The Mile Long Spaceship (19 page)

There would be no evidence that she had ever existed. She was like a dream that once over is gone irrevocably, leaving nothing of itself but memories that slowly fade until they too are gone.

Woodenly he stared straight ahead feeling the deadness of her weighing on him leaving him cold and heavy feeling inside. He didn't see the opening door until a man stood inside it and spoke.

"Mr. Andover?" He was short and very slight in build, but his face and manner suggested authority.

"Yes. Who are you?"

"Captain Farrell, police department. I'd like to ask you a few questions about your wife, if you don't mind."

The attorney returned only minutes before they were due back in the courtroom. "Well? Decide to tell what really happened?"

"What happened?" Roger repeated. "I thought the evidence made it quite clear what happened. My wife was unfaithful and I killed her. Just as any normal man would."

They returned to the courtroom to hear the sentence read, speaking no more.

It was
inevitable that they should meet one day. From the Iowa farm to the university, to the practical field work in Arabia, Canada, and Tibet, and now to the new fields of Mars, each step had led unalterably to this second. Rod accepted it fatalistically as if for years he had been preparing for that one moment when he stepped through the curved hatchway and his eyes by-passed all else and stopped on the man in seat Thirteen. The eyes that returned his stare were slaty, blank, hopeless, not appealing, not apologizing, not anything; merely eyes that saw or didn't see—but didn't flinch. Rod let his gaze drop and mumbled an indistinguishable something to the man who nudged his legs from behind.

During the day chairs were demagnetized and moved and fastened once more in new patterns like atoms encircling a nucleus, now around a card table, now around the community dining table, now before the quartz port that let them gasp at the first sight of Earth fully illuminated. Chair Thirteen alone was permanently fastened.

When the atomic clocks indicated enough hours for the day to have ended, the chairs became beds back in their original places and opaque screens turned each chair-bed into a tiny private room. It was first class traveling, dumb-bell style.

Before Rod succumbed to the mandatory sedation a faint, almost invisible, glow that the psychologists insisted upon played tricks on his eyes and he saw again his first glimpse of the dumb-bell hanging motionless against the black of space. The patterned black and white squares of the balls on either side of the connecting rod rearranged themselves, and became a pair of slate grey eyes that stared without expression.

"Hydroponics," a thick, shapeless man said, "section one-aught-nine-seven. What's your line?"

Rod answered automatically, "Geology, mine exploration." It was the third day and he was feeling depressed and unfriendly; the very solidity of the hydroponics man was an irritant to his nerves. He became aware of the changing pattern of the circular room as the three women on the passenger list detached themselves from one another and regrouped. One of them smiled brightly at him and eased her chair beside his.

"Geology!" she exclaimed. "That's always fascinated me!"

As she rushed headlong into conversation, Rod felt his dislike for her threaten to break out on his face, his whole body demanding a smoke. And he wasn't an habitual smoker. Her eyes were the color of peeled, overripe grapes. They stopped and narrowed and he knew she was watching the man from seat Thirteen as he was released for his mid-day pacing. A silence fell throughout the room, only to be thrust back with sustained effort, and now the throb of voices had a new, higher pitch as the owners purposefully pretended ignorance of the fact that the prisoner was receiving the amount of exercise doctors had agreed was essential for physical well being.

The moist purple eyes of the woman veiled whatever she was thinking. "Filth!" she mouthed looking past Rod.

With a dry bitter taste on his tongue Rod adjusted his chair and leaned back closing his eyes, fighting something he couldn't visualize much less verbalize.

Sometimes the curtain around Thirteen was drawn for hours at a time, until one of the ship's crew opened it. Only so many hours of privacy were allowed him. Other times he singled out an individual and his eyes followed that one until he drew his own curtain. Mostly he sat, or reclined, and looked at nothing. He could have been any age from thirty to sixty-five, but they knew he was forty-nine. His hair was white, his skin tanned by the ship's lamps, his eyes clear. A perfect specimen of man, never sick, never needing more than the annual check-up that was his by law. A man who could expect to live another forty years, barring an accident to the dumb-bell itself.

Fifth day. Rod and one other passenger, Williard Benton, had a vague, surface friendship that helped relieve the monotony. They talked intermittently throughout the days, but the greatest pleasure of this trip was to be had in the precious, rationed time in the "bath room." Rod watched the hand of the timer in its inexorable sweep and when it clicked into the final moment, he felt cheated. It was more than the familiar feeling of cleanliness, he reflected, as the moist warm air filled his pores; it was the feeling of space, of being alone with all that room. In there one could move his arms about; he could sing and hear an echo reverberate ever so slightly; he could see farther than the width of his shoulders or the length of his legs and still be completely alone. It was space, private space, that made the bath room the most treasured luxury of the trip to Mars. It was a bit of the familiar Earth he had left; a bit of the life he would rejoin; in there he could forget he was thousands of miles out in a cold, empty nothingness where he was the alien. It took so little to recapture what was of Earth, of home.

Back in his chair-bed with the drawn curtain and a film ready to view, he felt a quick stab of remorse that he felt so exhilarated and yet peaceful after his short breathing spell when that other poor devil.... Somehow his finger was on the button marked Thirteen and without being consciously aware of it, he pushed. Immediately he regretted his own stupidity and he hit the cancel button, but not, he was certain, before a call registered on a similar panel of the chair arm of Thirteen. He lay rigidly alert, waiting for a sign, for a return call, for any indication that his action had been noted. There was nothing, and gradually he relaxed again.

Sixth day, seventh, eighth. All were alike, all like the first. There was nothing but the routine of staying alive until the ship put in on Deimos. Yet for Rod each day became an interminable endurance contest. Add a million to infinity, he thought, and infinity's all the same for that. Add one day to a lifetime, and the lifetime could still be infinity. He cut off the confused thoughts and found his eyes burning from the intensity of his stare at the man in seat Thirteen.

It wasn't possible for a human to maintain that calm quiescence, that exterior of absolute acceptance... The others, also, seemed to have a growing awareness of him, awareness tinged with resentment against him, as if his stoicism were an affront to them personally. Conversations were more sporadic, less good natured, arguments more heated and bitter. This despite the tranquilizers that were part of their diets. Rod and Will Benton lingered over it during one of their frequent talks.

"What would we be after six months of this?" Benton mused doing knee bends effortlessly.

"Dead," Rod snapped. Even Benton's amiable, but determined, exercising grated on him. The other fellow never really exercised; he only walked, back and forth, back and forth.

Abruptly he asked, "Will, what do you think about him?"

There was no surprise on the short man's face as he reached high over his head and held the pose to a silent count of his own making. "Must be hell," was all he said.

"I mean, about what he did. I suppose there never was any doubt..."

"None. He was quite matter of fact about the whole thing." His voice was coolly impersonal as if talking about a figure who had lived and died during the Rennaissance.

"Yeah," Rod grunted, chewing his lip, thinking abstractedly that he'd become a chain smoker when he could get them again. He had known. He had been over and over the testimony, had memorized every word ever printed concerning it. The man never bothered to deny anything, admitted that he had foreseen the possible consequences, and then had gone ahead. Rod sighed and regarded his index finger as if it were a thing apart from him, as if it were responsible for the way it lingered over the button, and even—three times—pushed it.

Benton dropped into his chair and studied Rod with a quizzical expression. "It's got you, hasn't it? Him, I mean."

Rod merely grunted again, and he continued. "Don't let it. It'll tear you apart. It's all decided, has been for twenty-three years, and nothing you could do would change any of it. The UN has refused to take it up at all for seven years in a row now. And it's just."

"I know, but that poor devil..."

"That poor devil," Benton drawled, but the tone of his words did little to mask the murderous hatred that lurked beneath, "killed seventeen men in his crew. None of them needed to die. He killed to get into space. He killed to stay there, out front where the glory money was. By murdering UN space personnel from six countries he almost got the United States blown off the earth. And believe me, together they could have done just that. I know; it was my business to know."

Rod frowned and with an effort erased it and attempted a grin. "Ok, friend," he said, "the cure took. Punishment to fit the crime, and all that. Ok."

Benton leaned forward and patted his arm lightly.

Rod lay behind his curtain after lunch and thought about it.

Twenty-five years ago it had been. The fourth ship to aim for Mars, and it was failing, as had every expedition before it. There were mutterings that this one was it. One more false start and the whole economic structure of the UN Space Development Agency would collapse, it was rumored. Eighteen men looked failure in the face and of them one saw the way to success. One, but only one, could ride the ship to Mars and return it to the space station. For one there would be enough air in the meteor-ruined storage tanks. Eighteen of them could return to Earth as failures, but one could make the entire trip. One did. And he returned to Earth, the UN flag firmly planted on the rocky surface of Mars, his only mission in life accomplished.

Because of him the United States had been forced to turn the other cheek. Would it have been so if he had been French, or Polish, or English even? But he had been an American. All the long dormant fears of nuclear war were fanned once more. All the rivalry among the big powers stirred, and zombi-like left the flimsy tombs of treaties and agreements to stalk again among nations. Russian and Chinese rockets quivered, grew erect, and waited for the push of a button. American rockets slid from deep graves, proud but defeated as nation after nation hurled rocks of insult at the mighty now humbled. And the Americans turned their bewildered wrath upon the one who had brought shame to two hundred million. The planet's number one criminal was handed over to the UN.

It was the Chinese delegate, flat eyed and expressionless, who summoned the wisdom of Confucius and the cruelty of Khan to propose the sentence. He was to be sent back to the space he had fouled, to live the rest of his years between worlds.

Twenty days. Twenty-five. The ship moved without a murmur, drawing closer to the rust-colored planet where radars stared at its progress with open mouthed, blank looks. The plunge toward the surface was checked and the retro-rockets changed the course for the landing. They would be there before dinner. Curiously Rod, a non-drinker, desired a stiff drink above all else. Earlier he could have had it, but now, alone, sealed off and strapped into his bed, the thirst for a drink overwhelmed him.

What impossible demands did
his
body make? Rod's finger found Thirteen with no help from his eyes and this time he held it until there was an answering light.

"Are you all right?"

There was a prolonged silence, but it was the silence of a man breathing in hurried gasps as if each might be the last.

"Can you hear me?" Rod spoke slowly as if to a foreigner unfamiliar with his dialect.

"Yes... yes. Who...?"

"Never mind. Would you do it again?" His voice was quick and husky to his own ears as if everything depended on that one answer, as if his entire life had been arranged so that he might have this instant in which to ask it. He was unaware that he was holding his breath.

There was another silence, and then a faint, "Yes."

"You really think they would have called it all off?" he demanded harshly. "You actually think you saved space for the world?"

"The UN was falling apart... Three ships had been wiped out... There was no more money appropriated... What I think now, what I knew then... I don't know any more. Maybe they would have sent the fifth, and the sixth, and however many it would have taken. I don't know now. But I knew then! We all knew! Don't you remember...? Who are you? Do I know you?"

"No! They brought you back to Earth once and you got away. I saw you and told them. Do you remember?"

He did fully, the scene undimmed by the intervention of twenty years. The man ran and fell and his arms were outstretched, fingers clawing at the ground, coming away with hands full of the rich loam where corn would stand in two months. The seven year old boy saw him with a feeling of revulsion and disgust and hatred so strong that he was sick in his hiding place among the trees at the edge of the field. The man didn't protest or struggle when they came and took him, but his hands tightened over the two balls of compressed earth.

Rod passed his hand over his eyes and the re-run faded until it was gone. He thought in the interval the man had turned off, but the voice came once more.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Sorry it was you, that it was anyone." He didn't say goodby, but Rod knew that he was gone, that he wouldn't answer again.