“The cameras inside the cryonics area aren’t working now,” the girl tech said quietly, her fingers still tapping on her keyboard, trying to coax life back into the dead machines.
“Never mind,” Larry said woodenly. “There’s nothing in there that we should see.”
2
Larry sat in his living quarters, in the dark. It was a single compartment, barely big enough for a bunk, a desk, and a chair. The bunk and desk were molded into the curving walls of the compartment. Drawers and sliding partitions to the closet and sanitary blended almost invisibly with the silvery metal of the walls.
In the darkness, as he sat in the only chair and stared at nothing, there was only the residual glow of the viewscreen at the foot of the bed and the faint fluorescence of the wall painting that Valery had done for him years ago, when he had first been assigned a compartment of his own.
So you’ve lost a father you’ve never known, Larry still argued with himself. You’re not the only one. Every one of those fifty frozen people was a father or mother to somebody aboard the ship. Look at Dan; it’s hit him a lot harder.
But as he thought about it, slowly Larry began to realize that something else was bothering him. It wasn’t the deaths. Not really. That left nothing but a cold emptiness inside him. It was something else—
What caused the fire?
According to the ship’s computer records, they had been crawling through the huge gulf of space for nearly fifty years. Twenty-some thousand human beings, exiles from Earth, on their way to Alpha Centauri in a giant pinwheel of a ship. Nearly fifty years. Almost there.
But the ship was starting to die.
The men and women who had started on this long, long voyage were exiles. They had been scientists—molecular geneticists, most of them. The world government had rounded them up and placed them in a prison, this ship, which was then only a mammoth satellite orbiting Earth. Earth was overcrowded, it needed peace and above all it needed stability. The scientists represented the forces of change, not stability. The geneticists and their colleagues offered the ability to alter the human race, to make every baby into a superman or a slave, into a genius or a moron. On demand. Pay your money and take your choice.
The world government was humane. And very human. Its leaders decided such power would be too tempting, too easy to corrupt. So, as humanely as possible—but with thorough swiftness—they arrested all the scientists who were involved in genetic engineering and exited them to the satellite. Their knowledge was never to be used to alter the precious, hard-won peace and stability of Earth.
It had been Dan Christopher’s father—with the help of Larry’s father—who worked out the idea of turning their satellite prison into a starship. The Earth’s government agreed, reluctantly at first, but then with growing enthusiasm. Better to get rid of the troublesome scientists completely. Let them go toward Alpha Centauri. Whether they make it or not, they will no longer bother the teeming, overcrowded Earth.
But the ship itself was overcrowded. Twenty thousand people can’t be kept alive for year after year, decade after decade, for half a century or more. Not on a spacecraft. Not on the ship. So most of the people were frozen in cryogenic deepsleep, suspended animation, to be reawakened when they reached Alpha Centauri, or when they were needed for some special reason. The ship was run by a handful of people—no more than a thousand were allowed to be awake and active at one time. All this Larry knew from the history tapes. Much of it he had learned side by side with Dan, his best friend, when they were kids studying together. Both their mothers had died of a virus infection that killed hundreds of people before the medics figured out a way to stop it. Their fathers had handed the infant sons over to friends to be raised, and went into cryogenic sleep, to be awakened when they reached their destination. If they made it. The people who had built this ship were engineers of Earth.
The people who lived in it, riding out to the stars, were mostly scientists and their children. The ship had to operate far more than fifty years, if they were all to stay alive. The time was almost over, and the ship’s vast intricate systems were starting to break down, to fail. Youngsters trained as engineers and technicians had all the learning that the tapes could provide. But could they keep the ship going indefinitely?
A month ago it was the main power generator that failed, and they began to ration electrical power. Last week it was a pump in the hydroponics section; if they hadn’t been able to repair the pump they would have lost a quarter of their food production, plus the even more important oxygen-recycling ability of the green plants that grew in the long troughs of chemical nutrients. And now the fire. Fifty people dead.
Will any of us make it?
A soft tapping at his door. Fingernails on plastic. Valery.
“Come in,” Larry said, getting up from his chair.
The door slid open and she stood there framed in the light from the corridor.
Valery looked small, but she was actually almost Larry’s height, and he had known since their childhood together that she was as tough and supple as plastisteel. Her face was broad, with high Nordic cheekbones and wide, always-surprised-looking eyes. Changeable eyes; sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes something else altogether. Very fair skin with a scattering of freckles. Very, very pretty.
She was wearing a simple white jumpskirt and blouse. Like most of the girls aboard the ship, Valery made her own clothes.
“I heard about your father,” she said, her voice low.
Without waiting for him to say anything, she stepped into the compartment. Automatically, the door slid shut behind her. The room was suddenly plunged into darkness again. In the faint glow from the fluorescent painting, he started to reach for the light switch.
“No—” she said. “It’s all right like this. We don’t need lights.”
“Val—”
She was standing very close to him. He could smell the fragrance of her hair.
“I saw Dan. They took him to the infirmary. He collapsed.”
“I know,” Larry said.
He wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her and let her warmth engulf him. But he knew he couldn’t.
“You’d better… sit down,” he said.
Valery went to the plastic chair in front of the desk. She sat on it and tucked her feet up under her, as simple and feminine as a cat. Larry could see her in the darkness as a gleam of white, like a pale nebula set against the depths outside. He sat on the edge of the bunk.
“I wish there was something I could say,” Valery began. “I just feel so helpless.”
Larry found himself gripping the edge of the bunk hard with both hands. “Uh… how’s Dan?”
“Asleep. The medics have sedated him. He’s… he’s not strong, like you.”
“He does his thing, I do mine,” Larry said. “He shows his grief on the outside.”
“And you keep yours locked up inside you, so nobody can see.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can see it,” Valery said, her voice soft as a star-cloud. “I came over to tell you. I know what’s going on inside you, Larry. I…”
“Stop it!” he snapped. “You’re going to marry Dan in two more months. Leave me alone.”
Even in the darkness, he could sense her body stiffen. Then she said, “But I don’t love Dan. I love you.”
“That doesn’t make any difference and you know it.”
“You love me, Larry, I know that too.”
He shook his head. “No… I don’t. Not anymore.”
Her face was lost in shadow, but her voice smiled. “Larry—remember when we were just six or seven and we snuck into the free-fall playroom… you and Dan and me? And we were playing tag, and you got racing so fast that you flew smack into a wall—”