David’s log told me that he was slowly losing his mind. It told me his paranoid fantasies but it didn’t tell me if he would commit suicide or if Jason had killed him. At this point, I was sure that David had been murdered, but I couldn’t prove it.
I was sitting in the lounge, looking down at the Earth because that took my mind off our other problems. I could see the moon, when the conditions were right and I twisted around enough. The Earth was still a dirty marble with swirling gases caught in the glass. There was nothing recognizable down there. Just the browns and yellows of the pollution created by the asteroid impact. Lightning flashed along the upper reaches of the atmosphere creating spots of blue white that suggested something about the planet though I’m not sure what. If nothing else they told me that the atmosphere was alive.
I was searching for breaks in the clouds that would tell me that the worst was over for those on the surface, but the cloud deck was as unbroken as a hardwood floor and seemed almost as impenetrable. I could detect no changes in it. The clouds seemed as permanent as those surrounding Jupiter and Saturn but nowhere as beautiful.
Sarah, wearing the standard costume of T-shirt and shorts, wandered in and sat down next to me. She studied the clouds for a moment and then said, “I’ve heard nothing from down there for weeks. If anyone is still alive he’s not talking on the radio. I did get something briefly, a couple of days ago but I think it was one of those automated stations with a music loop playing over and over. The signal faded in and out. I wondered how it could still be working.”
“If true that tells us that not everything is wrecked and that the EMP didn’t take out everything as scientists thought it might. They’ve got power and a radio station down there that withstood the impacts to remain on the air even if it is automated.”
Sarah looked at me intensely and said, “I only picked it up for a few minutes and it could have been anything, including a signal that has bounced around space for a while only to return to Earth. SETI was always getting things that turned out to be signals that originated on Earth or originated on one of our satellites or had bounced off the moon. It means nothing unless I can find it again and pinpoint it.”
I took a deep breath and didn’t respond.
“What I really wanted to say was that I think David was killed. Murdered,” she said.
That took me by surprise. Not because it was a new concept. I’d already come to that conclusion. I just didn’t know that she had.
I said, “Now why would you think that? And why are you telling me this now?”
“Well, it just seems too coincidental,” she said. “He makes a big speech about people stealing food and we’re going to have to figure out a ration that is fair to everyone and the next thing we know, he’s dead with no note and no sign of ill health. Nothing but his body found in a way that suggests it was anything but accidental. He didn’t die of natural causes and then zip himself up.”
I turned my attention back to the Earth showing no sign that anything had changed and sighed.
“There are all kinds of things that could have killed him and murder is way down the list,” I said, but only to give her a chance to lay out her theory without me giving her any clue about what I thought.
“Except we haven’t done anything except create the rationing program and Jason is still eating as much as he wants without regard to our problems for the future, what little there might be left. I don’t think he’s following the rules yet.”
“You mean you think Jason killed David for the food,” I asked.
“It’s not the first time that something like that has happened. People commit all sorts of crimes when their survival is at stake, or when they’re hungry or thirsty or just plain bored.”
“What do you suggest we do? We have no evidence at all. Just your opinion.”
Well, it was a little more than just her opinion, but there wasn’t much to point in Jason’s direction. Again, it was the process of elimination. If I didn’t do it, and I knew I didn’t, and if Sheila didn’t do it and Sarah didn’t do it, then it had to be Jason. But that was supposing that David had been killed on purpose and not by accident or suicide and frankly, suicide didn’t look any better than accident or natural causes.
“If Jason is guilty of murder, then we have to punish him for the crime,” she said.
“How? Cut off his food?”
“Or reduce what he gets.”
“Which means more for us,” I said.
“I hadn’t really thought about it in that way. Only that if he did commit murder we have to do something about it or one of us could be the next victim.”
I wasn’t sure that I bought that. It sounded good, but I think she was thinking that she could enlist me in a plan that seemed to have the high moral ground while we were actually procuring more food for ourselves. Three could live longer on what we had than could four. We could rationalize it anyway we wanted but we were still talking about killing another human and the bottom line was that we’d have more food and we would live that much longer. When you began looking at your life in the terms of weeks or days, you would do anything that would give you another week or another day.
I also knew that I was probably being unfair to her. I knew her well enough now to believe that she was acting out of a sense of outrage. She didn’t want Jason to get away with murder, even if his crime had made things a little better for all of us and his punishment would make it even better for those of us left alive.
“The problem,” I said, “is that we don’t have any proof that David was murdered, and if we did, we have none to suggest that Jason, or you, or Sheila or I did it. The circumstances suggest it, but we can’t prove it.”
“So he just gets away with it.”
“He hasn’t gotten away with anything because we don’t know that he has done anything.”
Sarah stood up and said, “I should have known that you’d take his side.”
“Now what is that supposed to mean.”
“You know exactly what it means.” She then turned and walked out of the pod.