Accidental Death, Peter Baily [great books for teens TXT] 📗

"It was a fantastic situation. Here was the Whale, the most powerful ship ever built, which could cover fifty light-years in a subjective time of one second, and it was helpless. For, as of course you know, the star-drive couldn't be used again for at least two hours.

"The Whale also had ion rockets of course, the standard deuterium-fusion thing with direct conversion. As again you know, this is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five minutes to abandon ship.

"James got us all into the Minnow at a dead run. There was no time to take anything at all except the clothes we stood in. The Minnow was meant for short heavy hops to planets or asteroids. In addition to the ion drive it had emergency atomic rockets, using steam for reaction mass. We thanked God for that when Cazamian canceled our downwards velocity with them in a few seconds. We curved away up over China and from about fifty miles high we saw the Whale hit the Pacific. Six hundred tons of mass at well over two thousand miles an hour make an almighty splash. By now you'll have divers down, but I doubt they'll salvage much you can use.

"I wonder why James went down with the ship, as the saying is? Not that it made any difference. It must have broken his heart to know that his lovely ship was getting the chopper. Or did he suspect another human error?

"We didn't have time to think about that, or even to get the radio working. The steam rockets blew up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a crisp. Only thing that saved me was the spacesuit I was still wearing. I snapped the face plate down because the cabin was filling with fumes. I saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's how he'd escaped—and I saw him beginning to laugh. Then the port side collapsed and I fell out.

"I saw the launch spinning away, glowing red against a purplish black sky. I tumbled head over heels towards the huge curved shield of earth fifty miles below. I shut my eyes and that's about all I remember. I don't see how any of us could have survived. I think we're all dead.

"I'll have to get up and crack this suit and let some air in. But I can't. I fell fifty miles without a parachute. I'm dead so I can't stand up."

There was silence for a while except for the vicious howl of the wind. Then snow began to shift on the ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and came shakily to his feet. He moved slowly around for some time. After about two hours he returned to the hollow, squatted down and switched on the recorder. The voice began again, considerably wearier.

"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest wilderness I've ever seen. This place makes the moon look cozy. There's precipice around me every way but one and that's up. So it's up I'll have to go till I find a way to go down. I've been chewing snow to quench my thirst but I could eat a horse. I picked up a short-wave broadcast on my suit but couldn't understand a word. Not English, not French, and there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen minutes just to hear a human voice again. I haven't much hope of reaching anyone with my five milliwatt suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.

"Just before I start the climb there are two things I want to get on tape. The first is how I got here. I've remembered something from my military training, when I did some parachute jumps. Terminal velocity for a human body falling through air is about one hundred twenty m.p.h. Falling fifty miles is no worse than falling five hundred feet. You'd be lucky to live through a five hundred foot fall, true, but I've been lucky. The suit is bulky but light and probably slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile an hour updraft this side of the mountain, skidded downhill through about half a mile of snow and fetched up in a drift. The suit is part worn but still operational. I'm fine.

"The second thing I want to say is about the Chingsi, and here it is: watch out for them. Those jokers are dangerous. I'm not telling how because I've got a scientific reputation to watch. You'll have to figure it out for yourselves. Here are the clues:

(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but after all they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light-years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop? A talent that's so uncertain and rudimentary here that most people don't believe it, might be highly developed out there.

(2) The Whale expedition did fine till it found Chang. Then it hit a seam of bad luck. Real stinking bad luck that went on and on till it looks fishy. We lost the ship, we lost the launch, all but one of us lost our lives. We couldn't even win a game of ping-pong.

"So what is luck, good or bad? Scientifically speaking, future chance events are by definition chance. They can turn out favorable or not. When a preponderance of chance events has occurred unfavorably, you've got bad luck. It's a fancy name for a lot of chance results that didn't go your way. But the gambler defines it differently. For him, luck refers to the future, and you've got bad luck when future chance events won't go your way. Scientific investigations into this have been inconclusive, but everyone knows that some people are lucky and others aren't. All we've got are hints and glimmers, the fumbling touch of a rudimentary talent. There's the evil eye legend and the Jonah, bad luck bringers. Superstition? Maybe; but ask the insurance companies about accident prones. What's in a name? Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious. Call him accident prone and that's sound business sense. I've said enough.

"All the same, search the space-flight records, talk to the actuaries. When a ship is working perfectly and is operated by a hand-picked crew of highly trained men in perfect condition, how often is it wrecked by a series of silly errors happening one after another in defiance of probability?

"I'll sign off with two thoughts, one depressing and one cheering. A single Chingsi wrecked our ship and our launch. What could a whole planetful of them do?

"On the other hand, a talent that manipulates chance events is bound to be chancy. No matter how highly developed it can't be surefire. The proof is that I've survived to tell the tale."

At twenty below zero and fifty miles an hour the wind ravaged the mountain. Peering through his polarized vizor at the white waste and the snow-filled air howling over it, sliding and stumbling with every step on a slope that got gradually steeper and seemed to go on forever, Matt Hennessy began to inch his way up the north face of Mount Everest.

THE END