A day later, Jason came to see me. He stood there, wearing just his shorts and looking as if he had been working out in a very hot environment. I would have thought it nearly impossible to work up a sweat on the station given the air conditioning available. I seemed to be cold all the time. Cold was our problem, not the heat.
Without preamble he said, “I think I found the way to return to the Earth that will work.”
“I’m assuming you mean alive.”
He grinned at the lame joke and said, “Of course, alive. Part of this station was built from a modified shuttle, especially that part around the machinery pod. We need to replace the wings, or rather modify a couple of areas and fuel it from our general supplies, but we could adapt it so that we’d have a vehicle that could withstand the heat of reentry and have a chance of getting us to the ground alive. The main vehicle is still pretty much intact.”
I had known this and I had known about his attempt. Hell, he had me working on the orbital questions and the reentry problems so I wasn’t surprised by the announcement. I just hadn’t expected him to be successful at it.
I looked up at him and I asked the question that we all asked one another. “What do you think you’ll find down there?”
Yeah, I knew things were better and that the clouds were breaking up. We’d seen more of the surface in the last several hours and most of it was white telling me there had been a lot of snow but I didn’t know how thick the snow pack was and I didn’t know if the Earth was beginning to warm again now that there was some sun reaching the ground. It’d take several days of readings to get a feel for the trend on the surface if we could make any readings in a meaningful and scientific way in such a short period.
He stepped closer and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Oh, it’s messed up down there but it’s an environment in which we can live without having to worry about where our food is going to come from or if the oxygen is going to run out or if the power will fail.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “Food stocks are going to have been raided and I’ll bet much of the plant life is gone. Fungi will be growing all over the place if the cold hasn’t killed it. There are a lot of problems down there that we haven’t had to face up here.”
“The temperature readings suggest the climate is beginning to stabilize even if it is colder than it was before the impact of the asteroid. I’ve been monitoring all that for the last several days to get a feel of what it’s like on the surface. There must be pockets of humanity still alive.”
“We have no evidence of that,” I replied, “but even if there are, what good does that do us?”
“Shows that people can survive on the Earth. We’re living under a death sentence here and you know it. Eventually the food and water will run out and that’s it. We’re all done. We can’t grow more food or enough to matter, though we might be able to distill some water, not enough for all of us. In a couple of months we’ll all be dead if we don’t take some kind of a positive action.”
I didn’t respond to that. We’d had this discussion, off and on for weeks. We all knew it but we had ignored it because there hadn’t been anything that we could do about it. When the food ran out, we’d die in orbit and if humanity ever reached space again, they’d find us orbiting the planet in our metal coffin, a testament to what greatness we’d once achieved. A testament to a civilization that hadn’t planned on a huge rock from the sky.
No, I didn’t really need to talk about this anymore. I didn’t want to think about the days that were slipping away from us faster than seemed possible. I just wanted to have some good news that meant something and maybe eat enough so that I would be full.
So, I didn’t take at face value this latest claim that we could get back to Earth. I just asked, “How long would it take to get this thing ready?”
Jason rubbed a hand across his lips and said, “About two months if we all work on it and I have the problems figured right.”
I pointed a finger at him and said, “There’s something that you’re not telling me.”
He leaned down and whispered. “I figure that we can only take two. Maybe three, but that’s really stretching it. Any more and we won’t be able to enter the atmosphere without burning up. Not enough fuel to maneuver with more than three and maybe not enough then. Two would be safer. That’s what the numbers tell me anyway.”
I just couldn’t take his idea seriously especially now that he had complicated it. He shouldn’t have told me about the numbers. At least not yet, though I’m sure we would have figured them out eventually.
I said, “Presents quite the problem, doesn’t it? I mean with four of us still alive.”
“I think we can make it down,” he said ignoring the sarcasm. “But we can’t let the others know what we have in mind. Not yet anyway.”
I wasn’t into secrecy and deceit. All that would do was divide us into two teams of two and could create all sorts of trouble. Besides, the others could figure it all out. Alliances would be formed, or had been formed. We’d already divided ourselves into two teams. Sarah and me and Jason and Sheila. We weren’t competing with one another, at least, not yet, but this would certainly change the dynamic of the station. Jason was telling me that he could maybe get three of us down which would leave Sarah as the odd man out. I suppose Jason’s thinking was that we’d just climb into his makeshift shuttle and launch, leaving her here to fend for herself, which meant a slow death due to starvation.
All this ran through my mind quickly and I suppose that Jason believed that everyone thought the way he did. He didn’t care that one of us, more likely two, would be left behind, as long as one of them wasn’t him. He’d argue that it was his idea, he’d built the thing and he’d have to fly it, so he automatically rated a place.
He might also argue youth since he was younger than the rest of us and we’d already had our shot at life. He deserved his. I’d noticed this youth versus the rest of us attitude in a couple of other arenas and I wasn’t that old. I’d just noticed that the young believed they were smarter and better because they were young and hip. The rest of us were just cluttering up their world and they would be better off once we were gone.
Well, now lots of older people were gone . . . but so were many of the youth and the world was worst off. Of course that was no one’s fault. It was just the way things were.
After all that philosophizing, I had to say something so I asked, “When are you going to start?”
“Oh, I’ve already started. Just little things. Moving some of the equipment around and the like. My real problem is the navigational programming. I’d like some help with that and I think you’d be good at it. I won’t need anything right away but as we get closer to launch, then I can use the help to program the nav system. I know you’ve done some of it, but the data must be the very best. I think this shuttle is going to be a little fragile.”
Well, it explained why he had come to me with this proposal, but then, there were other things he’d need help with and I could see him going to either Sheila or Sarah and telling them the same thing he was telling me. All I could think was this is how it starts. Dividing us up and turning us against one another so that he could live on.
So, I said, “What happened to David?”
Jason snapped upright, as if caught by the cop shoplifting in his favorite store. He looked at me and finally said, “He must have had an accident. I just can’t think of anything else. It was an accident.”
But he had waited too long and he had said too much and I knew right then that he had killed David, and I knew that he knew that I knew. The environment had seemed to change almost physically in that moment and I realized that if I didn’t help him, or pretend to help him, I would have some kind of a fatal accident next. He was vicious enough that he would kill me if he thought I was going to say or do anything that would stop him from escaping from the station.
I said, to cover the moment, “You’ll probably need more help than just the navigation. I’m pretty good with a torch and I know something about the aerodynamics of reentry. I have a fairly mechanical hand. I could be a real help.”
“Yeah,” said Jason. “That’s all good stuff because we have only the one shot at this. If we don’t make it, if we can’t get it to work, then we’re stuck here until we die and I really don’t want to die up here alone.”
Our little society was beginning to fall apart.