Read Online One in 300 by J. T. McIntosh - Free Book Online Page A

you die. If this room had a door,

I'd lock it to keep you all out. Now go and leave me alone. I'm sorry,

Sammy, but I haven't time to be civil."
     
     
I went back to my calculations. I didn't notice Sammy going.
     
     
The first check was encouraging, as far as it went. There could be no

precision about flying a lifeship -- navigation with mass-produced

instruments, and very few of them at that, was little more than an affair

of pointing the ship's nose in roughly the right direction and praying.
     
     
And on this basis, it looked as if I could leave the course as it was

and not waste any of my precious moluone making corrections. I wasn't too

sure of our velocity -- that would take days of checking by the planets --

but it seemed that in about a hundred days the lifeship, in free fall, and

Mars, in its orbit round the sun, would have reached about the same spot.
     
     
Then, more carefully, I worked out how much fuel I'd need for a safe

landing on Mars, how much I had, and tried to close the gap. Mathematically

it couldn't be done. I just couldn't land safely on Mars, according to my

quadruple-checked figures.
     
     
I covered sheet after sheet with laborious calculation. The best I could

produce, the most favorable extrapolation, crooked, weighted mathematics

though it was, was still a very slim chance indeed.
     
     
Drugged with figures, working more and more from sheer obstinacy,

stubbornly trying everything I could think of to try, I came up with the

conclusion that our chances of getting to Mars, when we left the soil

of Earth, had been about a thousand to one against. And they weren't

very much better now.
     
     
True, we were clear of Earth and on a good course for Mars. We were over the first hurdle. We had accomplished what, at a guess, only two

or three hundred thousand of the seven hundred thousand lifeships had

been able to do.
     
     
And of those two or three hundred thousand, many must have used all their

fuel in tearing themselves free of Earth. Those ships were utterly helpless.

Some of them would be shooting off in all directions, every moment getting

farther from Mars, and utterly incapable of doing anything about it. Some

of them Would be pointed at the sun, or close enough to the sun to be

captured by it. Some would move on and on past the planets into space

. . . those ships would go on forever if they weren't captured by some

star or planet.
     
     
I didn't swear or curse at anyone. I just doggedly worked out problem

after problem, as if I could set everything right by my high school

mathematičs.
     
     
On the basis of our own experience I worked out how much fuel the lifeships

really needed. Then, since they would have to be so much bigger and stronger,

how many lifeships there would have been instead of seven hundred thousand.

How many people they could have taken.
     
     
Allowing a very small safety factor, it came out at ninety-seven thousand.

A chance of life for a million people instead of nearly eight million. Not

one in three hundred of the people of Earth, but one in twenty-two hundred.
     
     
I tried to imagine the job I might have had then, the job of picking out

ten people from a town of over twenty thousand. As it was, I knew hardly

anything about some of the people I'd chosen from a mere three thousand

or so. Sammy, Leslie, Betty, and Morgan were all last-minute choices,

because someone else had had to come off the list. On the whole I was

prepared to gamble on the first two, but Morgan and Betty could be my best

choice or my worst for all I knew. What sort of guess could I have made

if I'd been confronted with twenty thousand people and told to pick ten?
     
     
I shook my head wearily. The questions were too big for me. I had juggled

too long with figures of life and death -- a little life and a lot of death.

They weren't anything but figures to me. Perhaps that was why I had done it

-- to reduce humanity's most frightful disaster