Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  OPEN OXYGEN VALVE AT LEFT SHOULDER.

  His shaking fingers seemed slower than they were. Lilleth and some other people were at his side to help him, before he was finished. She fastened the last screw at his throat. “There, son,” she grated, a little contemptuous anger showing through her own fear. “Now jump!” Her voice came to Harvey through his helmet radio.

  There was no time to jump. For then the final blast came. Harvey was hurled out of the broken lounge. Out, out, and out, toward the rotating, sardonic stars... Some people were crushed, catapulted against more passive pieces of the disintegrating ship. Some spacesuits were torn, so that the air in them spewed out, and the blood in the flesh within began to boil away as the pressure dropped to zero.

  Man’s body is not made for outer space—for the beat of cosmic rays, and of hard ultra-violet light that can kill when there is no adequate shielding; for the absence of weight, that feels exactly like falling. It is only the human mind that has any connection with, or dominance over, such things. And sometimes the mind itself is broken in that awful abnormalcy.

  For Harvey Vellis’ fear, then, there was ample excuse. There was an excuse, too, for the screams that came to his ears through his helmet phones from other people. But for him the fear was special, for he had been rated a coward. His spacesuit protected him from cosmic and other radiations, and he was breathing good air. But his feet, in heavy space boots, kicked against the awful void, beneath him, all around him. It was like a dizzying height, infinitely extended, infinitely terrible. All of his reflexes were wrong. He could not swim, fly, or walk. He was in a far worse position than any fish out of water.

  He tried to scream, but his horror was too great. Only a ragged squawk came out of his constricted throat. He clutched at anything he could reach, trying to suppress that awful sense of separation from everything. Thus he got hold of another drifting, space-suited figure. And another... One was a little Mexican steward. The other was Lilleth Thomas. Both figures were limp. They had been hit by flying fragments.

  One thing more Harvey did. Maybe the impulse deep behind it was the desire to prove himself a man. Mostly, though, it was just clutching reflex action, and an instinctive urge to seek shelter. He grabbed at a great bale that hurtled past, blown from the hold of the Aries. It was fabric-covered, and tied with cord. Somehow he managed to tear into the fabric, and get under it, and draw the other two forms in after him. To him it seemed safer there under the fabric; and the great bale was something to cling to. Futile, of course ... He knew it right away. This was the end. The end of his wild lunge toward a better life.

  He did not realize that hiding himself and the others in the bale was the worst thing he could have done. He could not think reasonably. When he fainted, he thought it was death....

  HE DID not awaken for hours. By then the life rockets that had not been destroyed in the blast of the Aries had already landed on Mars. They had picked up all visible survivors. The rescue ship from Vananis had likewise come and gone.

  Harvey regained his senses gradually, with the prayers of the little Mexican steward to his matron saint droning in his earphones. The two other spacesuits were still in contact with his own. He felt one of them squirm a little. He turned toward it, and some dumb and hopeless curiosity caused him to peer through its face plate. There he saw the features of Lilleth Thomas. They were ghastly pale. Her eyes were very big. Her lips trembled. There were beads of sweat on her cheeks.

  “Are you all right?” he stammered thickly.

  Her lips moved stiffly. “I guess so,” she answered hollowly through the phones. “I was knocked out—I think. Something hit me across the shoulders. No harm done to my spine—or anything. At least I can still move my toes. I’m all in one piece—if that makes things all right. Only—only I’m scared to death. ”

  Her words ended with a choking sob.

  It was then that the little Mexican grabbed hold of her spacesuit and clung to it. “Ayudame!” he pleaded. “Help me, lady! I know you are strong and smart. I’ve heard the stories. You are Lilleth Thomas, daughter of the great explorer. Ojalá—perhaps you might know what to do. But no—not even God can help us now. I am José Eugenio Palmas Alvarez, and I’ve got to die out here—slow....”

  Joe Palmas was not visibly hurt, either. Like Lilleth, he had been hurled in the same direction as whatever it was that had hit and stunned him—hence the force of the blow had been lessened. But the scare in his face was an awful thing to see. His voice was a squeaky rustle in that terrible stillness.

  The stars all around were bleak, hard pinpoints in the black distance. And the small, rusty crescent that was Mars was shrinking away to sunward. Harvey and his companions had passed Mars, and were hurtling on, outward, toward that region of the wreckage of an exploded planet—the asteroid belt. Around them, moving with them in a gently spinning swarm, were the fragments of the Aries, its cargo and appointments.

  There was no hope of being found or rescued now. For Harvey there was only the thought that, ten thousand or a million years hence, someone might discover their spacesuits, with their mummified bodies still inside. For to all intents and purposes they had been buried alive—in an unbreathable vacuum many millions of miles deep. When the air-purifiers in their suits, gave out—

  Could Lilleth Thomas be blamed so much, when now in her own terror, the fairness in her gave way, and she began to hurl wild, half-hysterical accusations? She was strong and just, but human.

  “It’s your fault!” she shrilled at Harvey Vellis. “We’d all have been seen and rescued, if you hadn’t hidden us in this bale! You greenhorn fool—you—you—” She stopped, as if realizing suddenly that it was she who had spoken like this. “Oh— I’m sorry! I didn’t mean— How could you know? How could anybody know?”

  They were all clinging to the bale—half inside its fabric wrapper and half out. Harvey might have remained unaware of the result of what he had done, if the girl hadn’t spoken. But now he knew. Her words went stinging through his mind like bullets. Should he mind being accused and called names by her, now? Should such trifles matter? But they did matter, as truth always does.

  He might then have gone hysterical, as he thought he must. But there was far more strength in him than he realized. It was not courage that he lacked, but confidence. He was used to blundering, feeling the fool. That kind of experience had hardened a part of his nature, and that hardness was courage.

  All that they still had to lose was life. That loss seemed inevitable—if they succeeded in prolonging life, it seemed only a prolongation of mental torture toward madness. Still, Harvey Vellis could not quite accept such logic. He was like a cat responding to the instinct of self-preservation. But he was also a man trying to think of a way to make some amends for guilt. Without the latter, he might have been wholly animal, not trying to plan.

  He grew angry. He growled too—in self-defense, for once, hurling his words against her far greater experience. “All right!” he snapped, his frayed nerves making his voice quiver. “You needn’t try to take anything back! I heard what you said!”

  For a minute he looked around them at the drifting wreckage. It was a fantastic display of things that were utterly out of place in the depths of space. There was a milling cloud of beautifully upholstered chairs and other furniture, fragments of metal plating, crates, boxes, bits of wood and paper ... The wood, paper and fabrics were already turning black, as if they were being charred. Not in the ordinary manner, by oxygen and fire, but by the awful dryness of space, which, aided by the sun’s fierce rays, unscreened by any atmosphere, was sucking the oxygen and hydrogen in the proportions of water, out of all organic substances, leaving behind the black carbon.

  Hurry, he thought. Hurry, hurry... Maybe it’s a matter of time. Oxygen to breathe, first, or the apparatus to provide it. Then water, if it can be obtained. Then food, before it becomes inedible. With luck, maybe we can last a week. Or even a month.

  HARVEY was like a man doomed by an incura
ble disease, hoarding his last few days. In fact, to collect and hoard was part of the driving impulse in him.

  There was no great planning necessary for what he had to do. It was only the naive audacity of it that was strange. For a moment more he searched among the swirling wreckage for a beginning point. Then, with quivering, clumsy fingers, he began to tear cord from the great bale. He tied the pieces of cord together, and left one end attached to the bale; the other end he tied about his middle. Then, desperate to get things done, he leaped.

  He did not leap wildly, without purpose. His theoretical book knowledge about how material objects behave in space was complete enough. Only his physical actions were clumsy.

  He shot toward a great fragment of the ship, drawing the cord after him. He clutched at the fragment, found an airtight door broken from its hinges; but he could see that it was not beyond repair. There were two richly appointed staterooms inside, and part of a corridor. The fragment of the ship was rotating slowly, but what did that matter, here, where there was no appreciable gravity—no up or down? The artificial gravity once produced in the Aries by the centrifugal force of its rotation was lost here, for the arrangement was wrong. The fragment was only pivoting lazily upon its own center.

  In an emergency-supply compartment, Harvey found that ever-present testing device, the Geiger counter, used wherever there was any danger that atomic energy might go wild. After the explosion of the jet-motors of the Aries, much of its ruins might be tainted—“hot” with deadly radioactivity. Here, now, he watched the tube of the counter for the little flash, that, in the airlessness, where no sound could exist, replaced the familiar clicking. Only once it came in a minute, and that was not enough to be dangerous.

  Now he went back to the unhinged door, and pulled the cord. Easily, in frictionless space, the great bale that harbored his two friends came toward him, bumping against the chunk of the wreck. With flying awkward hands, he lashed it down. Then he prepared himself another, even longer cord from the lashings of the bale, tied it to his middle and to a torn piece of plating on his island of safety, and leaped again, this time toward a great cylinder of oxygen. The Geiger counter he carried showed it to be untainted, so he grasped it with his legs, locked his feet around it, and drew himself back to his chosen perch, by gathering in the cord toward him hand over hand. As with the bale, he tied the cylinder down.

  The process was repeated again and again, furiously. Often he had to discard things that were too “hot”, but his hoard began to grow. There were great flasks of water, cases of canned goods, furniture, crated machines meant to be used on Mars—the first bale actually contained, folded up, a huge, flexible, plastic dome. In the thin air of Mars it could be inflated, supported by the pressure of the air of normal Earth-density inside it—used as a habitation or a warehouse.

  Harvey Vellis labored like a demon. He labored awkwardly, like a person seldom required to do violent physical work, straining himself far more than necessary. But his conscientiousness was dogged and savage. Industry he had always had. And now, in it, he found a certain balm. It is always that way. Work diverts attention from disaster, releases tension. And bit by bit, as he became more adept at what he was doing, a little confidence—the thing he had always lacked—came to him. It was tragic that it should come so late, when he seemed inevitably doomed, no matter what he did. Still, it was something.

  At first he had just an audience. Joe Palmas, the little Mexican steward, gawped at him as at some mad fool. Lilleth Thomas stared at him, too. At first her gray eyes had a derisive bitterness, then a speculative puzzlement. The sweat dried on her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty again. Almost, she smiled. Almost, a little of that old dry humor came back. Did she say, “What are you doing—trying to grow up, son?” No, but she thought it gently, and with a chip of awe. And somehow, in spite of everything, the awe was a comfort to her.

  “A new game?” she said into her helmet phone. “May I play?”

  The sullen Harvey Vellis did not answer, but just the same she found cord for herself, and imitated him. Joe Palmas, his dark face very grave, followed suit, in his plodding, precise way.

  For hours, maybe days—for how could you tell out here where the sun seemed hardly to move?—the toil went on. Inside space gloves, hands developed vast blisters which went as unnoticed as the ache in muscles pushed to the limit of their capacity. Of course three humans could never have done so much work on Earth, but here there was no gravity.

  Lilleth Thomas even tried at last to lighten the situation with some scraps of humor. “We make a big bundle and take it to market,” she chanted almost gaily, sweat again coursing down her cheeks, but this time it was the sweat of toil. “What do we do with all this stuff?”

  "Try to live for a while!” Harvey Vellis snapped back.

  “Sure— I know. That’s at least partly a good answer,” she said almost contritely. "Only—” But there she stopped. They were going away from the sun—they were powerless to turn back. They might even jury-rig a jet-motor. But they could never make it drive this great, crude, spherical bundle that they were building around the two-room fragment of the Aries. It lacked utterly the perfect balance of a ship of the void. It would never go the way they wanted it to go. So they’d hurtle on, perhaps through the mysterious asteroid belt, to be smashed by flying fragments; or perhaps they would pass it, to freeze out there in the awful darkness, maybe returning sunward years later, when the gravity of the sun pulled them back, locking them in an elongated cometary orbit.

  But Lilleth Thomas did not wish to talk of such things. It was bad enough to remember.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Terror Belt

  AT LAST the task of collecting flotsam was almost finished. It was then that Lilleth Thomas took up action of her own. “Come on, Joe,” she said to the Mexican steward. "Our great master of ceremonies doesn’t like us. But we could maybe fix the door of the place where we’re supposed to live.”

  She was not unhandy with tools, and the latter were among the items they had collected. Through the tunnel left in the packed load of stuff, that completely enveloped the piece of the spaceship, they crept to the door, and proceeded to fix its hinges, and the packing around it. So when Harvey came through the tunnel, trying to drag at one time a crate of charred grapefruit, a small atomic stove, a cylinder of compressed air, and a small air-purifying machine, still in its box, and intended for some remote human encampment on Mars, the door was ready to be airtight again.

  Harvey Vellis’ face, beyond the window of his helmet, was so haggard and sweat-streaked now, that it hardly looked human. "Come on, you two,” he growled. “Don’t gawp. Help me with the other stuff.”

  So they did. They brought in cylinders of water and oxygen; they brought in more food. And at last, panting, Harvey closed and bolted the door. He bolted it with furious haste, as if there were some terrible enemy just outside, in hot pursuit. A thing that he had to shut out. But it was only the terrible, harsh stillness of space, and the sardonic stars. Harvey was reacting against the things he had feared, though he had thought he would love them.

  Again Lilleth tried to inject a bit of humor into the moment. "A nice two-room apartment,” she chuckled. “I used to dream of a vine-covered cottage, in Maine or California. Oh, well, this is all right too. We’ve even got lights and a stove. Boy! Are we riding space in luxury! The lights still burn because each lamp has its own atomic battery. It’s almost like home here!”

  But somehow her words, and her mild, kidding sarcasm, grated against Harvey Vellis’ raw nerves. “Oh,” he growled. “You want a real apartment, do you? Even a house, with all the comforts of home, eh? What do you expect? Don’t you realize our position—yet?”

  He’d never been rated a grouch. And, yes, he knew what was the matter with him. It was what space, and the dark future, did to people. It was his guilt for their being in their present position, and his helplessness to really right matters—especially for Lilleth. It was his feeling of in
adequacy and inequality before her. It was his desperate wish for other circumstances, in which he might try to give her all that she wanted....

  She understood some of how it was with him. It made her feel tender toward him. But his awful seriousness exasperated her.

  “You know darn well that I was just joking!” she stormed. “That ought to help us some—if you could only see it! You’ve done fine, Mr. Harvey Vellis. Now just simmer down!”

  He looked startled and ashamed, for there was even a little sob in her voice. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Only—well—skip it.”

  “Skip what?”

  “Nothing. Except, I suppose, you ought to have things like that. A home. A place for kids. Any girl—” He was down on his knees on the floor, releasing compressed air from a cylinder with a wrench, so that the sealed-up rooms would have an atmosphere.

  Lilleth looked at him. Oh, gosh—why did people yearn for things most, when they were most impossible? Cockeyed human nature! And about Harvey, here—he looked such a twerp, and yet he struggled so hard. Lilleth Thomas was confused.

  Now he had the air-purifier mechanism out of its box. He set its little atomic motor going. There was a cartridge in the mechanism, containing a special set of electrodes. Till it burned out, it could split up the carbon-dioxide that lungs exhaled, setting the oxygen free to be breathed again.

  Lilleth forced a small, hard laugh. “Me with a home?—nonsense!” she said. “I’m a drifter.”

  But for a second his glance at her was both stern and very soft, as if he knew that she was lying. It was a wrong thing for him to do to her—make her yearn more and more for the impossible.

  “Listen, Pal Harvey,” she said. “You’re all fizzled out. Go into that stateroom, tie yourself to a bunk so you won’t go drifting off, and get some sleep. Take Joe with you.”