Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  "Scratch two," Gannet said later. "Benrus and Tobias."

  Eight ships hissed up from the rented field the next day. You don't reasonably fly space craft manually. Speeds are too great; controlling is too finely timed. Nobody monkeyed with the pilot instruments. So the test flights were all successful. There were no more ruined potato patches to be paid for.

  Dopy Devlin came back, pale, but lost in a rapturous daze, "I saw the stars at noon!" he muttered. "And the black sky with the air ripped off and the stars white hot!..."

  They were all cocky, triumphant, and relieved of brass-flavored scare. Even Glodosky. Though a humble wonder showed in him.

  "I got back down, Gannet!" he enthused. "Here I am without a scratch on me! Maybe my jinx is busted. Maybe I'll make it to the moon with you and Devlin..."

  Gannet shook Glodosky's cold mechanical hand, just then realizing that these two would be companions. Phelps and little Thomas were plotting their courses to Venus, as their first venture. Not so good, some thought. Lenz, Roscoe, and Harwin meant to shoot straight out to the Asteroid Belt.

  Some minutes later, Harwin took Gannet aside, and gave him the gently insolent, suit-yourself advice of an older man who has faced danger many times, and has drawn shrewdness from experience.

  "The moon, eh, Gannet?" he said with a slow grin. "Getting into things by slow stages—like some people going into ice water?"

  Gannet chuckled. "That's about it," he said. "The moon's the nearest."

  "Umhm-m—that's one way of approaching an unknown that could finish you sometime," Harwin told him. "With caution. Me—I like the long, deep dives better. I already talked Lenz into switching from Venus to the Asteroids. The farthest place, the newest, the best. It ain't the culture of the Old Planet that blew up that's so important. It's that the whole metal insides of a world are laid open for easy mining. You know that the Earth has a heart that is largely gold, too. But who can get at it? And who wants gold, anyway? It'll be almost worthless, now. Think of almost pure uranium instead. The power source of the future is out there. And no end of industrial metals... Come on, be smart, Gannet. I like Glodosky. Too bad a good guy has to be a Jonah. But some of his luck might rub off on you. As for Devlin, when he mumbles to himself I wonder how the doctors can call him emotionally fit."

  Gannet felt a sharper twinge of worry. But a stubborn and adventurous perversity hit him.

  "I like to do things my way, Harwin," he laughed. "Step by step, not skipping anything. And I haven't seen the moon. Maybe we'll meet out there in your Asteroid Belt sometime before long...."

  It was mellow June, and the bunch graduated. Then some went home to visit their folk, and to say so long for a while. Thomas, Devlin, and Glodosky were all under twenty-one, but nobody kept any of these at the last minute, from space. Their intentions were an accepted thing everywhere, nowadays. Gannet was nineteen, but he was an orphan.

  Some of the crowd brought relatives back to see the takeoff. Devlin's mother came. And his sister. Devlin's mother was a prim little woman, different from what Gannet had suspected. Hard. But maybe naive, too. She seemed to think her boy was just going on a picnic, when she said to Gannet:

  "He's a strange kind of son..."

  Kath Devlin was just budding out of the awkward age—with great promise. Her pale brat's eyes dug at the ships with such interest that Gannet said jauntily for her to hear:

  "Before we get started, we'd better check for stowaways, fellas!"

  Kath met this compliment with a pout and a blush and a look of murder. Too bad for her that she wasn't a boy.

  Phelps' smooth Bett was there, and Lenz' Mary. Mary showed the hurt of long neglect. Bett masked her injury with a light and cheerful indifference.

  "We used to know each other—for laughs," she said. "Good luck."

  Phelps bowed, and patted her cheek. "Thanks, Bett," he said earnestly. But his former sartorial elegance still showed in the neat coverall he was wearing.

  The ships started out almost together. With the power of the Harmon Pushers to depend on, waiting for special favorable moments for a takeoff to any given destination was no longer necessary. You plotted your trajectory to fit the time that was convenient.

  Two ships flashed sunward. Three arced around the Earth to head in the opposite direction. Three more climbed more cautiously moonward. None dared to use full power. And all joined the general restless flow outward, to colonize the solar system.

  Not many hours later, Gannet watched his ship slide down backwards on its jets, to a velvet landing by instrument. Then, in a space armor that was really a high-altitude suit for bomber crewmen, he was stumbling through the dust of thermal erosion, and through the daze in his mind. The feeble lunar gravity confused his feet.

  There was the mountain ring-wall of Copernicus all around him, one half of it shoving the black fangs of undiffused shadows toward the blazing sunlight on the crack-lined lava around his boots. There were the brittle stars and the inky, airless sky. The Earth was high, and fuzzy blue-green, but he had the frightening impression that it was really far beneath him, and that he would never be able to climb down again.

  There were the clusters of glinting metal igloos that showed man's presence, even where there was no natural air to breathe. And he was moving toward them. His ears rang with the silence. But in his brain was the thought that he hadn't gone hysterical in space as some guys still did. Even the weightlessness, which felt exactly like falling, had brought him no panic. That much was proven. There was that much growth. He was that much of a man. And to the extent of what was around him, so much of burning curiosity was satisfied. He was on the moon! This was his personal conquest!

  Devlin and Glodosky he had hardly troubled to notice, but now their voices came to him by helmet radio:

  "We made it—we got here!" Glodosky was saying thickly. And the words were more pointing out of triumph.

  Devlin's tone quavered, either in terror or ecstasy. The sourness in him was gone. "Luna," he was saying, as if in apostrophe. "What was it like when it was brand new—back two billion years? Great meteors falling. Smoking craters. Hot lava. The vapors that might have formed an atmosphere, leaking away into space, because the gravity was too weak to hold them...."

  "Yeah—we know," Gannet growled. "Here come the security police."

  Martial law compelled you to work, here. That was to be expected, and Gannet and his companions accepted the fact as natural. Even the air you breathed had to be labored for—removed chemically from the oxides in the rocks.

  For Gannet it was all wonderful, at first. You slept in a dorm dug deep under the lava, sealed, white-walled, spotless. Your life was as coordinated as the parts of a watch. You ate vegetables grown in vaults, under sunlamps.

  Devlin was put to work in those gardens. Glodosky refused a hospital job for ruggeder work digging more tunnels and vaults—extending Earth's hold on its nearest colony. So Gannet and he were doing the same things. Other young men were around them, with histories paralleling their own. And it was good to be building something human and proud.

  Gannet kept his high spirits while Glodosky's cheeks hollowed with homesickness, and while Devlin, mumbling, withdrew deeper into himself, causing other men to look at him askance.

  Gannet didn't know quite what to do about Devlin; but to Glodosky he said encouragingly:

  "Feeling low can happen to anybody, pal. You'll straighten out."

  "Sure I will," Glodosky affirmed.

  But the nostalgia was his undoing. Befogged by it, he wandered right into danger, when somebody forgot to put up a safety rail, during blasting. Glodosky's jinx was still around.

  Advanced medical science could keep him alive, and patch him up, but it couldn't give him back his own legs. He was fixed up right there in the lunar hospital; and when it was over—well—you couldn't tell the difference.

  His legs, now, were like his right hand. They looked like flesh on the outside, even to the dark hairiness. But inside each there was a m
otor, and many steel cables, and a small atomic battery. Platinum wires finer than spiderweb were connected to nerve-ends in the stumps of Glodosky's real limbs, to pick up the minute neurotic currents. These were amplified, and used to direct the movements of Glodosky's new underpinnings just as if they were the ones he had originally been born with.

  But it took three lunar months. Time for the novelty of being on the moon to wear thin in Gannet. Time for his mind to get into mischief, thinking of the discipline exercised by officials whose natures were perhaps harshened by the harsh lunar scene. There were the "forbidden" notices. Ah, yes—it was good to dig more sub-lunarian chambers, but you never got close to anything important.

  The great fortress, that could range all of Earth with its guided missiles, was closed to you—the place that was meant to check future wars which didn't seem likely to come anymore, but somehow might anyway— Man had grown wary of himself, and of his old hopes of being finally civilized.

  You never got close to the great astronomical observatory, either, or to the vast research labs, where more wonderful newness was being figured out, far from the Earth, and where extensive populations would not be wiped out, were there an accident. Such places were for the elite. Or that was the bitter, inaccurate thought. Thus you never became an aware part of the moon's greatest meaning in the invasion of space. That was for the experts—those who were investigated and put under contract on Earth. You were of the bums, the drifters who came on their own, and were always suspect.

  Gannet fought such bitter thinking—with scant success. Being off the Earth changed everybody. Or was it life that did that? As soon as you broke its placid surface, and struck out to do something big and dangerous, your view of yourself and everything began to shift. A thing once yearned for could turn to venom inside you. A friend could seem an enemy. Or vice versa.

  In his restlessness he began to hate the moon. He felt responsible for Glodosky—tied to him. He thought about little Thomas. Deep in Venus he should be. If something hadn't gone wrong. And how about Harwin, Roscoe and Lenz? Out in the Belt! While he was only on the moon, stuck, left behind, outpaced! He was almost as bad as Tobias and his Kitty and his cowardice.

  Glodosky was back, working in the tunnels, for less than an hour when Gannet said to him:

  "I'm going, fella. Out after Harwin and the others. Maybe you and Devlin better go home."

  Glodosky's eyes lighted. "Unh-unh," he grunted. "I have my own ship. I go where I please."

  A half hour after Gannet got into space with the ship that had been stored at the port, two other well-known craft were tailing him. He cursed under his breath. What was he supposed to be, a nursemaid? He could cheerfully have killed Glodosky and Devlin just then.

  But being in motion once more, and on some kind of obscure quest, had lightened his inner nature. So, after a moment he smirked wryly into his radio and said:

  "Okay. I guess you guys didn't find yourselves on the moon anymore than I did."

  The acceleration produced by just one Earth-gravity of force, operating for an hour, builds a velocity of something over twenty miles per second. And the Harmon Pushers could do better than that. But maybe it's not so good to go much faster than fifty miles per second, because, for one thing, you have to slow down for a landing. Even so, distance is eaten up fast. A million miles in a bit more than five hours.

  But Gannet and his friends didn't get to the Asteroid Belt, then. Yeah—the reason was Glodosky. A brace in his ship snapped under the strain of acceleration, tore a big hole in the hull skin, and let his air out. All he could do was lie in his cabin in space armor, and sweat, and sound scared.

  No, you couldn't desert him, even if he begged you to—which he didn't. Sixty hours later, with Glodosky almost gone from thirst, since he had had no emergency flask of water inside his space suit, they soughed down through a tenuous atmosphere of nitrogen, mixed with small quantities of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and oxygen. They were down on the wide sweep of the space port of a place called Cross Valley, soon afterward.

  "I'm kind of glad we could come," Devlin said through his helmet radio. "Thanks, Glodosky, for being a clunk—this time."

  His eyes were bright and interested. He kicked at the dry ground, and with a quizzical intensity watched the thin wind—air pressure was only one-point-two pounds per square inch, compared to fourteen-point-five, Earth norm—blow a little cloud of dust toward a lazily turning anemometer atop a gleaming laboratory structure of Earthly design.

  Gannet was glad that he was here, too. Cross Valley was one-third several years old, its hemicylindrical corrugated-metal buildings caked with dust; and it was two-thirds yesterday-new and shining. All buildings were hermetically sealed, to confine breathable air, of course. The new part was to meet the needs of the flood of wanderers who had come to Mars by virtue of the Harmon Pusher.

  Gannet looked at the town, that sprawled in mid-afternoon sunshine from a weak sun not much more than half the diameter, in the greater distance, than it used to have, seen from Earth. Yet its brilliance was undiminished in the frostiness that must be creeping into the air from a high of fifty degrees, F., at noon.

  And he looked beyond the town to the umber hills, toward which the trails led in all directions. Young men followed those trails, now, to hunt for—well—whatever they found. Wealth, the solution of some mystery, a mood that was yearned for, or death. Nobody yet knew fully what Mars might be good for in the new scheme of things.

  The fabulous Martians had been wiped out long ago. But in return they had smashed even the planet of their enemies. Something ached in Gannet, and it was as cold as the thought of empty pockets far from home—even though he was now flush from recent pay. It was cold and lonely, but there was freedom in it, far from the crowded Earth. The scene fitted the feeling, too. The soft tones of dusty color, and the hard blue of the sky. The peace was that of a small, cold planet, sinking toward death.

  Gannet's gaze pulled itself nearer, to explore the vast, flat bottoms of the two valleys that crossed, here—through telescopes they would once have been called "canals," and they may have been artificial.

  No water was in them now, of course. There was just a great, rusty mound a mile away—the ruin of some machine. Monoliths loomed, wind and dust scarred, until their bas-reliefs were all but obliterated. There were sparse growths that he had read about. They had scientific and common names.

  The low shag-trees had paper-dry whorls, the color of an old hornets' nest, faintly patinaed with moss. The grubbers looked like huge gobs of hard tar, left to flatten irregularly in hot sunshine. But they were covered with little crinkles, like lichen. They were hoarders. They stored not only moisture inside their massy forms, but the oxygen that they produced from carbon dioxide—as all green plants do—as well. They didn't liberate it to the atmosphere but compressed it into hollow spaces in their horny shells. Such economy on Mars was necessary. There was so little oxygen in the air. And during the bitterly cold nights the stored supply served to maintain an animal-like tissue heat in them by slow oxidation.

  Gannet thought of this, and of many other things. In the town, through the thin plastic of his helmet, he heard muffled hammering. Absently he decided that a home-made space ship, powered with a Harmon Pusher, was exactly like a covered wagon. This was exaggeration.

  "Hey, Devlin!" Glodosky croaked. "Can I go into your unpunctured ship cabin and take off my helmet, so I can have a drink of water? Before I shrivel?"

  This plaintive request aroused Gannet from his thoughts.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's try the town. Beer, maybe. Five bucks a bottle. Unless the Harmon Pusher has already cut the cost of transportation. But what the hell...."

  They entered a nearby hut by its airlock. There was a restaurant. And because of an inevitable need in a place like Cross Valley, there was also an inevitable friendly man who grinned and said, "Do you birds want to work?"

  No—that doesn't have to be a crooked proposition, even on a frontier.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it must be okay...

  Before sunset, Gannet, Glodosky, and Devlin had signed up. Their ships went into storage again. And in the blackness of the night, with the stars blazing, and with Phobos, the nearer moon—not round, but a small jagged chunk crawling eastward among them, they were aboard a crawler—inside its heated air-tight cabin—while its caterpillar treads ground at the valley floor and then at the desert, where the temperature must have dropped to eighty below zero, at least.

  They rode all night, cross country, and thin winds covered their tracks by blowing dust, and fine salt from oceans that had died a hundred millions of years ago. They didn't know where they were going, except from what Bart Lasher, the driver who had hired them, had said. "A couple of hundred miles west. Wait and see—you'll like it..."

  "Yeah—I like it already," Devlin said. "I used to dream of Mars when I was a kid. And here it is. Deserts, valleys, strange life, ruins. Fifty million years ago its people died. In a big scrap across space... And now civilization is coming. Of people. Not—beings. Corruption and cheating are here already. The rest comes later... The dome cities. The harmony. The governments and politics..."

  Devlin talked on and on. But you never could quite tell whether he was being fervent or sarcastic... Sometimes they all dozed—like hoboes riding a freight long ago. But mostly they didn't.

  In the night they passed huge broken dams and rusted pumping stations rimed with frost, squeezed out of the dryness by cold. And strange towers loomed against the stars. And in the dawn there was a white haze of tiny frost-crystals, lying low in the valleys.

  At 10 a.m., by watches that had been retarded 37 minutes and 23 seconds from the daily Earth norm, they arrived at a small camp of Nissen huts at the foot of a bluff which was the mound of a city. The huts, dust plastered, were marvelously camouflaged by nature.