episode too was behind them. By tacit consent they’d gone back to their normal routine, although it did nothing to reduce the sense of strain. They avoided each other as much as possible except when meal times brought them together. When they did meet, they behaved with an exaggerated politeness, as if each were striving to be perfectly normal—yet inexplicably failing.
A day passed, and another. And a third.
Grant had hoped that McNeil would have broached the subject of suicide by now, thus sparing him a very awkward duty. When the engineer stubbornly refused to do anything of the sort it added to Grant’s resentment and contempt. To make matters worse he was now suffering from nightmares and sleeping very badly.
The nightmare was always the same. When Peter Grant was a child it had often happened that at bedtime he had been reading a story far too exciting to be left until morning.