Christ! That my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
Writing was all right, until I realized that I had begun feeling sorry for myself, and I was letting it get into the letter. I put the letter aside and wondered what else I could do to kill time. I got out some of the film plates I'd made of the surface of Mars. Of course I had transmitted them all to Lunar Base, but it would have been nice if I could have delivered the original plates. I studied them for a while but didn't find anything I hadn't seen before. Well, I had done my job at least. I had orbited Mars, I had the glory of being the first American to do that. I had dropped the instrument package and transmitted all the data I could get back to Lunar. My only failure would be in not bringing back the ship.
I remembered a conversation I'd had at the last International Space Symposium in Geneva. A buddy of mine and I had taken out one of the Soviet cosmonauts and got him drunk. He was a dignified sort of drunk, a Party member who told long, pointless Russian jokes with an unwavering, serious expression. He sat sideways on the bar stool, holding his glass of vodka between two fingers and staring straight ahead. He said one thing that I had never forgotten.
"Do you know why we are ahead of you in space?" he had said, staring with dignity at the tall blonde at a nearby table. "It is because of your bourgeois sentimentality. You do not like risking men. You build a skyscraper in New York to house some insurance company. Two or three construction workers are maimed or killed on the job. One of your coal mines collapses and fifty men are trapped. Yet, look. You are afraid of losing men in space because of what the people at home might think. So you are too conservative, you avoid risks. So we are ahead of you. We send out a ship with three men aboard when you would risk only one. We are not sentimental, that is all. That is why we are ahead of you." He ordered another drink and stared into the mirror for several minutes, letting us think that over. Then he went on.
"Yes, you are less scientific than we, less logical. Yet that is your advantage, too. You are more alert to the unprecedented, the unpredictable. You are always ready for the Wild Chance, the impossible possibility. You expect the unexpected. You hope for the hopeless. Being sentimental, you have imagination."
His words came back to me. The unpredictable, the wild chance, the impossible possibility. That was all that could save me now. But what? Maybe another meteor would come along and plug the hole the first one had made. No. I had to think my way out of this one. But what if there was no way out?
I pushed myself to the aft bulkhead, turned and looked forward to the instrument panel. I picked out the smallest meter face. I could just read the numbers on it. I told myself: When I can't read the numbers any more I'll know my vision is blurring from the beginning of anoxia. I thought: When that happens I'll key in the transmitter and tap out, TELL SANDY GOOD-BY.
It would be dramatic anyhow.
A withered mummy in a flying tomb.