Futures Past (27 page)

  
One man and one ship, he thought helplessly, 'til death do us part....

  
When he left the cone Herdman had accomplished nothing. He wanted to tell the passengers that their voluntary starvation was an utter waste of time. But they were all, with the exception of the doctor, strapped to their bunks. Ramsey was strapped firmly into Forsythe's bunk and the doctor was tethered loosely to it where he could keep the injured man under observation. All eyes went to Herdman as soon as he appeared, but nobody spoke— they were taking the rest business very seriously, it seemed. Herdman went past them without speaking, pretending that he had something to do in the cargo hold.

  
At the end of the third week they were still taking it seriously. Herdman had had to adjust the air and water purifying equipment several times because they were using less oxygen than expected and Forsythe had advised them to drink plenty to blunt the pangs of hunger. Herdman suspected that the doctor was conning them in this, but since it was in a good cause he didn't question it. And anyway, they had plenty of water for drinking even if there wasn't enough for landing.

  
Wallace and Ramsey had grown very thin and Brett appeared fatter and flabbier. But appearances were deceptive—it was simply that his skin was getting a little too large for him and, in the weightless condition, what adipose he had left tended to wobble more. Forsythe had grown positively bony and his practically nonexistent paunch had long since disappeared.

  
Herdman felt obliged to mention it one day while he was helping the doctor give Ramsey a bath in the fuel tank.

  
"You should allow yourself a little more food, Doctor," he said. "You seem to be working on a one-inch bulge for a very long time."

  
"Always was a small eater," said Forsythe shortly.

  
In addition to the" tanks and breathing masks from their suits they had headsets directly connected by cable. They could speak without being overheard, but even then the sentences were kept short because to speak at all was against the law.

  
"All the same," Herdman said as another thought occurred to him, "you should bring yourself level with Wallace and the captain here. Unless you're already passing your ration on to Ramsey, because he's—"

  
"If I had any to spare," the doctor interrupted sharply, "I'd pass them to you. I'm a practical man and you are in a position just now to save more lives than I could."

  
Which made Herdman remember his continued lack of success in the control room. He changed the subject hastily.

  
"I'm not an expert on this," he said carefully, "but it seems to me that the physical effort of talking—moving the tongue and so on—is not noticeably greater than the effort of breathing. Do we have to impose this absolute silence?"

  
"No," said the doctor, then added quickly, "but I think that if we'd talked all the time we'd have done nothing but bellyache all day long, which would have been very detrimental to morale. And anyway, silence is said to be good for the soul. It's a form of mental discipline, and discipline of the mind is something we are going to need badly in the weeks to come.. .."

  
Herdman could not see the doctor although they were both holding Ramsey and so were only a few feet from each other. The half-liquid, half-gaseous contents of the tank, stirred into slow turbulence by their entry and illuminated by its interior lighting, made a sparkling, opaque curtain between them. Only when Forsythe moved between one of the lights and himself did he see a vague, distorted picture that was like a scene observed through cut glass.

  
But the water had mass if no weight. As it curled and crawled along and around the tank it tugged and pushed at their bodies like a gentle, irresistible giant. It was an exhilarating experience, Herdman thought, or would have been if the circumstances had been different. He wondered why nobody had thought of using the reactor fuel tank as a swimming pool before now.

  
". . . In a few days' time," Forsythe resumed suddenly, "I'm going to suggest that a little talking will do us no harm. Say for an hour before and after, uh, lunch. By then I think the novelty of being able to talk again will keep everyone from dwelling too much on the menu— a case of trying to satisfy our hunger with a gabfest. . . ."

  
From the fourth until halfway through the eight week Forsythe's idea worked as he had hoped it would, although the first few days the discussions were practically welded onto the subject of food. But the passengers were all above the average in intelligence and they realized quickly when a discussion was totally unproductive, so they moved onto other subjects and gradually the two-hour talking period became almost a game with them.

  
There were few rules to the game other than the main one which stated that the two-hour period must not be exceeded. For twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours when they were not trying to sleep, the passengers lay silently framing their arguments and polishing their delivery in readiness for those two glorious hours when they would be allowed to talk. And when the verbal flood-gates were opened the result was very often bedlam. But there were occasions when the debates soared and scintillated and other times when, had Herdman not known that they were all strapped into their bunks, he would have been sure that they were tearing each other to pieces.

  
Although he was no longer under sedation, Captain Ramsey spoke very little. Herdman himself was not invited to join the discussions, but he could not help but hear everything from his position in the cone.

  
On the second day of the eighth week Ramsey hung midway between a sapphire called Earth and a dull-looking ruby that was Mars, and half of the voyage was over. The rest, the passengers told themselves repeatedly, was all downhill. But soon afterward the talking among each other diminished sharply, became listless and sporadic. When Herdman mentioned it to the doctor he was told that talking constantly for two hours had become too much of an effort for him.

  
Herdman was ragingly hungry all the time, and Forsythe kept telling him that he was getting just enough food to make him aware all the time that he hadn't nearly enough, while everyone else had reached the stage where their stomachs had begun to shrink so that they felt weak rather than hungry. He said that he felt sorry for Mr. Herdman. But there was no way of telling whether the doctor was sincere or indulging in a little irony because his voice had weakened so much and the skin was so tightly stretched across his face that reading tone or expression were impossible.

  
Wallace and Brett were terribly weak and emaciated also, and Captain Ramsey had shrunk until the cast around his broken arm and shoulder became useless and had to be cut away. The arm was strapped to his side now, and Ramsey was so thin that Forsythe said he could almost see the damage without benefit of X rays and that the prognosis was very favorable provided the patient received the proper treatment.

  
Very little effort was needed to move about the ship. The push of a finger was enough to send a body drifting in the direction of the heads or the tank or wherever one wanted to go. But by the tenth week Herdman thought it better to accompany the men when they visited the tank. The daily dunk in the tank was about the only pleasure remaining to them, but they were so weakened physically that there was danger of them not being able to secure their masks properly and drowning.

  
When he was helping them in and out of the tank lock they rarely spoke to him, with the exception of the doctor, and did not seem to want to look him in the eye. But they always stared at, and seemed to gain reassurance from, the tiny circles tattooed on his neck, chest and back which had been the markers for the space medics' electrodes taped to him during training orbits. And as the days passed more and more often they complained of feeling cold, although the internal temperature of the ship was comfortably high. He increased it several times but still they complained of feeling cold. Finally he wrapped blankets around them and they stopped complaining, even when he lowered the temperature again.

  
He didn't have to ask Forsythe to know that it had been a psychological thing, that they felt warmer and more secure when wrapped in blankets like children....

  
And gradually he could see their feelings changing toward him, softening. He was the person, Herdman realized suddenly, who washed them, fed them and wrapped them up warmly for the night. When he was doing these things, or even when he was simply moving through the passenger lounge; their eyes followed him trustingly—he even caught Ramsey doing it.

  
But their trust was misplaced, Herdman told himself angrily, because he was making very little progress in adapting himself to Ramsey's ship. And he was terribly, agonizingly hungry. When the job of distributing rations fell to him because the doctor had become too weak— in spirit as well as flesh, Forsythe insisted—the effort to keep from increasing his allowance took everything he had.

  
But the passengers did not always behave like frightened, trusting children. There was the occasion when Wallace unstrapped himself from his bunk while Herdman was busy in the cone and made himself violently ill by trying to eat the contents of one of the trays of green goo in the air unit—a highly specialized, nauseous but not poisonous species of plant life which was responsible for recycling their air. On that occasion he reminded them all quietly that they could eat the stuff or breathe but not both, that to get any good from the stuff they would need four stomachs like a cow, and that henceforth he would strap them into their bunks in such a way that only he could let them out.

  
Then there was the time when he was bringing Brett from the tank, and Brett began whispering urgently to him, suggesting a way of saving weight and helping the food situation at the same time. His idea was that they eat somebody and discard the inedible remains. At present it looked as if they were all going to die of starvation with the exception of Herdman, and this way at least three of them would survive for sure. Brett didn't care much who the somebody was, although he expected that it wouldn't be himself because he had suggested the idea...

  
Later, when he was dunking Forsythe, Herdman told the doctor about it.

  
Forsythe's lips drew back in a grimace that looked horrible but was probably meant for a smile. He said weakly, "Surprised it wasn't suggested sooner. To be expected ... in the circumstances. Don't see why you're ... so angry about it."

  
"I'm angry," said Herdman grimly, "because the damn fool made my mouth water."

  
"Oh," said Forsythe.

  
Several minutes later he said, "A person who talks about doing these things ... rarely does them."

  
His tone seemed lacking in confidence.

  
At fourteen weeks out, Earth was a tiny blue jewel far astern and Mars hung in the blackness ahead like a big orange ball that had been slightly smudged with handling. The passengers and Ramsey were incredibly emaciated. They had no inclination to speak, they scarcely seemed to breathe and only their eyes moved when Herd-man passed them. With just their faces showing above the blankets, faces that were little more than skulls covered with skin and hair, it was becoming difficult to tell them apart. He was no medical man, and in the circumstances he couldn't very well ask the doctor but he very much doubted if they could last another two weeks.

  
He wondered if he could pare down his own rations enough to help them, but reminded himself how thin his own body had become and how he had grayed-out momentarily a couple of days back when he had moved his head suddenly. Then he wondered if it really made any difference, because he wasn't doing well in the control room anyway.

  
Then ten days out from Mars, when Herdman was running through his fourth simulated landing in a row and trying desperately to coax a fraction more speed and accuracy out of hands which felt like two left feet, he became suddenly aware of Forsythe hanging over him.

  
"How the blazes did you get out?" he snapped, then at once softened his tone. "Sorry, Doctor. I'm not angry —at you, that is. And now you're here maybe you can help me. Basically it is a problem of psychology . . ."