Last Resort Read online

  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction April 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  LAST RESORT

  The phenomenon of "hysterical strength" at the physical level is well known. Wonder what the equivalent phenomenon at the psychological level might do....

  by STEPHEN BARTHOLOMEW

  ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE SCHELLING

  * * * * *

  I inflated a rubber balloon and set it adrift. The idea was that infree fall the balloon would drift slowly in the direction of the leak.This was the first thing I did after I had discovered the trouble. Imean it was the first action I took. I had been thinking about it forsome time. I had been thinking about what a great distance it was fromPacific Grove, California to Mars, and how I would never breathe theodor of eucalyptus again.

  I watched the white balloon floating in the middle of the cabin. Lightreflected from a spot on its surface, and it made me think of aMoonglobe I used to keep on my desk when I was in college. I hadturned off the fan, and tried to hold my breath to keep fromdisturbing the air. The balloon drifted slowly a few feet aft, wobbledthere for a minute or two, then began to drift forward again. Idecided to indulge in the rare luxury of a cigarette. I lighted one,reached over, and popped the balloon. The piece of rubber hung in theair, limp and twisted. I had not expected that trick to work.

  The rate of leakage was very low. It had been some thirty-six hourssince I'd first noticed it. This was one of those things, of course,that were not supposed to happen in space, and often did. Everyprecaution had been taken against it. The outer shell of the ship wastough enough to stop medium-velocity meteoroids, and inside the shellwas a self-sealing goo, like a tubeless tire. Evidently the goo hadn'tworked. Something had got through the hull and made a pinhole leak. Infact the hole was so small that it had taken me nearly thirty-fivehours to compute the rate of leakage exactly. But it was big enough,it would do.

  I had held the clipboard in my hand for a long time, rechecking thelittle black numbers on it again and again. Then I had warmed up thetransmitter, raised Lunar Base, and reported what had happened. I hadnot reported before because I had not even been sure I had a leak.There's a normal seepage rate, of course; a certain amount of air willseep right through the molecular structure of the hull. That's whatthe reserve tanks are for. But I had been out a long time, and therewasn't enough left in the tanks to compensate for this. Not quite.

  So I reported to Base. The operator on the other end told me to standby for instructions. That was for my morale. Then I spent some timethinking about Pacific Grove, and the white house there, and the standof eucalyptus. Then I blew up the balloon and popped it. As I waswatching the piece of rubber hang motionless in the air the receiverbegan clicking. I waited till it stopped, then pulled out the tape andread it. It said, HAVE YOU INSPECTED HULL? I switched on the send keyand tapped out, JUST GOING TO. STAND BY.

  I opened the locker and broke out my spacesuit. This was the firsttime I had put it on since lift-off. Without help, it took me nearlyhalf an hour to get it on and then check it out. I always did hatewearing a spacesuit, it's like a straitjacket. In theory I could havekept it on, plugged directly into the ship's oxygen supply, and riddenall the way back to Earth that way. The trouble with that idea wasthat the suit wasn't designed for it. You couldn't eat or drinkthrough the helmet, and no one had ever thought up a satisfactorymethod of removing body wastes. That would be the worst way to go, Ithought, poisoned slowly in my own juices.

  When I finally did get the thing on, I went out the air lock. If theleak had been bad enough, I would have been able to see the airspurting out through the hole, a miniature geyser. But I found no morethan what I expected. I crawled around the entire circumference of thehull and found only a thin silvery haze. The air as it leaked outformed a thin atmosphere around the hull, held there by the faintgravity of the ship's mass. Dust motes in the air, reflectingsunlight, were enough to hide any microscopic geyser spout. Before Ire-entered the air lock I looked out into space, in the direction awayfrom the sun. Out there, trailing far away, the air had formed asilver tail, I saw it faintly shimmering in the night. I was going tomake a good comet.

  I got back inside and stripped off the suit. Then I raised Lunar Baseagain and tapped out, HAVE INSPECTED HULL. RESULTS NEGATIVE. A fewminutes later the reply came back, STAND BY FOR INSTRUCTIONS. For mymorale.

  * * * * *

  I lighted another cigarette and thought about it some more. I lookedaround at the interior of my expensive, ten-foot coffin. I figured Iwould last for about another seventy-five hours. Of course I couldtake cyanide and get it over with. But this wouldn't be such a bad wayto go. Within seventy-five hours the last of my reserve tanks would beempty. Then I would just wait for the rest of the air to leak out ofthe cabin. First I would lose consciousness with anoxia. I'd hardlyeven notice. Then as the pressure got lower my body fluids would beginto evaporate.

  Once I had seen a mummy in a museum, it was some old prospector whohad been lying in the Nevada desert for a hundred years or so. I wasgoing to look like him, dried up, yellow, my teeth protruding in agrin, perfectly preserved. With no pilot, the ship would go into acometary orbit around the sun. Maybe in a hundred years or so someonewould come and take me back to a museum on earth.

  I began to think about my wife, Sandy. I got out a piece of paper andwrote a long letter to her. I thought, maybe she'll even get to readit some day. Writing gave me something to do. I wrote about the timewe had gone up to the Sierras together and slept in a sleeping bag atthe edge of a four-thousand foot cliff. And about the times we hadgone out in our cabin cruiser, the time we both nearly drowned. Andasked about our daughter Wendy, who would be four now. I rememberedpart of an old poem:

  Christ! That my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again!

  Writing was all right, until I realized that I had begun feeling sorryfor myself, and I was letting it get into the letter. I put the letteraside and wondered what else I could do to kill time. I got out someof the film plates I'd made of the surface of Mars. Of course I hadtransmitted them all to Lunar Base, but it would have been nice if Icould have delivered the original plates. I studied them for a whilebut didn't find anything I hadn't seen before. Well, I had done my jobat least. I had orbited Mars, I had the glory of being the firstAmerican to do that. I had dropped the instrument package andtransmitted all the data I could get back to Lunar. My only failurewould be in not bringing back the ship.

  I remembered a conversation I'd had at the last International SpaceSymposium in Geneva. A buddy of mine and I had taken out one of theSoviet cosmonauts and got him drunk. He was a dignified sort of drunk,a Party member who told long, pointless Russian jokes with anunwavering, serious expression. He sat sideways on the bar stool,holding his glass of vodka between two fingers and staring straightahead. He said one thing that I had never forgotten.

  "Do you know why we are ahead of you in space?" he had said, staringwith dignity at the tall blonde at a nearby table. "It is because ofyour bourgeois sentimentality. You do not like risking men. You builda skyscraper in New York to house some insurance company. Two or threeconstruction workers are maimed or killed on the job. One of your coalmines collapses and fifty men are trapped. Yet, look. You are afraidof losing men in space because of what the people at home might think.So you are too conservative, you avoid risks. So we are ahead of you.We send out a ship with three men ab
oard when you would risk only one.We are not sentimental, that is all. That is why we are ahead of you."He ordered another drink and stared into the mirror for severalminutes, letting us think that over. Then he went on.

  "Yes, you are less scientific than we, less logical. Yet that is youradvantage, too. You are more alert to the unprecedented, theunpredictable. You are always ready for the Wild Chance, theimpossible possibility. You expect the unexpected. You hope for thehopeless. Being sentimental, you have imagination."

  His words came back to me. The unpredictable, the wild chance, theimpossible possibility. That was all that could save me now. But what?Maybe another meteor would come along and plug the hole the first onehad made. No. I had to think my way out of this one. But what if therewas no way out?

  I pushed myself to the aft bulkhead, turned and looked forward to theinstrument panel. I picked out the smallest meter face. I could justread the numbers on it. I told myself: When I