Roll-call was responded to haltingly. Blankets were issued and with the other men Rube was guided through a passage to the interior of a large inflated tent, beyond whose sides wind-blown dust seethed faintly. The soup might have been drugged, for now Rube felt a bit drowsy. Several men, doubtless the slightly injured from the first rescue plane, were already asleep on the floor.
The newcomers had already been relieved of their space armor and oxygen helmets but now a guard patted them under the arms, exploratively. “Just to be sure you haven’t found anything to hurt yourselves with, Or to use to rip holes in the tent wall, and let the pressure out,” he explained with a grin.
As Rube was selecting a place to lie down, someone spoke from behind him in the semi-darkness: “Looks as though the men from our old bunch at the vita camp were all stowed in the same part of the ship, where the cans they were in could get smashed together. Logical, though—since we were cooked in the same kettle.
“I just spotted Doc Warren—remember him? Over there. Got his arm hurt, so they brought him in with the first. Now you, Jackson. Nobody else we know especially—but it’s best to keep the club small at first, eh? You look brighter than you did—also brighter than most. These facts interest me strangely—as to cause, Jackson.”
These words were given in the very low even tone that still sounds hard and suggests secrets. So Rube turned around very casually. “Hello, Hardy,” he said in a similar tone. “You sound lots brighter too. Maybe, like me, you had some pleasant thoughts.”
“Umhm-m,” Hardy grunted. “To cut Roland’s throat is a pleasant thought. To have been a sucker—past tense—ain’t. Maybe I could have been vitaed and stayed on Earth too. I wasn’t born in a tough neighborhood for nothing. There have always been fixers whenever enough people wanted something that is supposed to be illegal. Fake papers and stuff. The pleasant part is that, if I ever got back— Do I bore you, Jackson?”
Rube shook his head. “No but you are daydreaming, Hardy. You are far too fast—and too slow. Shall we talk to Dr. Warren?”
They went quietly to where the burly physician lay in a blanket and sprawled inconspicuously beside him.
“The last few hours were very rough on us, Doc,” Rube whispered. “How were they for you?”
Warren still seemed very shaken. “Don’t ask for details, fellas,” he pleaded. “Just remember your suffering at its worst, and accept the fact that it couldn’t have been any easier for me. It’s still pretty terrible. I should have realized.”
“How do you explain it, Doc?” Rube asked.
“Space nostalgia—just a particularly terrible variety of homesickness,” Warren answered, whispering now with a clinical sort of calm. “I treated some cases of it twenty years ago just before I quit my practice. Young men who had dreamed about going to the moon almost since they were tots in most instances. But they couldn’t face the reality of what they wanted. One was there only two hours before he was loaded on another Earthbound rocket. Raving crazy.
“Before he landed on Earth, he had gone into the passive secondary stage of the trouble—staring vacantly at nothing, refusal of food and water. He responded to treatment but not permanently—he could not be permanently convinced that he was home. Unguarded for a moment during a recurrent delusion he committed suicide.
“There was even one case wherein a rocket pilot in training had a seizure of the nostalgia only a thousand miles above the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Homesickness, the common, old-fashioned variety, has existed longer than mankind. Most of the higher animals are susceptible to it. Many have pined away and died when removed from their native haunts. I do not believe that any man is entirely immune to it—even when only terrestrial distances are considered. A human being is very apt to be most at ease in surroundings to which he has become accustomed. Man is on a shorter tether than he thinks.
“Projected to an inter-world scale of distance and difference homesickness becomes infinitely worse. To the average person the idea of being on another planet is too strange for his emotions to accept even though his intellect does so.
“He has his narrow segment of natural reality, not only established by personal contacts but inherited from his ancestry, all of it terrestrial, back to the start of evolution. Thus Earth enslaves its own.
“Somebody once said that to look on the face of God is a terrible thing to mortal man. That about describes a personal venture beyond our narrow reality. The awful newness, the loss of the values of habit and instinct, even to that of breathing, the sense of complete insecurity, and of being trapped become just too much.
“The moon is bad—jagged mountains, no air at all, black spatial sky from which the cosmic rays beat down unchecked and the meteors fall without flaming. But compared to Mars it is just a place with a simple volcanic history and no deep enigmas and there is always that wonderfully important thought that you can rocket home from it in just a few hours’ time.
“On Mars, aside from local messages, a radio can pick up only a sleepy rustle of static. For no Earthly station has yet been built that can beam its waves this far. Out here, if you think too much you begin to be terribly grateful that—that the magnesium of your space suit is—part of Earth.”
“Steady, Doc!” Rube hissed, as Warren’s whisper began to waver and crack. “Forget it! Tell us some more!”
The physician sighed heavily. “Thanks, Rube,” he said. “To continue—you can see strain in every one of the young personnel. And remember that everyone of them is a comparative rarity—a real adventurer, psyched and screened and selected from the cream of the crop of young space enthusiasts. Also, remember that they’re well-paid and that their families are waiting for them back home.
“Do you know it’s strange—the ultimate obstacle to really extensive space travel and colonization does not seem to be in the fields of effective propulsion, danger of crashing into meteors, the effect of weightlessness on the human body or even in the technology of living comfortably on strange planets? All those things are solved. The real obstacle is in man’s mind with its intricate psychology, where apparent trifles are so important to his well-being.
“I, of all people, should have realized. The best real cure of even simple homesickness, begins with return of a victim to his home. Drugs and mental suggestion help. And you can burn space nostalgia out of a person, by dulling permanently certain brain-areas with radiation. Hmm-m!
“Maybe you don’t like the idea. I don’t. Here I think it must be under severe legal restriction though you can’t be sure of what won’t be ordered as an emergency measure. And maybe it would even be best—with all its faults.”
“What do you think about our Doctor Carl Roland?” Rube asked.
“I was coming to him,” Warren replied, his lisping voice—he was toothless as Rube and all of the others were—slowing down. “I said that I, with the experience I have had, should have realized how it would be when a bunch of us revitalized oldsters were shipped out here.
“But I knew how desperate it was that new room be found for people to live in. Besides I believed in Roland—looked up to him. A brilliant theorist, I’d heard. Maybe he is that. Far as I can see now though he falls down terribly in practice.
“Even under perfect conditions his plan is no good. People aren’t made for it. All that gives me strength is the thought of going home—somehow. It’s got to be. I’m—so—damned—glad—to—be—sleepy. I thank them for the soporific.”
Warren began to snore.
“Nice soup, that was,” Hardy remarked. “It’ll put us under pretty soon now too. I haven’t been wasting time though, Jackson.” The little ex-salesman lowered his voice still further. “Been thinkin’,” he went on. “They’ll repair the ship. We’ll watch our chance, knock somebody over, grab a weapon or two . . .”
“Hold on,” Rube cut in. “Let’s go slow on the melodrama. And keep it simple. Less chance for error that way. Anyway we’ve got to know our ground first. Better forget th
e melodrama altogether—for now. There might be a better means. A little of the old Fabian policy, maybe—delay. Besides we’ve got more immediately important things to do.”
CHAPTER VI Stymied Promise
As if to explain Rube’s last remark there was a low, anguished moan from one of the nearby sleepers. From farther off, either in the woman’s quarters or wherever the seriously injured and the violent were, there was a thin shriek.
“Even dope doesn’t hold some of them down,” Rube went on. “But you and Doc and I all found us a medicine that works—a little. So what do we do? We pass it around, before everybody goes blooey.”
There in the semi-darkness Hardy’s wizened peeling face, which showed small patches of new skin, almost smiled. “Hmm-m, I catch,” he grunted. “May I doctor the first patient?”
Hardy glanced first across the tent, toward where the guard stood to be sure that he was not paying them too much attention. Then he crept several yards to the nearest of the other prone men. The fellow was not asleep. He only stared fixedly at the fabric roof.
“Why so glum, friend?” Hardy whispered. “Want to bet that Roland won’t have to take us back to Earth in a few days? Use your head, pal. By now he knows his scheme’s a flop. He can’t let us just die out here. The government won’t let him.”
Hardy wished that he wasn’t afraid that he was an awful liar.
His subject’s eyes never changed. For ten seconds it didn’t seem that he had heard. Then he said slowly. “This is like war. We were all of draft age.”
“Suit yourself, sucker!” Hardy retorted angrily. He picked another subject. This one would not respond at all.
Meanwhile Rube had worked a couple of customers. The second gave him an answer that made butterflies of his own recent terror flutter furiously in his stomach. “My name is Bob Walsh,” the man whispered, without being asked. “If I were dead I couldn’t be as far from my granddaughter as I am now. Hell and heaven can’t be as far from Earth as this. Home is just a star.”
Both Rube and Hardy, somewhat shaken, gave up for the time being. When they had returned to their blankets Rube said, “We can hope, can’t we? ’Nother thing’s important. Control your mind—don’t think, pal. But observe—watch for chances . . .”
“Gn-n-n-aa-ah-h!” Orville Hardy snored.
While they slept seven dead were buried in the history-ridden dust of Mars. Five had been crushed in their capsules. Two had died of injuries and madness.
Rube awoke at last, hearing clipped tones from an amplifier system dinning in his ears. Carl Roland surely had a penchant for addressing audiences in that manner. Rube felt cold, even though heat radiated from an electric grid. The corners of the great tent were webbed with frost. The sunshine coming through the fabric was brilliant. He’d slept the clock around, through a day twenty-four hours and thirty-seven-plus minutes long.
Men lay passively around him—Hardy and Doc Warren included. Whether they listened to Roland or not was hard to say. Rube let most of the words flow past him. More infuriating hogwash, the tones in which it was given were tinged now with definite evidence of scare and wildness.
“We must all work as soon as possible. Work is excellent therapy. You will love your new homes. We must not lose heart. We shall be very happy. Do you know that there is a Martian plant which stores an edible starch under its hard shell? We shall cultivate it on a vast scale. Earth plants too. You shall become as native Martians.”
Rube might even have tried very hard to believe all this—but in Roland’s tone was the frightened wonder of a fool, confronted at last by the fact of his foolishness. He did not believe himself. But admission of this was not in him—not yet, anyway. Well—maybe one hope lay in that direction. Rube was heartened a little.
Feeling that it was best that his friendship with Hardy and Doc Warren should not be too often evident to observers, Rube moved toward the tent exit alone. And his immediate wish was realized more easily than he had expected.
“Suit and helmet, sir?” said the young guard with a politeness that thinly veiled a certain cynical mockery. But Rube got the equipment. “Chow-hall—Main Street,” the youth added.
Rube found his way out into brilliant sunshine and thence to the mess-hall airlock. With his helmet beside him on a bench at a long table in the almost deserted place. The buxom young Amazon in uniform who ruled here looked at him sadly. He judged her to be a talkative type. But now she seemed as disinclined toward conversation as he was.
But to promote his rumor—his medicine for sick emotions—he took a parting shot at her as he left: “I hear that we’ll all be back on Earth soon,” he said. “That the Roland scheme is turning out to be a flop and is about to be abandoned . . .” It was a saving kind of sabotage.
Out in the dazzling sunshine again he followed his plan to observe and learn so that if and when the moment for action came, he would know his ground. Port Smitty’s aspect was changing under a forced drive that was like that of a military operation, the technical aspects of which have been calculated mathematically and plotted on paper, down to the last screw and button.
That the space ship had been disabled many miles from camp scarcely seemed to matter. Prefabricated parts, made to fit each other perfectly, were flown in by plane and assembled swiftly by young men in armor who know their jobs.
The first great greenhouses, vanguard of the vast hydroponic gardens which were supposed to follow, were going up, it seemed, almost by magic. Dormitories and other buildings, begun with the sketchy materials brought in by Roland’s survey ship months ago, were already finished.
An atomic generator of electricity, compact and massive, was flown in. Its sealed, cubical case, which concealed and protected its self-sufficient mechanism, measured less than a yard on either side, yet it could have lighted and heated a small city.
Air-purifiers came, bulkier things whose working principle was centered in a complex molecule resembling that of plant-chlorophyll, and were set up, along with air-conditioning pumps, in a special shed.
And there was a furnace and a still for roasting water out of gypsum rock—though water could be flown in from the polar cap and though a small underground aqueduct, built by the ancients and leading from the same source, was already under exploration, preparatory to its being unclogged of sediment and repaired for service.
There were electric forges and equipment for machine shops. The list of things was endless. But the benignness of a society toward the outcasts which it had felt guiltily forced to expel was best expressed by the growing heap of more intimate paraphernalia in the growing supply dump in Port Smitty’s chief thoroughfare.
Crated stoves, boxes of pots and pans and dishes, furniture, bales of clothing, books, what-not—stuff for the sealed cold-proofed apartment houses already under construction, where the exiles were eventually supposed to live.
It was all like a great and sentimental peace-offering, grotesquely out of place. For the red dust of Mars already coated it and little murky whirlwinds in the thin air gave promise of the time when most of it would be abandoned and buried. That thought, again, had shreds of panic in it, so Rube pushed it away.
His talkie with its variable tuning gave him access to all conversations carried on by that instrument in camp. Thus he contacted the forces of disintegration already hard at work in the human factor. Scraps of talk which he overheard revealed those forces plainly.
“Poor old rejuvenates. We gotta do what we can for ’em. It’s tough on us—but worse for them, Jim.”
Pity, that one was. And who wants pity? But the answer was worse.
“Like fun, Dave! We wouldn’t be in this hole if it wasn’t for them. Why should those old coots be living anyway? They’ve had their time. Put ‘em out of their misery, I say . . .”
That was hate and prejudice, which is often brought out in individuals, under strain. Rube responded to it with a cold fury. And would other exiles who heard, like it any better than he?
Such was part
of the disunity smoldering under the bustling exterior of Port Smitty, wrecking morale—or was it Mars that did the wrecking?
There was still more— “Take Roland, Dave. Yeah—the boss. What does he do but sit in that bulletproof office of his and talk? And he’ll probably be back home sooner than any of us to make some kind of phony report. Hmm!—wonder how a certain rumor got started, Dave? Funny how people hang onto life.”
The guy, Jim, was shameless—he didn’t seem to care who overheard what he said. He was unwary and openly insolent. Rube recognized this with a certain satisfaction. From the exiles themselves he heard a few things too. A few hardy souls had regained the power of speech.
“Yes, Mary Madigan—sure as my name’s Annie Riley—I’ll see the Big Shot myself. The Government can’t leave us here.”
Rube didn’t smile. He was glad that someone else would make the petition—would and could. And yet he saw how small the hopeful signs were and with time his mind medicine seemed to lose some of its power.
Depression came over him and in the early afternoon some vain impulse to escape urged him out into the mile-on-mile flats of the valley around Port Smitty.
A guard tried genially to wave him back but he ignored the gesture and the guard let him go.
He could not go far for he was tethered by a claustrophobic fact—the limited hours of usefulness of his oxygen helmet’s air-purifiers. For a while he pushed through the endless clumps of sere Martian growths. Then, on the strength of youthened muscles, he mounted the rise to the rather unrewarding, expanse of a city so long dead that its surface ruins—it must have been mainly underground anyway in such a severe climate that had even then prevailed—told really little of what it had been like.
Rube’s jaws felt sore and what did it matter that this was because the embryos of teeth had been planted in his withered gums and were sprouting—recalling to him some painful childhood memory? What did it matter that on bald pates—his own was probably the same—he had seen fuzz or that hoary white hair was beginning to darken at the roots?
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 29