Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Sometimes Gannet and Devlin still staggered along on their own feet. More often they were lashed to Glodosky's back by means of a rude sling of vegetable fibres. They still had to stop to collect pieces of the grubbers for oxygen and moisture and a little food value at frequent intervals. And for more nights they had to burrow into the ground to escape the cold. Their consciousness seemed to fade away from them. But here necessary actions became a kind of automatism.

  And so, late one morning, the people on the streets of Cross Valley were treated to a strange spectacle. A pair of strong legs bearing three nearly dead men, their clothing grimed with the red, salty dust of Mars. It was not easy to guess that only months before, they had been students in a quiet university town on Earth. But some who saw them did guess. For many had had a similar background. They too had joined the vast outward surging and had become part of the colonial impulse that the Harmon Fission Jet Engine had made possible. They rushed forward, eager to help as much for curiosity as for kindness. The weight of three men on Mars was about equal to one on Earth.

  Gannet awoke at last to the dim hammering and clang of building. He was in a hospital. It was natural, wasn't it, that in this harshness the nurses would be male? Sunlight was on the windows, heavily glazed to resist internal air pressure of an Earthly level. A studious looking middle-aged man came after awhile, and after profuse good wishes and congratulations for his still being alive, announced his name... Dan Simpson...

  "Survival on Mars, Mr. Gannet," he said. "Under native conditions, I mean. You and your friends have found a way. From what was in your helmets, I can guess part of your method. It will be useful knowledge for all colonists, here. A safeguard in case of emergencies. Something that should be standard, published advice, for everyone here, or on the way. I am prepared to pay fifteen thousand dollars to you three men. And the others said, come to you. There will be royalties as well, of course. So, would you explain your method fully to me, and allow my firm to prepare pamphlets?"

  Somehow the thought of commercial things, so soon after his and his pals escape from death, irritated Gannet. So did this man's gentle, rather insipid face— Gannet had already forgotten his name, and did not try to remember it. And with some brash carelessness, as of a haughty person tossing a coin to a beggar, he said:

  "Sure, friend. Listen carefully...."

  But he found a satisfaction, too. At having done a little. Adding something to knowledge. Doing something that counted. It was one thing that people aimed at, wasn't it? He talked on with better consideration, now.

  Yet his mind was on Throckson and revenge. He'd go back out there now—with whatever forces he'd collect. Police, or whatever else there was. Break the empire of a frontier baron...

  But later, after they'd let him up and out, he found it wasn't that simple. Throckson had taken care of things like that, it seemed. The sheriff wasn't interested in anything but positive proof, and they had nothing to show him. Mr. Throckson was a highly respected man here, and they couldn't just take anyone's word against him. Besides, the police were needed here—they were short-handed, and...

  Gannet left him, feeling contempt and something strangely like relief. He couldn't understand it, but somehow the trip to take revenge on Throckson didn't seem as important now as it had before. He told the others, and they nodded. They stood there in the Mars suits from Throckson's camp, but they were all busy with thoughts that had nothing to do with getting even. Finally Glodosky shrugged, and turned to Devlin.

  Devlin mused aloud: "So? I wouldn't mind staying on Mars for awhile. What's it got? Well—not much in available resources. It's half dead. And cold. But it has color. Romance. That's an easy thing to sell. And the Earth feels so small. And it's getting so that people can make any place comfortable. They like the challenge of doing that. I could stay—help see what we can do about Throckson. Work. And maybe try historical research, here. But the Asteroids are better. And plenty of folks have more right to get Throckson than I have. He's a damn fool who'll wind up very soon, smashed and dead. So why should I lose more time and risk my neck further, trying to do something that plenty of others are itching to do, anyway?"

  "We've been telling about Throckson, Gannet," Glodosky added. "While you were still out cold. And they could see where we came from. So more than that bird we just talked to, knows. Come on. Down there's the post office. Maybe mail was forwarded from the moon. From the gang. Especially from Roscoe, Harwin, and Lenz, out there where we ought to be going."

  Gannet felt a difference in his friends, now. Something everybody fought to get. Growth. Devlin, especially, seemed now to have his feet on solid stuff. Out of danger and strangeness, he'd won pride and confidence. He seemed to have found out what he wanted.

  Both Devlin and Glodosky collected bunches of letters. But Gannet, the orphan, got nothing at all. In spite of himself, he felt lonely and left out of things.

  Both of his companions thumbed through their sheaves of envelopes. Devlin glanced at Gannet. "Nothing from the crowd, here," he said. "Just family stuff. My mother. My sister."

  "Same with me. Only my dad," Glodosky stated.

  What they shared with him was the disappointment at no news from their friends. The family part they tried to depreciate. And that, he sensed, was consideration for him. In his new confidence, Devlin had lost his defensive sourness, too. That was another thing that space had done for him.

  "We'll head for the asteroids anyway," Glodosky said. "We know that Roscoe and Lenz and Harwin headed for the asteroid, Ceres."

  Gannet shrugged. He had wanted to go out there. He still did. It is what he would do. Still, there was a dull regret at leaving revenge behind.

  "Okay," he said. "So now we see if we can buy regular space suits."

  They found a shop. Gannet and Glodosky took new armor, still crated after shipment from Earth. High altitude suits, they were, really, like the ones they had had before. War surplus. But even at the low prices for such surplus, those two armor used up the better part of ten thousand dollars out here.

  Devlin did a little better. The smaller armor he bought was second hand, third hand, fourth hand—who could tell? Each dent and scratch on it might have had a history. He put it on right away. Then a puzzled smile came to his lips, and extended up to his eyes. His nose twitched.

  "Who hocked this thing, Mister?" he asked. "I mean who owned it before?"

  The graying shopkeeper grinned. "Somebody that needed a ticket, on a regular space liner," he said. "Back to Earth, or else farther out. I don't recall which. But a talkative person."

  "I see," Devlin answered with some awe. "l could stand a larger size. But I'll take this one..."

  When the transaction was completed, but while they were still all inside the pressurized shop, Devlin beckoned his companions close. The face plate of his helmet was open. "Make like dogs, you guys," he chuckled. They sniffed dutifully. Gannet caught just a trace of a delicate aroma emanating from the armor's interior, and it didn't come from the unwashed Devlin. It was a whispered hint, plying on them through memories of soft lights and music, far, far away.

  Perfume!

  And on the outside of the suit, over the heart, a red rose was carefully painted.

  Gannet and Glodosky donned their own new armor as fast as they could. Out in the street again, they all tried out their helmet radiophones. But that wasn't their interesting motive, just then.

  "It could be the effeminate type, " Gannet teased Devlin. "Male."

  "Could be. Sure," Devlin agreed mildly.

  "Or else some blowsy adventuress who'd cut your throat for a buck," Glodosky hinted.

  "Or a sweet and tender violet—who knows?" Devlin himself chuckled.

  "Not too likely—off the Earth, or even on it," Gannet stated.

  "Hey—what are you lugs tryin' to do—discourage me?" Devlin protested mournfully.

  "Of course not—we're your friends, and we just want you to be very realistic so you will never be disappointed," Glodosky
said. "Of course, probably, the former owner of your suit hocked it for the purpose of getting home to Earth, rather than to go farther. That's a more regular procedure for folks who go broke."

  "It is," Devlin agreed airily. "But who was it who once said, 'You never can tell...'? So what are we doing, anyway? Chasing skirts as our primary motive? We should have stood home..."

  "We didn't have the sense to do that, and now it's too late," Gannet laughed, meaning of course that if they had known about the events that they had just been through, in advance, they would never have had the nerve to start out at all. Now he was glad that they hadn't known....

  "We've got to collect our ships, from storage, and I've got to patch up the hole in mine. Then we can get some more fuel. And start out," Devlin said.

  They did all of that, clearing Mars at midnight for Ceres. Leaving with other Pusher vagabonds and their homemade craft, for the same destination. Mostly they were young, but a few were old.

  The stars were very bright and hard and unfeminine. But somehow they looked a little different now, to Gannet. There were women around in space, too. Adding another mystery to mystery. Being alive—that was a supreme success in itself—made him feel good. And lightly, for the sake of old-time joshing, which was back for now, he laughed over the radio, and said:

  "Just because you got her tin overalls doesn't make her your girl, Devlin." Then, strapped prone in his cabin, against the weightlessness, he slept. The slightly curved course outward was well plotted. The millions of miles reeled by.

  Later, much later, he saw the speck of Ceres growing before him. There was a fuzzy haze of light around it—boulders, meteors, dust, wreckage, following lunar paths and encircling it continuously, chained by its slight gravity. There was a glow from its great smelters—metal being the great new industry of the asteroids. But these countless thousands of bodies, most of them too small to be seen from Earth in a telescope, ranging singly and in clusters in an orbit almost half a billion miles across, could not be thought of as a single place, like Mars. Distances were too vast. To say that you went to the Asteroid Belt, this was not a very definite explanation.

  Gannet watched eagerly, wondering how much more eagerly Devlin must be watching. This region was legendary. Here a thing that people had worried as a possibility for Earth, too, had actually happened. An unnamed, inhabited planet had been blown to pieces, the latter following now many scattered orbits, around the sun. And Gannet's reveries about the region must have been then of the same quality as Devlin's. How quickly it must have happened. How cities, and whole sections of country must have been hurled skyward, the flames from the atomic explosion, and from the hot guts of the planet, being chilled and quenched quickly in the cold of space, so that destruction of that ancient culture had not been sudden and complete. In fact many of its artifacts had been perfectly preserved in the cold vacuum of space, and had made the millions of years that had passed since, mean nothing to them. The handiwork of Mars. Some gigantic torpedo, perhaps. But Mars' people had died too, in that great conflict. Perhaps both sides had fought for empire.

  Gannet and the others had to cut their speed to a crawl as they approached Ceres, to avoid collision with the yet uncleared lesser wreckage of the ancient planet. But they got through to what someone had called Boom Town, safely. At the spaceport the rotating beacon lights were reflected from a square mile plain of almost flawless and polished nickel steel—not imported, and not smelted in furnaces here, either. It had been smoothed as, on Earth, a native granite outcropping might be smoothed and cut. Nickel steel, the stuff of many meteors, unrusted in the absence of oxygen. And Ceres was like a gigantic meteor—a fragment that had come from deep inside the bulk of the original planet.

  After their landing, Gannet, Devlin, and Glodosky, stood in a group by the administration building of the port. Devlin didn't mutter, now. He spoke aloud.

  "The theory of planets' inner structure," he said. "Materials settling out in layers, according to density, down to the center. Light rocks on top, heavier ones below, then lots of this nickel steel. And at the center the really heavy stuff, in quantities undreamed of on the surface. Gold, lead, osmium. And a whole string of radioactive elements. But on Earth, and on other regular planets, all that stuff is buried too deep—maybe forever out of reach. Not here, though..."

  "Sure—we heard about all that before, Devlin," Glodosky laughed. "Look at the town. Boom Town. A corny name. But honest."

  It certainly was honest. It had the air of having been built overnight—but according to a precise plan. And it was still being built, swiftly—and for a swift, efficient life. Scores of huge airdromes, of thin clear plastic, flexible, but sustained by the atmosphere inside, looked toward the airless stars. And there were hundreds of long, low buildings. Factories, hospitals, laboratories, barracks. From the mines of Ceres, on what had been its deeper side in the original planet, came the radioactive metals that powered the post-war reconstruction on Earth, and the advance of industry, there, and the colonial surge into space. From the uranium of Ceres could be made more of the dynamium that was fuel for the Harmon Pushers.

  "Even the moon was nothing like this place," Glodosky remarked.

  "Let's not just stand gawping," Gannet advised.

  Their ships were wheeled into hangars, and they rode into town on a moving belt with their packs, and they found their way to a name registry office, where they were required to put down their own names, and could search for others. The calendar was different here, and arbitrary. There were numbered months of approximate Terrestrial length, divided into thirty watches, measured by the twenty-six-hour Cerean day.

  Thus they found the names, and the time of arrival of their three friends. "Fifth hour, third watch, twenty-second month." Long ago, of course, that turned out to be. But the address of the hostelry was also given. "Merret House, Fourth Lane, Second Cross."

  In the ridiculously low gravity, they almost floated to their destination. Harwin was in the lobby. The ex-infantryman. He searched their faces, which must have changed some. His own features had thinned down some, but his pale eyes still had that light challenge. He wasn't surprised to see them. Just pleased.

  "Good thing I came back from prospecting," he said. "Figured you'd be around soon. But Lenz and Roscoe have gone out again... Lenz thinks he wants to set up some kind of business. He's got that kind of a head. Roscoe's just a big lug..."

  "Funny we could find even you in a place as big as the Asteroid Belt," Gannet offered, grinning. "I mean it strikes me funny. Of course it's easy enough, as long as you are on Ceres... Why didn't you write to us...?"

  "Why didn't you write to me?" Harwin laughed back at him. "Don't worry. Same old story of separated pals, wandering. Too much happening. Too much that's new. New people, new things. No spare time. And the past getting a little dim."

  "Tell him what happened to us, Glodosky," Devlin said.

  "Glad to," Glodosky began. But Harwin's interest turned out to be only mild. When Glodosky was finished talking, he had his inning.

  "What I'll tell you will be mostly a build-up for the Asteroid Belt," he said. "You can find anything around here from a quick finish to fame and fortune—maybe in a way that you could never imagine beforehand. You've heard this before from the explorers books. Gold? Hell—don't worry about gold! Think of wreckage floating in space—never changed through all the ages, since the Great Blowup. As if a freighter, loaded with household supplies, and everything that makes for civilization, came apart in space. Only it's not our civilization. It was one that was bigger than ours, some ways. Do you know that, on a little piece of the surface of the old original planet, I once slept in what was left of the house of an ancient inhabitant? That house was stout enough not to fall completely to pieces by that shock. And I made what I suppose you'd call the stove in the place work. Self-contained power unit. But I didn't even bring it back with me. The old owner was there, too—dried up and on his pallet, black—with bones sticking out of him, and
not human at all. Kind of a leathery sack, with dried out tendrils, and eye-stalks sticking out of him... But these are just hints, of course. There are a lot of things and devices that you can find, that you'd have a tough time figuring out. Just floating in the emptiness. Maybe they're whole devices, or just fragments of the whole, torn apart in the blowup. There are ideas in that stuff. Here, Devlin. You ought to be good at this sort of thing. Catch!"

  The thing that lashed through the air to Devlin's palms was a maze of wheels and grids and sliding parts in a round crystal case. Devlin looked at it in awe that was like love. Of course he might never know what it was....

  And Harwin's voice ground on. "Things you find could blow up in your face. That has happened. Or it could be worth something. Of course there are the metal deposits, too—the mainstay of economics out here. You might as well say it's all like Aladdin's cave. But like that, it has a curse on it. You think you're a good guy, but wander around here for a while and you'll run into a situation where you know you're a wolf and a murderer. That is when death is on your tail, and morals don't mean anything..."

  You could see Devlin's eyes light up. This was for him. Even if Harwin was just gassing, some—as probably he was....

  They jabbered on through most of the night. But in the morning Glodosky, the med student, headed for the general hospital. "I'll play it safe," he said as he left. "I've been riding my luck heavy lately. And you know what it's like. So I'll play it slow, now..."

  Gannet found that Devlin had already left the hotel. He shrugged, and went to see Harwin's prospector's gear, put up in a warehouse. When they both returned to the hotel, Devlin was there in the lobby again. He looked fuddled. But he was all smiles.

  "Here she is, guys," he said. "Miss Jeanne Pauls."