Then, by the glow of the lights, he wrote his wife’s name in the-Martian dust that had settled on the white enamel of the stove before the windows had been put in place and sealed. Just then, for all the homelike qualities it had, that stove might as well have been a piece of flotsam, whirling in the spatial cold of Saturn’s rings. Rube was tense about Joan.
He cleaned the apartment up, set it in order, then tried to sleep. He tried to think optimistic things—that the Earth government was benign, that Roland’s scheme was just an experiment, that laws could be changed.
He remembered too that a spaceship’s shell, perhaps not minutely streamlined and smooth after repair, while moving at trans-sonic speed through an atmosphere just after takeoff, might develop burbles over some flaw and be jolted far off its aimed course to be lost in the frictionless void.
Well, that was a chance to be taken. The youthful crew could probably be impressed into service easily enough. Another thing bothered him though—not so much a thing of guilt as of vast failure.
At dawn the storm still screamed, undiminished. Doc arrived. Both Rube and he had been excused from work to bring Joan out of Suspended. Tensely Rube watched her after they had put her down on the bed.
CHAPTER VIII Attunement
Her eyes opened. She gasped, smiled nervously, said, “Why, Rube! How? Where?” Her gaze wandered puzzledly around their narrow Pullman-style quarters, lingered on the plastic table with the upholstered seats, on the white food-chest with the fanciful gnomes decaled on it—frivolities that tried to mask grimness.
Then her eyes roved to the window, heavily glazed to resist pressurizing. The Martian hurricane was out there, the rusty daylight, the weird unearthly growths, dim through the murk.
Rube saw how her eyes took on that wild look of a cat that fears being thrown into a fire—something of immeasurable miles and of soul-disorientation was in it. It was mild compared to what he had seen in others. But then she had been awakened under gentler, more ideal conditions. And maybe she had more courage than the average.
“Rube!” she gasped and it was like a protest that wrung his heart because she was his. She was another poor creature, scabbed and terrified and lost. Rube whispered endearments and held her shoulders gently to the bed.
Doc Warren administered a sedative and left, saying, “See you later, Rube.”
Joan cried a little. Because it was her way to be optimistic, she said, “I’m sorry to be such a baby, Rube. I suppose everything will be all right.”
After awhile she slept. And after another while, because it was necessary, he left her alone.
His friends and he acted at one by the retarded clocks that were in use on Mars. They had the outlaw’s advantage of ruthless surprise attack. More than a third of the young personnel of the camp, men and a few women, were unhelmeted in the mess hall, eating listlessly. Thirty-five persons, all armed.
Rube regretted treachery but what other way was so sure? He nodded a greeting to the guard outside the entrance and then, with a quick blow of a heavy chisel, cut the fellow’s plastic face-plate wide open, leaving him to gasp helplessly in the dead Martian air.
He pressed the button which opened the outer door of the airlock and a second later thrust his little piece of copper into the safety device which prevented the inner door from being opened at the same time, short-circuiting it.
Then he pressed the control of the inner door and threw his own weight against it, afraid for an instant that it would not yield against the air-pressure in the mess hall itself. But these great valves were power-driven. With both doors open the air of Earth-density whooshed out.
That would have been enough without the strangling wind-blown dust that intruded a moment later. Doc and Hardy had both been in the mess hall, waiting. They had redonned their helmets just in time, warned by the faint noise Rube had made at the airlock.
Now they relieved the victims of their ionic pistols while Rube dragged the hapless guard inside, withdrew the copper slug, closed the lock’s inner door and spun a wheel-valve which released air from supply tanks to replace quickly what had been lost.
“Mission accomplished here—no serious casualties,” Doc breathed gratefully for wasn’t it true that these young people had rescued them from the damaged spaceship and since, for the most part, had treated them kindly?
“Guard them, Doc,” Rube ordered.
Their arms full of pistols, Hardy and he left the mess hall to meet and distribute weapons to their fellow insurgents who had gathered now, just outside.
They scattered through the storm-marked camp, where no general alarm had been spread. Again they had the advantage of the attacker who knows he is attacking—that against surprise, questioning and momentary uncertainty. Most of the rebels had two pistols—weapons that ionized a thin path of air, making it a conductor along which a silent stunning bolt of electricity flashed.
In less than ten minutes the rebellion had gained complete success. Many of Roland’s young people—Cousin Helen Sands, caught at her post in the hospital, included—surrendered with a shrug and a grin. “So now we know what happens—eh, Gramps?” Helen commented.
Carl Roland was unaware that anything had happened until pistols faced him in his office.
“We’re in control,” Rube told him quietly, not feeling the gratified fury that he had expected to feel. “You will not be harmed. Within a week, perhaps, we’ll leave—as soon as the spaceship can be as perfectly repaired as possible. You may come with us or wait for the relief ship, due in a month.”
It was interesting to watch Roland’s thin youngish face pass through phases of fear and rage until his eyes gained a calmer more-lucid light and a strange surprise.
“Now you have the responsibility!” he snapped. Then he began to sob. He trembled violently. Perhaps it was the throes of a man’s dealing with his ego and his faults and growing up. Somehow the sobs sounded humble—and relieved.
“Hospital!” Rube ordered his henchmen.
No less interesting were Rube’s own feelings. The tension of needing to revolt from an oppressor in impossible circumstances was out of him. He had gained his immediate objective. The driving need for haste was gone. In him there was an embarrassed and slightly guilty peace. Perhaps in part it was the democratic principle functioning. He was free. No one was telling him what to do.
“Might as well let our young captives out of the mess hall,” Hardy offered. “As long as they’re not the ones with the weapons. Practically all of ’em on our side in their hearts anyway. Okay?”
Hardy looked puzzled, genial, a bit swaggering. He also looked slightly comic—as all of the rejuvenates must by now—with darkening fuzz on his pate and his cheeks turning young and fresh, the last peeling skin almost gone. When his teeth really sprouted he’d be like a clever dead-end kid of twenty.
Rube shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Go tell Doc—”
Rube put on his helmet again. On his way to apartment 117 he stopped on inspiration at the supply office and discovered that he could get his and Joan’s luggage—two hand cases.
As he hurried on all he really wanted to do at the moment was to croon over his wife, get her past the first awful shock of being on a strange planet, cook coffee for her, look after her.
So that was what he did. Except that he did notice that the storm was dying fast. The afternoon sun already shone red through it.
And after a while he heard Joan say, because she was valiant, “This little apartment reminds me of the first one we ever had.”
Rube scowled to himself, his feelings in an odd tumult.
The week which followed was strange and rather miraculous. Repair of the spaceship moved slowly. It had to be done with care. But delay mattered less for there was no one to insist that the exiles remain on Mars.
On the other hand there was nobody to tell them that they had to go. Some of them railed, of course, at the slowness in getting started. But even the worst hospital cases of space nostalgia showed some
improvement.
It was weird spring on Mars. The nights remained bitterly cold. But the sun, beating down from the ultramarine sky, raised the midday temperature almost to fifty degrees, Fahrenheit. There was a dusty haze on the horizon.
The Martian plants dropped their sere, tattered whorls and, drawing a little moisture from the atmosphere—it came from the sublimating Polar deposits—began sprouting fresh whorls, dry-seeming but of a fresh blue-green—except for one special leaf to each of the commonest plants. This was bright vermillion. Could there be something so Earthly here as a flower, native to Mars? It was not a flower—it was a single petal, covered with little prongs. Call it a kind of flag.
And from burrows in the ground, in the deposited debris of many generations of vegetation, little two-legged quasi-insects crept as slowly as the hands of a clock for there was so little oxygen to give them life in the Martian atmosphere.
They say that all springs are magic. And there may have been magic here when one looked over the mile-on-mile of queer growths in the valley, something comparable to the view of pioneers, looking at a vaguely similar scene from a covered wagon.
Was there here beauty of a sort? Were there the mystery and challenge of vast expanses of unexplored territory? Could there be here even an earnest urge to build permanently—to own—to possess?
Rube Jackson’s puzzling unrest increased. Several times, knocking off from work on the repair of the spaceship, he wandered out of Port Smitty with Joan, often with several of their friends.
Joan had brightened, as had the others though, under better conditions, of course more swiftly. Seldom did Rube have to chase the panic-devils out of her eyes by saying, “Only a few days more, hon,” or at last, “Day after tomorrow, Joanie.”
That was the late afternoon when a whole gang of people climbed to the ruins of the ancient city. That was the time when a real youth named George remarked that you got used to wearing an oxygen helmet just as you got used to wearing boots.
That was the time when an Annie Riley stated that on Mars she was at least away from her daughter-in-law and that the tomato seeds she had happened to plant in a tin can in the glassed-in “back yard” of her apartment, had already sprouted.
That was when Joan really laughed for the first time on Mars, when Rube and some others became convinced at last of their own great ingratitude.
That was when, from a thin pearly veil of cloud from the Pole, a few fine dry flakes drifted down. Joan caught two on the palms of her space mittens. She stared at them wonderingly, as if they were a part of home, as if they didn’t belong here at this distance from Earth at all.
“Star-shaped,” she said. “Just regular snowflakes. Of course it has to be—here or any place. Out to the farthest Earthlike planet in the farthest galaxy.” Then she laughed—with real pleasure. “I hardly believe it—on Mars!” she added.
“Umhm-m, Mrs. Jackson,” Doc Warren mused. “Ice crystals form according to the same basic laws everywhere. Everywhere one finds the same elements, the same basic forces. It may be hard to grasp but that much of home a human being can find as far toward the rim of the universe as any vehicle of his will ever take him. It’s hard to realize but true.”
“Knowing that is a little like being given the universe, isn’t it, Dr. Warren?” Joan remarked. “Being set free from the space nostalgia. As I think somehow we are free—already. Though space nostalgia was terrible on the moon and here. Can you explain?”
Doc looked embarrassed. “I believe I can,” he answered. “I have said that human well-being is dependent on finely balanced factors—or words to that effect. Here at Port Smitty there is already a suggestion of real community living such as does not yet exist among the transient minors on the dead moon.
Man, being a social animal, finds this pleasant.
“There are several other forces acting against space nostalgia here—and now. But one towers over all its competitors. It is the fact of vita, and what vita means. After the first shock of being stranded in so strange a place as this has worn off it comes into play. The mere knowledge that you are alive and in no great discomfort and can foresee living on is enough to lift the spirit out of the doldrums.
“You have another lifetime ahead—perhaps many lifetimes. Time or prison or hardship don’t matter. The mind begins to soar. You feel as though you’ve been part of something big that should be matched by other bigness. Progress, the answering of Earth’s greatest problem, the building of the future, something of immortality—and of the stars . . .”
Doc’s words had become flowery and oratorical. His voice quivered with emotion. But Rube did not smile. His feeling of guilt and of ingratitude, which he had begun to understand during the last few days, was plain to him now. Whatever other faults Roland had, his dream was possible and it was full of promise.
The man did not matter but the dream must be upheld. Rube’s thoughts rose with it. He looked at his wife and she nodded. As part of the future he remembered how pretty she had been and saw how pretty she was going to be again. Old youthful adventure and fire surged in him. Memories of Earth were still pleasant but they were dim.
“It looks as though Doc wants to stay on Mars,” Rube drawled, grinning, “It looks as though Joan and I are staying.”
“I’d be a chump to leave when all my friends are here.” Orville Hardy chuckled. “I wasted one lifetime. Who knows—maybe here I’ll become a great archeologist—like Smitty?”
Porter Smith, who stood near in patched clothes and battered helmet, only grinned his cynically gentle grin.
“Besides,” Hardy added, “It’s still against the law for us to return to Earth. I’m law-abiding when I can be!”
Cousin Helen Sands said, “May I make my earnest contribution? As soon as there’s a real town or two—as soon as Mars takes on a human touch—I’ll bet there’ll be immigrants of all ages, not just rejuvenates. So the law’ll be changed. Meanwhile I’m staying.”
“So we’ll have a showing of hands tonight in the new rec-hall,” Doc offered. “A few people, I think, will have to be sent home on the relief ship, law or no law. They can’t fit. Many of the young people will want to go.”
“Not as many as you think,” George retorted. “Remember that most of us teethed on the idea of traveling to other worlds! We’ve as much pioneering spirit in our blood as most of you!”
When they had all returned to camp, Rube went to eat crow. But not even the idea of humbling himself slightly before Roland, could depress him now.
Roland was still in the hospital.
“Most of us, I believe, are staying here, Roland,” Rube offered rather stiffly. “Just as you wanted—and just as most of us seem to want—now. I hope you will forgive me for the mutiny—though it seems to have had a psychological value, helping to clear the atmosphere. So much for my defense.
“You’re free—we’ve all had a lot of trouble. I appreciate the problems you faced—they were awful. The thousands of people still in Suspended, I suppose, will be revived in small groups, as originally intended.”
For a second Roland’s lips twitched as with fury. Then he shrugged and his eyes lighted eagerly as if now he had become a whole man. Rube had the strange feeling that they were two men who had both made mistakes but who had both helped to accomplish something great, something that had been really the achievement of many people.
“It was the accident to the spaceship and having almost two hundred rejuvenates to take care of before we were ready for them that was so bad for me,” Roland confessed humbly. “Telling them what they had to do and making them angry in the hope that it would blast them out of the awful reverie phase of space nostalgia was my conscious tactic—not a bad one, I still think.
“But I lost my nerve and went to pieces because I was responsible, and because I had the nostalgia, myself. Your rumor of return to Earth was the only thing that gave them the hope that carried them over the rough spot.
“I think I was wishing for a revolt subc
onsciously, for the relief from responsibility that it would bring. Being thus overpowered I couldn’t be blamed so much for failure. Of course I meant to return to Earth—but now, if I am still useful, I will stay. I feel ready to leave the hospital.”
Rube was surprised. He had a great deal better opinion of Dr. Carl Roland.
The meeting that night for a show of hands turned into a party there in the new rec-hall. Outside it was fifty below zero—inside, music and warmth.
Hardy danced with Helen Sands, teaching her the jive-stuff of his first youth gleefully. Rube talked with Doc Warren and Carl Roland about the construction work for tomorrow. Already Rube was the unofficial mayor of Port Smitty.
Joan pondered the birth of a new social question in a feminine manner while she watched Hardy and Helen dance. Should people with an age difference of a century between them be permitted to marry? Being tolerant, she shrugged, and posed another question to the men.
“Will people really colonize other solar systems when ours is overcrowded?”
“Good night, Joanie—do you want to look ahead a hundred thousand years?” Rube laughed.
“Hmm—well, no,” Joan chuckled. “Let’s dance, Rube.”
Out on the floor, however, he thought of snow falling on transgalactic worlds. And with all the wonders he’d seen happen already, who knew? Joan and he might even be living then if living hadn’t killed them.
Only one present in the room was returning soon to Earth—Porter Smith, who played the violin for the company. But his trouble was different. He’d been too lonely for too long.
The End
*****************************
Legacy from Mars,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Science Fiction Adventures July 1953
Novelette - 15666 words
Marty and Martia, quite naturally, came from Mars. But even after all the fuss and bother they made, it was hard to see why a couple of such creatures should want to join the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 31