Twenty-Two

"St. Peter!" I shouted. Was he there? I couldn't see. Should I go in? I swam toward the blinding light. Would there be gamma radiation there, lethal to me? I hesitated, then activated my propulsion again.

"Well," said St. Peter, emerging as I was about to enter (the whole thing had probably taken less than ten seconds, but it would be hard to say what the time really was), "it is as I knew it would be. If I had vanished, of course, you would know that Galileo was right; but unfortunately, this experiment leaves you still with your problem, since there is still the possibility, for you, that the radiation might take a long time to work, or that the lethal rays are activated by the priest who always attends at the door--which would make it murder rather than suicide. Still, what I have done makes it rather more likely that it is Galileo who was mistaken or lying."

"You--you would have died to help me," I said.

"Oh, we needn't think of it quite in those melodramatic terms," he answered. "After all, all I did was enter a room in which I was convinced I would return unscathed. I could entertain the possibility that I might be destroyed, but for me it was not a realistic one. I did it because I knew that if I did not, you would return to earth constantly troubled with the thought that one day I would unheedingly come here and do away with myself; and I see no reason for not sparing you that anguish.

"I think, however, that I have given you now all the help I can, except this: let us stay a while in the church, and pray that whatever course you three decide upon will be best not only for yourself but for earth and for Galileo."

So we floated in the middle of that magnificent building for upwards of an hour; and though no revelation came, I was in a much better frame of mind for confronting the problem. I had pretty much solved it, in fact; and I was thinking of ways to pacify Mike, who would be enraged when he heard that there was no real objection, but that I had a feeling that Galileo should not come. But I wanted to hear him out first; it was only fair; and so I decided not to allow myself to make a fixed resolve at the moment.

We had still about an hour of our time outside the ship; but I didn't want to spend any more time there in the church. I felt like a person who has waked himself up from sleep with the thought of what is to be done today; further meditation was now impossible.

But there didn't seem to be much point in doing sightseeing or studying with St. Peter either, since what I now needed was to plan how best to handle what was to come; and that I could probably do back at the ship. So I told St. Peter that I thought I should return and figure out what to do before Mike and Michele got back.

Oddly, none of the Acosmians was around the ship. Perhaps the transmissions had ceased early, I hoped--or perhaps, and more likely, there was a new difficulty with the radio. We had experienced a problem because the radio had been on so long, and some of the transistors had failed, creating enough static that it was impossible to hear clearly; so yesterday, we had hooked up the laser receiver to the original high-gain antenna. Maybe the connection had gone bad too.

As I entered the ship, I noticed a strange odor; and when I got down to the cabin, I was confronted with a mass of twisted metal that used to be the laser receiver.

The full impact of what had happened did not dawn on me at once. One of our instruments had been destroyed, and that enraged and frightened me. The navigational computer, to one side of the mess, didn't look right either; and I pushed a couple of buttons without quite realizing what I was doing--and nothing happened.

I felt a sudden shock.

I pushed more buttons, and nothing I could do elicited a response.

Frantically, I moved about the cabin, checking the other instruments. Everything else seemed to work. I went back to the navigational computer. Nothing.

I sat down in my seat. We had a perfectly operational ship, except for two things: we could no longer receive any instructions from earth, since the radio receivers had too much noise (though we could still transmit, I discovered by trying it out), and we could no longer perform the complicated calculations that would guide the ship in space. If we could have flown back to earth by sight or by the little computers that each of us had, everything would be fine; but that was simply out of the question. We were stuck on Jupiter until our food and oxygen ran out.

I must have sat there a full half hour, though it seemed only a minute or so, unable to think. Eventually, I lifted a heavy arm, and pulled over the communicating transmitter, and typed a very disjointed report to earth, informing them that we wouldn't be able to hear their reply--but pleading with them to keep sending something as long as they could hear from us, just in case we could get something fixed up. I didn't know how, but just possibly one of the Acosmians could help. But there was no metal here. Still . . .

I then discovered that I was afraid to die.

I tried to see if something could be done with the laser receiver. It looked hopeless; it was as if it had been blown up. And the computer was so complex that even if we had tools, we'd have to be lucky to--no, how could we do it? We could barely get the case off.

I looked out the window, and there were Mike and Galileo, headed for the airlock above me. Why had he done this? How had he known that I was going to refuse to take him?

I didn't know what to do, but I was incapable of doing anything anyway, so I just waited.

"Paul," said Mike, "What are--God Almighty! What have you done?"

"What have I done? Ask him what's been done."

"What are you talking about?"

"See that? That used to be our laser receiver. And the navigation computer's down. I don't know how he found out I was thinking of leaving him, but I guess they can read minds. Anyway, we're all in for it now. We're stuck here."

"What are you saying? You think Galileo did this? I've been with him every second since I left you!"

"Hello, Paul," came a slurred version of Mike's voice over the ship's speakers. "Mike's told me a lot about you."

"You get out of here!"

"I don't understand," I told Mike. "If he didn't do it, who did?"

"That's what I'd like to know."

"You look funny," said Mike's voice over the radio. "What's happened?"

"Shut up, Galileo," said Mike. "You're drunk, and this is serious."

"Don't you shut me up, you suppurating pustule!" said Galileo, still with Mike's voice.

"Maybe you know more words than I do, but you're still drunk. For your information, we can't get back to earth if what Paul says is true; we'll be here until we starve to death."

"But then what will I do for oxygen?"

"I don't give a sweet shit what you'll do for oxygen! Now shut up and let us think!"

"I don't get it. I was sure he'd done it," I said.

"Not him; he'd know enough not to cut off his oxygen supply. Let me look. This thing blew up from inside! It's lucky it had that thick shield all around it or the whole cabin would've gone with it."

"Janice."

"Has to have been. Did she--sure. She was putting the reducers on these components, remember? The one she stole was the gyro in here to orient the lens. That was why I didn't spot the discrepancy; she must have substituted a chip of explosive for the mass-reducer and walked off with the reducer! We only saw it was gone when you noticed the weight was too big; I must've seen the chip and not paid attention to the scales!"

"It could have been," I said.

"It was about the kind of thing she'd be capable of. Somebody could have got her to make the substitution; but then when she lost the chip and her blouse got light, she wasn't about to go fooling around with mysterious things, and she called me. Yeah, it fits. Great. So now we know pretty well what happened, and where do we go from here?"

"We don't go anywhere, as I see it. We just stay here until we die."

"But then there won't be any more oxygen," said Galileo.

"Correct. We're going to use it all up, unless you can figure out a way to change our metabolism so that we can breathe hydrogen and eat plastic."

"Why not? I can breathe oxygen."

"Yeah, well we're not like you. Talk to us when you're rational again."

"I'm perfectly rational. Then why don't you fix the receiver?"

"With what? There's no metal in this lovely world of yours, not to mention tools, photographic equipment, no nothing. All we've got is brains. Now leave us alone so we can feel sorry for ourselves."

We sat in silence for a while, Galileo making odd movements as if he had swallowed a tire, and it was moving up and down inside him. After a while, this movement slowed and then stopped; and I realized I had been staring at him with disgust.

Finally, he said, "You could build another receiver."

Mike looked at him. "How?" he said scornfully. "I told you we've got nothing to build it with; and even if we did, there isn't the machinery here to do it."

"Mike," said Galileo. It was uncanny, listening to Mike talk to himself; but evidently he was used to hearing his voice talk back to him. Of course, Galileo had heard no one else but Mike. "I've been trying to tell you all this time that half of the complications you get into are because of the primitive approach you people have to physics. All you need is an instrument that will convert fluctuations of one color of light into vibrations of a diaphragm, right?"

"You sound as if you're thinking again."

"I am, unfortunately. I could build a receiver like that in a day or two. But it would be work. I don't know if I'm up to something like that."

Several choice phrases were on the tip of my tongue; but we needed him.

"Besides," he continued, "if I did build you one, you'd leave, and where would I get my oxygen?"

"One thing sure," said Mike. "If you don't, then you'll never get to earth, and the oxygen here won't last all that long."

"I had thought of that," he said.

"You tell me what to do and I'll build it," said Mike.

"That seems fair enough."

"Come on, then, let's go and get started. Paul, I'm going to skip my rest period tonight. Until we get that thing made, we don't need to be around the ship during the blackout anyhow. I'm going up to charge up my tanks."

"Now wait a minute," said Galileo. "I just got here."

"All the more reason. You know the headache you had the last time. You'll be better off leaving now."

"It's the changes. If I just stayed in here, I'd be all right."

"I know, we talked about that, remember? Come on home. Come on. And no more oxygen till it's finished; I don't want the receiver singing Sweet Adeline to us."

As they went up to the first stage, Mike turned back to me and said, "Don't judge him by what you just saw, Paul; I told you he gets drunk for a while when he first gets into oxygen. He's really a nice guy. And he's going to save our lives; remember that. We'll owe him a lot, Paul."

"I know, Mike." I didn't like the idea, but it was true--if he did build us a receiver.

I waited up in the first stage for Michele, and filled her in on what had happened as she was hanging up her space suit and plugging in the oxygen tanks for tomorrow's excursion. While I was at it, I did the same; I had dropped mine when I smelled the smoke and looked into the cabin.

"Well, I hope he can make one for us," she said as she looked at the mess.

"Mike seems to think he can," I said.

"I don't know," she said, picking up a piece of shrapnel and tossing it into the waste bin. "I don't trust him."

"Neither do I, really. But there's the fact that he wants his dose of oxygen, and he won't get it until the receiver is finished. And maybe he really does want to help us; it's hard to judge a person by what he says when he's drunk."

She sighed. "Leave it to Mike to get us into a fix like this!"

"Now wait a minute. This fix wasn't Mike's fault!"

"Oh no? He took Janice in as lab assistant. Why would anyone take a lab assistant who didn't know the first thing about physics and acted like such an idiot all the time?" Since any man who took one look at Janice would know the answer to that, and since I also knew why Mike was interested in someone who acted like an idiot, I remained silent.

"But listen," she said. "I bet I know what's wrong with the computer. The receiver overheated and blew up, because it'd been on steady for three hours. The computer didn't, because we haven't used it that much, and it didn't get hot. Evidently, whoever gave Janice the explosive didn't know how coolly these things run.

"But just suppose the heat of the explosion was enough to make some explosive in the computer melt a little or get soft and gum up the works without exploding. Maybe we can spot it and take it off. If that's what it is, it'd be on the edge of the circuit board where the reducer was supposed to be."

"It's worth a try. But if you're right, we'll have to be damned careful, because the heat from our hands or friction might be enough to set it off."

"It must be able to withstand body heat," she answered, "or she'd never have been able to put it on in the first place."

"Well, we can look anyway."

We unscrewed the instrument panel and got at the front panel of the computer's case. The screws here were on the inside, and my palms began to sweat by the time I got all six of them out; I had visions of scratching something and creating a spark or making enough heat to ring down the curtain on the whole voyage; there was no shield between the cabin and the explosive now.

Then we gently, gently lifted the computer a centimeter or so (so as not to slide it) and pulled it slowly out. The precautions were probably unnecessary, but who could tell? Put a dish of water on top of a plate and tell someone it's nitroglycerine, and ask him to bring the plate over to you, and watch how carefully he does it. That was what we were doing. Now I had to reach around to unplug the connection before we could turn it around and look at the circuit board. This took a good three minutes, because the connection was near where the mass-reducer should have been.

By the time we got the computer (which only weighed a couple of kilograms) out and onto the movable shelf over my seat, all my arms and my chest were in agony from the tension of my muscles, as if I'd spent an hour lifting weights.

"Well, there it is," said Michele, looking in. I went over to her side and contemplated what had once been a dime-sized disk, that had melted over the circuit board to about the space a quarter would take.

"So all we have to do is peel it off," I said, not reaching to get started.

"That's all," she assented.

We looked at it.

"Well, it's got to be done," I said finally. "Just pray that my hands are cool enough." I touched the mass with the tips of my fingers and gingerly began to peel it from the computer's board.

At first it wouldn't come. I wiped the sweat from my upper lip with my left hand, and tried a little harder. One edge came free, and it looked as if it was sticking together into a single mass.

When the main mass was halfway unstuck, I thought I'd better give it a rest, to cool down, and for me to be able to take a breath again.

"Here," said Michele. "Let me fan it."

"I think maybe you should go up to the first stage, in case something happens," I said, becoming aware of her.

"Don't be silly," she said. "If this blows up, it's just a question of how soon we die, and how pleasantly. Besides, you need me here to fan it."

I didn't, but what was I to say? The thing was to get the damn stuff off, not argue. Most of it came off all of a sudden, and Michele collected it on a little piece of paper, which we were going to take and drop out the door. There remained the problem of the few fragments that were still stuck, which might be enough to blow up the whole computer if they were left there and got hot.

For some of it, I had to use a knife, which scared me even more than digging at the main mass; but after about fifteen minutes of gentle digging under it and telling myself, "Now don't get complacent just because nothing has happened up to now," we had got off all that we could see, and nothing did happen.

"That looks like it," I said finally.

"Okay," breathed Michele. "Let me get rid of this."

I saw it flutter by as it went down to the incinerator in the center of the planet. If it blew up down there, as it would, it would be right at home.

It was now short work to connect up the computer again and put it back into its place. And when I turned it on, I found to my joy that it worked.

--Except that our unplugging it had fouled up its memory. It would have to be reprogrammed.

"Oh, delightful!" said Michele. "We've got our navigator back, only he's forgotten everything. Why didn't we have all this on disk?"

"Because it was on three different EPROMS. Who'd have thought that we'd have to mess up all three of them?"

"There's no way to reprogram them from here, I suppose."

"Not without data from earth. Nope. It's up to Galileo. And Mich, I hate to say this, but if he builds us the receiver, I really think we ought to take him back with us. St. Peter didn't raise any religious objection."

"Oh, no!"

"I'm sorry; but St. Peter did say that he could probably do us a lot of good. He said it'd be dangerous; but what hasn't been, in the course of world history? And this receiver will show his good faith, I think."

"Well, let's wait and see if he makes it."

"Oh, sure; and I'm going to have a talk with him, too--outside the ship, so he won't be drunk. But I thought I'd warn you; it looks as if we should take him."

"I still don't like it. I don't like it at all."