Sarah came to me the next evening after another few hours of listening to static on the radio. She had not found that automated station again and she had heard nothing to indicate any radio communications between various groups on the ground. Earth, as a radio source, had fallen quiet.
She dropped into one of the molded metal chairs, looked out the port at the swirling brown of the clouds on Earth that, for the moment, looked as thick and as unbroken as they had in the days after the impact. She said, “I think we have to do something.”
I wondered why they were all coming to me with these ideas and then realized that everyone was talking to everyone else. I just hadn’t been in all the conversations, so I said, “What’s happened now?”
“Jason came to me earlier and said that he could reconfigure part of one of the pods into a rudimentary shuttle so that we can get off the station.”
“So he’s now taken you into his confidence which means you have even less to worry about now than you did a couple of hours ago.”
“I thought of that too. I’m not sure why he’s done that unless he plans to play us all off against one another. Maybe he hopes one of us will kill off another and his problem of crew assignments will be settled.”
“I’m not sure how good that planning might be,” I said. “I really can’t see either you or Sheila killing me and I can’t really see myself killing one or both of you just to make sure I have a place on his jury-rigged shuttle.”
“We women can be just as deadly as the male.”
I laughed but said, “I know but there isn’t a reason for it here. It’s not as if we were sociopaths caught in some kind of lover’s triangle or you were protecting your children. We’re calm, rational adults who understand the ramifications of killing someone. I’m sorry but I just don’t see either one of you killing someone else.”
“Even when faced with a slow, painful death by starvation.”
“Granted that it is an unpleasant prospect, but we’re not starving right now. Maybe he’s planning for the long run,” I said.
“Maybe.”
I decided I’d had enough of this conversation, or at least this part of it. I didn’t want to speculate on who might be willing to kill whom under what circumstances on the station. To change the subject, I said, “No real luck with the radios?”
She looked at me surprised and said, “Nothing that I can find. No people anyway which is not to say that there might not be food available down there.”
I nodded and said, “Okay, so what’s the problem?”
“Could be lack of power to run the radio or the EMP but we’ve had some contact. Might be that everyone down there is dead now. Maybe all the aftereffects were just too great.”
“Which might mean,” I said, “that if we can get down there, all that processed food in cans or freeze dried, or packed for storage will still be around for us to use until the sun comes back and we can begin to find our own food.”
“If we can get down to it,” said Sarah, shrugging.
I looked at the display of the brown ball of Earth and said, “I just can’t believe that everyone is dead. I can’t believe there aren’t pockets of survival scattered around the world. Hell, there were people who planned for this sort of thing and would have holed up in their survival caves and bunkers once they knew what was happening. Surely they planned well enough and built bunkers strong enough that some of them are still alive. We just have to find them.”
“Which, I guess, brings us right back to the original problem,” said Sarah.
“So we have to monitor this closely. We have to keep the radio watch and we have to keep an eye on Jason because he is quite dangerous.”
She said, “I think he thinks that he might become the new Adam. I think he wants to take only two people with him and neither of them is male.”
This was a frightening idea, though why it should have surprised me, I don’t know. It was clear to me that he had killed David for his share of the food and for the resistance to his idea of building a shuttle and he was now planning on eliminating one of us because he thought it was impossible to take all of us on his shuttle. I thought Sarah was probably right about who it would be.
I didn’t know what to say here. I wasn’t about to suggest that we take him out first. I wasn’t even sure that this jury-rigged shuttle would work, but at the moment, it was the only hope that we had. Or rather, that two, and maybe three of us had of survival.
I had another thought. This might also be a way of committing suicide without actually doing it. He had convinced himself that he could build a craft that would hold together long enough to reach the surface of the planet. Maybe he didn’t really believe that, but he didn’t want to starve to death either. Since he couldn’t kill himself in a single, blatant act, he’d do it in a craft that had no actual chance of reaching the Earth in one piece. That way he wouldn’t suffer as he starved and he could tell himself that it was his only hope of survival.
“So,” she said, interrupting my thoughts “we watch him carefully and don’t let him get to the shuttle without one of us there.”
That seemed impractical to me but I didn’t say that either. I just nodded.
“He’s made some kind of deal with you, hasn’t he?” she said. “The two of you are planning to leave us behind. I can see it on your face.”
Now I laughed. “Not much of a plan,” I said. “And Jason and I couldn’t repopulate the Earth. We’d need one of you and then hope that you could have lots of girl babies.”
She looked at me with horror in her eyes and I suddenly heard the words from her point of view. I knew that nothing I could say now would change the poor choice of words I had used before.
I added hastily, “And some boy babies. Takes nine months for a baby but a single male can impregnate a number of females.”
“Yeah,” she snapped. “David had made that quite clear not so long ago.”
So I had just made it even worse. I had just dug the same hole and I wasn’t about to get out of it, no matter how much I scrambled around. The best thing I could do was just quit trying and shut up.
Sarah hesitated, and then stood up and backed away. She said, “We have to watch you . . . I mean him.”