by Zach Hughes
Dom introduced Doris to old friends, guided her through the museum to see the scanty remains of the primitive extinct animal and plant life. The museum always made him feel sad. It told its story only too well. Mars had once been a living planet, both geologically and biologically. Scientists were still discussing the cause of her death. Currently, the most favored theory pointed to a varying sun. That school of theorists said that tens or hundreds of millions of years in the past, the sun had radiated more energy. At that far-distant time, the water now encased in the polar icecaps had been free, the atmosphere more dense, the whole planet wetter, allowing the development of both plant and animal life.
Dom wasn’t too happy with that theory. It could neither be proved nor disproved. The nature of a star is such that in a body the size of old Sol, energy released at the sun’s core requires some eight million years to work its way to the surface, where it is then radiated to the planets within minutes. Activity at the suns surface, the light falling on Mars that day, represented what had happened inside the sun millions of years ago and provided no clue as to the activity at the core at the given moment. However, if Mars had been affected by a change in the sun’s energies, the Earth would have felt the same effects. Of course, there was plenty of evidence of changing conditions on Earth, but the evidence was subject to a variety of interpretations.
Depending on one’s personal choice, fossil ferns and corals in arctic areas could be explained in several different ways, solar variation and continental drift being the two most favored theories. Solar variation was in current favor, since that theory also served to explain the change in Mars from a living planet to a desert of waste with lichens the only form of life to be found when Trelawny first landed on the red sands.
Dom was not fully convinced of either theory to explain some things on Earth. The presence of mammoths in the ice of both Siberia and Alaska, some frozen so rapidly that their flesh was, after millions of years, used as food for sled dogs, had never been explained by advocates of either theory. In fact, most scientists simply choose to ignore the puzzle of the frozen mammoths.
Perhaps, Dom felt, the true explanation could involve a combination of both factors, plus some things not yet theorized. He, himself, could not guess at additional factors, but he believed that continental drift had a definite part. The evidence cited by those who studied plate tectonics was very convincing.
It was one thing to study the past on Earth, and another to see it in skeleton form on Mars, to see the pathetic remains of life as evidence that something, some terrible force, had turned a living planet into a dead one. The old, romantic notions of dead civilizations on Mars were long since discredited, but there had been life, life very similar to that of the Earth, and all that life, except for some hardy lichens, had been wasted.
Doris seemed to sense Dom’s mood of melancholy. She suggested a meal and coffee in the main cafeteria. It was good to be with people again, to hear the talk, to smell their presence.
The meal was cultured protein, the coffee hot and strong. They chatted with two phosphate miners seated at the next table, lingered over cigarettes, and then made their way topside for a jumper ride back to the Kennedy. The twenty-four-hour Martian day was ending as they boarded. Ellen and J.J. were on watch. They were eager to take their turn at going into the domes. It was merely changing one closed environment for another, but it was a change from shipboard life.
Alone on the ship, they sat in the control room, the view being better there, had a glass of their own personal alcohol ration, watched the small moons grow brighter in the swift darkness as the planet swung them into nightside. In the darkness, neither of them having activated the lighting system, Dom felt a growing awareness of Doris’ nearness.
She came into his arms without protest. Her lips were sweet. He felt a new sense of possessiveness, a sense of wonder. She was his, his girl, his woman. The hostile world in front of the viewport seemed to emphasize their aliveness. They were alone, only their lives, their two separate entities, belying the dead world outside, the cold, airless surface. Far way, their own world was being torn apart, once again, in strife between men. Still farther away was a bloated gas giant with a killing, crushing gravity field and monstrous pressures. Strife and uncertainty behind them, danger ahead of them. The kiss reaffirmed the fact that they were, for the moment at least, alive. But there was an agreement between them.
He pushed her away, his breath rapid, his pulse pounding. “Girl, you’d better run for your life,” he whispered.
“No fair,” she said. “Don’t try to force me to have enough willpower for two.”
“Women are scarce on Mars,” Dom said. “So they make things as simple as possible. There’s no waiting period for marriage. We don’t believe in wasting a single moment.”
“Wonderful,” she said.
“Huh?”
“All right, I’ll make it perfectly clear,” she said. “So that even a man can understand. Yes.”
“Yes?” he asked.
“Y-e-s,” she spelled. “Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Now you’re sounding as though you’re not sure,” she said, hitting him lightly with her fist. “Look, I feel very, very small and very, very insignificant. I want reassurance. I guess I’m all female, because what I need is the safety and the security of your arms around me.”
He held her happily for a few moments. Then he contacted ground control and stated his needs. The minister was aboard Kennedy within the hour, scarcely giving Doris time to put on her best uniform. The brief ceremony was witnessed, in the absence of the rest of Kennedy’s crew, by two men from the landing-pad staff. The bride was toasted in clear, cold water.
Once again they were alone. There was, at first, a shyness between them. They were in Dom’s quarters, since it was, as the captain’s cabin, the larger. He helped her move her few personal possessions into the room, they used another bit of their wine ration, and came together to give mutual assurances against the long and lonely night outside. She was more than he remembered and all that he’d ever dreamed.
In the early morning Dom lay awake listening to her soft breathing. Now and then she made a tiny little purring sound. He felt a great welling up in his chest, and he smiled as he looked at her face. His eyes misted in sheer gladness.
The ship muttered and whispered around them. A servo cut in somewhere deep down, and he could feel the sense of well-being which comes from being on a living ship. The ship did have a sort of life. She functioned, giving herself orders through the complicated circuits, the miles of wiring. She lived and she allowed the crew to live. But only so long as man-made machinery did the job of purifying air.
He felt a fear. Doris, beside him, stirred in her sleep and one of her long, soft legs came over his, so smooth, so warm, so terribly vulnerable to the harsh and uncaring emptiness of space. Doris lived, but she lived only because the ship which he’d designed provided her with a suitable environment. As long as his hull held out cold and vacuum, as long as his hull resisted the crushing pressures of the Jovian atmosphere, she would continue to live.
It was not a prophecy. It was not an omen. He didn’t believe in premonitions. The ship would take them there and it would bring them back. But had he made a mistake? Should they have waited? Having known the little hot slicknesses of her, the cling of her, the hunger of her lips and body, would he err on the side of overcaution, thinking of her?
So it must have been, he thought, in the first days, when the first man looked at his woman and desired her to the point of fear of losing her. So it was in the dawn-age civilizations, when the first cities offered some protection against the fierce and warring savages. Throughout history, and in prehistory, a man looked at his sleeping woman and knew the same fears, dreamed the same dreams, facing death but dreading its coming before the appointed time. Dawn-age man protected his woman from the beasts, from the desires of other men, and Dominic Gordon, lying awake in a huge spaceship on Mars
, vowed to protect his woman from the hostile environment and from other men. He would protect her with fang and claw and with his skills, and he would take her into the high pressure of the Jovian clouds and expose her to great danger, and then if they lived they would face the renewed savagery of the barbarians of Earth. How he would protect her he was not sure, but he would. He would make a safe place for his woman, and for all women.
He went to sleep with fierce half-dreams of blood and killing, mentally devastating Firsters and Savers and all others who insisted on turning his planet into a bloody arena, fierce man dreaming of wrecking havoc on other fierce men.
As light grew on the eastern horizon the servos of the Kennedy compensated for temperature changes in the hull. The sun, shrunken by distance, was still a powerful force as it rose above the harsh and eroded mountains.
Chapter Eleven
“I am shamelessly happy,” Doris said.
The jumper sat atop the fifteen-mile height of the ancient crater, Olympus Mons.
“I will not feel guilty for being happy,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
The news from Earth was bad. In the west, terrorists were gaining steadily. The valuable space facility at DOSEWEX was besieged and was being sustained by airlift. There was talk of evacuating DOSEWEX, to concentrate the defense in the east. Should DOSEWEX be abandoned, everything of value would have to be destroyed. The waste would be horrifying. Moreover, with DOSEWEX gone, one lucky hit on the Houston center would leave DOSE without communications with its ships in space. J.J. sent down word to hold DOSEWEX at all costs.
DOSE was, of course, in command of the moon. A command post had been set up there. To compensate for the possible loss of DOSEWEX, powerful communications equipment had been lifted from the Canaveral base, and it was now possible for Kennedy to communicate directly with the command post.
Dom was surprised to find that J.J. was considered by those on the moon to be quite powerful and very valuable. J.J. received regular reports on the situation.
Although the situation was not good, it was encouraging that the vast masses of the people still seemed to be content to sit back and watch without taking sides. Both sides were leaning over backward to treat the populace with the utmost consideration. Refugees from battle zones were living in more luxury than most of the citizens who had not been driven from their homes. Both forces shared food and supplies and medical treatment with their refugees. The alliance between the remnants of government and the armed services had seized vast stores of materials and food and were less strained than the rebels.
At times the fighting was deadly and fierce, but the real battle was being fought in the minds of the uncommitted masses. The propaganda flow from both sides promised milk and honey in the future.
Dom knew exactly what Doris meant about feeling guilty. While the world faced the crisis, he found the days of waiting on Mars to be the happiest of his life. While they were not pulling watch they were free to explore. The trip to the top of the planet’s highest mountain was only one of several excursions which they enjoyed while the water was being offloaded. Since a jumper is self-powered by the heat of the sun, it was not at all wasteful to travel. Dom was an old Mars hand, knew the best times to view the huge rift system to get a maximum show of light and shadow, knew the best vantage point atop Olympus Mons, and enjoyed it anew because of the delight which Doris showed.
There was time, during the waiting period, to talk with the crew of the Callisto Explorer, who had seen the alien ship dive into Jupiter. Those men had seen the ship, had heard the weak signals which were still being transmitted from just inside the gaseous atmosphere. On watch, Dom could speak directly to the picket ship on duty out near the gas giant. While keeping radio watch on the signals, the ship was taking atmosphere samples from the larger moons of Jupiter’s thirteen-satellite system. Dom often talked with the skipper.
The signal was too weak to be picked up by Kennedy’s receivers, but the picket ship could relay it. Dom made dozens of recordings for study. The alien was broadcasting on one of the natural frequencies, 1420 megahertz. The signal was simple and brief, so brief it still defied attempts at decoding. Still, he felt closer to the goal to be able to listen to the relay from the picket ship.
In talking with crew who had done picket duty, Doris was impressed by the words of one young spacer.
“When you’re in close,” he said, “she swallows up all of space and looms over your head so that you wake up in a cold sweat thinking that she’s come unstuck and is falling down on top of you.”
Every man who had been near Jupiter had been awed by her.
One of the things Dom liked best about Mars was the feeling of togetherness which permeated the population. Everyone felt the friendliness—temporary visitors, spacers, permanent settlers, scientists. The harshness of the surface, the millions of miles which separated them from home, the odd, small look of the sun, covering only two-thirds of the area of sky which an Earth-viewed sun covered, all seemed to draw people closer together. In spite of the armed guard which surrounded the Kennedy at all times, it was difficult to believe that the Earthside war could affect Mars. Dom expressed the belief that if a Firster fanatic could penetrate the service and get all the way to Mars he would be impressed that feel the sense of accomplishment shared by all spacers, would forget his beliefs and become just a spacer. That he was wrong was evidenced by an attempt to attach a limpet mine to the Kennedy’s number four port thruster by an enlisted spacer with twelve years’ service. Caught in the act, the man took two space marines with him into the small but growing Mars Station Cemetery.
The incident seemed to kill the glow of contentment and happiness which Dom had felt since Doris said yes that night in the main control room. To think that the lunacy of Earth could contaminate Mars depressed him. He was glad when the hold was closed and pressurized and the Kennedy once again stood ready.
The longest leg of the journey lay ahead of them. Roughly, they had traveled one half of an astronomical unit to reach Mars, about one half the distance between Earth and the sun, or about forty-seven million miles. The distance between Mars and Jupiter was roughly three and three-quarters astronomical units, in the neighborhood of three hundred and sixty million miles. When dealing with such figures the mind refused to accept the vastness of space and tended to think of the journey in terms of months. Distance becomes relative when expressed in terms of time. Dom liked to remember that it had taken the pioneers almost as long to travel from the midwest to the Pacific coast by wagon train as it now took a ship to move from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Jupiter. Kennedy, with her unlimited power for acceleration, was at her best over long distances. She could pick up speed faster, cruise faster, and slow faster than conventional ships.
After a thorough inspection of the ship, although no Mars personnel had boarded her, they settled into the comfortable routine which had been established during the last weeks of the run to Mars. Jensen’s powerplant pushed and then rested. Acceleration continued well past the midway point. A picket ship was still on duty near Jupiter, and the watch on both ships, glad for company in the vastness of space, talked back and forth, using relatively low power as the distance between them grew steadily less, so that their often informal conversations could not be monitored back on Earth.
At turnaround time, Neil and Jensen swung the mass of the Kennedy and the reverse thrust began to kill the forward speed.
On Earth, the situation had reached an uneasy stability. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties. The defense line was holding on the Chicago-Corpus Christi line, and DOSEWEX was holding out. The propaganda war was still raging, and the masses were beginning to mutter about the shortage of food and consumer goods. Some of the most severe battles had been fought in the grain belt of the great plains. Large areas of fertile farmland had been devastated. There would be difficulty in planting spring crops.
It was no longer possible to brush off the senator from New Mexico
with contempt, for he had emerged as the man who was clearly in control of the radical forces, and he was now more often than not referred to by his name, John V. Shaw. He had proved himself to be not only a skillful organizer, but a brilliant military tactician. Shaw was preaching the gospel of revolt to the masses, promising to pull in all the slackers from space, to beat the spaceship hulls into plowshares in order to produce food under a new form of freedom. The exact form of this new freedom was not spelled out. It was clear, however, that the senator’s message was a vital one as food supplies became more and more scarce.
It seemed to the crew of the Kennedy that it was only a matter of time before the hungry millions began to flock to Shaw’s cause. Starvation is the most powerful of persuasions, and vast segments of the metropolitan east faced severe hunger as winter approached.
Time was critical. J.J. talked of a swift completion of their mission, a long run home, an arrival during the Christmas season.
“I think you’re being optimistic, J.J.,” Dom said. “You’re allowing only a short time for the descent into the atmosphere, the location of the ship, and bringing her out.”
“We’ll do it,” J.J. said.
“It’s a big planet,” Art said.
“We can home in on the radio signal,” J.J. said. “We won’t have any trouble locating the ship.”
“There’s always trouble in a new situation,” Neil said. “Keep in mind that we’ll be testing a new and untried ship under severe conditions.”
“What’s to test?” J.J. asked. “It’s a very simple proposition. She does it or she doesn’t. She goes in. That much we know. She’d have to go in to test the hull, so why fool around? We go in. If she doesn’t implode, we come out. Why worry?”