Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  They liked being here at first. They couldn't help it. It was so new to them. The bunks were not as clean as on the moon. But good enough. And the food came from Earth, in dehydrated forms. Water was flown in from the snows hard hoarfrost of the south polar cap a thousand miles away. Things were better than they had expected, and that was a surprise that lifted them from the dumps. And you expected guys who had stayed here a long time to look tough, didn't you. Tough and full of grouches? It was natural.

  So they went to work, digging into the strata of that bluff. Sometimes you used shovels, sometimes fine knives, and sometimes even brushes as fine as a painter of portraits uses. For care was the nature of the work. It was like archeology with a heavily commercial angle. For what you found were exquisitely colored tiles. Bowls of stone or porcelain. Most were broken, of course. But there were ways to patch them together so that the breaks couldn't be seen. But it was important to find all the pieces that you could. For it was hard to make restorations. And then the price dropped, on Earth, in the art salons where stuff like this brought minor fortunes. It was a new fad....

  Throckson, the boss, explained some of this, but he didn't explain all of it. Yet it didn't take many days to get the general drift. Throckson was long and lean, and near fifty. And he could handle himself pretty well. And he matched an old mold. The man who had come to a frontier to win wealth and power by whatever means came to hand. Sometimes he still looked the professor of literature that he claimed to have been. But he had a system, now. Also pretty cut and dried, in a way. It had no aspects of violence, except for the young roughnecks he kept around in case somebody got aggressively difficult. Otherwise, you did your work, you got paid and fed. And you could quit if you wanted to. Only, no means of transportation was provided back to Cross Valley, the nearest settlement. Moreover, ostensibly for greater freedom and comfort while working, your regular space suits were taken from you, and you were issued a lightweight coverall with an oxygen helmet, suitable for Mars. It really was more comfortable. But it carried only lightweight oxygen tanks, instead of regular air purifiers. And in the cold of the Martian night it would never be any good.

  "They'll give your space suits back, too—if you ask for them," a big youth who looked as though he'd soaked up all the ruggedness of the solar system, told Gannet bitterly. His name was Hellers... "Only, there's always something wrong with those suits. A tear you can't fix. Or a missing part... Oh, sure—lots of men have quit and started out, crazy mad. Do you think they ever got to Cross Valley? You guess. There's no life for men in Martian air."

  Gannet never cursed or anything. Not audibly. Nor did Glodosky. Both looked scared. And sober. And wise after being dumb. But what good did it do? Think, maybe? Figure out an angle?

  As for Devlin—well, any time now. He worked all right. He kept the color in his cheeks. But he'd lost four-fifths of his contact with reality. He looked at things with a kind of half smile—but he seemed to look more beyond them, or through them. The hills around. The gorge or "canal" extending away. And he muttered—not even looking embarrassed any more. You could catch what he said, sometimes.

  "Sea roar. Surf on beaches. Here. Once. Like Earthly geology. Similar. Not the same. Coal formed in the same way, though. In swamps. Before intelligence developed. Pulpy things without bones that corresponded to the dinosaurs. Blue sky. Rain. The air was never dense though. Low gravity. High atmospheric expansion... And never a very warm climate. Then the Martians. Things that stood up on legs without bones, and made the first spears... Can you see them in the darkness? Half visible... Gone... It's figured out a little, isn't it? But there's lots more. Fossils. Pieces of machinery. Pumps can be understood. Engines. But much can't be understood. I wonder what a Martian would think a table fork was for, or a lady's powder puff?..."

  Poor Devlin—made of softer stuff. And what good would he be when trouble came? Well, he'd die fast, anyhow.

  And a couple of times Glodosky said: "I wish I was like Tobias. Home with a woman. He's no fool."

  Gannet didn't even agree, audibly. It went without saying, now. Aspects had changed, utterly.

  No plan of action was made. Events just blossomed out by themselves in mid afternoon, two weeks after Gannet and his companions had arrived. A tough old man took issue with Throckson. It didn't matter what the argument was about. There were too many possible subjects. Throckson knocked the man down, pulled him erect, and repeated the process. The man's light helmet was torn from him, and he gasped in the thinness. But Throckson, with a smirk on his face kept pounding, even after the man's bloodied lips began to turn blue with the cyanosis of asphyxia....

  Maybe it was a cold, dispassionate thing on Throckson's part. Part of a plan of periodic intimidation for everybody. To maintain order, later. Of course he started a riot. Someone took a swing at him, too, and he went down. Gannet got the second poke in, and it also had good results. Then the pug-uglies went to work, and everybody had to quiet down, or run. Some did run for a ways. But most of them came back to surrender, because they didn't want to die.

  Five didn't come back. They were too full of rage to surrender. To knuckle down. There was Gannet. And Hellers. And another big guy with a soft drawl. And there was Glodosky, who might have gone back, if Gannet had gone with him. Maybe Devlin's motives were the same as Glodosky's—if his mind had any rational motives left.

  They straggled down the valley among the boulders and the corkers and the grubbers—those queer Martian growth. Enraged, Gannet, Hellers, and the other big man forged away from camp for almost an hour without thought of consequences. But the sun was sinking, and that meant ninety below zero. Also, their oxygen tanks were low. There was no food or water. Cross Valley was two hundred miles of this kind of wilderness, away. A pale haze of frost was gathering high in the air, already....

  Gannet growled to his companions. "Throckson got free of law out here. It was easy. Why—in a hundred years, when Mars ought to have many people on it, and cities, there probably will be hundreds of thousands of square miles of desert that nobody has put a foot onto. There can't be any law in such country except nature..."

  His wits began to come back out of the blur of blind rage. But enough fury remained to stimulate ingenuity. And there was fear of the lengthening shadows, and of frosty cold creeping through the coverall, to add to that. The blue shadows. The quiet scene took on the taint of death. But the question of how to breathe was more pressing. Oxygen. Oxygen...

  The grubbers had it. If there was any way to make use of it. Martian plants were like Earth plants. They liberated oxygen from carbon dioxide under the action of sunlight. They made starch molecules by hooking the carbon to water molecules drawn from the dry air, too. Photosynthesis. A function of chlorophyll. But Martian plants couldn't be wasteful. Especially the grubbers. They kept moisture sealed in their hard bulbous forms. And the free oxygen, too. They couldn't let it go. It was too precious. To maintain a faint body warmth by slow combustion at night. That was the way they had learned to survive the nocturnal cold, and the harshened climate.

  All right—what good was having read about all that? It was like saying that there is iron in most any kind of soil, when you needed to make yourself a knife....

  He kept right on going, away from camp, though. He wouldn't go back. Dying was bad, but not a bad enough alternative. He didn't tell Devlin or Glodosky or the others to go back. He was through with that. They were supposed to be grown men. If they weren't entirely that, was it his responsibility? He felt worn out.

  But the sun sank out of sight. It gilded the castle-like crags of the gorge walls far ahead, for awhile after that. But the stars came out brilliantly, and the speck of the Earth, attended by the lesser speck of the moon, and it seemed a dream that he had ever been to either place. The cold deepened, and gnawed at his fingers and his lips. And after that—well—desperation took him, and he seemed just to follow his nose, doing all he could.

  He found a soft spot of dust underfoot, and began to dig a h
ole into it, barehanded, and dog-fashion. "Dust insulates against cold," he said to anybody who would listen. If you listened hard enough, you could hear, on Mars, even through a thin helmet, without the intervention of radiophones.

  Then he tore at the grubbers, and threw the pieces into the deep hole. Hundreds of pounds of the stuff—even on Mars. Then he packed the whole business over with dust, mounding it high, stamping it down for a kind of seal.

  At long last he really burrowed—like a worm going into the ground. He pushed dust backward, plugging his point of entrance behind him. He got down a yard or more to the grubber fragments, and with his gloved fingers, he tore them apart. They half exploded with little pops, from the pressure of the almost pure oxygen sealed up in sponge-like cavities within. Maybe it would work. Maybe it was a new invention, sort of. Maybe his companions would catch on to what he was trying to do, and follow suit. He hardly cared, one way or another.

  He got his helmet off, and tried to breathe. There was a thin atmosphere sealed up around him. But it was mostly oxygen. He found out that, for the moment, he could get along. There were little dewdrops of water inside the cavities in the grubbers. He lapped at them. And though he wasn't hungry yet, he chewed some of the fibrous pulp, and sucked it dry. There had to be some slight food value at least, in most any plant. The stuff tasted faintly sweet, and there was an oiliness on his tongue. Maybe there was nothing in it to kill him. So this was an experiment. Maybe it could keep him going.

  He tore up more chunks of grubber, to free more oxygen. Then he tried to sleep. It didn't work, then. And in an hour, by the luminous dial of his watch, he had to rip up still more grubber parts. Once he succeeded in sleeping—only to awaken from a nightmare of suffocation. That was near dawn, when the awful cold was beginning to dig down to him. By then he didn't have many unused grubber fragments left. His head ached terribly. Well, maybe he'd figured out a way of sorts to keep alive. But as much or more depended on endurance. Two hundred miles! Well—no. Say a hundred and ninety-three, now. They'd already come part way. But he bet that other guys had thought of his technique before. And had any come through alive? Not that he knew of.

  He put his helmet back on, and let the dregs of the contents of his oxygen flask flow into it, and dug up to daylight. He saw then that the others had paralleled his scheme exactly. Digging deep holes, mounding up dust over the pulp of the grubbers. And the others had already emerged. They'd even added a new wrinkle, that Gannet figured would have come to him too.

  Stuff your oxygen helmet, except for the absolute minimum needed for your head and vision, with fragments of those same plants. Put the helmet on. Start ripping the fragments apart with your teeth. The key point of course was, that on Mars, with lungs full of concentrated but expanded oxygen, you could go without your helmet, and without breathing, for most of a minute. But you had to work fast.

  Gannet worked the trick himself, and then said: "Come on—let's go!" One thing was in their favor. There were plenty of the queer plants they needed growing in the flat canal bottom ahead. If that hadn't been so they would have had to try to carry a supply. Which wouldn't last long. Well—that time might come. If they had that much good luck.

  His mood was waspish. His nerves tore at his mind, and the awful desolation around him tore at his nerves. Mars' charm was gone for him, now. And this valley was what you'd call a fertile region—comparatively! What a place to kick off in! He ached mightily to tear Throckson apart. Maybe the fury of revenge in him was the one force that sustained his efforts to keep alive. Sometime. Some way.

  Hellers and the other guy were in worse shape than he was. "Three greenhorns we got on our hands, too—Mic," he growled to his companion. "Like having babies to take care of. Especially Mumblehead, here! He was nuts at the start.... He'll go loopy at the next turn. Well—you don't catch me trying to hold him down!..."

  Gannet growled under his breath, as he saw Hellers' twisted thinking. Baby, huh? He'd given Hellers and Mic the tip about the grubbers, that enabled them to still be alive, hadn't he? He fought for self control to keep from leaping at Hellers. But he hated Devlin too, just as he worried about him. Devlin with the kiddish pink cheeks, the eyes with the cherubic look that had lost all grasp of reality, now. And his mumbles that you couldn't hear the words of, in that thin muffling air. But he spoke up loud enough a few times, so that the sounds came through his helmet, and across the small distance to the other men.

  "Swell picnic, fellas. Nice to be along..."

  Every fifteen minutes or so the grubber pieces in the helmets had to be changed for fresh stock. But the march went on. Lying behind some rocks they found a corpse in a Mars suit. He'd managed to steal an extra oxygen flask, it seemed, from Throckson's camp, on some previous occasion. But both his flasks were empty, now. And all that Glodosky, who went through his clothes with shaking fingers, found on him was a crumpled letter from a little place in Illinois. It was signed, Mom. His name was Fetterly. Burt Fetterly. Yeah—take it along for identification. Maybe...

  After that the daze began to close in on Gannet. When the sun got higher, aches began to afflict his body. Something like the bends in that thin air, maybe. But you had to keep going. Thirst was on his tongue from the dryness. And the drops he kept licking from inside the spongy cavities, didn't seem to help as much as they must have. Without them he would have been in a lot worse shape.

  Sometimes they had to carry huge bundles of grubbers across desolate stretches. Bundles fastened to their backs with fibers torn from the corkers—those strange treelike growths. In the fifty degree heat of noon, Gannet felt hot and feverish. But maybe the fever was a good thing. He didn't lose so much moisture from his body, sweating.

  They bedded down that evening, as they had the evening before. They were near a vast pavement of rusted iron, to which areas of white glaze still clung. Lord only knew what it was for. The millions of years and the thoughts and purposes of rough skinned creatures who hadn't been men, and who were long extinct, hid that. And who cared, now, anyway?... Maybe they'd covered twenty-five miles that day.

  Two days later, around noon, Hellers blew up. Gannet watched it happen as he might have watched a dream that he didn't believe in. Hellers just ran off toward the low hills of the widened valley. His screams turned swiftly fainter. The other man, Mic, took off after him. And what were you supposed to do about it? Try a rescue? Where did you find the energy for that, or the concentration of mind, even if there was any good or any reality in all that? Gannet half wanted to run, himself. Sure, it was an impulse to try to escape. From aching feet and body, and strain that went on and on and on... Why he didn't, then, was maybe that he kind of lost interest. He just kept plodding, with the mumbled conversation of Glodosky and Devlin droning, without words or meaning in his ears...

  Every time he replenished the Martian plant-life in his helmet he did so more clumsily, and with less interest, as if he were going to sleep. Near sundown, all he did was give up—flopping over in a faint.

  He woke up with his helmet stuffed again, and with Devlin with all the old sourness out of his nature, talking to him very gently: "Easy, pal. We've gone almost half way. We can make it. We can bed down here for the night."

  Devlin's voice was scratchy as with great thirst, but his words were perfectly rational. And Gannet found himself almost hating the thought. Devlin the kid, the Mamma's Boy, the crackpot from the start, the soft-headed dreamer, still on his feet, and still—or again—able to talk straight, when this day two guys of large and ugly proportions and long experience with Mars, had gone to their certain deaths, raving nuts... While he himself, who had always looked down on Devlin, had worried about him, was also near to coming all in pieces. He met the truth of it now with a poisonous resentment, which said that all the natural laws of human nature were off beam, when it came to places beyond the Earth.

  But as Devlin continued speaking, Gannet knew that a conviction of Devlin's advantage had been growing in him all the time.

  "
Listen, Gannet," Devlin said. "l found out that I've got something most people haven't got. All Hellers and that other mug could see here was the terrible desolation. I've been seeing a lot more. Mars as it was way back—just after the planets were thrown off from the sun. Mars with its first life—perhaps in its small salty oceans of those times. Mars in a stone age. Then, grown old, but at the peak of its civilization. Exploring space, even. Establishing a few colonies. Then, Mars at war with its nameless neighbor. To the complete smashing of one, while the people of the other were wiped out. And maybe Mars of the future, too. See what I mean. Reverie and dreams, under control, can be a good thing, Gannet. Velvet padding between you and the harshness. Sure I mumble. It doesn't mean anything. It's part of the reverie... Try it yourself. Now let's get you bedded down...."

  Devlin sounded very earnest.

  The next day Gannet did try the reverie. He knew what it was, some, of course, He'd felt the charm... But he wasn't quite like Devlin... He couldn't romanticize Mars, right now. But he thought about girls he used to know. And his dead folks, and the country place they'd had. And a certain island in a lake... It helped. And it might go on helping. If he didn't get in too deep. For that stuff was utterly out of reach, now....

  But energy still kept dropping lower and lower, under wear and tear. In another twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes, both Gannet and Devlin were just about done. So Glodosky croaked through cracked lips: "Come on. I'll carry you both..."

  "Carry us?" Gannet echoed. "How are you so strong?"

  "You know," Glodosky answered. "My legs."

  Gannet had all but forgotten. His legs. Not of flesh but of machinery. Atom powered. Never tiring.

  And so they were able to go on. With Gannet thinking a curious thought. That if Glodosky hadn't lost his real legs, they'd be about dead by now. Misfortune adding up to—maybe—good fortune. Life. Cock-eyed. Unpredictable. Who could blame anybody for anything?