The Seeds of Time

‘How big?’ he asked.

‘Around forty miles mean diameter.’

‘What’d that be in gravity?’

‘Haven’t worked it out. Call it slight, and reckon there isn’t any, and you’ll be near enough.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Duncan.

On the way back to the mess-room he paused to put his head into the cabin. Lellie was lying on her bunk, with the spring-cover fastened over her to give some illusion of weight. At the sight of him she raised herself on one elbow.

She was small-not much over five feet. Her face and hands were delicate; they had a fragility which was not simply a matter of poor bone-structure. To an Earthman her eyes looked unnaturally round, seeming to give her permanently an expression of innocence surprised. The lobes of her ears hung unusually low out of a mass of brown hair that glinted with red among its waves. The paleness of her skin was emphasized by the colour on her cheeks and the vivid red on her lips.

‘Hey,’ said Duncan. ‘You can start to get busy packing up the stuff now.’

‘Packing up?’ she repeated doubtfully, in a curiously resonant voice.

‘Sure. Pack,’ Duncan told her. He demonstrated by opening a box, cramming some clothes into it, and waving a hand to include the rest. Her expression did not change, but the idea got across.

‘We are come?’ she asked.

‘We are nearly come. So get busy on this lot,’ he informed her.

‘Yith-okay,’ she said, and began to unhook the cover.

Duncan shut the door, and gave a shove which sent him floating down the passage leading to the general mess and living-room.

Inside the cabin, Lellie pushed away the cover. She reached down cautiously for a pair of metallic soles, and attached them to her slippers by their clips. Still cautiously holding on to the bunk, she swung her feet over the side and lowered them until the magnetic soles clicked into contact with the floor. She stood up, more confidently. The brown overall suit she wore revealed proportions that might be admired among Martians, but by Earth standards they were not classic-it is said to be the consequence of the thinner air of Mars that has in the course of time produced a greater lung capacity, with consequent modification. Still ill at ease with her condition of weightlessness, she slid her feet to keep contact as she crossed the room. For some moments she paused in front of a wall mirror, contemplating her reflection. Then she turned away and set about the packing.

‘-one hell of a place to take a woman to,’ Wishart, the ship’s cook, was saying as Duncan came in.

Duncan did not care a lot for Wishart-chiefly on account of the fact that when it had occurred to him that it was highly desirable for Lellie to have some lessons in weightless cooking. Wishart had refused to give the tuition for less than Ł50, and thus increased the investment cost to Ł2,360. Nevertheless, it was not his way to pretend to have misheard.

‘One hell of a place to be given a job,’ he said, grimly. No one replied to that. They knew how men came to be offered way-load jobs.

It was not necessary, as the Company frequently pointed out, for superannuation at the age of forty to come as a hardship to anyone: salaries were good, and they could cite plenty of cases where men had founded brilliant subsequent careers on the savings of their space-service days. That was all right for the men who had saved, and had not been obsessively interested in the fact that one four-legged animal can run faster than another. But this was not even an enterprising way to have lost one’s money, so when it came to Duncan’s time to leave crew work they made him no more than the routine offer.

He had never been to Jupiter IV/II, but he knew just what it would be like-something that was second moon to Callisto; itself fourth moon, in order of discovery, to Jupiter; would inevitably be one of the grimmer kinds of cosmic pebble. They offered no alternative, so he signed up at the usual terms: Ł5,000 a year for five years, all found, plus five months waiting time on half-pay before he could get there, plus six months afterwards, also on half-pay, during ‘readjustment to gravity.’

Well-it meant the next six years taken care of; five of them without expenses, and a nice little sum at the end. The splinter in the mouthful was: could you get through five years of isolation without cracking up? Even when the psychologist had okayed you, you couldn’t be sure. Some could: others went to pieces in a few months, and had to be taken off, gibbering. If you got through two years, they said, you’d be okay for five. But the only way to find out about the two was to try …

‘What about my putting in the waiting time on Mars? I could live cheaper there,’ Duncan suggested.

They had consulted planetary tables and sailing schedules, and discovered that it would come cheaper for them, too. They had declined to split the difference on the saving thus made, but they had booked him a passage for the following week, and arranged for him to draw, on credit, from the Company’s agent there.

The Martian colony in and around Port Clarke is rich in ex-spacemen who find it more comfortable to spend their rearguard years in the lesser gravity, broader morality, and greater economy obtaining there. They are great advisers. Duncan listened, but discarded most of it. Such methods of occupying oneself to preserve sanity as learning the Bible or the works of Shakespeare by heart, or copying out three pages of the Encyclopaedia every day, or building model spaceships in bottles, struck him not only as tedious, but probably of doubtful efficacy, as well. The only one which he had felt to show sound practical advantages was that which had led him to picking Lellie to share his exile, and he still fancied it was a sound one, in spite of its letting him in for Ł2,360.