Zach Hughes - Pressure Man

Art, not realizing what Dom was trying to do, looked uncomfortable. He tried to get Dom’s attention, to tell him to be quiet.

“He added it all up,” Dom went on. “He added in the lives of Doris Gomulka and Art Donald, the ship, the alien out there in the atmosphere of Jupiter. He balanced all the factors against the life of Larry Gomulka, and it evened out. And if you try to take out even one element of that decision, the life of Doris Gomulka, then you’re robbing Larry of his last successful problem solution. You’re saying that he failed, because he had it figured wrong and his death is not evened out by your being alive and the project continuing. If your life isn’t worth the value he assigned to it, he gave more than was gained.”

He was still holding her hand. She tried to pull it away. She was breathing hard.

“Larry died so that, among other things, you might live. You have to admit that, Doris. Give that to him. Don’t try to take that away from him.”

It came out of her in an agonized, low-pitched wail, a river of sadness. She made no attempt to cover her face. Her lips distorted, her eyes closed, squeezing out tears. Her face was dramatic in its expression of pain, and the sound of her sobbing was too much for Art. He left the scene. She gulped air and sobbed. Dom led her gently toward the couch and pushed her down. Her hands were clenched at her sides. She wept with great gusto and noise, not neatly, not at all ladylike. There was wetness and huge gulpings and hoarse, grating noises and grunts of pain.

When the worst was over he positioned her on the couch and covered her with a blanket. He left her still weeping, but more quietly.

As he changed in his own quarters and went into the lock to don the heavy suit, he felt a little misty-eyed himself, for Larry would have enjoyed the sight of Folly hanging up there in space. He wondered if he would have been fast enough and decisive enough to do what Larry had done if he’d been in Larry’s place. He didn’t know. But he would never again ask himself if Larry’s death had been worthwhile.

He took a jumper up to the construction site. The plates were going on over the interior skeleton. Monowelding required the near vacuum of space. He could see miniature stars where the welders were at work. It was all done in an eerie silence in the airlessness. The stars were a quiet audience.

A good spacer has a celestial clock of sorts in his head. He knew, as he watched from a short distance, the relative position of the planets in their orbits. Mars there, finely visible. Jupiter was hidden, if he had been at a telescope, behind the bulk of the moon.

But the signals still came. Their strength was undiminished, not quite strong enough to be easily detected from Earth. They were being constantly monitored from the moon and from ships in space.

The new freedom of spending which was the hallmark of the project extended outward from the construction site in an expanding fan of beneficial largess for the entire service. The necessity of monitoring the signals sent ships out, and while they listened, they did useful work which had been planned but unfunded for decades. Once again the gathering of space data was a going industry. Men practiced science for the sake of science, just to scratch that persistent human itch for the knowledge of what lies over the next hill.

A ship monitoring the signal from Jupiter could be taking magnetic measurements or aiming shipboard telescopes out beyond the system or picking up asteroid samples or doing any one of hundreds of small research projects which would add to man’s knowledge. Even the critics were sold on the extra research in order to make the most out of the necessity of having ships in space.

Dom’s presence on the moon was not essential. His work was done. But it would have taken an act of Congress to get him away, even if he did not participate actively in putting together the Tinker-Toy construction which would become the John F. Kennedy . (If he thought of her as Folly , he added the word “ Grand” in front of the epithet.) There were ongoing crises and decisions to be made, but he could have made them from DOSEWEX or DOSEAST. On the other hand, Doris was valuable and Art Donald’s team was needed to run a series of tests on construction as it went into place.

She grew rapidly. There wasn’t another building project under way anywhere in the world. The department was concentrating all its manpower and most of its available money on the Kennedy . She was the topic of conversation wherever DOSE people worked, from Earthside to the last picket ship out near the mass of Jupiter.

The grandeur which was a ship took shape in her own element with the pocked moon and the blackness of space as her backdrop. It made for a serene and beautiful picture. Sitting in a jumper five thousand yards from the Kennedy , it was difficult to imagine the conflict going on down there on that blue-and-white ball which was the home planet. There, governments were being changed. Fighting varied from savage and random acts of terror by the Firsters to the highly charged atmosphere of the Senate, where radicals were locked in combat with the outnumbered men who believed in a future for man which did not entail buttoning up and toughing it out on the home planet.

For weeks a debate raged over the battle of DOSEWEX, where thirty-two hundred Earthfirsters died. The ruling party, the Publicrats, received the brunt of an attack from rabid, self-confessed Firsters and Worldsavers. Liberals wept openly on the Senate floor as they bewailed the mass slaughter of humanity at DOSEWEX, and, in their zeal against the death penalty for terrorists, they called loudly for the pitiless execution of all those responsible for the slaughter of innocent terrorists who were merely using their First Amendment rights to express dissatisfaction with space policy.

Only once did a courageous man stand up to remind the Senate that two dozen civilians died at DOSEWEX, along with over a hundred space marines. He was hooted into silence. On the way to his fortified apartment, he was attacked by a teenage Firster girl in a sexy little dress which concealed a bomb in an oversized bra. The bomb ruptured the brave senator’s left eardrum and killed two of his bodyguards. Thus were courageous and commonsense views silenced, without regard for First Amendment freedoms.

It was almost as if the majority of Americans felt guilty for taking the government’s cradle-to-the-grave security at the expense of individual freedom and wanted to be punished by the Firster knife or bomb. Overpeopled, underfed, the country was one teeming warren of interconnected big-city heaps where people suffering the traumas of crowding seemed all too eager to die and saw no promise in tomorrow.

Earthside was such a turmoil that there was no ground leave. The limited facilities of the moon were taxed by the construction crews, and spacers in from Mars or the Jupiter surveillance run sometimes had to spend their ground time aboard ship. Their bitchings were surprisingly good-natured, for they could see the Kennedy as she grew.

Dom spent a lot of time with Neil Walters, who would test and pilot the Kennedy . Although he was older, Neil was a perpetual boy of twenty-five in appearance. He stood six-four and was topped by a mop of blond, curly hair. He had deep, laughing blue eyes and a classical angularity of face which went with his daring and his reputation. He liked talking about flying only slightly less than he liked flying. He set out to learn the Kennedy from the smallest component upward. He was good company, for the Kennedy had become Dom’s main reason for living.

When she flew, Neil would be in command. He had a sharp mind, and Dom never had to explain even the most complicated technical details. In fact, Neil posed questions which put Dom back into the lab, Doris with him at the keyboard of a computer, to check and recheck. Neil’s questions were basic and penetrating. They caused Dom to check all the important calculations and the thinking which went into the revolutionary concept of the folding hull. Dom discovered nothing serious wrong, but he did make slight changes here and there.