Futures Past (37 page)

  
There was a pause. Gregg could imagine Allerton in the control room, weighing things in his mind, wondering how much he should divulge for general distribution. Then the second pilot spoke a few crisp sentences and Gregg had the picture as the other saw it.

  
"Is that all?" Gregg almost laughed in relief.

  
"That, as you put it, is plenty." Something in Allerton's voice made him feel vaguely uneasy again. "Don't, of course, mention the radioactivity to the passengers—it isn't immediately important and would only frighten them. Better get cracking on it now."
               
—

  
Gregg left for the passenger salon.

  
The strains of a slow waltz—played with great feeling by an orchestra that seemed to be all string section—met him as he entered the salon, and, badly out of time with the music, eighteen hammocks swung wildly to and fro. Gregg quickly began moving among the hammock cables, loosening alternate pairs so as to destroy their equilibrium and bring them to rest. He saw at once that there were no casualties. The mere fact of the passengers staying put instead of trying to escape from the acceleration hammocks had saved them the bruises and abrasions suffered by Peterson and himself. A few of them were looking a bit green, Gregg thought. To be on the safe side he gave them some simple instructions and a plastic bag each. He went to the tape-player, turned off the music, and tried to look competent and reassuring.

  
They were a pretty varied bunch, Gregg saw; not the type to panic easily. Construction and -mining engineers, ecological technicians, and representatives of the Earth-based business concerns that supplied machinery and material to the flourishing Mars colony, were the sort of people that made up the passenger lists of most inter- planetary ships. The occasional tourist had to be extremely wealthy to indulge in space travel purely for sightseeing. Gregg pulled himself across the room to a hammock where a small, frail-seeming woman of about sixty was lying with her eyes closed, apparently unconscious.

  
This would undoubtedly be a tourist. She probably had the constitution of a plough-horse, he thought bitterly as he reached out to shake the bony shoulder, otherwise she'd never have been allowed to travel at all. But his bitterness, he knew, was born chiefly of envy—envy of a physical condition which, unlike his own, could take normal acceleration indefinitely. He didn't allow the feeling to show in his voice as he began reassuringly: "You're perfectly safe, ma'am. There is no danger—"

  
He broke off in surprise as the old woman opened her eyes slowly, twinkled them at him, and said: "I'm all right, son. I was just thinking." The voice sounded small and frail like the rest of her. "I was wondering what could have hit us such a wallop way out here." She shook her head in gentle bewilderment, and began talking to herself about cometary orbits and meteorite shoals—all in the highly rarefied language of calculus! Gregg, aware that his mouth was hanging open, shut it and did a mental double take. What sort of tourist was this ...?

  
His baffled, faintly amused speculation was abruptly cut short as a hand gripped his elbow—the sore one—and pain exploded through his whole arm. Gasping, he squirmed free and faced around. But he choked back the rush of angry words when he saw the passenger clearly.

  
"Yes?" he asked, trying to keep his voice and features neutral. He didn't think he succeeded very well.

  
"W-what happened to us?" The voice was low and would have been pleasant but for the discordance of fear and uncertainty running through it. Her hair was long and black, and—due to the absence of gravity—tufts of it stuck out in all directions. It reminded Gregg of a medusa, or maybe a drunken golliwog. He almost forgot the throbbing in his arm. As she brushed a tangle of hair out of her eyes, Gregg saw two things—they were a nice blue color, and there was a glint of anger coming into them. The anger seemed to be directed at him.

  
Obviously she had misread his expression after grabbing his arm, Gregg thought; she must have thought his grimace denoted barely concealed anger and disgust at her show of cowardice, or something like that. Women! He shook his head; he couldn't let her go on thinking like that. After all he'd been in a worse funk five minutes ago himself.

  
"I don't know exactly, miss," Gregg began,
 
"but—"

  
"How bad is it, mister?" a voice cut in roughly. "What chance have we got of—"

  
"What hit us?" a third voice shouted. In a few seconds everybody was talking at once. Gregg wriggled away from another hand reaching for his mistreated elbow and yelled, "Quiet!" With a little twinge of shame then he remembered that he was supposed to be polite to passengers and added, "Please." The babble of voices died.

  
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, hoping he sounded briskly confident—the way a proper crewman giving reassurance about some very minor mishap should sound. "You are in no immediate danger. As far as we know you are in no danger at all." He smiled, then went on. "But in case some of you may become worried unnecessarily, I'll explain the position as we know it."

  
As /know it, Gregg amended silently to himself. He was beginning to wonder if Allerton had told him the whole truth. Aloud, he said: "We were struck by a body of unknown size, fortunately moving at a speed relatively slow with respect to ours. The collision caused certain safety devices to go into operation, one of which automatically shut off our A-Drive and leaving us in our present weightless condition.

  
"The collision may have damaged our outer hull—but as not a single puncture has been discovered inside the ship, the damage, if any, must be slight. We have power, light, and an adequate air supply, so you can see that there is very little to worry about. A meteor either kills you or it just isn't worth bothering about.

  
"However, we're rather afraid that the premature shutting down of the A-Drive will make course corrections necessary, which will cause a few hours delay in our scheduled time of arrival. . . ." Gregg was ad-libbing a bit, but he knew enough to be pretty sure something like that would happen. Besides, it was sound psychology to be overly apologetic about a small thing; people rarely suspected then that there was anything big to merit apology.

  
". . . We are sorry about this and hope that it won't inconvenience anyone too much."

  
Gregg looked quickly at the faces of all the drifting bodies which englobed him. They showed expressions of great relief, and little, if any, fear. There would be no panic, which was something. He said: "I suggest you all remain here and take it easy. The crew are very busy men at a time like this, and you'd probably get in their way if you went wandering about the ship—even though most of you would be anxious only to help us. The customary ten-minute warning will be given before we begin acceleration." "

  
As Gregg moved toward the salon's exit, somebody said plaintively, "But we're not ^supposed to be hit by meteors. The probability against that happening . . ." The voice trailed off into silence.

  
"I know," Gregg agreed. "But just think, you all qualify for the Googol Club now." He was trying to catch the dark-haired girl's eyes, but she'd moved toward her hammock again, still angry with him. He shook his head; what difference did it make anyway? And he shouldn't allow himself to be sidetracked at a time like this. He was needed in the control room.

  
On the way out he restarted the tape player. The soothing strains of that wonderful string orchestra oozed from the matched wall speakers, and was quickly drowned by a rising hubbub of conversation.

  
"Chess, anyone?"

  
"Why can't we have modern stuff? This old-fashioned music just puts me to sleep ..."

  
"What's a googol anyway?"

  
The panel sliding into position behind him brought silence.

  
Membership in the very exclusive Googol Club should please them, Gregg thought as he pulled himself toward the nose section. Space was so big, and spaceships so relatively tiny, that in fifteen years of space flight less than sixty people had qualified. A well-known mathematician of a few decades back had coined the word "googol" in order to describe probabilities of an extremely low order —virtual impossibilities, in fact. A "googol" was the numeral one followed by one million noughts, a very large number indeed, and one that came closest to stating the chances against meteoric collision in space. The Googol Club was an apt name.

  
The trouble was, Gregg thought grimly, in most cases the candidate died on attaining membership.

  
The control room was smaller even than he'd expected, and it was crammed with kicking, floundering bodies. It looked, Gregg thought, like an overcrowded goldfish bowl. Then he had another look and saw that there were only six people excluding himself present, and that the confusion was fairly orderly.

  
Three men were moving rapidly about exchanging dial readings and technicalities among themselves in low, urgent voices. A fourth hung over an acceleration chair containing a fifth, working over him and looking concerned. From the amount of gold braid worn by the figure in the chair Gregg knew that it was Captain Ferguson—and he really did look sick. The sixth man, who occupied the other acceleration chair, looked up as Gregg entered. His voice identified him as the second pilot, Allerton.

  
"I overheard you with the passengers," he said curtly, nodding at a speaker near him. "Nice work." Allerton's eyes shifted quickly to the recumbent captain then, and there was silence. Gregg, feeling awkward, had his mouth half open to acknowledge the compliment. He shut it again; nobody was looking at him, everybody's eyes were on Allerton.

  
The second pilot was young, Gregg saw; very young— and he wasn't enjoying this situation at all. His thin, serious face was a pale, expressionless mask, but something that was very nearly panic was reflected in his frightened eyes. The chief pilot, or captain, was the supreme authority on any spaceship; after him responsibility devolved upon the second pilot. But the overwhelming responsibility that had descended on Allerton was too much for him apparently, he wanted to get out from under it. Gregg understood and felt sorry for him—and considerably more anxious for the safety of himself and the rest of the Wallaby's passengers, if this was what they had to depend on.

  
Allerton said suddenly: "Mercer, what do you think?" His tone was brisk, none of the emotions he was feeling were allowed to show in it.

  
The man working over the captain looked up. He wasn't much older than Allerton, but his mouth had a cynical twist to it that made him look as though he was. "I can't tell how serious it is without an X-ray," he said slowly, and shot a meaningful look at the main control panel. "But one thing I can tell you, he isn't fit for duty."

  
There was another silence, during which the crew continued to stare at Allerton.

  
Abruptly the second pilot seemed to get a grip on himself. To Gregg the other still looked desperately afraid and unsure of himself underneath those rigidly disciplined features, but now the fear and anxiety were different somehow, as if sealed off in some separate compartment of his mind.

  
"Right," Allerton said. "You'd better leave him then, and take Gregg here and start checking the outer hull. That is the more important half of your job at the moment." To Gregg he said: "Mercer will show you what needs doing; go with him. And thank you for your assistance up to now, Mr. Gregg. We appreciate it."

  
The thanks, Gregg thought as he followed Mercer out of the control room, must have been a mere formula of words, a polite afterthought which Gregg's non-crew status made necessary. But Gregg didn't mind Allerton treating him as one of the crew. He hadn't minded it ten years ago ...

  
Ten years ago.

  
Gregg had been engineer on the Allendyne, a two-man freighter and one of the first to be powered solely by the Allen Drive. The A-Drive, though a fast and highly-economical method of propulsion, had one serious drawback—it couldn't function within an atmosphere. That drawback didn't apply to the Allendyne however, because she was designed to remain in the vacuum of space until she fell apart through old age. Small, chemically-powered ferry rockets loaded or unloaded her cargoes while she held orbit well out in space. She was a slab-sided, aesthetically repulsive contraption—girders and grapples and cargo netting sprouted all over her—but functionally she was just about perfect. And she was fast.