by James White
"Things, he says." Berryman made a face and began passing out lunch.
They nearly always ate after a discussion about the beings on the Ship, but Berryman and Walters had stopped mentioning the psychological connection between feelings of insecurity and eating. The only person to speak at all during the meal was Walters, who said thoughtfully, "You know, Doctor, there must be something you can do!"
Three days later something came up which the doctor could do. Something, apparently, which only the doctor could do.
"Morrison here. Put the doctor on, please."
"Yes, sir," said McCullough.
"Captain Hollis is having trouble. A -- a skin condition, among other things. He won't sleep without heavy sedation and we're running out of that. I realize it is a lot to ask, but I'd prefer you to see him rather than prescribe from where you are. Can you come over to P-One, Doctor?"
Instinctively McCullough looked out at the stars. He could not see P-One because it was visible only on the radar screen. The last time anyone had seen it was when they were being inserted into orbit above Earth. He cleared his throat and said, "Yes, of course."
"At this distance there is an element of risk involved."
"I realize that."
"Very well. Thank you."
When the colonel had signed off, Walters gave McCullough a long, steady look, then held up three fingers. He said, "One, you're stupid. Two, you're brave. Or three, you've been brainwashed."
chapter four
The personnel launcher was a light-alloy rigid pipe fifty feet long, built up in sections and slotted together without projections of any kind. It was assembled forward so as to form a continuation of the center line of the ship, and the charge which tossed its human missile into space was matched by an equal thrust directed aft so as to avoid the necessity of course corrections. On this occasion the whole ship had to be aimed at the target on a radar bearing rather than a visual sighting.
Berryman threaded the launching harness onto the first section of pipe and, while Walters completed the erection, the command pilot harnessed McCullough to the stupid contraption. It was a little odd that McCullough regarded it as a contraption now, when on Earth, after studying drawings and operating principles and seeing the demonstration films, he had considered it an ingenious and foolproof device.
The harness itself was a somewhat lopsided fabrication of thin metal tubing built around the hollow cylinder which fitted over the launching pipe, with the bulky oxygen and reaction tanks grouped on one side and the body webbing on the other. But when a man was attached to the harness with his arms drawn back and joined behind him and his legs bent vertically at the knees -- there were special cuffs and stirrups fitted so that this could be done comfortably -- the device began to assume a degree of symmetry. With the man added the center of thrust roughly coincided with the center of gravity so that the system had only a slight tendency to spin after launching.
"The push will send you off at just under fifteen miles per hour," Berryman told McCullough for the third or fourth time, "so if our shooting is very good and you hit P-One at this speed, it would be like running into a brick wall. You would hurt yourself, you might damage or rupture your suit and the impact could wreck the other ship . . ."
"Don't joke about things like that, Berryman! Besides, you'll make him nervous."
"I wasn't joking, Colonel," the command pilot replied. Then to McCullough he went on, "I was trying to make you cautious rather than nervous, Doctor. Just remember to check your velocity with respect to the other ship in plenty of time. Start decelerating when you are about a mile off, come to a stop not too close, then edge in on your gas motor. You have a good reserve of reaction mass, your air will last for six hours, and the trip will take roughly three and a half hours since P-One is over fifty miles away . . ."
"Suppose it isn't there after three and a half hours?" said McCullough. "It's a very small ship and . . ."
"Such morbid imaginings," said Walters severely, "ill behoove a psychological gentleman . . ."
"You're ready to go, Doctor," said Berryman. "Give me ten minutes to get inside and check the radar bearing again. Walters, keep clear of the launcher . . ."
The launch itself was an anticlimax: just a comfortable, solid push that reminded McCullough of the first few seconds in an express elevator. Then he cleared the guide tube and was tumbling very slowly end over end.
Quickly he withdrew his arms and legs from their retaining clips and, when P-Two came into sight again, spread them out to check his spin. Walters and Berryman did not talk, although he could hear the sound of their breathing in his phones, and McCullough kept silent as well. The ship dwindled in size very slowly -- it did not appear to move away from him, just to grow smaller -- so that the launcher was dismantled and the tiny figures of the two pilots had re-entered the lock before distance made the finer details of the vehicle run together into a silvery triangular blur.
Just before it disappeared completely, McCullough rotated himself until he was facing his direction of travel, and began searching for an identical blur which would be Morrison's ship, even though the soonest he could hope to see it would be in another two hours.
The colonel had suggested that he sleep on the way over, leaving his receiver switched on at full volume so that Morrison could wake him when it became necessary. McCullough had refused this suggestion for two reasons. The one he gave the colonel was that he did not want to be half asleep when he closed with P-One -- making contact might be a tricky enough job with him wide-awake. The other reason he did not tell anyone. It was his fear of waking up with no ship in sight, beyond all help or hope of help, alone . . .
He was very much aware of the safety line coiled neatly at his waist, and of the fact that the other end of it was not attached to anything.
But that was just the beginning . . .
In the weightless condition no muscular effort was required to keep arms and legs outstretched, and in that attitude spin was reduced to a minimum. But gradually the position began to feel awkward and ridiculous and, in some obscure fashion, unprotected. All around him the stars hung bright and close and beautiful, but the blackness between them went on and on forever. He told himself truthfully that he enjoyed being out here, that there was nothing to threaten him, nothing to be immediately afraid of, and nobody to see his fear even if he should show it.
He was all alone.
His rate of spin began to increase slowly, then rapidly as his outstretched arms and legs contracted until his knees were drawn up against his stomach and his arms, with the elbows tucked in as far as his suit would allow, folded tightly across his chest. But it was not until he realized that his eyes were squeezed shut that McCullough began to wonder what exactly it was that was happening to him.
He badly needed to straighten himself out, in both senses of the word.
But for some odd reason his body had passed beyond the control of his mind, just as the various layers of his mind were no longer under the control of his will. He was feeling rather than thinking. It was as if he were an enormous, dry sponge soaking up, saturating itself in loneliness -- the purely subjective loneliness of being unknown and unnoticed in a crowd, the actual loneliness of being on a deserted beach where the uncaring natural phenomena of wind and wave press all around, and the awful, lost feeling of the child in the night who believes, whether rightly or wrongly, that he is unwanted and unloved. The feeling which was welling up inside McCullough was loneliness distilled, concentrated and ultimately refined. Anything in his previous experience was like comparing a slight overexposure to the sun with third-degree burns.
He crouched into himself even more tightly while the unseen stars whirled around him and the hot tears forced their way between his squeezed-together lids.
Then the awful feeling of loneliness began to withdraw, or perhaps he was withdrawing from it. The weightless spinning was oddly pleasant. There was a timeless, hypnotic quality about it. The sensation was like the m
oment after a tumble into deep water when it is impossible to tell if one is upside down or not, and yet the warm salt water is supporting and protecting and pressing close
"Say something!" shouted McCullough.
"Something," said Berryman promptly.
"Anything wrong, Doctor?"
"Not -- not really, sir," said McCullough. "Whatever it was -- I'm all right now."
"Good! I thought you were sleeping after all -- you haven't made a sound for over two hours. We should be just about visible to you now."
McCullough straightened and slowed his spin. The stars rose majestically above the upper rim of his visor, reached zenith and then slowly set between his feet. When the sun came around, he covered it with his hand so as not to be blinded, and he searched the sky. But the two bright objects he picked out were too brilliant to be P-One -- they were probably Sirius and Jupiter, but he was so disoriented that he could not be sure.
"I can't find you."
There must have been an edge of panic in his tone because Morrison said quickly, "You're doing fine, Doctor. Our radar shows a solid trace for P-Two. If you were off course to any large extent there would be two traces, so any divergence is minor. Look around you, carefully."
Perhaps ten minutes went by, then Morrison said, "When you were launched, our position with respect to your ship was approximately ten degrees below and fifteen degrees to the right of the central star in the right half of the W in Cassiopeia, or above and to the left of the left center star if you're turned around and it looks like an M. Use Cassiopeia as your center and search outward into Perseus, Andromeda and Cepheus -- do you get the idea? The closer you are to us the greater will be our apparent displacement.
"We should be the brightest object in sight by now. You should begin deceleration in seven and one half minutes . . ."
And if he did not decelerate, McCullough would go past P-One, possibly without even seeing it. But if he decelerated without seeing it and directing his thrust in the right section of sky, the chances were that he would go off at a tangent or shoot past the ship at double his present velocity. If that happened, he doubted very much whether his air or his reaction mass would be sufficient for him to find his way back.
McCullough tried not to pursue that line of thought. He tried so hard that before he realized it, his knees were drawn up and his arms pressed tightly against his chest again, and the stars were swirling around him like a jeweled blizzard. He swore suddenly and starfished again, forcing his mind to concentrate on the slowly wheeling heavens so that he could impose some sort of order out of what had become a mass of tiny, unidentifiable lights. He viewed them with his head straight and tilted to each side, or he tried to imagine them upside down, and gradually he was able to see them with the imaginary lines connecting one to the other, which gave them the shapes of Hunters and Archers and Crabs. He realized suddenly that as well as spinning head over heels he had also been turning sideways, and he was able to identify Capella, which was hanging out beyond his left hip.
Capella had picked up a very strange companion.
As quickly as possible, McCullough lined himself up on the object, placed hands and feet into the cuffs and stirrups, then said, "I have you. Standing by to decelerate."
"In eight seconds, Doctor. And I must say you cut it close . . . Now!"
A little later Morrison said, "We can see your gas discharge, Doctor. Very nice shooting, P-Two."
From the other ship there came sounds of Berryman and Walters being modest. McCullough's precalculated period of deceleration ceased, leaving him barely three hundred yards from the other ship, where two tiny figures were already crawling out of the airlock and onto the hull. He aimed himself carefully and jetted slowly toward them.
Morrison said, "As you know, Doctor, there is no privacy and very little space for a physical examination in the control module, so Drew and I will erect the launcher for your return while you have a look at Captain Hollis. Take your time -- within reason, of course -- and signal with the airlock lamp when you've finished. You may not want us to be listening with our suit radios . . ."
There was little conversation after that until McCullough made contact with the hull and negotiated the airlock. He found himself in a control module which was in every respect identical to the one on the other ship -- it even smelled as bad -- and differed only in the figure occupying the supernumary's position.
McCullough gave Hollis a long, sympathetic, clinical look and then sighed. Unoriginally he said, "What seems to be the trouble?"
chapter five
It was a simple question but McCullough knew the answer would be a complicated one. Hollis was a distressed and deeply troubled man.
There was, of course, no provision for taking baths on the Prometheus expedition, but the crews had periodic alcohol rubdowns to unclog their pores, the alcohol being filtered out and reclaimed by the air circulation system. While their meals lacked bulk, they contained all the necessary vitamins. Even so, as McCullough peeled the one-piece coverall from Hollis' shoulders and arms he could not help thinking about ancient sailing ships with water going green in their casks and the crews down with scurvy or worse . . .
A large area of the physicist's body had obviously not known the alcohol pad for months -- the skin was clogged and dry and scaling -- and his arms, chest and shoulders were covered with raw patches and sores, the condition extending up to his face and neck. Despite having no fingernails to speak of, it was plain that Hollis had been continually picking or rubbing at them through his coveralls until his body must have become one great, livid itch.
"Can you remember when this trouble started?" McCullough asked quietly, trying to ignore the pricklings of the sympathetic itch that was creeping over his own body.
"About -- about nine weeks out," Hollis answered. His eyes would not meet McCullough's and his hands twitched and crawled all over his body. He went on, "I suppose it started about two weeks after Drew let slip -- after I found out what they were doing. But I can't tell you about that."
"Why not?" said McCullough, smiling. "I don't shock very easily, you know."
Hollis looked startled and for a moment he almost laughed, then he said quickly, apologetically, "I'm sorry, I gave you the wrong impression. It isn't shocking like that. They -- they have a secret. They do have a secret! Of course they don't know I know about it. Walters and Berryman aren't in on it, either. Or you. But it's bad. You have no idea how bad. But I'm sorry -- I can't tell you about it, I don't know how you'd react. You might let something slip to Morrison. Or you might blow the whole thing wide open and be a party to . . . I suppose it would be mutiny. I'm sorry, it wouldn't be fair to burden you with this thing. I -- I don't want to talk about it."
But it was quite obvious that he did want to talk about it, desperately, and that McCullough would have very little coaxing to do to have this deep, dark, desperate secret revealed to him in its entirety. He said, still smiling, "I expect you know best. But it would have been nice to take back a juicy piece of gossip to the other ship . . ."
"This is serious, damn you!"
"Very well," McCullough said, less pleasantly. "Your present condition is something we will have to talk about. And because I prefer the talk to be private, and Morrison and Drew have a limited supply of air out there, we will have to cut a few corners.
"Since everyone on this expedition seems to be very well informed on the subjects of psychiatry and psychology," he went on, smiling again, "I'll assume that you have a fair understanding of the operation of the subconscious mind. You will be aware of the perfectly normal pressures, conflicts of personality and basic insecurities to which all of us are subject, also of the fact that these are seriously aggravated by our present environment. This being so, you must realize that your physical trouble, this unsightly and uncomfortable skin condition, has a purely psychological basis. There are no germs, no vitamin deficiencies, nothing to which you would be allergic on the ship."
If Berryman and W
alters could hear me now, McCullough thought briefly. The trouble was it was so easy to talk like a psychologist . . .
