"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
moment 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 Walters could hear me now,
McCullough thought briefly.
The trouble was it was so easy to