Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Just then Devlin sounded sure—convinced. A guy who had jiggled into his own particular place.

  "How did the Martians blow up this world?" Gannet asked. "Has that been figured out yet?"

  For a second Devlin looked scared—as if the question posed a hidden answer that still might be a danger out here. "You can guess that it was atomic, of course," he said. "Otherwise there's not much data—yet... But forget it. What else have I got to show you? Books on thin sheets of metal, that nobody has read much of yet, you no doubt know. No—let's get back to photography. Lots of guys bring lots of half burned junk in. And I get the restored prints. I've got quite a collection. Here..."

  Gannet hadn't really seen the like, before. Those photos in color, might have been taken yesterday. High thin clouds, no doubt ice crystals. Deep blue sky, almost like that of Mars. But the hills and plains were green. Often the vegetation was planted in rows, too. Gannet had walked across such rows, dried out and blackened, on chips of the outer crust of that world. The surface asteroids, they were called.

  And in the various pictures, shapes reared up—quasi-human at a distance, leathery, decorated with bright bits of color. They were the many mummies he had seen, filled out, animated again. In some pictures, they bent over strange machines. In others—well there were a great deal of others.

  Gannet laughed. "You want to put old machinery together, Devlin," he said. "Why not put the whole planet together again? The pieces are all floating in space. Including all the smallest ones, which can't be seen from Earth, they'd make a world as big as Mars. It would be a real restoration."

  "You think you're joshing," Devlin told him with a grin. "I thought of that. It could be done. With lot of Pushers, the pieces could be collected. Still—what for? The asteroids are better as they are. They make a very special region. Which brings me to something else..."

  Devlin spread some plans on a table. "A house," he continued. "A covering of thin, transparent plastic, with an inner layer of gum as a sealer against meteors. A sort of huge tent, covering house and gardens. The life of Riley. It could be nice. Beautiful. It's happening already, Gannet. Permanent colonists, loaded with their junk, are moving in. To farm. To feed the miners. To make things like they were at home. Me—I'm a family man, now. There's got to be a place for kids..."

  Gannet felt elation creeping over him. Something like a meaning was, or seemed, clear. One civilization creeping over the wreckage of another. Order coming out of chaos. From the murder of colonial beginnings. And the harshness of space. He really felt part of something big. He felt that his life was well spent. But maybe the groundwork was laid, and it was time for a shift. He'd had enough of the lonely thrills of vast distance, and of the danger in it.

  He even looked at another kind of photograph—atop a cabinet of books. A girl just emerging from the gangling stage. A brat beginning to bud with great promise.

  "I saw her before, Devlin," he said. "Just before we left Earth."

  "Yeah, Gannet," Devlin said. "The brat. My sister. Kath... She's crazy. She wants to come here, too." His eyes teased.

  Gannet thought of the thousand times that he'd envied Tobias. The guy who had stayed home With his wife. The guy whose choice had been along the path of good sense.

  "It happens here, too," he said suddenly. "I'm gonna write to Tobias and his Kitty. I'm gonna put them straight. I wonder how they are. Life in a cottage. With roses. Well—that's a lot, too. I'll write right now..."

  Jeanne's expression sobered suddenly. "Don't do it, Gannet," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Tobias is sick." She touched a finger to her forehead.

  Gannet felt the prickles of surprise and strangeness again. "Am I guessing the reason for his sickness?" he asked.

  "Probably," Jeanne answered. Her eyes were soft.

  Gannet looked back in time to see Tobias pleading that he was not yellow. While he didn't live up to his own standard. All he had had to do was get rid of those ideas. Relax on Earth. Accept his Kitty's pattern. But he hadn't been able to. He was in an emotional trap. Maybe all people were, partly. You could die in space. But you could die on Earth, too.

  "Has his Kitty stuck with him?" Gannet demanded.

  "Yes," Jeanne answered.

  "If he'd come along with us, he'd probably be both alive and sane," Gannet said.

  Devlin's grin was elfin. "Probably," he said.

  Gannet and Harwin spent several days on Ceres, loosening up and doing the town. Gannet still meant to stay. But at last Harwin grew bored.

  "It's fun for a while," he said. "But I like open space, better. I'd rather be on the pioneering end. Staying in Boom Town—well—what more is it than just another version of what poor Tobias did? No—don't let me influence you, Gannet. Do what you have to or want to..."

  Harwin was all in one direction. He belonged in his work. Gannet was not so sure. Most of the bunch belonged where they were. After over a year, he was still at loose ends, unsettled. He wanted to team up with Devlin. Maybe it was the idea of not taking too many chances with his neck—and of seeking security. But what had happened to Tobias on the safe Earth, sort of disturbed that notion. It was a prop knocked out from under him. And he liked the open regions of the Belt. The strange discoveries. The fun of relaxing in Refuge, after bringing in a profitable net load. It was a way of life that could get into your blood. The adventurer's vanity was in it.

  "Got to go wind up things with Roscoe and Lenz," he told Devlin. "But I'll be back—I guess..."

  They were an hour out of Ceres. They stopped to investigate a large meteor mass, which probably had been examined many times before. It was more or less just whim. The way the sun glinted on flakes of gold. Gannet got out of his ship. He stood on the chunk of gold fleeced wreckage, watching a string of colonists ships, trailing away toward the farther regions.

  Then, all of a sudden, he was very ill. The first thing he thought of was a heart attack. But he knew that that was unlikely. Out of nowhere, and out of a peaceful moment, disaster had come to him. He coughed inside his helmet, and tasted blood in his mouth. Blackness began to creep into his mind. He thought of rumors of the viruses of diseases kept in cold storage like other things, from the time of the ancients, and active again among the colonists. But there had never been any real substantiation of such talk.

  Then he heard the racing whir of his air-purifier that settled quickly back to an even hum. He thought of the fluid gum between the double walls of his space armor, that could quickly seal any small puncture, and of course now he knew what had happened.

  He thought of the distance, represented by an hour's swift flight back to Ceres. Across cold vacuum. He wondered if he'd ever see the place again. "Harwin!" he called hoarsely, and saw his friend veer his ship toward him as he blacked out....

  It was a long fuzzy pull back toward thready awareness. He smelled hospital smells, and saw the faces of his friends worried around him. But maybe he only dreamed it. It seemed that he was climbing a high hill, and couldn't quite make it. For a white he sank into darkness again.

  Then there was Devlin's indulgent voice chuckling:

  "You were hit by a meteor, Gannet. It sounds spectacular, doesn't it? A fast stray, from outer space, from outside the Belt. The usual kind—the size of a large grain of sand, and travelling up to twenty-five miles per second. Of course the Medics didn't find it. It went right straight through you from right shoulder to left thigh, and on out into space again. Like a long needle driven in the same course, and producing the same kind of wound—with hardly any time for the heat of friction to burn tissues. You know, don't you?"

  Of course he knew! His mind was almost defiant about it. He knew space, didn't he? What did Devlin think?... There were always those tiny meteors. On Earth the gravity drew millions of them into the atmosphere in a day. But the atmosphere, there, was a shield—they burned up quickly, and hurt no one. Here, there was none of that. Still, their distribution was thin. If there were fifty to a square mile in a
day, rarely would they hit a man. But there were not nearly fifty. The chance of a man being in a particular few cubic feet of space at a given time, to keep a tryst with a meteor from interstellar space, was slim. Yet it had happened before.

  "The danger to those hit is seldom large," Devlin went on. "And you know you'll be all right..."

  Yet if you wanted to, you could say that there was the intervention of Fate in it. Devlin didn't say anything to Gannet about a definite focusing now of the latter's plans. But he must know it was there. It was in his voice. Being ill or injured always swung a person away from rugged living. It was like having your mind made up for you. And Gannet relaxed in this at last. It was time for a shift, anyway. While he was still weak, he began drawing plans. He'd studied architecture at the U. hadn't he? Let Harwin, with the pioneer in him, chuckle and go away out into the wilderness.

  So Gannet went along with Devlin's idea. They had the funds to start. Gannet had piled up a lot in his year with Harwin. And Devlin, with his job, and with the proceeds of some new processes, and alloys figured out from the relics of the ancients—to which he acquired patent rights on his own—was almost as well heeled, himself. Without getting rich being the main thought, as with Lenz.

  "I want a certain mood to what we do, " Devlin said. "Otherwise, it's the same as with lots of colonists. Bringing the fruits and flowers of Earth out here and growing them..."

  Gannet agreed. The rest was rugged work and defiance of space again. They chose an asteroid almost an Earth day out from Ceres. It was a surface chip asteroid, from the old planet. One side held thirty square miles of ancient soil, in which water had been locked through the ages, in the form of ice. Most of the latter had not sublimated away even in the dryness of space, after the quick freeze that had followed that vast explosion.

  Here, in the negligible gravity they blew up their first great plastic air-bubbles with atmosphere brought out in cylinders from Earth. Each covered acres of the plain, where the rows and stalks of old agriculture showed. The ground thawed, for the plastic roof cut off only the dangerous rays of the distant sun, whose heat was not diminished by great depths of atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of confined air did its work....

  Oh, you kept your weapons close to you. You couldn't tell what might happen, as far out as this. But you kept working. Drilling into the deep subsoil, and introducing heat units to thaw the ice. Then attaching pumps, pumping it into old storage cisterns. A score of such wells they drilled outside of their airdromes. But the cisterns were under the latter. Water was of first importance. For itself. And for the oxygen you could free from it.

  It was tough work for just two men and their machines. But it was best that there were just two, whose ideas matched, and who could trust each other.

  In the warm, thawed ground, strange vegetation, shaggy and dark green, began to sprout, proving the fact of suspended animation in the frozen cold, and through the ages, at least in the case of some seeds. But they added Earthly grass. They planted young trees. They planted vegetables. Vegetation around them would keep the air fresh, charged with oxygen for them to breathe.

  Then, using the rectangular blocks of stone from the ruins, they began to build Devlin's house. Though the more interesting ruins, the more complete ones, they did not disturb. Those with the strange cells and passages that humans could not use.

  It was Devlin's house which they built first, for Devlin had a wife and son waiting on Ceres. Gannet had not bitten off that much to chew. He was aware of being smarter than that. It was in his grin.

  To Devlin's joshing he had quick answers. "Right now I'm in this to help you, and for the profit of business, and for fun," he said. By fun he probably meant seeing something blossom out under his fingers. Something that meant that space was really being colonized. And not in a half-scientific and a half haphazard way. Like rough and lusty Refuge, with its banks, foundries, and trading places.

  But it wasn't to be said that he didn't think of the future. All in proper order. It wasn't to be said that he didn't think of Kath Devlin's picture. Kath who was still in high school, on Earth. Or of the girls of Refuge, even.

  Devlin's wife and infant son, David, came out as soon as Devlin's house was finished. Then, long before Gannet's first house was finished, he had a dozen prospective buyers—men who had made good among the asteroids, and could pay the fantastic prices prevalent there.

  Too bad that no one knew what lay in the ground of this asteroid. A thing made on Mars. A dangerous thing.

  Devlin and Gannet expanded their housebuilding operations. They also admitted people to build for themselves—to set up shops, and residences, and metal refineries, as in other places. But they retained strings of control. Their plan must be followed. There must be beauty, and not disorder. The commerce must be hidden. The mellow feeling of a countryside in summer must be preserved.

  So that was their life for six years. By that time their asteroid was populous, and shaggy green, under its many connected domes. There had been a dozen times when Gannet and Devlin, and those who had joined them, had to drive off bands of space hopping marauders. But the result was being achieved.

  They had a central lake, a great park, rich farmlands, and a thousand houses, perched sometimes, at fantastic angles on weird crags, for gravitational force—what there was of it—was always toward the asteroid's center of gravity, while it was not round. Going straight out toward either end of it, was always up hill.

  Glodosky came out with the clinic. He was a physician, now, having completed his studies in a university branch attached to the hospital on Ceres.... To this record, he had already added important research work....

  And Kath Devlin came out from Earth. One of the first things Gannet said to her, was: "Miss Devlin—you'll be disappointed here, now. The setup is too easy. You'd like to build from scratch. It's in your eyes..."

  She was bronzed and beautiful. Let's see. She'd be about twenty, now. She liked blue. And he had meant what he said. She had all of Jeanne's courage. But she was a finer drawn type. She was here to work in the clinic.

  Her eyes smiled as they went over him with that kind of searching which told him that she had heard a lot about him from her brother.

  "Maybe you're right, Gannet," she said. "But the building goes on for a long time, doesn't it?"

  She called him Gannet without explanation or apology, as if it were what she was used to. And what he said to himself was that here in her was his future....

  When the asteroid tumbled over, turning like a pivoted chip in its regular twenty-two hour period, and it was night, he held her hand. He told her how long he had thought about her—since the day he'd left Earth. And she said, "This seems to be the way it's supposed to be—Norb. Yes—I know your name is Norbert... I thought about you, too..."

  It was pretty well settled, then. Though he didn't want to hurry her. She might not want that. Meantime Glodosky developed a crush. He worked with her all day, on local people, and on people moving among the asteroids. Mostly it was that kind of hangdog crush. Common out here. Women still were not plentiful.

  Maybe Kath was just flattered. "He talks about the farther planets. The giants. And little Pluto—little by comparison, way out in the cold and the gloom. The satellites of Jupiter have already been reached, haven't they? I guess that was natural, wasn't it? But the others are so much farther. I hear that an expedition to Saturn didn't come back. Considering that the Rings are composed of meteors, I guess dangerous strays must be plentiful there, too... But what will anyone do with Saturn's satellites? Or the farther planets? They're all so big and cold? Of course I know my brother has found something. Still—well—nobody's tried yet for farther than Saturn, though the Harmon Jet is perfectly good for the greater distances. He talks about going, Norb..."

  Kath's eyes were warm. Right then Gannet would have liked to poke Glodosky in the nose. Glodosky's crush was perfectly evident to anyone who saw him within half a mile of Kath....

  But there came
a moment when all this seemed unimportant. It was while some underground storehouses were being dug. Part of a rusted steel cylinder began to be uncovered. Gannet didn't even know it had happened.

  Yet he did remember those last minutes very clearly, later. Walking in the late afternoon with Kath. Walking, or rather gliding. You could swim up through the air, if you wanted to. A couple of small boys were doing just that, nearby. Tussling and yelling.

  Then the explosion came. An eye-searching blop of light. A delayed but terrific concussion that knocked them prone. Out toward the farther end of the asteroid. The ground opened and turned to dazzling fire, right in the middle of a bunch of air bubbles.

  Gannet could guess what it was. "An old bomb," he yelled. He knew of course that it couldn't be anything like the giant that had destroyed the planet, perhaps after drilling to its core. But a bomb from the same conflict. A dud, before...

  There was no time to speculate on such matters, now. There was just the rush to help. With Kath. Ten hours later, they and the other people were still laboring like demons, sweating, burned by radiation. Five hundred people were dead. A third of the populated area was wiped out. It was not news to Gannet or Kath to see charred bodies. Of adults and infants. That had been part of the war. But experience did not diminish horror. Two hundred people were injured. Most of them not badly. For that was the nature of the bomb. It either incinerated its victims completely, or left them all but untouched outside of its zone of action.

  There was one exception. Glodosky. He whom circumstance seemed always to have conspired against. He was not at the clinic. Which was left untouched. He was off duty, and on a minor errand. He would have been crisped by the blast, except for those mechanical legs of his. They kept walking after he had all but lost consciousness. They walked him out of the zone of intense heat, before the latter, combined with the airlessness after a dome collapsed, could have full effect. And so space-suited men picked him up. He was black from head to foot. His clothing was burned off, and his skin. His lungs were seared inside. His body was ripped open. His lips, ears, and eyes were burned away.