Eddie puffed with effort as he ran on the treadmill, trying to ignore the discomfort of the mouthpiece strapped to his face, collecting his exhaled breath for analysis. Sweat trickled down his bare chest and soaked his shorts, while the running shoes they'd given him chafed at his ankles. One of the electrodes strapped to his chest came loose and dangled around his waist. A pretty nurse came over and stuck it back in place beside the other three.
The tests had begun virtually the moment he'd gotten off the plane. They wanted to know whether he was fit enough to survive a six gee launch and all the other rigors of an extended stay in space. Nobody he'd met so far was happy with the idea of sending him up with so little preparation. He'd seen nothing but scowls and frowns since arriving at the astronaut training facility in Cologne, or perhaps that was just Germans, he thought with amusement. It was said that they had a sense of humour, but so far he'd seen no evidence for it.
The physical examination had been first. They'd made him strip naked while a group of half a dozen people, women as well as men, had prodded and poked at him with instruments to measure his muscle tone, his bone density, his fat percentage and other things he'd never heard of. He'd endured it stoically, even when some of the tests had turned out to be uncomfortably invasive, but then, to his relief, he'd been given the shorts so that he could endure the rest of the tests with some dignity. Since then, he'd donated samples of blood, and had been told that they'd also be wanting samples of pretty much every other kind of body fluid. They were going to give him a full body CAT scan, a brain scan, a kidney function test and probably other things he'd never heard of while they tried to assure themselves that he wasn't going to kick the bucket the moment the Star Pigeon fired up its engines. First, though, he had to endure the lung function test, the real purpose of which, he was beginning to suspect, was to find out just how much he really wanted to go through with the space mission.
He had a headache. It was caused by dehydration, he knew. He was perspiring heavily and had refused all offers of drink. He had to get his weight down! He was starting to think that he might be overdoing it, though. If the dehydration started to affect him, physically or even mentally, he knew that his examiners would seize upon it as a reason to declare him medically unfit and he couldn't have that. Not with so much riding upon the success of his mission. He beckoned the nurse back, therefore, miming a drinking action with one hand, and she came across with a flask of water. “Don’t stop running!” she warned him in her sexy German accent. She then lifted the mask from his face and put the straw to his mouth. He sipped at the sugary water as he continued to run, just enough to wet his mouth and ease the worst of the headache. Then he gestured for her to take it away.
It was another thirty minutes before they allowed him to stop and he leaned against the bar with relief as he tried to get his breath back. The nurse handed him a towel and he used it to wipe the sweat from his body. “So, did I pass?” he asked. The doctor ignored him and typed something into his tablet. Eddie stepped off the machine and walked over to him.
“Thank you,” said the doctor as he approached. “Helga will show you to room twenty seven. Doctor Vogel is waiting to run some electrolyte tests on you.”
“I was wondering,” said Eddie, though. “You know why I have to go into space. You know how important this mission is. If one of these tests shows me to be in less than perfect health, would you really forbid me from going?”
The doctor glanced up at him, then returned his attention to the tablet. “Because you know how many people have died already,” Eddie continued. “Thousands in this country alone. Millions all around the world. Who knows how many made homeless.”
He thought back to what he'd seen on the flight over the north sea in the Cessna light aircraft, the low flying four seater being all that was required for the number of people flying at the moment. Almost all business and industry was taking a break. They were hunkering down, waiting for the moon to move on and hoping that some random catastrophe didn't kill them in the meantime. The man sitting next to him in the cramped cabin, a large man in a business suit, had told him that even this flight had almost been cancelled, in which case Eddie supposed that the air force would have had to arrange a flight for him. A cramped seat in the back of an Atlas, perhaps, with no windows. Nothing to look at except the bare metal of the opposite wall.
As soon as they were in the air, though, he'd found himself wishing there were no windows. The devastation caused by the tsunami had been horrifying! He’d wanted to turn his face away, close the shutter to shut out the view, but each vision of destruction, worse than the one before, had transfixed him and he had only been able to stare in horror. He'd seen a ferry, similar to the one on which he'd first met Ben, maybe the very same one. It had been lying on its side miles above the high tide line, in the middle of what had once been a school playing field. Mud was piled up along one side like a snowdrift, while on its other side the powerfully swirling waters had eaten away at the topsoil, excavating a deep depression that he was pretty sure went all the way down to the bedrock. The mud was everywhere! Whether it was silt that had originally sat at the bottom of the sea or whether it was topsoil, torn loose from the dry land on which it had originally sat, he didn’t know, but it covered everything from farmers fields to the streets and gardens of small towns so that it was hard to tell which had been which. And everywhere he had seen survivors, as small as ants from this height but all universally brown, head to foot, with mud. Wandering the devastated wasteland, seemingly as aimless as zombies in a horror movie or the dazed, half stunned survivors of a massive bombing attack.
“And if we fail to move the moon back into its proper orbit, this is only the beginning,” he continued. “The damage to buildings and the Earth’s crust will accumulate. The death toll next time, twenty nine days from now, won’t be less. It'll be greater! If we succeed in our mission, we could prevent that. Some people might think that the life of one man would be a small price to pay for that.” The doctor still failed to respond. “What I'm trying to say,” said Eddie in growing exasperation, “is that, if you declare me medically unfit to go, you might be saving one life, but you would be condemning countless others.”
“Those others are not my responsibility,” the doctor finally said. “You are.”
“They are your responsibility if they die because of a decision you made. I'm willing to risk my life. I'd want to go up even if I knew that it was a suicide mission.”
“The greatest risk to you comes during the launch. You will not be saving anyone if you have a stroke while experiencing six times the force of the Earth’s gravity.”
“But no matter how unfit I was, dying on the way up would still only be a possibility, not a certainty. Wouldn't it be worth the risk of killing me if it also meant a chance of saving all those people?”
“If you have reason to think you will be found medically unfit, you should tell me now.”
“So far as I know, I'm in perfect health. I'm just saying that, if I should turn out to be just slightly short of some vital measurement, you might be saving an awful lot of lives by, by, well, by just fudging the figures a little, you know?”
“Your courage and determination do you credit , Mister Nash, but if your health is found to fall short of mission requirements, then we cannot recommend you for this mission. Whether our political masters decide to send you up anyway, against our recommendation, is, of course, another matter. All we can do is tell them what we find.”
“Yes, of course,” said Eddie, encouraged. Of course they would send him up anyway no matter what the doctors found, he realised. They’d tie him to an altar and cut out his heart if that was what it took to put things right, providing Ben, the British Prime Minister and others succeeded in convincing those who needed convincing that the mission had a chance of success. He was going up into space! The only thing that might prevent it was if he was still overweight. There would be no point in launching him if it was a mathematical certainty that he would fail to reach orbit. He began to regret his decision to have that sip of water. Let him become dehydrated, it didn’t matter. They could launch him in a dehydration coma and it wouldn’t matter so long as he reached orbit alive. The astronauts could give him as much water as he needed when he got there.
“Could I weigh myself?” he asked.
“You were weighed when you first arrived, just two hours ago,” the doctor replied.
“Could I weigh myself again? Please?”
The doctor looked at him, then pointed to a pair of scales under the table. Eddie pulled them out and stepped onto them. Sixty nine point two kilogrammes. His heart sank in despair. He took off his running shoes and socks, then tried again. The scales gave the same weight. Eddie thought about taking his shorts off and weighing himself naked, but if the shoes hadn't made a difference, the shorts wouldn’t either. Two hundred grams! he thought, his mind racing. Can I sweat off another two hundred grams of water without collapsing? The doctor would know, but he wasn't going to ask him. He would just lose as much water as he could and see how he felt.
He put his shoes back on, therefore, and allowed the nurse to lead him away, to the next doctor waiting to do tests on him. Today would be non stop medical test after medical test, he knew, while tomorrow would be a crash course on how to use a spacesuit. There wasn't time to teach him more than that. He just needed to know how not to do something stupid in a spacesuit that would get him killed. How to control the air system, the cooling system. How to take it off safely. He wouldn’t have to worry about putting it on safely, he'd have about a dozen people helping him to do that.
Still, at least the girls were pretty here. He smiled at the nurse accompanying him along the corridor, but she kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, prim and professional. Just as well, Eddie mused. His headache was beginning to come back. He put all thoughts of romance out of his head, therefore, and mentally prepared himself for the ordeal to come.
☆☆☆
An RAF air base was never entirely quiet, Margaret discovered. Not even in the middle of the night. Some vehicles had somehow survived the tsunami, it appeared, and they seemed to be forever driving from one place to another, or else just standing in one spot with the engine idling while the sounds of conversation came from nearby. None of the air base personnel seemed to be getting any sleep, by the sound of it, and it was keeping the civilians from getting any asleep either, except for one man snoring loudly and contentedly on the other side of the hanger.
What were they doing out there? she wondered. They'd be wanting to get communications up and running again, of course, but she imagined that that would be accomplished by a couple of pimply faced computer geeks discussing the latest computer games while stripping down and drying out circuit boards. The sounds outside sounded as though they were being made by soldiers, or at least by beefy, physical men of some kind. Was it to do with the hole in the perimeter fence? She thought about asking one of her fellow refugees what they thought, but they were all trying to get some sleep and probably wouldn’t appreciate being woken the rest of the way up. She lay still in the coarse, woollen blankets the airmen had found somewhere for the civilians, therefore, and allowed the sounds of activity from outside to wash over her as if it were the crashing of waves against rocks; a sound that had always sent her quickly to sleep during her holidays in Scotland.
Sleep didn't come, though. The sounds from outside were too distracting. Her brain insisted on trying to deduce what was going on out there. After a while, though, she had the sense that the quality of the sounds from outside had changed. The voices sounded more urgent, almost worried, and it brought her back to full wakefulness with a twinge of anxiety. Several people in the hanger had woken, she realised, or perhaps, like her, they’d never been fully asleep. There was a conversation going on somewhere, their voices hushed as if trying not to disturb other people but clearly audible to Margaret. A woman was asking someone what was going on. A man replied that he didn't know.
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Margaret got quietly to her feet, fully dressed, pulled on a coat and made her way carefully to the hanger doors, stepping past people wrapped in blankets, some of whom may have been genuinely asleep although some had open eyes and were watching curiously as she crept past. It got colder as she moved further from the electric heaters, and she pulled her coat closer around herself, buttoning it up with one hand. The huge main doors had a row of small windows in it. She went to one of them, stood up on tiptoe to bring her eyes level with the glass, and peered out.
Huge searchlights had been set up, pointing outwards and, together with the huge, half full moon that was finally dropping towards the horizon, they were bright enough to illuminate the entire airfield as brightly as a heavily overcast winters day. Across the other side of the field, she saw what was causing the commotion. The crowd of people trying to get in through the gap in the fence had grown enormously. There must be a couple of thousand people out there now, she estimated, and virtually every military man had gone out with weapons to stop them. Even some of the civilian personnel were out there, she saw, lending their support to the effort even though they weren’t carrying weapons.
The dozen or so professional soldiers formed the first line of defence. They were standing in an arc around the breached section of fence, one every twenty metres or so, with parked vehicles between them. Ordinary cars for the most part, three in a line between one soldier and the next, but also trucks and fuel tankers and even a coach, painted green and with the logo of a football team on the side. Behind this first line stood the air force personnel, armed only with hand guns, and behind them stood the unarmed men, fidgeting and looking nervous. Margaret saw Captain McMillan holding a megaphone to his mouth, shouting something to the crowd, but the distance rendered the words almost unintelligible.
Margaret became aware of a movement behind her and turned to see Richard standing there. He was tall enough to see out through the window easily and she heard him give a shocked intake of breath. “That's not good,” he said.
“I think they just want medical help,” Margaret said. “People were probably injured by the tsunami. They must know we've got a doctor here. Medical supplies.”
“If I were in charge,” said Richard, “I think I'd just give them what they want. They can't keep them out. With everyone gathered in this spot, someone could easily cut a hole in the fence somewhere else. And are they really going to shoot them if they suddenly charge? I know that’s what they’re probably supposed to do, but how many people, even trained soldiers, would actually open fire on unarmed civilians?”
“Maybe they've sent for reinforcements,” said Margaret. “There could be truckloads of soldiers on their way right now.”
“I doubt it. Every soldier and police officer in the country probably already has his hands full trying to maintain order out there. The country is under martial law in everything but name. If they had soldiers to spare, they'd probably send them to the refugee camps to keep all the angry people under control.”
“We've got angry people right here! And the army has to protect us, to keep Paul from worrying.”
“Paul has no way of knowing that we're in trouble. You spoke to him just a few hours ago and told him that we were all safe and happy. He has to reason to think anything's changed. All they have to do is make sure that no bad news reaches him. No, I think we're on our own. There's no reinforcements coming. Arndale has to do the best he can with what he has.”
Margaret stared at him in alarm, then turned to look back out through the window. The crowd was becoming visibly agitated, with several people shouting and waving their hands angrily. She moved to another spot where the glass was slightly less grimy, giving her a better view. They were in a pretty poor way, she saw. Their clothes were caked with filth and muck and many of them were bandaged or limping. They looked as though they'd been through Hell! If she were with them with a family to protect, she thought she might be as desperate as they were, and willing to take any risk to get her loved ones the help they needed.
“So why doesn't the crowd just charge them?” she asked.
“Because the sight of a man with a gun is scary, and you never know if his finger will tighten on the trigger, just as a reflex, a spasm of fear, when he sees a crowd of people rushing towards him. They'd have better luck if they just edge slowly forwards in a slow, unthreatening manner. One step at a time, with open hands raised in front of them. I would imagine it's very hard to hurt a man holding his hands up in a ‘I surrender’ gesture, even if he is moving towards you.”
“Surely they're trained to deal with situations like that, though, aren’t they?”
“Training is one thing. Actually having a living human being in front of you is another.”
“So what's going to happen?”
“One of two things, I would imagine. Either the crowd will be intimidated by the guns and back away, or Arndale will be forced to make concessions of some kind, probably calling it a humanitarian gesture. Allow some of the injured in for treatment. Probably many more than they can possibly cope with. Just having them here, on the premises, will hopefully mollify the crowd, though. If I were in charge, I'd set up some kind of triage centre out there, near the hole in the fence. Put relatives of the most seriously injured civilians in charge of keeping the crowd under control. They'll be locals, so hopefully the crowd will listen to them, and they'll have an interest in keeping order in order to protect their injured loved ones.”
“Even if they do that, the crowd might still suspect them of withholding medical supplies. Keeping them for their own use.”
“Maybe, but what's the alternative? They can hardly let people in to search the place. There's all kind of top secret stuff in here. We just have to hope that common sense prevails on both sides.”
Margaret nodded. Some kind of negotiation did seem to be going on out there, by the look of it. McMillan was still talking through the megaphone, while occasionally talking to someone else on a hand held radio. Probably the Group Captain, up in the control tower where he'd have a good view of everything that was going on, she thought. A member of the crowd, a self designated spokesman, had come forward and was speaking with the soldiers. He was tiny from this distance, but it was clear to see that it was a man with natural authority. Possibly a council officer from one of the nearby towns. Someone whose position made him feel responsible for the people standing behind him and for the injured people further back, where the spotlights couldn’t see them.
It seemed to be going well, she thought. McMillan and the spokesman were standing close together, close enough to be able to speak in a normal tone of voice. Their body languages suggested a lessening of tension, and the soldiers were also looking less tense. She saw rifles dipping, no longer being aimed at people, while the crowd calmed, standing silently as they listened to their spokesman negotiating on their behalf. Margaret relaxed and thought about going back to her sleeping bag. She was very tired...
From the back of the crowd a man came running forward, clearly in a state of great anxiety and distress. His appearance made the rest of the crowd press close around him. Sympathetic hands were put on his shoulders, words were spoken. The soldiers tensed up again and the guns were brought back up to the ready.
“Uh oh!” said Richard. “I'm guessing someone just died.
Other people were coming to the windows to see out as they became aware that something was going on. Margaret moved aside to let Cathy see through the window. “I'm a doctor,” she heard someone say. “Maybe I should go out to volunteer my services.”
“They know you're a doctor,” a woman replied. “They’ll ask for you if they want you. I think we should just keep out of the way.”
Margaret thought that was good advice. She found herself grateful that none of the hanger’s lights were on. It meant that no-one in the crowd had any way of knowing there was anyone inside. She moved to the next window to look out again. An angry looking conversation was taking place between the crowd's spokesman and Captain McMillan. She could imagine what was being said. He, or she, would still be alive if you’d let us in sooner. How many more of us are you going to allow to die? Behind the spokesman, she saw a man raising a hand. There was something in it. Every soldier turned their weapons to aim at him. She heard a gunshot. The man in the crowd fell.
She froze in horror, as did everyone around her. Outside, both the airbase personnel and the crowd tensed up in shock. McMillan shouted back at his men. The crowd pulled back in sudden fear and several people turned and ran back to the gap in the perimeter fence. The others halted as they overcame their initial shock and then reacted with anger, surging forward, only stopping when more shots were fired into the air ahead of them. One man ran over to the fallen man and dropped to his side. He shouted something to the spokesman but made no move to reach for whatever it was the fallen man had been holding. McMillan ran over to join him, as did the spokesman and a couple of other members of the crowd. McMillan shouted orders at them and two of them picked up the fallen man. McMillan led them to one of the cars that formed part of the makeshift barrier. He opened the door and the two members of the crowd placed the man gently inside. Then he got into the driver's seat. The spokesman got in the back seat with the fallen man, and the car began driving back towards the airport buildings.
“He must still be alive,” said Richard with relief. “Maybe they can still salvage something from this.”
“What do you mean?” asked Len. “The crowd’s pulling back. They're too afraid to try anything now.”
“They won't charge the guns, if that’s what you mean,” said Richard, “but they can come through the fence anywhere they like, in their hundreds. They'll be all over the airbase before we know what’s happening. We’ll be overrun. There's maybe enough men to defend the main building, but nowhere else. Certainly not us. They’ll leave us to the crowd’s mercy. McMillan's doing what he has to to defuse the situation. Maybe the crowd can still be placated if we show we care about them.”
“But if they treat one man, they’ll have to treat all their injured!”
“Yes, they probably will. They would probably have had to anyway. That crowd was angry before. Now, they're furious. If we're lucky, though, they can still be reasoned with. Hopefully, getting treatment for their injured people really is all they want.”
The car had arrived at one of the smaller of the airport buildings and its occupants jumped out as soon as its doors opened. They saw McMillan and the spokesman carrying the injured man towards the building. The door opened as they approached and a man helped them inside. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd was milling around uncertainty. Watching the armed soldiers warily, who watched them back. It didn't look as though anything more was going to happen over there until their respective leaders returned, though.
It didn’t take long. Five or ten minutes. Then the door opened again and McMillan and the spokesman emerged. They got back into the car and drove back to where the confrontation was taking place. The spokesman immediately gave orders to the crowd and a number of people were brought forward. Some lying on makeshift stretchers, others walking with the help of people supporting them under one arm. The injured people were helped into cars, which drove them back to the same building. The airbase's medical centre, apparently. The rest of the crowd, meanwhile, began to slowly edge its way back to the gap in the fence, followed at a respectful distance by the soldiers.
Richard breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, that seems to be that,” he said. “Sanity and good sense prevails, for now at least.”
“I wonder what he was holding,” said Len. “A phone, you think? Recording the whole thing so he can upload it when this is all over and show the whole world what nasty people we are?”
“It looked like a gun to me,” said the man standing beside him.
“That other guy made no move to pick it up,” pointed out another.
“Because he'd have been shot dead if he’d touched it.”
“Maybe, but I still think it was a phone. He thought he could pressure them into giving them what they wanted by showing the world pictures of British soldiers refusing care to injured men. That's what I think, anyway.”
“If so, it's pretty ironic that he became one of the injured men. I imagine the guy who shot him’ll be in pretty hot water.”
“Maybe. Prosecuting soldiers who are just trying to do their duty is a dangerous habit to get into. Your enemies start conjuring up moral dilemmas to get them into. He'll probably just say that he thought it was a gun, that he thought his life was in danger, and he’ll get off with a slap on the wrist. Whatever happens next, though, the present crisis seems to be over.”
Margaret though he was right. The crowd was dispersing, retreating back to the fence line, and the soldiers were watching them go. Most of the refugees in the hanger were also drifting back to their sleeping places and Margaret was reminded that it was about three in the morning. She was too full of stress to sleep any more that night, though, and she and Richard remained by the windows, watching the scene lit up by the spotlights, for some time longer.
“I'm going to offer them my help,” said the doctor. “They must be bringing nearly a hundred people in. With that many people to treat, they're going to need all the help they can get.”
“I'll go with you,” said the woman standing beside him. His wife, Margaret presumed. “They'll need nurses too.”
“You’re an ICU nurse, not an ER nurse...”
“And you're a GP so don't lecture me! Come on, let's go.”
“I'm going with them,” Margaret told Richard. “They’ll probably need people to wash bandages and so on.”
“I'll...” began Richard, but then he looked across as Cathy and Timmy. He couldn't come with her. He had his own family to protect. “I think you should stay here, where it's safe.”
“I’ll be safe enough with all the soldiers to protect me. You take care of the others.”
Richard looked torn, but he nodded. He hugged his mother and the others came forward to make her promise to be careful. She did so, and then she went after the doctor. A couple of others had had the same idea, and the five or them left the hanger together, stepping out into the cold night air.