Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

My orders had stated that I would be met here by someone from my assigned station, but for over an hour I was by myself in the middle of that crowd. In retrospect I think the experience was good for me, and perhaps it was planned that way. I had been anticipating the loneliness of duty in some remote part of the wilderness outside of the cities, and I had been trained for that. But this was different. It taught me that I was vulnerable after all, and I think it made me accept Mark, when he came, more than I would have otherwise.

I still remember how glad I was when I saw a hat like mine over the heads of that surging mass of people. I took off my own and waved it over my head to let him know where I was, and grasped his hand eagerly when he extended it. Half shouting to make myself heard, I said, “Identity 887332. Call me Eyebem.”

He said, “Call me Mark.”

I still don’t know whether “Mark” is really Mark’s name or merely one he has assumed to put us at our ease. I could ask him now, turning up my speaker until he heard me over the whistling wind, but he is thinking. All our own names, of course, derive from the dawn age of cybernetics: Ceedeesy’s from the old Control Data Corporation computers, and “Mark” from the famous series which included the Mark VII and Mark VIII. At any rate I had been expecting one of us, and the name postponed for half a minute at least my discovery that Mark was human. To be truthful, I don’t believe I was really sure of it until we were alone in the cab of the copter. Then, sitting next to him as he started the engine, I could study the skin of his neck. After that it seemed best to say something so he wouldn’t realize I was staring, so I asked where we were going.

“Main station,” he said. “About thirty miles up the Kobuk River.” I could tell that he wasn’t accustomed to talking a great deal, but he was perfectly friendly. I asked if it were far, and he said two hundred and fifty miles farther north. We had lifted off by then and I was too busy looking at the country to want to ask more questions. It was rocky, with conifers on the higher ground and alders following the watercourses. In places they had already shed their leaves, and I knew this must be one of the last good days we would have before the short Arctic summer ended and winter closed in.

At the main station I was reassured to find that Mark was the only human. The station boss was one of us, very imposing in a huge old grey cabinet with sensors scattered all over the station, but he made me welcome in a hearty, pleasant voice that made me feel right at home. There was another fellow too, from the crèche-cycle two years ahead of mine as it turned out, who had come in from a tour to report and rest up.

With my own anxiety gone I began to feel sorry for Mark. He had to prepare food when the rest of us were sitting around recharging our power packs, and a lot of the little jokes and things that were said pretty well left him out—not intentionally but just by the nature of things. Since I had the least seniority I had to cut wood for the fireplace and do the odd jobs the station boss couldn’t be bothered with around the low-yield pile that kept our generator running, but I didn’t mind and I felt sure Mark would have traded places with me gladly if he could.

Then the pleasant time at the station was over and Mark and I left for our tour. By then I had learned that Mark, who was nearly thirty, would be retiring the next year, and I was to work with him until then, learning the territory and getting the specialized knowledge that can only be acquired in the field. We could have flown since the first big storm of the winter hadn’t come yet, but Mark was afraid that if we did we wouldn’t be able to get the copter back out when it turned nasty, so we took a snow jeep instead.

The first night that we camped I knew that I had reached the life in which I could fulfill myself, the thing I had been made and trained for. Without his asking I carried water up from the creek for Mark so that he could wash and make coffee. After he had gone to bed I sat up half the night staring at the polestar—so bright and so high here—and listening to the sounds the wind made in the little spruce trees around us.

The next day Mark showed me the tracks of a bear overlapping my own beside the creek. “He came before the frost got to the mud,” Mark said, “so it must have been pretty early in the evening. Did you see him?”

I shook my head. “He’s not dangerous, is he?”

“I wouldn’t want to blunder into him in the dark, and he might go after the grub I’ve got locked in the jeep.”

I hadn’t thought of that. The bear couldn’t eat amperes out of my power pack, but if it got to Mark’s food—not here where we could easily get back to the station, but when we were farther out—Mark might starve. That knowledge hung like a dark cloud at the back of my mind while we broke camp and loaded the snow jeep. I hadn’t realized I was allowing the worry to show on my face, but when we were under way Mark asked, “What’s the matter, Eyebem?”

I told him what was troubling me and he laughed. “I’m an old hand. Funny, but while you were worrying about me I was fretting about you and the boss and the rest of you; wondering if you’ll be all right when I leave.”

“About us?” Frankly I was shocked.

“Uh-huh.” He swung the snow jeep around a fallen tree. “I know there are a lot of these completely automated stations operating successfully, but I still worry.”

Completely automated? I suppose in a sense Mark was right, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. I said as gently as I could, “We’re designed for it, Mark. This is our home out here. If anyone’s out of place it’s you, and I’m sure the station boss and all of us will feel a lot less concern when you go to one of the cities.”

Mark didn’t say anything to that, but I could see he didn’t really agree. To change the subject I said, “The bears will be going into hibernation soon, I suppose. Then we won’t have to worry about them.”

“Most of them are in already.” Mark sounded like a bear himself. “The one we had around camp was probably an old male; some of them don’t go until the last bit of food’s gone, and they’ll stick their heads out any time during the winter when there’s a little stretch of better than average weather.”

I know all that, of course. I had asked the question to give him something to talk about that wouldn’t hurt his pride. It worked, too. Bears around camp are always a problem, and he told bear stories for the rest of that day as we picked our way north.

The storm came on our fifth day out, but we were expecting it and had made ourselves as secure as possible, pitching our tent in a sheltered spot and weighing down the edges with rocks until it looked almost like a stone house. The storm kept us there for three days, but when it was over we could put the skis on the snow jeep and skim along where we had had to pick our way before. We looked in on the sea otter rookeries north of the abandoned city of Kivalina, then followed the coast north toward Point Hope. We were still about two days’ travel south of it when the second storm came.

That one held us five days, and when it was over Mark decided we’d better cut our tour short and head back toward the station. We dug the snow jeep out of the drifts and got ready to leave, but when Mark engaged the transmission the engine died and would not restart.

I know very little about turbines—I’ve only so much program capacity after all—but Mark seemed to be quite familiar with them, so while I built a snow wall to give him some shelter from the wind, he tore the engine down.

A drive shaft bearing race had shattered. It was broken so badly it wouldn’t even keep the shaft in place, much less allow it to turn. It had jammed the turbine, and the overtorque breaker was what had actually shut down the engine; the trouble with the bearing had probably been due to cold-shortness, the weakness that will make an ax head fly into a thousand pieces sometimes when it’s been left outside all night in sub-zero cold and you slam it into a frozen knot. All our equipment is supposed to be tested against it, but apparently this slipped through, or more likely, as Mark says, some mechanic doing an overhaul made an unauthorized substitution.