“Lower it. Don’t hold it on the edge, hold your hands flat on the top, like this. There’s no danger of it falling.”
Ricks laughed nervously. “It’s like a table-raising at a séance.” They stood on opposite sides of the hole, the panel flat between them, their arms out over it, gloved hands pressing it slowly down. The fixer reep rolled gently in toward them, and Wiley said, “Let me know when you’re ready, Glenn.”
“Just a minute now.”
The panel was a little too far over on Ricks’ side. Together, they adjusted it, and lowered it to match the hole. They stood crouched opposite one another, holding the panel in place, while the fixer reep edged into position, and the welding arm reached out to the bottom left corner. “Turn your face away, Ricks,” warned Blair.
“Right.”
It took ten minutes to weld the new piece into place. In the meantime, the gripper reep returned from dumping the scrap section, and Blair sent Ricks up to the grid to help Dan moor his ship. Ricks and Dan came back carrying two tool kits and, when the welding job was finished, Blair and Ricks stood aside as Dan power-sanded the new weld and did a quick spray-painting that removed the signs of the patch. Straightening, he said, “There you go. Good as new.”
“Fine,” said Blair. “Let’s see how the cargo made out.”
The three men returned to the grid, where they moored Wiley’s ship across from Dan’s, and then the four of them went on back inside the Station.
Mendel was waiting for them inside the lock, brow furrowed with worry. He glanced back and forth from Blair to Ricks, then said to Blair, “How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“Just peachy,” said Ricks. “I get my merit badge, don’t I, Cargomaster?”
Blair shook his head at Mendel, and went on toward the elevator without answering Ricks.
He headed immediately for Section Five. Three crewmen were already at the bulkhead, which was still sealed shut. Blair looked at the pressure gauge, and saw that the dial was above the halfway mark and noticeably climbing. He talked with the crewmen a few minutes, discussing the strike and its repairing, and then at last the bulkhead door slid back into its recess, and they went on in. The crewmen went to work on the permanent repair of the inner hull, and Blair checked his cargo. A few of the food cartons had exploded when the section had gone to vacuum, but he gave them hardly a glance. He found the seven aluminum crates for QB. All had split open, releasing interior air, but their contents looked to be still in good condition. Blair grinned to himself with relief.
QB was the maintenance base. As such, it had a permanent crew of eighty-four men. These men were on thirty-minute call at all times, and were fulfilling a two-year contract with General Transists. They spent every moment of those two years inside the QB satellite. Most of the time, they had little work to do, but the size of the crew was the statistical minimum required for any foreseeable accident to any part of the General Transits lifeline between the Earth and the Moon. When there was any sort of breakdown, such as this meteor strike on Station One, they went to work. The rest of the time, they were completely on their own. Their world, for two years, was a small metal ring nearly a quarter million miles from home. They couldn’t leave it, and they had little to do inside it.
That was why the contents of the seven aluminum crates was so important. Four cartons of motion picture film and three cartons of microfilmed books. Six months of entertainment, of distraction. The only way the men of QB could keep from going stir-crazy in their two years of self-imposed imprisonment, the only way to last through the inactive days and weeks between the infrequent calls for their skills and labor.
With no books, no motion pictures, no cheerful distractions for their minds, the men of QB would falter. Irritations would mount, squabbles would turn to hatreds, aggravations to bloody vendettas. Efficiency would collapse, morale disappear. Statistically, there would be within the first sixty days five suicides and eight murders.
Entertainment. Tinsel. But, to the men of QB, as vital as food.
Glenn Blair patted the aluminum crates, and grinned with relief.
Now that it was over, Harvey Ricks was terrified. Before he’d gone out, he’d been too full of the challenge he’d hurled at Blair; while he’d been outside, he’d been too busy. Now it was over, and he had time to realize the extent of the risks he’d taken, and he was terrified.
He spent the next four hours in his cubicle, staring at the wall, vowing great resolutions of reform. From now on, he would mind his own business, accept his limitations.
Then, after four hours, the barbell arrived from Station Three, and the transfer of cargo and passengers was made. There were five men coming back to Earth, there was stack after stack of cargo. The huge hold of the barbell was emptied, and then the shipment for the Moon — and the cargo for QB — was loaded aboard, and the three passengers for the Moon left Station One, carrying their one-suitcase-each to the new cubicle, where they would live another fifteen days of their lives. Ricks looked around at the new room, and already the retroactive terror was receding, already he was thinking of his exploit in self-congratulatory terms. He’d done well. He’d showed the Cargomaster that Harvey Ricks was a good man to have at your side, a man who can do the job right the first time.
After a while, Blair knocked at the cubicle door and entered, smiling hesitantly, saying, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you, Ricks. You did a good job out there.”
Ricks smiled, the old self-confident challenging smile. “Why, any time, Cargomaster.”
Blair’s face tightened. “Well,” he said. “So I’ve thanked you.”
“So you have, Cargomaster.”
Blair left without another word.
Ricks settled back on his bunk, arms behind his head, and smiled at the ceiling. He’d made it again. He’d sent the hunters away, and when the wolf had come he’d tromped it all on his own. He still hadn’t run across the wolf he couldn’t handle.
But there was time. There was still plenty of time for Harvey Ricks to have his reckoning.
Two years’ worth.
1962
Look Before You Leap
Want a man with his heart on the right-hand side? A left-handed red-head with one blue and one brown eye? If you just check carefully enough millions of men, you can expect to find almost any anomaly you want…
The third day of bivouac Jeremy got so scared he went home.
Just like that. And that scared him so much, he went right back. And then he spent a few days thinking about it.
Jeremy knew that it had been an hallucination. They were on bivouac, on night problem, with the tear gas bombs bursting in air, and everybody whispering, “Gas!”, and the concealed Tactical Instructors having fun with rifle shots and flares and things that went bump in the night. Jeremy was one of a long line of basic trainees crawling through a pitch-black dry drainage pipe, the curved roughness of the pipe magnifying the sounds from outside. A couple of TI’s had dropped tear gas bombs at either end of the pipe, and the whispered warnings — “Gas!” — had echoed forward and back toward Jeremy, in the middle of the pipe.
By this time, Jeremy was just about as frightened as he could possibly be anyway. And then he heard the whispers, and he pulled off his fatigue cap with one hand, and his glasses with the other hand, and that didn’t leave any hands for the gas mask.
He skittered frantically, all crouched and cramped in the pipe, trying to hold cap and glasses in one hand and put the gas mask on with two hands, and it was pitch-black so he couldn’t see a thing, and then he dropped the gas mask, and couldn’t find it.