Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Front cover
The departure lounge was half full since the coach had left on its first trip to the ship, but it had not grown any quieter. Excitement, impatience and natural anxiety had combined to raise the noise level of every conversation until the background music and its intended soothing effect were obliterated. Ignoring the low and sinfully soft couches scattered around the large, cool room, the remaining passengers for Eurydice clustered about the exit ramp like jet travelers bucking for a seat by a window.
None of them were watching Mercer directly. Relieved, he dropped his eyes to the papers which he had not been studying for the past half hour and wondered if replacing them in his briefcase would be a signal for passengers to come surging over to introduce themselves or ask questions. He already knew all of their names, having memorized the passenger list, since his job would consist largely of looking after them. But right now they were still strangers — for the simple reason that he did not know which face went with any given name. He decided to savor his last remaining moments of introversion before he had to join the ship.
Mercer had no sooner made this decision and was beginning to feel pleasantly guilty about it when a pair of small feet moved into the area of floor covered by his downcast eyes and stopped a few yards in front of his chair. He looked up slowly.
Black sneakers, black slacks, black tunic and long-visored cap, which carried an improbable quantity of insignia and plastic scrambled eggs. The uniform had probably been a good fit last Christmas, but now it was a little short and tight. Even though the body overfilling the uniform was sturdy and well-nourished, the face had the pinched, big-eyed look of the over-imaginative, intelligent and probably highly nervous type. Mercer did not have to read the identity patch on his chest to know that this was Robert Mathewson, because there was only one ten-year-old boy on the passenger list.
They stared at each other for a long time, with Mercer feeling as tongue-tied as the boy looked. This was ridiculous, he told himself irritably as the silence began to drag and both their faces shifted deeper into the infrared. This was, after all, his first social contact with a passenger, and one this young should be easy — good practice for him, in fact.
Clearing his throat, he said, "I didn't know that we had been assigned a cadet for this trip, but I can certainly use your help —"
"Bobby, I told you not to wander off!" said a voice from behind him. It was a feminine, harassed voice, belonging, Mercer saw as he turned, to the boy's mother. She was very young, dark-haired and with a face subtly distorted by tension and worry, so that he could not decide whether it was pretty or downright lovely. She rushed on, "You were told not to talk to strangers and that means not making a nuisance of yourself to the ship's officers. I'm sorry about this, sir. You're obviously busy and he knows better than to ..."
"It's quite all right, m'am," began Mercer, but already she was dragging her son towards the largest group of passengers, still scolding and apologizing and not listening to him at all.
For a few minutes he watched the boy in the space officer's outfit and his mother in the issue coveralls which the passengers wore shipside. The one-piece coverall was not exactly shapeless — especially not in Mrs. Mathewson's case — but it obeyed the dictates of the current neo-puritan fashion, which insisted on covering the female form on public occasions from neck to ankles.
Suddenly restless. Mercer stuffed the papers back into his briefcase and stood up. He began pacing slowly around the empty end of the lounge, staring at the large, full-color pictures which were closely spaced along the walls so that he would not have to look at, and perhaps become involved with, the passengers. His first contact with two of them had not exactly helped his self-confidence.
Like the background music, the pictures were designed to be reassuring — there was only one take-off, a few interior shots, and the rest showed Eurydice or her sister ships coming in to land beneath enormous, brightly-colored dirigible parachutes, or floating in the ten-miles-distant landing lake and held upright by a collar of inflated life pods while the passengers slid laughing down a transparent tube into a waiting boat. The pictures stressed the Happy Return rather than the Voyage itself. Mercer thought cynically as he moved to the big periscopic window, which looked out over the field.
Two miles away, Eurydice stood by her gantry, clean but for the passenger boarding bridge. Only the topmost hundred feet or so of the ship proper, comprising the control room, crew quarters and the upper members of the structure which supported the rotating section, was visible. The service and life-support modules, water tank, and nuclear power unit were wrapped in thick swathes of boosters. A mile farther down the line stood the empty gantry which had serviced Minerva before her departure four months earlier, and beyond that, rippling faintly in the heat, there rose a ship identical to Eurydice except for its much larger and more complex wrapping of boosters.
Nobody talked about that particular ship, and it did not have a name. Like the homecoming pictures scattered around the lounge, it was meant to be a reassuring sight, but somehow it was nothing of the kind.
The only difference between the passengers and himself, Mercer thought sourly, was that he had nobody to talk loudly and nervously to ...
"Eurydice, sir?"
He turned to find a hostess standing behind him. She was wearing one of the old-style mirror plastic uniforms — described as pseudo-futuristic by female fashion writers and with animal growls of appreciation by men regardless of occupation — and for the first few seconds that was all he saw. He was vaguely aware of glittering boots, a hat streamlined for Mach Three and short cloak thrown back over shoulders that were a flawless, creamy pink, and intensely aware of the rest of the get-up, which was virtually topless and wellnigh bottomless. When he finally raised his eyes, Mercer discovered that she was not just a beautiful body — she had a nice face, too.
"The coach is waiting, sir," she said. Her smile was polite and not at all impatient, and her eyes were laughing at him.
Mercer nodded and began walking briskly towards the exit, where the passengers were already climbing the ramp, which led from the cool, blast-proof lounge to the blistering heat of the surface one hundred feet above. She hurried to keep pace with him, and Mercer wondered why until he realized suddenly that they were, after all, fellow workers, servants of the same company, colleagues. The realization made it possible for him to untie his suddenly knotted tongue.
"I'm sorry if I appeared rude back there," he said, trying hard to keep his eyes on a level with her face, "but it seems to me that, to anyone leaving Earth perhaps never to return, you make a very nice last impression. In fact, if there was a little more time before take-off it would not take much to convince me not to leave at all. Or come to think of it, when I get back in eight months we could meet and maybe —"
"What you are thinking would probably get us both into trouble, with my husband," she broke in, laughing. "This is your first trip, sir."
It was a statement with not the slightest suggestion of a question mark tacked onto the end. Trying to hide his irritation. Mercer said, "I didn't think it showed."
She was silent while they left the lounge and began to mount the flat spiral ramp leading to the surface. The radiation doors which interrupted the ascending tunnel every twenty yards had been dogged open, so that the hot, dusty air from above was already reaching them. When she spoke, the last of the passengers were out of sight and hearing, hidden by the curve of the tunnel and their own self-generated wall of sound.
"It shows, sir," she said seriously, "but I'm learning caution in my old age. You see, I don't seem to be able to give advice without also giving offence, and so unless I'm asked ..."
"I'm asking," said Mercer dryly.
She nodded and went on. "You are the tall, hungry-looking type who suits that black rig — but you, especially, must be careful how you wear it. That rakish angle of the hat is wrong for Eurydice, and some of your pocket zips are done and some half-done — you haven't got that right, either, and at this stage of the game you shouldn't even try. Even the plays which you've been watching so carefully on TV never get it right, so don't feel too bad about it.
"This mystique with the zips and caps which veteran spacemen practice," she went on, "began as sheer sloppiness, no doubt, but now the so-and-sos change the rules after every trip just to confuse people. But you, sir, are not yet a veteran, so it is much better that you don't get it at all than get it wrong. In any case, there are two officers on every ship who do not subscribe to these little idiosyncrasies of dress. They are the Captain, who is too important to care about such things, and the other is you, sir, who is generally considered to be the lowest form of life in the service and who is not supposed to get ideas above his station. But you know all this already, I hope."
She was watching him intently, but she relaxed when he smiled and said, "I was told, but not precisely in those words. The general idea seems to be that since our passengers have to be physically fit to be allowed to make the trip in the first place, my medical know-how is not essential, and since I have no other specialized technical training useful in space, my duties will be largely those of a steward. The responsibility for ensuring that the customers have a happy and comfortable trip is mine, apparently, and up until now, I'm sorry to say, the thought of mixing with and looking after more than forty healthy people has me scared stiff —"
"You are being too negative, sir!" she broke in sharply. "You may be little more than the ship's steward, but you must not act like one or even think like one. And you apologized to me twice during, oh, five minutes of conversation. That's bad. You must be the strong, silent type if you want to gain the respect of your charges. Failing that, you can be the weak, silent type — just so long as you're silent, reserved, somewhat aloof at all times and never tell them your troubles. Remember that the passengers don't know that you are just a glorified steward, and they must never suspect that you are their servant or your first trip will be hell, and your last so far as Eurydice is concerned. Because if even once you have to go to the real officers with a passenger problem, your name is mud, and you'll never —"
She was beginning to sound rather emotional. Mercer thought. He held up his hand and said, "What did I ever do to you?"
She was quiet for the next dozen paces, then she laughed and said, "Not a thing. But you can return my favor if you like. I would like to have a few extra minutes on board. If I could stay up there with the first group of passengers while you took up the second batch, I really would appreciate that, sir."
Return what favor? Mercer wondered, then thought that her advice and criticism had been just that, even if it had nearly lifted the skin off his back. He nodded.
"Oh, thank you, sir."
Definitely the emotional type, he thought.
A few minutes later they reached the upper end of the ramp and stood blinking in the twin glare of the afternoon sun and the mirror-bright coach. His dark uniform soaked up the heat like a thermal sponge, and beside him the girl became a glittering, truncated cone as she pulled the cloak around her shoulders.
"Sorry to spoil your view," she said, "but I don't tan in the sun, I frizzle up. You take the seat beside mine at the rear — you'll have more leg-room — and ignore the flashing lights on my call panel. People always sit on the arm-rest buttons while finding a seat. Be with you in a minute, sir."
By the time she rejoined him he had used the cosmetic mirror set into her service panel to adjust his cap, which was now absolutely straight and as level as the distant blue line of the landing lake. He had already checked his zips. The coach was already picking up speed towards Eurydice's gantry and the noise level was keeping pace with it. Two seats in front of them a man was complaining bitterly because the coaches weren't big enough to move everyone to the ship at the same time, another was insisting that at the price this trip was costing his company he was damn well going to watch the take-off from a port, and from farther along the coach two different call lights were blinking.
"It's high time," said Mercer, rising, "that I started getting to know my patients — I mean passengers."
Her small, strong hand pushed him back into the seat.
"I'll handle it," she said. "Until they are all trussed up and safe in their acceleration couches they are my responsibility. Sit there, and save your strength."
Because it was a widely accepted fact that many people could undertake plane trips and even interplanetary voyages without qualms and yet be scared silly by three hundred feet of altitude, the elevator which took Eurydice's passengers up to the main entry lock was completely enclosed. But that low-ceilinged, windowless cage had a very subduing effect, Mercer noted. It was as if the passengers realized that they were taking their first tiny step spacewards and that there was still time to step back. Or was he simply putting thoughts into the passengers' minds because the same thoughts were going through his own?
The cage was uncomfortably crowded, but the passengers were somehow managing to keep their distance from each other, and they did not even look at him. Starting to introduce himself in these conditions was impossible — he would simply make himself look and sound ridiculous. But he could at least nod at young Mathewson without loss of dignity or doing irreparable harm to his image.
But the boy tried to salute him and jabbed a passenger in the stomach with his elbow, his mother grabbed his arm and began apologizing all round, and Mercer retreated behind his personal wall of silence wondering, as they reached the top and the passengers preceded him into the ship, if it was possible to project an image so strong and silent that he would not have to speak to anyone at all for the entire four months of the trip.
First Officer Prescott was waiting for him just inside the outer seal. He ran his eyes quickly from Mercer's cap to his sneakers and back again, looking faintly surprised, but when he spoke he sounded more than faintly disappointed. "I thought you weren't going to make it. What kept you?"
"I was told to come aboard with the last coachload of passengers ..." began Mercer. But Prescott was obviously not listening, so he concentrated on being strong and silent again as he passed into the lock antechamber. He could feel his face burning, so the chances were that he was fooling nobody but himself.
The Captain was standing just inside the seal, looking cool, correct, and with his features, if anything, stiffer than his too-erect body. He was looking through Mercer and the double hull behind him at some remembered object or event, which claimed all of his attention.
He had met Collingwood and the other officers very briefly during his training, and the Captain had been the only ship's officer who had not made him feel like crawling under the nearest stone. But now it looked as if Collingwood was angry about something, probably the misdemeanor of the girl deserting half a coachload of passengers. Perhaps one of them had actually complained to him about it, and now she was standing beside the Captain looking as if she was about to cry.
Mercer felt sorry for her. She was very easy to like and even easier to feel sorry for, and in a way he was responsible for her trouble because he had agreed to her request. He wanted badly to apologize but remembered that she did not like people who apologized too often. He stopped. The Captain was still staring into the middle distance, not even seeing him.
"Good-bye, m'am," he said.
It came close to being the shortest and most uninspired farewell of all time, but her reaction literally rocked him back on his heels.
"Take care of yourself," she said, standing on tiptoe and giving him a very warm but sisterly kiss on the cheek. Then she looked at him very seriously and added, "Take care of all of them, sir."
Mercer had instinctively put his arms around her waist, both to keep his balance and because it seemed to be the thing to do, then let them drop to his sides. She had not, he saw, committed some trifling misdemeanor and been told off for it — there was far too much tension and sheer misery in her expression. He wondered what kind of trouble could make a girl with a disposition like hers react like this, and if he could help. But today he seemed to have left his inspiration in his other suit, and all he could manage was a sickly smile and a line of dialogue, which was too trite for words.
...
Nashea2