The waitress brought the cakes.
The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried. He knew it for what it was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with—even more than that, it had become a way of life. It was his comfort and his shield, the driving force that kept him trudging on each day.
He finished the cakes and paid for them.
“Good luck,” said the waitress, with a smile.
“Thank you,” he said.
He tramped down the road, with the gravel crunching underfoot and the sun like a blast upon his back, but he had left the greenness. The port lay bare and bald, scalped and cauterized.
He reached where he was going and went up to the desk.
“You again,” said the union agent.
“Anything for Mars?”
“Not a thing. No, wait a minute. There was a man in here not too long ago.”
The agent got up from the desk and went to the door. Then he stepped outside the door and began to shout at someone.
A few minutes later, he was back. Behind him came a lumbering and irate individual. He had a cap upon his head that said CAPTAIN in greasy, torn letters, but aside from that he was distinctly out of uniform.
“Here’s the man,” the agent told the captain. “Name of Anson Cooper. Engineer first class, but his record’s not too good.”
“Damn the record!” bawled the captain. He said to Cooper: “Do you know Morrisons?”
“I was raised with them,” said Cooper. It was not the truth, but he knew he could get by.
“They’re good engines,” said the captain, “but cranky and demanding. You’ll have to baby them. You’ll have to sleep with them. And if you don’t watch them close, they’ll up and break your back.”
“I know how to handle them,” said Cooper.
“My engineer ran out on me.” The captain spat on the floor to show his contempt for runaway engineers. “He wasn’t man enough.”
“I’m man enough,” Cooper declared.
And he knew, standing there, what it would be like. But there was no other choice. If he wanted to get back to Mars, he had to take the Morrisons.
“O.K., then, come on with you,” the captain said.
“Wait a minute,” said the union agent. “You can’t rush a man off like this. You have to give him time to pick up his duffle.”
“I haven’t any to pick up,” Cooper said, thinking of the few pitiful belongings back in the boarding house. “Or none that matters.”
“You understand,” the agent said to the captain, “that the union cannot vouch for a man with a record such as his.”
“To hell with that,” said the captain. “Just so he can run the engines. That’s all I ask.”
The ship stood far out in the field. She had not been much to start with and she had not improved with age. Just the job of riding on a craft like that would be high torture, without the worry of nursing Morrisons.
“She’ll hang together, no fear,” said the captain. “She’s got a lot more trips left in her than you’d think. It beats all hell what a tub like that can take.”
Just one more trip, thought Cooper. Just so she gets me to Mars. Then she can fall apart, for all I care.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, and meant it.
He walked up to one of the great landing fins and laid a hand upon it. It was solid metal, with all the paint peeled off it, with tiny pits of corrosion speckling its surface and with a hint of cold, as if it might not as yet have shed all the touch of space.
And this was it, he thought. After all the weeks of waiting, here finally was the thing of steel and engineering that would take him home again.
He walked back to where the captain stood.
“Let’s get on with it,” he said. “I’ll want to look the engines over.”
“They’re all right,” said the captain.
“That may be so. I still want to run a check on them.”
He had expected the engines to be bad, but not as bad as they turned out to be. If the ship had not been much to look at, the Morrisons were worse.
“They’ll need some work,” he said. “We can’t lift with them, the shape they’re in.”
The captain raved and swore. “We have to blast by dawn, damn it! This is a goddam emergency.”
“You’ll lift by dawn,” snapped Cooper. “Just leave me alone.”
He drove his gang to work, and he worked himself, for fourteen solid hours, without a wink of sleep, without a bite to eat.
Then he crossed his fingers and told the captain he was ready.
They got out of atmosphere with the engines holding together. Cooper uncrossed his fingers and sighed with deep relief. Now all he had to do was keep them running.
The captain called him forward and brought out a bottle. “You did better, Mr. Cooper, than I thought you would.”
Cooper shook his head. “We aren’t there yet, Captain. We’ve a long way still to go.”
“Mr. Cooper,” said the captain, “you know what we are carrying? You got any idea at all?”
Cooper shook his head.
“Medicines,” the captain told him. “There’s an epidemic out there. We were the only ship anywhere near ready for takeoff. So we were requisitioned.”
“It would have been much better if we could have overhauled the engines.”
“We didn’t have the time. Every minute counts.”
Cooper drank the liquor, stupid with a tiredness that cut clear to the bone. “Epidemic, you say. What kind?”
“Sand fever,” said the captain. “You’ve heard of it, perhaps.”
Cooper felt the chill of deadly fear creep along his body. “I’ve heard of it.” He finished off the whisky and stood up. “I have to get back, sir. I have to watch those engines.”
“We’re counting on you, Mr. Cooper. You have to get us through.”
He went back to the engine room and slumped into a chair, listening to the engine-song that beat throughout the ship.
He had to keep them going. There was no question of it now, if there’d ever been a question. For now it was not the simple matter of getting home again, but of getting needed drugs to the old home planet.
“I promise you,” he said, talking to himself. “I promise you we’ll get there.”
He drove the engine crew and he drove himself, day after dying day, while the howling of the tubes and the thunder of the haywire Morrisons racked a man almost beyond endurance.
There was no such thing as sleep—only catnaps caught as one could catch them. There were no such things as meals, only food gulped on the run. And there was work, and worse than work were the watching and the waiting, the shoulders tensed against the stutter or the sudden screech of metal that would spell disaster.
Why, he wondered dully, did a man ever go to space? Why should one deliberately choose a job like this? Here in the engine room, with its cranky motors, it might be worse than elsewhere in the ship. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t bad. For throughout the ship stretched tension and discomfort and, above all, the dead, black fear of space itself, of what space could do to a ship and the men within it.
In some of the bigger, newer ships, conditions might be better, but not a great deal better. They still tranquilized the passengers and colonists who went out to the other planets—tranquilized them to quiet the worries, to make them more insensitive to discomfort, to prevent their breaking into panic.
But a crew you could not tranquilize. A crew must be wide-awake, with all its faculties intact. A crew had to sit and take it.
Perhaps the time would come when the ships were big enough, when the engines and the drives would be perfected, when Man had lost some of his fear of the emptiness of space—then it would be easier.