Forever Free (15 page)

There's no lock on the door, but when Rudkowski, a strong, fat man, had gone to open it, it wouldn't budge. Another cook helped him pull on it, and it jerked open suddenly, with a sucking inrush of air. Same thing happened the next day, and so he sent up the report.

We emptied out the locker and went over it minutely, and even had Antres 906 come up and use his differently acute senses. The only way for the thing to lose air would be for somebody to pump it out, but none of us could find any opening.

"Fearsome," was the Tauran's only reaction. We were still annoyed, rather than scared. But then we had the locker watched all afternoon and night. No one came near it, but by the next morning it was full of vacuum again.

Against the obscure possibility of conspiracy, I stood watch over it all night myself, drinking what passed for coffee. The air disappeared again.

Word got out about this strangeness, and reactions were diverse. Some stolid people—or people in ignorant denial—didn't think it was a big deal. The locker was small, and the daily air loss from it was not even 1 percent of what we lost through normal accepted leakage. If we left it closed, we wouldn't even lose that.

Other people were terrified, and I had some sympathy with them. Since we didn't know what mechanism was sucking air out of the small space, how could we know that the same mechanism might not empty out whole rooms, whole floors—the entire ship!

Teresa Larson and her co-religionists were actually smug: here was something going on that the scientists and engineers couldn't explain. Something mystical, that was happening for a purpose, and God would reveal Her purpose in due course. I asked her whether she would like to spend the night in the grain locker, to test God's sympathy with her belief. She patiently explained the fallacy behind my logic. If you "tested" God, that was the direct opposite of belief, and of course She would punish you.

I kept my silence about that elaboration of foolishness. I like Teresa, and she was probably the best farmer aboard, but her grasp of reality beyond the tilled field or hydroponic tank was seriously impaired.

Most people were in the same middle ground that I inhabited. Something serious was going on that we didn't yet understand. For now, the practical course was to seal the locker and store the grain elsewhere, while people mulled it over.

The most disturbing reaction was from Antres 906. It asked for permission to do a complete systems check on the escape vessels, with the help of a few human engineers. It said we would need them soon.

Antres 906 approached me first. If it had been a human, I would have said no; we're close enough to panic, and don't need to fuel it. But Tauran logic and emotion are odd, so I took him up to Marygay for a captain's decision.

Marygay was reluctant to grant special permission, since of course we did have a regular inspection schedule, and it could look like panic. But there was no actual harm in it, so long as it was done quietly, as if it were routine. And she did have sympathy for Antres 906 in its isolation. A human locked in a ship with a hundred Taurans would be forgiven for odd behavior.

But when she asked it to elaborate on why it thought the inspection was necessary, the response was creepy. "Not long ago, William asked me about that piece of paper? The one from Earth? 'Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.' "

It did the little Tauran dance of agitation. "We are inside the foreign. Your airless locker represents the unknown."

"Wait," I said. "Are you saying that that homily is a kind of prophecy?"

"No, never." The dance again. "Prophecy is foolish. What it is, is a statement of condition."

Marygay stared at him. "You're saying we should be ready for the unknowable."

It rubbed its neck and rattled assent and danced, and danced.

It took two months for the unknowable to catch up with us.

Marygay and I were asleep. A chime woke us up. "Sorry, but I have to disturb you."

Marygay sat up and touched the light. "Me?" she said, rubbing her eyes. "What's wrong?"

"Both of you. We're losing fuel."

"Losing fuel?"

"It began less than a minute ago. The antimatter is steadily decreasing in mass. As I speak, we have lost about one half of one percent."

"Good God," I said. "What, is it leaking?" And if so, how come we still exist?

"It is not physically leaking. It is in some way disappearing, though." It made a rare humming sound, that meant it was thinking. It thought so fast it could solve most problems between phonemes.

"I can say with certainty that it is not leaking. If it were, the antiprotons would be receding from us at one gee. I sprayed water back along our path, and there was no reaction."

I didn't know whether that was good or bad. "Have you sent a message to Middle Finger?"

"Yes. But if it continues at this rate, the antimatter will be gone long before they receive it."

Of course; we were more than four light-days away. "Charge up every fuel cell to the maximum."

"I did that as we were speaking."

"How long … " Marygay said, "how long can we last on auxiliary power?"

"About five days, at the normal rate of consumption. Several weeks, if we close off most life support and confine everybody to one floor."

"We're still losing it?"

"Yes. The rate of loss appears to be increasing. If this continues, we will be out of fuel in twenty-eight minutes."

"Should we sound the general alarm?" I asked Marygay.

"Not yet. We have enough to worry about."

"Ship, do you have any idea where the fuel could be going; whether we could get it back?"

"No. Nothing consistent with physics as I know it. There is an analogy in the Rhomer model for transient-barrier virtual particle substitution, but it has never been demonstrated." I'd have to look that up sometime.

"Wait!" Marygay said. "The escape ships. Is their antimatter evaporating, too?"

"Not yet. But it is not transferable."

"I'm not thinking about transferring it," she said to me. "I'm thinking about getting the hell out of here before something worse happens."

"Very sensible," the ship said.

We put on robes and hurried down to the first floor. From the viewing port we could see the antimatter sphere as it shrank. It otherwise didn't look any different, a ball of blue sparkles, but it did grow smaller and smaller. Finally, it blinked out.

Acceleration stopped and the automatic zerogee cables unreeled, with a soft regular chiming, loud enough to wake most of the people. We could hear a few louder bells from some residences.

We'd done zerogee drill five times, twice unannounced, so it was not a big deal, yet. People floated out of their homes in various states of undress and started monkey-climbing to the common floor's assembly area.

Eloi Casi, the sculptor, was fully dressed, with a work apron covered with wood shavings. "Damned silly time to pull a drill, Mandella. I'm trying to work."

"Wish it was a drill, Eloi." We drifted past him.

"What?"

"No power. No antimatter. No choices."

Those six words were about all we could tell the company assembled, with the ship adding numbers and times. "We might as well zip up in the escape ships and get the hell out of here," Marygay said. "Every second we delay, it's another twenty-four thousand kilometers we have to make up."

"We're going eight percent of the speed of light," I said. "The escape ships have a slow steady thrust of 7.6 centimeters per second, squared. It will take us ten years to slow down to zero, and another fourteen to get back to MF."

"Why do we have to rush it?" Alysa Bertram said. "That antimatter might come back as mysteriously as it disappeared."

"Yeah, suppose it does?" Stephen Funk said, coming to my elbow. "Do you want to rely on it then? What if it went fine for another couple of months and then disappeared for good? You want to risk ten thousand years in suspended animation?"

Antres 906 had entered, and was floating just inside the door. I looked its way and it bobbed its head: Who knows? "I agree with Steve," I said. "Show of hands? How many want to zip up and leave?"

Slightly more than half the hands went up. "Wait a minute here," Teresa Larson said. "I haven't had my goddamned coffee yet, and you want me to decide whether to give all this up and go flinging into space?"

Nobody had put more work into revitalizing the ship. "I'm sorry, Teresa. But I watched the stuff disappear, and I don't see any alternative."

"Maybe it's our faith being tested, William. Though you wouldn't know anything about that."

"No, I wouldn't. But I don't think the antimatter's going to come back just because we really, sincerely want it to."

"Those escape ships are death traps," Eloy Macabee whined. "How many people die in SA, one out of three? Four?"

"Suspended animation has a survival rate of over eighty percent," I said. "The survival rate here aboard ship is going to be zero."

Diana had come up to float beside me. "The less time we spend in SA, the more likely we are to survive. Teresa, you have your cup of coffee. But then come down and get in line. I'm going to prep people as quickly as possible."

"We aren't accelerating anymore," Ami Larson said. "We can afford to wait and think things over."

"Okay—you hang around and think," Diana said heatedly. "I want out of here before something else happens. Like the air disappearing, next—you want to think that one over, Ami? You want to tell me it couldn't happen?"

"If people do want to stay till the last minute," I said, "you can't expect Diana to wait along with you."

"They can prep themselves, without a doctor or nurse," she said. "But if anything goes wrong, they just die."

"In their sleep," Teresa said.

"I don't know. Maybe you wake up long enough to strangle. Nobody's ever come back to report."

Marygay stepped into the moment of hostile silence. She had a clipboard. "I want names of people willing to leave on the first and second ships. That's sixty people. You can take at most three kilograms of personal items. First group, show up at ten o'clock."

To Diana: "How long does it take to prepare?"

"The purging part is like lightning. You want to be sitting on a toilet when you take the medicine." Some people laughed nervously. "Seriously. Then it takes maybe five minutes to hook up the orthotics. Those of us who did high-gee combat used to do it in under a minute. But we're out of practice."

"And a little older now. So figure the second group at noon?"

"That's reasonable. Nobody eat anything between now and then, and don't drink anything but water. Don't take any medicine unless you clear it with me."

The clipboard started around. "Once I get these sixty names," Marygay said, "the ones who've signed up can go. Then we'll start filling ships Three and Four. How many people are dead-set against going?" Twenty people raised hands, some tentatively. I think Paul Greyton and Elena Monet did it out of fear of going against their spouses. Or maybe reluctance to leave them. "Come over here with me and William, to the coffee station."

No more coffee from this gravity-fed machine, ever again. That was a plus.

Marygay kissed for the ship. "What chance do these people have for survival?"

"I can't calculate that, Captain. I don't know where the antimatter went, so I don't know what the probability is that it might reappear."

"How long will they live if it stays missing?"

"If the twenty people stayed in this one room, and kept it insulated, they could live for many years. My water will begin to freeze in a few weeks, though, and one person will have to go out to the pool and mine it.

"But the pool has enough water for ten years, if you only drink it, and don't wash.

"Food is the complicating factor. Before the first year is over, you'll have to resort to cannibalism. Of course, with each person harvested, there is one less person to feed, and the average body should yield about three hundred meals. So the final survivor will have lived one thousand sixty-four days after the first one is killed, assuming he or she stays warm."

Marygay was silent for a moment, smiling. "Think it over." She kicked off from the table and floated toward the door. I followed, less gracefully.

There was a private command line outside the cafeteria door. I picked up the handset, and said, "Ship, do you have a sense of humor?"

"Only in that I can distinguish between incongruous situations and sensible ones. That was incongruous."

"What are you going to do when everyone is gone?"

"I have no choice but to wait."

"For what?"

"For the return of the antimatter."

"You actually think it will come back?"

"I didn't 'actually' think it would disappear. I have no idea where it is. Whatever agency caused it to relocate may be constrained by some physical conservation law."

"So you wouldn't be surprised if it reappeared."

"I'm never surprised."

"And if it does come back?"

"I'll return to Middle Finger, to my parking orbit. With some new data for you physicists."

Nobody had called me a physicist in a long time. I'm a science teacher and fish harvester and vacuum welder. "I'll miss you, Ship."

"I understand," it said, and made a noise like a throat clearing. "In your game with Charles, you should move the queen's rook to QR6. Then sacrifice your remaining knight to the pawn, and move the black bishop up to checkmate."

"Thanks. I'll try to remember that."

"I'll miss everybody," it said without prompting. "I do have plenty of information to move around and recombine; enough to keep busy for a long time. But it's not the same as the constant chaotic input from you."

"Goodbye, Ship."

"Goodbye, William."

There was a line floating for the lift. I clambered down the steps hand-over-hand, feeling athletic.

I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let's get this over with, one way or the other.