There was little chance that the suspendfreeze techniques or apparatus would go wrong. But that didn't mean they couldn't be sent wrong . . .
"You've got a pretty nasty job, haven't you, Mr. Joley?" purred the bland-faced scientist with an engaging smile.
"I'm not complaining," grunted the lanky lieutenant who sat across the desk from him and gazed at him curiously, as if wondering what this interview all about.
From beneath the deck came the surly growl of the rockets. Behind the desk, a viewing port displayed the glittering jewelry of the galaxy, hung in the black emptiness. They had been in space for several months.
After a few moments of waiting for the scientist to come to his purpose, the lieutenant glanced restlessly aside to stare through the hatchway into the adjoining compartment, where a gleaming maze of electro-surgical apparatus lurked in gloomy half-light.
"Is that stuff part of your suspendfreeze gadgetry?" he asked.
The physicist-surgeon stiffened slightly, then smiled pompously. " ' Stuff' —` gadgetry'," he echoed in the tones of a professor plucking bad words out of a freshman English theme.
"I didn't mean to belittle it, Doc!" Joley said hastily, remembering that the man was unreasonably touchy about his inventions.
"That's all right, Joley," said Doc Fraylin like a martyr. "I guess I should have known that people—all people—would be instinctively suspicious of it. They seem to feel it smacks of death—or of tampering with the sacred perhaps."
"I didn't mean to imply—"
"Never mind," Fraylin sighed. He glanced lovingly through the hatchway. "De Galbin invented the alpha drive and gave men the planets. De Galbin is now a multimillionaire. I invented the suspendfreeze and gave men the stars. And I am still—" He shrugged and smiled benignly, as if his presence as a technician aboard the ship were self-explanatory.
Lieutenant Joley said nothing to contradict. But he knew Fraylin was warping the truth a little. De Galbin had been a millionaire to begin with. He had hired dozens of engineers to help him perfect the drive; it had been De Galbin's money, but not altogether his brain-child. Fraylin, on the other hand, had been hired by the government to tackle a specific project: that of quick-freezing and thawing a human body without killing the subject.
"Ah well!" said Fraylin. "I suppose I can't complain. We all get bad breaks. Like you for instance, Mr. Joley."
"How do you mean?" the engineer asked stiffly.
"Why—you wanted to come on this trip as a colonist, I believe. Applied five years ago, didn't you? And here you are as an emergency-technician."
Eric Joley frowned. "I'll be permitted to join the colonists, when we get to Sigma Seven," he growled.
"I know, I know. If you're still alive. But you must remember: you're the ship's main fuse, Joley. If trouble comes while the ship sleeps, the emergency-circuits are set to thaw you out of your suspendfreeze unit, to handle the difficulty. And you can't put yourself back in. You'll be all alone, Joley —in a shipful of frozen corpses—maybe two hundred years before arrival-time."
Eric glared at the scientist irritably. Was he being sounded-out? What did Fraylin want?
"As I say: bad breaks," Fraylin continued. "It's not your fault the psychologists thought your personality fitted the task. They think your ethical standards are high enough so that you would endure a lifetime of solitude in space rather than awaken someone to be your companion—and share your fate. Therefore, you were condemned to the task because of your ethics."
Eric snorted angrily. " 'Ethics' wasn't the word they used. They said `emotional stability during prolonged deprivation of social contacts.' Furthermore, I volunteered for the job—when they wouldn't take me as a colonist. Did you call me in here to tell me what a sucker I am?"
Fraylin laughed. "Not at all. Roagan called me. Asked me to make a last-minute check on your attitude. I understand we're approaching final velocity, and that the jets will be shut off in about forty hours. We'll begin freezing colonists before then. When the jets are off, we freeze the crew. Then you and the other two, uh ... fuses. When everybody's tucked in, of course, my staff and I will get aboard the tug and go back to Earth. Then—you're all alone. Roagan naturally wants to make certain of everything before then."
"I see."
"You have any last minute qualms?"
Eric grinned. "Slight case of the jitters. I don't relish the idea of thawing out in mid-space."
Fraylin nodded sympathetically and glanced toward the pharmaceutical lockers. "If you're very nervous, I can give you something."
"No thanks."
The physicist-surgeon shrugged. "You'll observe your pledge then? To disturb none of the 'sleepers' in case you're awakened?" He paused. "Not even the girl who's listed with you on the genetic recommendations?"
"I haven't even seen her. I haven't looked at the bio-recs. I don't even know her name. I don't want to know."
Fraylin made a surprised mouth. "You're either remarkably self-restrained—or else you're remarkably feelingless."
"Neither. I don't want to be tempted."
"If you thawed yourself a companion, you wouldn't be punished, you know. You couldn't be."
"Don't put the idea in my mind," he growled.
Fraylin mused in silence for a moment. "I wonder what I would do—if I were in your place."
Eric watched the man's speculative eyes. He wondered, too.
"If you're brought to consciousness," Fraylin murmured, "you'll be in a position of complete control over more than two hundred sleepers. They'll be helpless in your hands. Joley."
"So?"
"You'll be unwatched, unjudged, a law unto yourself. A king aboard the ship."
"A hermit, you mean."
"If you wish it so."
"Still not convinced about those ethics, are you?" Eric snapped, brushing back the lock of red hair that fell on his forehead whenever anger threatened.
"I didn't say—"
"Listen, Fraylin! Are you through? I want to get out of here. I don't like inquisitions, I don't like your talk, and—as of now—I don't like you."
Fraylin glanced at him with lofty pity. "I'm not so sure you're as stable as they think, Joley."
"I didn't know you were a psych," he snapped.
"I'm not." Fraylin slid a filing folder onto his desk top and studied its contents briefly. "Psychologists are fallible," he muttered.
"You're not?"
The scientist ignored it. "Only child," he breathed, reading half-aloud. "No early-implanted need for social contact . . . mechanical extrovert, social introvert ... motivation derives from self-approval in task-accomplishment . . . endures prolonged solitude without distress—"
"Such inferences are guesswork," he grunted, looking up.
"I spent six months in solitary confinement to prove—"
Fraylin softened. "Nobody's satisfied, Joley—not with anything—not until the ship's safely in Sigma Seven. This whole deal is a gamble from beginning to end. Nearly three hundred lives are the stakes."
"For a man who's going back to Earth, Doc, you're worrying a lot." "Not worrying, just checking." "Are you through with me?"
"Yes—thank you. You may go."
Eric's exit was carefully jaunty, but when he reached a turning in the corridor, he paused to mop his forehead and to glance back to see if Fraylin was watching from the doorway. But the surgeon had remained at his desk. Eric caught the faint mutter of his voice speaking on the private interphone—to Commander Roagan, he guessed. He strode on toward the colonists' quarters, his face wearing a gloomier expression than he cared to show to the medics or to Skipper Roagan. It was not pleasant to think about the cold and utter aloneness of a lifetime spent in a silent ship of frigid corpses. A living death in a tomb of suspended life. Why did they keep reminding him of that possibility?
The call-system suddenly blared: Hear this, hear this. Mr. Jessel report to Space-Surgeon's office. Jessel to surgeon's office. This is all.
Eric made a wry mouth. Jessel was the second link in the emergency fusing. He would be awakened if the first link was already dead and if a second emergency threatened the ship. Eric felt better. At least he alone had not been singled out for Roagan's doubts.
He liked to wander about in that area of the ship assigned to the two hundred colonists. They were a tough but gregarious lot, and he enjoyed hovering on the outskirts of their laughter and companionship, even though he was less than welcome there. The presence of the gawky guardian of their big sleep sent the voices wavering into lower tones, and he sometimes felt their eyes watching his back with uneasy curiosity. The crew and the colonists both gave him the restless respect men reserve for those whose duty involves their own death. He saw their feelings toward him: they knew they owed him gratitude, yet friendly overtures were always damped by the thought what if I were in his boots?
And sometimes he detected a note of suspicion. What if his mind goes haywire? What if he wakes us all a couple of centuries too soon? What will the lonely prowler do while we are asleep and helpless? How could a man spend fifty years in complete aloneness—in a lifeless sepulcher. How will he deal with the temptation to awaken a comrade?
They were afraid of him. If I become his friend, he might thaw me out of loneliness.
Eric stopped to lounge in the doorway of the ship's dayroom where a game of poker progressed in an atmosphere of boredom—boredom, because the chips, whatever they represented were necessarily worthless. Money would mean nothing on the new world they sought. There would be no values save survival values. He listened to their talk for a time, and learned that the chips were acres of land, but that, too, was meaningless. Farming would have to be communal for a long time, until the colony grew.
They were all young, the two-hundred—young and hardy. A staff of government scientists had spent two years selecting them from many thousands of volunteers. Five additional years were given to their indoctrination, education, and conditioning—a year of which had left them stranded in the Amazon jungles for "survival' practice." They were physically healthy, mentally superior, and personally gregarious—with an aggressiveness that branded some of them as abnormal in a politer society, and with a high adaptability that sometimes expressed itself as complete abandonment of conventionality.
Eric, who had been selected for a different task, knew that he was not one of them.
One of the players—a muscular young man with a smugly handsome face—glanced up briefly from the game to see Eric standing in the entrance. He turned and murmured quietly to a sandy-haired girl beside him. Then he grinned at her mockingly. The girl reddened beneath her freckles and shook her head slightly. She stared fixedly at her cards. Eric recalled having seen them before—strolling about the ship together. Partners, he guessed, thrown together on the recommended mating lists.
The young man chuckled inaudibly and nudged her again. She responded by kicking him under the table. He turned to whisper to the others. Several pairs of eyes glanced up at Eric, but looked quickly back to the center of amusement: the sandy-haired girl. They began muttering to her and giggling. Her color deepened, and she hissed at them to be silent.
Eric studied her briefly. She was no beauty—slightly gawky and rawbone. She had a nice white grin that flickered on and off amid her embarrassed protests. Once she stole a glance at Eric, who was beginning to stiffen self-consciously.
"All right!" she snapped suddenly. "I'll let you have your fun."
She pushed back her chair and arose. Then he saw with consternation that she was coming toward him with a friendly if nervous smile, and her hand was extended in greeting. From the table, five teasing grins watched her derisively.
"Hello, Lieutenant Joley." Her voice was warm and throaty, and some of the flush was leaving her face. Frank blue eyes gazed at him evenly.
Eric murmured politely, took the hand coolly, and dropped it quickly. "A pleasure, Miss, but—"
"Waters—Angela Waters."
An instant of hushed expectancy hovered over the room, but Eric shook his head slowly. Snickers came from the table. He felt a dark inkling.
"Those jokers are having their fun at my expense, lieutenant. They're not laughing at you."
A chorus of guffaws came from the small audience. Eric frowned angrily over the girl's shoulder. He guessed the situation, then.
"He never heard of you, Ang!" somebody called in mockery.
Then the voice of the young man who had initiated the scene: "Mr. Joley, meet your wife."
The engineer looked helplessly at the girl and saw she was miserable; nor was she doing a good job of concealing it any longer. Her eyes fluttered longingly toward the exit, and she stood nervously hesitating between an urge to flee and the waning desire to "be a sport."
"Excuse me for a moment, Angela," he murmured with a quiet smile, then stepped around her and approached the table stiffly.
He dropped his knuckles lightly among the cards and stared expressionlessly down at the young originator of the incident.
"It wasn't funny."
The man's grin became defiant. "I thought it was." He extended his hand. "I'm Kenneth Thoren."
Eric ignored the hand. "Care to apologize to Miss Waters?"
An expectant hush had fallen over the group. A girl giggled. "Watch out, Ken. Don't make him mad. He's your guardian angel."
"Yee-eah!" Thoren drawled, grinning at her.
"I'm telling you—watch out. You might wake up too soon."
"Care to apologize, Thoren?" Eric asked again, but his voice was drowned in a sudden chatter of conversation. Even Thoren was joining in it.
Their indifference to his anger stung him to cool rage. He tapped Thoren's shoulder. "Let's step aft, fellow. I know a good joke, too."
Thoren brushed his hand away contemptuously. "Don't bother me, boy scout. Go chase your wife."
Eric caught his collar to tug him upward, but Thoren had evidently expected it. His fist lashed up and skidded against the engineer's cheekbone. Although startled, Eric jerked hard at the collar, throwing him off balance as he came up. He threw a short chopping blow hard into Thoren's face, then sent him sprawling across the table with a left to the temple. Poker chips and cards sprayed across the room, and the spectators lunged for safety.
"Call the skipper," a voice barked.
Eric was on the fallen man before he could crawl away from the table. "If you want more in here, I'll kick your teeth out now. Otherwise you can get up, and we'll go aft."
Thoren rolled over and came to his hands and knees. He spat blood, then looked up with a red snarl. "It'll wait for Sigma Seven, fellow," he panted. "The skipper wouldn't like what I'm going to do to you."
"Any time, Thoren. Any time." Eric recovered his cap, glanced coolly at the others, and stalked out of the hushed room. The girl had gone.
But as he passed the first bend in the corridor he stumbled quickly aside to avoid colliding with her. She was leaning against the metal handrail, staring gloomily at the stars through a narrow viewing port. He muttered a hasty apology, tipped his cap, and started away briskly.
"Wait."
He came back slowly toward a pair of dismayed blue eyes.
"I'm sorry it happened," she said. "You were minding your own business. It was my fault." She found a handkerchief and dabbed at his cheekbone. It came away streaked with red.
"You heard the commotion?"
She nodded. "Is Ken all right?"
"For a while," he muttered ominously.
"You let him alone!"
Eric caught his breath at the sharpness of her tone. He smiled stiffly, nodded, and started away again.
"Yes?" He stopped to look back.
"I didn't mean . . . well . . . I meant, you'd do well to avoid trouble with him. He's got a nasty disposition."
"So have I."
"Well, I'm warning you. I know Ken Thoren too well." She stopped to watch his expression for an instant. Then she laughed nervously. "Oh no. Not that well, lieutenant."
He reapproached her slowly, wearing an easy "I am sorry it happened. I don't belong in this part of the ship, really. If I had stayed away—"
"I wouldn't have bothered you."
"Then I'm glad it did happen."
She acknowledged the gallantry with a wry smirk. "Well, since we're acquainted, shall we talk business?"
"I don't understand."
"The genetic recommendations—that's business, isn't it?"
He laughed nervously. "I suppose so. I hereby relinquish my claim—reluctantly and sorrowfully of course. Not that the listings give any claims. They're just suggestions. So I release you from the suggestion. I can't imagine what made them decide I was deserving of you anyway."
She smiled peculiarly for a moment. "You talk that way because you're shy, don't you?"
Eric bowed slightly. "Shall we announce the business session as closed?" She studied him speculatively.
"Maybe we'll leave it open a while."
"Ma'am?"
"You're quaint. Say—why did they pick you for that emergency job?"
"I have the exact form of unsanity that fits their needs."
"Which is?"
"I'm antisocial enough to live alone and like it."
"You don't sound like a hermit. You act reasonably human."
"Thanks. It's just a defense mechanism I have."
"What will you do if you're thawed —in space, I mean?"
Eric considered it. "Oh—dump all the male corpses overboard, I guess and wake all the ladies."
She laughed. "Business is definitely closed. I won't be a member of Joley's flying harem. Leave me in my icebox, please."
"O.K., but I'll come often to peek through the little window."
"Will I be dressed?"
Eric smiled at the ceiling and shook, his head slowly. "Naked as a hard-boiled egg—unshelled." He sighed.
"Stop wiggling your Adam's apple!"
He fingered his throat thoughtfully and gazed down at her with wry grin. "Thanks, ma'am," he murmured.
"For what?
"For not looking at me like I might turn out to be a time bomb instead of a protective device."
Her face went solemn and she looked again through the viewscreen. "I wonder who started that rumor," she breathed.
"What rumor?"
"You don't know?"
He shook his head slowly. She looked quickly up and down the corridor before she spoke.
"There's a story around that you three men, if you're called for an emergency, get your pick of the women. That you have the right to—"
Eric's face became a sudden thundercloud. He seized her arm and pulled her to the nearest interphone station.
"What are you doing?" she protested.
Eric buzzed the commander's office quickly. A gruff voice barked, "Roagan speaking."
"Just a minute, skipper. I've uncovered something I think you ought to hear." He turned to the girl. "Tell him about that rumor."
Surprised and sobered, she blurted it out haltingly. When she was half-finished, Roagan began bellowing.
"Whoa!" she cried. "I didn't start it."
"Who did then?"
"How should I know?"
"Then find out."
"I'm not your lackey" she snapped.
Roagan sputtered for a moment. "Joley, get to my cabin—or—no, never mind! I'll call a meeting of the colonists. We'll get this straight. No colonist is to be thawed before we hit Sigma Seven."
The station clicked off. The girl looked at Eric and arched her brows. "Pardon me—for starting a minor riot."
"Good thing you did. That story could start real trouble. Some of the couples have already married. The husbands might get a little nasty if they heard it."
"There is some bitter talk," she admitted.
The call system crackled for a moment, then blurted : Hear this, hear this. All non-crewmen colonists report to assembly room. Colonists to assembly. Hasty hasty. This is all.
"I'd better go," she muttered.
Eric nodded and stepped aside, but she hesitated, her pale eyes scrutinizing his face.
"Meet me later," she said.
His forehead wrinkled in surprise. "Why? The bio-reck business being closed, maybe we shouldn't—"
"Who said it was closed?"
She winked, simpered sourly, and sauntered away, leaving Eric uneasily gnawing the corner of his lip. The girl puzzled him. She seemed nice enough, but the pale eyes were full of strangeness. They quietly judged and measured him, but he caught the queer impression that the code by which they weighed was not the code currently popular among civilized humans.
" 'Also doth Satan bless, or damn,' " he breathed after her.
One thing seemed apparent — she approved him. But Eric somehow failed to feel flattered.
Although he had no duty-assignment while the ship was accelerating to final velocity, he wandered about through the control and reactor rooms, idly inspecting equipment, checking the computer circuits of the automatic course-correcting equipment, and otherwise trying to assure himself that no emergency would occur during the big sleep of the inertial flight across the galaxy. The circuits were a network of checks and balances, each capable, of detecting trouble in another, and of switching out the faulty elements to replace them with new circuit sections which were already set up. The equipment could repair itself—within limits. But the repair devices were without imagination, and if their judgment was wrong, they would continue switching new elements into the same recurrent trouble until the replacement-sections were exhausted. Then they could only call Joley from his big freeze, call him awake to build new ones.
His inspection revealed nothing but good efficient operation. But he failed to be reassured. Before leaving Earth, he had privately gathered data from intra-system space companies, gathered it and organized it into meaningful form. The repair records revealed that he could regard his premature awakening as sixty per cent probable, a conclusion which he discussed with Jessel, the second link in the emergency chain.
"Only one chance in ten of two emergencies occurring, Jess," he said as they sat in the observation blister, watching the Doppler effect tinge the stars to the fore with blue, and redden the ones to the aft. "Your odds are better than mine. Almost as good as those of finding an earthlike planet in Sigma Seven."
"You got it wrong, Eric," grunted the chubby Jessel as he sucked at a fat pipe. "Your data won't apply."
Eric glanced at him with a faint smile. Jessel was fond of contradicting, whatever the cause. "Why not, Jess?"
Jessel counted off the reasons on his stubby fingers. "One: A five-hundred-year flight has never been tried before. Two: This ship is no tried-and-true edition; new mechanical species are always full of bugs. Three: It's pushing overload right now, trying to get up to final velocity in a hurry—on account of the medics gotta go home; it's getting a good opportunity to develop electrical ulcers. Four: How do we know our course is clear? Meteors the automatics can avoid, but if we get sucked off course by the gravity of some black-dwarf star that they never foresaw . . . well . . . we can only call on you, Mr. Joley."
"Is that all?"
"If it's not enough, there's five: The interception factor."
"The what?"
Jesser grinned a wide expanse of pink gums and small teeth. "We'll range within a light-year or so of several stars before we get to the Sigma Seven cluster, Eric—stars, and maybe a planet or so. Can you anthropocentrically assume that there aren't any unearthly gentlemen living thereupon? Fellows capable of coming out to investigate us and holler, 'Stop in the name of the law!'?"
Eric scoffed. "I don't assume not, but it seems unlikely."
"O.K., go on in your naive faith—Man's the center of the universe, and all that. But don't wake me up in case a six-legged policeman comes banging on the air lock to spoil the fun."
"You're taking this pretty lightly, Jess."
"I can afford to. My odds are better than yours—as you say."
"You got it wrong, Jess," Eric mimicked. "There's the psychological factor."
"Huh?"
"Sure, I might lose my head and turn on your induction heater."
"That sort of practical joke could lead to a killing," said Jessel in a gloomy tone that suggested he meant it.
An aura of uneasiness seemed to be growing about the ship—affecting passengers and crew alike. Even after the meeting of the colonists, at which Roagan loudly contradicted the whispered rumor, Eric noticed the tenseness in men's glances as he wandered past them. And there was a general feeling of unrest that made itself apparent in surly faces, sharp tongues, and pointless arguments. The ship was restless, living in anxious dread of the big sleep drawing close upon them. By ship's-night, the corridors echoed with the footsteps of wandering insomniacs that drifted from screen to screen to stare across the emptiness, as if seeking an escape.
Suspendfreeze was temporary death. Would there be a resurrection? The time was growing shorter, and men's minds fled down the unseen bypaths of silent desperation, while they waited, forlornly waited.
"What if we do...
allforjesus2001