Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

In his office, he told his secretary that he was available only to members of the team and the chief, meaning J.J. He poured coffee and sat in his deliberately uncomfortable desk chair. Desk work bored him. If he had kept the padded, swiveling, seductive chair which came with the office he’d have spent a lot of time sleeping in it.

The office was in top-security country. It was as well protected as the labs and the main control room. The labs were adjacent. They contained everything needed for the preliminary, mainly theoretical work. He could have a full meal from a varied menu at any time of the day or night, and if he desired, it would be delivered to his office or his quarters, which opened off the other side of the office. The office and the quarters were small, but pleasant. They were so well ventilated and so well lit that it was easy to forget that they were several hundred feet underground. In his room were several bottles of his favorite brand of bourbon, a viewer which was capable of receiving topside broadcasts and also offered a selection of taped dramas, documentaries, and scientific film. The music system had been stocked with his favorites, obviously from his preference list aboard his last ship.

A blockshield contained the entire lab-office complex. Communications out were complicated, except for a private line direct to J.J.’s office. It was a good setup for work.

He looked over the reports from Neil’s engine tests. The powerplant had worked to design specs, and Neil was riding it home to join the construction team out behind the moon, where the hull would be fabricated. The hull was not even designed yet, but the construction crews were in place. Dom had worked under pressure before, but never like this.

He had been over the engine test data a hundred times, and he knew he was reading it again simply to take his mind off the way she looked when she walked into the lab dusty and rumpled from a trip across the desert by ground car. He kept remembering the Cape and how they had walked under a Florida moon arm in arm, both slightly tipsy. And above all he remembered how her lips flattened and then resisted under his.

And there were other memories, because that kiss under the Florida moon had not been the first. He’d kissed her a lot when they were together in the Academy. They’d even plighted a few troths and made a few plans. Yes, a lot of kisses then, and a lot of tears, openly on her part, secretly on his, when he unplighted his troths and grabbed a chance for an immediate berth on a Mars ship. He grabbed it with both hands and let her hand fall limply from his, leaving her behind. She married Larry Gomulka while he was on his second Mars trip, after he’d told her, as kindly as he could, that his first love was space and that she’d have to accept being number two.

Doris was not the sort to be content with being number two, and she was happy, or she seemed to be, with Larry.

Dom could understand why she didn’t want to be the few-weeks-out-of-the-year wife of a spacer, but he could not understand her being happy with Larry. Larry stood two hands shorter than Doris and he tended toward stoutness. He was a small barrel of a man with a protruding stomach and a liking for ordinary beer. He was a smiler. He was everything Dom Gordon wasn’t. He was the most unlikely candidate for being Doris’ husband, and he was, when Dom came home from that second Mars trip. He was, indeed, Doris’ husband.

Well, hell, a good spacer doesn’t kiss anyone but his ship, except when on Earthside R R. He could live with it, or he thought he could until, a little bit drunk, he kissed her under a Florida moon and found her mouth to be as sweet as before, but without the response.

The kiss took place during the early days of the water-hull project. DOSE wanted a vessel to explore the deepest ocean, and Dom was the man. He picked his team, and Doris was the first to arrive. They found themselves with time on their hands. Larry was off, as usual, in some inaccessible place in Africa or Asia. Art Donald was finishing a project in Seattle.

He kissed her, felt a momentary response, then she pushed him away. Marriage was still recognized by some people as an honorable institution. There were people, like Doris, who felt that marriage vows were to be kept. In a world where the vast majority of women took what they wanted when they wanted it, Doris clung to what she laughingly called “middle-class morality.”

Dom had never been a pleader. If a girl said no she simply wasn’t interested at the moment. She’d be interested later, and if she were not, another would be. It was not egoism or chauvinism on his part, it was just the way things were. He should have backed off when she said no, but he was, he realized, still in love with her. He tried gentle force, pulling her to him. She was strong. She resisted silently.

“Hey, this is Dom,” he said. “You know me.”

“That’s the past, Dom,” she said.

“What difference would it make?”

“It would make a lot of difference to me,” she said.

“You loved me,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It would be the first time since I married Larry,” she said. Hell, he understood, but he had to preserve his pride. He stood there thinking of things to say. He knew what he should have said.

He should have said, “Doris, I understand. That’s the way I thought of you back at the Academy when you were my girl. I admire you for being that way.”

Instead, he let his passions guide him, begged her, became a prideless beggar and saw, in her eyes, her loss of respect for him. That made him angry, and he made the situation worse by saying angry things.

“Dom, you are not going to force me to pull out of this project,” she said. “I’m interested in it and Larry is interested in it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being damned unfair. Just put it down to one too many drinks and let’s forget it.”

“I’d like that.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you, Dom.”

“It wouldn’t have happened this time,” he said, with one last effort to hurt her, “if you hadn’t walked with me.”

“That won’t happen again,” she said.

“Thank you, Doris,” he said.

It would have taken a computer and a good operator to figure the miles he’d covered since Florida. There were always girls for spacers, and then she walks into a lab and it’s all up front again and, goddammit, she wasn’t even beautiful. Her breasts were too small and her hips too wide and she was an intellectual snob and why the hell couldn’t he get her out of his mind?

“My boy,” he said, “it’s a matter of self-control.”

He practiced self-control. He picked up Art’s notes on a new alloy and studied them, and then he was into it, going over J.J.’s specs for a ship which would be impossible to build. They wanted a five-hundred-yard monster with a cargo hold taking up four-fifths of her volume.

“What the hell are we going to do?” he exploded, when he first saw the specs. “Carry the bogie home in her belly?”

“Is that a bad idea?” J. J. asked.

“You’re compounding the problems,” Dom protested. “You’re giving me an impossibility on top of an improbability. How can I build a pressure hull with nothing inside but a huge empty space?”

“You can build as many bulkheads as needed,” J.J. said.

“Not if you’re going to carry the bogie in the hold,” he said.

“Dom, we’ve got to make everyone think she’s nothing but a giant tanker,” J.J. said.

“To carry water to Mars?”

“To carry water to Mars. To carry phosphates back. She’s too big to be built in secret. We’ve got to have the backing of powerful men, even if we keep her construction secret from the public. Can you see the senator from New Mexico buying the bogie-on-Jupe idea? Water to Mars he can understand. Even the most rabid antispacers are already half convinced of her economic value, because she can multiply the cargo tonnage between here and Mars.”