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    One in One Thousand: Book Two in the One in Three Hundred Trilogy
    One in One Thousand: Book Two in the One in Three Hundred Trilogy
    One in One Thousand: Book Two in the One in Three Hundred Trilogy
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    One in One Thousand: Book Two in the One in Three Hundred Trilogy

    By J.T. McIntosh

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    About this ebook

    The odds were against them every step of the way.

    “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.”

    Bill Easson has made it out of Earth’s doomed atmosphere in his lifeship - with ten Earthling expats in tow - but countless questions had followed them. Was Earth really doomed? How many more lives could they have saved with more time to prepare? Would there even be enough fuel to get to Mars?

    And to what lengths will they go to get themselves there?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9781440559334
    One in One Thousand: Book Two in the One in Three Hundred Trilogy
    Author

    J.T. McIntosh

    An Adams Media author.

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      Book preview

      One in One Thousand - J.T. McIntosh

      1

      Somewhere between the surface of Earth and Mars, well on the way or just about to take off, there were seven hundred thousand-odd lifeships. And believe me, the operative word was odd. It took about a year to build a spaceship, and each and every one of these lifeships had been thrown together in eight weeks.

      Problem: If two thousand skilled men can build a lifeship in a hundred days, how long will it take a thousand unskilled men to do it? Answer: 56 days. If your math’s as good as mine (and mine isn’t so hot) you’ll get a pretty good indication of the standard of workmanship in the lifeships.

      I was lying in the pilot’s acceleration couch, controlling the ship with my fingertips, as far as it was being controlled at all, and hearing, seeing, and feeling the moluone fuel drain away as if it were my lifeblood. I had a simple enough choice. I could stop the blast now, and crash back on Earth; or I could let it roar out of the tanks the way it was doing, and crash somewhere else, if I ever reached anything to crash against.

      When I say in the couch I mean just that. The couch was constructed so that I was half sitting, half lying, knees up to assist the circulation. That was a better position in which to withstand the acceleration than lying flat. I was strapped up like a mummy with imprex tape supporting my muscles. And though the couch wasn’t particularly soft — it felt like solid rock — I was almost submerged in it.

      But that was unimportant. What mattered was this — somehow the lifeship had to escape from Earth’s gravity, and sometime it had to land on Mars. There wasn’t enough fuel to do it. I could see that now, only a matter of seconds from takeoff. Ten people, lower down in the lifeship, were depending on me and on the ship for life that the ship and I weren’t going to be able to give them.

      I was thinking like a prairie fire, though I was practically certain there was no solution. Soon I had a little piece of an answer. My fingers moved and the blast mounted. Anyone below who had thought nothing could be worse than 6G found his mistake as the acceleration went up and up.

      The ship was designed for four minutes’ blasting, but if I were to save fuel there was only one way to do it. That was to get off more quickly, reach escape velocity, and stop blasting sooner, saving the fuel which would have been needed to hold the ship up during the extra time.

      I refused to think about the jet linings. They were designed for four minutes’ blast, presumably, and now they were being asked to take the same thrust in less time.

      I nearly blacked out. I screamed and hardly heard myself. You won’t understand how I felt physically unless the same kind of thing has happened to you — when you must and do remain conscious but you’re so near unconsciousness that perceptions sent along the nerve channels to your brain simply don’t leave any record there. You have to notice them as they happen or you’ve lost them forever.

      I strained my eyes at the dials in front of me, trying to make them mean that I could cut the drive. They persisted in telling the truth, which was no good to me. I saw why people sometimes strain to believe something they know is false. There are times when hopeful fantasy is much more attractive than hopeless fact.

      At last I was able to cut the drive. It had been on for hours. The chronometer said it was only three minutes or so, but I knew better. It didn’t stop cleanly, as it should, it eased off gently. The couch gradually rose, and I floated off, weightless.

      You never quite get used to free fall, no matter how often you experience it. It’s a surprise every time when up and down disappear from the environment and the normal way of getting about ceases to be beetlelike and becomes birdlike. It’s amusing or frustrating, depending on how you’re feeling at the time, when you want to go one way and find yourself going the other, impelled by some tiny movement of air you can’t see and normally wouldn’t notice at all.

      The body adjusts to the new conditions more quickly than the mind. The lungs and heart and stomach, puzzled for a few minutes by the absence of gravity, soon learn their new job and do it as well as they did the old one. Clothes and hair are inconveniences, though. Practically every garment of civilization except riding breeches and bathing costumes depends to some extent on gravity to hold it in place. Whenever I moved, my jacket began to ride up about me like water wings, and my trousers gradually worked themselves in untidy folds up my legs, showing the imprex tape underneath.

      I found Mars through the tungsten glass ports and began to check on the old space navigators’ Irishism — whether it would be where we were when we got there. But I wasn’t allowed much grace. Sammy Hoggan came in, his face grim.

      Mary Stowe’s dead, he said briefly.

      I couldn’t understand that at first. Somebody dead — already? It interfered with my long-term calculation that we were all going to die. It jammed the works for a moment, this curious, irrelevant intimation that someone hadn’t waited for the execution that appeared to be planned for us all.

      Acceleration? I asked.

      That and her couch collapsing. It couldn’t take the strain. Bill — didn’t you accelerate more than you were supposed to?

      Yes, I said.

      Then that killed her, he said bluntly. The extra weight came on — and the couch broke. That was —

      I had heard enough about Mary, and it was too late to do anything about her. Go away, I said.

      Sammy swore. Dammit, Bill, he said hotly, "you’re responsible for all of us. You’re the man

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