Lifeboat by Harrison Harry & Dickson Gordon R

Author:Harrison, Harry & Dickson, Gordon R. [Harrison, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780860079309
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 1977-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

8

Sixth day—23:57 hours

The humans, except Giles, were all asleep. Although the lights still blazed eternally overhead, they had all fallen into a pattern, a sleeping and waking cycle. At about midnight, lifeshiptime, Giles sat murmuring into the recorder to log the day before trying to sleep himself.

“Sixth day,” he dictated. “There’s still enough fruit, but the numbers of those with spots are increasing. More leaves dying. Morale, about the same. This is the end of the sixth day.”

He put the recorder safely away on the floor at the head of his cot, where Esteven could come and get it in the morning, and reached for the sleeve he had cut from his shipsuit. The orange-colored sleeve, from wrist to shoulder, was long enough to make a workable blindfold with its two ends tied behind his head—enough to keep the light out so that he could sleep more easily. He had no way aboard the lifeship of seeing himself reflected, but he could imagine how his one bare, exercise-muscled arm and his curly, six-day beard gave him a wild, almost barbaric look. Curiously, none of the arbites had such a look. Though Groce and Esteven both were sprouting considerable beards—touched with a few gray hairs in Groce’s case—they looked disheveled and unwashed, rather than wild. Frenco and Hem, on the other hand, had no beards to speak of. Frenco’s consisted of a few limp black hairs scattered sparsely over his lower features. Hem had a faint fluff of blond mustache and some sandy stubble following the line of his jawbone on each side from chin to upper cheeks.

Nearly all of them now, except Biset, had sacrificed at least a small part of their clothing to make a light shield for their eyes during sleeping hours. He could hear them breathing slumberously beyond the screen now. Lucidly none of them was a snorer of any heaviness or regularity, although Hem occasionally rolled over on his back and fell into a sort of deep rumbling in his throat.

Giles wrapped his loose sleeve around his head and tied it, then stretched out on his cot. He waited for sleep, but it was slow in coming. At moments like this he became actively conscious of the closeness of the surroundings, the thickness of the atmosphere, and all the unresolved problems that stood between them and a safe planetfall on 20B-40, to say nothing of those standing between him and the successful completion of his mission. He turned over restlessly on the cot, looking for a more comfortable position. Even assuming the ib vine held up and they could make the course change to 20B40, could the arbites stand up to another thirty or forty more days like this?

Something intruded on his thoughts. Something barely heard, like a cry cut off before it had actually had time to clear the throat of the one crying out. He listened ... but he heard nothing.

He continued to listen. There was no sound but the nighttime heavy breathing; even Hem’s approximation of a snore was silent.

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