Futures Past (28 page)

  
"You forgot to strap me in," Forsythe broke in weakly, but with an undercurrent of pleasure or excitement in his voice. His lips made a death's head smile and he added, "Or maybe, considering what you've just said, you used a Freudian slip-knot...,"

  
Cracks at a time like this ... thought Herdman, ashamed at the comparison with his own manner and feelings.

  
". . . But you're getting on top of it now, Mr. Herd-man," he continued, slowly but enthusiastically. "Piloting Ramsey, I mean. I was watching you. I've never seen anyone's hands move so fast!"

  
"Slow, Doctor," Herdman said soberly, "for a pilot."

  
Sighing, Herdman tried to explain what fast meant to a spaceship captain and what an approach and landing entailed. Even captains in charge of their own vessels had to practice constantly to keep their hands in, he explained, and used taped data fed randomly into a panel which was otherwise dead. The dry runs were always difficult, always unexpected in the problems they threw out. And very often the problems had to be solved faster than thought. They had to be solved automatically, instinctively, without thought.

  
In the old days a bird could be thrown into space and, with all systems Go and an incredible amount of luck all around, it could be soft-landed with a small instrument package on another planetary body. Five hundred tons of rocket and associated electronic gadgetry to land fifty pounds of instruments. But when manned space-flight arrived, economies of weight, fuel and mechanisms became necessary. The people on the ground were no longer responsible for everything, they merely hoisted the bird aloft and pointed it where it was supposed to go. They didn't load it down with telemetering devices—if anything went wrong there was a pilot to tell them all about it. Neither did they use ninety percent of the available pay-load fitting automatic, and often fallible, landing equipment. There was a pilot to take care of that, too. A pilot was a hundred times lighter and more dependable than any servomechanism ever built, and his rigorous training and deep-level conditioning enabled him to operate at very nearly the same speed.

  
As one of his instructors had told him during training, a man was not simply fitted for space, he was physically and psychologically machined to fit both space and his spaceship. Exactly. The way a nut fitted a bolt. . . .

  
". . . And this nut," said Herdman grimly, tapping him-self on the chest and nodding at the panels surrounding him, "does not fit this bolt."

  
"This nut . . ." began Forsythe, and coughed. He went on, "Your instructor was not without a sense of humor. But can't you force the thread a little? After all, man is the most adaptable machine there is, and you've done very well so far. In another ten days ..."

  
Again Herdman tried to explain that Ramsey wasn't his ship—it wasn't even his old ship's sister, there was no family resemblance at all. The instruments were in the wrong places, at awkward angles and distances from his hands. She was different in a hundred more subtle ways. Even her paintwork was wrong—a cold, unfriendly combination of white and cool green. Herdman's control room had been warm gray with the main panels done in a deep, rich brown—those colors were keyed to his personality, the psychologists had told him, and were very important to his emotional stability.

  
The doctor was following every word that he said, and probably thought that he understood. But Herdman knew that he didn't.

  
"I'll do another run," said Herdman suddenly. "You watch. You'll see that I move fast, but with a certain jerkiness—I'm having to stop and think...."

  
The forward vision screen remained blank but all the other instruments—approach radar, hull temperature, atmosphere density and turbulence and a dozen others-— were sending him a picture plainer than any screen could show of a planetary surface swooping up to meet him. His controls were not many for a reactor landing—jet deflectors and thrust control, mainly, but it was a matter of anticipation and feel more than anything else. There wasn't time to look at the instruments and then think what to do. So his hands moved fast, faster. Sweat popped on his forehead and hung stubbornly in the air before his eyes. He groaned and tried to move faster still. and suddenly all the instruments were at zero and he joined his shaking hands across his chest in a gesture that was almost one of prayer.

  
"Well," said Forsythe admiringly, "we're down. That seemed fast, and smooth enough, too. I only saw you fumble once."

  
Herdman grunted and a few seconds later began questioning the doctor about Ramsey's condition. He didn't have the heart to tell Forsythe that he had still been correcting for wind deflection at twenty thousand feet when the instruments said they were down. They would have been down, all right, in a thirty-foot-deep grave they had just dug for themselves.

  
Five days out Herdman began preparation for lightening ship, tracking down each item of cargo or movable equipment and carefully estimating its weight. All of the cargo could be jettisoned, also all the personal possessions of everyone aboard, much of the water and air regeneration gear—including all the precious greenery when every last drop of moisture had been squeezed from it and transferred to the fuel tank. That would be one of the last things done, of course, because he would first have to replenish the ship's emergency air tanks and those of the passengers' suits. When he had totaled all the disposable weight he went over Brett's figures again.

  
There still wasn't enough fuel, but what they had fell so little short of the minimum requirement that he had to try for a landing.

  
The thought came that he might jettison a passenger —he had the figures of their respective weights as well as those of their baggage and the cargo. But he thrust the thought firmly out of his mind and began busying himself with lightening ship.

  
All the small stuff he tossed out of the airlock in different directions. He did this because a ship in distress was supposed to give all possible information regarding the cause of its trouble in the hope that a similar accident could be guarded against. When ground radar on Mars picked him up that debris would have traveled so far that Ramsey would show as a point of light surrounded by a large, fuzzy trace—a clear indication that he was short of fuel. Because they would already have been trying unsuccessfully to raise him, they would know that Ramsey had no radio. It wasn't much data he was giving them, but it was the best he could do. The larger stuff—heavy machinery, the pressure containers which the manifest said contained paint, the spare spacesuits—he let drift outside the ship. They would fall ahead immediately when he applied thrust and there was no point wasting energy in pushing them away.

  
He was supposed to be saving his strength for the landing.

  
With two days to go the food ran out. All of the food, including his own. Herdman's allowance had been calculated to last him until the final day of the voyage— he was supposed to take a meal a few hours before landing, in fact. But Ramsey and Wallace had seemed to be dying a couple of days earlier and he had increased their ration. This had been a very stupid thing to do; but it had been just after a particularly unsuccessful session at the controls and Herdman had felt that it didn't matter much whether he was physically fit during the landing or not when he was going to kill them all anyway.

  
And now all the passengers looked as if they were dying. Their white, skeletal faces were turned outward from their bunks and their eyes were open, but they didn't seem to see him when he passed. Some of them didn't move even when he disturbed their blankets to feel for the fast, incredibly weak pulse at their wrists.

  
It was later on the same day that he discovered an error in their flight path. Considering the distance they had come the error was trifling, but it required five seconds' thrust at one-quarter G to correct it and they were already on a negative safety margin of fuel....

  
One effect of the course correction was that the passengers, feeling the ship under power again, began to show some interest in things again. Herdman used the period of increased awareness to explain the landing drill as it would affect them. How at minus eighteen hours he would perform the prelanding checks and put everyone into spacesuits with the helmets left open. This was so that they would be on ship's air for as long as possible. At minus three hours he would seal them up, blow all the moisture which might be locked in the air purifiers and plumbing into the fuel tank, and dump everything that was movable out the airlock. The fuel and food situation being what it was there would be no stooging around in orbit. They would drop straight in.

  
All the time he talked loudly and reassuringly, as if it were a simple matter of time before they were down on Mars being cared for.

  
He wanted them to die as happy as possible. Herd-man thought he owed them that much at least.

  
After dragging its feet for so long, time began suddenly to race by. He practiced dry runs every chance he got, and his chronometer told him that he was doing steadily worse instead of better. Forsythe had said that a human being was the most adaptable machine there was, but Herdman's ability to adapt seemed to have been trained, conditioned, out of him. He had been fitted to operate in a spaceship, Ms own spaceship. The things which the psychologists had done to him were basic and beyond the influence of logical thought processes. He was trying to force himself to fit a ship which was not his own, and he felt that the ship hated what he was doing as much as he hated doing it. But he had to make friends with this cold, hostile, awkward ship. For a few hours he had to make her do what he wanted.

  
The prelanding checks took longer than he had expected. Herdman felt very weak and he seemed to be fumbling a lot, and it was minus fourteen hours when he started the long, heart-breaking job of putting the passengers into their suits. The first thing he discovered was that he would have to leave off their gauntlets temporarily as well as the helmets—he had forgotten, because the process had been so gradual, how long their fingernails had become. The gauntlets wouldn't fit until he trimmed their nails.

  
All at once Herdman felt revolted by these brittle, dry, horribly emaciated bodies and the empty, staring eyes-most of them seemed too far gone to know either hope or fear or even hunger. Yet he had had to do much worse things than cut their nails for them. His revulsion changed suddenly to anger and then guilt. It wasn't fair that they should be unknowing and uncaring of what was going to happen to them. He should have told them all long ago, and insisted that they listen and understand. Now his load of guilt was too heavy. He had to unload it on somebody if only to ask forgiveness.

  
He began to shake Forsythe's suit, hearing and feeling the doctor's body moving loosely inside it, talking softly and earnestly into the open face plate. He wasn't sure what he said exactly except that his guilt and his helplessness and his dilemma with the controls figured largely in the passionate monologue, and that after a long time he stopped because the doctor was trying to say something.

  
Putting his ear close to Forsythe's lips he said gently, "What was that, Doctor?"

  
"Maybe you got . . . wrong end ... of the stick." Forsythe whispered in a feeble, unutterably weary voice. The rest of what he said was slurred and unintelligible.

  
"What did you say?"

  
The doctor made a supreme effort to control his breath and tongue. "Got to adapt," he whispered carefully. "But adapt... adaptability... works both ways...."

  
He said nothing coherent after that, but he had said enough. As Herdman kicked himself toward the control room he asked himself viciously if he had been conditioned to have a one-track mind or was he just naturally stupid....

  
The ship's tool kit had not yet been jettisoned and Herdman attacked the control panels, unbolting or cutting away everything that would move and that was in the wrong place. Some of the gear would not be necessary for a reactor landing and could be moved without regard for connecting wiring. But other pieces he had to move, sometimes only a few inches, with the associated plumbing remaining intact. Sometimes these necessary items did not possess the right type of lugs or brackets to fit their new positions, and Herdman wired them or stuck them in place with sealing compound. The compound might not be strong enough to hold under thrust, but it would do until he could think of something better—if he had time to think of something better.