‘Francis!’ Chalmers shouted. ‘Once you go down there you’ll never come out! Don’t you realize you’re entombing yourself in a situation that’s totally unreal? You’re deliberately withdrawing into a nightmare, sending yourself off on a non-stop journey to nowhere!’
Curtly, before he switched the set off for the last time, Francis replied: ‘Not nowhere, Colonel: Alpha Centauri.’
Sitting down thankfully in the narrow bunk in his cabin, Francis rested briefly before setting off for the commissary. All day he had been busy coding the computer punch tapes for Abel, and his eyes ached with the strain of manually stamping each of the thousands of minuscule holes. For eight hours he had sat without a break in the small isolation cell, electrodes clamped to his chest, knees and elbows while Abel measured his cardiac and respiratory rhythms.
The tests bore no relation to the daily programmes Abel now worked out for his father, and Francis was finding it difficult to maintain his patience. Initially Abel had tested his ability to follow a prescribed set of instructions, producing an endless exponential function, then a digital representation of pi to a thousand places. Finally Abel had persuaded Francis to cooperate in a more difficult test — the task of producing a totally random sequence. Whenever he unconsciously repeated a simple progression, as he did if he was tired or bored, or a fragment of a larger possible progression, the computer scanning his progress sounded an alarm on the desk and he would have to start afresh. After a few hours the buzzer rasped out every ten seconds, snapping at him like a bad-tempered insect. Francis had finally hobbled over to the door that afternoon, entangling himself in the electrode leads, found to his annoyance that the door was locked (ostensibly to prevent any interruption by a fire patrol), then saw through the small porthole that the computer in the cubicle outside was running unattended.
But when Francis’ pounding roused Abel from the far end of the next laboratory he had been almost irritable with the doctor for wanting to discontinue the experiment.
‘Damn it, Abel, I’ve been punching away at these things for three weeks now.’ He winced as Abel disconnected him, brusquely tearing off the adhesive tape. ‘Trying to produce random sequences isn’t all that easy my sense of reality is beginning to fog.’ (Sometimes he wondered if Abel was secretly waiting for this.) ‘I think I’m entitled to a vote of thanks.’
‘But we arranged for the trial to last three days, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out. ‘It’s only later that the valuable results begin to appear. It’s the errors you make that are interesting. The whole experiment is pointless now.’
‘Well, it’s probably pointless anyway. Some mathematicians used to maintain that a random sequence was impossible to define.’
‘But we can assume that it is possible,’ Abel insisted. ‘I was just giving you some practice before we started on the trans-finite numbers.’
Francis baulked here. ‘I’m sorry, Abel. Maybe I’m not so fit as I used to be. Anyway, I’ve got other duties to attend to.’
‘But they don’t take long, Doctor. There’s really nothing for you to do now.’
He was right, as Francis was forced to admit. In the year he had spent in the dome Abel had remarkably streamlined the daily routines, provided himself and Francis with an excess of leisure time, particularly as the latter never went to conditioning (Francis was frightened of the sub-sonic voices — Chalmers and Short would be subtle in their attempts to extricate him, perhaps too subtle).
Life aboard the dome had been more of a drain on him than he anticipated. Chained to the routines of the ship, limited in his recreations and with few intellectual pastimes — there were no books aboard the ship — he found it increasingly difficult to sustain his former good humour, was beginning to sink into the deadening lethargy that had overcome most of the other crew members. Matthias Granger had retreated to his cabin, content to leave the programming to Abel, spent his time playing with a damaged clock, while the two Peters rarely strayed from Control. The three wives were almost completely inert, satisfied to knit and murmur to each other. The days passed indistinguishably. Sometimes Francis told himself wryly he nearly did believe that they were en route for Alpha Centauri. That would have been a joke for General Short!
At 6.30 when he went to the commissary for his evening meal, he found that he was a quarter of an hour late.
‘Your meal time was changed this afternoon,’ Baker told him, lowering the hatchway. ‘I got nothing ready for you.’
Francis began to remonstrate but the man was adamant. ‘I can’t make a special dip into space-hold just because you didn’t look at Routine Orders can I, Doctor?’
On the way out Francis met Abel, tried to persuade him to countermand the order. ‘You could have warned me, Abel. Damnation, I’ve been sitting inside your test rig all afternoon.’
‘But you went back to your cabin, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out smoothly. ‘You pass three SRO bulletins on your way from the laboratory. Always look at them at every opportunity, remember. Last-minute changes are liable at any time. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until 10.30 now.’
Francis went back to his cabin, suspecting that the sudden change had been Abel’s revenge on him for discontinuing the test. He would have to be more conciliatory with Abel, or the young man could make his life a hell, literally starve him to death. Escape from the dome was impossible now — there was a mandatory 20 year sentence on anyone making an unauthorized entry into the space simulator.
After resting for an hour or so, he left his cabin at 8 o’clock to carry out his duty checks of the pressure seals by the B-Deck Meteor Screen. He always went through the pretence of reading them, enjoying the sense of participation in the space flight which the exercise gave him, deliberately accepting the illusion.
The seals were mounted in the control point set at ten yard intervals along the perimeter corridor, a narrow circular passageway around the main corridor. Alone there, the servos clicking and snapping, he felt at peace within the space vehicle. ‘Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun,’ he mused as he checked the seals, ‘and the whole solar system is travelling at 40 miles a second towards the constellation Lyra. The degree of illusion that exists is a complex question.’
Something cut through his reverie.
The pressure indicator was flickering slightly. The needle wavered between 0.001 and 0.0015 psi. The pressure inside the dome was fractionally above atmospheric, in order that dust might be expelled through untoward cracks (though the main object of the pressure seals was to get the crew safely into the vacuum-proof emergency cylinders in case the dome was damaged and required internal repairs).
For a moment Francis panicked, wondering whether Short had decided to come in after him — the reading, although meaningless, indicated that a breach had opened in the hull. Then the hand moved back to zero, and footsteps sounded along the radial corridor at right angles past the next bulkhead.
Quickly Francis stepped into its shadow. Before his death old Peters had spent a lot of time mysteriously pottering around the corridor, probably secreting a private food cache behind one of the rusting panels.
He leaned forward as the footsteps crossed the corridor.
Abel?
He watched the young man disappear down a stairway, then made his way into the radial corridor, searching the steelgrey sheeting for a retractable panel. Immediately adjacent to the end wall of the corridor, against the outer skin of the dome, was a small fire control booth.
A tuft of slate-white hairs lay on the floor of the booth.
Asbestos fibres!