“Now they know very well the shot won’t last for thirty days. If it did he’d starve to death. So what have they accomplished? Nothing. As a matter of fact they’ve made things worse instead of better. What’s going to happen to that poor kid when he wakes up in twelve hours and finds out he still has to wait for thirty more days? What’s going to happen to him then, Doc? Don’t you think that kid will really go off his rocker for sure?”
Donnelly and Williams both looked at the little psychiatrist. He sat again at his former place at the table, white and shaken. His face was once again buried in one hand.
“Come on, Doc,” whispered Williams, quietly. “What’s going on here, anyway?”
“That’s enough,” cried the doctor, suddenly. He sprang up and strode toward the door. “Leave me alone,” he exclaimed, almost in tears. “By heaven, I’ve had enough of this. I’ve had all I can stand.”
Donnelly moved to block the door and the psychiatrist came abruptly to a halt. “That ain’t enough, Doc. You get out after you talk.”
“For God’s sake, Joe.”
“Shut up, Williams, I’m warning you for the last time.”
“Let me by. I warn you, Donnelly. Let me by.”
Williams moved in, regaining a sudden spurt of assurance. “What about that kid up there, Doc? Nobody’s letting him by, are they, Doc?”
A look of utter weariness swept across the doctor’s face.
“All right,” he said. “You may as well know the truth then. You won’t like or understand it, but here it is anyway. You see, there isn’t any tug up there, experimental or otherwise. There was only our need for a good excuse—in this present case—to get him to take the drug. You’re a space-engineer and a good one, Donnelly. That’s why you were chosen for this job. If anybody could help those kids, you could.”
Donnelly’s face tightened warningly and the doctor hurried on. “You would have known about it if there had been any experimental models developed even if they had been secret. As a matter of fact, with your standing, you would probably have been working on them.”
“Why all this, then, Doc? Why?”
“Because,” the little doctor hesitated—and then shrugged. “I may as well tell you. It’s not going to make any difference now, anyway. It was all done to put him out for several hours until—”
“Until what, Doc?” Donnelly’s tone was harsh and uncompromising.
“You must understand that I’m under orders. I’m doing what is done in all these cases. Though heaven help me, I wish I didn’t have to—”
“Doc,” Donnelly roared. “You have been contradicting yourself all along and I intend to find out why.”
“There isn’t much more to find out . . . . Wait.”
The doctor strode quickly over to the radio, and glanced at his wristwatch. His face haggard with strain, he turned to Williams. “Will you contact the MR4, please?”
He held up a silencing hand to Donnelly. “There’s a reason behind all this. Just wait for a moment, please. Just wait and listen—”
*
It was a fumbling-fingered ten minutes later, after Donnelly had signed off, that Hal Burnett finally found the tiny red plastic box in the little emergency medical kit. Trembling he held it in his hand as he floated in free fall.
It was a little red key—a key to Earth, to life and to the chance to ram every cold, precise, contemptuous word down his father’s over-analytical mouth.
He didn’t really hate the old man but he knew that he feared him. He feared also that his father might be right about him after all. Who in his own mind, he thought bitterly, should know a son better than that son’s own father.
A quick surge of elation swept over him as he swam quickly to the Tele-screen and switched it on. It wasn’t a bit like saying good-bye to an old friend, he thought, as he gazed at the flaming prominences not so far below him. After a while he switched the instrument off and swam triumphantly back to his bunk.
There were some tri-dimensional color slides in the ditty bag hanging by his bunk. He took them out and looked at them. None of them were of his father.
The girl was there, though. She was a small, cute girl with a rainbow of laughter wreathed about her. She hadn’t been really important before, but she sure was important now that he was going to live. His old man had foretold that, too.
After a little while he put the slides back in the portable holder and broke open the plastic box. It contained a gleaming hypo filled with what looked like a small quantity of water. There was an odd peppermint-like odor about it.
There were no instructions. Just the needle and the little red box.
He wondered how many hours he would have to wait before help would come. But that didn’t matter. He would be asleep, anyway.
The temperature had climbed. It was burning, roaring hot.
Gently he slid the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger . . . .
*
The MR4 continued to spin even more lazily in space. Her sun-blackened hull, pitted by the glancing blows of by-passing meteor fragments, was slowly overheating. Her refrigeration units were gradually breaking down under their tremendous overload.
She was inching in ever-shortening circles always in the direction of the massive, molten globe not so far below . . . .
Sometime later, Hal Burnett awakened slowly, as if from some distant and dimly-remembered dream. The haze of a deep and foggy sleep clung to the unfamiliar mass that was his mind.
A distant alarm bell had rung deep within the primitive, subcortical levels of his brain. It had rung—but not loudly nor insistently enough. It had failed to cut through the eddying fog that was rising slowly into his ebbing consciousness.
He did not remember undoing the straps with benumbed and aching fingers. He did not remember the befogged and stumbling “walk” into the Control Room. Dimly, as if viewing himself and the room from a distant world, he switched on the dying hum of the radio and tried futilely to transmit a message.
The faint crackle of the radio grew more distant. He slumped forward in the bucket seat, his head striking the controls in front of him—and, for him, the sounds of the muted radio died out completely.
The burning heat seared into the metal hull of the MR4. Its outer hull was almost at the boiling point. Inside, it was a burning, suffocating hell. Perhaps it was the heat that aroused Hal Burnett once again. Somehow he managed to stumble to the Tele-screen. With the last vestige of a waning strength, he managed to switch it on and hold himself erect.
The stupendous white blast of the Sun struck across his staring eyes, but he did not flinch. Unconscious, his hands clutched at the control knobs as his sagging legs let him drift weightlessly toward the floor. He was like a drowning swimmer, out of control and helplessly floating under water.
He seemed to become aware for a moment as a last flicker of consciousness crossed his mind. He mouthed something unintelligible—a last, forgotten word.
Anchored only by his grip on the control knobs, his weightless body floated aimlessly in the almost steaming cabin as the awful stillness re-echoed throughout the hollow vault of the ship.
Down below, with ever-growing closeness, the Sun waited patiently, like a bright and hovering vulture.
The MR4 swung and pivoted gently like a ship at sea straining at its anchor in the first, fresh breezes of a gathering storm. For a moment it seemed to