But the next day the feeling of pressure returned. I felt like a chunk of chondrite being transformed to Chantonnay. My life’s course had been bent by this event, and there was no way to straighten it out; all my choices lay in a new direction, where eventual disaster seemed more and more likely. This sense of pressure became unbearable, and I went to the centrifuge to run. It felt good to get in the gravity and run like a hamster in a wheel, like a creature without choices.
So I was running. The floor of the centrifuge was made of curved wooden planking, the walls and ceiling were white, dotted by numbered red circles to tell runners where they were. There were unmarked, informal lanes—slow to the right, fast to the left. Usually I just went to the left wall and started running, looking at the planks as they passed under me.
This time I heard the thump of feet directly behind me, and I moved over, thinking, stupid sprinters. It was Davydov. He drew even with me.
“Mind if I run with you?”
I shook my head, although I don’t like running with others. We ran side by side for a few revolutions.
“Do you always run this fast?” he said.
Now when I run, I am doing a middle-distance workout, and the point is to get up to about ninety percent maximum pulse rate and keep it there for up to twenty or thirty minutes. It is working to the limit. When Davydov asked me this question I had been going for almost half an hour, and I was about to collapse. Nevertheless, I said, “Or faster.”
He grunted. We ran on. His breathing quickened.
“You about ready to take off?” I asked.
“Yeah. A few days. I think.”
“Going to make closure?”
He glanced at me briefly; he knew that I knew that they weren’t. Then he looked back at the floor, thinking about it.
“No,” he said. A few strides. “Water loss. Waste build-up. Not enough fuel.”
“How long can you go?”
“Eighty. Eighty years.”
I smiled for a moment, pleased with the accuracy of my own calculations. They should have had me from the start, I thought. I said, “Doesn’t that worry you?”
Again he watched the floor. We took quite a few strides, nearly circled the run.
“Yes,” he expelled suddenly. A slight stumble to mark the admission. “Yes, I’m worried.” Several strides. “I’ve got to. Stop now. Join me? In game room?”
“In a few minutes.” He slowed abruptly and dropped back to the right. I waved a hand without turning and started to run freely again, thinking about the look on his face and the sense of release when he said yes, I’m worried.
After six thousand meters I climbed up to the hub and got out of the centrifuge, took a quick sponge bath. I walked down to the game room, feeling much better, tired and strong in the no-gee.
Davydov was over in an isolated corner of the game room, sitting at a table for two, staring out the tiny port in the wall beside him. It seemed that the seasons were accelerating aboard our ship, for the room was walled in somber tones, brown and thunderhead blue and silver. I sat down beside him and we stared at the little square of stars. He got me a bulb of milk. His big dark face was lined with concern, and he didn’t meet my gaze.
“Eighty years isn’t very long,” I observed.
“No. It could be enough, if we’re lucky.”
“But it isn’t as much as you had hoped for.”
“No.” His mouth was set. “Not at all.”
“What will you do?”
He didn’t answer. He took sips from his bulb, pulled at his rough face. I had never seen such an expression of uncertainty on his face before. I thought of it. He had committed much of his long life to the idea of the starship and its voyage. Suddenly the idea was realized!—and it was not as perfect as the idea had been; thus more dangerous. And he was filled with doubts. He now saw that he could be leading people to death; I saw it in his expression. That transition, from idea to reality, had had its usual effect on him—it had clarified the possibility of failure, heightened his sense of danger, frightened him.
“You could just take it back,” I said. “You could fly it into an Earth orbit and tell the Terrans what you’ve done and why. You could advocate a real starship. The Committee wouldn’t dare attack you in Earth space.”
He was shaking his head. “They wouldn’t have to. The American and Soviet military would do it for them. Board us and take us down and ask the Committee what they’d like done with us.”
“Not if the Committee’s been overthrown by this revolt you’ve told me about.”
“I doubt that will happen. The Committee controls too much, and they have the Earth powers behind them.”
“Well, you’ve got eighty years—you could play hide-and-seek in the system, radio Earth and Mars and tell them about yourselves, avoid capture until you become a cause célèbre and no one will dare harm you—”
Again he was shaking his head. “They’d just hunt us down. That isn’t what we did all this for.”
“But eighty years isn’t long enough for interstellar flight!”
“Yes, yes it is—”
“Oleg,” I said. “You can’t say it’s enough just because it might be enough to get you to one of the nearest stars. You’re going to have to search for a habitable planet, and eighty years isn’t enough time for that.”
He stared out the window, took several sips from his bulb. “But during that time,” he said, “we’ll improve the life-support system. And that will give us more time.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“We’ve got a lot of equipment and parts with us, and one of the finest system-design teams ever assembled. If they’re good enough, then we’ll have all the time we’ll need.”
I stared at him. “That’s a big if.”
He nodded, the worried expression still on his face. “I know it is. I just have to hope that the systems team is the best one it could possibly be.”
We sat in silence for a while longer, and then Ilene’s voice called Davydov back to some business or other, and I was left to brood over the meaning of that last statement of his. It wasn’t all that obscure, and I gritted my teeth as I felt the pressure mount.
Later that day, still feeling the slow progress of compression and transformation, I ate dinner with Swann. He was in an excellent mood, and talked at length about improvements made in the R and G of the starship. They were going to have to switch from acceleration to deceleration quite a few times, and now they would be able to do it using less fuel.
“What’s with you?” he asked, when he noticed how much of the conversation he was supplying.
“How are you going to get out of the solar system?” I replied. “Without the Committee police seeing your exhaust?”
“We’re going to keep something between us and them the whole time our rockets are firing. At first we’ll have the sun between us and Mars, then we’ll shut down until we meet with Saturn. Orbit it for a while, then coast out to Pluto.” He looked at me oddly. “That’s only a few open bursts. But you’ll keep this all a secret?”
“Unless they drag it out of me,” I said morosely. “Or drug it out of me. You’d probably better not tell me any more.”
“What’s this?”
“Duggins and Valenski plan to tell the Committee that I collaborted with you. I may end up on Amor, for all I know.”
“Oh my. Oh, Emma—you’ll have to deny their accusations. Most of the people returning will support you.”
“Maybe. It’s going to be a mess.”
“Here. I’m going to get a liter of wine.” They made a good white wine on Rust Eagle, with only a few vines. While he got it I tried to remember whether the starship would have any grapevines. No. Too much waste.
I proceeded to drink most of the wine, without responding much to Swann’s conversation. After dinner we went down to our rooms. In front of my door Eric kissed me, and almost angrily I kissed back, hard. Drunk.… “Let’s go to my room,” he said,
and I agreed, surprising myself. We went, and it never occurred to me, then, to wonder if this was exactly the man I had in mind to go to bed with.… In his room we turned off the lights and undressed as we floated about kissing. Making love was the usual clumsy, pleasant affair in the weightlessness—holding onto the bed, moving slowly at unfortunate moments, using the velcro straps. I lost myself in the sensations, marveling once again at how open lovers become to one another. I felt a surge of affection for this friend of mine, this cheerful and gentle man, this crazy exile fleeing from humanity. How to think of him? What was he fleeing, after all, but the turmoil and repression on Mars, the absolute madness of Earth, our home world, our home—fleeing all the hatred and war. If only they all understood, that everyone is as human as your lover is.… Maybe on the starship they would remember it, I thought disconsolately.
“Emma,” he said, as we floated quietly in our embrace. “Emma?”
“Yes?”
“Please come with us.”
“… Oh, Eric.”
“Please, Emma. We need you. It’ll be a good life, one of the great human lives. And I want you along. It will make all the difference for me—”
“Eric,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I want to live on Mars. That’s my home.”
“But—” He stopped, sighed.
We floated, and for once the weightlessness felt like gravity, gravity pressing from every direction. Tears leaked out of my eyes.
This was my chance to join humanity’s greatest voyage. I wished I hadn’t drunk so much. “I want to go back to my room,” I whispered. I switched on the desk lamp, retrieved my clothes from the air, avoided Eric’s sad gaze. I kissed him before I left.
“Think about it?” he said.
“Oh I will,” I said. “I will.…”
* * *
In the last few days they gutted the Rust Eagle, leaving it just able to get home. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne looked haggard. One day I helped them get their belongings together, as they were moving to the starship. Marie-Anne dabbed at her eyes and embraced me and the three of us stood there, a triad of sane femininity in a crazy world … but they left.
The bare empty room was very oppressive. I left it and floated through the ship, disdaining the velcro-and-balance routine, making lazy fingertip-turns to negotiate the frequent bends. I flew as if in a dream, touring the ship, refusing to acknowledge the few people I passed. It was night-time, the halls were dimmed to nothing but guidance lights. Occasional clumps of people sat in the lounges, talking softly, drink bulbs hovering over them like djinn-jars. They didn’t look up as I passed.
Through the quiet living quarters (in open doors people packed their goods to cross to the starship), up to the huge, dark bays at the top, amongst the mining equipment that was left, the waldoes like monsters or sad mangled robots, half seen in the shadows they cast. Down the long jump tube back to the power station, where it was bright, humming, empty. And then back up the tube to the bridge, where I stood before the broad window and looked across at the thing.
Well, I thought, there it is. I could go on the first flight to the stars. I felt that it somehow should have been more momentous, an invitation filled with ceremony: interviews by large committees, batteries of tests, acceptance by videogram, the attention of two worlds. Instead, two old miners fused by insubordinate friends—and me invited by these friends, including two men I had cared about for years. It didn’t seem right. I recalled all the stories in literature about interstellar flight, all the deranged, degenerate, incestuous little societies. Yet this expedition, its members living through and beyond the voyage, would not turn out like that. Or would it? Maybe the dream of the savannah would drive them mad. Suddenly I was acutely conscious of the fact that I was in a little bulb of air like an extended spacesuit—I was in a submarine, millions of fathoms deep in a vacuum ocean.
No, I could not go with them. They might be able to do it—if I went, Nadezhda and I could keep that life-support system working, surely—but I could not go. I needed to be able to walk on ground, bare Mars ground.
The vision of the books struck me again, and I saw the double ship floating out there empty, light years away, the skeleton of a failed idea.
I could prevent them from leaving. The thought made me glance furtively at the silent figures sitting at the ship’s controls. They ignored me.
I couldn’t do anything to the starship. But if I disabled Rust Eagle, they would be forced to—to what? They wouldn’t kill us, and so perhaps all would be saved.… There were key codes in Davydov’s cabin, that would open the cocks in the deuterium holds.
Without really thinking about it I drifted out of the bridge, and, still floating about like a disembodied spirit, I came to Davydov’s room off in a corner bend of the upper hall. The door was about a quarter open. It was light inside.
I tapped the door, holding the jamb beside it for support. No reply. I stuck my head in and looked around. Empty? A single desk lamp lit the room. I was about to put my feet to the velcro strip on the floor, but thought better of it—too noisy. I pushed the door open a little farther and slipped in.
He was asleep. He had put two chairs together, and was draped across them head and shoulders on one, knees on the other. His mouth hung open, and he breathed easily. Under the lamp I noticed that his hair had the same kinked texture as the velcro carpet below him.
For a long time I coasted through the air, watching his dark face, darker still in the shadows. He looked so ordinary.
On the desk, in the lamp’s gleam under a clamp, were a few scattered papers. I was already intruding; I tiptoed off a wall and floated over to look at them.
They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing. Under one sheet lay a compass and straight-edge. The diagrams were all circular, or near it: constructions made with several arcs of the compass, that resulted in circles flattened slightly on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil. I looked at a faint scrawl, written under a long series of numbers. “Something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all—” The penciling was smeared, as if by the back of a hand. The final dash trailed off across the page.
I stared at the little black rectangles for a long time, looking over at Davydov once or twice. Plans for a monument to themselves, to a group leaving all that humans knew and shared together. “Something to show we were here at all.…” Floating in the dark room, no sound but the airy hooooooo of the vents, the desolation began to fill me, the vacuum. We all will die. It was the first time in my life I had had that thought and truly believed it. The postponements we have devised make it easy not to think of, for it might be a millennium away. But it will come. The diagrams below me seemed like circles of gravestones. Designs for a tomb. That’s how we show we were here; that’s all we can do.
I floated over the sleeping man, stretched out horizontally above him. Even the exile wants to be remembered. This poor ragged group, with their stupid dream … I wished I were a succubus, and could possess him without his full awakening, without his becoming conscious and human. He breathed on. With a convulsive shudder I drifted away, touched off a wall to the door, slipped out and down the hall, my plan to disable the Eagle abandoned. It was not my part to interfere with anyone else’s method of dying, or of leaving their mark before.
Soon they all would be gone.
* * *
Back in my room I drifted off into a troubled sleep. Once I half woke and found myself wedged in a corner, lying upright beside the bed. I groped about until my hand hit a velcro strap, stuck it against the stick-strips on either side of me, and fell asleep again. It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped. I slept and slept, sleepfloated down to the toilet and back, slept yet again. I didn’t want to wake up. I was tired.
Many hours later I was awakened by a knock on the door. I burst out of my velcro strapping, landed on the far wall. I collected myself and answered the door.
It was Davydov. I blinked, confusing this moment with the last time I had seen him. Still dreaming.
“We’d like everybody to come over to the starship for a final meeting. It’ll be in a couple of hours.”
“Is it time?”
He nodded. “Would you like to go over there with me? I’m crossing in a little while.”
“Uh. Sure. Let me get myself together.”
After I had cleaned up I joined him in the boat bay, and we crossed the space separating the two ships. The starship looked the same, a work in progress.
Lermontov was emptier than I remembered. Davydov took me through the rough tunnel of the lock-tube connecting the two ships, and showed me the living quarters of Hidalgo: walls had been knocked out, and all of the bedrooms were twice as big as before. The hospital had been extended, mostly for storage space. We passed stacks of plastic boxes, one nearly blocking a hallway. “Still moving in,” Davydov said. He seemed full of quiet pride, the captain of a bright new spaceship, all of his doubts vanished in the night while mine had accumulated.
“I’m tired,” I complained.
We returned to the bridge of Lermontov. There was still some time before the meeting. After that, those of us returning would cross to Rust Eagle. It was time for the parting.
They were going to leave Rust Eagle one boat, and just enough fuel to accelerate to about fifty km/sec and decelerate again—that meant a weightless coast around the sun, for most of the return, in fact. I cursed when Davydov told me that. So sick of no-gee!