The Daleth Effect

10

“Signing off until sixteen hundred hours foir next contact,” Colonel Nartov said, and threw the switch on the radio. He wore sunglasses and ragged-bottom shorts, hacked from his nylon shipsuit, and nothing else. His dark whiskers were now long enough to feel soft when he rubbed kt them, having finally grown out of the scratchy stage. They itched too: not for the first time he wished that there was enough water to have a good scrub. He felt hot and sticky all over, and the tiny cabin reeked like a bear pit.

Shavkun was asleep, breathing hoarsely through his gaping mouth. Captain Zlotnikova was fiddling with the knobs on the receiver—they had more than enough power from their solar panels—looking for the special program that was beamed to them night and day. There was static, a blare of music, then the gentle melody of a balalaika playing an old folk melody. Zlotnikova leaned back, arms behind his head, and hummed a quiet accompaniment. Nartov looked up at the blue and white mottled globe in the black sky and felt a strong desire for a cigarette. Shavkun groaned in his sleep and made smacking noises with his mouth.

“Chess?” Nartov asked, and Zlotnikova laid down the well-worn thin-paper copy of The Collected Works of V.I. Lenin that he had been leafing through. It was the only book aboard—they had planned to read from it when they planted the Soviet flag in Lunar soil—and, while inspiring in other circumstances, bore little relationship to their present condition. Chess was better. The litde pocket set was the most important piece of equipment aboard Vostok IV.

“I’m four games ahead of you,” Nartov said, passing over the board. “You’re white.”

Zlotnikova nodded and played a safe and sane pawn to king four. The colonel was a strong player and he was taking no chances. The sun, pouring down on the Sea of Tranquility outside, hung apparently motionless in the black sky, although it crept closer to the horizon all the time. Even with sunglasses he squinted against the glare, automatically looking for some movement, some change in that ocean of rock and sand, mother-of-pearl, grayish green, lifeless.

“Your move.” He looked back at the board, moved his knight.

“A vacuum, airless… whoever thought it would be this hot?” Zlotnikova said.

“Whoever thought we would be here this long, as I have told you before. As highly polished as this ship is, some radiation still gets through. It hasn’t a hundred percent albedo. So we warm up. We were supposed to be here less than a day, it wasn’t considered important.”

“It is after eleven days. Guard your queen.”

The colonel wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm, looked out at the changeless moonscape, looked back to the board. Shavkun grunted and opened his eyes.

“Too damn hot to sleep,” he mumbled.

“That hasn’t seemed to bother you the last couple of hours,” Zlotnikova said, then castled queenside to get away from the swiftly mounting kingside attack. “Watch your tongue, Captain,” Shavkun said, irritable after the heat-sodden sleep. “I’m a Hero of the Soviet People,” Zlotnikova answered, unimpressed by the reprimand. Rank meant very little now.

Shavkun looked distastefully at the other two, heads bent over the board. He was a really second-rate player himself. The other two beat him so easily that it had been decided to leave him out of the contest. This gave him too much time to think in.

“How long before the oxygen runs out?”

Nartov shrugged, bearlike and fatalistic, without bothering to look up from the board. “Two days, maybe a third. We’ll know better when we have to crack the last cylinder.”

“And then what?”

“And then we will decide about it,” he said with quick irritation. Playing the game had put the unavoidable from his mind for a few minutes; he did not enjoy being dragged back to it. “We have already talked about it. Dying by asphyxiation can be painful. There are a lot simpler ways. We’ll discuss it then.”

Shavkun slid from the bunk and leaned against the viewport, which was canted at a slight angle. They had managed to level off the vessel by digging at the other two legs, but nothing could replace the lost fuel. And there was the Earth, looking so close. He pulled the camera from its clip and squinted through the pentaprism, using their strongest telescopic lens.

“That storm is over. The entire Baltic is clear. I do believe I can even see Leningrad. It’s clear, really clear there with the sun shining…”

“Shut up,” Colonel Nartov said sharply, and he did.