After we killed the passengers, we put the
bodies in one of the low-pressure, unheated storage compartments. Some people had wanted to have some kind of
solemn burial-in-space thing; that was too ghoulish for most of us,
though. Mostly the ones we killed had
been okay, but a few had to be forced. I
had had to kill one of them.
I
met Jenny Fenton in the lounge. She’s
a tall black girl, an able spacer, real smart.
I’d thought we might end up getting something together, but at
the time we were just friends. She
bought me a beer.
“Rough?”
she said.
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “I just hope it does some good.”
She
ignored my implied question. “Come
on, Vas, you know there was no other way.
The lottery was fair, if that’s what you’re
thinking.”
“I
wasn’t thinking at all, actually.”
“So
what else is new?” Gordon Yamaguchi sat
down, which didn’t please me a lot.
Ordinarily I liked him okay--not great, just okay--but he was good at
being flip and sarcastic, and I wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Stow
it, Gord,” said Jenny.
Gordon
shrugged. “When you gotta go, you gotta
go. Hell, half of them were triage cases
anyway.”
“Lots
of them would have made it to Minerva,” I said.
“Yeah,
dead, like the rest of us.” Gordon ordered a
double Scotch, which made me think maybe he wasn’t as cool as he pretended to
be.
I
finished the beer. “Look,
Jenny, what’s the deal? Are we
going to have to do a second round?”
Jenny shook her head. “Sorry, Vas, I don’t know. They’re looking at the life support now,
what’s left of it I mean, and trying to figure how much time we lost getting
back on course.” She lowered her voice. “I probably shouldn’t tell you guys this, but
it doesn’t look like we’re going to get our commo and detection gear back
anytime soon.”
“Jesus,” said Gordon. “How are we navigating?”
“The
old fashioned way,” said Jenny. “Drop
out of hype, look at some stars, measure some angles, crunch some numbers. That’s why it’s
taking so long.”
I
went back to my quarters, but I couldn’t sleep. The face of the passenger I had killed, had
had to kill, kept coming back to me.
That sounds corny, but it’s true--what Doc called a “flashbulb memory.” This passenger was an ordinary guy, about
forty-five, graying hair, a little pot belly.
I’d seen him, I think, but I never knew his name. He wasn’t the type you’d
have expected to make trouble, but at the last minute he jumped me, screaming.
We didn’t have guns--who takes guns on a
passenger liner?--so all I had was a big wooden billy club, made from an
ornamental lamp that had been in the first-class lounge. And a kitchen knife, for what little that was
worth. Anyway, what scared me, thinking
about it in my berth, was that I hadn’t hesitated. Not even a little. I don’t know what I had been thinking, if I
was thinking at all. I clearly remember
what I did, but it’s like my brain was a total blank. I whipped that lamp around as hard as I could
and got him smack on the temple. It
sounded like someone crushing plastic.
He crumpled up, kind of sideways, and I hit him again, and again. I could smell his blood. If I had drawn a different lot, it could have
been me.
I got up and wandered the corridors for a
while. The lighting was way down to save
power, not that that was the worst of our worries. Some of the corridors had been sealed off so
as not to waste air, though. I was in
second class, and the corridors were functional, like motel hallways--bland
carpets, painted walls. Up in first
class they were softly lit and paneled with wood; down in steerage they were
bare, with pipes and conduits and exposed lights. That was where most of the colonists were,
and where most of the civilian casualties had come.
I
had been walking when the meteor hit us.
The lights kind of wobbled, and the ship rang, like a gigantic
bell. Nobody knew what had happened, but
it didn’t seem like anything to worry about. We joked about it as we steadied
ourselves. I remember someone saying
something about the Captain getting nailed for DUI. We should have thought a little: the ship was
a whale, an enormous thing; anything that could make the whole thing quiver was
something to worry about.
I
looked up and realized that I had made my way to sickbay. I pushed the door chime.
“Come
on in,” said Doc.
Doc
Li looked like a video doctor, and he had the manners, too: a little white
haired guy, who wore old-fashioned glasses and fussed a bit. He had made a big stink about crew being
exempt from the lottery, and had tried to put his name in. I liked him a lot.
“Well,
Vassily,” he said, “what brings you here?”
“Eh. Couldn’t sleep.”
“You
want a pill? In your case it might be a
good idea.”
“Nah.”
He
didn’t say anything, just puttered around his office tidying
things.
“Doc,”
I said, “why did you make such a thing about the crew not being in
the lottery?”
He
looked at me over the tops of his glasses.
“Bad precedent.”
“Isn’t
it true what the Captain said, about having had heavy crew casualties in the
explosion and fires and needing every spacer to keep the ship running?”
“Oh,
I don’t know. Probably.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “But that’s
not the point.”
“Well,”
I said, “what is the point?”
“The
point is,” Doc said, “it was handed down as a dogma. Not ‘people we need will be exempt,’
but ‘crew are by definition exempt.’”
I
didn’t see what he was driving at, and my expression must have
shown it.
“Look,”
he said. “It went pretty smoothly today,
right?”
“I
had to kill a guy.”
“I
know,” said Doc. “I’m
sorry about that, Vas. God knows, every
time I think about my medical supplies being used for--that, I get sick. You know, they wanted me to do the injections. I refused, said it would violate the
Hippocratic Oath. Which it would.”
“Anyway,
what were you saying?” I still didn’t
want to talk about it. “I
guess it went pretty smooth. I mean,
there was a little trouble, but not much.”
“Sure,”
said Doc. “People knew that there wasn’t
much choice. A lot of them were
critically injured, some volunteered.
But what happens if we find out--say, that we’re
still short oxygen, or water, or something?”
“Well,”
I said, “I guess we’ll have--we’ll have to have another lottery.”
“It
won’t be as smooth,” said Doc. “And if we need a third or, God
help us, more rounds--”
“Hell,”
I said, “that won’t happen! I mean, if
worst comes to worst and we do need to, um, do it again, they’ll
be able to figure out how many need to go.”
“A
minimum number, maybe.” Doc polished his
glasses on his lab coat. “But
we’re going to be making continual course corrections by dead
reckoning. Which will slow us down,
depending on how much fuel we use and how far off course we go. Anything that could happen, I mean anything
unexpected, would be bad. Anything at
all that breaks--the air, the water, the engines--will make it worse.”
“Jesus,”
I said.
“Or
whoever,” said Doc. “That’s
why I think the crew should be in the lottery.
Even if it’s just a token.
Otherwise, it’ll make it an us-against-them thing later on.”
“Thanks
a lot, Doc,” I said.
He
looked at me with his old blue eyes, and I thought he looked sad. “Vas,”
he said, “you’re a big, strong young man.
If there’s another round, if you’re not picked, you’re
going to be tapped for enforcer again.”
“I
think I’d better take that sleeping pill,”
I said.
