With the help of the torch, Pavel did as he was told, and the lid sprang back. His blood ran suddenly cold.
“Know what that is, do you?” Andrew said triumphantly.
“Yes.” Pavel heard his voice as gritty as the wind blowing across the dunes outside. “I should have guessed that this was what you meant. It’s an Easy Way Out.”
Small. No longer, no thicker, than his forearm. But unbelievably expensive. This sleek blue plasteel cylinder with its white cap on one end, bedded in a shock-absorbent lining covered with red velvet, might easily have cost half as much as the Pennyroyal.
It was a legal development of an earlier device which had had to be banned because on planet after planet it had stolen the hope of survival from pioneers worn out with their attempts to overcome the infinite problems an alien world could pose. Cynical and cold-blooded entrepreneurs had bought early versions of the machine—which filled half a spaceship—and made fortunes by luring settlers into imaginary universes so delightful they were happy to starve to death rather than give up their next session of pleasure. Several worlds that were now officially freehold in the power of a single family had been, as one might say, “cleared” in this manner.
When the scandal threatened to reach epidemic proportions, Earth’s sluggish government had finally enacted a law. By then, however, the profit to be had from using the machines had shrunk; there were few worlds remaining to be grabbed. And in addition miniaturization had—as always—progressed, so that they could be held in one’s hand instead of sprawling out through a fifty-metre hold. Also as always the law was a compromise. It was not forbidden to manufacture the things, only to purchase or use them if one was not a bona fide space traveler or engaged in some occupation so dangerous as to involve the risk of fatal accident. In practice, that meant they were sold to space tourists, government officials, and chief officers of spacelines. They were rich.
Activated—and all it required for activation was a twist of the white cap and a firm push—it broadcast a signal direct to the brain of anybody within range, in other words within about a hundred metres. The signal forged a link, so to speak, between the brain’s pleasure centres and the memory, diverting the remaining resources of the body into the construction of a delectable dream so absorbing, so convincing, that minor matters like loss of blood, or starvation, or intolerable pain, were instantly forgotten. Trapped in a collapsed mineshaft, sunk beneath an ocean with an hour’s worth of air, lost between the stars, one could live out the balance of his life in an ideally happy illusion. According to temperament, it could be erotic—or an orgy of eating—or a tussle with a favourite hallucinogen—or the accomplishment of a lifelong ambition—or . . .
Or anything. Literally, anything.
In principle, then, it was a marvelous and humane idea. What fate could be crueller to an aware, sensitive being than knowledge of inescapably impending death? When there was no hope of rescue, better that a man should end his days in unalloyed delight!
Fine.
But the moment that cap was pressed home, it was certain that he would end his days. It was a gesture implying suicide. Once those new neural paths had been burned into the cortex, there could never be any retreat from death.
According to what Pavel had read, this had not been true of the earliest versions. One could recover from those, as one could from the ancient addictive drugs, at the cost of incredible self-discipline and long, slow, painstaking psychiatric help. With a model as advanced as the one he held now . . . no.
He shut the lid and jumbled the lock again, and carefully placed the case on a shelf where Andrew could not reach it.
“What are you doing?” Andrew cried. “You said you knew what it was! Can’t you turn it on?”
“Yes.” Pavel averted his face and focused his little torch on his medical gear, making a great business of picking out what he would need to complete the job he had barely started.
“Then. . .!”
“Oh, shut up!” With a fury that appalled him—it was no tone for a doctor to use to a patient. “Or I’ll shut you up!” He grasped an anesthetic injector, not local like the one he had already administered, designed to inactivate pain-nerves selectively, but one which would blot out the whole nervous system. “In fact”—with growing resolution—“I guess I’ll do that anyway!”
And clapped the injector against Andrew’s arm.
“You bastard!” Andrew husked. “You devil! You . . . !”
On the last word his voice failed. His eyes, glinting in the pale beam of the torch, shut against his will, and seconds later he slumped inert.
It’s kinder, anyway. . . .
But Pavel knew, even as he pulled the coverlet from the bunk and mechanically began to occupy himself with the foul job of cleaning excrement and dried blood from Andrew’s lower body, that that was not the truth. There had been as much violence in that act as if he had given Andrew a punch on the jaw. And the reason why he needed to let his violence erupt—
Well, even though his mind was preoccupied with his work, even though the effect of the stimulant injection he had given himself was half used up by the low-oxygen air and the hunger which now—paradoxically—was making his stomach growl audibly, he was able to reason it out. He was scared out of his wits. He was very young by modern standards, if not as young as Andrew, being only thirty-five and looking forward to a probable lifetime of at least a hundred and twenty. Proportionately, he vis-a-vis Andrew was in the same situation as a man just come of age at twenty-one would have been when dealing with a twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy before mankind began to colonize other solar systems: very much aware of the drawbacks of being adolescent because they were still so fresh in
