by Hank Davis
“Queeklrle.” It wasn’t a very brilliant conversation, but it had to do.
Dave watched Queekle assemble the plants on top of the converter shield. The bright boys had done fine, there—they’d learned to chain radiation and neutrons with a thin wall of metal and an intangible linkage of forces. The result made an excellent field for the vines, and Queekle scooted about, making sure the loads of dirt were spread out and its charges arranged comfortably, to suit it. It looked intelligent—but so would the behavior of ants. If the pressure inside the ship bothered the creature, there was no sign of it.
“Queeklrle,” it announced finally, and turned toward Dave. He let it follow him up the steps, found some chocolate, and offered it to the pseudopods. But Queekle wasn’t hungry. Nor would the thing accept water, beyond touching it and brushing a drop over its fuzzy surface.
It squatted on the floor until Dave flopped down on the cushions, then tried to climb up beside him. He reached down, surprised to feel the fuzz give way instantly to a hard surface underneath, and lifted it up beside him. Queekle was neither cold nor warm; probably all Martian life had developed excellent insulation, and perhaps the ability to suck water out of the almost dehydrated atmosphere and then retain it.
For a second, Dave remembered the old tales of vampire beasts, but he rejected them at once. When you come down to it, most of the animal life wasn’t too bad—not nearly as bad as man had pictured it to justify his own superiority. And Queekle seemed content to lie there, making soft monotonous little squeaks and letting it go at that.
Surprisingly, sleep came easily.
Dave stayed away from the ship most of the next two days, moving aimlessly, but working his energy out in pure muscular exertion. It helped, enough to keep him away from the radar. He found tongs and stripped the lining from the tubes, and that helped more, because it occupied his mind as well as his muscles. But it was only a temporary expedient, and not good enough for even the two remaining weeks. He started out the next day, went a few miles, and came back. For a while then, he watched the plants that were thriving unbelievably on the converter shield.
Queekle was busy among them, nipping off something here and there and pushing it underneath where its mouth was. Dave tasted one of the buds, gagged, and spat it out; the thing smelled almost like an Earth plant, but combined all the quintessence of sour and bitter with something that was outside his experience. Queekle, he’d found, didn’t care for chocolate—only the sugar in it; the rest was ejected later in a hard lump.
And then there was nothing to do. Queekle finished its work and they squatted side by side, but with entirely different reactions; the Martian creature seemed satisfied.
Three hours later, Dave stood in the observatory again, listening to the radar. There was some music coming through at this hour—but the squiggly reception ruined that. And the news was exactly what he’d expected—a lot of detail about national things, a few quick words on some conference at the United Nations, and more on the celebration of Israel over the anniversary of beginning as an independent nation. Dave’s own memories of that were dim, but some came back as he listened. The old United Nations had done a lot of wrangling over that, but it had been good for them, in a way—neither side had felt the issue offered enough chance for any direct gain to threaten war, but it kept the professional diplomats from getting quite so deeply into more dangerous grounds.
But that, like the Chinese plague, wouldn’t come up again.
He cut off the radar, finally, only vaguely conscious of the fact that the rocket hadn’t been mentioned. He could no longer even work up a feeling of disgust. Nothing mattered beyond his own sheer boredom, and when the air machine—
Then it hit him. There were no clicks. There had been none while he was in the tip. He jerked to the controls, saw that the meter indicated the same as it had when he was last here, and threw open the cover. Everything looked fine. There was a spark from the switch, and the motor went on when he depressed the starting button. When he released it, it went off instantly. He tried switching manually to other tanks, but while the valve moved, the machine remained silent.
The air smelled fresh, though—fresher than it had since the first day out from Earth, though a trifle drier than he’d have liked.
“Queekle!” Dave looked at the creature, watched it move nearer at his voice, as it had been doing lately. Apparently, it knew its name now, and answered with the usual squeak and gurgle.
It was the answer, of course. No wonder its plants had been thriving. They’d had all the carbon dioxide and water vapor they could use, for a change. No Earth plants could have kept the air fresh in such a limited amount of space, but Mars had taught her children efficiency through sheer necessity. And now he had six months, rather than two weeks!
Yeah, six months to do nothing but sit and wait and watch for the blowup that might come, to tell him he was the last of his kind. Six months with nothing but a squeaking burble for conversation, except for the radar news.
He flipped it on again with an impatient slap of his hand, then reached to cut it off. But words were already coming out:
“. . . Foundation will dedicate a plaque today to young Dave Mannen, the little man with more courage than most big men can hold. Andrew Buller, backer of the ill-fated Mars rocket, will be on hand to pay tribute—”
Dave kicked the slush off with his foot. They would bother with plaques at a time like this, when all he’d ever wanted was the right number of marks on United States currency. He snapped at the dials, twisting them, and grabbed for the automatic key as more circuits coupled in.
“Tell Andrew Buller and the whole Foundation to go—”
Nobody’d hear his Morse at this late stage, but at least it felt good. He tried it again, this time with some Anglo-Saxon adjectives thrown in. Queekle came over to investigate the new sounds and squeaked doubtfully. Dave dropped the key.
“Just human nonsense, Queekle. We also kick chairs when we bump into—”
“Mannen!” The radar barked it out at him. “Thank God, you got your radar fixed. This is Buller—been waiting here a week and more now. Never did believe all that folderol about it being impossible for it to be the radar at fault. Oof, your message still coming in and I’m getting the typescript. Good thing there’s no FCC out there. Know just how you feel, though. Darned fools here. Always said they should have another rocket ready. Look, if your set is bad, don’t waste it, just tell me how long you can hold out, and by Harry, we’ll get another ship built and up there. How are you, what—”
He went on, his words piling up on each other as Dave went through a mixture of reactions that shouldn’t have fitted any human situation. But he knew better than to build up hope. Even six months wasn’t long enough—it took time to finish and test a rocket—more than he had. Air was fine, but men needed food, as well.
He hit the key again. “Two weeks’ air in tanks. Staying with Martian farmer of doubtful intelligence, but his air too thin, pumps no good.” The last he let fade out, ending with an abrupt cutoff of power. There was no sense in their sending out fools in half-built ships to try to rescue him. He wasn’t a kid in an airplane, crying at the mess he was in, and he didn’t intend to act like one. That farmer business would give them enough to chew on; they had their money’s worth, and that was that.
He wasn’t quite prepared for the news that came over the radar later—particularly for the things he’d been quoted as saying. For the first time it occurred to him that the other pilot, sailing off beyond Mars to die, might have said things a little different from the clicks of Morse they had broadcast. Dave tried to figure the original version of “Don’t give up the ship” as a sailor might give it, and chuckled.
And at least the speculation over their official version of his Martian farmer helped to kill the boredom. In another week at the most, there’d be an end to that, too, and he’d be back out of the news. Then there’d be more long days and nights to fill somehow, before his time ran
out. But for the moment, he could enjoy the antics of nearly three billion people who got more excited over one man in trouble on Mars than they would have out of half the population starving to death.
He set the radar back on the Foundation wavelength, but there was nothing there; Buller had finally run down, and not yet got his breath back. Finally, he turned back to the general broadcast on the Lunar signal. It was remarkable how man’s progress had leaped ahead by decades, along with his pomposity, just because an insignificant midget was still alive on Mars. They couldn’t have discovered a prettier set of half-truths about anybody than they had from the crumbs of facts he hadn’t even known existed concerning his life.
Then he sobered. That was the man on the street’s reaction. But the diplomats, like the tides, waited on no man. And his life made no difference to a lithium bomb. He was still going through a counterreaction when Queekle insisted it was bedtime and persuaded him to leave the radar.
After all, not a single thing had been accomplished by his fool message.
But he snapped back to the message as a new voice came on: “And here’s a late flash from the United Nations headquarters. Russia has just volunteered the use of a completed rocketship for the rescue of David Mannen on Mars, and we’ve accepted the offer. The Russian delegation is still being cheered on the floor! Here are the details we have now. This will be a one-way trip, radar-guided by a new bomb control method—no, here’s more news! It will be guided by radar and an automatic searching head that will put it down within a mile of Mannen’s ship. Unmanned, it can take tremendous acceleration, and reach Mannen before another week is out! United Technical Foundation is even now trying to contact Mannen through a hookup to the big government high-frequency labs where a new type of receiver—”
It was almost eight minutes before Buller’s voice came in, evidently while the man was still getting Dave’s hurried message off the tape. “Mannen, you’re coming in fine. Okay, those refractories—they’ll be on the way to Moscow in six hours, some new type the scientists here worked out after you left. We’ll send two sets this time to be sure, but they test almost twenty times as good as the others. We’re still in contact with Moscow, and some details are still being worked on, but we’re equipping their ship with the same type refractories. Most of the other supplies will come straight from them—”
Dave nodded. And there’d be a lot of things he’d need—he’d see to that. Things that would be supplied straight from them. Right now, everything was milk and honey, and all nations were being the fool pilots rescuing the kid in the plane, suddenly bowled over by interplanetary success. But they’d need plenty later to keep their diplomats busy—something to wrangle over and blow off steam that would be vented on important things, otherwise.
Well, the planets wouldn’t be important to any nation for a long time, but they were spectacular enough. And just how was a planet claimed, if the man who landed was taken off in a ship that was a mixture of the work of two countries?
Maybe his theories were all wet, but there was no harm in the gamble. And even if the worst happened, all this might hold off the trouble long enough for colonies. Mars was still a stinking world, but it could support life if it had to.
“Queekle,” he said slowly, “you’re going to be the first Martian ambassador to Earth. But first, how about a little side trip to Venus on the way back, instead of going direct? That ought to drive them crazy and tangle up their interplanetary rights a little more. Well? On to Venus, or direct home to Earth?”
“Queeklrle,” the Martian creature answered. It wasn’t too clear, but it was obviously a lot more like a two-syllable word.
Dave nodded. “Right! Venus.”
The sky was still filled with the nasty little stars he’d seen the first night on Mars, but he grinned now as he looked up, before reaching for the key again. He wouldn’t have to laugh at big men, after all. He could look up at the sky and laugh at every star in it. It shouldn’t be long before those snickering stars had a surprise coming to them.
KYRIE
by Poul Anderson
Two Poul Anderson stories constitutes an embarrassment of riches, but at my age, I’m hard to embarrass. This one is deservedly well-known, was nominated for the Nebula Award (and should have won, imho) and has been anthologized several times—but not lately, so if you missed it before, now’s your chance! Set much farther in the future than “Third Stage,” it nonetheless pointedly reminds us that things can still go wrong, and the cold, uncaring universe may require a human sacrifice—or an inhuman sacrifice.
On a high peak in the Lunar Carpathians stands a convent of St. Martha of Bethany. The walls are native rock; they lift dark and cragged as the mountainside itself, into a sky that is always black. As you approach from Northpole, flitting low to keep the force screens along Route Plato between you and the meteoroidal rain, you see the cross which surmounts the tower, stark athwart Earth’s blue disc. No bells resound from there—not in airlessness. You may hear them inside at the canonical hours, and throughout the crypts below where machines toil to maintain a semblance of terrestrial environment. If you linger a while you will also hear them calling to requiem mass. For it has become a tradition that prayers be offered at St. Martha’s for those who have perished in space; and they are more with every passing year.
This is not the work of the sisters. They minister to the sick, the needy, the crippled, the insane, all whom space has broken and cast back. Luna is full of such exiles because they can no longer endure Earth’s pull or because it is feared they may be incubating a plague from some unknown planet or because men are so busy with their frontiers that they have no time to spare for the failures. The sisters wear spacesuits as often as habits, are as likely to hold a medikit as a rosary.
But they are granted some time for contemplation. At night, when for half a month the sun’s glare has departed, the chapel is unshuttered and stars look down through the glaze-dome to the candles. They do not wink and their light is winter cold. One of the nuns in particular is there as often as may be, praying for her own dead. And the abbess sees to it that she can be present when the yearly mass, that she endowed before she took her vows, is sung.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux
perpetua luceat eis.
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.
The Supernova Sagittarii expedition comprised fifty human beings and a flame. It went the long way around from Earth orbit, stopping at Epsilon Lyrae to pick up its last member. Thence it approached its destination by stages.
This is the paradox: time and space are aspects of each other. The explosion was more than a hundred years past when noted by men on Lasthope. They were part of a generations-long effort to fathom the civilization of creatures altogether unlike us; but one night they looked up and saw a light so brilliant it cast shadows.
That wavefront would reach Earth several centuries hence. By then it would be so tenuous that nothing but another bright point would appear in the sky. Meanwhile, though, a ship overleaping the space through which light must creep could track the great star’s death across time.
Suitably far off, instruments recorded what had been before the outburst: incandescence collapsing upon itself after the last nuclear fuel was burned out. A jump, and they saw what happened a century ago: convulsion, storm of quanta and neutrinos, a radiation equal to the massed hundred billion suns of this galaxy.
It faded, leaving an emptiness in heaven, and the Raven moved closer. Fifty light-years—fifty years—inward, she studied a shrinking fieriness in the midst of a fog which shone like lightning.
Twenty-five years later the central globe had dwindled more, the nebula had expanded and dimmed. But because the distance was now so much less, everything seemed larger and brighter. The naked eye saw a dazzle too fierce to look straight at, making the constellations pale by contrast. Telescopes showed a blue-white spark in the heart of an opalescent cloud delicately filamented at the edges.
Captain Teodor Szili went on a last-minute inspection tour. The ship murmured around him, running at one gravity of acceleration to reach the desired intrinsic velocity. Power droned, regulators whickered, ventilation systems rustled. He felt the energies quiver in his bones. But metal surrounded him, blank and comfortless. Viewports gave on a dragon’s hoard of stars, the ghostly arch of the Milky Way: on vacuum, cosmic rays, cold not far above absolute zero, distance beyond imagination to the nearest human hearthfire. He was about to take his people where none had ever been before, into conditions none was sure about, and that was a heavy burden on him.
He found Eloise Waggoner at her post, a cubbyhole with intercom connections directly to the command bridge. Music drew him, a triumphant serenity he did not recognize. Stopping in the doorway, he saw her seated with a small tape machine on the desk.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
“Oh!” The woman (he could not think of her as a girl though she was barely out of her teens) started. “I . . . I was waiting for the jump.”
“You were to wait at the alert.”
“What have I to do?” she answered less timidly than was her wont. “I mean, I’m not a crewman or a scientist.”
“You are in the crew. Special communications technician.”
“With Lucifer. And he likes the music. He says we come closer to oneness with it than in anything else he knows about us.”
Szili arched his brows. “Oneness?”
A blush went up Eloise’s thin cheeks. She stared at the deck and her hands twisted together. “Maybe that isn’t the right word. Peace, harmony, unity . . . God? . . . I sense what he means, but we haven’t any word that fits.”
“Hm. Well, you are supposed to keep him happy.” The skipper regarded her with a return of the distaste he had tried to suppress. She was a decent sort, he supposed, in her gauche and inhibited way; but her looks! Scrawny, big-footed, big-nosed, pop eyes, and stringy dust-colored hair—and, to be sure, telepaths always made him uncomfortable. She said she could only read Lucifer’s mind, but was that true?