One in 300 (12 page)

 

 

"Saw it on the meters," he said simply.

 

 

I hadn't thought there was the slightest risk of that. It wasn't a simple
story that could be read from the meters at a glance. The boy must have
done a lot of thinking and calculation before he could have worked out
for himself what I had been careful never to hint to him.

 

 

"Have you told anyone?" I asked quickly.

 

 

"No," said Jim. "I guessed you would tell them if you wanted them to know."

 

 

I nodded. "Jim," I said, "you're going to be a useful man in the colony.
When the rest of us are old, you'll be helping to run things. Just keep
thinking things out as you've been doing, and you won't find much that'll
beat you."

 

 

The boy flushed with pleasure. Naturally enough, I was his hero, and anything
I said was worth something.

 

 

"Fuel from other ships," I mused. "I wonder."

 

 

The thought, or a germ of it, had occurred to me before and had been
abandoned. Perhaps I had given it up too soon.

 

 

"I did think of that, Jim," I said. "Know why I gave up the idea?"

 

 

"Because we can't see any other ships and there may not be any in millions
of miles."

 

 

"That and one or two other things. Even if there was another ship, we'd
have to use fuel getting to her. At least, just now, we're not using any."

 

 

Jim nodded seriously.

 

 

"And apart from that, this other ship wouldn't have much fuel either.
Certainly none to spare. What would we do, fight for what it had? Take
the people in the other ship aboard? If lifeships could hold twenty,
there would be twenty in them. Anyway, how would we transship them?
Each ship carries only one space suit . . ."

 

 

But as I went on detailing the objections it seemed more and more that we
should at least look into the matter.

 

 

"Jim," I said, "go and get Sammy and Leslie."

 

 

He came erect excitedly. "Can I come back with them?" he asked.

 

 

"Sure -- you're the assistant pilot, aren't you?" I stopped him as he
was about to dive through the doorway. "Don't let anyone know there's
anything going on," I warned. "Be casual."

 

 

He went more slowly.

 

 

Leslie and Sammy were in the control room with us in two minutes.

 

 

I hadn't told Leslie about the fuel situation, but she didn't turn a hair
when I did tell her.

 

 

"I guessed it," she said.

 

 

"I wonder if anyone else has?" I said. "Here's four of us who know about it.
That only leaves six who don't. Do you think I'm right to try to keep it
secret?"

 

 

"As long as you can," said Sammy. "But when you can't, the others may as
well know the truth. I don't think things would be as bad as you believe,
Bill. They're good people. They wouldn't go to pieces."

 

 

We discussed Jim's suggestion. I asked him to state it himself, and it was
obvious how proud he was to be included in our council.

 

 

"That's all very well," said Sammy. "But since we can't see any other
ships . . . ?"

 

 

"We haven't tried," I said. "We only have an angle of vision of about 150°
here. The first step is for me to go out at the air lock in the space suit
and scan space behind us. There may be a ship within a hundred yards."

 

 

"Not you," said Sammy definitely. "Me. There may not be much risk, but if
anything should happen to the man who goes out, he'd better not be the one
man who can operate this ship."

 

 

I nodded. "No time like the present," I said. "Let's go now."

 

 

The others didn't pay any particular attention to us as we went through
the lounge. Sammy and I or Leslie and I were always working on something.
There was no indication that there might be anything special about
this occasion.

 

 

We started to put the space suit on Sammy. The hydroponics plant was between
us and the other six; they might see us, but we couldn't help that.

 

 

"You'd be more comfortable with your clothes on for this," I said. "But you
needn't stay out long."

 

 

He had the whole suit on except the helmet when we discovered something
that had been missed when we checked the suit.

 

 

The helmet wouldn't fit on the suit -- not with Sammy's head in it. It was
flawed, like the acceleration couch that had broken, like hundreds of
other things, probably, in thousands of other lifeships. The outside
was perfectly machined, the heavy steel base and the tungsten glass
face plate were perfect. Everything was perfect, except that inside the
dome was a jagged, irregular lump of metal that rested on the top of
Sammy's head and wouldn't let the base of the helmet meet the ring on
the suit. There was a gap of four and a half inches all the way.

 

 

Sammy, who had been quite even-tempered for a long time, forgot Leslie
and Jim and swore long and bitterly.

 

 

We should have tried the helmet on our heads before, of course, instead
of deciding it was all right because it looked all right. But there wasn't
any more we could have done about it than we could do about it now.

 

 

I tried it on my head. The space between base and ring was even bigger.

 

 

We had hopes of Leslie -- the gap was smaller and it seemed for a moment
that if we padded her shoulders so that all the free space was at the top
of the suit we could force the ring on it high enough to meet the base
of the helmet. The arms were the trouble. Some suits have mechanical
arms operated from inside the suit, but not this one. True, we could
get the suit on Leslie with her arms pinned at her sides. Then, however,
she would be completely helpless, unable to operate even the air lock,
and certainly not the propulsion unit. If she went out like that she
would fall into space and be lost.

 

 

"I don't know," I said, "whether to laugh or cry."

 

 

"I do," said Sammy gloomily. "You three cry, and I'll laugh."

 

 

Sammy had the misfortune to be a tragedian with all the gestures and
expressions of a comedian. Leslie and I grinned, and Jim gave a surprisingly
adult chuckle. Both Jim and Bessie always found Sammy a great joke.

 

 

I felt better for a moment, but only a moment. I hadn't taken the matter
as seriously as Sammy at first. I was something of a handy man; the thought
of a little metalwork didn't disturb me in the slightest. However, as I ran
over in my mind everything we had in the empty, naked lifeship, my face
changed, and Leslie noticed it.

 

 

"Isn't there
anything
we can do?" she asked.

 

 

With even a hammer and chisel we might have chipped the flaw away in time.
We could improvise a hammer, but what could we use as a chisel?

 

 

"You don't need to do anything," said Jim earnestly. "The suit will go on me.
I'm sure of it."

 

 

I looked at him thoughtfully. "That's probably true, Jim," I said slowly.
"But you don't mind if we try a few other things first?"

 

 

"Oh, I don't mind," Jim said confidently. "But it'll be me all right.
You'll see."

 

 

Sammy and I scouted around the whole lifeship, looking at everything,
picking it up and trying it. Practically all the loose metal objects
were thin aluminum.

 

 

We abandoned all idea of secrecy. We showed the helmet to the others and
asked for ideas. A host of impracticable suggestions were immediately
forthcoming. We laughed at some of them -- it was all great fun, a sort
of parlor game in which we all joined, not Hunt the Slipper but Who Can
Wear the Space Suit? We tried it on everybody, with much hilarity.

 

 

With Betty we nearly made it. The helmet and its fitting actually met.
However, that was the limit -- tightening it down could only drive the
metal in the dome through the top of her head. We thought of an airtight
collar above the ring, but there was no way to make one. We chipped at
the metal with all the substitutes for a hammer and chisel we could find,
and managed to scratch it, no more.

 

 

Someone suggested acid, and by pooling our knowledge we found that
hydrochloric acid was hydrogen and chlorine, that you could make it with
salt and sulphuric acid, and that you could make sulphuric acid with
sulphur trioxide. Which was very interesting but didn't help, since none
of us really knew how to do it, and we couldn't risk tampering with the
hydroponics chemicals and the water purifier to get the stuff.

 

 

"It looks," I said at last, after we had tried everything we could think
of, "as if you're right, Jim. It's got to be you or little Bessie."

 

 

"What's that?" asked Stowe sharply.

 

 

And it wasn't a joke any more. As Sammy had said, though there wasn't
much danger in going outside a ship in a space suit, there was always a
risk. A score of things that we couldn't check any other way might turn
out to be wrong with the suit. Jim might be blown out with the air. The
lock might stick. The little things that might happen would be nothing
to a spaceman, but they might well be fatal to a thirteen-year-old boy.

 

 

Theoretically I could give any orders I liked, and they had to be obeyed.
But I couldn't let Jim go out unless his father agreed. After all, Stowe had
already lost Mary.

 

 

I told them we needed fuel. Though I didn't say how serious it was,
I made it clear our chances would be much better if we could get some
from somewhere. And we had just demonstrated that any space-suit work
that had to be done, Jim Stowe would have to do.

 

 

"No!" exclaimed John Stowe, as I expected. "Mary's dead -- now you want
to risk Jim!"

 

 

I waited. I saw Stowe struggling with himself. "I'd go," said Stowe at last.
"But not Jim -- please, not Jim."

 

 

"You can't," I told him. "If it were possible, we'd do it ourselves.
Only Jim can do it -- or Bessie. Do you want it to be Bessie?"

 

 

It was Jim himself who swayed the balance in the end. "Please, Dad,"
he begged. "Can't you see I've got to do it? But I won't if you say no."

 

 

I wasn't quite honest about all this. I couldn't afford to be. There was
small risk in sending Jim out to have a look back the way we had come. But
if he did happen to see another ship, and if we decided to contact it,
Jim would have to do it. And that would be very dangerous indeed.

 

 

I knew that if Stowe said yes once he'd have to say it twice. This wasn't
just his permission for Jim to do a simple, fairly safe job. It was his
agreement for Jim to do any space-suit job that was needed, no matter
how dangerous.

 

 

He didn't know that. He said, "Yes." And we began to get Jim ready.

 

 

There was no trouble. Jim was out a long time, but he battered on the hull
occasionally, as I'd told him to do, to let us know that all was well
and he was just taking his time. I was as impatient as Stowe, asking
myself what Jim could be doing all this time, and wondering, unworthily,
whether he wasn't just playing, pretending to be a spaceman doing a
dangerous repair job on a damaged ship.

 

 

But then I remembered how careful Jim was and realized that he wouldn't
come in until he felt absolutely responsible for what he had to say,
and could tell us, not "I think," but "I know."

 

 

I said this to Stowe when he spoke anxiously. He seemed comforted.

 

 

"You like Jim, don't you?" he said.

 

 

"I'd rather risk Leslie than him," I told him. Leslie heard that. She smiled
at me approvingly, but I saw she didn't believe it. Leslie wasn't an anxious,
jealous wife. She wasn't unsure of herself, or of me. I might not love her
as some men had loved some women, but there were already strong ties of
affection between us, and she knew it.

 

 

What I said was true, nevertheless. I'd rather risk Leslie than Jim.
Leslie would play her part in the new colony, if we reached it,
and play it well. She would never be, however, the asset Jim might be.

 

 

Jim came in at last. His teeth were chattering as we helped him out of
the suit -- the big suit, apparently, absorbed less heat from the sun
and radiated more than the hull of the ship.

 

 

"There's a lifeship not more than a few miles behind us," said Jim clearly.
"I waited till I was sure it was moving the same way and at the same speed
as us. I couldn't see any- thing else anywhere that could be a ship."

 

 

I almost refused to believe him. This had just been something to try,
and when it duly failed we'd be no worse off.

 

 

"You're sure?" I asked foolishly -- obviously he was sure. The others began
to chatter excitedly, glad to know we weren't as alone in space as we'd
thought. I grinned at Sammy. "What has the voice of doom to say now?"
I asked.

 

 

"Nothing. It's his day off," said Sammy apologetically.

 

 

"The sun," Jim told us, puzzled, "looks very small and far away. I thought
it would be big and bright, Lieutenant Bill. But it's not."

 

 

 

 

 

 

6

 

 

There was really something to think about now. Did we want to contact
the other ship? How was it to be done? Should we try to communicate with
it first?