CRITICAL PATH

DAVID COLES

On a long star voyage it would be logical to pair a male-female team for routine spells of duty while the majority slept in deep freeze—but illogical to have an uneven number …

* * * *

RICHARD was completing the last task before going into deep sleep—packing and tidying the cabin’s appointments. For five months the ten by ten by eight space had been his home; now, as always, he was surprised by the amount of rubbish accumulated during the duty period. It seemed impossible within the confines of a small starship.

He finished packing his own belongings in the small case and carried it out to his personal locker. They would remain locked in the cupboard during his sleep until he was next awakened for duty.

Norman, the other on-duty crew member had finished his clean-up operations and stowed his gear, he was reading the small display panel which conveyed messages from the computer. The display now held information about the duration of the coming sleep period and the crew member scheduled to be on duty with each of them next awakening.

‘Lucky fellow—you’re up with Susan next time,’ said Norman. Richard nodded. He’d been on duty with Susan before, some ten years ago.

The ship’s computer selected the on-duty crew on a random basis; notifying the two out-going crew just before their sleep period. This allowed any complaints to be made and a new selection to be made if necessary.

Complaints were few. Even with the petty annoyances which most human beings provoke, five months is not unendurable. Five months was the minimum period allowed between deep sleep sessions—it allowed the body to re-accustom itself to living. For similar reasons, the interval of deep sleep could not be longer than some five years except in emergencies.

During the past five months Richard had grown to dislike his crewing partner. There was no open hostility, but Norman’s petty attention to detail, his habitual neatness and other quirks of personality had been enough to annoy Richard, the more lackadaisical of the two. Informality tended to run high among starship crews, most members wore only the lightest of clothing but Norman affected a pair of nattily pressed shorts with creases like knife edges and a continually clean vest. The elegance contrasted rather heavily with the only garment which Richard wore—a less than sartorial pair of drill shorts.

Richard sighed; a few more minutes and he wouldn’t see his partner for—months.

‘Say, I forgot to check how long I’d be in deep sleep.’

‘Twenty-four months,’ said Norman, in near anticipation of Richard’s questions. Another irksome habit. The other was too good, his body too near perfection, his mind too poised and alert. With luck, however, the two might never share the same duty again.

Together they entered the control room to check the instruments. Norman tapped the series of buttons which, one by one, consigned the ship’s many instruments and mechanisms to the control of its computer. After an unknown period of time two more crew members would be roused for a minimum of five months duty to take over from the machine-mind of the ship.

Each signed his name with light pencil on the log screen and added the time and the date.

‘Twenty-two years, eleven months and a handful of days,’ said Norman in the tone of someone making conversation for the sake of appearances. ‘Another thirty some years and we’ll be there.’

‘And six months of hard labour and back the quick way.’

It took all of six months hard and sometimes dangerous work to set up a matter transceiver and the necessary power supply. Sending a complete transceiver would, of course, have been much faster, but because of the size and mass, prohibitively expensive. Instead, only the complex, precision-built circuits were taken on the ship; framework, housing and power supply were variously scavenged from the ship or made from locally available supplies.

The two men left the control room and walked down the short stainless-steel corridor to the deep sleep chamber. The alternating intervals of duty and catatonic sleep would not be needed for the return trip. When the first jury-rigged transceiver had been built and tuned. Earth would be just a step beyond the threshold. A bevy of technicians would return bringing full equipment and prefabricated parts to build a new and permanent installation.

Homesteading was just around the corner. ,

The deep sleep chamber was chilly on their bare skins, the air redolent with the faintly pungent odour of the life-support fluid. There were seven sleep tanks, five of them holding still, white, almost-dead forms immersed in heavy oily liquid. Resilient buffers held the bodies against shocks and a maze of tiny wires and tubes ending in slim needles were inserted into the near-corpses, metering, measuring, sustaining the last feeble flicker of life against the day of resurrection.

Four men and three girls on their way to the stars.

The pair, stripped and gleaming from the shower, climbed into their highly custom-built tanks. Transparent covers descended, bonds of pliable plastic restricted movement.

Richard felt a brief spark of pain as over a hundred slivers of stainless steel lanced into different parts of his body. Some bit deep into the main nerve trunks, others into blood vessels, the lymphatic system, digestive tract. He felt cold, drousy, death but a heart beat away. But the heart beat never came, that vital muscle was stilled and death cheated. Mental oblivion came more slowly; it took long seconds for the electrical energy to die away and for the last shreds of conscious thought to dim.

‘Funny number—seven.’ The thought congealed to a memory, hanging like a mutilated cobweb. ‘Why not eight? Or six?’

* * * *

He swam up through murky depths, striving towards the lighter regions far above. At last he burst the tight meniscus of consciousness, gaining thought but lacking mobility. His state couldn’t be called full life, merely a parting of his death’s veil.

The life support medium still surrounded him, its viscous depths blurring vision, cloaking stimuli. Sound carried through the liquid; straining, he could hear voices, see blurred forms above him.

‘But we must. We should wake the human.’

‘I tell you we can handle the situation. You should have consulted with me before …’

Who were they? These vague shapes that called him human? Had aliens penetrated the ship?

There was a sudden motion from one of the dark forms. Needles stung his flesh and he felt himself sinking once more into Lethe’s still water. Words still reverberated through his emptying skull.

‘We should wake the Human.

wake the Human …

and echoed on:

the HUMAN, MAN, MAN MA …’

The sounds, amplified in the emptiness of his psyche, followed him down the vortex to oblivion.

Light again.

‘Good.’

A sound, a trickle, a gurgle.

Feeling returning.

He was cold.

Who was he? Richard, um, Richard—Sammes. Twenty three years subjective, about fifty years old objectively.

Heat flared gently on his skin. His eyes opened.

Where was he? On board the starship Spectre.

He was alive again. Wasn’t he ?

A face framed in a honey-coloured halo smiled at him. Beautiful, angelic; fleetingly he wondered if he’d crossed the narrow border to death.

Yes, he was alive.

‘Hi,’ greeted Susan.

‘Hello, Sue.’ He smiled weakly.

‘Be back in five minutes.’ And the head was gone from his cone of vision. The corona of blonde hair had shielded him from the harsh glare of fluorescents, now they struck down.

He closed his eyes against the painful brilliance and relaxed as the radiant heaters struggled against the cold deep within his body, raising his temperature to a more normal 310 degrees Kelvin.

A few minutes later he got out of the now dry tank, went to the shower booth on shaky legs. When the hot, needle-sharp jets of water had cleansed the last of the sticky liquid from his skin, he lay in the grip of a massaging machine, enduring the almost pleasantly painful tingle of newly circulating blood.

By the time Richard was suffering only a slight attack of pins and needles he was dressing and feeling almost human again. The quick, unconsciously voiced thought triggered a half-remembered recollection which caused him to inspect the curiously paired punctures of the life system’s needles.

‘Why two of each ?’ The memory nagged but refused to come into the open. Richard shrugged and forgot it. It would be back for examination if it was important enough.

Susan returned and all else was forgotten.

‘Hurry up, lunch is ready.’

He felt saliva run in his mouth.

‘Lunch ? How long have you been up ?’

‘A couple of hours—I had to make myself presentable.’

Richard grinned and made no answer. He remembered that it had happened the last time they had been on duty together. The next few months should be pleasant ones indeed.

He went to the control room, signed his name, noted the time and date on the log screen and pressed the review button.

Twenty-three years, seven months. Heavy debris, damage to antennae. Manual replacement.

It was the only entry of note.

He left and went on to the living quarters.

‘Which cabin have you got ?’

‘A.’

‘Okay, I’ll just dump my things.’

He slid back the door to ‘B’ cabin, tossed his bag on to the bunk. On an impulse he slid the door to ‘A’ cabin ajar and poked his head in. Both cabins were, in fact, identical, but somehow Susan’s seemed different. Different from ‘B’, different from the time he’d been in ‘A’. There was already the stamp of the girl’s personality, her character, in the way the covers were drawn up, the few trinkets displayed; something indefinable.

‘I was in the kitchen, not the bedroom.’ The whisper sounded close to his ear.

Richard jumped and Susan laughed.

‘Snooper.’

He coloured. ‘Sorry, I was just looking to see how you had it fixed. I was in “A” last time.’

‘I didn’t mean anything, really. I’ll swap if you like, no trouble.’

‘Nonsense. It doesn’t matter. Now, where’s the food?’ He blustered.

‘On the table—getting cold. After I’ve slaved over a hot cooker all this time.’

Susan’s hot cooker consisted of a sixty second microwave grill but Richard took the admonishment meekly and sat down to his first meal in two years.

At last, he sat back wiping his mouth on a napkin.

‘Great!’

‘I thought you were never going to stop.’

He looked his partner over while she finished her own food. She’d certainly used her two hour lead to good effect.

The fair hair framed an oval face set with emerald eyes and white teeth. A tiny blemish above her right eye accentuated her beauty rather than detracted from it. She was tall, approaching his own two metres and some centimetres; trimly figured, graceful of movement. Yes, the next five months or so could be very pleasant.

Susan looked, catching the tail end of his appraisal, and blushed becomingly.

‘Coffee?’ he asked, not attempting to cloak-his admiration.

‘I’ll get it.’

‘No, no. Sit down, you’ve hardly finished; besides you’ve been slaving over a hot cooker.’

Susan giggled and Richard got up to switch on the percolator, standing by the kitchenette as it warmed.

He sat down again and poured the coffee, adding sugar and cream. Susan seemed too feminine for this kind of a job, he thought. To Richard, it seemed that she should have been the horsey type; tweeds and brogues and long country walks type. Not for the lissom Susan the trail blazing to the stars, labouring to build a matter transceiver. Still, the selectors must have known what they were doing, nearly thirty years ago. He knew the brain behind those green eyes, knew that it was as sharp and as neat as the face in front.

‘Now, just stop looking at me like that. I feel like a butterfly on a pin—and there’s work to do. First.’

‘Sorry,’ Richard lied. ‘I wasn’t focusing.’ And the extra word after Susan’s last sentence turned on a tap somewhere in his endocrine system.

* * * *

The work which had to be done was the only real work, saving emergencies, that had to be done during the on-duty period and Richard suspected that it was work for the sake of filling time—all of it could easily have been done by the ship computer.

First there was the guidance system to check, the new antennae, navigation sightings, dead reckoning checks, real progress against computed. And so on and so on.

They made tea and took it into the lounge. As he ate, Richard thought about the Spectre’s set-up again.

A task force of seven. Why seven? Why an odd number? What if there were an accident, something went wrong? Drives could malfunction, it would mean a crash landing on an unknown world. Even a bad planetfall on Halvar might mean damaged control circuits for the transceiver and, consequently, no return. These were the risks which they all undertook willingly but they were human beings, mammals, killer animals. There’d be pairing off and the number seven would lead to trouble. There might be trouble anyway, six months to go in building the transfer unit—more than enough time to spark off acrimony, fights to establish a pecking order and rights to the women.

Wait now. Perhaps that was the purpose. Bring things to a head quickly, sort out the boss and the bossed. On previous jobs trouble had arrived sooner or later, in spite of evenly divided sexes.

A crash of chords interrupted his chain of thought, Susan had turned up the player to full volume and Greig burst into the room with a finality which put an end to his reverie.

‘I thought that that might rouse you. I can’t have a taciturn man on my hands the first day.’

Man ? MAN, HUMAN, WAKE THE HUMAN.

The memory merged with musical chords and was lost again.

‘You’re quite right, young lady. Come over here and let’s listen.’

The quieter second movement of the concerto, reminiscent of springtime rain and breezes brought the two closer. Susan’s head on his shoulder, Richard imagined wide lakes and skittering cat’s paws of wind. Leaves waving in tune to the french horns, slow pools of rain gathering on leaves and falling with the piano solo.

When the recording had finished, Richard switched on the view screen and dialled tapes on Halvar, their destination. The tapes were now over a century out of date but the world would not have changed. They showed scenes of a colder world than Earth, a world made up, for the most part, of savage blizzards and blinding snow fields. Orbiting well within the usual single astronomical unit of a star younger and cooler than Sol, the grip of winter relaxed only within the tropics. Between those imaginary lines; spring, a short lived summer, a brown autumn and a long mild winter paraded. Reminiscent of Scandinavia, the country held fertile regions within deep gorges glacier-cut into hard bedrock. Sparkling streams leapt and cascaded from high-perched hanging valleys into a spring of brilliant flowers. Rivers to be fished, reindeer to tame, timber for houses—an unspoilt home.

‘This is a place I could settle to,’ whispered Susan.

‘Let’s smash the transceiver circuits.’

The momentary squeeze of a slim hand spoke volumes. But there were seven of them.

Considering the fact that scenic splendour and beauty had not been the criteria used by the robot probes, the tapes hinted a general magnificence, an imagined splendour that could only be guessed at. These pictures were only of the kindliest most hospitable regions, chosen for survival.

Richard leaned back and stretched.

‘Coffee?’

‘And brandy.’

‘Oh, naturally.’

On the way back with the laden tray, his foot caught the edge of a rug and he overbalanced sending the tray and its contents across the room. He fell heavily, awkwardly, the stainless steel floor seemed to come up to him in slow motion before thumping him soundly on the forehead and splitting a lip against a tooth.

He went out like a snuffed candle.

When he came to, Richard was in his bunk, his face stiff with sticking plaster and bruises. Susan must have lugged him into the cabin and tucked him up—tough girl. He fingered his swollen face. Tougher than she looked.

Susan entered then, carrying a fresh cup of coffee.

‘Your coffee, sir; better late than never.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And next time, just wait till you get sat down before tackling the brandy—I thought you could take it.’

‘I’ll remember that.’ He gasped. ‘God this coffee’s hot.’

He swallowed some more.

‘I’m a clumsy idiot. Thanks for cleaning my face up. You didn’t strain anything, lifting me in here?’

She flexed her arm as if expecting a bulging biceps to pop up.

‘I’ve given you a shot of metabol, you get off to sleep now.’ She brushed his wounded lips with her own.

‘That’ll stop any capers for tonight, anyway.’

‘Spoil sport.’

The next ship morning, he felt fine. The contusion and cut lip had healed rapidly under the influence of the metabol which was designed to speed the body’s healing powers. Only a slight soreness and stiffness remained.

Entering the kitchenette after a shower, he was pleased to find himself up first.

‘Coffee—breakfast—roast—and crispy bacon for two.’

* * * *

Days wandered by pleasantly. The ship managed itself with only the minimum of human intervention. The off-duty crew continued to almost-die peacefully and the parsecs of empty space hurtled by at a velocity which only just broke the old Einsteinian laws.

One late ship afternoon found the crew relaxing in the lounge. Albinoni’s eighteenth century Adagio lent a sonorous rhythm to the atmosphere.

‘I wonder why they send humans out on this sort of work? Why not robots? They could set up a transceiver easily enough. No deep, sleep facilities needed either.’

Susan looked up sharply and then laid her head back on Richard’s shoulder.

‘Survival of the species,’ she answered in an oddly bitter tone. ‘Shipwreck, transceiver failure—it happens. At least we’d—there’d be an outpost of human beings on Halvar or wherever. There’s enough genetic material in the stores to impregnate an army of women. Let alone—three.’

Richard realised he’d touched a hidden sensibility and dialled a view of the outside star field in an effort to change the subject. He cradled Susan’s head more gently. Her body, stiff with the unknown emotion, relaxed gradually into his arms.

‘Androids are nearly human, you know. Just because their nerves are drawn gold and their brains grown from synthetic neural tissue—they’re sentient creatures.’

Richard knew of other differences but was willing to concede that they lived.

‘It’s only because they can’t, can’t have …’ She paused, picking a clinical rather than human term. ‘Can’t reproduce. That’s why they send human people on these trips.’

There was the barest lurch in the deck beneath them. The ship had altered course to annul a collision risk. The acceleration involved had been too fast for the internal grav fields to make complete compensation.

The ship computer performed a continual delicate balancing act between speed and safety. An instantaneous network analysis of the space ahead; computing an optimum route, a critical path through the random obstructions.

Another lurch threw Susan’s weight on to Richard in a flurry of frills and bare arms and legs.

He took advantage of the situation.

At velocities above cee, nominally empty space could become pretty congested at times. That path could become very critical.

The deck heaved beneath them, and again china and cutlery smashed to the floor with sharp fragments caroming about like shrapnel. The couple reluctantly disentangled, it was too dangerous at the moment. The incident could be serious and although they could not aid the computer in its split nano-second decisions, the control room might be the best place.

They made the control room unsteadily in the shifting pseudo-grav fields. More and more shifts in the grav field’s direction betokened faster and tighter manoeuvring by the ship computer.

Richard’s inner ear mechanisms were sending violently contradictory messages to his brain. A longer and more than usually vicious jerk sent him sliding across the floor, now at a forty degree tilt to the usual ‘up’ or ‘down’. He felt his arm snap and involuntarily yelled with pain. Within instants, Susan was with him, a slim arm about his waist pinioning him to her taut body. She practically carried him to a control chair across the yawning and pitching deck and laced the safety straps across him.

‘Arm’s broken—left one.’

She strapped the useless limb to the chair arm and fought her way across to the piloting console.

The pain was soon replaced by a blessed numbness and Richard thankfully let the safety harness take his weight as he watched Susan daintily punching buttons on the damaged board. She looked so out of place against the starkly functional instruments that Richard had to smile at the picture.

The smile died; the girl had been hurt, her blouse had been ripped away exposing a long, deep ugly cut across her shoulder.

But it wasn’t a cut. The right word was ‘tear’. He followed the line of the tear; starting below her right ear, down her neck and across the collar bone, down across the left breast—all without a trace of blood.

Richard turned his head away, watching covertly from the corner of his eye. The emergency died, he felt her concentration ebb, saw her become aware of her injuries— damage; noticed her quick glance in his direction.

She turned away from him.

‘I’ll get a cast for that arm. Are you in much pain ?’

‘No, it’s gone numb now.’

Poor little human, he imagined her—it—thinking, so frail.

She was away longer than necessary to get a medikit. When she reappeared, a fresh blouse had replaced the torn one. She bent over him, administering a shot of pain killer, unstrapping the broken arm. Deft fingers explored the break, righted the broken bone and sprayed a quick setting cast. Richard touched the girl’s neck with his right hand. Where the cut had been the artificial flesh was warm and whole. He stroked his fingers along the smooth, smooth pseudo-flesh beneath her blouse; no cut, no abrasion, and yet he’d seen it.

She looked up and smiled, then bent to administer a dose of metabol.

‘You’d better go easy on this stuff from now on. Someone else may need a drop.’

Richard bared his teeth in an attempted grin.

Not you, you bitch. He voiced to himself.

She half helped, half carried him to his cabin over the now stable floor. She helped him undress, cutting the shirt away from his broken arm.

A sedative sent him to sleep.

Sometime later he awoke from a fitful doze with a sense of wrongness. The bulkhead clock indicated one o’clock in the ship’s morning. There were low voices from the kitchenette and the clink of china. One voice belonged to Susan; another was Roger’s and a third, Norman’s.

He listened intently but could make out nothing. Stiffly, he stretched out a hand and eased open the door.

‘No, everything will be all right now, his arm will have knitted in a few days. You get back to the tank room and de-activate; I’ll go to bed. We don’t want Richard to see us all up and about.’

But he had, or at least, heard them, which was as good. And memory flooded back—the voices in his last sleep period.

‘MAN—WAKE THE HUMAN.’

Now he knew. Now he knew why there were only seven. No doubt he would have been told on Halvar in the normal course of events, that he was the only human aboard. The one real human being, the one real live entity among a load of wire and string copies!

Richard lay back and watched the minute hand trace out a complete circle round the illuminated clock face. His arm was throbbing violently and he could not have slept in any case. The minute hand followed another quarter of its allotted locus and then he gingerly got out of bed.

He felt a little dizzy. ‘Nearly human,’ she had said. Richard’s anger seethed. No wonder she’d been so vehement about androids, she had a vested interest.

Silently he opened the door, walking in bare feet. He carried a wicked hunting knife he’d taken from his personal locker. He stole across the cold floor of the control room and gained the corridor to the deep sleep chamber. He stopped at the threshold and looked around him. Immediately to his left, Norman lay beneath the transparent cover. The too, too carefully modelled Norman. Using the knife as a lever, Richard prised the lid off the life support system. The inspection cover should have held a slave computer and interface units.

It was empty.

He’d seen the inside of his own several times, hundreds of wires and tiny tubes should have led from the metering devices into the tank. These would control the Ph, the ion balance and dozens of closely linked and interdependent variables of the life support fluid and the occupant’s body.

But Norman’s tank had no such metering devices. An android didn’t need them, he merely died a total but temporary death; a shock administered to the artificial heart’s pacemaker was all that was needed to wake him, but till that shock …

Richard looked down at the still figure. The upper arms, the chest and thighs were covered in goose pimples now frozen into place by the sub-zero temperature. This was only a facsimile of a human being. A likeness, a machine, not alive in the same way that he, Richard, was alive.

Hesitantly, expecting the still form to suddenly awake, Richard lifted the cover, touched the android’s chest with his knife. He applied pressure and watched in fascination as the point broke through the now brittle plastic sheath. He drew the blade downward across the thorax and the plastic broke and peeled back. Beneath the surface of the sham life support liquid stainless steel ribs were exposed. Bubbles of air pushed their way out of the chest cavity and burst sluggishly on the liquid’s surface.

The next tank was empty, it was his own.

The one after that was Christine’s.

Off came the cap of the metering unit, empty, a shell, a fake like the sleeping form within the clear cover.

He sent the knife edge across the back of her still white hand. The ‘skin’ stretched away from the cut revealing the metallic bone structure, the steel cord tendons.

Clive: gold wires gleamed at their cut ends under the razor edge.

Richard felt a kind of God-like power over these inferior creatures; these fabrications that men like himself had made.

Roger: a charged capacitor shorted across the blade leaving a nick in the cutting edge.

And Richard knelt and wept in front of Rosanna’s tank. So perfect, such an exact copy. He could see the golden down of hairs on the forearms, the tiny whorls of carefully sculpted fingerprints. This girl he’d never known in space, never met the robot after the initial briefing session. The computer had never matched them for duty; now, it never would complete the charade.

The long thin, razor edged weapon sighed into a long cut. From throat to waist, cutting through the rounded breast, laying bare the metallic rib cage, the heartless heart.

‘God, what a joke. An eternity from Earth, no one but me and a bunch of zombies.’

But the flesh wasn’t artfully padded plastic. Given time, a real heart would have beaten beneath the mutilated breast. Belatedly, Richard remembered the seed bank which the ship carried—enough to impregnate an army of women, Susan had said.

The thick cold liquid was becoming tinged with a turgid flow of red blood. Human blood, seeping from the awful wound.

Richard didn’t know that he could scream so loud. He was still screaming when Susan came.