Pressure Man

Chapter Six

At one end of the room thick plastic ports gave a view of the stars, bright, undimmed by atmosphere, hard and sharp points of light in a pitch-black sky. Among a small group of people at the far end of the room, so that the stars were not visible to them, Dom stood in full dress uniform. Doris, too, was in the parade dress of the service. Art Donald was, in fact, the only civilian present as a four-star admiral presented Larry’s medal to his widow. The ceremony was being televised live to Earth.

When it was over and the admiral was on his way back to DOSEAST in Washington, Dom watched Doris gulp a full ounce of raw scotch.

“I don’t want it,” she said, looking down at the small gold medallion in her hand.

“I think I know how you feel,” Dom said.

“Larry would have laughed his head off at this,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“He would have said, never was there a more unlikely candidate for the Space Medal of Honor.” She smiled faintly, but there was no joy in the smile.

“No man ever deserved it more,” Dom said.

“Amen,” Art said.

“Is your life worth so much?” Doris asked bitterly. “I don’t value mine that high.”

Art choked on his drink. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Oh, Art, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I think it’s all so funny. So very, very f-f-funny.”

“Easy,” Dom said, putting his hand over hers.

“There’s no way Art could have known that we, Larry and I, have talked about this very sort of thing,” Doris said. “He said heroism, especially the sort which entails the ultimate self-sacrifice, is one of our more cherished traditions, beginning with the Spartan boy who let a fox or a rat or something gnaw out his guts for some reason. Then the good soldier throws himself atop the grenade to save the lives of his buddies at the expense of his own. Isn’t it very strange, he would say, how the top medals, the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Space Medal of Honor, are so often awarded posthumously?”

“I think if you’d asked him how he really felt he would have explained that top medals are awarded posthumously to show our great regard for individual life,” Dom said. “When a man gives all he has, his life, for a buddy, or his country—”

“Then let’s give the Congressional Medal of Honor to all of the Earthfirsters who commit suicide,” Doris said.

“It isn’t the same,” Art said, weakly.

“No, it isn’t,” Doris said. “Because they’re not dying for what we happen to believe at this particular time.”

“Do you doubt that Larry died for what he believed?” Dom asked. He knew she was on the narrow edge, and he thought perhaps it was time someone or something pushed her over. She had submerged herself in her work following the attack on DOSEWEX, first in repairing the computer and then in the project.

“But that’s it,” she said, her face puckering as she looked at him. “Don’t you see? That’s it.” She had to swallow and work her mouth before she could continue. “If I could believe that he did it for the project, for the worlds—”

“He had that in mind, too,” Dom said. “You know how fast his mind worked. He measured all of it, the project, the effect on the future. He put all of it into his mind as a problem to be solved and he solved it. The solution called for him to punch a button on a detonator.” He was doing it deliberately. She had not cried, to his knowledge. Not once had he seen her show emotion, not until she was holding a small piece of gold in her hand.

Art, not realizing what Dom was trying to do, looked uncomfortable. He tried to get Dom’s attention, to tell him to be quiet.

“He added it all up,” Dom went on. “He added in the lives of Doris Gomulka and Art Donald, the ship, the alien out there in the atmosphere of Jupiter. He balanced all the factors against the life of Larry Gomulka, and it evened out. And if you try to take out even one element of that decision, the life of Doris Gomulka, then you’re robbing Larry of his last successful problem solution. You’re saying that he failed, because he had it figured wrong and his death is not evened out by your being alive and the project continuing. If your life isn’t worth the value he assigned to it, he gave more than was gained.”

He was still holding her hand. She tried to pull it away. She was breathing hard.

“Larry died so that, among other things, you might live. You have to admit that, Doris. Give that to him. Don’t try to take that away from him.”

It came out of her in an agonized, low-pitched wail, a river of sadness. She made no attempt to cover her face. Her lips distorted, her eyes closed, squeezing out tears. Her face was dramatic in its expression of pain, and the sound of her sobbing was too much for Art. He left the scene. She gulped air and sobbed. Dom led her gently toward the couch and pushed her down. Her hands were clenched at her sides. She wept with great gusto and noise, not neatly, not at all ladylike. There was wetness and huge gulpings and hoarse, grating noises and grunts of pain.

When the worst was over he positioned her on the couch and covered her with a blanket. He left her still weeping, but more quietly.

As he changed in his own quarters and went into the lock to don the heavy suit, he felt a little misty-eyed himself, for Larry would have enjoyed the sight of Folly hanging up there in space. He wondered if he would have been fast enough and decisive enough to do what Larry had done if he’d been in Larry’s place. He didn’t know. But he would never again ask himself if Larry’s death had been worthwhile.

He took a jumper up to the construction site. The plates were going on over the interior skeleton. Monowelding required the near vacuum of space. He could see miniature stars where the welders were at work. It was all done in an eerie silence in the airlessness. The stars were a quiet audience.

A good spacer has a celestial clock of sorts in his head. He knew, as he watched from a short distance, the relative position of the planets in their orbits. Mars there, finely visible. Jupiter was hidden, if he had been at a telescope, behind the bulk of the moon.

But the signals still came. Their strength was undiminished, not quite strong enough to be easily detected from Earth. They were being constantly monitored from the moon and from ships in space.

The new freedom of spending which was the hallmark of the project extended outward from the construction site in an expanding fan of beneficial largess for the entire service. The necessity of monitoring the signals sent ships out, and while they listened, they did useful work which had been planned but unfunded for decades. Once again the gathering of space data was a going industry. Men practiced science for the sake of science, just to scratch that persistent human itch for the knowledge of what lies over the next hill.

A ship monitoring the signal from Jupiter could be taking magnetic measurements or aiming shipboard telescopes out beyond the system or picking up asteroid samples or doing any one of hundreds of small research projects which would add to man’s knowledge. Even the critics were sold on the extra research in order to make the most out of the necessity of having ships in space.

Dom’s presence on the moon was not essential. His work was done. But it would have taken an act of Congress to get him away, even if he did not participate actively in putting together the Tinker-Toy construction which would become the John F. Kennedy. (If he thought of her as Folly, he added the word “Grand” in front of the epithet.) There were ongoing crises and decisions to be made, but he could have made them from DOSEWEX or DOSEAST. On the other hand, Doris was valuable and Art Donald’s team was needed to run a series of tests on construction as it went into place.

She grew rapidly. There wasn’t another building project under way anywhere in the world. The department was concentrating all its manpower and most of its available money on the Kennedy. She was the topic of conversation wherever DOSE people worked, from Earthside to the last picket ship out near the mass of Jupiter.

The grandeur which was a ship took shape in her own element with the pocked moon and the blackness of space as her backdrop. It made for a serene and beautiful picture. Sitting in a jumper five thousand yards from the Kennedy, it was difficult to imagine the conflict going on down there on that blue-and-white ball which was the home planet. There, governments were being changed. Fighting varied from savage and random acts of terror by the Firsters to the highly charged atmosphere of the Senate, where radicals were locked in combat with the outnumbered men who believed in a future for man which did not entail buttoning up and toughing it out on the home planet.

For weeks a debate raged over the battle of DOSEWEX, where thirty-two hundred Earthfirsters died. The ruling party, the Publicrats, received the brunt of an attack from rabid, self-confessed Firsters and Worldsavers. Liberals wept openly on the Senate floor as they bewailed the mass slaughter of humanity at DOSEWEX, and, in their zeal against the death penalty for terrorists, they called loudly for the pitiless execution of all those responsible for the slaughter of innocent terrorists who were merely using their First Amendment rights to express dissatisfaction with space policy.

Only once did a courageous man stand up to remind the Senate that two dozen civilians died at DOSEWEX, along with over a hundred space marines. He was hooted into silence. On the way to his fortified apartment, he was attacked by a teenage Firster girl in a sexy little dress which concealed a bomb in an oversized bra. The bomb ruptured the brave senator’s left eardrum and killed two of his bodyguards. Thus were courageous and commonsense views silenced, without regard for First Amendment freedoms.

It was almost as if the majority of Americans felt guilty for taking the government’s cradle-to-the-grave security at the expense of individual freedom and wanted to be punished by the Firster knife or bomb. Overpeopled, underfed, the country was one teeming warren of interconnected big-city heaps where people suffering the traumas of crowding seemed all too eager to die and saw no promise in tomorrow.

Earthside was such a turmoil that there was no ground leave. The limited facilities of the moon were taxed by the construction crews, and spacers in from Mars or the Jupiter surveillance run sometimes had to spend their ground time aboard ship. Their bitchings were surprisingly good-natured, for they could see the Kennedy as she grew.

Dom spent a lot of time with Neil Walters, who would test and pilot the Kennedy. Although he was older, Neil was a perpetual boy of twenty-five in appearance. He stood six-four and was topped by a mop of blond, curly hair. He had deep, laughing blue eyes and a classical angularity of face which went with his daring and his reputation. He liked talking about flying only slightly less than he liked flying. He set out to learn the Kennedy from the smallest component upward. He was good company, for the Kennedy had become Dom’s main reason for living.

When she flew, Neil would be in command. He had a sharp mind, and Dom never had to explain even the most complicated technical details. In fact, Neil posed questions which put Dom back into the lab, Doris with him at the keyboard of a computer, to check and recheck. Neil’s questions were basic and penetrating. They caused Dom to check all the important calculations and the thinking which went into the revolutionary concept of the folding hull. Dom discovered nothing serious wrong, but he did make slight changes here and there.

Neil’s main criticism of the plan was that it would be impossible to test Kennedy’s hull under pressure.

“Either it works when we get down into Jupe or it doesn’t,” Dom said.

“Well, it only has to work once,” Neil said, with a wide grin.

“We’ll be reading the stress on the hull as we go down, reading it carefully and following it all the way,” Dom said. “We can always turn back if something begins to give.”

Neil laughed. “One good thing about this one. If something goes whango I might have time to spit right in the designer’s face before I check out.”

Neil was stimulating, but not even talking with Neil could fill all the hours. There was not a lot to do on the moon. Drink was expensive, because there were no distilleries on the moon and booze was a luxury item not included in rations. Dom spent a lot of time in the observatories, He played some bridge. He explored a bit, but once you’ve seen one acre of the moon’s surface there is a sameness. One crater is like every other crater, just a bit bigger or smaller. He also did a lot of reading. But still the days dragged and the weeks were endless and the months were eons. The ship grew, and that was the main pleasure, just going out there to see what work had been done in the past twenty-four hours.

It was interesting when the monowelders began to join the mush-bonded collapsing seams to the plates. It went just as predicted, with no problems.

Doris had her work. She kept busy, finding time for dinner with Dom only occasionally. When they were alone Dom was careful to stick to business and keep the conversation away from personal things. After that bull market of weeping on the day she received Larry’s medal, she could talk about him without pain. It was no longer necessary to remember not to mention Larry, because she often did. As if Larry were merely off somewhere on one of his jaunts, she’d say, “I wonder what Larry would think about that?” He lived in her memory, but he did not become an obsession. Dom suspected that her grief was not totally spent, but it was not a festering sore. She could laugh at a joke, be sentimental about a love song, muse over her memories, all without giving the outward appearance of a perpetually grieving widow.

J.J. made regular trips to encourage, investigate, cheer, and urge on. He was on the moon the day air was pumped into the hull and for the first time workers could operate inside the Kennedy without life-support gear. Work on the fittings and finishings began to go faster. J.J. sat in the pilot’s seat and examined the instrumentation spreading before him.

“I’ll have to take a refresher course,” he said.

“For what?” Dom asked.

“To be able to fly this mother.”

“You?”

“I’m copilot,” J.J. said.

Dom considered the advantages and the disadvantages of that. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have,” he said.

“Bless you, my son,” J.J. said airily. “It will be understood, of course, that I am senior only in rank. In ship operations I’ll be second in command to Neil and you, and only you will have the final say about safety.”

“Bless you,” Dom said.

J.J. looked ahead, out the front port. “Flash,” he said, “it’s all going to be in your hands there on Jupe. We’re shooting the works, all of us, on this trip, but there’s no need for us to die needlessly. If it works, you’ll get credit for it. If it fails, no one will ever be able to tell you I told you so. But remember, if we lose, if it doesn’t work, the whole silly damned human race is the prime loser.”

Dom had no comment to make on that.