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“What’s to do except record the message?” Bickel asked.
He began adjusting hull-integrity sensors, finished that, checked the Accept-And-Translate system, swung the AAT board close beside him where he could see its telltale when Moonbase replied.
Flattery shrugged, got out his own full-vacuum suit. He noted that Timberlake already was suiting up—but with a fumbling reluctance.
Tim senses Bickel taking absolute command, Flattery thought, but he doesn’t know the necessity for it … and he cannot bring himself to like it. He will, though.
Bickel satisfied himself the ship was functioning as well as it could without the homeostatic control of an OMC. He sank back to watch the board as the others left Com-central. The hatch seals hissed and there came the metallic slap of the magnetic locks as the hatch closed and resealed itself.
Now, Bickel felt the ship around him as though he had neural connections to every sensor revealed on his board. The Earthling lay spread out for him—a monstrous juggernaut … yet fragile as an egg—a tin egg.
Against his will, Bickel’s attention drifted toward that dead light on the lower left corner of his board—the light that should have been glowing a live yellow to denote that all was well with the OMC.
But all was not well with the OMC; the unsleeping brains had failed.
They were stress-tested for every conceivable situation, Bickel told himself. Something inconceivable happened. Or did it?
Timberlake’s question nagged at him. “Why didn’t they prepare us for it?”
The master board above him grew a line of yellow lights that told him the ship’s gravity center had shifted. A wild shift in the gravity field had torn colony cargo from its holdowns and killed Maida. Gently, to avoid oscillations, Bickel began adjusting controls to bring the field back into line.
How much simpler it would have been to get along without gravity, he thought. But medical science had never really solved the problem of the human physical deterioration that resulted from existence in prolonged null gravity. The balance mechanism of the inner ear still was the most susceptible. Four to five weeks without gravity brought permanent damage for some subjects. So they lived with the minimal field system—the gravity-field mechanism that had developed an unexpected deadly bug out here.
The telltale lights began to wink out.
Bickel followed the balance readjustment carefully. They had only the most tenuous theory on what caused that field to shift this way! They suspected local anomalies as they moved through the solar system’s own gravitational field.
The last telltale went dark.
Bickel sank back onto the couch, drew a deep, ragged breath. Perspiration covered his body and he felt his suit system laboring to compensate.
This watch on Com-central could become a particular kind of hell, Bickel realized. The suspenseful responsibility, duel with an unknown death, wore you down. You controlled only the most essential ship functions from here. Monitor instruments had never been intended for this work. Fine adjustments and delicate repairs had to be ignored until they reached that point of gross demand where a crewman had to be sent out to direct the servos in their work.
An increment of damage could be computed—the kind of damage, one thing added to another, where the ship itself would cease operating. There was a death point for the ship out ahead of them and it could be computed as a function of damage.
Bickel avoided feeding the problem into the computer. He knew his own limits. Precise knowledge of that unknown moment would hamper him unless it became a matter of immediacy. They had months yet—perhaps the full ten. And ten months was forever, the way things now stood. The ship was far more likely to meet disaster in some other form; he could feel it.
Something about the Tin Egg was sour—Big Sour. It did not make sense to Bickel that a man had to sit here in Com-central, the strain of responsibility increasing with each heartbeat, waiting and knowing some mechanism or balancing function of the ship was headed for trouble—yet unable to meet the problem with more than a gross, clumsy makeshift.
With the OMCs, this ship balance had been a finely tuned neuro-servo reflex, almost automatic—as homeostatic in response as that of a healthy human body.
Bickel added his own corollary question now to the one Timberlake had posed: Why were all the eggs put in one basket?
Chapter 3
What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground—and, dreaming, must invoke ever-new dreams.
—Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase
As she awoke, Prudence thought: We made it!
Excitement filled her at the thought of stepping out onto a virgin world with all its strange newness and never-before problems. Six failures were worth it. The seventh try was a charm. We have succeeded. Otherwise … otherwise …
Her mind bogged down in sluggishness. Otherwise was a concept with several pathways out of it.
The tingle-ache of dehyb ran along the muscles of her arms and legs, produced transient knots of pain. She knew as a doctor the reasons for the pain, could rationalize the fact of it: human hybernation was a far different process from animal hibernation. Not a drop of water could remain in the body—and you went so close to the borders of death that some contended you were suspended within death.
She tried to sit up.
It was then she saw Timberlake and Flattery looking down at her where she lay on the lab shuttle. Their expressions brought otherwise to full focus. For a moment, she looked beyond them to the tubes and stimulant plugs that had been removed from functional contact with her body.
Flattery restrained her. “Easy now, Dr. Weygand,” he said.
Dr. Weygand, she thought. Not Prudence. Not Prue. Dr. Weygand. Cold formality.
She began losing that first elation.
Then Flattery began explaining in his soft, soothing voice and she knew her elation had to be put away. The contingency problem had arisen. She had been awakened for that.
“Just tell me who we lost,” she said, and her throat hurt from its months of disuse.
Timberlake told her.
“Three dead?” she said. She didn’t ask how they had died. The other problem, the contingency for which she had been prepared, took precedence over mere curiosity.
“Bickel requested you be bro
ught out of hyb,” Flattery said.
“Does he know why?” she asked, ignoring the strange look Timberlake shifted from her to Flattery.
“He rationalized it,” Flattery said, and he wished she’d withheld these questions until they were alone.
“Of course he did,” she said. “But has—”
“He hasn’t posed the problem yet,” Flattery said.
“Don’t push him,” she said, and glanced at Timberlake. “Forget what you just heard here, Tim.”
Timberlake scowled, suddenly withdrawn and wary.
Flattery bent over her right arm with a slapshot hypo in his hand.
“Must you?” she asked. Then: “Yes, of course.”
“There’s nothing for you to do right now except recuperate,” he said, and pressed the slapshot against her arm.
She felt the mechanism’s kick and, presently, the soft spread of narcosis. Flattery and Timberlake became wavering figures haloed in light.
At least Bickel is still alive, she thought. We do not have to replace him with a backup—take second best.
And just before sinking into the downy cloud of sleep, she wondered: How did Maida die? Lovely Maida who …
Timberlake watched the film of withdrawal wash over her light blue eyes. Her breathing took on soft regularity.
As life-systems specialist, Timberlake had checked the computer-filed tape flag for every person on the Tin Egg. He recalled now that Prudence Lon Weygand was classed superb as a surgeon—“Superior 9 in tool facility.” And the scale went only to 10. He reflected now on her strange conversation with Flattery and realized the tape had not told the full story. She obviously had ship functions beyond surgeon-ecologist … and at least one of these functions concerned Bickel.
“Forget what you just heard here, Tim.”
Timberlake could still hear that cold-voiced command and he knew it did not square with the emotional index on Prudence Lon Weygand’s tapes. There, she was listed as “Place nine-d green” on the compassionate vector. In the close-quarters living of this umbilicus crew, that emotional index posed problems because of its tightly linked sex drive. With a sense of shock, Timberlake took a closer look at her feed-tube spectrum on the hyb chart, saw that she had been fed the sex-suppressant anti-S drugs even under hyb. She had been kept ready.
