Futures Past (24 page)

  
"You will get used to that feeling, Dr. Brett," said Ramsey sharply, and winced again. Suddenly he looked puzzled and a little frightened. He began staring hard at each of them in turn, as if trying to see through a dense fog. His voice, when he went on, had become slurred:

  
"Mr. Herdman, will you explain what this means to these people. And . . . and try to work something out. . ." The voice faded and his eyes, which were open, turned up to show their whites. His fingers relaxed their hold on the nearby bunk and he, began drifting toward the passengers.

  
Ramsey had passed out, Herdman saw, and the fact that a man could lose consciousness without his head lolling forward onto his chest or, as sometimes happened in free fall, without his eyelids dropping closed was having a disquieting effect on the other passengers. Not unnaturally it was Forsythe who reacted first.

  
"He might injure himself against something," the doctor said gruffly. "He's unconscious. We'll have to strap him down somewhere. . . ."

  
'The control-room couch," said Herdman.

  
Forsythe shook his head. "One of the passenger bunks would be better. Then I could keep an eye on him. . . ."

  
"The control-room," said Herdman firmly, and took hold of the captain's good arm and with his fingers gently closed Ramsey's eyes. Then he launched them both toward the cone, judging the dive so that he would arrive first and be able to absorb the shock of contact with his own body.

  
When he returned a few minutes later the passengers had their heads together and, despite the fact that he could not hear anything of what was being said, Herdman could tell that the doctor was angry because of the apparently high-handed manner in which his advice regarding the captain had been ignored and that the others were merely frightened. They stopped talking suddenly as he approached, obviously because they had been talking about him.

  
This time it was Wallace, the third doctor on the passenger list, who spoke first. He was a small, thin-faced, nervous man who was trying hard to hide his fear behind a jocular tone. He said, "Uh, Mr. Herdman, the captain said you would explain things to us. Er, what exactly is our problem?"

  
This was a question which Herdman had been considering since the moment he had realized the full extent of the damage, which meant that he had had nearly three hours to prepare a short, non-technical answer to it. He had considered all the possible angles and permutations and no matter which way he looked at it the situation was bad, so bad that he had neither the ability nor the inclination to match Wallace's tone when he replied.

  
"It is a three-cornered problem," he said grimly. "First, our captain is physically incapable of handling the approach and landing when we reach Mars. Second, when we reach Mars we will be going too fast because we haven't enough fuel to decelerate into a landing orbit. And third, there isn't enough food to keep us alive until then anyway."

  
He watched them try to accept the idea that they were all going to die and then reject it, just as he had rejected it himself a few hours ago. Then the objections and counter-suggestions began to come. Herdman answered them all, quietly and always negatively.

  
No, he told them, they could not jerry-rig a radio and call for help. All communications equipment with the exception of the suit radios and the landing radar had been contained in the lost unit, and letting people know they were in trouble did not mean that they would be automatically rescued—things did not happen that way in space. And no, they could not turn back while they were still close to Earth—they hadn't sufficient fuel for landing on a light-gravity planet like Mars, so they could not decelerate to a stop and go back. The suggestion that they modify course to put them into a circumlunar orbit was a good one, except that the Moon was in the wrong position at present to try it. Even if they checked their velocity away from Earth, and Earth control had been worried enough by their failure to report after takeoff to set one of the big radio scopes to tracking them, there were no spaceships in existence which could take off from Earth, decelerate to match velocities with them and return.

  
The only possible hope of rescue lay in a ship following the same course to Mars, with surplus fuel aboard for the necessary velocity matching maneuvers. But he had to remind them that even in this age of spaceflight there were rarely more than thirty ships on Earth at any given time, that traffic was considered heavy if more than three of them took off or landed in a month, and that a ship took many days to prepare for flight. During the four or five days required to ready a ship for Mars both Earth and the destination planet would have changed position so that it would require some very fancy computing to make the second ship's path intersect theirs.

  
So the best bet would be for them to continue toward Mars, except that if they did that, ground control would almost certainly think that all that ailed them was a faulty radio and not bother sending a rescue ship anyway....

  
"You've got an answer for everything!" Brett raged suddenly. "The same answer, no! Anybody would think that you wanted to starve to death or crash . . . !"

  
"Or both, concurrently," Forsythe put in dryly, obviously trying to avert a row without actually coming out in support of Herdman.

  
"Like everyone else," said Herdman grimly, "I'm hoping one of you will ask a question which I can't answer with a 'No.' Personally I think our position is hopeless—"

  
"Personally," Brett broke in hotly, "I think you're a—"

  
"B-before I agree with Mr. Herdman," Wallace cut in hastily, "I'd like us to try attacking the problem from a couple of different directions. To begin with let's break it into its three separate parts and consider them one at a time. Take the matter of our injured captain first..."

  
Here it comes, thought Herdman wearily.

  
". . . We all know that Mr. Herdman was a pilot," Wallace continued eagerly. "We recognized him as soon as he took his suit off. We also know that he was trained for a ship whose type went obsolete five years ago, which means that he has been uh, retired for five years. But if we assume that we will reach Mars alive and that there will be enough fuel to get there, then that part of the problem is solved.

  
"I realize, of course," he added quickly, "that Ramsey may be a completely different class of ship from that which Mr. Herdman trained for. But there must be many similarities, and with four months to familiarize himself with the controls . . ."

  
Herdman shook his head violently. "I couldn't do it! My training was for—"

  
"You could try," said Forsythe mildly.

  
"Of course he'll try," Wallace said eagerly. "We don't expect more than that. And with the first part of the problem more or less taken care of we come to the second part, fuel. ..."

  
Part one of the problem was not solved and the time to tell them so was now. But Herdman was beginning to feel a great respect for this small, nervous, frightened man who was fighting so hard not to die, and a little sympathy, too. It wasn't as if the first part of the problem alone would cause their deaths, he told himself, the end lay in all three corners. So he kept silent, not wanting to spoil Wallace's dreams.

  
". . . What we need to attack this problem," Wallace was saying, "is information on methods of lightening the ship together with the exact quantity of fuel remaining to us. How much fuel do we have exactly?"

  
Herdman shook his head again. "I don't know."

  
"But..."

  
Patiently and quietly, because he did not want them to think that he was stupid and non-cooperative as well as being something of a wet blanket, Herdman told them why he did not know exactly how much fuel remained in the tanks.

  
"At the beginning of a trip the capacity of the tank equaled the available working fluid, with a metering device measuring the fuel that passed into the reactor and recording by subtraction the amount that remained. After the accident, however, fuel had been leaking from the tank by another exit so that the meter reading was no longer accurate. And in weightless conditions the liquid hung about inside the tank in a chaotic mass of froth— and it was impossible to tell whether it was composed of air bubbles in water or gobs of water floating in air, except that it wasn't air but water vapor that caused the bubbles. The simplest way to work it out would be to apply thrust for a few minutes and allow the water to settle to the bottom of the tank, then measure its height and compute the volume from the known measurements of the tank. But applying thrust would waste more of their already scarce fuel as well as cause a deviation from their flight plan, which would require more fuel to correct. . . . ". . . And spinning the ship to make centrifugal force take the place of thrust would not work either," Herdman added as he saw Wallace's mouth open to ask what was the next logical question, "because the ship's center of gravity is somewhere inside the tank, and taking accurate measurements
  
with
  
the
  
ship
  
spinning
  
rapidly
  
around you ..."

  
Wallace groaned piteously, then said, "There must be a simple way to do this. We have this dirty great tank partly full of water, which we can't measure because the stuff is weightless. It's there, we should be able to tell how much of it there is! D'you think I could go inside and see if something suggests itself when I'm in the tank?"

  
"Why not," said Herdman. "It's your swimming pool as well as mine."

  
"That's right," said Wallace, grinning. A few minutes later he was disconnecting the oxygen tanks, air hose and breathing mask from his spacesuit and stripping to his shorts. Herdman wanted to warn him to be careful in the tank, because water could do all sorts of unpredictable things in weightless conditions, but he reminded himself that the passengers had all been given instructions on handling themselves in the swimming pool/ fuel tank together with advice regarding the operation of locks, suits, and air plant and so on, and remained silent.

  
When Wallace had disappeared sternward, Brett looked at Herdman and said, "I suppose you've no objection to my looking over the cargo to see how much of it we can jettison?"

  
"Why should I?" said Herdman.

  
Brett followed Wallace and Forsythe coughed gently. He said, "The third part of the problem is the food supply. It might be a good idea to see exactly where we stand."

  
"Go ahead," said Herdman.

  
For the best part of an hour the three men worked in or near the cargo space, the bumps and scuffles of the movements drifting up to Herdman as he hung alone in the passenger lounge. Most of the time their conversation was too subdued for him to hear what they were saying, but occasionally—usually when Wallace got excited about something—he heard it clearly, and sometimes it was directed at himself.

  
Like the time when Wallace started talking about Boyle's Law and asking if it was possible to seal an empty spacesuit from the outside while keeping the internal pressure high. He also wanted to know if anything cataclysmic would happen to the ship if he unscrewed the pressure gauge from the cargo space bulkhead. Herdman gave him instructions on how best to achieve the former and reassurances regarding the latter and had just finished speaking when Brett shouted up if it was possible for him to see a detailed cargo manifest. Some of the cargo was pressure sealed and he could more easily estimate its weight if he knew exactly what was inside. . ..

  
The excitement was catching, Herdman found, and so was the hope. Even though he knew that there was no hope, that it was a three-part problem and that one and one did not and never would make three....

  
There was the time when Wallace returned from the tank with his gear and a storm of vituperation erupted through the open cargo lock. Without seeing it Herdman could picture exactly what had happened. Wallace had been soaking wet and naturally,
 
automatically, he had shaken himself. In the weightless condition the result would have been like a rainstorm down there. But the storm of abuse died on a complaining note with Brett muttering something to the effect that if the water was so blank-blank scarce why was Wallace slopping so much of it around?