McQueen has been leaning against one of the work surfaces, his elbow resting on the main centrifuge. He comes erect now, with something of languor in his movements. You can lead him to water, he seems to say, but he’ll drink in his own good time.
“Only the obvious,” he says. “If you’re separated from the main party, you go to ground. Find some height if you can. There’s always more hungry activity at street level. Radio in and we’ll come and get you. Don’t strike out on your own because that’s the best way to get killed.
“Everyone should refresh their e-blocker before stepping out of the airlock, and again at one-hour intervals. If you break into a sweat, give yourself a top-up right there and then. Don’t wait until the hungries start to compliment you on your rich bouquet.
“As far as the firing goes, usual drill pertains: you choose; we shoot. Once we start to shoot, you stay absolutely still. I don’t want anyone ambling into our sights and messing up the clearance. You don’t want that either. Any questions?”
There are no questions.
“Very well,” Fournier says. “Dr. Sealey has assigned each of you a specific sampling brief. He’ll go over those with you now. I’ll be in the engine room if I’m needed. The lieutenant will lead out from the mid-section airlock in ten minutes.”
The scientists scatter. Everyone has already assembled their kit, but now they check everything again in case they’ve left some crucial piece of equipment on their bunks or out in the workspace. John does not repeat their individual shopping lists: he knows he doesn’t have to.
Khan glances across at Stephen, who is prepping an additional specimen box. She watches as he slips this second box into his rucksack. In spite of the briefing, he seems very much inclined to further some project of his own.
She was surprised when she learned that Stephen had asked to come with the team today. Normally he works with the samples they bring back but will do anything to avoid going out in their company. She understands, or thinks she does. Company, for Stephen, is equivalent to unresolved tension. His interactions with other people are awkward, and their interactions with each other are a distraction he finds hard to cope with.
So what’s different about today? Khan could ask him, of course, but hitting Stephen with a direct question feels like rolling him for his spare change. He has no defence against questions.
So she says nothing, and returns to checking her own sample kit for the third or fourth time.
John Sealey is watching Khan as she watches Greaves. He feels, not for the first time, a twinge of jealousy at her solicitude for the boy. It seems sometimes as though the two of them have an intimacy he can’t break into.
That’s crazy talk, of course. You can’t get intimate with Greaves; with the Robot, as the soldiers call him. When it comes to the muddled give-and-take of human relationships, Stephen doesn’t have a functional interface. Which means Sealey is jealous of a mirage.
Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.
All the same, it hurts him just a little when Rina is so worried about Stephen Greaves that she forgets that anyone else—including himself—is even in the room.
He touches her shoulder, bringing her back. “All tooled up?” he asks her unnecessarily. She shows him her sample kit, like a schoolkid brandishing her lunchbox. “Ready to rock,” she says, with about a half of a smile.
“Then let’s go,” John suggests. “Last one in the airlock is a smelly cheese.”
Lieutenant McQueen doesn’t greatly appreciate babysitting duties, but he does like getting out of the big tin can. He likes being in charge, which he always is on these expeditions (the colonel remains in the vehicle on account of his bad leg; Dr. Fournier stays behind too, just because). And he likes using his expertise.
Dr. Khan accused him once, on some occasion when a bottle or two of hard spirits had eroded the usual demarcation between the scientists and the soldiers, of having a relaxed attitude to killing. He didn’t take any offence at that. In fact, he laughed. She was so far off the mark that he couldn’t even feel insulted.
He is no more casual about killing than she is about science. It’s a discipline, that’s the truth of it, and some men (some women too, with Lance-Bombardier Foss pre-eminent among them) are better fitted for it than others. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about life. Quite the opposite. You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.
And conversely, killing a hungry is like swatting a fly. There’s nothing there, no future possibility left. It’s only a shell, a cast skin that a man or a woman or a child shucked off. What Dr. Khan thinks of as his indifference to death is really a by-product of how well he understands it.
He thinks, briefly, as he cycles the airlock and lets her out, about the possibility of killing her. Not because he wants to. He dislikes her but not nearly enough for that. It’s just that the complexity of the equation in her case makes the thought-experiment interesting: killing a pregnant woman carries a greater freight of consequences than any other killing. However contemptible the doctor is (and she is contemptible, sneering at things she doesn’t understand, endangering the mission in order to get laid, talking down to decent men while she treats the Robot like an overgrown baby), the life inside her has its own potentiality that isn’t related to hers in any way. He would pause before shooting her, if it came to it. Pause for the kind of reflection that she thinks him incapable of.
Then he would do the job because it needed to be done and he doesn’t flinch from something just because it’s hard or dangerous or ugly. Not that Khan does either, he has to admit. This is why he can’t bring himself to despise her all the way down to the ground, the way he despises Fournier and Sealey. Whatever else you can say about her, she does the job that’s in front of her.