The Lost Worlds of 2001

24. 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."

Midway between Mars and Jupiter, two tiny, and slowly separating, bubbles of warmth and light began to reverberate to the sounds of spring. When the symphony had run its course and ebbed into silence, the pod was more than a thousand miles away.

It was still quite clearly recognizable in the telescope, though its finer details could no longer be seen. Every day, it would draw eight thousand miles further ahead of Discovery, and though its future position could be predicted to the end of time, it would soon be lost against the background of the stars.

"Dave," said Whitehead suddenly, "can you still hear me?" His voice sounded more animated-less remote and detached. It was as if he had made some decision, and was no longer drifting helplessly.

"I read you loud and clear."

"There's a job I still have to do. I want to find what went wrong. It won't make any difference now-but it may help someone else."

That thought had already passed through Bowman's mind, but he wanted the suggestion to come from Whitehead. He felt an absurd impulse to say "Be careful!" and managed to fight it down.

"What do you think happened?" he asked instead.

"I was in shadow for thirty minutes on that last job, and I noticed it was getting very cold; the heater system must have gone on the blink. Nothing really serious-but perhaps the cold cracked one of the pipelines. I guess there was a leak; some propellant may have got out, and then frozen on the controls. I still don't see how it was possible, but it's the only theory that makes sense. Anyway, I'm going out to check it. I have thirty minutes of air in this suit. I'll call you back as soon as I've depressurized the capsule."

"I'll be listening out," said Bowman. He found it very hard to say anything-even to make the simplest responses. The feeling of utter helplessness and inadequacy still overwhelmed him; the sense of loneliness would come later.

He knew exactly what Whitehead was attempting to do. When he had depressurized the capsule, he would open the hatch and work his way, hand over hand, around to the propulsion unit at the rear. It would not be hard for him to take off the protective covers, and perhaps he could see what had gone wrong. It was not very likely, but it was worth trying. And certainly it was better than waiting passively for the end.

One minute-two minutes-went by. Surely he had made the trip by now!

"Peter-have you found anything?" Bowman called at last.

There was no answer. He called again, and again.

Then he began to wonder. Perhaps something had gone wrong-but if so, was it really an accident this time?

Once more he called out into the unreverberant silence, but already he was certain that he would never know the answer.

There were times when the greatest heroism consisted of dying quietly, without making a fuss. This Peter Whitehead had done; no one could ask for more.

And two months from now, a million miles ahead of his comrades, he would be the first of all men to reach Jupiter.