Targett stopped speaking and his boyish face seemed to crease into age. “Oh, Jesus– what are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do except sit tight,” Surgenor said. “Ten minutes ago we thought we were finished.”
“This is different, Dave. No more outside factors. This time there’s nothing left but ourselves.”
“That reminds me,” Gillespie said in a dour voice, “we’d better call another meeting as soon as everybody sobers up.”
“Is it worth another meeting? That’s all we seem to do– and it might be best if they went on being drunk.”
“That’s the whole point. Liquor is food. It’s loaded with calories, and it’ll have to be rationed out like anything else.”
The meeting was fixed for ship midnight, which left Surgenor two hours in which to think about dying of starvation, dying of loneliness in an empty and black continuum, dying of spiritual hypothermia. He kept on the move, rather than return to brood in his room, but this had the effect of indefinitely multiplying his sense of shock. A few minutes of involvement with some menial job would drive the hopelessness of the situation to the back of his mind, and then as the task was on the verge of completion an inner voice would tell him it was time to start thinking about the overall picture again, and he would take another mental plunge.
Once he encountered Christine Holmes in the corridor near his room and tried to speak to her, but she slipped past him with the impersonal gaze of a stranger and he understood that neither of them had anything to give or receive. He continued moving, working, talking, and was confronted when the designated hour arrived and the eleven remaining members of the Sarafand’s company drew together at the long table in the mess. The “windows’ around the semi-circular outer wall were dark, as befitted the middle of the night, but the room lights glowing orange and yellow and white created an atmosphere of secure warmth.
Just as the meeting was about to begin, Gillespie took Surgenor aside. “Dave, how about if I do the talking for a change?”
“Suits me.” Surgenor smiled at Gillespie, suddenly appreciative of the fact that the former Idaho foodstuffs salesman had acquired new stature. “I’ll back you up this time.”
Gillespie went to the head of the table and stood there until the others had taken their seats. “I guess I don’t need to tell anybody here that we’ve run into big trouble. It’s so big that none of us can see a way out– even Captain Aesop can’t see a way out– but, just the way we did when we thought we could reach a planet, we’re going to agree a set of rules. And we’re going to stick to them for as long as it takes.”
“Dress for dinner, stiff upper lip, salute the Queen,” Burt Schilling muttered. He had swallowed two Antox capsules, but his face had a sullen stiffness about it which suggested that he was still drunk.
“Most of the rules will, of course, be concerned with how we make use of our supply of food,” Gillespie said, unperturbed, glancing at his note pad. “I think we want to prolong life– but not beyond a reasonable period, not under conditions which would make it meaningless– and for that reason it is proposed that we have a daily ration of a thousand calories of solid food and non-alcoholic beverages for each person. Aesop has supplied me with an inventory, and on the basis of a thousand calories each per day we have enough food to last eighty-four days.”
We’ll be old by then, Surgenor thought. It isn’t a long time, but getting through it will wear us down to nothing.
“We’ll be a lot thinner, naturally enough, but Aesop says a proper mix of protein, fat and carbohydrate will keep us healthy.” Gillespie paused and looked around the table. “Next there’s the question of booze– which isn’t so easy to decide. Taken over the same period of eighty-four days, we have three hundred calories a day each in beer and wine, and two-forty calories a day in spirits. The thing we have to work out is do we in fact want a daily ration, or would it be better to save it for a…?”
“I’m sick of listening to all this crap,” Schilling announced, slapping the table. We don’t have to make rules and regulations about how we drink.”
Gillespie remained calm. “The food and drink has to be properly allocated.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned,” Schilling said. “I’m not going to sit around here nibbling crusts for the next three months. I don’t want any food– I’ll take my ration in booze. All of it in booze.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Schilling tried to sound reasonable. “It would mean extra solid food for the ones that like that sort of stuff.”
Gillespie placed his note pad on the table and leaned towards him. “Because you could pour your entire ration down your throat in a couple of weeks, easily; then when you sobered up you’d decide you weren’t ready to starve just yet, and other people would have to feed you. That’s why not.”
Schilling snorted. “All right, all right. I’ll make private deals with my friends– my food for their liquor.”
“We’re not going to permit that sort of thing, either,” Gillespie said. “It would lead to the same situation.”
Listening to the exchange, Surgenor was in general agreement with Gillespie, and yet he felt that some degree of flexibility was required. He was wondering how to voice his opinion without appearing to go against Gillespie when Wilbur Desanto– who had begun to partner Gillespie in Module Two– raised his hand.
“Excuse me, Al,” Desanto said unhappily. “All these calculations are based on eleven people being around for the whole period– but what if anybody wants to get it over with right now?”
“You mean commit suicide?” Gillespie considered the idea for a moment and shook his head. “Nobody would want to do that.”
“Wouldn’t they?” Desanto gave the others at the table a lop-sided, shame-faced smile. “Maybe Billy Narvik had the right idea.”
“Narvik tripped and fell by accident.”
“You weren’t there,” Schilling put in. “He did the neatest swallow dive I’ve seen in years. He meant to do it, man.”
Gillespie puffed out his cheeks impatiently. “Narvik is the only one who can settle this argument, so if you see his ghost coming out of the tool store let me know, will you?” He studied the faces at the table, making sure his sarcasm had not been wasted. “And until that happens I’d like to concentrate on the living. Okay?”
Desanto raised his hand again. “How about it, Al? What’s the arrangement for anybody who decides he’d rather have a quick exit? Will Aesop issue the right sort of package in the dispensary?”
“For the last time…’
“It’s a legitimate query,” Surgenor said in a low voice. “I think it deserves some sort of an answer.”
Gillespie looked betrayed. “For starters, Aesop doesn’t carry suitable drugs in his inventory. He’s programmed to jump back to the nearest Service base if any crewman develops a serious illness, so…’
“That’s it!” Victor Voysey spread his hands in a QED gesture. “Somebody should pop an appendix, and Aesop will just have to get us back home.”
“In any case,” Gillespie continued, ignoring the interruption, “Aesop wouldn’t assist a man to end his own life, no matter what the circumstances were.”
“Let’s ask him about that– just to make sure.”
“No!” Gillespie’s voice was hard. “The purpose of this meeting is to discuss arrangements for staying alive. Anybody who wants to talk to Aesop about how to commit suicide can do it privately in his room later on, but it seems to me that any moron should be able to arrange a simple little thing like that without any help from a lousy computer. It seems to me that it doesn’t take much imagination, and that anybody who really wanted to kill himself could easily do it without making grandstand plays at our general meetings and wasting everybody else’s time.”