Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  He kissed her. Joe Palmas stepped discreetly behind some boxes.

  Harvey went on: “Considering uncertainty and shortage of time, honey, do you suppose it would be all right to do what you once said, about Joe?”

  “Maybe we should,” she answered. “Things like that often become necessary on a frontier. You have to improvise, make the beginnings on which later law is founded—”

  So they called Joe, and Harvey Vellis said to him, “Joe—do you suppose you could ever be a pastor, priest or a justice of the peace?”

  Joe’s grin was a mile wide. He had a big and sentimental heart. “I catch,” he said. “Sure—all three—maybe more!”

  They ordained Joe in writing, on space-darkened paper: “We, being a community of three, on an unknown asteroid, do declare José Eugenio Palmas Alvarez, one of our number, to be, and to assume the duties of, our civil magistrate....”

  Then, on another paper, Harvey wrote: "Before the laws of man and nature, I, Harvey Vellis, of Dos Piedras, New Mexico, U.S.A., Earth, do enter into marriage with Lilleth Thomas, of New York, by pledge of my honor and life, for all the time that is left to us, this contract being written and pledged with solemn respect to the codes of our native planet and nation, now out of reach, but to be conformed with in full and directly, if chance and earnest effort permit.”

  Joe used his own ring and pocket Bible. With Harvey and Lilleth, he went through familiar lines and pledges in English. Then he muttered a prayer in his own language.

  It was a reckless thing for these young people to do. But they could not have been more solemn or earnest. Life had become infinitely precious.

  Above them the stars were brilliant and hard. There was a tap on the roof of the dome. A little rock had drifted in from space—part of the asteroid belt. Its speed, relative to the sun, was probably around fourteen miles per second. But all the belt was moving at approximately that speed, and in the same direction. So there was no harm in it.

  “How do you feel, honey?” Harvey asked.

  "Fine—perfect!” she answered, and meant it.

  It was more illusion, for even what they seemed to have of life and home was not yet theirs.

  THE FLAW lay in the human element, as affected by space, and, more specifically, by the conditions peculiar to the asteroid belt itself. Scattered thinly around its tremendous ring-like expanse were perhaps three thousand men—newcomers to this latest colonial frontier—a place of tremendous resources, unorganized as yet, even for proper exploitation, much less by law, order, or civilization.

  These men were ordinary men, for the most part, even though high romance and the eagerness for wealth had touched them. But can a man keep himself civilized or sane, while living as they lived?

  The belt is a strange region, with no counterpart elsewhere in the solar system. Those tiny minor planets, those fragments of a real world, have so little gravity that a real spaceship is not needed to travel among them. A specially designed and balanced spacesuit, with a small atomic jet-motor fitted into its back-plate, is sufficient. So men can skip from asteroid to asteroid, wandering like nomads.

  But consider how they live, sleeping in their armor, drawing their arms out of the heavy sleeves of their spacesuits to feed themselves pellets of concentrated rations inside their helmets, smelling the rank perspiration of their own unwashed bodies, and the accumulation of the fumes of the few cigarettes they can allow themselves, to avoid overtaxing their perishable air-purifiers.

  This is only a sketchy picture of the truth. Consider the constant worry of having their air-purifiers give out, of consuming all of their food and water, of being hopelessly lost. Add a stiff dose of wealth-hunger. Add homesickness. Add the inevitable effect of icy stars. Add the instinct of self-preservation, when death by suffocation is perhaps only scant hours away.

  Then, have you the same fellow, who, on Earth, used to grin genially to his friends, and say “Hiyuh, pal!” Or do you have an individual dominated by the instincts of the wolf-pack on the hunt, who would gladly murder for a breath of fresh air, that his hoarded wealth of metal cannot buy?

  About three months after the landing of Harvey Vellis, Lillith Thomas Vellis, and Joe Palmas on the asteroid, there was such a group of nine men a scant million miles away. Their supplies were very low. They’d wandered far. Gold they had scorned in their hunt for treasure. It was worth less than dirt, here.

  Here in the belt, formed by the explosion of a world from natural, atomic causes, all buried wealth was exposed. Not just soft, useless gold, but uranium, radium, and half a dozen other costly metals, needed to feed the space fleets, and the wheels of industry and comfort at home....

  They had gathered it in a great wire net, which they towed by means of cables, as they hurtled along in free flight. And they had more than just these metals. They had treasures from that destroyed civilization of fifty million years ago. Beautifully wrought jewelry, small, ornate vases, fabrics and tapestries of gorgeous design that never aged. The lot was worth twenty fortunes.

  Still, they were in desperate straits. They knew that a supply-ship was due—maybe already overdue. You were never quite sure of supply-ships. They moved erratically, landing here and there. You never knew quite when or where.

  In space you can see a long way. That helps to make the vastness of distance less significant. One of the nine men peered ahead, through a small telescope that swung into place over the face-plate of his helmet. “Dammit,” he growled to his companions, “I was sure I saw a little star wink on and off—” He was a big man with a growling voice—one of a type. A rough leader.

  They passed into the shadow of a small asteroid, and there, in the intense blackness, the seeing was better. “There she is again!” the big man snapped.

  “The ship?” another man asked. “Never heard of ’em botherin’ to signal their position with lights. They’d be afraid guys like us would mob ’em.”

  “Could be what’s left of a liner,” the big man answered. “Heard of one crackin’ up. Hmm—what if it was so, boys? Them signalin’ for help. Imagine.... And us needing to help ourselves! Worth looking into, anyhow. Can’t be a natural light. So let’s get clear of the belt, where we can’t hit anything, and pour on what’s left of the juice. Thirty miles a second’ll bring us to that light in short order.”

  Of the gang, one had been a jeweler with many friends, one had been a police-man, another had been a hospital steward. Two had been carpenters, who had taken their wives and kids out riding on Sunday. But life in the belt had changed them. All carried blasters, useful in asteroid mining, equally useful to kill.

  They came toward the big rotating searchlight that Harvey and Joe had rigged as a distress beacon, as unheralded as ghosts, for by luck it was still night on the side of the asteroid where there were now five domes. Five minutes after they landed, the small sun appeared over the eastern edge of the plain, and revealed a strange spectacle to the intruders.

  "Well, whatdyuhknow!” the big man chirped in falsely naive and harmless wonder. “They even got a garden, with sweet corn and stuff growing in it, in one of those domes. Loosen up your belts, guys. First thing you know, a little gal with an apron’ll come marchin’ out!”

  It was all terribly easy. Space was partly responsible, again. On the part of Joe and Harvey, there was that first awful gladness at seeing other human beings after having been hopelessly stranded. For a critical few seconds, it made them as trusting as children.

  Joe opened the airlock to the pack, and they came tramping into the main dome, with its chairs, rugs, and its zinnias, growing in jars filled with bits of rock and hydroponic solution.

  Harvey was armed with a blaster, for he was not wholly green. But another thing threw him—it was the sight of the big man. For a second he thought it was Dink Darrell, who had hazed him most when he was a kid. It wasn’t Dink, but it was a guy like him. It hit the raw edge of an old complex in Harvey Vellis—a complex which no longer had a basis in fact, since he’d worked
out of it. But its shadow was still there, for a critical moment—that old fear of big men laughing, kidding, that old unfaceable dread of being discovered in a place where it used to seem that he could never belong.

  It made Harvey quiver; it made his cheeks turn pale—for just long enough to prevent him from getting his weapon from its holster, when it could have been of some use.

  THE LEERS went around the dome—mocking travesties of friendly smiles. “Hello, friend,” said the big guy. “Gosh, you’ve got a nice place here!”

  He removed his helmet, and pushed himself into a chair. But it wasn’t hard to see how the hands of the others lingered near their weapons.

  “Nice and homelike,” the big guy went on. “Bet we can even get breakfast here, hunh? Glory, how I’d go for a good home-cooked meal! Notice you got a lot of equipment, too, stacked up in the other domes out there. We need an awful lot of stuff—”

  Nowhere in the big man’s words themselves was there anything yet that was definitely out of line. It was only the coarsely gentle tone, and the grins of the other members of the pack, and the gleam in their slitted eyes, that made it perfectly plain that these men were bent on pillage at the very least—pillage, that, out here, where supplies were vital, amounted to murder.

  Harvey and Joe stood passively sullen. They hadn’t disarmed Harvey, for, still white-cheeked, he had the look of the harmless twerp, again. Maybe that was their mistake; but it didn’t amount to much, because they had a lot of blasters. They didn’t even bother to draw. But that didn’t help Harvey much, either. He had to think of something....

  The big guy’s gaze went dreamy. He even seemed to relax. “Yeah,” he mused “Nice. Real nice. Six months I been out here—six lousy, stinkin’ months without a bath. So this is civilization!”

  You could sense it, at a certain moment. A subtle shift from sincerity. Not only in the big man, but in the others. More of the treachery of space—aimed, this time, at them. Fearfully hard living—then the relief, the relaxation, the unwariness, encouraged by the presence of a little desperately needed comfort....

  HARVEY Vellis sensed that moment; matched it, he hoped, with the probable meaning of a faint, shadowy movement beyond a door, which led to the two rooms that had been part of the Aries. Then he acted.

  He drew and fired his blaster at the leg of the chair in which the big leader had sprawled with such insolent confidence. As the chair and man toppled lazily, and while the place was full of dazzling light and dazing sound, he leaped to close quarters, and jerked the blaster from the holster at chief’s hip, at the same time jerking him erect against the feeble gravity, to use him as a momentary shield against the others’ guns.

  The latter maneuver wasn’t necessary, for just then the muzzle of a heavy-gauge blaster appeared from the shadowy doorway, with a space-armored figure behind it. One blurp from that weapon would have mowed most of the intruders down, and blown their vaporized atoms straight through the wall of the collapsing dome. Harvey and Joe would have had to gasp for a moment in the vacuum, before they were rescued....

  But that didn’t happen.

  The big leader’s jaw dropped. His surprise looked almost hurt, as if his mind were bogged down somewhere between law, order, and the comforts of regular living, and the brutality of a space frontier.

  Lilleth stood, grim and ready, behind the heavy blaster.

  “Hey—this is downright unfriendly!” the big guy protested, too fuddled, now, to be sarcastic.

  “Oh, so?” Lilleth challenged. Joe was collecting the blasters and belt knives from the others.

  Harvey took over. It wasn’t primarily generosity that moved him now, but a plan must have been growing in his subconscious for a long time. A beginning for something big. “Not unfriendly—just careful,” he said. “It seems that people go belt-daffy. So that’s over. I just had an idea—”

  He let go of the big leader, and backed away from him, and lowered the muzzle of his own weapon.

  “We do have a lot of supplies here, which are ours by right of salvage, and a lot of work and danger,” he continued. “If you have anything to trade you can buy what you need that we have, at a price that is fair for these regions—considering what it took to salvage the stuff, and considering the enormous value of the things within easy reach of asteroid miners. Yes, you must have stuff to trade. Or if you have nothing, we’ll give you enough on credit, to tide you over. And you could wash up and sleep, here, and get a meal.

  “Fair enough?”

  The big guy had a strange, puzzled light in his eyes, as if he had just discovered that this was the way that he wanted things to be out here—orderly, and on the level, like at home. The weariness after long months of harsh living in the belt was too great for the result, now, to have been otherwise.

  He looked at his men questioningly, and they nodded. They felt the same way.

  “My name’s Dave Barrow,” he said to Harvey. “What’s yours?”

  Harvey told him.

  “Your offer looks okay to me,” Barrow said. “And we have plenty to trade—more than all the stuff you got could ever be worth!”

  “You could trade some of it, and store the rest—for a fee,” Harvey Vellis said. “Right now there doesn’t seem to be any way for us to cheat you, even if we wanted to. Besides, we can list everything by measure, and give you a receipt. How does that sound?”

  Barrow grinned, as if he too visualized, in what was here, another outward step toward the stars, and was pleased. “You go fast, Friend Vellis,” he laughed. “But okay. We could use your hospitality, also some new electrodes for our air-purifiers, also concentrated rations and canned goods and water and tools and fuel-bars. Also a couple of new spacesuits, maybe—of the belt-hopping variety, balanced, and with built-in jets—”

  “If we had such suits, we would have gotten away from here,” Harvey answered. “But we can give you the other things you want, plus repair service—maybe. Or—unless I’m getting too far ahead of myself—maybe we might find a way to order those suits for you. Yeah, we just might do that....”

  Harvey was getting a little dizzy over his own words, which seemed to come out without any assistance from himself. Habit and training were coming into play in him.

  “We’ll probably see the supply ship after we leave here,” Dave Barrow offered. “Most likely they’ll be sold out; but we could tell ’em to land here, and take your orders. Though I’ll probably come back with it myself, to make sure you don’t try to rook me when they take my stuff aboard.”

  Harvey chuckled. “Now I'll say fair enough!” be replied. "Only I’d better go into conference with my associates, before I promise too much.” He looked at Lilleth. “Honey—do we stay here to do business or do we shove back to Earth, or Mars?”

  She glanced around her for half a minute before she answered. At the chairs. At the flowers. At the corn and carrots and lettuce and radishes in the adjacent garden-dome. At the rugs. Her gaze grew fond, and possessive. It seems that a woman can make a home anywhere. Especially an adventurous woman like Lilleth Thomas Vellis. It doesn’t have to be in Maine, or even in California. It can be on a barren hunk of rock, a million miles from nowhere....

  “We stay here, Harv,” she said. Joe Palmas nodded.

  THAT’S about all there is to the really important part of the whimsical story of Harvey Vellis, that drifted back to Dos Piedras from the belt, from Out, where it seemed that the scared little clerk from Mr. Finkel’s store could never go. But the tale goes on and on—part of mankind’s outward surge across the face of the universe....

  They were married again by the captain of the supply-ship. But an hour after it had left, they were painting a sign together. A symbol of a beginning of something in the belt. Something that most everybody wanted. A touch of home and safety. A beginning, around which a domed city is rising, to push the frontiers outward and outward. And the start of a fortune for themselves.

  Harvey Vellis painted the letters of the words at his wif
e’s dictation:

  TRADING POST — GENERAL STORE — HOSTELRY — BANK — SPACEMAN’S REFUGE. VELLIS AND PALMAS — OWNERS.

  Lilleth laughed, and kissed Harvey. “Now put in ‘Mail posted and received,’ ” she told him.

  The End

  ********************************

  Sort of Like Atlas,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Astro-Adventures #7 April 1989

  Short Story - 7007 words

  Also fresh from our time-portal is a hitherto-unpublished

  galactic goodie by Raymond Z. Gallun, "Sort of Like Atlas."

  We know last issue's double-barrel zap from Gallun had

  only whetted your astro-appetite.

  —Captain Astro

  Tom Lisky wasn’t the first to have a space armor made for his dog.

  "Wherever we set our feet there’ll be mutts around, sooner or later," he explained. "It's more friendly and safer. They've got sharper senses than us in some respects."

  Lisky was brown, lean, five feet eight. He had an egotist's swagger. His face, once slashed by a meteor, looked about as sentimental as a broken rock. Which of course made it partly a liar. He'd spent a year among the Asteroids chiefly for what he could get out of them, and that is not a soft philosophy. But like other tough guys out in space, he had found that he thought of his folks, his kid brother, his fiancee, and his pooch, a lot more than on Earth.

  Snowdrop was a small white mongrel with brown and black markings on his head and muzzle. After a vacation at home, Tom took him along on the liner, when he returned to the Asteroid Belt.