To avoid detection he had continued reading under the bedclothes by flashlight, curled up in a snug white- walled cocoon. Every ten minutes or so the air had become too stifling to breathe and his emergence into the delicious cool air had been a major part of the fun. Now, thirty years later, these innocent childhood hours returned to haunt him. He was dreaming that he could not escape from the suffocating sheets while the air was steadily and remorselessly thickening around him.
He’d intended to give McNeil the letter after two days, yet somehow he’d put it off again. This procrastination was very unlike Grant, but he managed to persuade himself that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. He was giving McNeil a chance to redeem himself— —to prove that he wasn’t a coward, by raising the issue first. It never occurred to Grant that McNeil might be waiting for him to do the same. . . .
The all-too-literal deadline was three days off when, for the first time, Grant’s mind brushed lightly against the thought of murder. He’d retired to the flight deck after the “evening” meal, trying to relax by gazing at the starry night through the wide windows that surrounded the flight deck, but McNeil was doing a very thorough and noisy job of cleaning up the galley, clattering around with what must surely be an unnecessary, even a deliberate, amount of noise.
What use was McNeil to this world? He had no family, no responsibilities. Who would be the worse for his death?
Grant, on the other hand, had a wife and three children, of whom he was moderately fond, even if they were no more than dutiful in their perfunctory displays of affection for him. An impartial judge would have no diffi- culty in deciding which of them should survive, and if McNeil had had a spark of decency in him he would have come to the same conclusion already. Since he appeared to have done nothing of the sort he had surely forfeited all further claims to consideration. . . .
Such was the elemental logic of Grant’s subconscious mind, which of course had arrived at this conclusion days before but had only now succeeded in attracting the attention for which it had been clamoring.
To Grant’s credit he at once rejected the thought. With horror.
He was an upright and honorable person, with a very strict code of behavior. Even the vagrant homicidal impulses of what is misleadingly called a “normal” man had seldom ruffled his mind. But in the days—the very few days—left to him, they would come more and more often.
The air was noticeably fouler. Although air pressure had been reduced to a minimum and there was no shortage of the canisters that were used to scrub carbon dioxide from the circulating atmosphere, it was impossible to prevent a slow increase in the ratio of inert gases to the dwindling oxygen reserves. There was still no real difficulty in breathing, but the thick odor was a constant reminder of what lay ahead.
Grant was in his cabin. It was “night,” but he could not sleep—a relief in one way, for it broke the hold of his nightmares. But he had not slept well the previous night either, and he was becoming physically run down; his nerve was rapidly deteriorating, a state of affairs accentuated by the fact that McNeil had been behaving with a calmness that was not only unexpected but quite annoying.
Grant realized that in his own emotional state it would be dangerous to delay the showdown any longer. He freed himself from his loose sleep restraint and opened his desk, reaching for the letter he had intended to give to McNeil days ago. And then he smelled something— A single neutron begins the chain reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives, the toil of generations.
Equally insignificant are the trigger-events that can alter a person’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of the future. Nothing could have been more trivial than what made Grant pause with the letter in his hand; under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed it at all. It was the smell of smoke—tobacco smoke.
The revelation that McNeil, that sybaritic engineer, had so little self-control that he was squandering the last precious pounds of oxygen on cigarettes filled Grant with a blinding fury. For a moment he went quite rigid with the intensity of his emotion. Then, slowly, he crumpled the letter in his hand. The thought that had first been an unwelcome intruder, then a casual speculation, was now fi- nally accepted. McNeil had had his chance and had proved, by this unbelievable selfishness, unworthy of it.
Very well—he could die.
The speed with which Grant arrived at this selfjustifying conclusion would have been obvious to the rankest of amateur psychiatrists. He had needed to convince himself that there was no point in doing the honorable thing, suggesting some game of chance that would give McNeil and him an equal chance at life. Here was the excuse he needed, and he seized upon it. He might now plan and carry out McNeil’s murder according to his own particular moral code.
Relief as much as hatred drove Grant back to his bunk, where every whiff of tobacco aroma salved his conscience.
* * *
McNeil could have told Grant that once again he was badly misjudging him. The engineer had been a heavy smoker for years—against his better judgment, it’s true, and quite conscious that he was unavoidably an annoyance to the majority of folk who did not care to breathe his exhaust. He’d tried to quit—it was easy, he sometimes quipped, he’d done it often—but in moments of strain he inevitably found himself reaching for those fragrant paper cylinders. He envied Grant, the sort of man who could smoke a cigarette when he wanted one but put them aside without regret. He wondered why Grant smoked at all, if he didn’t need to. Some sort of symbolic rebellion . . . ?
At any rate, McNeil had calculated that he could afford two cigarettes a day without producing the least measurable difference in the duration of a breathable atmosphere.
The luxury of those six or seven minutes, twice a day— one late at night, one at mid-morning, hidden deep down in the central corridor of the ship—was in all likelihood beyond the capacity of Peter Grant to imagine, and it contributed greatly to Angus McNeil’s mental well-being.
Though the two cigarettes made no difference to the oxygen supply, they made all the difference in the world to McNeil’s nerves, and thus contributed indirectly to Grant’s peace of mind.
But no use trying to tell Grant that. So McNeil smoked privately, exercising a self-control that was in itself surprisingly agreeable, even voluptuous.
Had McNeil known of Grant’s insomnia, he would not have risked even that late night cigarette in his unsealed cabin. . . .
For a man who had only an hour ago talked himself into murder, Grant’s actions were remarkably methodical.
Without hesitation—beyond that necessitated by caution— Grant floated silently past his cabin partition and on across the darkened common area to the wall-mounted medicine chest near the galley. Only a ghostly blue safelight illuminated the interior of the chest, in which tubes and vials and instruments were snugly secured in their padded nests by straps of Velcro. The ship’s outfitters had provided tools and medicines for every emergency they had ever heard of or could imagine.
Including this one. There behind its retaining strap was the tiny bottle whose image had been lying far down in the depths of Grant’s unconscious all these days. In the blue light he could not read the fine print on the label— all he could see was the skull and crossbones—but he knew the words by heart: “Approximately one-half gram will cause painless and almost instantaneous death.”
Painless and instantaneous—good. Even better was a fact that went unmentioned on the label. The stuff was tasteless.
Most of another day went by.
The contrast between the meals prepared by Grant and those organized with considerable skill and care by McNeil was striking. Anyone who was fond of food and who spent a good deal of his life in space usually learned the art of cooking in self-defense, and McNeil had not only learned it but had mastered it. He could coax a piquant sauce from dried milk, the juices of rehydrated beefsteak, and his private stash of herbs; he could coax flavor from the deep freeze with his flasks of oils and vinegars.
To Grant, eating was one of those necessary but annoying jobs that was to be got through as quickly as possible, and his cooking mirrored this attitude. McNeil had long ago ceased to grumble about it; imagine his bemusement, then, had he seen the trouble Grant was taking over this particular dinner.