One in 300 (2 page)

 

 

"Say, Harry," I said. "You know Sammy Hoggan well?"

 

 

Harry knew everybody. He nodded, very serious. He knew that whatever
he said to me, whatever anyone said to me, might mean life or death for
someone. So it was a solemn business talking to me.

 

 

It had probably never crossed his mind that he might be one of the ten.
When you really came down to it, there were a surprising number of people
who took it for granted that they had no right to live, if only a few
could survive.

 

 

"What's the matter with him?" I asked.

 

 

"Thought you knew. His girl left him."

 

 

"That all?"

 

 

"Son," said Harry seriously, "I've lived a bit longer than you, even if
you're the most important man around just now. Never say, 'That all?'
about someone's reasons for doing anything. That's only your reaction
to the circumstances as you know them, and it means next to nothing."

 

 

"Okay," I said. "What was the girl like?"

 

 

"No good."

 

 

"Because she left Sammy?"

 

 

"That among other things. Sammy's a good boy, Bill. You'd like him.
It's a pity you've no chance now of knowing what he's like."

 

 

Unexpectedly, Pat said something coarse and regrettably audible. One of
the unfortunate things about Pat was that she could get completely drunk
on a thimbleful of whisky.

 

 

One of the others, though it ill becomes me to say it, was that when
people called her the unpleasant things people so often call beautiful,
reckless girls, they were for once perfectly right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

After we'd had another drink or two I decided to go to Havinton,
five miles over the hill. Pat wanted to come, but I liked her better
sober. She got drunk easily and sobered easily. By the time I got back
she'd be all right.

 

 

Something was going to happen that afternoon that I wasn't going to like.
I had put it off as long as I could. For a while I had thought I was going
to be able to put it off until it was too late.

 

 

When I first came to Simsville Father Clark came to see me. I'd been told
that if I was to co-operate with anyone it should be with ministers of
all faiths. We were pretty free; we had little or nothing to do with the
police, and nothing at all with other local authorities. But the job the
ministers were doing, strangely enough, linked up quite well with ours.

 

 

Father Clark was one of those people who are transparently sincere and
so humble that you can't help being uncomfortable in their presence
and glad to get away. When he said he and Pastor Munch and the Reverend
John MacLean would like to have a meeting with me as soon as possible
and discuss a few things, I had been vague and managed to avoid fixing
a date. There was a solemnity about working together with clergymen
of three faiths that reminded me, when I didn't want to be reminded,
that I wasn't just Bill Easson any more.

 

 

The three men of God were so busy that it was easy for me to keep stalling.
Sure, I was shirking my responsibilities. My only excuse was that that
was the only responsibility I was consciously shirking. Other lieutenants
would have other things to square with their consciences. Men with color
prejudices would have to face up to the idea that the catastrophe wasn't
a special dispensation to remove all but pure whites from the human race;
some lieutenants whose blood crawled at the thought would pick colored
men to go to Mars, knowing that if they didn't they would never know
peace again. Men who hadn't noticed children for years would realize that
there was such a thing as responsibility to young people; the intelligent
would discover responsibility for the stupid; and of course all of us
were adjusting ourselves to the idea that a baby just out of the womb,
a dreamy, clear-skinned boy of eight, a beautiful girl of seventeen,
a man in the prime of life, and an old toothless woman were all units
in the fantastic new numerology we were using.

 

 

Anyway, this responsibility had caught up with me. I was to see the three
clergymen later that afternoon. Meantime I'd had enough of being important,
so I went to Havinton. In Havinton I was just a man among men. The gods
there were Lieutenants Britten, Smith, Schutz, and Hallstead. From which
it might be gathered that Havinton was about four times the size of
Simsville.

 

 

 

 

It's difficult to say how much warning we had of the end of the world.
The first concrete thing was certainly Professor Clubber's article in the
Astronomical Journal two years earlier, in which he said that if and if
and if, the sun was going to fry at least the four nearest planets to crisps
very soon. But who reads the
Astronomical Journal
?

 

 

No, it was a year before the possible end of the world was publicized
even enough for crackpot cults to spring up -- and God knows that doesn't
take much publicity.

 

 

The trouble was, at first it was more or less all-inclusive. Not only
Earth but Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids as well. That was as
far as any spaceship from Earth had gone so far. Someday someone would
land on one of the satellites of the bigger worlds, but not in time to
affect this problem. So at first there was no question of any refuge. No
preparations were made -- there was nothing to prepare for. And priceless
months were wasted.

 

 

The sun wasn't going to become a nova, or anything like that. It was only
going to burn a little brighter for a while, like an open fire suddenly
collapsing on itself and shooting out spurts of flaming hydrogen.
Astronomers on distant worlds, if there were any, would have to be
advanced indeed before they would change Sol's brightness index as a
result of any observations they might be making.

 

 

It was such a tiny change, astronomically speaking, which the sun was
going to make that one could understand why cults like the Sunlovers
started. The first I heard of this group, it was a thousand strong. When
I checked on the figure it was three million. A week later there were
over a hundred million members of an international Sunlovers' Association.

 

 

What the Sunlovers were going to do was just get used to the change before
it came. They flowed to the tropics. They found the hottest spots on Earth.
The SunA embraced sun bathing, primitivism, nudism, Egyptology, swimming,
anything remotely connected with the sun. The SunAs, as they called
themselves (pronounced Sunays), soon had a routine in which clothes were
ceremoniously torn to pieces and the body was offered to the sun.

 

 

Well. But don't let's be hard on the SunAs. Fully ninety-five per cent
of them were sane, sensible people -- it was only the extremists who
carried out those stunts like walking through fires and burning ice
factories and giving birth to children out in the blazing sun and
publicly branding their breasts with the SunA sign by sunrays focused
though giant magnifying glasses.

 

 

Most of the SunAs were people who thought that if they took the step of
converting their environment from, say, fur-clad Alaska to bathing-suited
Bermuda they would have gone part of the way to being ready for the
admittedly tiny increase in radiated solar energy. They didn't get up
before dawn to pay their respects to the sun; or if they did, it was
out of politeness, not to the Sun God, but to the more fervid SunAs
around them.

 

 

What the SunAs couldn't or wouldn't understand was that astronomical
temperatures, even solar-system temperatures, ranged from -273° C.
to 20,000° C., and humanity was only comfortable between 10° and 30°.
Certainly people could exist at below-zero and above-blood-heat temperatures.
But while nobody wanted to claim accuracy to a degree or two, there was
unquestionably going to be no place left on the surface of Earth where
water would remain liquid.

 

 

Then there were the Trogs, who weren't so much going to get used to the
new conditions as run away from them. Basically, if the aim of all the
Trog societies must be reduced to its simplest terms, they were going to
dig holes in the ground. Oh, certainly some of the Trogs were scientists
genuinely planning on survival in a 250°-500° C. world. They were working
on a basis of shelter, to equalize temperatures; refrigeration, to convert
the energy of heat to the task of keeping a few cubic feet cool; hydroponics,
for food and water -- all the obvious things. The only thing was, it was like
trying to move a mountain with a wooden spade. It wasn't going to work.
Undoubtedly some Trogs were going to live longer than anyone else when the
heat really came on, but that was all -- minutes, hours, or days. There
just wasn't time to find out how to make a bubble which one could never
leave in a 300° C. world and keep it at what had once been normal Earth
temperature. Our science was a caveman technology -- we knew about
lighting fires and staying warm, but our only solution when there was
too much heat was to go somewhere else.

 

 

Yes, it was a pity we worked on wrong premises for so long. Until well on
in July there was still room for doubt; but then two things were shown
conclusively. One was that life would cease on Earth on or about September
18; the other was that Mars, instead of sharing in the disaster, would
almost certainly be more habitable after the solar change than before.

 

 

It was a double blow. Before that, people could refuse to believe that the
world was in any danger. After it, there was the knowledge that
some
people would live. The law of survival became Mars at Any Price.

 

 

A few people who moved quickly enough actually gave themselves life
simply by booking passages to Mars. But very soon the survival of the
human race was organized. The planners and statisticians got to work.
And about their deliberations and premises I know nothing.

 

 

The edict was that 1 in 324.7 people could go to Mars. That was pretty
damn good, we were told. It could be achieved only by having every machine
plant that could possibly be used for the job feverishly producing anything
that could prise itself off Earth before it was too late.

 

 

Pretty damn good it might be, but it meant that 324 out of every 325 people
all over Earth were going to die.

 

 

Somehow one person out of every three hundred or so had to be picked out
for a chance to live on a strange world. And the job had been given,
rightly or wrongly, to the men who were actually to take them to their
new home.

 

 

There wasn't much time for argument. Friday, September 18, was deadline.
For a few hours after noon on Friday the real spaceships, the ships
properly built before the heat was on, would be landing and taking away
extra cargoes of human beings. But by noon Friday all the rush jobs,
the lifeships made in desperate haste for one trip only, would have to
be clear of Earth. Otherwise they might as well stay where they were.

 

 

So they sent us out -- us, the men and women who happened to be able to
handle a ship -- to collect the ten people who would go with each of us.

 

 

See what I mean about needing a library for the whole story? The details
of how agreement was reached on that point would make a book.

 

 

We weren't anything special, the newly appointed gods who had to pick
ten people out of 3250 or so. It just so hap- pened that the way to get
most people off the Earth was to build thousands of tiny ships into which
eleven people could be packed. A little more time, and perhaps mighty ships
could have been built, and a different method of selection employed.

 

 

Anyone who had any hope of being able to handle a lifeship was given a
command. I had been a radio officer on an expeditionary spaceship. At
that I had a better background than some of the men and women who were
going to try to take lifeships to Mars. Mary Homer, the stewardess on
the exploration ship, had a command, I knew.

 

 

In the end, of course, the real shortage wasn't of lieutenants but of
lifeships. Otherwise they'd have had training schools set up to turn
out space pilots in a hurry (normally, it only took five years).

 

 

I had been given Simsville, which was just big enough to supply a
lifeship complement and no more. I'd never been there before, of
course. Lieutenants were invariably sent where they knew nobody.

 

 

And four days before takeoff, I had my list of people who were to live.

 

 

The Powells. They were Mr. and Mrs. America, Jr. Fred Mortenson, the
brash, clean-limbed young hero-to-be. Harry Phillips, who wasn't quite
sure it was right for people to go dashing away from the world that
had given them life, merely because it was now going to bring them
death. Little Bessie Phillips, who didn't know what it was all about
(who did?). Miss Wallace, a schoolteacher and a good one. People like
her would be needed. The Stowes, Mr. and Mrs. America, Sr., and Jim,
their son. Leslie Darby.

 

 

Because Leslie was going, Pat would stay. Don't allow for what you think
the rest of you are going to do, I'd been told, with all the other
lieutenants of lifeships. But it was difficult to escape the idea that
there would be plenty of young and beautiful girls on the list for
Mars. So I had only one in my ten.

 

 

I had only three things to worry about now.