Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  But all that is but a foretaste—a beginning. Beyond Mars, both newer and older, lies the asteroid belt—wreckage of a world that exploded, but that was peopled once, too. It is a wonderful, terrible region. Far beyond it lie Jupiter and his moons. As yet, very few rockets have ever gone that far. Then comes ringed Saturn. Then Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.... Then the eternal and inconceivably distant stars....

  Is it remarkable, then, that there are scarcely any young men left in the little towns around the White Sands spaceport? The opportunity is close at hand. Always, men are needed. Whether they achieve satisfaction, or even the glory of progress made, or merely hurl themselves into the maw of a new kind of Moloch, is a matter of viewpoint and chance. For out there are both danger and opportunity. Out there are swift death in many forms, incalculable riches, and gut-twisting strangeness....

  Few can stay behind. So there are empty chairs and saddles, and unslept-in beds in boyhood rooms. And the stories come back—of success and disaster. All this stamps itself into the local attitude of life. It is a hard attitude, that worships courage, and smiles a knowing and contemptuous challenge to those youths who seem to lack it.

  Of all the stories, perhaps there is none quite as whimsical and strange, in its own way, as that of Harvey Vellis. He was born, it seemed, to be the butt of bullies. That was only part of his ill luck. For what can anybody really do about being a skinny little twerp? Besides, he had a certain kind of mother. “Yes, Ma. All right, Ma,” was about all he ever said to her. Some people thought that she was the kindest woman on Earth. But maybe she was a cruel, possessive tyrant. On the other hand, maybe she was just a frightened widow who remembered too well that her husband had joined the crew of the Artemis, and had died in a crash on the moon.

  Harvey Vellis became a clerk in Mr. Finkel’s General Store, in the little town of Dos Piedras, where he had been born. For a vegetative type of youth, this might have been all right, for Mr. Finkel was a kind, understanding man. The trouble was that Harvey was far from vegetative. The trouble, further, was that people who had always been around him, had drawn their own picture of what his soul was like. Their belief in that picture was so strong that they had made him believe in it too. They had never let him be himself.

  Day after day, year after year, he heard the same challenge and the same joke, flung at him in one form or another, by one person or another. First it was by his swashbuckling contemporaries—big Dink Darrell was the best example—then, as they vanished into the space wilderness, by younger boys, even by tots....

  “Hey, Harv—when you blasting out? Next year, maybe? Think your Mamma’ll let you?”

  It is an old tale. The repetitious cruelty of it sits on the shoulders of its victims, a vulture, destroying not courage so much, but confidence. The laughs have a jagged edge. In the focus of attention from all sides, one becomes self-centered—not in a proud way, but in another way that makes one feel that, in all the world and in all history, there has never been another as gutless and pink-livered as one’s own self.

  IT WAS doubly hard for Harvey Vellis, for all of his wishes and dreams belonged to space. How many books about Venus, Mars, and the outer planets had he read? How often did he fondle the quarra weed, dry and dead now, which he used as a book-marker?

  A spaceman, who had picked it casually near the point of Syrtis Major, that strange, triangular depression thousands of miles in extent, near the equator of Mars, had dropped it as casually on Main Street in Dos Piedras, and Harvey, recognizing it for what it was from his booklore, had pounced upon it as a treasure.

  How often had he sniffed its faint, dry aroma, as if to it clung the frosty pungence of dusty, dehydrated winds that no longer contained enough oxygen to sustain Earthly human life? Of such stuff is the fabric of romance woven. And it was to such pathetic trifles that Harvey Vellis clung. Echoes they were, from a great distance; and they touched Harvey as echoes of music touch the ears of a music lover, starved for what he needs.

  Time went on. Harvey worked and dreamed. In his spare time he studied the blueprints of spacecraft and space armor, until he knew their structure by heart. And he tinkered with odds and ends ot equipment, learning all that he could about things related to the distance that it seemed he could never reach. He even achieved a certain adjustment to his unpleasant lot. His cheeks forgot how to flush under the hazing; his response, instead, became a small, wry smile, and a shrug that hid some of the hurt inside him.

  Death comes just as surely to those who live sheltered lives as it does to those who live dangerously, and it came at last to Harvey Vellis’ mother. “I suppose you’ll blast out, now, Harvey,” she said to him near the end, not realizing the heavy handicaps she had laid upon him. “You won’t have to look after me any more.”

  Those were the words that she poured into the gulf of grief and disorientation that her passing meant to him. It was a mockery. And more of a mockery was the honest if contemptuous pity which he read in other eyes. People, it seemed, were no good to him, even when they meant well. For a week he kept to himself, fogged and lost.

  There was one good thing about what his life had been like—perhaps. Frustration had been like the restraining of a steel spring, or the wiring-down of the safety valve of a boiler. It had built up the power of the drives in him, impelled them to push past fear and ruined confidence, toward what he had always wanted.

  What he wanted was not entirely clear or simple. He was too naive and too full of dreams to aim quite practically. His goal was a vagueness. Out, somewhere toward the vastness, was as far as his thinking about it went—and that, certainly, was dangerous. Just what he would do to live, he did not know....

  He had saved up twelve hundred dollars. Passages to Mars cost a thousand. How was it that he did not simply go to the employment offices of the space lines so near at hand? How was it that, instead, he drove his old car to Albuquerque, and bought a ticket to Mars there? That, when he might easily have gotten a job, and saved his money?

  The answer is easy and old. His emotions were ill, so he could not do things so directly. People that he knew would see him; they’d wonder, they’d laugh, they’d pity. They’d stare at him as if they had caught him trying to commit suicide. Maybe, in fact, what he contemplated amounted to the same thing. For him, the inept, helpless coward—when it was so terrible and wonderful out there. . . . No, he could never face those eyes that knew him. Before he felt that he would curl up and die in an agony of stage-fright. It was better to slip away quietly, seek the shelter of anonymity on a strange planet.

  Maybe, in all that he forced himself to do, there was courage of a sort. No human can live for years with a handicap or with fear without achieving a kind of courage.

  He put his affairs in order as quietly as he could. Mr. Finkel pretended not to know what was happening, for that was the kindest way. In his heart he was both glad and worried about what Harvey Vellis was doing.

  Harvey boarded the train for the short journey to the spaceport at midnight—the best time to slip away. There were many faces around him—mercifully those of people that he did not know. Hard, bronzed faces—eyes that had seen much that he had not seen—that took coolly what to him was so new and different. They were blasé and unruffled. Their luggage bore stickers from New York, London, Paris—Kaie-Yeel, Venus; Vananis, Mars. Among such company, Harvey Vellis felt like the awkward yokel that he was.

  The girl beside him in the train smiled at him. Her blonde hair was cut in a long bob, and she sat casually. Her blue dress was elegantly simple. She was pretty, but not too pretty. She even looked a bit rough-hewn. Her eyes were gray. For a second they probed him, and he felt like an insect on a pin. He suspected, with the ready suspicion of the self-conscious, that all of his frustrated personal history was stamped in his face and figure for her to see, and laugh about silently, just as if she were one of those others who had always known him; and that he could never escape from himself with her, even for a minute. All of this was at least half so true
....

  But the sophisticate must often play parts that mask a true understanding for a reason. The reason can be kindness. Or it can be curiosity—especially in the case of a woman.

  LILLETH THOMAS was both kind and curious about the people who traveled with her. It was an old need in her—the need of the rolling stone for quick acquaintance—especially when the rolling is not started by one’s own desire to move, but by a parent’s love of the strange and different. Lilleth Thomas had been dragged around by her explorer father, everywhere. Not that she minded much—she loved newness herself. But deep in her was that primal need of all women—permanence and stability. A vine-covered cottage, maybe in Maine, or perhaps California.... That she saw nothing of the sort—and in fact nothing of any permanent meaning to her—in the worried, thin face beside her, did not stop her from being kind. “Hi, friend,” she said.

  “Hello, miss,” Harvey Vellis answered, feeling the first flash of companionship, a little of the release from self, a little of the velvet padding of enjoyment and romance. It was a golden net—a stepping into a dream that had never been real to him before.

  “First time Out?” he ventured.

  She shrugged, and did not lie directly. “There always has to be a first time,” she chuckled.

  An awful impulse to brag and lie and four-flush—to build himself up as an adventurer before this girl, seized Harvey Vellis. He resisted it, not from reasons of honor, but from fear of being found out, later, maybe, when they were blasting off from Earth, and the black sky of the void was beginning to be visible to eyes that dimmed under the pressure of an awful acceleration.... Or was it too because a big hulk of a man passed him on the train—a spaceman that he knew? Harvey Vellis hunched his shoulders, and turned his face away, so that he would not be recognized, while the hulk with the glittering insignia passed by. Then he breathed again.

  “But Dad does a good deal of traveling,” the girl went on. “He’s sent me a few thousand photographs from just about everywhere. It’s a kind of propaganda that gets under your skin after a while. You want to travel, too.”

  “Any of the pictures handy?” Harvey asked eagerly.

  Lilleth fumbled with her purse. A moment later they were looking at color photographs—gigantic Venusian mountains, their peaks lost in the eternal cloud blankets; monsters that wallowed, slug-like, in vast marshes that corresponded to the Coal Period swamps on earth; men in vacuum armor, tramping over a Martian desert, where fantastically carven monoliths, fifty million years old, loomed against a purple sky.... Harvey Vellis' blood quickened.

  “That’s the kind of stuff that folks like us are made for!” he said fervently. The spell of strangers was upon him. He felt history, everywhere. What was happening, now. What had happened long ago. The civilizations that had risen and fallen. The far future. The universe.... Maybe his own day was at hand. Good fortune and fulfillment at last. It was at least a wonderful illusion. It was good that he did not know....

  The train moved swiftly. Incident followed incident, in the pattern of anyone’s first approach to a great spaceport. Presently, in the great waiting room, he was helping Lilleth Thomas with her luggage. His mind was full of wonder at each small detail of his surroundings. The white tile walls. The numbered exits to the various blasting-off platforms. The drone of the speaker: “Vananis— Gate nineteen— Vananis—”

  They moved with the other passengers, across the floor in a long line. Up the shielded gangway.... Harvey’s senses continued to grab hungrily at every impression. This was the liner Aries. Even its airlock portals looked wolfish, suggestive of distance and power. Within, everything was a combination of compactness, luxury, and careful preparation for danger.

  White was the predominant color here. Meaning cleanliness, and the precision of intricate machinery, functioning perfectly.... You could feel a kind of wordless poetry here. The contrast, the struggle between two sides of something. On one side, Nature, harsh, empty space, the planets, which, for ages had been symbols of the absolutely unattainable... And on the other side something that was harsh and wolfish, too—power, plan, design, shape, and strength—all to match and dominate fearsome distances and dangers. Here was the mind of man, thinking, studying—beginning to rule at last even the once-unattainable.

  There was a little of the brassy taste of fear on Harvey Vellis’ tongue, but not nearly as much as he had expected. For romance and companionship were like a velvet shell around him.

  “The red lights are on, Lilleth,” he said almost gleefully—her name and his had both come out in their conversation. “Fasten your safety belt. Just another thirty seconds more. Wait until we get out there, and see the stars of space. Wait till we reach Mars! It’s a frosty place. The air pressure there is the same as at a fifty-thousand foot altitude on Earth. Everything’s different—” He talked on, not lying directly, but hoping that she’d believe that he’d been there, seen the things he spoke about....

  The takeoff thrust began gently, but it grew and grew till even consciousness dimmed to the threadiness of a dream. But Harvey took it well enough. For him this trifle, this thing that millions of people had already experienced, became a pathetic triumph that gave him more confidence than he should have had. Mars lay ahead—yes—and he was ill-equipped for life there. But this was not the worst. How was he to know that he was to be hurled much farther than Mars, missing the red planet entirely?

  It was already decided by a chain of cause and effect. In the stout shell of one of the Aries’ atomic motors, there was a tiny flaw, almost beyond the power of the radar instruments that constantly checked every brace and plate and part of the space ship, to detect. In one of the bars of alloyed lead and heavy radioactive elements that served as fuel, there was a portion of metal where the mixture was too rich. Normally, there would have been no danger. But use that bar with the over-rich flaw at full throttle, and in mid-space, and things would be terribly different....

  But as yet this incident was fifteen days off.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Adrift In the Infinite

  AS IT went up into space, accelerating toward the velocity that would enable it to glide on indefinitely, the Aries began to rotate on its central axis, like a projectile. And the rotation provided, by centrifugal force, a substitute for gravity in the rooms and compartments arranged around the central light-well of the ship. The slightly curved floors of those rooms were all against the outer, cylindrical shell of the craft.

  For fifteen days life went on, more or less pleasantly, as it does on any great liner, of sea or air or interplanetary space. There were games, music, dining, dancing, making love.... Harvey walked with Lilleth, and, conforming to pattern, fell for her hopelessly.

  The best was at the beginning, when he did not know that she was not a green-horn like himself. The worst was when the truth about her came out—when people aboard the ship said things to her:

  “Hiyuh, Lilleth? Is Venus too small for you? What do you do, live on these rockets?” A young ship’s officer said that. A sleek, middle-aged woman added her bit: “How was it there in Kobolah, in the jungles, Lilleth? I got your letters, but you never finished the story about that tus plague. My dear, it must have been terrible....”

  Such knowledge, to Harvey Vellis, was hopeless separation from her. It brought on a hollow ache, and an exposure, again, to the rough edges of truth. But in such things Harvey had become toughened by long experience. He’d had too many disappointments in his time. Lilleth looked at him and smiled kindly. She might have explained things to him as to a child—that there were other friends who needed her time, too. But he only shrugged, and grinned back. So it wasn't necessary. He accepted his position as one of the lesser members of the crowd.

  But something sheltering was gone from him, and he felt weak and clumsy before harsh reality. He began to see his motives more starkly—his running away toward what he hoped was a new beginning of life—the thing that many people try to do, in spite of the old platitude that nobody c
an run away from himself.

  The days passed. The stars rolled around the ship, as the metal shell rotated steadily. In that rotating procession, Mars swelled to a beautiful, mottled globe. And then came the moment when small corrections of direction of flight had to be made, while at the same time the speed of the ship had to be checked somewhat, for the time of landing on Mars was not far off.

  So the forejets roared and flamed, hurling their dazzling incandescence, with a steady soughing, at full.... And then it happened. There was a hissing, roaring, rending sound, and a sense of impossible motion, as the ship began to spin, end over end, now, impelled to do so by the flood of fire that burst from her side. Alarm sirens hooted; airtight doors clanged; the pressure of the air around Harvey Vellis kept dropping, hurting his eardrums, deadening sounds, making his lungs feel tight.

  Into Harvey Vellis stabbed the jagged knife of pure terror, as he was hurled across the lounge. But he was not the only one to be frightened, for the strongest of men could feel open fear now.

  Lilleth had been among the crowd in the lounge, too. He saw her form hurtling among the others. Then he hit the wall with a solid thump. After that, most impressions were vague. Once he yelled, “Lilleth— I’ll— I’ll—” But she answered back, her voice trembling, “I’ll take care of myself, fella!”

  Against the wall stood a spacesuit, lashed into place. For a dragging second all that he saw was the legend in big white print:

  LOWER BODY INTO LEG UNITS, PULLRED TAB UPWARD TO CLOSE ZIPPER SEALER. PUT ON HELMET. TURN SEAL SCREWS AT THROAT.