“It wasn’t until after we got here that we began to find out what it was all about, and I guess you know we liked it. Building up this place, everybody working together—it just couldn’t ever get done that way back on Earth.
“And then this other thing happened, and lire doc said it looked like it was going to work out all right this time.
“We started thinking then, and this is what I’ve been working up to. Maybe it’s silly, but we figure it’s something about Mars that made it work, or something about the Colony. And now the baby’s here, I hope none of you will mind, but we’d like to name him Sun Lake City Colony Kandro . . .”
Jim stopped abruptly, and for a too-long moment there was only the grim silence of the crowd, the same bitter thought in every mind.
Then he went on: “Maybe you folks think that’s not a very good idea right now. I don’t know. If you don’t like it, we won’t do it. But the way we feel, Polly and me—well, we know things look bad now, but they’re going to have an awful hard time, the Planetary Affairs Commission or anybody else, getting us off Mars.”
“You’re damned well right, Jim!” shouted Nick Cantrella. He faced the crowd with his fists banging alertly. “Anybody think the kid shouldn’t be called Sun Lake City Colony Kandro?”
The harsh silence broke in a roar of confidence that lifted Tony’s chin, even though he knew there was no justification for it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
INSIDE, the baby was wailing lustily again. From her position on the couch, Polly raised a commanding arm.
“Turn him over, Jim. He’ll probably stop crying if you put him on his tummy.”
Tony watched while the new father slid his hand under his son’s back with an exquisite caution that belied his proud air of assurance. Turning to hide his smile, the doctor began piling hospital equipment on the hand-truck, to take back with him when he went.
“Look! Tony, look! Look at Sunny!”
“Sunny, is it?” The doctor turned around slowly. “So he’s lost all his dignity already. I was wondering how you were going to get around that tongue-twister of a name . . . Well, what do you know?”
HE WATCHED the baby struggle briefly, then rear back and lift his head upright. He had to admit there was cause for the pride in Polly’s voice when a baby not yet two days old could do that.
“Well,” the doctor teased, “he’s Sun Lake City Colony Kandro, after all. You ask anybody in town if that doesn’t make a difference. I won’t be surprised if he walks next week, and starts doing long division the first of the month. Who knows, he might learn how to eat pretty soon!” He realized abruptly he’d made a mistake. Neither parent was ready to joke about that.
“Doc,” Jim asked hesitantly, “you’re pretty sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“I told you before,” Tony said shortly, “I’m not sure of a blessed thing. If you can see any single reason to believe there’s anything wrong with that baby, I wish you’d tell me, because I can’t, but—this is Mars. I can’t make promises, and I’ll make damned few flat statements. You can go along with me and trust me, or—” There was no alternative, and his brief irritation was already worn out. “You can not trust me and go along with me. We have to feel our way, that’s all. Now.” he said briskly, “you’re all checked out on the mask? No trouble with it?”
“No, it’s all right. I’m sorry, Doc—”
“Got enough tanks?” Tony interrupted.
“You gave us enough to go from here to Jupiter,” Polly put in. “Listen, Tony, please don’t think we—”
“What I think,” Tony told her, “is that you’re good parents, naturally concerned about your child, and that I had no business blowing off. Now let’s forget it.”
“No,” Jim said firmly. “I think you ought to know how we—I mean there’s no question in anyone’s mind about trusting you. Hell, how do I go about saying this? What I want to tell you is—”
“He wants to say,” said Polly from the bed, “that we’re both very grateful for what you’ve done. It’s a happiness we thought we’d never know.”
“That’s it,” said Jim.
“He’s your baby,” said Dr. Tony. “Do a good job with him.” He pushed the hand-truck to the door, and waited for Jim to come and help him ease it through. “Oh, by the way,” he added, smiling, “I’ll fill out the birth certificate tonight, now that I know the name, if you’ll come over and. . . Doc!”
IT WAS Hank Radcliff, running down the street breathless and distraught.
“Doc, come quick—Joan’s dying!”
Tony grabbed his black bag and raced down the street with Hank plowing along beside him.
“What happened?”
“When I took her out in the tote truck,” Hank panted, “before she could walk to the street, she toppled right over—”
“Walk? You let her walk?”
“But she told me you said it was all right!” The youngster seemed close to tears.
“Joan told you that?” They slowed in front of the Radcliff hut. Tony wiped the anger off his face and went in.
Joan was on the bunk in a parka; the doctor stripped it off and applied his stethoscope. He had adrenalin into her heart in thirty seconds and then sat, grim-faced, at the edge of the bunk, not taking the black disk from her chest.
“Get that coffee,” he snapped at Hank without turning. “The stuff they found in the shakedown.”
Hank raced out.
After long minutes, Tony exhaled heavily and put away the stethoscope. She’d pulled through once more.
The girl lifted her parchmentlike eyelids and looked at him dully. “I feel better now,” she whispered. “I guess I fainted.”
“You don’t have to talk.” Tony sat again on the edge of the bed.
She was silent for a minute, lying back with her eyes closed. He picked up her bird’s claw of a hand; the pulse was racing now.
“Doctor Tony?” she asked.
“I’m right here. Don’t try to talk. Go to sleep.”
“Is Hank here?”
“He’ll be back in a minute.
“I want to tell you something, Doctor Tony. It wasn’t his fault. I didn’t tell him the truth. I told him you said it was all right for me to walk.”
“You knew better than that.”
“Yes. Yes, I did. I know you’ll have to send me back to Earth—”
“Never mind about that, Joan.”
“I do, Doctor Tony. Not for me; for Hank. That’s why I did it. I’d go back for the Colony because it isn’t fair of me to take up all your time, but what about Hank? If I went back, he’d have to go back, too. He couldn’t stay here in the Colony if I were on Earth—alive.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded the doctor, though he knew with terrible certainty what she meant—what she had tried to do. “Of course he’s going back with you. He loves you. Don’t you love him?”
She smiled a little and said softly, without urgency, “Yes, I love him.”
And then, again hysterically: “But this is what he’s wanted all his life. He doesn’t feel the way I do about the Colony, the wonderful way we’re all working together for everybody. With him it’s Mars, ever since he was a little boy. He’s in the Colony and he works hard and everybody likes him, but it would be enough for him to be a prospector like old Learoyd. Ever since he was a little boy he used to dream about it. You know how he’s always going out into the desert——
“Tell him he doesn’t have to go back with me! Tell him I’ll be all right. Talk to the shareholders. Make them let him stay. It would break his heart to send him back.”
TONY didn’t dare excite her by telling her that they might all be sent back, that the Colony was a failure. Even if they pulled through by a miracle. Hank couldn’t stay.
They called it the “M or M” rule—“married or marriageable.”
Far from the lunacies of the jam-packed Earth, they had meant to build with children and allowed no place for new immigrant women
past childbearing—or for Hank in love with a woman returned to Earth. It didn’t matter now, he thought.
Wearily, he lied, “They wouldn’t make him go back if he didn’t want to. But he’d want to go himself.” She sighed and closed her eyes. It seemed a long time before he was sure she was asleep.
Hank was waiting in the living room with the coffee.
“She’ll be all right for a while,” Tony told him. “She’s asleep now, I think.” He looked at the open doorway and added, “Come outside a minute.”
Sitting on the tote truck, he said, “Give her one cup of coffee each day as long as it lasts. After any meal. It’ll make her feel better. God, I wish I knew what else we could do. That stuff from Benoway didn’t have any effect. I’m sorry I sent you all the way out there.”
“That’s all right, Doc. There was a chance. And I like seeing the country.”
“You certainly do. You should have been one of the pork-and-beaners.”
“Hell, Doc, I like it fine here in the Colony!”
Liked it, yes. It was on Mars. Tell him or not? wondered Tony. Young man, your wife tried to commit suicide so you would be free to stay on this planet. And what do you think of that?
The hell with it. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, upset him, make him feel guilty—
“Doc, do you think we will have to go back?” Hank’s voice was more than strained, it was desperate.
Tony stared. “It looks that way right now, Hank. But we have three weeks. Something—anything—may happen. I’m not giving up hope.”
But the young man’s face was tortured as Tony left him.
ii
JOAN RADCLIFF had wanted death and been cheated of it by adrenalin. Sunny Kandro wanted life, which meant his mother’s breast, but some savage irony was cheating him, too. Newly born, five pounds of reflexes depending on the key suckling reflex that somehow was scrambled.
Sunny lay awake without crying, didn’t seem to need sleep, could lift his head—all right, put that down to lighter gravity, even though the Bergens’ little Loretta hadn’t done it. Sunny had a wonderful color, a powerful nursing instinct—but he choked and gagged at the breast. Without fuel the machine of reflexes would run down and stop . . .
It didn’t make sense to Tony. He had guiltily half-lied to the Kandros when he told them many babies didn’t know how to nurse at first. That was the truth; the lie was that this baby knew how but choked all the same. A feeding problem, they would have blandly called it on Earth, where there still were millions of cow’s, sterile hospitals, relays of trained nurses for intravenous nourishment regimes. Here a feeding problem was a feeding problem.
Anyone of the wealthier industrial colonies would automatically have taken Earth-import powdered milk from its stores, but Sun Lake couldn’t afford it, didn’t have any;
And what was more, Sun Lake wouldn’t get powdered milk if Commissioner Bell made good on his threat . . .
If Sunny died, it would be worse than the unnamed little boy the Connollys had lost, and he had left a scar on the doctor’s mind that time would never heal. Tony could still see the agonized blue face and the butterfly gasping for air—a preemie, but he never should have cleared Mrs. Connolly, seven months gone, until they’d had oxygen cylinders and masks and a tent for emergencies.
The Connollys had shipped back to Earth on the next rocket after the tragedy.
The father had cursed him insanely, damned him for a killer because he hadn’t foreseen the need of OxEn for their baby two months before it was due. OxEn they had, but OxEn made no change in the lungs of a baby. He’d given it intravenously, orally, in every solvent he could lay his hands on during the desperate hours before the improvised mask fed the last trickle of oxygen from their single tank into the lungs of the infant.
Tony forced his face into a smile as he passed a couple—Flexner and his girl Verna. Behind the smile he was dunking that it would be harder to bear a muter reproach from the patient Kandros than Connolly’s raging curses.
Tony dragged the loaded hand-truck into the middle of his living room, and left it there. He could put the stuff away later; it was getting late now, and he had yet to make his afternoon radiation inspection at the Lab. There was a package on the table; he took time to pick it up and read: “For Doctor Tony from Jim and Polly Kandro—with much thanks.”
For a moment he held it, weighing it in his hand. No, he decided, he’d open it later, when there was time to relax and appreciate the sentiment that lay behind it. The gift itself would be—would have to be—meaningless.
There was no way for any colonist to purchase or procure anything at all from the outside. Except for the very few personal treasures that were somehow squeezed into the rigid weight limit on baggage when they came out, all plastic chairs and sinks, blankets, and windows were uniformly functional and durable. But they were uniform, and they were also scarce. Each household contained the same irreducible minimum; Lab space and work hours were too precious to be used for the production of local consumption items.
TONY closed his door behind him, and set out for the Lab once more. Dull, monotonous, primitive, uncomfortable, he raged inwardly. Every home, inside and out, just the same!
Why had they come to Mars? For a better, saner way of life, to retrieve some of the dignity of men, to escape from the complexities and inequities and fear pressures of Earth. And what were they doing? Building a new life, with hard work and suffering, on the precise pattern of the old. There wasn’t a person in the Colony who wouldn’t do better back on Earth.
He found the Lab in an uproar. All work had stopped, so the grim hunt for the marcaine could go on. Nick had already begun an inventory.
“Make this an extra-good check, Doc,” Tony was told in the office before he started out. “We’ll be handling a lot of stuff that hasn’t been used in a long time. And getting into all the corners too.”
“Are the checkout tubes racked yet?” Tony asked.
“Right. We issued new ones to the men on the inspection squad.”
“I’ll do them first,” the doctor decided, and went into tire cleanup room where the wall racks were already lined with the tubes for that day. Usually they were checked in the following morning’s inspection; but today the plant had closed down early for all practical purposes.
The tubes checked dean all down the line.
Tony selected a fresh tube from the opposite wall and went on out through the shipping room to the workrooms. He didn’t need armor for the afternoon inspection. The technicians had been in there working, and if their tubes were all clean there couldn’t be any deadly hot stuff. The purpose of the late-day check was to catch reactions that were just starting up, and that might make trouble overnight. In the morning it was different. Anything that had been chaining for twelve or more hours could be vicious.
Back in the office, when he was finished, Tony reported a clean check through. “What,” he asked, “are you going to do about the shipment crates?”
“Leave them till last,” Mimi Jonathan told him. “If anything turns up in the workrooms or storage bins, we’ll have to open up the shipment crates one at a time. Doc, do you think . . .?”
She stopped, looked down a moment and then back at Tony, with a wry smile. “That’s silly, isn’t it? I don’t know why I expect you to know more about it than I do. Oh, listen—they want you to stick around and monitor if they do have to open the crates. I’ll let you know when it gets that far.”
“Okay.” Tony smiled back at her. “Try to give me more than five minutes notice, will you? I wish we had either a full-time radiological man or another doctor.”
“How about Harve?” she suggested. “Could he fill in for you? We didn’t want to assign him without your okay—he hasn’t done any monitoring on his own yet, has he?”
“No,” Tony said thoughtfully. “Not yet. But this won’t be anything more than standing by with a counter and keeping his eyes open. I don’t see why not; he knows the routine as we
ll as I do by now. I’d leave it up to him,” the doctor decided. “If he feels ready to take it on, it’ll be a big help to me.”
“I’ll ask him,” Mimi promised.
iii
THIS afternoon the familiar splendors of the Martian scene evoked no glowing certainties in Tony’s mind. He walked back from the Lab in the early twilight, his eyes fixed on the far hills, his thought roaming bitterly beyond, to the other side of the range.
Tony had been to the new town, just once, to help out when a too hastily built furnace exploded. The injuries had been more than Pittco’s green young doctor could handle all at once. The doctor’s inexperience, like the faulty furnace, was typical. The whole place was temporary, until it showed a profit for Pittco. Where it did, solid structures would replace the jerry-built shacks; an efficient company administration would put an end to the anarchic social organization.
But for now the town was just a sprawling collection of ramshackle buildings, constructed of a dozen different inadequate materials, whatever was available in Marsport when a new house was needed. There was no thought of the future on the other side of the hill, no worry about permanence, no eye to consequence.
If the camp went bust, the population would move on to one of the newer locations—and move again when that collapsed. If, on the other hand, the town survived, the population would move on anyhow. A new crop of workers would be imported from Earth, a tamer, quieter crew, to do routine work in an organized company town, at considerably lower pay. And the boom-town adventurers would go, to find higher wages and a freer life somewhere else.
They struck no roots there, and they wanted none. Of all the widely scattered human settlements on Mars, the Sun Lake Colony alone believed that man could and would some day flourish naturally on the alien soil.
Tony Hellman had a religion: it was the earnest hope that that day would come before he died, that he would live to see them cut the cord with Earth. Training and instinct both cried out against the new danger of abortion to the embryo civilization.
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