Silent Running (9 page)

Lowell sat on the edge of the operating table wiping the sweat from his drawn face and staring straight ahead.

At length he said, “Why don’t you guys just stay here? Dewey, you keep Huey company.”

Lowell walked from the surgery and down the corridor to his room, then flopped on his bed.

 TEN 

W
hirling through space, Lowell was hardly aware of moving. He wakened, grubby and tired, with the memory of his failure with Huey bitter in his mind. He glanced down at his wrinkled clothes and passed a quick hand over his unshaven face.

“Huey, Dewey!” He nodded to them, standing close by his cot, and realized they must have come from surgery during the night.

Dewey was whirring normally, but Huey wasn’t doing so well.

“Dewey,” Lowell said, “you run your normal maintenance checks today. “Huey,” he added gently, “you stay with me.”

Dewey whirred and hesitated a moment, then trundled off to work.

Lowell led the way to the kitchen with Huey following as best he could. Lowell pushed open the door.

“Wow!” The kitchen was a mess of food trays, wrappers, and garbage.

Lowell snacked from a cold tray, standing up, for there was no place to sit down. Huey just looked on.

“Now,” Lowell slammed down his tray, “we’ll hit Main Control.”

Stepping through the debris, he led the way to the communications center of
Valley Forge.
With Huey trailing, he pushed into the room filled with communications instruments. He sat before the radio listening intently, tuning it for clarity, but nothing came over but wild static.

Restlessly, Lowell rose to seek his own room once more.

He tried to work at his desk, but it was no use.

He sat staring at the wall, then at Huey.

“I don’t know . . .” he said to the drone. “The radio isn’t working and neither are you.”

Acutely aware of
Valley Forge’s
impotent, mighty bulk plunging through space, and of his own failures, Lowell barged from the room to wander aimlessly over the spacecraft. Huey followed.

Lowell raised his eyes. There lay the sun. He could picture the ship passing before it.

“Come on, Huey,” he said. “Let’s go to the forest.”

Once there, Lowell stooped to powder a dead leaf in his hand. He reached to brush a withering flower.

“Dying, the trees, the plants, all are dying!” Lowell murmured.

Lowell fled to his room, with Huey scarcely able to keep up with him. He snatched a book at random from his case. He lay back on his cot staring upward unseeing at the open pages, while his mind reviewed the state of the ship.

“Kitchen’s a mess,” he murmured. “Main Control’s nothing but static. Cargo hold’s silent, silent. My forest’s clean but going. It’s dying.”

Lowell’s head dropped forward and he slept. Huey stood by, whirring in a stuttering rhythm.

In Main Control, though Lowell could not hear it, the radio crackled to life.

Suddenly a very distant voice—Neal’s voice—queried:

“ ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . COME IN, ‘VALLEY FORGE.’ THIS IS ‘BERKSHIRE’ TO ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . DO YOU READ ME . . . ?”

But there was no one in the room to read him . . . Lowell slept on in his own room, an open book spilled on the floor beside his cot.

Valley Forge
swept on, but Lowell did not heed. The great ship swirled through a sea of stars, its great flag, once so clean and bright, now barely distinguishable.

The lone Dome One stood out against the starry sky. Around it lay the scarred empty cradles of the five severed nodes that had held the domes carrying his beautiful forests.

Out across the hull of mighty
Valley Forge
something could be seen passing in front of the sun.

Lowell still slept.

But suddenly the hiss of the P.A. system engulfed the ship. Again it was Neal pleading:

“ ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . COME IN, ‘VALLEY FORGE.’ THIS IS ‘BERKSHIRE,’ CAN YOU READ ME, ‘VALLEY FORGE’ . . . ?”

Lowell opened his eyes, startled. Neal’s voice . . . ? How was that possible? How had he tracked him down?

Neal’s voice continued:

“LOWELL, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? GOT A SPOT ON YOU, LOWELL. FANTASTIC! WE’RE LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU, BUDDY . . . YOU BEAT IT . . . ! YOU PASSED THROUGH SATURN’S RINGS!”

Lowell was stunned. He leaped from his bed and dashed from the room. His mind whirled with the past—the past, and now here was Neal on the
Berkshire,
riding orbit somewhere. He’d never expected to see them again.

Lowell ran toward Main Control, with unidentifiable excited voices in the background catching up with him.

Then it was Neal again, impatiently pleading:

“NOW, TRANSMIT, WILL YUH? PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE, IMMEDIATELY. COME IN ‘VALLEY FORGE.’ . . . CAN YOU READ ME . . . ?”
There followed a long pause, then Neal again:
“PLEASE TRANSMIT IMMEDIATELY. ‘BERKSHIRE’ TO ‘VALLEY FORGE.’ . . . ‘BERKSHIRE’ TO ‘VALLEY FORGE.’ HOW ABOUT A WORD, LOWELL, HUH?”

Suddenly there was Anderson’s voice, full of the usual Anderson bogus cheeriness:

“LOWELL . . . ! HA! HA! I’M MIGHTY GLAD TO SEE YOU, BOY!”

Lowell stood over the radio, incredulously. He clicked on the mike, his mind racing, while the whole recent past crashed in upon him: Wolf’s death and his body buried in Dome One. Keenan’s and Barker’s blowing up in Dome Two to be explained. Worse, Neal was back. Neal who had been up in space so long that all he wanted was to go home, to obey orders. Dome One with its forest would be blown up. It would be the end of his beloved garden, the end of his dream for Earth.

Finally, Lowell managed to speak: “Who, who is this?”

“
THIS IS ANDERSON, LOWELL. MY GOD, WE’VE LOOKED HIGH AND LOW FOR YOU, BOY.”

Lowell could hardly speak. His voice came weakly, almost in a whisper: “How did you find me . . . why did you even try?”

Anderson’s chuckle crackled in:

“HEY! YOU MUST BE KIDDING, WE COULDN’T LET YOU GO WITHOUT AT LEAST TRYING TO FIND YOU. WE SAID WE’D SEND OUT A SEARCH PARTY.”

Lowell swallowed, and managed some intelligible sounds. All the time, his mind kept saying, “They’ll cock and blow it. They’ll blow Dome One.”

Anderson’s voice went on and on:

“IT WASN’T EASY FINDING YOU, EITHER. EVEN WITH OUR DEEP SPACE TRACK.”

Lowell murmured, “Guess not . . .”

Then Anderson’s voice came in with authority:
“FREEMAN!”
His voice was flat, final.
“WE’LL HAVE TO FIND SOME WAY TO JETTISON THE DOME!”

Lowell gulped.

Anderson plowed on:

“AND IT’S AWFULLY DARK OUT HERE, YOU’RE SO FAR FROM THE SUN . . .”

Suddenly Lowell’s head jerked up. It was dark.
Valley Forge
was dark. Dome one was dark, with no sunshine!

Then it hit him. He leaped to his feet.

“The sun—! That’s what it is—the sun! Did you hear what he just said? It’s being so far from the sun! That’s why my forest is dying.”

“WHAT . . . ?”

Anderson’s voice came flatly.

Lowell at a loss for a moment, finally said, “Aah, nothing. I was just saying that, that . . . everything is all right.”

Anderson took a new tack:

“SAY, WHERE WAS YOUR BIG EXPLOSION, THE ONE REPORTED TO US BEFORE WE LOST CONTROL, BEFORE YOU WENT THROUGH SATURN’S RINGS?”

“Oh, the explosion. On the other side of the ship.”

“THE OTHER SIDE . . .”
Anderson came back.
“WE’LL BE INSTRUMENT DOCKING AT YOUR PORT SIDE IN ABOUT SIX HOURS . . .”

The word “docking” hit Lowell like the blow of a fist, swinging him around. “Six hours!” Lowell exclaimed. “Huey, Dewey, c’mon. We can still save the forest.”

He barged toward the corridor, wondering why he hadn’t thought of the forest dying for lack of sunshine. And it had to be Anderson who had pointed it out.

 ELEVEN 

W
ith Anderson’s “Six hours, six hours,” beating at his brain, Lowell led the way from Main Control to the immense cargo hold below. With Huey and Dewey trailing him, he raced to inspect row on row of stacked cargo modules, looking for the right ones. At length, he paused before a group of strange angular-shaped crates or modules.

“Here they are, Dewey,” he said. “Give me a hand.” Lowell began breaking open the modules that had stenciled on their sides:

(20) HIGH INTENSITY SOLAR LAMPS
AND STANDS

Lowell ripped open module after module and started to remove the contents. Inspecting them, he could see that the solar energy devices resembled very small compact light sources. At length all of the modules lay opened.

“Now to get them to the forest,” Lowell declared. Swinging around, his eyes lighted on the three cargo vehicles. He ran to one and drove it back to where the modules stood.

“Dewey,” he ordered, slipping from behind the wheel, “start loading all the agricultural cargo onto the other cars.”

Dewey’s engine whirred. He waddled across to select a car and began to load it.

Lowell got behind the wheel of his car and edged it closer to the modules containing solar lamps.

“Boy, oh boy!” he exclaimed and, leaping from the car, began piling solar lamps on his vehicle. “Okay,” he said at last, “let’s go, Huey. Dewey, you keep on loading the other modules on the cars.”

With Huey beside him, Lowell drove swiftly from the cargo hold, through the tunnel, and into the dying forest.

“Wait, wait!” He couldn’t help calling to the dying trees. Leaping from the car he began stringing solar lamps around. He put them in his garden, among the vegetables, and ferns, and bushes, and along pathways leading into his beloved trees.

The forest looked terribly drab and deathly.

Lowell swiftly began stringing solar devices together, hooking them up to a master power source in the dome. This done, he went to help Dewey, and together, with Huey looking on, they drove load after load of cargo to the far end of the dome. Here they piled them according to their labels. Hundreds of modules stood stacked there for later use.

Suddenly, all was in readiness.

Lowell walked over to a switch and looked around him. For the moment, all thought of Neal and the
Berkshire
had been crowded from his mind. Now, he could only think of his forest being saved . . . saved if he, Lowell, could save it.

“Okay?” He looked skyward to a towering spruce wilting, its branches browning, its trunk shriveled, and scaly.

Huey’s engine whirred. Dewey’s motor idled evenly.

“Now!” Lowell exclaimed. His hand flipped the switch, activating the power source that threw on all the solar energy sources.

Suddenly, the forest burst with light. It became illuminated with a brilliant warmth. Birds, animals . . . even insects . . . seemed to react to the light.

Lowell forgot about “Six hours” and
Berkshire.

He turned to Huey and Dewey.

“How about that!” he shouted. “It’s going to work!”

Lowell’s eyes deepened with thought.

“And if it does . . . ?” something within him asked. “What then?”

“Yeah, what then?” Lowell repeated, while the ugly future seemed to spread out like a printed page before him.

But the forest, reviving under the lights, again crowded out all thought of Anderson, Neal, and the
Berkshire.

He turned to Dewey and Huey and together they ambled into the deep forest, with the lights shining about them.

Lowell touched a tree trunk, already warmed, already responding. He knelt to touch a flower, now withered, that would spread its petals and bloom once more.

At length, they came back to the cars, and Lowell also came back to reality.

He led them to a grassy bank and sat down cross-legged with a drone standing to his right and left.

“Dewey!” Lowell sighed. “I’ve taught you everything that I know about taking care of the forest here.” Lowell paused to look around him, then went on, “And—that’s all that you have to do from now on.”

Dewey bleeped softly, and nodded.

Lowell went on, his voice husky with emotion: “That’s all, just—maintain the forest.” He flung an arm out. “Now, these lights here will do the job that the sun does. They provide everything. I—” Lowell’s lips trembled. “I just can’t do it anymore. You see . . . things are . . . things just haven’t . . . worked out for me.”

Lowell paused a long time. His hand moved gently to touch Dewey’s metal shoulder. He fought for control. Finally, in a hoarse whisper, he said, “Take care of yourself, Dewey!”

For a long time Lowell sat in the forest. Birds sang in the trees. Rabbits hopped across the grass. A falcon lighted on his arm, its clean symmetrical brown and white wings folding against its body. Lowell stroked its neck. It pecked his arm, then flew away.

Finally, Lowell turned to the little bronze-colored drone.

“Huey,” he said gently, “you’ll have to come with me, because you . . . you’re just not working well enough to help Dewey.”

Suddenly Neal’s voice came, stridently seeking Lowell out:

“BERKSHIRE TO VALLEY FORGE . . . ! BERKSHIRE TO VALLEY FORGE . . . ! WE’LL BE DOCKING ON YOUR PORT SIDE IN TWO HOURS. STAND BY FOR UPDATES.”

For a moment, Lowell couldn’t move. “Two hours,” drummed through his mind. “Two hours until Neal will come and blow up Dome One.”

Suddenly, Lowell turned to his car. It had come. The thing that he had known would come was here.

“Huey,” he said gently, “come with me.”

Huey climbed in.

Lowell got behind the wheel. For a long moment he let his eyes stray through the woods, then came back to Dewey. His hands tightened on the wheel. “So long, Dewey,” he said, hoarsely. “Take care of yourself . . . and your forest.”

Dewey stood quietly, his motor whirring rhythmically. A soft sound came from him. His manipulator arm moved up then down.