“Consider the situation, Airthman,” came. the savage, shouted answer, “ ‘Tis night, Martian night. The temperature’s down past zero and plummeting every minute. We haven’t any time t’ look;-we’ve got t’ go straight there. If we’re not there in half an hour, we’re not going t’ get there at all.”
Allen knew that well, and mention of the cold increased his consciousness of it. He spoke through chattering teeth as he drew his heavy, fur-lined coat closer about him.
“We might build a fire!” The suggestion was a half-hearted one, muttered indistinctly, and fallen upon immediately by the other.
“With what?” George was beside himself with sheer disappointment and frustration. “We’ve pulled through this far, and now we’ll prob’ly freeze t’ death within a mile o’ the city. C’mon keep running. It’s a hundred-t’-one chance.”
But Allen pulled him back. There was a feverish glint in the Earthman’s eye, “Bonfires!” he said irrelevantly. “It’s a possibility. Want to take a chance that might do the trick?”
“Nothin else t’ do,” growled the other. “But hurry. Every minute I-”
“Then run with the wind-and keep going.”
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Do what I say-run with the wind!”
There was no false optimism in Allen as he bounded through the dark, stumbling over loose stones, sliding down declivities,-always with the wind at his back. George ran at his side, a vague, formless blotch in the night.
The cold was growing more bitter, but it was not quite as bitter as the freezing pang of apprehension gnawing at the Earthman’s vitals.
Death is unpleasant!
And then they topped the rise, and from George’s throat came a loud “B’ Jupe ‘n’ domn!” of triumph.
The ground before them, as far as the eye could see, was dotted by bonfires. Shattered Aresopolis lay ahead, its homeless inhabitants making the night bearable by the simple agency of burning wood.
And on the hilly slopes, two weary figures slapped each other on the backs, laughed wildly, and pressed half-frozen, stubbly cheeks together for sheer, unadulterated joy.
They were there at last!
The Aresopolis lab, on the very outskirts of the city, was one of the few structures still standing. Within, by makeshift light, haggard chemists were distilling the last drops of extract. Without, the city’s police-force remnants were clearing desperate way for the precious flasks and vials as they were distributed to the various emergency medical centers set up in various regions of the bonfire-pocked ruins that were once the Martian metropolis.
Old Hal Vincent supervised the process and his faded eyes ever and again peered anxiously into the hills beyond, watching hopefully but doubtfully for the promised cargo of blooms.
And then two figures reeled out of the darkness and collapsed to halt before him.
Chill anxiety clamped down upon him, “The blooms! Where are they? Have you got them?”
“At Twin Peaks,” gasped Allen. “A ton of them and better in a sandtruck. Send for them.”
A group of police ground-cars set off before he had finished, and Vincent exclaimed bewilderedly, “A sandtruck? Why didn’t you send it in a ship? What’s wrong with you out there, anyway? Earthquake-”
He received no direct answer. George had stumbled towards the nearest bonfire with a beatific expression on his worn face.
“Ahhh, ‘tis warm!” Slowly, he folded and dropped, asleep before he hit the ground.
Allen coughed gaspingly, “Huh! The Gannie tenderfoot! Couldn’t-ulp-take it!”
And the ground came up and hit him in the face.
Allen woke with the evening sun in his eyes and the odor of frying bacon in his nostrils. George shoved the frying pan towards him and said between gigantic, wolfing mouthfuls, “Help yourself.”
He pointed to the empty sandtruck outside the labs, “They got the stuff all right.”
Allen fell to, quietly. George wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, “Say, All’n, how ‘d y’ find the city? I’ve been sitting here trying t’ figure it all out”
“It was the bonfires,” came the muffled answer. “It was the only way they could get heat, and fires over square miles of land create a whole section of heated air, which rises, causing the cold surrounding air of the hills to sweep in.” He suited his words with appropriate gestures. “The wind in the hills was heading for the city to replace warm air and we followed the wind. -Sort of a natural compass, pointing to where we wanted to go.”
George was silent, kicking with embarrassed vigor at the ashes of the bonfire of the night before.
“Lis’n, All’n, I’ve had y’ a’wrong. Y’ were an Airthman tanderfoot t’ me till-’ He paused, drew a deep breath and exploded with, “Well, by Jupe n’ domn, y’r my twin brother and I’m proud o’ it All Airth c’dn’t drown out the Carter blood in y’.”
The Earthman opened his mouth to reply but his brother clamped one palm over it, “Y’ keep quiet, till I’m finished. After we get back, y’ can fix up that mechanical picker or anything else y’ want. I drop my veto. If Airth and machines c’n tairn out y’r kind o’ man, they’re all right. But just the same,” there was a trace of wistfulness in his voice, “y’ got t” admit that everytime the machines broke down-from irrigation-trucks and rocket-ships to ventilators and sandtrucks- t’was men who had t’ pull through in spite o’ all that Mars could do.”
Allen wrenched his face from out behind the restraining palm.
“The machines do their best,” he said, but not too vehemently.
“Sure, but that’s all they can do. When the emairgency comes, a man’s got t’ do a damn lot better than his .best or he’s a goner.”
The other paused, nodded, and gripped the other’s hand with sudden fierceness, “Oh, we’re not so different. Earth and Ganymede are plastered thinly over the outside of us, but inside-”
He caught himself.
“Come on, let’s give out with that old Gannie quaver.”
And from the two fraternal throats tore forth a shrieking eldritch yell such as the thin, cold Martian air had seldom before carried.
A day in the life of a deep-soil diver—where a single slip means a planet-sized tomb
ROCK DIVER
By Harry Harrison
The wind hurtled over the crest of the ridge and rushed down the slope in an icy torrent. It tore at Pete’s canvas suit, pelting him with steel-hard particles of ice. Head down, he fought against it as he worked his way uphill towards the granite outcropping.
He was freezing to death. A man can’t wear enough clothes to stay alive in fifty degrees below zero. Pete could feel the numbness creeping up his arms. When he wiped his frozen breath from his whiskers there was no sensation. His skin was white and shiny wherever it was exposed to the Alaskan air.
“All in a day’s work.” His cracked lips painfully shaped themselves into the ghost of a smile. “If any of those claimjumping scissorbills followed me this far they’re gonna be awful cold before they get back.”
The outcropping sheltered him as he fumbled for the switch at his side. A shrill whine built up in the steel box slung at his belt. The sudden hiss of released oxygen was cut off as he snapped shut the faceplate of his helmet. Pete clambered onto the granite ridge that pushed up through the frozen ground.
He stood straight against the wind now, not feeling its pressure, the phantom snowflakes swirling through his body. Following the outcropping, he slowly walked into the ground. The top of his helmet bobbed for a second like a bottle in water, then sank below the surface of the snow.
Underground it was warmer, the wind and cold left far behind; Pete stopped and shook the snow from his suit. He carefully unhooked the ultra-light from his pack and switched it on. The light beam, polarized to his own mass-penetrating frequency, reached out through the layers of surrounding earth as if they were cloudy gelatine.
Pete had been a rock diver for eleven years, but the sight of this incredi
ble environment never ceased to amaze him. He took the miracle of his vibratory penetrator, the rock diver’s “walkthrough,” for granted. It was just a gadget, a good gadget, but something he could take apart and fix if he had to. The important thing was what it did to the world around him.
The hogback of granite started at his feet and sank down into a murky sea of red fog. It was a fog composed of the lighter limestone and other rock, sweeping away in frozen layers. Seemingly suspended in mid-air were granite boulders and rocks of all sizes, caught in the strata of lighter materials. He ducked his head carefully to avoid these.
If his preliminary survey was right, this rocky ridge should lead him to the site of the missing lode. He had been following leads and drifts for over a year now, closing in on what he hoped was the source of the smaller veins.
He trudged downward, leaning forward as he pushed his way through the soupy limestone. It rushed through and around him like a strong current of water. It was getting harder every day to push through the stuff. The piezoelectric crystal of his walkthrough was getting farther away from the optimum frequency every day. It took a hard push to get the atoms of his body between those of the surrounding matter. He twisted his head around and blinked to focus his eyes on the two-inch oscilloscope screen set inside his helmet. The little green face smiled at him—the jagged wave-pattern gleaming like a row of broken teeth. His jaw clenched at the variations between the reading and the true pattern etched onto the surface of the tube. If the crystal failed, the entire circuit was inoperative, and frozen death waited quietly in the air far above him for the day he couldn’t go under. Or he might be underground, when the crystal collapsed. Death was here, too, a quicker and much more spectacular death that would leave him stuck forever like a fly in amber. A fly that is part of the amber. He thought about the way SoftHead had got his and shuddered slightly.
SoftHead Samuels had been one of the old gang, the hard-bitten rock divers who had been the first to uncover the mineral wealth under the eternal Alaskan snows. SoftHead had slipped off a hogback two hundred meters down, and literally fallen face first into the fabulous White Owl mother lode. That was the strike that started the rush of ’63. As the money-hungry hordes rushed north to Dawson he had strolled south with a fortune. He came back in three years with no more than his plane fare and a measureless distrust of humanity.
He rejoined the little group around the pot-bellied stove, content just to sit among his old cronies. He didn’t talk about his trip to the outside and no one asked any questions. The only sign that he had been away was the way he clamped down on his cigar whenever a stranger came into the room. North American Mining grubstaked him to a new outfit and he went back to tramping the underground wastes.
One day he walked into the ground and never came up again. “Got stuck,” they muttered, but they didn’t know just where until Peter walked through him in ’71.
Pete remembered it, too well. He had been dog-tired and sleepy when he had walked through that hunk of rock that hadn’t been all rock. SoftHead was standing there— trapped for eternity in the stone. His face was horror-stricken as he stood half bent over, grabbing at his switch box. For one horrible instant SoftHead must have known that something was wrong with his walkthrough—then the rock had closed in. He had been standing there for seven years in the same position he would occupy for all eternity, the atoms of his body mixed inextricably with the atoms of the surrounding rock.
Peter cursed under his breath. If he didn’t get enough of a strike pretty soon to buy a new crystal, he would become part of that timeless gallery of lost prospectors. His power pack was shot and his oxygen tank leaked. His beat-up Miller sub-suit belonged in a museum, not on active duty. It was patched like an inner tube and still wouldn’t hold air the way it should. All he needed was one strike, one little strike.
His helmet light picked a blue glint from some crystals in the gulley wall. It might be Ytt. He leaped off the granite spine he had been following and sank slowly through the lighter rock. Plugging his hand neutralizer into the socket in his belt, he lifted out a foot-thick section of rock. The shining rod of the neutralizer adjusted the vibration plane of the sample to the same frequency as his own. Pete pressed the mouth-shaped opening of the spectro-analyzer to the boulder and pressed the trigger. The brief, intensely hot atomic flame blazed against the hard surface, vaporizing it instantly.
The flim transparency popped out of the analyzer and Pete studied the spectrographic lines intently. Wrong again; no trace of the familiar Yttrotantalite lines. With an angry motion he stowed the test equipment in his pack and ploughed on through the gummy rock.
Yttrotantalite was the ore and tantalum was the metal extracted from it. This rare metal was the main ingredient of the delicate piezoelectric crystals that made the vibratory mass penetrator possible. Ytt made tantalum, tantalum made crystals, crystals operated the walkthrough that he used to find more Ytt to make ... It was just like a squirrel cage, and Pete was the squirrel, a very unhappy animal at the present moment.
Pete carefully turned the rheostat knob on the walkthrough, feeding a trifle more power into the circuit. It would be hard on the crystal, but he needed it to enable him to push through the jelly-like earth.
His thoughts kept returning to that little crystal that meant his life. It was a thin wafer of what looked like dirty glass, ground and polished to the most exacting tolerances. When subjected to an almost microscopic current, it vibrated at exactly the correct frequency that allowed one mass to slide between the molecules of another. This weak signal in turn controlled the much more powerful circuit that enabled himself and all his equipment to move through the earth. If the crystal failed, the atoms of his body would return to the vibratory plane of the normal world and alloy themselves with the earth atoms through which he was moving. . . . Pete shook his head as if to clear away the offending thoughts and quickened his pace down the slope.
He had been pushing against the resisting rock for three hours now and his leg-muscles felt like hot pokers. In a few minutes he would have to turn back, if he wanted to leave himself a margin of safety. But he had been getting Ytt traces for an hour now, and they seemed to be getting stronger as he followed the probable course of the drift. The mother lode had to be a rich one—if he could only find it!
It was time to start the long uphill return. Pete jerked a rock for a last test. He’d mark the spot and take up the search tomorrow. The test bulb flashed and he held the transparency against it.
His body tensed and his heart began to thud heavily. He blinked and looked again—it was there! The tantalum lines burned through the weaker traces with a harsh brilliance. His hand was shaking as he jerked open his knee pocket. He had a comparison film from the White Owl claim, the richest in the territory. There wasn’t the slightest doubt— his was the richer ore!
He took the half-crystals out of their cushioned pouch and gently placed the B crystal in the hole he had made when he removed the sample rock. No one else could ever find this spot without the other half of the same crystal, ground accurately to a single ultra-shortwave frequency. If half A was used to key the frequency of a signal generator, side B bounced back an echo of the same wave-length that would be picked up by a delicate receiver. In this way the crystal both marked the claim and enabled Pete to find his way back to it.
He carefully stowed the A crystal in its cushioned compartment and started the long trek back to the surface. Walking was almost impossible; the old crystal in his walkthrough was deviating so far that he could scarcely push through the gluey earth. He could feel the imponderable mass of the half-mile of rock over his head, waiting to imprison him in its eternal grip. The only way to the surface was to follow the long hogback of granite until it finally cleared the surface.
The crystal had been in continuous use now for over five hours. If he could only turn it off for a while, the whole unit would have a chance to cool down. His hand shook as he fumbled with his pack straps—he forced himself to
slow down and do the job properly.
He turned the hand neutralizer to full power and held the glowing rod at arm’s length before him. Out of the haze there suddenly materialized an eighteen-foot boulder of limestone, adjusted now to his own penetrating frequency. Gravity gripped the gigantic rock and it slowly sank. When it had cleared the level of the granite ledge, he turned off the neutralizer. There was a heavy crunch as the molecules of the boulder welded themselves firmly to those of the surrounding rock. Pete stepped into the artificial bubble he had formed in the rock and turned off his walkthrough.
With a suddenness that never ceased to amaze him, his hazy surroundings became solid walls of rock. His helmet light splashed off the sides of the little chamber, a bubble with no exit, one-half mile below the freezing Alaskan wastes.
With a grunt of relief, Pete slipped out of his heavy pack and stretched his aching muscles. He had to conserve oxygen; that was the reason he had picked this particular spot. His artificial cave cut through a vein of RbO, rubidium oxide. It was a cheap and plentiful mineral, not worth mining this far north, but still the rock diver’s best friend.
Pete rummaged in the pack for the airmaker and fastened its power pack to his belt. He thumbed the unit on and plunged the contact points into the RbO vein. The silent flash illuminating the chamber glinted on the white snow that was beginning to fall. The flakes of oxygen released by the airmaker melted before they touched the floor. The underground room was getting a life-giving atmosphere of its own. With air around him, he could open his faceplate and get some chow out of his pack.
He cautiously cracked the helmet valve and sniffed. The air was good, although pressure was low—around twelve pounds. The oxygen concentration was a little too high; he giggled happily with a mild oxygen jag. Pete hummed tunelessly as he tore the cardboard wrapper from a ration pack.
Cool water from the canteen washed down the tasteless hardtack, but he smiled, thinking of thick, juicy steaks. The claim would be assayed and mine owners’ eyes would bulge when they read the report. Then they would come to him. Dignified, sincere men clutching contracts in their well-manicured hands. He would sell to the highest bidder, the entire claim; let someone else do all the work for a change. They would level and surface this granite ridge and big pressure trucks would plow through the earth, bringing miners to and from the underground diggings. He relaxed against the curved wall of the bubble, smiling. He could see himself, bathed, shaven and manicured, walking into the Miners’ Rest. . . .
Beyond the End of Time (1952) Anthology Page 7