One in 300 (11 page)

 

 

That didn't matter much. We could handle that problem as we had handled it
before. But something else did matter.

 

 

Earth was beginning to die. Already the extra heat was searing the world
we had left. I saw Sammy's eyes cloud and knew what he was thinking.

 

 

The polar icecaps were melting. Elsewhere, clouds of water vapor were rising
from every open body of water. Soon lakes would bubble and gurgle;
real steam would begin to rise. The ground would crack and leaves would
shrivel. There would be earthquakes, as the wave of heat tried to equalize
itself through Earth's brittle crust.

 

 

SunAs were ecstatically offering their bodies to the new sun, glorying in
the new warmth in cold spots, throwing away furs and heavy coats. In the
warmer places the SunAs were arching back luxuriously in the new blinding
heat -- and in a few minutes screaming as it blackened their skin.

 

 

Wood houses were catching fire spontaneously, bridges buckling, girders
pushing their way through masonry and plaster. Parched winds were rising,
sweeping hissing steam along city streets. Lamp standards buckled,
water tanks burst, glass cracked and fell in splinters.

 

 

People were running, then tripping as the sidewalks split, screaming
as their clothes began to smolder. People were dashing into bathrooms,
turning on the cold shower and being scalded by the boiling water and
steam that emerged. Others, unthinking, were running for lakes and pools,
unaware that the water was already well on the way to being steam. Once
more the astonishing thing would be that human beings lived so long, still
moving, trying to survive in a world where every tree was blazing. All
over one side of the planet people who were dead, their bodies roasted,
still moved and shrieked and strove for blessed coolness which no
longer existed.

 

 

Now even the polar regions would be hidden under boiling clouds. Down in
the depths of the sea there was still coolness, while the waters above
boiled and tried to leap bodily into the atmosphere. Some deep-sea fish
would still be swimming about unaware of disaster.

 

 

People on the slopes of high mountains were climbing higher and higher,
and then finding abruptly that there was no escape. Even the icecaps of
high mountains were turning to steam.

 

 

Hurricanes were sweeping the world, for the heat was still uneven. But they
weren't cold gales -- they were tearing blasts of hot air that could lift
a stream bodily and never let it down.

 

 

Coalpits were burning, grassland was burning, forests were burning,
whole streets in towns were ablaze. Yet there would still be freak spots
in this mad world where people and animals out in the open were still
alive, and water existed as water, not steam.

 

 

Now there would be volcanoes where there never had been volcanoes, the
ravaged Earth adding her own contribution to the devastation. Perhaps
Atlantis had risen again and was dry as a bone in a matter of minutes.

 

 

The side of Earth where it was night was having a very different, but no
less frightening, experience. Tremors, sudden winds, a hot breath from
somewhere, no more. Time to prepare, for obviously something was happening,
something worse was going to happen; suspense, not actuality. A few minutes,
even an hour or two, of reports from the other side of the world, jamming
the wires and the ether -- then silence. More tremors, earthquakes; the
first tidal waves. And all the time the Earth was spinning, bringing
millions of square miles of undevastated land into the glare, tilting
seared land and boiling sea into darkness and comparative coolness --
too late.

 

 

Then storms, pouring rain as water-sodden air swept around the world,
cooled, and unloaded millions of tons of water on the dark land and
sea. Still the world turned, giving more and more of its surface to the
killing heat. Hot hurricanes were following the cool monsoons on the dark
side. Already, in the night, the quarter of the Earth that remained was
feeling the burning breath of the new sun. The moon was strangely bright,
reflecting a stronger glare.

 

 

The part of the Earth which had been in the glare of the sun since the
beginning was by this time cauterized, sterilized by heat. Nothing remained,
not animals, not birds, not reptiles, not insects, not plant life.
And there was no liquid for fish to live in. The bodies of the creatures
which had died, if not burned, were desiccated.

 

 

But even in this part there was still life, human life. The Trogs lived
-- the scientific cavemen, the people who had known what was coming and
prepared for it, digging deep and very special holes in the ground.

 

 

This, however, was only the start. Even when the Earth turned and there
was not a square inch of ground that had not been seared by the new, more
passionate sun, it was no more than a beginning. The mean temperature
of the Earth, through all its mass, probably hadn't risen more than one
degree yet. . . .

 

 

That was for the future -- the next day, then the next. But no one would
be around to see what happened in the later stages.

 

 

 

 

What brought me back to the lifeship, which was my concern, from the doomed
Earth, which wasn't, was the prosaic fact that Harry Phillips was taking off
his shirt.

 

 

I forced my attention back to the present, the lifeship. Earth was the past
-- we had known that since we left it.

 

 

It wasn't unimportant that Harry was taking off his shirt. Given the lead,
Morgan Smith started to peel off his clothes too. They had thought in
their various ways of the world they had left, and suddenly, perhaps for
the first time, they realized they had left it and that its standards, its
way of life, and the things it demanded no longer had any real meaning.

 

 

It was hot in the lifeship, stifling hot; Bill Easson was probably right
after all. So they stripped, and another part of Earth died. We were no
longer men and women of the third planet, the green world.

 

 

As Sammy and I unscrewed more panels on the sides farthest from the sun,
there was even laughter and a suggestion of horseplay. Miss Wallace
wore sensible underwear, of course. While it didn't positively deny
sex, it made it look improbable. John Stowe grinned fleetingly as he
looked at her -- the first time he had smiled since Mary died. Morgan
was flushed with embarrassment until he realized that there was no need
for it, and he grinned too. Old Harry was quite unconcerned. He, at any
rate, had held out for so long only because he saw no need to do as I
suggested. Betty took off her slacks, but felt it necessary to explain,
embarrassed, that she couldn't take off her sweater because she wasn't
wearing anything underneath.

 

 

For some reason everyone thought that was very funny. Betty went redder
and redder, then impulsively caught hold of her sweater to tear it off.
I watched with interest that had nothing to do with sex. If Betty,
the shy, nervous, self-conscious Betty, could do that, something had
really happened.

 

 

But she didn't, of course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

There was a slightly different attitude among us after that. For one thing,
Mary Stowe's death no longer seemed to be hanging over us. We all, even
John Stowe, found it easier now to think of her as one of the casualties
of the disaster. There had always been a lingering doubt about the truth
of the scientists' predictions. We might be making fools of ourselves,
and Mary might have died for nothing.

 

 

Now that was gone. We could tell from the conditions in our own little
ship that all the scientists had said was justified.

 

 

The casual marriages of Morgan and Betty, and Leslie and me, were now
accepted completely. Miss Wallace made a point of telling me that she was
satisfied I was right. In fact, she said a little wistfully, if there was
any question of the situation arising in her case -- which, of course,
there wasn't -- she would gladly marry in the same conditions. Or even,
she said stoutly, have children without marrying.

 

 

It was the knowledge of what had happened on Earth that did that. There is
a feeling for race survival in every human being, and not only survival,
but strong survival. The thought of the tiny proportion of the human
race which would be left stimulated this feeling in everyone. The way
people casually mentioned having children showed how their thoughts had
been directed.

 

 

Morgan and Betty asked me -- rather late, I suspected -- when we would
be safely down on Mars at latest, and whether it was all right to start
children. I reassured them. Miss Wallace observed in some surprise,
after long calculation, that she could still have nine or ten children.
I thought that was rather an overestimate, myself. Sammy dropped a remark
or two about things he was going to tell his children. Harry Phillips
wondered if old people could get together on a one-child basis, so that
a woman who might have another child could be partnered by a man who
was past his best, and neither could be a drag on the reproduction of
the younger folk. John Stowe remarked that Mary wouldn't have been able
to have any more children anyway.

 

 

The attitude of the people on the lifeship still wasn't all it might be,
however.

 

 

"It will be different on other lifeships," I told Leslie once. "Some crews
will be finding their lieutenant turning into a little dictator."

 

 

She grinned. "I can't see you as a dictator. Your way's right, Bill."

 

 

"No, their way's right," I said. "Suppose I had to get everyone to do
something in a hurry. Would they do it? Only if it suited them. They'd
argue. They'd complain. Some would do it, some wouldn't."

 

 

"And I still think that's right," Leslie declared. "You must too, Bill."

 

 

"How do you work that out?"

 

 

"You picked us. If you wanted slaves you'd have picked slaves."

 

 

I had to admit that.

 

 

But I still had a point, I felt. I didn't want to give the example of
the attitude I thought was right, not to Leslie.

 

 

I had married Leslie, but she didn't matter to me. She didn't figure
in my calculations. That didn't mean that later, if there was a later,
I wouldn't love her and cherish her and build my whole new world about
her. Meantime, I was in charge of a spaceship, and having a girl was
an irrelevance. If something dangerous had to be done that only Leslie
could do, I wouldn't hesitate an instant before telling her to do it.

 

 

It wasn't a question of not having time for her. I had plenty of time.
If it hadn't been for the fact that she still spent a lot of time in the
hydroponics plant, she'd have been with me twenty-four hours of the day.
What I couldn't afford to give her was attention.

 

 

We didn't get the temperature in the ship as low as it had been before,
not for a long time. The hull was absorbing more heat, conducting it
around, and couldn't radiate away as much from inside.

 

 

I don't know whether suggestion came into it, but apart from that possibility
we proved to the hilt how much health depends on air circulation,
temperature, and humidity. The water purifier's condensation unit went
on strike for a day or two, and by the time we had it working again we
were all like limp rags and would have lost pounds in sweat if there
had been any way to measure that.

 

 

Morgan drifted all over the ship with the air current as he slept one
night. He woke with a headache and fever, and for five days he had
the works -- cold, sore throat, headache, cough, fever. There may have
been other causes, but the high temperature and absence of air movement
(since he went with the air) seemed to cover it.

 

 

It was Jim who suggested something I should have thought of long since.
One day as he and I were in the control cabin, companionably silent,
he said:

 

 

"Why can't we see any of the other ships, Lieutenant Bill?" He always
called me that.

 

 

"The other lifeships, Jim?" I asked.

 

 

"Yes. There's millions of them, aren't there, all going the same way?"

 

 

"Not quite millions, Jim. Why can't we see them? Well, look. Remember
all those ships at Detroit? They all took off more or less together,
going from the same place to the same place. Yet I'll bet there wasn't
one collision. At the end of ten seconds each ship's done about two
miles. Even if you point another ship after it then and
try
to ram it,
you can't do it."

 

 

I waited while he worked that out for himself. He was an intelligent kid,
more intelligent than any of the adults except Sammy and Leslie. Then I
went on: "Between Earth and Mars now there should be hundreds of thousands
of lifeships. But the volume of space in which they may be is about --
oh, say fifty million million miles. I'm sure I could make it a lot more
if I tried."

 

 

I grinned at him. "So if you think of it," I said, we're not likely to
see many of the others, are we?"

 

 

"That's a pity," said Jim thoughtfully. "If there were others close,
we might be able to get fuel from them."

 

 

I jerked convulsively. "How do you know we need fuel?" I demanded.