In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,
and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.
Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in
his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as
he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a
hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not
know.
"Damn," he gasped. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn."
He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There
were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and
buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged
through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.
The plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. He peeled it off, trying
not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. His body was slow,
inert, a thing to fight. There was no more feeling in his back, was he
dead already?
Redness flamed before his eyes, red like Valeria's hair blowing across
the stars. It was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the
patch over the hole in his suit. The adhesive gripped, drying fast in
the sucking vacuum. The patch bellied out from internal air pressure,
straining to break loose and kill him.
Bo's mind wavered back toward life. He opened the valves wide on his
tanks, and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. For
a long time he lay there, only lungs and heart had motion. His throat
felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air through it was like being
born again.
Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,
to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and
wanted to scream again.
Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled
as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot
trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must
have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off
the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably
wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through
a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.
He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the
gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three
hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.
It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars
and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping
back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and
sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on
an asteroid.
He wanted terribly to sleep.
* * * * *
There wasn't much room in the _Sirius_, the only privacy was gained by
drawing curtains across your bunk. Men without psych training could
get to hate each other on a voyage. Bo wondered if he would reach Luna
hating Einar Lundgard.
The man was competent, a willing worker, tempering his cheerfulness
with tact, always immaculate in the neat blue and white of the Fireball
Line which made Bo feel doubly sloppy in his own old gray coverall. He
was a fine conversationalist with an enormous stock of reminiscence and
ideas, witty above a certain passion of belief. It seemed as if he and
Valeria were always talking, animated voices like a sound of life over
the mechanical ship-murmurs, while Bo sat dumbly in a corner wishing he
could think of something to say.
The trouble was, in spite of all his efforts, he was doing a cometary
dive into another bad case of one-sided love. When she spoke in that
husky voice of hers, gray gleam of eyes under hair that floated flaming
in null-gee, the beauty he saw in her was like pain. And she was always
around. It couldn't be helped. Once they had gone into free fall he
could only polish so much metal and tinker with so many appliances;
after that they were crowded together in a long waiting.
--"And why were you all alone in the Belt?" asked Lundgard. "In spite
of all the romantic stories about the wild free life of the rockhound,
it's the dullest place in the System."
"Not to me," she smiled. "I was working. There were experiments to be
done, factors to be measured, away from solar radiation. There are
always ions around inside the orbit of Mars to jamble up a delicate
apparatus."
Bo sat quiet, trying to keep his eyes off her. She looked good in
shorts and half-cape. Too good.
"It's something to do with power beaming, isn't it?" Lundgard's
handsome face creased in a frown. "Afraid I don't quite understand.
They've been beaming power on the planets for a long time now."
"So they have," she nodded. "What we're after is an interplanetary
power beam. And we've got it." She gestured to the baggage rack and a
thick trunk full of papers she had put there. "That's it. The basic
circuits, factors, and constants. Any competent engineer could draw up
a design from them."
"Hmmm ... precision work, eh?"
"Obviously! It was hard enough to do on, say, Earth--you need a
_really_ tight beam in just the right frequencies, a feedback signal
to direct each beam at the desired outlet, relay stations--oh, yes,
it was a ten-year research project before they could even think about
building. An interplanetary beam has all those problems plus a number
of its own. You have to get the dispersion down to a figure so low
it hardly seems possible. You can't use feedback because of the time
lag, so the beams have to be aimed _exactly_ right--and the planets
are always moving, at miles per second. An error of one degree would
throw your beam almost two million miles off in crossing one A.U. And
besides being so precise, the beam has to carry a begawatt at least to
be worth the trouble. The problem looked insoluble till someone in the
Order of Planetary Engineers came up with an idea for a trick control
circuit hooked into a special computer. My lab's been working together
with the Order on it, and I was making certain final determinations for
them. It's finished now ... twelve years of work and we're done." She
laughed. "Except for building the stations and getting the bugs out!"
* * * * *
Lundgard cocked an oddly sardonic brow. "And what do you hope for from
it?" he asked. "What have the psychotechs decided to do with this
thing?"
"Isn't it obvious?" she cried. "Power! Nuclear fuel is getting scarcer
every day, and civilization is finished if we can't find another energy
source. The sun is pouring out more than we'll ever need, but sheer
distance dilutes it below a useful level by the time it gets to Venus.
"We'll build stations on the hot side of Mercury. Orbital stations
can relay. We can get the beams as far out as Mars without too much
dispersion. It'll bring down the rising price of atomic energy, which
is making all other prices rise, and stretch our supply of fissionables
for centuries more. No more fuel worries, no more Martians freezing to
death because a converter fails, no more clan feuds on Venus starting
over uranium beds--" The excited flush on her cheeks was lovely to look
at.
Lundgard shook his head. There was a sadness in his smile. "You're
a true child of the New Enlightenment," he said. "Reason will solve
everything. Science will find a cure for all our ills. Give man a cheap
energy source and leave him forever happy. It won't work, you know."
Something like anger crossed her eyes. "What are you?" she asked. "A
Humanist?"
"Yes," said Lundgard quietly.
Bo started. He'd known about the anti-psychotechnic movement which was
growing on Earth, seen a few of its adherents, but--
"I never thought a spaceman would be a Humanist," he stammered.
Lundgard shrugged wryly. "Don't be afraid. I don't eat babies. I don't
even get hysterics in an argument. All I've done is use the scientific
method, observing the world without preconceptions, and learned by it
that the scientific method doesn't have all the answers."
"Instead," said Valeria, scornfully, "we should all go back to church
and pray for what we want rather than working for it."
"Not at all," said Lundgard mildly. "The New Enlightenment is--or was,
because it's dying--a very natural state of mind. Here Earth had come
out of the World Wars, racked and ruined, starving and chaotic, and
all because of unbridled ideology. So the physical scientists produced
goods and machines and conquered the planets; the biologists found
new food sources and new cures for disease; the psychotechs built up
their knowledge to a point where the socio-economic unity could really
be planned and the plan worked. Man was unified, war had sunken to an
occasional small 'police action,' people were eating and had comfort
and security--all through applied, working science. Naturally they came
to believe reason would solve their remaining problems. But this faith
in reason was itself an emotional reaction from the preceding age of
unreason.
"Well, we've had a century of enlightenment now, and it has created its
own troubles which it cannot solve. No age can handle the difficulties
it raises for itself; that's left to the next era. There are practical
problems arising, and no matter how desperately the psychotechs work
they aren't succeeding with them."
"What problems?" asked Bo, feeling a little bewildered.
"Man, don't you ever see a newscast?" challenged Lundgard. "The Second
Industrial Revolution, millions of people thrown out of work by the
new automata. They aren't going hungry, but they are displaced and
bitter. The economic center of Earth is shifting to Asia, the political
power with it, and hundreds of millions of Asians are skeptical aboard
this antiseptic New Order the West has been bringing them: cultural
resistance, and not all the psychotechnic propaganda in the System can
shake it off. The men of Mars, Venus, the Belt, the Jovian moons are
developing their own civilizations--inevitably, in alien environments;
their own ways of living and thinking, which just don't fit into
the neat scheme of an Earth-dominated Solar Union. The psychotechs
themselves are being driven to oligarchic, unconstitutional acts; they
have no choice, but it's making them enemies.
"And then there's the normal human energy and drive. Man can only
be safe and sane and secure for so long, then he reacts. This New
Enlightenment is really a decadent age, a period where an exhausted
civilization has been resting under a holy status quo. It can't last.
Man always wants something new."
"You Humanists talk a lot about 'man's right to variability,'" said
Valeria. "If you really carry off that revolution your writings
advocate you'll just trade one power group for another--and more
fanatic, less lawful, than the present one."
"Not necessarily," said Lundgard. "After all, the Union will probably
break up. It can't last forever. All we want to do is hasten the day
because we feel that it's outlived its usefulness."
Bo shook his head. "I can't see it," he said heavily. "I just can't
see it. All those people--the Lunarites, the violent clansmen on
Venus, the stiff correct Martians, the asteroid rockhounds, even those
mysterious Jovians--they all came from Earth. It was Earth's help that
made their planets habitable. We're all men, all one race."
"A fiction," said Lundgard. "The human race is a fiction. There are
only small groups with their own conflicting interests."
"And if those conflicts are allowed to break into war--" said Valeria.
"Do you know what a lithium bomb can do?"
There was a reckless gleam in Lundgard's eyes. "If a period of
interplanetary wars is necessary, let's get it over with," he answered.
"Enough men will survive to build something better. This age has
gotten stale. It's petrifying. There have been plenty of shake-ups in
history--the fall of Rome, the Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, the
World Wars. It's been man's way of progressing."
"I don't know about all those," said Bo slowly. "I just know I wouldn't
want to live through such a time."
"You're soft," said Lundgard. "Down underneath you're soft." He laughed
disarmingly. "Pardon me. I didn't mean anything personal. I'll never
convince you and you'll never convince me, so let's keep it friendly. I
hope you'll have some free time on Luna, Valeria. I know a little grill
where they serve the best synthosteaks in the System."
"All right," she smiled. "It's a date."
Bo mumbled some excuse and went aft. He was still calling her Dr.
McKittrick.