Short fiction complete, p.5
Short Fiction Complete, page 5
“Someone has to.”
“Yeah.” Tom ran a hand across his mouth. Boy, could I use a cigarette. Funny, I haven’t even thought about them in years.
“Look,” he said to the radio, “we might as well settle something right now. How many men are you going to let me have?”
“Don’t you think you’d better save that for now and get back to work?”
“It’s too damned cold out there. My fingers are still numb. You could have done a better job on insulating this suit.”
“There are a lot of things we could have done,” Jason said, “if we had the material.”
“How about the expedition? How many men can I have?”
“As many as you can get,” the radio voice answered. “I promised I won’t stand in your way once the satellite is finished and operating.”
“Won’t stand in my way,” Tom repeated. “That means you won’t encourage anyone, either.”
Jason’s voice rose a trifle. “I can’t encourage my people to go out and risk their lives just because you want to poke around some radioactive slag heaps!”
“You promised that if I put the satellite together and got back alive, I could investigate the cities. That was our deal.”
“That’s right. You can. And anyone foolish enough to accompany you can follow along.”
“Jason, you know I need at least twenty-five armed men to venture out of the settlement . . .”
“Then you admit it’s dangerous!” the radio voice crackled.
“Sure, if we meet a robber band. You’ve sent out enough foraging groups to know that. And we’ll be travelling hundreds of miles. But it’s not dangerous for the reasons you’ve been circulating . . . radioactivity and disease germs and that nonsense. There’s no danger that one of your own foraging groups couldn’t handle. I came through the cities last year alone, and I made it.”
Tom waited for a reply from the radio, but only the hissing and crackling of electrical disturbances answered him.
“Jason, those cities hold what’s left of a world-wide civilization. We can’t begin to rebuild unless we reopen that knowledge. We need it, we need it desperately!”
“It’s either destroyed or radioactive, and to think anything else is self-delusion. Besides, we have enough intelligence right here at the settlement to build a new civilization, better than the old one, once the satellite is ready.”
“But you don’t!” Tom shouted. “You poor damned fool, you don’t even realize how much you don’t know.”
“This is a waste of time,” Jason snapped. “Get outside and finish your work.”
“I’m still cold, dammit,” Tom said. He glanced at the thermometer on the control console. “Jason! It’s below freezing in here!”
“What?”
“The heating unit isn’t working at all!”
“Impossible. You must have turned it off instead of on.”
“I can read, dammit! It’s turned as high as it’ll go . . .”
“What’s the internal thermometer reading?”
Tom looked. “Barely thirty . . . and it’s still going down.”
“Hold on, I’ll wake Arnoldsson and the electrical engineers.”
Silence. Tom stared at the inanimate radio which gave off only the whines and scratches of lightning and sun and stars, all far distant from him. For all his senses could tell him, he was the last living thing in the universe.
Sure, call a conference, Tom thought. How much more work is there to be done? About twenty-four hours, he said. Another day. And another full night. Another night, this time with no heat. And maybe no oxygen, either. The heaters must have been working tonight until I pushed them tip to full power. Something must have blown out. Maybe it’s just a broken wire. I could fix that if they tell me how. But if it’s not . . . no heat tomorrow night, no heat at all.
Then Arnoldsson’s voice floated up through the radio speaker: soft, friendly, calm, soothing . . .
The next thing Tom knew he was putting on his helmet. Sunlight was lancing through the tinted observation port and the ship was noticeably warmer.
“What happened?” he mumbled through the dissolving haze of hypnosis.
“It’s all right, Tom.” Ruth’s voice. “Dr. Arnoldsson put you under and had you check the ship’s wiring. Now he and Jason and the engineers are figuring out what to do. They said it’s nothing to worry about . . . they’ll have everything figured out in a couple of hours.”
“And I’m to work on the satellite until they’re ready?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s all right, Tom. Don’t worry.”
“Sure Ruth, I’m not worried.” That makes us both liars.
He worked mechanically, handling the unfamiliar machinery with the engineers’ knowledge through Arnoldsson’s hypnotic communication.
Just like the pictures they used to shots of nuclear engineers handling radioactive materials with remotely-controlled mechanical hands from behind a concrete wall. I’m only a pair of hands, a couple of opposed thumbs, a fortunate mutation of a self-conscious simian . . . but, God, why don’t they call? She said it wasn’t anything big. Just the wiring, probably. Then why don’t they call?
He tried to work without thinking about anything, but he couldn’t force his mind into stillness.
Even if I can fix the heaters, even if I don’t freeze to death, I might run out of oxygen. And how am I going to land the ship? The takeoff was automatic, but even Jason and Arnoldsson can’t make a pilot out of me . . .
“Tom?” Jason’s voice.
“Yes!” He jerked to attention and floated free of the satellite.
“We’ve . . . eh, checked what you told us about the ship’s electrical system while Arnoldsson had you under the hypnotic trance . . .”
“And?”
“Well . . . it, eh, looks as though one of the batteries gave out. The batteries feed all the ship’s lights, heat, and electrical power . . . with one of them out, you don’t have enough power to run the heaters.”
“There’s no way to fix it?”
“Not unless you cut out something else. And you need everything else . . . the radio, the controls, the oxygen pumps . . .”
“What about the lights? I don’t need them, I’ve got the lamp on my suit helmet.”
“They don’t take as much power as the heaters do. It wouldn’t help at all.”
Tom twisted weightlessly and stared back at Earth. “Well just what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t get excited,” Jason’s voice grated in his earphones. “We’ve calculated it all out. According to our figures, your suit will store enough heat during the day to last the night . . .”
“I nearly froze to death last night and the ship was heated most of the time!”
“It will get cold,” Jason’s voice answered calmly, “but you should be able to make it. Your own body warmth will be stored by the suit’s insulation, and that will help somewhat. But you must not open the suit all night, not even to take off your helmet.”
“And the oxygen?”
“You can take all the replacement cylinders from the ship and keep them at the satellite. The time you save by not having to go back and forth to the ship for fresh oxygen will give you about an hour’s extra margin. You should be able to make it.”
Tom nodded. “And of course I’m expected to work on the satellite right through the night.”
“It will help you keep your mind off the cold. If we see that you’re not going to make it—either because of the cold or the oxygen—we’ll warn you and you can return to the settlement.”
“Suppose I have enough oxygen to just finish the satellite, but if I do, I won’t have enough to fly home. Will you warn me then?”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Go to hell.”
“Dr. Arnoldsson said he could put you under,” Jason continued unemotionally, “but he thinks you might freeze once your conscious mind went asleep.”
“You’ve figured out all the details,” Tom muttered. “All I have to do is put your damned satellite together without freezing to death and then fly 22,500 miles back home before my air runs out. Simple.”
He glanced at the sun, still glaring bright even through his tinted visor. It was nearly on the edge of the Earth-disk.
“All right,” Tom said, “I’m going into the ship now, for some pills; it’s nearly sunset.”
Cold. Dark and so cold that numbers lost their meaning. Paralyzing cold, seeping in through the suit while you worked, crawling up your limbs until you could hardly move. The whole universe hung up in the sky and looked down on the small cold figure of a man struggling blindly with machinery he could not understand.
Dark. Dark and cold.
Huth stayed on the radio as long as Jason would allow her, talking to Tom, keeping the link with life and warmth. But finally Jason took over, and the radio went silent.
So don’t talk, Tom growled silently, I can keep warm just by hating you, Jason.
lie worked through the frigid night, struggling antlike with huge pieces of equipment. Slowly he assembled the big parabolic mirror, the sighting mechanism and the atomic convertor. With dreamy motions he started connecting the intricate wiring systems.
And all the while he raged at himself: Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why me? Why did I agree to do this? I knew I’d never live through it; why did I do it?
He retraced the days of his life: the preparations for the flight, the arguments with Jason over exploring the cities, his trek from Chicago to the settlement, the aimless years after the radiation death of his two boys and Marjorie, his wife.
Marjorie and the boys, lying sick month after month, dying one after the other in a cancerous agony while he stood by helplessly in the ruins of what had been their home.
No! His mind warned him. Don’t think of that. Not that. Think of Jason, Jason who prevents you from doing the one thing you want, who is taking your life from you; Jason, the peerless leader; Jason, who’s afraid of the cities. Why? Why is he afraid of the cities? That’s the hub of everything down there. Why does Jason fear the cities?
It wasn’t until he finished connecting the satellite’s last unit—the sighting mechanism—that Tom realized the answer.
One answer. And everything fell into place.
Everything . . . except what Tom Morris was going to do about it.
Tom squinted through the twin telescopes of the sighting mechanism again, then pushed away and floated free, staring at the Earth bathed in pale moonlight.
What do I do now? For an instant he was close to panic, but he forced it down. Think, he said to himself. You’re supposed to be a Homo Sapiens . . . use that brain. Think!
The long night ended. The sun swung around from behind the bulk of Earth. Tom looked at it as he felt its warmth penetrating the insulated suit, and he knew it was the last time he would see the sun. He felt no more anger—even his hatred of Jason was drained out of him now. In its place was a sense of—finality.
He spoke into his helmet mike. “Jason.”
“He is in conference with the astronomers.” Dr. Arnoldsson’s voice.
“Get him for me, please.”
A few minutes of silence, broken only by the star-whisperings in his earphones.
Jason’s voice was carefully modulated. “Tom, you made it.”
“I made it. And the satellite’s finished.”
“It’s finished? Good. Now, what we have to do . . .”
“Wait,” Tom interrupted. “It’s finished but it’s useless.”
“What?”
Tom twisted around to look at the completed satellite, its oddly-angled framework and bulbous machinery glinting fiercely in the newly-risen sun. “After I finished it I looked through the sighting mechanism to make certain the satellite’s transmitters were correctly aimed at the settlement. Nobody told me to, but nobody said not to, either, so I looked. It’s a simple mechanism . . . The transmitters are pointed smack in the middle of Hudson’s Bay.”
“You’re sure?”
“Certainly.”
“You can rotate the antennas . . .”
“I know. I tried it. I can turn them as far south as the Great Lakes.”
A long pause.
“I was afraid of this,” Jason’s voice said evenly.
I’ll bet you were, Tom answered to himself.
“You must have moved the satellite out of position while assembling its components.”
“So my work here comes to nothing because the satellite’s power beam can’t reach the settlement’s receivers.”
“Not . . . not unless you use the ship . . . to tow the satellite into the proper orbital position,” Jason stammered.
You actually went through with it, Tom thought. Aloud, he said, “But if I use the ship’s engine to tow the satellite, I won’t have enough fuel left to get back to Earth, will I?” Not to mention oxygen.
A longer pause. “No.”
“I have two questions, Jason. I think I know the answers to them both but I’ll ask you anyway. One. You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve calculated this insane business down to the last drop of sweat,” Tom growled. “You knew that I’d knock the satellite out of position while I was working on it, and the only way to get it back in the right orbit would be for me to tow it back and strand myself up here. This is a suicide mission, isn’t it, Jason?”
“That’s not true . . .”
“Don’t bother defending yourself. I don’t hate you anymore, Jason, I understand you, dammit. You made our deal as much to get rid of me as to get your precious satellite put together.”
“No one can force you to tow the satellite . . .”
“Sure, I can leave it where it is and come back home. If I can fly this ship, which I doubt. And what would I come back to? I left a world without power. I’d return to a world without hope. And some dark night one of your disappointed young goons would catch up with me . . . and no one would blame him, would they?”
Jason’s voice was brittle. “You’ll tow it into position?”
“After you answer my second question,” Tom countered. “Why are you afraid of the cities?”
“Afraid? I’m not afraid.”
“Yes you are. Oh, you could use the hope of exploring the cities to lure me up here on this suicide-job, but you knew I’d never be back to claim my half of the bargain. You’re afraid of the cities, and I think I know why. You’re afraid of the unknown quantity they represent, distrustful of your own leadership when new problems arise . . .”
“We’ve worked for more than ten years to make this settlement what it is,” Jason fumed. “We fought and died to keep those marauding lunatics from wrecking us. We are mankind’s last hope! We can’t afford to let others in . . . they’re not scientists, they wouldn’t understand, they’d ruin everything.”
“Mankind’s last hope, terrified of men.” Tom was suddenly tired, weary of the whole struggle. But there was something he had to tell them.
“Listen Jason,” he said. “The walls you’ve built around the settlement weren’t meant to keep you from going outside. You’re not a self-sufficient little community . . . you’re cut off from mankind’s memory, from his dreams, from his ambitions. You can’t even start to rebuild a civilization—and if you do try, don’t you think the people outside will learn about it? Don’t you think they’ve got a right to share in whatever progress the settlement makes? And if you don’t let them, don’t you realize that they’ll destroy the settlement?”
Silence.
“I’m a historian,” Tom continued, “and I know that a civilization can’t exist in a vacuum. If outsiders don’t conquer it, it’ll rot from within. It’s happened to Babylonia, Greece, Rome, China, even. Over and again. The Soviets built an Iron Curtain around themselves, and wiped themselves out because of it.
“Don’t you see, Jason? There are only two types of animals on this planet: the gamblers and the extinct. It won’t be easy to live with the outsiders, there’ll be problems of every type. But the alternative is decay and destruction. You’ve got to take the chance, if you don’t you’re dead.”
A long silence. Finally Jason said, “You’ve only got about a half-hour’s worth of oxygen left. Will you tow the satellite into the proper position?”
Tom stared at the planet unseeingly. “Yes,” he mumbled.
“I’ll have to check some calculations with the astronomers,” Jason’s voice buzzed flatly in his earphones.
A background murmer, scarcely audible over the crackling static.
Then Ruth’s voice broke through, “Tom, Tom, you can’t do this! You won’t be able to get back!”
“I know,” he said, as he started pulling his way along the lifeline back to the ship.
“No! Come back, Tom, please. Come back. Forget the satellite. Come back and explore the cities. I’ll go with you. Please. Don’t die, Tom, please don’t die . . .”
“Ruth, Ruth, you’re too young to cry over me. I’ll be all right, don’t worry.”
“No, it isn’t fair.”
“It never is,” Tom said. “Listen, Ruth. I’ve been dead a long time. Since the bombs fell, I guess. My world died then and I died with it. When I came to the settlement, when I agreed to make this flight, I think we all knew I’d never return, even if we wouldn’t admit it to ourselves. But I’m just one man, Ruth, one small part of the story. The story goes on, with or without me. There’s tomorrow . . . your tomorrow. I’ve got no place in it, but it belongs to you. So don’t waste your time crying over a man who died eighteen years ago.”
He snapped off his suit radio and went the rest of the way to the ship in silence. After locking the hatch and pumping air back into the cabin, he took off his helmet.
Good clean canned air, Tom said to himself. Too bad it won’t last longer.
He sat down and flicked a switch on the radio console. “All right, do you have those calculations ready?”
“In a few moments . . .” Arnoldsson’s voice.
“Yeah.” Tom ran a hand across his mouth. Boy, could I use a cigarette. Funny, I haven’t even thought about them in years.
“Look,” he said to the radio, “we might as well settle something right now. How many men are you going to let me have?”
“Don’t you think you’d better save that for now and get back to work?”
“It’s too damned cold out there. My fingers are still numb. You could have done a better job on insulating this suit.”
“There are a lot of things we could have done,” Jason said, “if we had the material.”
“How about the expedition? How many men can I have?”
“As many as you can get,” the radio voice answered. “I promised I won’t stand in your way once the satellite is finished and operating.”
“Won’t stand in my way,” Tom repeated. “That means you won’t encourage anyone, either.”
Jason’s voice rose a trifle. “I can’t encourage my people to go out and risk their lives just because you want to poke around some radioactive slag heaps!”
“You promised that if I put the satellite together and got back alive, I could investigate the cities. That was our deal.”
“That’s right. You can. And anyone foolish enough to accompany you can follow along.”
“Jason, you know I need at least twenty-five armed men to venture out of the settlement . . .”
“Then you admit it’s dangerous!” the radio voice crackled.
“Sure, if we meet a robber band. You’ve sent out enough foraging groups to know that. And we’ll be travelling hundreds of miles. But it’s not dangerous for the reasons you’ve been circulating . . . radioactivity and disease germs and that nonsense. There’s no danger that one of your own foraging groups couldn’t handle. I came through the cities last year alone, and I made it.”
Tom waited for a reply from the radio, but only the hissing and crackling of electrical disturbances answered him.
“Jason, those cities hold what’s left of a world-wide civilization. We can’t begin to rebuild unless we reopen that knowledge. We need it, we need it desperately!”
“It’s either destroyed or radioactive, and to think anything else is self-delusion. Besides, we have enough intelligence right here at the settlement to build a new civilization, better than the old one, once the satellite is ready.”
“But you don’t!” Tom shouted. “You poor damned fool, you don’t even realize how much you don’t know.”
“This is a waste of time,” Jason snapped. “Get outside and finish your work.”
“I’m still cold, dammit,” Tom said. He glanced at the thermometer on the control console. “Jason! It’s below freezing in here!”
“What?”
“The heating unit isn’t working at all!”
“Impossible. You must have turned it off instead of on.”
“I can read, dammit! It’s turned as high as it’ll go . . .”
“What’s the internal thermometer reading?”
Tom looked. “Barely thirty . . . and it’s still going down.”
“Hold on, I’ll wake Arnoldsson and the electrical engineers.”
Silence. Tom stared at the inanimate radio which gave off only the whines and scratches of lightning and sun and stars, all far distant from him. For all his senses could tell him, he was the last living thing in the universe.
Sure, call a conference, Tom thought. How much more work is there to be done? About twenty-four hours, he said. Another day. And another full night. Another night, this time with no heat. And maybe no oxygen, either. The heaters must have been working tonight until I pushed them tip to full power. Something must have blown out. Maybe it’s just a broken wire. I could fix that if they tell me how. But if it’s not . . . no heat tomorrow night, no heat at all.
Then Arnoldsson’s voice floated up through the radio speaker: soft, friendly, calm, soothing . . .
The next thing Tom knew he was putting on his helmet. Sunlight was lancing through the tinted observation port and the ship was noticeably warmer.
“What happened?” he mumbled through the dissolving haze of hypnosis.
“It’s all right, Tom.” Ruth’s voice. “Dr. Arnoldsson put you under and had you check the ship’s wiring. Now he and Jason and the engineers are figuring out what to do. They said it’s nothing to worry about . . . they’ll have everything figured out in a couple of hours.”
“And I’m to work on the satellite until they’re ready?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s all right, Tom. Don’t worry.”
“Sure Ruth, I’m not worried.” That makes us both liars.
He worked mechanically, handling the unfamiliar machinery with the engineers’ knowledge through Arnoldsson’s hypnotic communication.
Just like the pictures they used to shots of nuclear engineers handling radioactive materials with remotely-controlled mechanical hands from behind a concrete wall. I’m only a pair of hands, a couple of opposed thumbs, a fortunate mutation of a self-conscious simian . . . but, God, why don’t they call? She said it wasn’t anything big. Just the wiring, probably. Then why don’t they call?
He tried to work without thinking about anything, but he couldn’t force his mind into stillness.
Even if I can fix the heaters, even if I don’t freeze to death, I might run out of oxygen. And how am I going to land the ship? The takeoff was automatic, but even Jason and Arnoldsson can’t make a pilot out of me . . .
“Tom?” Jason’s voice.
“Yes!” He jerked to attention and floated free of the satellite.
“We’ve . . . eh, checked what you told us about the ship’s electrical system while Arnoldsson had you under the hypnotic trance . . .”
“And?”
“Well . . . it, eh, looks as though one of the batteries gave out. The batteries feed all the ship’s lights, heat, and electrical power . . . with one of them out, you don’t have enough power to run the heaters.”
“There’s no way to fix it?”
“Not unless you cut out something else. And you need everything else . . . the radio, the controls, the oxygen pumps . . .”
“What about the lights? I don’t need them, I’ve got the lamp on my suit helmet.”
“They don’t take as much power as the heaters do. It wouldn’t help at all.”
Tom twisted weightlessly and stared back at Earth. “Well just what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t get excited,” Jason’s voice grated in his earphones. “We’ve calculated it all out. According to our figures, your suit will store enough heat during the day to last the night . . .”
“I nearly froze to death last night and the ship was heated most of the time!”
“It will get cold,” Jason’s voice answered calmly, “but you should be able to make it. Your own body warmth will be stored by the suit’s insulation, and that will help somewhat. But you must not open the suit all night, not even to take off your helmet.”
“And the oxygen?”
“You can take all the replacement cylinders from the ship and keep them at the satellite. The time you save by not having to go back and forth to the ship for fresh oxygen will give you about an hour’s extra margin. You should be able to make it.”
Tom nodded. “And of course I’m expected to work on the satellite right through the night.”
“It will help you keep your mind off the cold. If we see that you’re not going to make it—either because of the cold or the oxygen—we’ll warn you and you can return to the settlement.”
“Suppose I have enough oxygen to just finish the satellite, but if I do, I won’t have enough to fly home. Will you warn me then?”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Go to hell.”
“Dr. Arnoldsson said he could put you under,” Jason continued unemotionally, “but he thinks you might freeze once your conscious mind went asleep.”
“You’ve figured out all the details,” Tom muttered. “All I have to do is put your damned satellite together without freezing to death and then fly 22,500 miles back home before my air runs out. Simple.”
He glanced at the sun, still glaring bright even through his tinted visor. It was nearly on the edge of the Earth-disk.
“All right,” Tom said, “I’m going into the ship now, for some pills; it’s nearly sunset.”
Cold. Dark and so cold that numbers lost their meaning. Paralyzing cold, seeping in through the suit while you worked, crawling up your limbs until you could hardly move. The whole universe hung up in the sky and looked down on the small cold figure of a man struggling blindly with machinery he could not understand.
Dark. Dark and cold.
Huth stayed on the radio as long as Jason would allow her, talking to Tom, keeping the link with life and warmth. But finally Jason took over, and the radio went silent.
So don’t talk, Tom growled silently, I can keep warm just by hating you, Jason.
lie worked through the frigid night, struggling antlike with huge pieces of equipment. Slowly he assembled the big parabolic mirror, the sighting mechanism and the atomic convertor. With dreamy motions he started connecting the intricate wiring systems.
And all the while he raged at himself: Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why me? Why did I agree to do this? I knew I’d never live through it; why did I do it?
He retraced the days of his life: the preparations for the flight, the arguments with Jason over exploring the cities, his trek from Chicago to the settlement, the aimless years after the radiation death of his two boys and Marjorie, his wife.
Marjorie and the boys, lying sick month after month, dying one after the other in a cancerous agony while he stood by helplessly in the ruins of what had been their home.
No! His mind warned him. Don’t think of that. Not that. Think of Jason, Jason who prevents you from doing the one thing you want, who is taking your life from you; Jason, the peerless leader; Jason, who’s afraid of the cities. Why? Why is he afraid of the cities? That’s the hub of everything down there. Why does Jason fear the cities?
It wasn’t until he finished connecting the satellite’s last unit—the sighting mechanism—that Tom realized the answer.
One answer. And everything fell into place.
Everything . . . except what Tom Morris was going to do about it.
Tom squinted through the twin telescopes of the sighting mechanism again, then pushed away and floated free, staring at the Earth bathed in pale moonlight.
What do I do now? For an instant he was close to panic, but he forced it down. Think, he said to himself. You’re supposed to be a Homo Sapiens . . . use that brain. Think!
The long night ended. The sun swung around from behind the bulk of Earth. Tom looked at it as he felt its warmth penetrating the insulated suit, and he knew it was the last time he would see the sun. He felt no more anger—even his hatred of Jason was drained out of him now. In its place was a sense of—finality.
He spoke into his helmet mike. “Jason.”
“He is in conference with the astronomers.” Dr. Arnoldsson’s voice.
“Get him for me, please.”
A few minutes of silence, broken only by the star-whisperings in his earphones.
Jason’s voice was carefully modulated. “Tom, you made it.”
“I made it. And the satellite’s finished.”
“It’s finished? Good. Now, what we have to do . . .”
“Wait,” Tom interrupted. “It’s finished but it’s useless.”
“What?”
Tom twisted around to look at the completed satellite, its oddly-angled framework and bulbous machinery glinting fiercely in the newly-risen sun. “After I finished it I looked through the sighting mechanism to make certain the satellite’s transmitters were correctly aimed at the settlement. Nobody told me to, but nobody said not to, either, so I looked. It’s a simple mechanism . . . The transmitters are pointed smack in the middle of Hudson’s Bay.”
“You’re sure?”
“Certainly.”
“You can rotate the antennas . . .”
“I know. I tried it. I can turn them as far south as the Great Lakes.”
A long pause.
“I was afraid of this,” Jason’s voice said evenly.
I’ll bet you were, Tom answered to himself.
“You must have moved the satellite out of position while assembling its components.”
“So my work here comes to nothing because the satellite’s power beam can’t reach the settlement’s receivers.”
“Not . . . not unless you use the ship . . . to tow the satellite into the proper orbital position,” Jason stammered.
You actually went through with it, Tom thought. Aloud, he said, “But if I use the ship’s engine to tow the satellite, I won’t have enough fuel left to get back to Earth, will I?” Not to mention oxygen.
A longer pause. “No.”
“I have two questions, Jason. I think I know the answers to them both but I’ll ask you anyway. One. You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve calculated this insane business down to the last drop of sweat,” Tom growled. “You knew that I’d knock the satellite out of position while I was working on it, and the only way to get it back in the right orbit would be for me to tow it back and strand myself up here. This is a suicide mission, isn’t it, Jason?”
“That’s not true . . .”
“Don’t bother defending yourself. I don’t hate you anymore, Jason, I understand you, dammit. You made our deal as much to get rid of me as to get your precious satellite put together.”
“No one can force you to tow the satellite . . .”
“Sure, I can leave it where it is and come back home. If I can fly this ship, which I doubt. And what would I come back to? I left a world without power. I’d return to a world without hope. And some dark night one of your disappointed young goons would catch up with me . . . and no one would blame him, would they?”
Jason’s voice was brittle. “You’ll tow it into position?”
“After you answer my second question,” Tom countered. “Why are you afraid of the cities?”
“Afraid? I’m not afraid.”
“Yes you are. Oh, you could use the hope of exploring the cities to lure me up here on this suicide-job, but you knew I’d never be back to claim my half of the bargain. You’re afraid of the cities, and I think I know why. You’re afraid of the unknown quantity they represent, distrustful of your own leadership when new problems arise . . .”
“We’ve worked for more than ten years to make this settlement what it is,” Jason fumed. “We fought and died to keep those marauding lunatics from wrecking us. We are mankind’s last hope! We can’t afford to let others in . . . they’re not scientists, they wouldn’t understand, they’d ruin everything.”
“Mankind’s last hope, terrified of men.” Tom was suddenly tired, weary of the whole struggle. But there was something he had to tell them.
“Listen Jason,” he said. “The walls you’ve built around the settlement weren’t meant to keep you from going outside. You’re not a self-sufficient little community . . . you’re cut off from mankind’s memory, from his dreams, from his ambitions. You can’t even start to rebuild a civilization—and if you do try, don’t you think the people outside will learn about it? Don’t you think they’ve got a right to share in whatever progress the settlement makes? And if you don’t let them, don’t you realize that they’ll destroy the settlement?”
Silence.
“I’m a historian,” Tom continued, “and I know that a civilization can’t exist in a vacuum. If outsiders don’t conquer it, it’ll rot from within. It’s happened to Babylonia, Greece, Rome, China, even. Over and again. The Soviets built an Iron Curtain around themselves, and wiped themselves out because of it.
“Don’t you see, Jason? There are only two types of animals on this planet: the gamblers and the extinct. It won’t be easy to live with the outsiders, there’ll be problems of every type. But the alternative is decay and destruction. You’ve got to take the chance, if you don’t you’re dead.”
A long silence. Finally Jason said, “You’ve only got about a half-hour’s worth of oxygen left. Will you tow the satellite into the proper position?”
Tom stared at the planet unseeingly. “Yes,” he mumbled.
“I’ll have to check some calculations with the astronomers,” Jason’s voice buzzed flatly in his earphones.
A background murmer, scarcely audible over the crackling static.
Then Ruth’s voice broke through, “Tom, Tom, you can’t do this! You won’t be able to get back!”
“I know,” he said, as he started pulling his way along the lifeline back to the ship.
“No! Come back, Tom, please. Come back. Forget the satellite. Come back and explore the cities. I’ll go with you. Please. Don’t die, Tom, please don’t die . . .”
“Ruth, Ruth, you’re too young to cry over me. I’ll be all right, don’t worry.”
“No, it isn’t fair.”
“It never is,” Tom said. “Listen, Ruth. I’ve been dead a long time. Since the bombs fell, I guess. My world died then and I died with it. When I came to the settlement, when I agreed to make this flight, I think we all knew I’d never return, even if we wouldn’t admit it to ourselves. But I’m just one man, Ruth, one small part of the story. The story goes on, with or without me. There’s tomorrow . . . your tomorrow. I’ve got no place in it, but it belongs to you. So don’t waste your time crying over a man who died eighteen years ago.”
He snapped off his suit radio and went the rest of the way to the ship in silence. After locking the hatch and pumping air back into the cabin, he took off his helmet.
Good clean canned air, Tom said to himself. Too bad it won’t last longer.
He sat down and flicked a switch on the radio console. “All right, do you have those calculations ready?”
“In a few moments . . .” Arnoldsson’s voice.
