The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [44]
It passed as swiftly as it had come, leaving him sick and trembling. For the first time, he realized that his dislike of McNeil was slowly turning to hatred.
It is a fundamental rule of space-flight that, for sound psychological reasons, the minimum crew on a long journey shall consist of not less than three men.
But rules are made to be broken and the Star Queen’s owners had obtained full authority from the Board of Space Control and the insurance companies when the freighter set off for Venus without her regular captain.
At the last moment he had been taken ill and there was no replacement. Since the planets are disinclined to wait upon man and his affairs, if she did not sail on time she would not sail at all.
Millions of dollars were involved—so she sailed. Grant and McNeil were both highly capable men and they had no objection at all to earning double their normal pay for very little extra work. Despite fundamental differences in temperament, they got on well enough in regular circumstances. It was nobody’s fault that circumstances were now very far from ordinary.
Three days without food, it is said, it is long enough to remove most of the subtle differences between a civilized man and a savage. Grant and McNeil were still in no physical discomfort. But their imaginations had been only too active and they now had more in common with two hungry Pacific Islanders in a lost canoe than either would have cared to admit.
For there was one aspect of the situation, and that the most important of all, which had never been mentioned. When the last figures on Grant’s writing-pad had been checked and rechecked, the calculation was still not quite complete. Instantly each man had made one further step, each had arrived simultaneously at the same unspoken result.
It was terribly simple—a macabre parody of those problems in the first-year arithmetic that begin, “If six men take two days to assemble five helicopters, how long . . .”
The oxygen would last two men for about twenty days, and Venus was thirty days away. One did not have to be a calculating prodigy to see at once that one man, and one man only, might yet live to walk the metal streets of Port Hesperus.
The acknowledged deadline was twenty days ahead, but the unmentioned was only ten days off. Until that time there would still be enough air for two men—and thereafter for one man only for the rest of the voyage. To a sufficiently detached observer the situation would have been very entertaining.
It was obvious that the conspiracy of silence could not last much longer. But it is not easy, even at the best of times, for two people to decide amicably which one of them shall commit suicide. It is still more difficult when they are no longer on speaking terms.
Grant wished to be perfectly fair. Therefore the only thing to do was to wait until McNeil sobered up and then to put the question to him frankly. He could think best at his desk, so he went to the control cabin and strapped himself down in the pilot's chair.
For a while he stared thoughtfully into nothingness. It would be better, he decided, to broach the matter by correspondence, especially while diplomatic relations were in their present state. He clipped a sheet of notepaper on the writing pad and began, “Dear McNeil . . .” Then he tore it out and started again, “McNeil . . .”
It took him the best part of three hours and even then he wasn’t wholly satisfied. There were some things it was so darned difficult to put down on paper. But at last he managed to finish. He sealed the letter and locked it away in his safe. It could wait for a day or two.
Few of the waiting millions on Earth and Venus could have any idea of the tensions that were slowly building up aboard the Star Queen. For days press and radio had been full of fantastic rescue schemes. On three worlds there was hardly any other topic of conversation. But only the faintest echo of the planet-wide tumult reached