by Ben Bova
The world government was humane. And very human. Its leaders decided such power would be too tempting, too easy to corrupt. So, as humanely as possible—but with thorough swiftness—they arrested all the scientists who were involved in genetic engineering and exited them to the satellite. Their knowledge was never to be used to alter the precious, hard-won peace and stability of Earth.
It had been Dan Christopher’s father—with the help of Larry’s father—who worked out the idea of turning their satellite prison into a starship. The Earth’s government agreed, reluctantly at first, but then with growing enthusiasm. Better to get rid of the troublesome scientists completely. Let them go toward Alpha Centauri. Whether they make it or not, they will no longer bother the teeming, overcrowded Earth.
But the ship itself was overcrowded. Twenty thousand people can’t be kept alive for year after year, decade after decade, for half a century or more. Not on a spacecraft. Not on the ship. So most of the people were frozen in cryogenic deepsleep, suspended animation, to be reawakened when they reached Alpha Centauri, or when they were needed for some special reason. The ship was run by a handful of people—no more than a thousand were allowed to be awake and active at one time. All this Larry knew from the history tapes. Much of it he had learned side by side with Dan, his best friend, when they were kids studying together. Both their mothers had died of a virus infection that killed hundreds of people before the medics figured out a way to stop it. Their fathers had handed the infant sons over to friends to be raised, and went into cryogenic sleep, to be awakened when they reached their destination. If they made it. The people who had built this ship were engineers of Earth.
The people who lived in it, riding out to the stars, were mostly scientists and their children. The ship had to operate far more than fifty years, if they were all to stay alive. The time was almost over, and the ship’s vast intricate systems were starting to break down, to fail. Youngsters trained as engineers and technicians had all the learning that the tapes could provide. But could they keep the ship going indefinitely?
A month ago it was the main power generator that failed, and they began to ration electrical power. Last week it was a pump in the hydroponics section; if they hadn’t been able to repair the pump they would have lost a quarter of their food production, plus the even more important oxygen-recycling ability of the green plants that grew in the long troughs of chemical nutrients. And now the fire. Fifty people dead.
Will any of us make it?
A soft tapping at his door. Fingernails on plastic. Valery.
“Come in,” Larry said, getting up from his chair.
The door slid open and she stood there framed in the light from the corridor.
Valery looked small, but she was actually almost Larry’s height, and he had known since their childhood together that she was as tough and supple as plastisteel. Her face was broad, with high Nordic cheekbones and wide, always-surprised-looking eyes. Changeable eyes; sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes something else altogether. Very fair skin with a scattering of freckles. Very, very pretty.
She was wearing a simple white jumpskirt and blouse. Like most of the girls aboard the ship, Valery made her own clothes.
“I heard about your father,” she said, her voice low.
Without waiting for him to say anything, she stepped into the compartment. Automatically, the door slid shut behind her. The room was suddenly plunged into darkness again. In the faint glow from the fluorescent painting, he started to reach for the light switch.
“No—” she said. “It’s all right like this. We don’t need lights.”
“Val—”
She was standing very close to him. He could smell the fragrance of her hair.
“I saw Dan. They took him to the infirmary. He collapsed.”
“I know,” Larry said.
He wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her and let her warmth engulf him. But he knew he couldn’t.
“You’d better… sit down,” he said.
Valery went to the plastic chair in front of the desk. She sat on it and tucked her feet up under her, as simple and feminine as a cat. Larry could see her in the darkness as a gleam of white, like a pale nebula set against the depths outside. He sat on the edge of the bunk.
“I wish there was something I could say,” Valery began. “I just feel so helpless.”
Larry found himself gripping the edge of the bunk hard with both hands. “Uh… how’s Dan?”
“Asleep. The medics have sedated him. He’s… he’s not strong, like you.”
“He does his thing, I do mine,” Larry said. “He shows his grief on the outside.”
“And you keep yours locked up inside you, so nobody can see.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can see it,” Valery said, her voice soft as a star-cloud. “I came over to tell you. I know what’s going on inside you, Larry. I…”
“Stop it!” he snapped. “You’re going to marry Dan in two more months. Leave,me alone.”
Even in the darkness, he could sense her body stiffen. Then she said, “But I don’t love Dan. I love you.”
“That doesn’t make any difference and’you know it.”
“You love me, Larry, i know that too.”
He shook his head. “No… I don’t. Not anymore.”
Her face was lost in shadow, but her voice smiled. “Larry—remember when we were just six or seven and we snuck into the free-fall playroom… you and Dan and me? And we were playing tag, and you got racing so fast that you flew smack into a wall___”
“It was the ceiling,” he said.
“You hurt your shoulder, but you kept telling us it wasn’t hurt. But I could see your pain, Larry. I could see it.”
“Okay, so I broke my shoulder.”
Suddenly she was beside him, kneeling alongside the bunk. “So don’t say you don’t love me, Larry Belsen.ll know you do.”
“it’s no use,” he said, his voice as cracked and miserable as he
felt inside. “The computer selection was final. Not even the Council can revoke it. You can’t have people just flying off and marrying anybody they feel like marrying! That’s what happened to old Earth. The genetics went from bad to worse. We’ve got to live by the rules, Val… there’s no other way.”
“And the rules say I have to marry Dan.”
“He loves you, Val.”
“And you don’t?”
He couldn’t answer. Instead, he stared down at her for an infinite moment, then pulled her up to him and kissed her. She felt soft and good and loving. She clung to him hard, warmly. Everything else left his mind and he thought of nothing but her.
When he finally surfaced for air, she asked sleepily, “You don’t have a duty shift, do you?”
Shaking his head, “No. Excused from duty until after the funeral services.”
“Oh.”
He sat there on the bunk, loving her and hating himself. This is all wrong. What I’m doing…
“Larry?”
“What is it?”
“If the Council would allow it, would you want to marry me?”
“Don’t make it worse than it is, Valery.”
“But would you?”
“Sure.”
She sat up beside him. “We can do it, you know. If you really want to.”
“You must be…”
“No, we can,” she insisted. “The Council’s due to vote on the new Chairman in two days, right? The Chairman and the permanent Council members are Class A, aren’t they? Their genetic options are much wider than B’s, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but…”
“I checked it all out. The computer selection rated you and Dan so close together that it wasn’t until the third-order effects were taken into account that it rated Dan ahead of you. And then it was only a shade. But if you’re elected Chairman, then…”
Larry shook his head. “It’s Dan’s turn to be Chairman. He’s a
year older th
an I am. Besides, he wanted to revive his father when we got to Centauri and turn the Chairmanship over to him.”
“But that’s all changed now.”
Larry frowned. “No… Dan and I talked it over a long time ago. He’s a year older than I am, so he’ll get a chance to be Chairman first___”
Very softly, Valery said, “That means in two months I’ll be Mrs. Christopher. Unless you do something about it now.”
“I can’t….”
“Dan’s in no condition to run the Council,” she said. “When they vote, two days from now, he’ll still be in the infirmary. And a lot of the older Council members have always thought he’s much too emotional to be Chairman, even if it’s only for a couple of months. Especially now, when we’re about to make landfall… they’d rather have a stronger, cooler Chairman. You can ask my father; that’s what they’re saying.”
Larry knew. He knew all of it. To be Chairman when we reach the new world. Every eligible young man and woman aboard wanted that honor.
“Do you think Dan could handle that responsibility?” Valery asked, sliding a hand around the back of Larry’s neck.
Not as well as I can, he answered silently.
“As Chairman, you can marry me,” she said.
“Val…”
“Don’t send me to Dan. Please. It’s you I want.”
I CAN do a better job than he would. And marry Val.
“Larry, do I have to beg you?” She leaned her cheek against his. It felt wet. Tears.
“But it’s wrong,” he muttered. “It’s like kicking my best friend when he’s down.”
“It’s the only chance you’ve got, Larry. We all need you, everybody aboard the ship. You’re the best one to be Chairman, everybody knows that. And I need you! I can’t live without you!”
He closed his eyes and heard himself saying, “All right. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
(3)
The ship was built on the principle of wheels within wheels. It consisted of seven ring structures, starting from a central bulbous hub. Going outward, each ring was bigger and held more room for equipment and living space. The entire ship was turning, revolving slowly, to provide an artifical gravity. The outermost wheel, level one, was at one full Earth g, and everyone felt his normal Earth weight there. Going “upward,” toward the hub, weight and gravity fell off consi-tently, until at the hub itself, there was effectively no gravity, weightlessness.
The thousand or so people who were awake and active had their living quarters in level one. All the levels were linked by tubes.
The infirmary was on the second level, where the spin-induced gravity was slightly less than I g. It made for an unconscious buoyant feeling, a sense of well-being and optimism, that the medics claimed helped to get patients recovered from their ailments.
The infirmary stretched over a long section of the second level. Instead of viewports looking outside, the main wall of the infirmary was made up of viewscreens that showed constantly changing pictures of Earth; old Earth, before the bursting population had torn down most of her forests, ripped open her mineral-rich lands, covered vast stretches of ground with festering cities.
Dan Christopher was sitting up in his infirmary bed, floating lightly on the liquid-filled mattress. He had drifted in and out of sleep several times this morning. When he had first been awakened for his morning check by the automated sensor system at his bedside, the scene on the wall screens outside his plastiglass-walled cubicle had shown an impossible blue sky and a vista of rugged white mountains dotted by patches of green, under a gleaming sun.
Dan knew that the sun was a star, but it didn’t look like any star he had ever seen. Now, later in the morning, the scene was a deep green forest, where the sunlight filtered down in dusty shafts and strange four-legged animals tip-toed warily through the underbrush.
Wasting electrical power to show these scenes, he told himself. Dan still felt woozy, as much from the medicines they had been filling him with as from the dreams that haunted his sleep. The medics had pumped him full of tranquilizers, he guessed. But underneath their flat calming effect he knew there was a core of terror and rage inside him.
He’s dead. The man who gave us this ship, the man who started this mission, the man who gave me life. The most important man aboard. Dead. A couple of months before we’re due to reach our destination. A couple of months before he’d be reawakened and I’d get to really know him. Now he’s dead.
Two nurses walked briskly past his cubicle, chatting together. Dan paid no attention to them. Thechief medic would be here soon. Dan wanted to get out of the infirmary.
A tapping on his door snapped him fully awake. Through the plastiglass he saw Joe Haller: solid, dependable Joe. A good engineer and a good friend. Joe’s long hair and beard turned off many of the older people, but he was one of the most reliable and brightest men aboard. Next to Larry, Joe was Dan’s best and longest friend.
Dan waved him in, and Joe opened the plastiglass door and stepped into the cramped cubicle. There was no room for a chair, so he simply stood next to Dan’s bed.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked.
Dan said, “Good enough. I’ve got to get out of here today. How long have I been here?”
“This is the third day.”
Dan could feel a shock race through him. “Three days? Then the Council meeting…”
“It’s over. They picked Larry as Chairman.”
“Larry!”
Joe shrugged and evaded looking straight into Dan’s eyes. “Larry was there, you weren’t. I don’t know what went on before the meeting, what Larry did to convince them. The rumble is that Larry let them know he wanted to be Chairman, and as long as you were too sick to depend on, he ought to have the job.”
Dan sagged back in the bed.
Looking worried, Joe added “They … uh, they held services for the people who died in the fire—yesterday.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“My father too? They didn’t wait…”
“Everybody. One single service. Their remains went into the hydroponics tank.”
“They couldn’t wait for me?”
Joe shrugged and looked away.
Dan reached up and grabbed his wrist. “They couldn’t wait a day or two for me to be there?” he shouted. “For my own father!”
“Larry decided…”
“Larry!”
“Listen,” Joe said, his voice suddenly low and urgent. “I know you and Larry have been friends since you were kids. But he sure isn’t acting like a friend of yours right now.”
Dan let himself sink slowly back into the yielding warmth of the bed again. He could feel his heart racing. Deliberately, he took a deep, calming breath.
“I’ve got to be calm,” he said, his voice steady now. “If I get excited, the medics will trank me again. If I show them I’m calm and relaxed, then they’ll let me out.”
Joe looked at him for a moment. “What’re you going to do when you get out?”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “Something… but I don’t know what.”
Joe left shortly afterward. Dan held himself rigidly under control, not speaking, not moving, trying to not even think. He concentrated on the sensor screens next to his bed. Keep those luminous traces as calm and steady as you can. Watch them wiggle across the screens; heartbeat, blood pressure, alpha wave, respiration, basal metabolism. Calm and steady. Calm and steady. Stare at them, let them hypnotize you. Feel your heart muscle working inside you. Slower. Slower. Calm. Steady.
He fell asleep watching the screens. And he dreamed. Dreamed of the luminous lines worming across the screens; they were ropes, they were snakes, twining around him, choking him, crushing him. But then he was watching from somewhere far off as the glowing snakes squeezed the life out of someone else. His father! Himself!
He woke screaming.
“The more I think about it, the more glad I am that we voted you Chairman,” said Dr. Lo
ring.
Larry Belsen was sitting in the main room of the Lorings’ quarters.’ Valery sat next to him on the foldout couch. Her father was comfortably sunk in the depths of a webchair. Every time he moved, the plastic webbing creaked; Larry was afraid it would give way under his weight.
Dr. Loring was one of the twelve oldest men awake, and thus was a permanent member of the Council. He had been a child when the ship had left Earth, and had never undergone deepsleep. “I want to see it all, from beginning to end,” he often said. The Council balanced age, tradition and stability against youth, vigor and change. The twelve oldest people awake were permanent members. The remaining Council seats were filled by younger men and women, and the Chairman was always elected from the younger generation, for a one-year term.
“Yes, you’ll be a good Chairman, Lawrence, my boy,” Dr. Loring went one. “Frankly, I always had my doubts about Dan…” he glanced at his daughter, “… as far as being Chairman is concerned. Too emotional. That’s not bad in some aspects of life, of course, but as Chairman…”
Valery smiled at the old man. “Dad, you’ve told us the same thing three times now.”
“Oh? Really? Well…” He shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed. Dr. Loring was a heavy man, big-boned and round with paunch. He was nearly bald, nothing but scraggly white tufts of hair sticking out around his ears. H is eyes were big and moist and always blinking. Larry thought of him sometimes as a frog who’d been turned into a prince… fifty years ago.
Dr. Loring turned in his webchair, producing a chorus of groans from the plastic, and called to his wife: “What about dinner?”
She was standing in the kitchen alcove, thoughtfully watching the bank of dials set alongside the eye-level oven.
“I’m trying to time everything so that it’s all done together, and everything will be hot when we sit down…. Valery, you can fold out the table and set places.”
As Val got up, Dr. Loring complained, “It was a lot easier when the microwave ovens were working. This business of using heat for cooking… it’s barbaric.”
Larry said, “We just can’t afford the electrical power for microwave cooking until the main generator’s back on the line.”
