Palimpsest

Somehow Hanlon had wormed his way into their quarters and was waiting when Geddes and Lowe and Hovic, crew of the Terra IV, returned to base from their final interview with the press. Hanlon had been drunk for days, and was in pitiable condition. His hand shook violently and the bloodshot shine of his eyes was like a reflection to the fiery red of his unkempt hair.

"I had to say good-bye before the blast-off," he said, with a sorry attempt at his old assurance. "After all, I was one of you until a couple of months ago, and I ... well, I wanted to wish you luck. I wish I were going to Venus with you."

They considered him without particular emotion, three dark, compact men in their late twenties, calm with the nerveless poise of long indoctrination and utterly sure of themselves. Hovic, bluntest of the three, ignored Hanlon and went directly to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

"You lost your chance when you flunked training, Hanlon," Geddes said. "Just now you're a definite irritant, and we can't afford being upset just before the flight. You'll have to go."

Hanlon avoided his eyes, looking thoroughly hangdog and disreputable. He needed a shave badly and his careless clothing had been slept in more than once.

"I could have borne the surgical operations," he said. "A man's appendix and tonsils and teeth can be dangerous in space or on another planet where he can't get medical attention--but their damned psycho-conditioning was too much. How could I know what I'd really be like when those cold-blooded Foundation specialists got through with me?"

"It takes a specially adapted kind of man to beat space," Geddes pointed out patiently. "We can't risk neurosis out there, any more than we can risk appendicitis or abscessed teeth. The Foundation learned a lot from those first three failures, Hanlon. This time it's not repeating its old errors."

Hovic came out of the bathroom, replacing his dentures. He was the heaviest of the crew, a muscular Slav with the unimaginative man's natural directness. "You're washed up, Hanlon. Why don't you get out and leave us alone?"

At the door Hanlon hesitated, his face averted. "You'll be blasting off in another six hours, leaving everything behind. You will be heroes when you come back and you'll be rich...."

Geddes felt his lip curling. "But right now we've no use for our spare credits, is that it? You'd like to make a last touch before we go, and if we don't come back the debt won't worry you, Hanlon."

Lowe came between them, digging out his wallet. He was a slender, sensitive sort, the only one of the three who had been really friendly with Hanlon before the Irishman's congenital wildness led to his discharge.

"Let it go, Ged. What do a few credits mean to us now?"

He emptied his wallet, dropping yellow notes into Hanlon's ready hands. After a moment Geddes followed suit, but Hovic stood fast.

"He can stay sober for my part," Hovic growled. "Let him go back to his gambling friends and his wenches if he wants a handout."

Hanlon pocketed his alms and grinned at Geddes, the hangdog look melting before his old recklessness. "Keep a close eye on my pal Hovic, Ged. Ten to one he cracks up on you at null-area and finishes the trip under hypnol."

They forgot him the instant he was gone, turning to their last-minute packing, laying out the heavy coveralls they would wear during the flight, shaving and showering before their final nap.

In the shower, Geddes caught Lowe fingering the pale scar of his appendectomy and frowning thoughtfully. Without his dentures Lowe looked older and uncertain and somehow shrunken, and in spite of his conditioned calm Geddes felt a cold stirring of alarm.

"Forget Hanlon's carping," he said. He punched Lowe in the ribs, trying to be jocular. "Those Foundation medics know what they're about. Come on, we've got to get our beauty sleep before the jumpoff."

When they awoke three hours later and dressed for the flight they found that Hanlon had paid them a second visit and had stolen all three of their wrist chronometers, expensive instruments easily negotiable for their weight in platinum.

"Cheap at the price," said Geddes, and shrugged away the loss with conditioned equanimity. Lowe had no comment. Only Hovic grumbled.

"Those chronos will keep him in Irish whiskey for weeks," he said. "I hope the louse drinks himself to death on it."

On that note they went down to the Foundation staff car that waited to take them to the launching site--three calm, resolute young men, serenely confident and prepared for anything.

They arrived at dusk, just as the last supply drum was being hoisted into the vertical bronze spindle of the Terra IV. They went up the tall personnel ladder, undisturbed by the actinic lightnings of photographers' flash-bulbs, and vanished one at a time into the belly of the ship that was finally to bridge the emptiness between Earth and Venus. They sealed the port, checked the instrument gauges and the medicine cabinet with its hypnol equipment, and strapped themselves down on jointed pneumatic acceleration couches.

A red-glowing bulb on the instrument panel turned amber and then green. Geddes pressed the firing button....

Weight bore them down like a giant hand. They were not disturbed. Inured to acceleration and knowing the exact instant when their discomfort must cease. They waited patiently, eyes closed, blackout fended off by past conditioning in centrifuges and endless sessions of psychological preparation.

They were free of Earth's atmosphere in a matter of minutes. At the end of an hour the chemical jets cut out and atomic propulsors took over, shoving the Terra IV on at a lessened acceleration that would bring her to Venus, allowing for orbital drift corrections, in exactly twenty-seven days.

Communicating with the Foundation later was in theory a simple matter of narrow-beam linkage. The Terra I had proved that in 1969, twenty-nine years before, when frozen fuel lines sent her drifting derelict into space. The catch was that the atomic drive with its monstrous din of interference must be shut off before the radio could operate.

It was eight days before null-area was reached, but long before that time--on the second day out, to be exact--the Terra IV's first emergency struck.

Lowe, making a routine check of supply crates lashed to bulkhead eye-bolts in the hold, heard a frantic hammering that originated, not from the outside hull as his first startled fancy had it, but from inside an airtight drum stenciled "_FILM_."

He called Geddes and Hovic, more for moral support than for assistance, and together they ripped open the drum. Inside they found Hanlon, unconscious upon a litter of food tins and exhausted oxygen flasks.

There was also a whiskey bottle among the ruck. Hanlon, true to form, was very drunk.

They carried Hanlon out of the hold and strapped him into the radio chair, a position not to be used for another six days. They clamped an oxygen mask over his purpled face and fed him intravenously, and finally his impossibly resilient constitution threw off the effects of acceleration, Irish whiskey and near-asphyxiation.

He laughed in their faces when they asked why he had stowed away.