Podkayne of Mars (11 page)

Captain Darling picked a delay of twenty-five seconds, for where we were and what he expected from the weather reports. I asked him how he picked it and he just grinned without looking happy and said, “I asked my grandfather’s ghost.”

Five times while I was in the control room the officer of the watch started that clock . . . and five times contact with Hermes Station was picked up again before time ran out and the switch was opened.

The sixth time the seconds trickled away while all of us held our breaths . . . and contact with Hermes wasn’t picked up again and the alarm sounded like the wakeful trump of doom.

The Captain looked stony-faced and turned to duck down the hatch into the radiation shelter. I didn’t move, because I expected to be allowed to remain in the control room. Strictly speaking, the control room is part of the radiation shelter, since it is just above it and is enclosed by the same layers of cascade shielding.

(It’s amazing how many people think that a captain controls his ship by peering out a port as if he were driving a sand wagon. But he doesn’t, of course. The control room is inside, where he can watch things much more accurately and conveniently by displays and instruments. The only viewport in the
Tricorn
is one at the top end of the main axis, to allow passengers to look out at the stars. But we have never been headed so that the mass of the ship would protect that sightseeing room from solar radiation, so it has been locked off this whole trip.)

I knew I was safe where I was, so I hung back, intending to take advantage of being “teacher’s pet”—for I certainly didn’t want to spend hours or days stretched out on a shelf with gabbling and maybe hysterical women crowding me on both sides.

I should have known. The Captain hesitated a split second as he started down the hatch and snapped, “Come along, Miss Fries.”

I came. He
always
calls me “Poddy”—and his voice had spank in it.

Third-class passengers were already pouring in, since they have the shortest distance to go, and crew members were mustering them into their billets. The crew has been on emergency routine ever since we first were warned by Hermes Station, with their usual one watch in three replaced by four hours on and four hours off. Part of the crew had been staying dressed in radiation armor (which must be
very
uncomfortable) and simply hanging around passenger country. They can’t take that heavy armor off for any reason at all until their reliefs show up, dressed also in armor. These crewmen are the “chasers” who bet their lives that they can check every passenger space, root out stragglers, and still reach the shelter fast enough not to accumulate radiation poisoning. They are all volunteers and the chasers on duty when the alarm sounds get a big bonus and the other half of them who were lucky enough not to be on duty get a little bonus.

The Chief Officer is in charge of the first section of chasers and the Purser is in charge of the second—but they don’t get any bonus even though the one on duty when the alarm sounds is by tradition and law the last man to enter the safety of the shelter. This hardly seems fair . . . but it is considered their honor as well as their duty.

Other crewmen take turns in the radiation shelter and are equipped with mustering lists and billeting diagrams.

Naturally, service has been pretty skimpy of late, with so many of the crew pulled off their regular duties in order to do just one thing and do it
fast
at the first jangle of the alarm. Most of these emergency-duty assignments have to be made from the stewards and clerks; engineers and communicators and such usually can’t be spared. So state rooms may not be made up until late afternoon—unless you make your own bed and tidy your room yourself, as I had been doing—and serving meals takes about twice as long as usual, and lounge service is almost nonexistent.

But of course the passengers realize the necessity for this temporary mild austerity and are grateful because it is all done for safety.

You think so? My dear, if you believe that, you will believe anything. You haven’t Seen Life until you’ve seen a rich, elderly Earthman deprived of something he feels is his rightful due, because he figures he paid for it in the price of his ticket. I saw one man, perhaps as old as Uncle Tom and certainly old enough to know better, almost have a stroke. He turned purple, really purple and gibbered—all because the bar steward didn’t show up on the bounce to fetch him a new deck of playing cards.

The bar steward was in armor at the time and couldn’t leave his assigned area, and the lounge steward was trying to be three places at once and answer stateroom rings as well. This didn’t mean anything to our jolly shipmate; he was threatening to sue the Line and all its directors, when his speech became incoherent.

Not everybody is that way, of course. Mrs. Grew, fat as she is, has been making her own bed and she is never impatient. Some others who are ordinarily inclined to demand lots of service have lately been making a cheerful best of things.

But some of them act like children with tantrums—which isn’t pretty in children and is even uglier in grandparents.

The instant I followed the Captain into the radiation shelter I discovered just how efficient
Tricorn
service can be when it really matters. I was snatched—snatched like a ball, right out of the air—and passed from hand to hand. Of course I don’t weigh much at one-tenth gravity, all there is at the main axis, but it is rather breath-taking. Some more hands shoved me into my billet, already stretched out, as casually and impersonally as a housewife stows clean laundry, and a voice called out, “Fries, Podkayne!” and another voice answered, “Check.”

The spaces around me, and above and below and across from me, filled up awfully fast, with the crewmen working with the unhurried efficiency of automatic machinery sorting mail capsules. Somewhere a baby was crying and through it. I heard the Captain saying, “Is that the last?”

“Last one, Captain,” I heard the Purser answer. “How’s the time?”

“Two minutes thirty-seven seconds—and your boys can start figuring their payoff, because this one is no drill.”

“I didn’t think it was, Skipper—and I’ve won a small bet from the Mate myself.” Then the Purser walked past my billet carrying someone, and I tried to sit up and bumped my head and my eyes bugged out.

The passenger he was carrying had fainted; her head lolled loosely over the crook of his arm. At first I couldn’t tell who it was, as the face was a bright, bright red. And then I recognized her and
I
almost fainted. Mrs. Royer—

Of course the first symptom of any bad radiation exposure is erythema. Even with a sunburn, or just carelessness with an ultraviolet lamp, the first thing you see is the skin turning pink or bright red.

But was it possible that Mrs. Royer had been hit with such extremely sharp radiation in so very little time that her skin had
already
turned red in the worst “sunburn” imaginable? Just from being last man in?

In that case she hadn’t fainted; she was dead.

And if that was true, then it was equally true that the passengers who were last to reach the shelter must all have received several times the lethal dosage. They might not feel ill for hours yet; they might not die for days. But they were just as dead as if they were already stretched out stiff and cold.

How many? I had no way of guessing. Possibly—
probably
I corrected myself—all the first-class-passengers; they had the farthest to go and were most exposed to start with.

Uncle Tom and Clark—

I felt sudden sick sorrow and wished that I had not been in the control room. If my brother and Uncle Tom were dying, I didn’t want to be alive myself.

I don’t think. I wasted any sympathy on Mrs. Royer. I did feel a shock of horror when I saw that flaming red face, but truthfully, I didn’t like her, I thought she was a parasite with contemptible opinions, and if she had died of heart failure instead, I can’t honestly say that it would have affected my appetite. None of us goes around sobbing over the millions and billions of people who have died in the past . . . nor over those still living and yet to be born whose single certain heritage is death (including Podkayne Fries herself). So why should you cry foolish tears simply because you happen to be in the neighborhood when someone you don’t like—despise, in fact—comes to the end of her string?

In any case, I did not have time to feel sorrow for Mrs. Royer; my heart was filled with grief over my brother and my uncle. I was sorry that I hadn’t been sweeter to Uncle Tom, instead of imposing on him and expecting him always to drop whatever he was doing to help me with my silly problems. I regretted all the many times I had fought with my brother. After all, he was a child and I am a woman; I should have made allowances.

Tears were welling out of my eyes and I almost missed the Captain’s first words:

“Shipmates,” he said, in a voice firm and very soothing, “my crew and our guests aboard . . . this is not a drill; this is indeed a radiation storm.

“Do not be alarmed; we are all, each and every one of us, perfectly safe. The Surgeon has examined the personal radiation exposure meter of the very last one to reach the shelter. It is well within safe limits. Even if it were added to the accumulated exposure of the most exposed person aboard—who is not a passenger, by the way, but one of the ship’s company—the total would still be inside the conservative maximum for personal health and genetic hygiene.

“Let me say it again. No one has been hurt, no one is going to be hurt. We are simply going to suffer a mild inconvenience. I wish I could tell you how long we will have to remain here in the safety of the shelter. But I do not know. It might be a few hours, it might be several days. The longest radiation storm of record lasted less than a week. We hope that Old Sol is not that bad-tempered this time. But until we receive word from Hermes Station that the storm is over, we will all have to stay inside here. Once we know a storm is over it usually does not take too long to check the ship and make sure that your usual comfortable quarters are safe. Until then, be patient and be patient with each other.”

I started to feel better as soon as the Captain started to talk. His voice was almost hypnotic; it had the soothing all-better-now effect of a mother reassuring a child. I relaxed and was simply weak with the aftereffects of my fears.

But presently I began to wonder. Would Captain Darling tell us that everything was all right when really everything was All Wrong simply because it was too late and nothing could be done about it?

I thought over everything I had ever learned about radiation poisoning, from the simple hygiene they teach in kindergarten to a tape belonging to Mr. Clancy that I had scanned only that week.

And I decided that the Captain had been telling the truth. Why? Because, even if my very worst fears had been correct, and we had been hit as hard and unexpectedly as if a nuclear weapon had exploded by us, nevertheless something can
always
be done about it. There would be three groups of us—those who hadn’t been hurt at all and were not going to die (certainly everybody who was in the control room or in the shelter when it happened, plus all or almost all the third-class passengers if they had moved fast), a second group so terribly exposed that they were certain to die, no matter what (let’s say everybody in first class country), and a third group, no telling how large, which had been dangerously exposed but could be saved by quick and drastic treatment.

In which case that quick and drastic action would be going on.

They would be checking our exposure meters and reshuffling us—sorting out the ones in danger who required rapid treatment, giving morphine shots to the ones who were going to die anyhow and moving them off by themselves, stacking those of us who were safe by ourselves to keep us from getting in the way, or drafting us to help nurse the ones who could be helped.

That was certain. But there was nothing going on, nothing at all—just some babies crying and a murmur of voices. Why, they hadn’t even looked at the exposure meters o’ most of us; it seemed likely that the Surgeon had checked only the last few stragglers to reach the shelter.

Therefore the Captain had told us the simple, heart-warming truth.

I felt so good that I forgot to wonder why Mrs. Royer had looked like a ripe tomato. I relaxed and soaked in the warm and happy fact that darling Uncle Tom wasn’t going to die and that my kid brother would live to cause me lots more homey grief. I almost went to sleep . . .

. . . and was yanked out of it by the woman on my right starting to scream: “Let me out of here!
Let me out of here!
”

Then I did see some fast and drastic emergency action.

Two crewmen swarmed up to our shelf and grabbed her; a stewardess was right behind them. She slapped a gag over the woman’s mouth and gave her a shot in the arm, all in one motion. Then they held her until she stopped struggling. When she was quiet, one of the crewmen picked her up and took her somewhere.

Shortly thereafter a stewardess showed up who was collecting exposure meters and passing out sleeping pills. Most people took them but I resisted—I don’t like pills at best and I certainly won’t take one to knock me out so that I won’t know what is going on. The stewardess was insistent but I can be awfully stubborn, so she shrugged and went away. After that there were three or four more cases of galloping claustrophobia or maybe just plain screaming funk; I wouldn’t know. Each was taken care of promptly with no fuss and shortly the shelter was quiet except for snores, a few voices, and fairly continuous sounds of babies crying.

There aren’t any babies in first class and not many children of any age. Second class has quite a few kids, but third class is swarming with them and every family seems to have at least one young baby. It’s why they are there, of course; almost all of third class are Earth people emigrating to Venus. With Earth so crowded, a man with a big family can easily reach the point where emigration to Venus looks like the best way out of an impossible situation, so he signs a labor contract and Venus Corporation pays for their tickets as an advance against his wages.