Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  The power was not as great as that which his own large atomic battery would have supplied. But it proved sufficient. And the current was direct--as it was supposed to be. The electrolysis apparatus bubbled vigorously. Slowly the tentlike roof began to rise, under the beginnings of a tiny gas-pressure.

  "That does it, Pops!" Bubs shrilled.

  "Yeah--maybe so," John Endlich agreed almost optimistically. He felt really tender toward his kids, just then. They'd really helped him, for once.

  Yes--almost he was hopeful. Until he glanced at the rapidly declining sun. An all-night vigil. No. Probably worse. Oh Lord--how long could he last like this? Even if he managed to keep Neely and Company at bay? Night after night.... All that he had accomplished seemed useless. He just had so much more that could be wrecked--pushed over with a harsh laugh, as if it really was something funny.

  John Endlich's flesh crawled. And in his thinking, now, he went a little against his own determinations. Probably because, in the present state of his disgust, he needed a drink--bad.

  "Nuts!" he growled lugubriously. "If I'd only been a little more sociable.... That was where the trouble started. I might have got broke, but I would've made friends. They think I'm snooty."

  Rose's jaw hardened, as if she took his regrets as an accusation that she had led him along the straight and narrow path, which--by an exasperating shift in philosophical principle--now seemed the shortest route to destruction. But he felt very sorry for her, too; and he didn't believe that what he had just said was entirely the truth.

  So he added: "I don't mean it, Honey. I'm just griping."

  She softened. "You've got to eat, Johnny," she said. "You haven't eaten all day. And tonight you've got to sleep. I'll keep watch. Maybe it'll be all right...."

  Well, anyway it was nice to know that his wife was like that. Yeah--gentle, and fairminded. After they had all eaten supper, he tried hard to keep awake. Fear helped him to do so more than ever. Their tent was now covered by the rising plastic roof--but beyond the clear substance, he could still watch for starlight to be stopped by prowling forms, out there at the jagged rim of Vesta. It was hell to feel your skin puckering, and yet to have exhaustion pushing your eyelids down inexorably....

  Somewhere he lost the hold on himself. And he dreamed that Alf Neely and he were fighting with their fists. And he was being beaten to a pulp. But he was wishing desperately that he could win. Then they could have a drink, and maybe be friends. But he knew hopelessly that things weren't quite that simple, either.

  * * * * *

  He awoke to blink at blazing sunshine. Then his whole body became clammy with perspiration, as he thought of his lapse from responsibility; glancing over, he saw that Rose was sleeping as soundly as the kids. His wide eyes searched for the disaster that he knew he'd find....

  But the wide roof was all the way up, now--intact. It made a great, squarish bubble, the skin of which was specially treated to stop the hard and dangerous part of the ultra-violet rays of the sun, and also the lethal portion of the cosmic rays. It even had an inter-skin layer of gum that could seal the punctures that grain-of-sand-sized meteors might make. But meteors, though plentiful in the asteroid belt, were curiously innocuous. They all moved in much the same direction as the large asteroids, and at much the same velocity--so their relative speed had to be low.

  The walls of the small tent around Endlich sagged, where they had bulged tautly before--showing that there was now a firm and equal pressure beyond them. The electrolysis apparatus had been left active all night, and the heating units. This was the result.

  John Endlich was at first almost unbelieving when he saw that nothing had been wrecked during the night. For a moment he was elated. He woke up his family by shouting: "Look! The bums stayed away! They didn't come! Look! We've got five acres of ground, covered by air that we can breathe!"

  His sense of triumph, however, was soon dampened. Yes--he'd been left unmolested--for one night. But had that been done only to keep him at a fruitless and sleepless watch? Probably. Another delicate form of hazing. And it meant nothing for the night to come--or for those to follow. So he was in the same harrowing position as before, pursued only by a wild and defenseless drive to get things done. To find some slight illusion of security by working to build a sham of normal, Earthly life. To shut out the cold vacuum, and a little of the bluntness of the voidal stars. To make certain reassuring sounds possible around him.

  "Got to patch up the pieces of the house, first, and bolt 'em together, Rose," he said feverishly. "Kids--maybe you could help by setting out some of the hydroponic troughs for planting. We gotta break plain ground, too, as soon as it's thawed enough. We gotta...." His words raced on with his flying thoughts.

  * * * * *

  It was a mad day of toil. The hours were pitifully short. They couldn't be stretched to cover more than a fraction of all the work that Endlich wanted to get done. But the low gravity reduced the problem of heavy lifting to almost zero, at least. And he did get the house assembled--so that Rose and the kids and he could sleep inside its sealed doors. Sealed, that is, if Neely or somebody didn't use a blaster or an explosive cap or bullet--in an orgy of perverted humor.... He still had no answer for that.

  Rose and the children toiled almost as hard as he did. Rose even managed to find a couple of dozen eggs, that--by being carefully packed to withstand a spaceship's takeoff--had withstood the effects of Neely's idea of fun. She set up an incubator, and put them inside, to be hatched.

  But, of course, sunset came again--with the same pendent threat as before. Nerve-twisting. Terrible. And a vigil was all but impossible. John Endlich was out on his feet--far more than just dog-tired....

  "That damned Neely," he groaned, almost too weary even to swallow his food, in spite of the luxury of a real, pullman-style supper table. "He doesn't lose sleep. He can pick his time to come here and raise hob!"

  Rose's glance was strange--almost guilty. "Tonight I think he might have to stay home--too," she said.

  John Endlich blinked at her.

  "All right," she answered, rather defensively. "So to speak, Johnny, I called the cops. Yesterday--with the small radio transmitter. When you and Bubs and Evelyn were up in those old buildings. I reported Neely and his companions."

  "Reported them?"

  "Sure. To Mr. Mahoney, the boss at the mining camp. I was glad to find out that there is a little law and order around here. Mr. Mahoney was nice. He said that he wouldn't be surprised if they were cooled in the can for a few days, and then confined to the camp area. Matter of fact, I radioed him again last night. It's been done."

  John Endlich's vast sigh of relief was slightly tainted by the idea that to call on a policing power for protection was a little bit on the timid side.

  "Oh," he grunted. "Thanks. I never thought of doing that."

  "Johnny."

  "Yeah?"

  "I kind of got the notion, though--from between the lines of what Mr. Mahoney said--that there was heavy trouble brewing at the camp. About conditions, and home-leaves, and increased profit-sharing. Maybe there's danger of riots and what-not, Johnny. Anyhow, Mr. Mahoney said that we should 'keep on exercising all reasonable caution.'"

  "Hmm-m--Mr. Mahoney is very nice, ain't he?" Endlich growled.

  "You stop that, Johnny," Rose ordered.

  But her husband had already passed beyond thoughts of jealousy. He was thinking of the time when Neely would have worked out his sentence, and would be free to roam around again--no doubt with increased annoyance at the Endlich clan for causing his restraint. If a riot or something didn't spring him, beforehand. John Endlich itched to try to tear his head off. But, of course, the same consequences as before still applied....

  * * * * *

  As it turned out, the Endlichs had a reprieve of two months and fourteen days, almost to the hour and figured on a strictly Earth-time scale.

  For what it was worth, they accomplished a great deal. In their great plastic greenhouse, supported like
a colossal bubble by the humid, artificially-warmed air inside it, long troughs were filled with pebbles and hydroponic solution. And therein tomatoes were planted, and lettuce, radishes, corn, onions, melons--just about everything in the vegetable line.

  There remained plenty of ground left over from the five acres, so John Endlich tinkered with that fifty-million-year-old tractor, figured out its atomic-power-to-steam principle, and used it to help harrow up the ancient soil of a smashed planet. He added commercial fertilizers and nitrates to it--the nitrates were, of course, distinct from the gaseous nitrogen that had been held, spongelike, by the subsoil, and had helped supply the greenhouse with atmosphere. Then he harrowed the ground again. The tractor worked fine, except that the feeble gravity made the lugs of its wheels slip a lot. He repeated his planting, in the old-fashioned manner.

  Under ideal conditions, the inside of the great bubble was soon a mass of growing things. Rose had planted flowers--to be admired, and to help out the hive of bees, which were essential to some of the other plants, as well. Nor was the flora limited to the Earthly. Some seeds or spores had survived, here, from the mother world of the asteroids. They came out of their eons of suspended animation, to become root and tough, spiky stalk, and to mix themselves sparsely with vegetation that had immigrated from Earth, now that livable conditions had been restored over this little piece of ground. But whether they were fruit or weed, it was difficult to say.

  Sometimes John Endlich was misled. Sometimes, listening to familiar sounds, and smelling familiar odors, toward the latter part of his reprieve, he almost imagined that he'd accomplished his basic desires here on Vesta--when he had always failed on Earth.

  There was the smell of warm soil, flowers, greenery. He heard irrigation water trickling. The sweetcorn rustled in the wind of fans he'd set up to circulate the air. Bees buzzed. Chickens, approaching adolescence, peeped contentedly as they dusted themselves and stretched luxuriously in the shadows of the cornfield.

  For John Endlich it was all like the echo of a somnolent summer of his boyhood. There was peace in it: it was like a yearning fulfilled. An end of wanderlust for him, here on Vesta. In contrast to the airless desolation outside, the interior of this five-acre greenhouse was the one most desirable place to be. So, except for the vaguest of stirrings sometimes in his mind, there was not much incentive to seek fun elsewhere. If he ever had time.

  And there was a lot of the legendary, too, in what his family and he had accomplished. It was like returning a little of the blue sky and the sounds of life to this land of ruins and roadways and the ghosts of dead beauty. Maybe there'd be a lot more of all that, soon, when the rumored major influx of homesteaders reached Vesta.

  "Yes, Johnny," Rose said once. "'Legendary' is a lot nicer word than 'ghostly'. And the ghosts are changing their name to legends."

  Rose had to teach the kids their regular lessons. That children would be taught was part of the agreement you had to sign at the A. H. O. before you could be shipped out with them. But the kids had time for whimsy, too. In make-believe, they took their excursions far back to former ages. They played that they were "Old People."

  Endlich, having repaired his atomic battery, didn't draw power anymore from the unit that had supplied the ancient buildings. But the relics remained. From a device like a phonograph, there was even a bell-like voice that chanted when a lever was pressed.

  And it was the kids who found the first "tay-tay bug," a day after its trills were heard from among the new foliage. "Ta-a-a-ay-y-y--ta-a-a-a-ay-y-yy-y--" The sound was like that of a little wheel, humming with the speed of rotation, and then slowing to a scratchy stop.

  A one-legged hopper, with a thin but rigid gliding wing of horn. Opalescent in its colors. It had evidently hatched from a tiny egg, preserved by the cold for ages.

  Wise enough not to clutch it with his bare hands, Bubs came running with it held in a leaf.

  It proved harmless. It was ugly and beautiful. Its great charm was that it was a vocal echo from the far past.

  * * * * *

  Sure. Life got to be fairly okay, in spite of hard work. The Endlichs had conquered the awful stillness with life-sounds. Growing plants kept the air in their greenhouse fresh and breathable by photosynthesis. John Endlich did a lot of grinning and whistling. His temper never flared once. Deep down in him there was only a brooding certainty that the calm couldn't last. For, from all reports, trouble seethed at the mining camp. At any time there might be a blowup, a reign of terror that would roll over all of Vesta. A thing to release pent-up forces in men who had seen too many hard stars, and had heard too much stillness. They were like the stuff inside a complaining volcano.

  The Endlichs had sought to time their various crops, so that they would all be ready for market on as nearly as possible the same day. It was intended as a trick of advertising--a dramatically sudden appearance of much fresh produce.

  So, one morning, in a jet-equipped space-suit, Endlich arced out for the mining camp. Inside the suit he carried samples from his garden. Six tomatoes. Beauties.

  "Have luck with them, Johnny! But watch out!" Rose flung after him by helmet phone. With a warm laugh. Just for a moment he felt maybe a little silly. Tomatoes! But they were what he was banking on, and had forced toward maturity, most. The way he figured, they were the kind of fruit that the guys in the camp--gagged by a diet of canned and dehydrated stuff, because they were too busy chasing mineral wealth to keep a decent hydroponic garden going--would be hungriest for.

  Well--he was rather too right, in some ways, to be fortunate. Yeah--they still call what happened the Tomato War.

  Poor Johnny Endlich. He was headed for the commissary dome to display his wares. But vague urges sidetracked him, and he went into the recreation dome of the camp, instead.

  And into the bar.

  The petty sin of two drinks hardly merits the punishing trouble which came his way as, at least partially, a result. With his face-window open, he stood at the bar with men whom he had never seen before. And he began to have minor delusions of grandeur. He became a little too proud of his accomplishments. His wariness slipped into abeyance. He had a queer idea that, as a farmer with concrete evidence of his skills to show, he would win respect that had been denied him. Dread of consequences of some things that he might do, became blurred. His hot temper began to smolder, under the spark of memory and the fury of insult and malicious tricks, that, considering the safety of his loved ones, he had had no way to fight back against. Frustration is a dangerous force. Released a little, it excited him more. And the tense mood of the camp--a thing in the very air of the domes--stirred him up more. The camp--ready to explode into sudden, open barbarism for days--was now at a point where nothing so dramatic as fresh tomatoes and farmers in a bar was needed to set the fireworks off.

  John Endlich had his two drinks. Then, with calm and foolhardy detachment, he set the six tomatoes out in a row before him on the synthetic mahogany.

  * * * * *

  He didn't have to wait at all for results. Bloodshot eyes, some of them belonging to men who had been as gentle as lambs in their ordinary lives on Earth, turned swiftly alert. Bristly faces showed swift changes of expression: surprise, interest, greed for possession--but most of all, aggressive and Satanic humor.

  "Jeez--tamadas!" somebody growled, amazed.

  Under the circumstances, to be aware of opportunity was to act. Big paws, some bare and calloused, some in the gloves of space suits, reached out, grabbed. Teeth bit. Juice squirted, landing on hard metal shaped for the interplanetary regions.

  So far, fine. John Endlich felt prouder of himself--he'd expected a certain fierceness and lack of manners. But knowing all he did know, he should have taken time to visualize the inevitable chain-reaction.

  "Thanks, pal.... You're a prince...."

  Sure--but the thanks were more of a mockery than a formality.

  "Hey! None for me? Whatsa idea?..."

  "Shuddup, Mic.... Who's dis guy?... Say, Friend-
-you wouldn't be that pun'kin-head we been hearin' about, would you?... Well--my gracious--bet you are! Dis'll be nice to watch!..."

  "Where's Alf Neely, Cranston? What we need is excitement."

  "Seen him out by the slot-machines. The bar is still out of bounds for him. He can't come in here."

  "Says who? Boss Man Mahoney? For dis much sport Neely can go straight to hell! And take Boss Man with him on a pitchfork.... Hey-y-y!... Ne-e-e-e-l-y-y-y!..."

  The big man whose name was called lumbered to the window at the entrance to the bar, and peered inside. During the last couple of months he'd been in a perpetual grouch over his deprivation of liberty, which had rankled him more as an affront to his dignity.

  When he saw the husband of the authoress of his woes--the little bum, who, being unable to guard his own, had allowed his woman to holler "Cop!"--Neely let out a yell of sheer glee. His huge shoulders hunched, his pendulous nose wobbled, his squinty eyes gleamed and he charged into the bar.

  John Endlich's first reaction was curiously similar to Neely's. He felt a flash of savage triumph under the stimulus of the thought of immediate battle with the cause of most of his troubles. Temper blazed in him.

  Belatedly, however, the awareness came into his mind that he had started an emotional avalanche that went far beyond the weight and fury of one man like Neely. Lord, wouldn't he ever learn? It was tough as hell to crawl, but how could a man put his wife and kids in awful jeopardy at the hands of a flock of guys whom space had turned into gorillas?

  Endlich tried for peace. It was to his credit that he did so quite coolly. He turned toward his charging adversary and grinned.

  "Hi, Neely," he said. "Have a drink--on me."

  The big man stopped short, almost in unbelief that anyone could stoop so low as to offer appeasement. Then he laughed uproariously.

  "Why, I'd be delighted, Mr. Pun'kins," he said in a poisonous-sweet tone. "Let bygones be bygones. Hey, Charlie! Hear what Pun'kins says? The drinks are all on him! And how is the Little Lady, Mrs. Pun'kins? Lonesome, I bet. Glad to hear it. I'm gonna fix that!"