Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  For once, he grinned. “Not until I get out of this spacesuit and chew on a grapefruit,” he answered.

  “Not any more than a grapefruit,” she told him. “You know that the space-sickness is coming, don’t you? Lots worse than sea-sickness. Lack of weight does it, after a while. The nervous system gets disoriented. The lymph-glands bog down before they adjust—and in some people they never do. The mind is disturbed—as if being adrift in space isn’t enough. Me—I feel a bit queasy already....”

  Harvey only nodded, grimly. Joe Palmas, having removed his space armor, was clinging to the wall. He had begun to pray to Santa Guadalupe again.

  Harvey and Lilleth punched holes in two grapefruit, and sucked the juice out. It was the only practical way, for they never could have put the juice in a glass; it would have globed out and floated gently away.

  As they sucked on the grapefruit, Harvey and Lilleth somehow fell into a whimsical conversation.

  “I wonder what the asteroid belt is like,” she mused. “Really.”

  “A world blew up,” he answered. “One as big as Mars—and inhabited by beings that weren’t men. It happened maybe fifty million years ago. You know the theory of the structure of planets. On the outside are the lighter materials—air, water, lighter rocks. But during the molten stages of a planet, when it’s new, most of the heavier materials sink naturally toward its center—forming spheres, or layers in order of density. Rock on top, then a lot of iron and nickel. Then the heavier things, thousands of miles deep, near the center. Gold, lead, osmium, uranium.

  “On that planet, according to somebody’s theory, a pocket of Uranium 235, somehow almost pure, and unalloyed with the more stable Uranium 238, which is generally far more common, began to form, growing progressively more pure, more dangerous. If you get together a sufficient mass of U-235, the stray neutrons speeding through it become concentrated enough so that a spontaneous chain-reaction is set off. That such a relatively pure mass was formed was probably a freak—because it hasn’t happened on any of the other planets. It must have happened quite suddenly, perhaps under the influence of a quake or volcanic action—no one can really know just how. But it blew that inhabited planet beyond Mars apart—exposed its insides—all the rich and the dangerous metals that are seen only in relatively small quantities on the surface of large worlds. Treasure—gold, of course, in huge amounts. And platinum, silver, radium. If it means anything. Stuff still almost untouched....

  “Treasure—too much to count—”

  UNCONSCIOUSLY, Harvey Vellis was trying to build up romance to push away the shadows a little, to gild the dark facts. But what he had said of treasure was no exaggeration.

  Lilleth carried the picture along. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Even Pop hasn’t been out there, yet. And that’s saying something. The asteroid belt was visited for the first time only about two years ago. There are a few men there now—beginning to look things over for the exploitation of resources. But I saw some pictures, somewhere. Some parts of the belt suggest the wreck of a spaceship. Things float in it besides rock and metal. Cornices of buildings. Machines. There’s more archaeology there than even on Mars. It’s supposed to be the strangest region in the solar system.”

  She paused. Trying to create a sense of glamor about the asteroids wasn’t easy. For all of that region was deadly, and it was so huge that the few thousand men who had gone there hardly mattered, as far as population went. How could you find any of them? Or how could they find you? To find a special grain of dust in a cornfield must inevitably seem easier.

  Lilleth and Harvey broke up the conversation at last. The men took one state-room, and Lilleth the other. Harvey Vellis slept a deep, uneasy sleep, shot through and through with feverish nightmares. Sometimes it seemed that childhood acquaintances of his were hazing him again—laughing at him. Especially Dink Darrell, with the huge body and the booming guffaw.

  At other times it seemed to Harvey that he groped through endless cobwebby distances, while the whole universe tumbled around him, and the awful space vertigo hammered at his stomach and head.... And it could hardly have been any better for his companions....

  It was like that for days, certainly. Harvey Vellis’ wristwatch was not now covered by the sleeve of his spacesuit, but he hardly bothered to look at it.

  They all came out of the sickness gradually. On the small atomic stove, Harvey warmed some canned soup in a small sealed pot. The liquid was transferred by steam pressure through a tube to flexible plastic flasks, which are part of the regulation equipment of all space-rescue kits. You squeeze the flasks, and the liquid, that you cannot pour where there is no weight, is forced into your mouth.

  Lilleth went around straightening things in the two rooms. She did not walk, she floated, shoving herself from wall to wall.

  Harvey said, “You look domestic.”

  Joe Palmas actually laughed.

  And Harvey felt that old pang of guilt, and the strange wish that he could give Lilleth what she wanted for the little time that remained to them. A bit of hominess could soften the harshness of the cold, unfriendly stars....

  That was why, when she said absently, “I wish we had a chessboard,” he closed the airtight doors of the two staterooms, so that the passage and the door outside could be used as an airlock, and went out to search among the hoard of stuff they had collected. He found chess equipment easily enough, in a drawer of a table from the game-room of the Aries. He also brought a phonograph and records—of use on spacecraft because radio and television programs do not easily reach as far as the ships go. Besides, he found some steaks, still palatable since they were in a sealed chest.

  “Harv, you’re nuts—you're absolutely nuts!” Lilleth said. But they cooked a steak, and anchored it to their plates with special clamps, and learned to eat it with pincers and surgical scissors. They played chess, gumming the bottoms of the pieces, and played the records, and some of the illusion that they wanted came to them.

  More days passed. They read, they slept. Until Joe Palmas announced, nodding toward a circular window: “I see some specks up ahead. Lots of ’em in a little row. Maybe we live some more—maybe not, eh? But so far I eat good. Like they say in Guadalajara—Belly full, heart happy. Barriga Ilena, corazón contento ... Verdad?...”

  Maybe that was all there was left, but Harvey Vellis wasn’t ready for it. You could call it fear, or whatever you liked. He just wasn’t ready, and he didn’t want Lilleth to be ready, either. He'd been thinking about it for a long time.

  Nor was Lilleth a fatalist. “So we’re catching up with the asteroids,” she said. “We could get into spacesuits, and try to rig a jet from the spare supplies. We can’t make it work very good, but maybe we could reduce speed some—lessen the danger of a crash. Come on, Joe—you too—”

  She was cool, alert, and ready, then. She was the girl who had nursed victims of the plague on Venus. Harvey felt proud of her. Maybe he even guessed that she was proud of him. It was a great thing to feel. They had a job and a viewpoint to share, at last.

  So, again, the three of them were furiously busy, on the outside of the great bundle of things from the wreck of the Aries. They broke out a spare jet from its crate. After six hours of toil, they had mounted it crudely but firmly, by clamping it between two great crates that contained machines, and wiring it into place. Further, they had bound the huge bundle more firmly together, so that it would not be scattered by the kick of the jet, by running wire around it in every direction. Close to the jet mounting, they placed thick sheets of lead, to shield their hoard from radioactive contamination. Then they were ready to fire.

  EVERY time the thin line of luminescent specks, that marked the position of the nearing asteroid belt, came into view as the bundle rotated, Harvey fired the jet, by remote control through an electric wire, from beneath lead shielding several yards away, while his companions crouched beside him. Each burst was a great plume of blue-white incandescence, whose temperature approached fifty thousand degrees
.

  There was of course no sound in the vacuum—only a quiver in the great bundle, and a wavering of its rotation. Time and again, as the hours passed, the rotation changed both direction and axis under the thrust. No one could have told how erratic the movement of that great mass of material became, across space. But it was jerked away from the vicinity of the radiation-tainted wreckage that Harvey and his companions had left adrift. And one thing was fairly certain—the velocity of their approach to the asteroids, a matter, originally, of many miles per second, was dropping off fast.

  “They’re getting bigger, though,” Lilleth said. “We must be coming into the thickest part of the belt. There’s one of the big ones—you can see its shape! Not round, like a real planet, but jagged, like a broken hunk of rock! Harv—maybe we’ll have a little luck. Some kind of break—”

  Funny how easy it is to start up optimism in people.

  “Maybe so!” Joe Palmas said. “We’re coming in with a steep slant—going the same direction as the asteroids on their trip around the sun, and it looks like maybe almost the same speed. Nothing going the same speed and direction as us can smash us up, huh? Keep the fingers crossed. But it looks like buena suerte, no?”

  Good luck. Yeah.... Maybe Harvey Vellis had some of it coming to him for once in his life. But maybe it was just another sorry joke. For what good is it to be stranded on an asteroid, one of a great scattered ring of broken fragments five hundred million miles across, with the sun at its center? Talk about one’s chances of being rescued from a desert island on Earth, say in the 19th century. Here the chances must seem infinitely slimmer.

  But somehow the faces of all three castaways were beaming. That’s human nature, again. Put people in a really hopeless spot for a while, and then give them just a faint ray of hope, and see how their spirits come back, even though their situation is still more or less hopeless.

  A few tense, eager minutes passed, while no one spoke, and the belt loomed nearer.

  But finally Lilleth had to talk. “We’re gonna miss the big one, you guys—it must be anyway twenty thousand miles away. But we’re going almost exactly toward that smaller one, there. You can see nearly every detail of the rocks on it. It must be close. It’s maybe two miles long, and a half-mile thick—just a big, white chip, torn out of the middle of a planet, airless, now, and not good for much. I’ll bet it hasn’t even got a number in the astronomer’s books, much less a name—but, boy, does it look good to me!”

  The enthusiasm of her voice had an edge to it, which Harvey began to recognize. Another side of possible space hysteria—distorted values and viewpoint. He grasped Lilleth’s plastic-gloved hand. “Easy,” he warned. “Take it easy—”

  Her expression became surprised, then awed, as at a narrow escape. “Yeah,” she mused. “Funny—I was as excited about a dead chunk of rock as I once was about finding my first four-leafed clover, when I was a kid. Back in Minnesota . . .”

  She caught herself without being prompted. Thoughts of an old home could lead to nostalgia here that might make one raving crazy.

  Joe Palmas spoke up, now. “Three long cords, we need,” he said. “Tie ’em to the bundle of stuff, and to us. Then jump, same like we did before. Land. Pull the stuff down to that asteroid . . .”

  Several minutes later, they had accomplished all of this. Light as feathers, they landed on porous rock, after a long, slow leap. They were on a kind of plain, near the mid-section of the asteroid, which was large enough to have a barely perceptible gravity. In response to their tugs on the cords, the huge bulk of equipment and supplies that they had gathered drifted toward them, and came to rest like a slightly underinflated balloon.

  They took a moment to look around them. The plain was littered with other lumps of rock that once had been drifting free in space, but which had come to rest, here, drawn by the tiny gravity. In fun Joe picked up a rock, that on Earth would have weighed twenty tons, and hurled it. It did not even fall back. Joe flexed his muscles and grinned.

  One rock looked like the capital of a pillar. It was obviously carven. Near it was a blackened, dried thing, fifty million years old, but quite well preserved, considering. Human? No—there was no resemblance, except that it must have been a two-armed and two-legged creature, and intelligent. You couldn’t be sure whether it had had a face or not, it was that different.

  Somehow it had managed to escape disintegration in the awful blast that had ended its world. Maybe many of the bodies of its kind had, for the surface of that planet might have broken up in great chunks, which had simply been hurled out into space, with their terrain intact. Near the body were some blackened fragments that might have been vegetation. And the body wore both clothes and beautiful golden ornaments.

  Harvey bent down and touched the pale blue fabric, that looked like silk. “It must be of mineral,” he said. “Anything like ordinary cloth would char out here in an hour.”

  No one commented. Joe Palmas just picked up the body, looked for a moment at a golden thing attached to its garment—it might have been a timepiece of some kind, and he was partial to timepieces. But now he muttered a brief prayer under his breath, glanced questioningly, at his companions, received their nods, and hurled the corpse far into space.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One Foot On a Star

  IT WAS a full minute later before Lilleth managed to smile. “Well, Harv,” she said. “Here we are, marooned on an airless hunk of stone. Want me to tell you what’s in your mind? And how long do you think we can last—six months?”

  He grinned back. “Depends,” he answered. “If we can civilize space in the raw, here, just a little, to keep ourselves from going bats—” His gaze was gentle.

  She knew what he meant. A livable home for their last days. Some slight compensation for the house in Maine or California that would never be.... He didn’t have to say it. He could even have yelled it in fury. The devotion of it still would have spelled love....

  She felt tender toward him. “Thanks, Harv,” she said gratefully, seeing no twerp at all, now. “It’s the same with me—for you. I wonder if we could make a cleric out of Joe?”

  In another moment, they were as furiously busy as they had ever been. They began sorting supplies, separating them into categorical stacks.

  It was strange seeing Lilleth’s small form carrying huge loads. “I’m better than twenty stevedores,” she laughed.

  Now they unbaled three huge plastic domes, fitted each with an airlock, drew one over each of three separate stacks of supplies, and inflated them with air from many cylinders. They joined the domes by means of prefabricated passageways of similar plastic.

  Joe was about ready to stop working, then; but Harvey, now inside one of the great bubble-like shelters, and out of his space armor, had found a brush and opened a can of paint.

  “Good night, Harv—what are you going to do—label everything?” Lilleth asked.

  “Just in a general way, so we can find what we want,” he answered. “Too bad we haven’t got shelves for some of this stuff.”

  “Hmm—still methodical, I see,” she said. “It’s a wonder you haven’t thought of a hydroponic garden under a dome, like they have on Mars. The plastic is more transparent than glass to visible light, but it cuts off all dangerous radiations. And I’ve noticed that tins of seeds were included in the cargo of the Aries. Meant for Mars, of course—”

  She was kidding. But he didn’t take it quite that way. “Maybe—” he muttered. Then a wild optimism seized him. He considered. "We’ve got a good deal of water and air,” he said. “Besides, a hydroponic garden, with some people to breathe its air and supply carbon dioxide to the plants, doesn’t use up its original quota of air and water. At least, not very fast. It can be almost self-contained, like a well-balanced aquarium. Then too, there are certain pieces of apparatus among our equipment—also intended for Mars. Some rock crystals contain water, which can be extracted. And even space isn’t completely empty. Quite a few oxygen, hydrogen, nitrog
en, water, and other molecules that have escaped from the atmospheres of planets, are floating in it. There are ways of attracting them—slowly. And collecting them. If we can ever set up the apparatus—”

  Later, as if it were only a bubble, and not tons of metal, they carried the great fragment which had been part of the Aries, and which contained the two rooms, and set it up against one of the domes. By means of a tunnel-section of plastic, they attached it.

  It was the very lightness of things that exhausted them—it encouraged them to work to the limits of their strength, as if the real need, in itself, were not enough. And they were still clumsy—always exerting too much force for a given task, always having to exert more energy to check the first over-strong impulses of their efforts, they never seemed to notice the tiring—at first. It was when they relaxed a bit that the weariness hit them.

  The asteroid was rotating slowly, the axis along its greatest length. Now, when they had their encampment tentatively in order, the sun disappeared behind the western edge of the plain; and like a knife blade turning over, the side of the asteroid that had been in daylight was plunged into Stygian darkness—except for the glow of the atomic lamps that had been set up in the dome where the castaways were, and except for the cold blaze of the stars And, perhaps unwarily, Harvey Vellis gave himself up to an illusion—that Out, space, other worlds, were the glamorous things that he had wanted them to be. It was fulfillment of a sort. He was a full-fledged man of space, in his own belief, now, needing to feel no inadequacy in anyone’s presence. He was aware that his girl knew it, and was proud of it. There was just one big defect—eventual doom when time and space had their way with them—when their irreplacable supplies gave out or wore out. But Harvey Vellis did not think of this so much, now.

  Lilleth and he had removed their helmets. He grew bold. “Honey,” he asked, "is it so bad—being like this?” She looked at her little, homely, thin-faced man, and if she lied at all to reassure him, she did so without hesitation. “I feel at home already,” she answered.