'I'm damned if it is. I'm coming out to catch you. Hold on.'
There was another pause, before Whitehead replied: 'You can't do that-not enough safety time, anyhow. You know you can't leave the ship.'
'I bloody well can; Athena can handle things. I'm coming.'
'Let's not fool ourselves. What was that velocity vector?'
'Five hundred thirty feet a second.'
'Give that sum to Athena, if you like. I know the answer already.' So, in his heart, did Bowman. If he risked abandoning the ship and his four sleeping companions, he could eventually catch up with Whitehead. But then they would both be several hundred miles from Discovery-and still moving away from her at that deadly five hundred thirty feet a second. The rescue pod would first have to cancel that speed, and not until then could it start on the return journey. With that extra payload, it could never make it home.
Nevertheless, Bowman fed the figures to Athena. The answer came back instantly: IMPOSSIBLE.
Just for a moment, before his years of training asserted themselves, he was overcome by a sense of blind rage, and wanted to hammer his fists against the cold display panels of the computer. But that would be no help to Whitehead or to himself. It was impossible to argue with the laws of mathematics, and stupid to feel anger at them. If one chose to live by the implacable equations of the Universe, then when the time came one must also die by them.
But he refused to admit defeat; men did not give up as easily as this. He remembered Whitehead's own favorite saying: 'Every problem has a technical solution.' There must be a solution for this problem, if only he could think of it.
The situation was so absurd, so utterly ironic. Here he was in a ship that could cross half a billion miles of space and travel at thousands of miles an hour-and he could not save a friend drifting slowly to his death a mere ten miles away. If he returned to Earth, who would ever understand his terrible dilemma? Always there would be the unspoken question: 'But surely you could have done something?''
But this was no TV space opera, where the hero conjured some brilliant answer out of his hat. This was a problem for which there was no solution.
'Dave,' said the loudspeaker suddenly. 'Can the ship do anything?'
Though Whitehead was not a propulsion expert, he certainly knew better than this. The very fact that he had asked such a question indicated some loss of self-control, but Bowman could hardly blame him. A desperate man would clutch at any straw.
'I'm sorry, Peter,' he answered gently and patiently. 'You know the main reactor has been shut down and the thrusters have all been mothballed. It takes over a day to test them and run them up.'
And even then, he might have added, it would not have helped. The ship's acceleration was so low that it could never overtake the pod before the five hours were up.
That was going to be the longest five hours in Bowman's life.
FIRST MAN TO JUPITER
And then while Bowman was still considering his next move, Whitehead asked an extraordinary question.
'Dave,' he said, in a curiously flat voice, 'Are there any asteroids close to us?'
'Not according to the Ephemeris. Why?'
'Unless I'm crazy, there's something else out here– only a few miles away.'
Bowman's first reaction was one of surprised disappointment. He had not expected Peter to start cracking up so soon, but perhaps that blow on the head had produced aftereffects. Not for a moment did he credit the report; space was so inconceivably empty that a close passage by any other object was almost a mathematical impossibility. Whitehead could only be suffering from hallucinations; it would be best to humor him.
But that thought had already occurred to Whitehead himself.
'No-I'm not seeing things,' he said, almost as if he was reading Bowman's mind. 'There it is again-it's flashing every ten or fifteen seconds. And it's definitely moving against the star background-it can't be more than five or ten miles away.'
'Can you give me a bearing?'
Bowman still did not believe a word of it, but he started the wide-scan radar-and almost at once his jaw dropped in astonishment.
There was Whitehead's echo, now at twenty-two miles. But thirty degrees away from it, at considerably less range, was a far larger one.
'Christ!' he exclaimed, 'you're right! And it's bloody enormous. Let me get a scope on it.'
As he fed the radar coordinates to the telescope, and waited for the instrument to swing to the right quarter of the sky, his mind was a tumult of conflicting emotions. Perhaps they were both hallucinating; looked at dispassionately, that was the likeliest explanation.
And then, just for a few comforting seconds, a naive wish-fulfillment fantasy flashed through his mind. They were not alone; there was another ship out here, arriving to rescue Whitehead in the nick of time…. It could not, of course, be a ship from Earth; it could only be-
The star images stabilized. There in the center of the field was, without any question, something large and obviously artificial, glittering metallically as it turned slowly in the sun. With fingers that trembled slightly, Bowman zoomed up the magnification.
Then the fantasy dissolved, and for the first time he realized the full extent of the disaster that had overwhelmed the expedition. He knew now why none of the alarms had sounded when Whitehead's capsule had collided with the ship. In missing the hull, it had hit a target that was almost equally vital.
Receding there behind them, still spinning with the force of the impact, was the entire long– range antenna complex. The big forty-foot-diameter parabola, the smaller dishes clustered around it, the gear designed to aim their radio beams across half a billion miles of space-all were drifting slowly back toward the sun.
The runaway capsule that had doomed Peter Whitehead had also destroyed their only link with Earth.
'Funny thing,' said Whitehead, as he passed the six hundred-mile mark, 'but there are no messages I want to send, anyhow. I made all my goodbyes back on Earth; I'm glad I don't have to go through that again.' He paused, then added; 'There was a girl, but she told me she wouldn't be waiting. Just as well.'
There was a curious detachment and lack of interest in Whitehead's voice. Already, it seemed, he was drifting away from the human race in spirit as well as in body. Perhaps the defensive mechanisms of the mind were quietly coming into play, extinguishing the fires of emotion, as the engineer of a sinking ship will close down his boilers lest they cause a last-minute explosion.
Presently he said: 'I wish I could see Earth; a pity it's lost in the sun. But Jupiter looks beautiful; it seems so close already. I hope you make it-I hope you find what you're looking for.'
'We'll do our best,' answered Bowman, swallowing hard. 'Don't worry about that.' He wondered if Whitehead realized that he had said 'you,' not 'we.' Consciously or unconsciously, he had already removed himself from the roll call of the expedition.
The leaden minutes ticked slowly away, while Bowman waited with mingled grief and frustration. If Whitehead wished to be left to his own thoughts, so be it; he was not going to engage him in light chatter at moments such as this.
The radio circuit to the capsule was still heartbreakingly dear; there was no sense of distance or separation. Over such a trivial span of miles, the low-power transmitter in the Control Center was perfectly adequate. Though it was designed for communication with space pods working in the immediate vicinity of the ship, it had more than enough range for this task.
Then Whitehead said, quite unexpectedly: 'There's one thing I'd like you to do for me, Dave.'
'Of course.'
'Play some music-something cheerful.'
'What would you like?'
'The Pastoral, I think. Yes, that would do nicely.'
