No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5)

by Clifford D. Simak

  Someone slammed the door and the voice was cut off.

  Scott hunched into the wind to light a cigarette.

  “The explorers are going crazy, too,” he said.

  Probably, later on in the program the announcer would have mentioned Scott Nixon and Jack Riley would blast off in a few minutes in another attempt to reach Mars. But it would be well along in the program and it wouldn’t take much time. Ten years ago Mars had been big news. Today it rated small heads in the press, slight mention on the air.

  But the newscaster would have been wrong about Jack Riley. Jack Riley lay in the base camp hospital with an attack of ptomaine. Only an hour before Jack had clasped Scott’s hand and grinned at him and wished him luck.

  He needed luck. For in this business a man didn’t have even an inside chance.

  Scott walked toward the tilted rocket. He could hear the crunch of Alexander’s feet as the man moved with him.

  “It won’t be new to you,” Alexander was saying, “you’ve been to the Moon before.”

  Yes, he had been to the Moon three times and he was still alive. But, then, he had been lucky. Your luck just simply didn’t hold forever. There was too much to gamble on in space. Fuel, for one thing. Men had experimented with fuel for ten years now and still the only thing they had was a combination of liquid oxygen and gasoline. They had tried liquid hydrogen but that had proved too cold, too difficult to confine, treacherous to handle, too bulky because of its low density. Liquid oxygen could be put under pressure, condensed into little space. It was safe to handle, safe until it combined with gasoline and then it was sheer death to anything that got within its reach.

  Of course, there had been some improvements. Better handling of the fuel, for instance. Combustion chambers stood up better now because they were designed better. Feed lines didn’t freeze so readily now as when the first coffins took to space. Rocket motors were more efficient, but still cranky.

  But there were other things. Meteors, for one, and you couldn’t do much about them. Not until someone designed a screen, and no one had. Radiations were another. Space was full of radiations and, despite the insulating jacket of ozone some of them seeped through.

  Scott climbed through the rocket valve and turned to close it. He hesitated for a moment, drinking in the smell and sight of Earth. There wasn’t much that one could see. The anxious face of Alexander, the huddled shadows that were watching men, the twinkling base camp lights.

  With a curse at his own weakness, Scott slammed the valve lock, twirled it home.

  Fitting himself into the shock absorbent chair, he fastened the straps that held him. His right foot reached out and found the trip that would fire the rockets. Then he lifted his wrist in front of his eyes and watched the second hand of the watch.

  Ten seconds. Eight. Now five. The hand was creeping up, ticking off the time. It rested on the zero mark and he slammed down his foot. Cruel weight smashed down upon him, driving his body back into the padded chair. His lungs were flattened, the air driven from them. His heart thumped. Nausea seized him, and black mists swam before his eyes. He seemed to be slipping into a midnight chasm and he cried out weakly. His body went limp, sagging in the chair. Twin streams of blood trickled from his nose and down his lip.

  He was far out in space when he struggled back to consciousness. For a time he did not stir. Lying in the chair, it took long minutes to realize where he was. Gradually his brain cleared and his eyes focused and made impressions on his senses. Slowly he became aware of the lighted instrument board, of the rectangle of quartz that formed the vision panel. His ears registered the silence that steeped the ship, the weird, deathly silence of outer space.

  Weakly he stirred and sat upright, his eyes automatically studying the panel. The fuel pressure was all right, atmospheric pressure was holding, speed was satisfactory.

  He leaned back in the chair and waited, resting, storing his strength. Automatically his hand reached up and wiped the blood from his lips and chin.

  II

  He was in space. Headed for the Moon and from there for Mars. But even the realization of this failed to rouse him from the lethargy of battered body and tortured brain.

  Taking off in a rocket was punishment. Severe, terrible punishment. Only men who were perfect physical specimens could attempt it. An imperfect heart would simply stop under the jarring impact of the blast-off.

  Someday rockets would be perfected. Someday rockets would rise gently from the Earth, shaking off Earth’s gravity by gradual application of power rather than by tremendous thrusts that kicked steel and glass and men out into space.

  But not yet, not for many years. Perhaps not for many generations. For many years men would risk their lives in blasting projectiles that ripped loose from the Earth by the sheer savagery of exploding oxygen and gasoline.

  A moan came from the rear of the ship, a stifled pitiful moan that brought Scott upright in the chair, tearing with nervous hands at the buckles of his belt.

  With belt loosened, body tensed, he waited for a second, hardly believing he had heard the sound. It came again, a piteous human cry.

  Scott leaped to his feet, staggered under the lack of gravitation. The rocket was coasting on momentum now and, while its forward motion gave it a simulation of gravity, enough so a man could orient himself, there was in actuality no positive gravity center in the shell.

  A bundle of heavy blankets lay in a corner formed by a lashed down pile of boxes … and the bundle was moving feebly. With a cry in his throat, Scott leaped forward and tore the blankets aside. Under them lay a battered man, crumpled , with a pool of blood soaking into a blanket that lay beneath him. Scott lifted the body. The head flopped over and he stared down into the vacant, blood-streaked face of Jimmy Baldwin.

  Jimmy’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Scott squatted on his heels, wild thoughts hammering in his head. Jimmy’s eyes opened again and regarded the pilot. He raised a feeble hand in greeting. The lips moved, but Jimmy’s voice was faint.

  “Hello, Scott.”

  “What are you doing here?” Scott demanded fiercely.

  “I don’t know,” said Jimmy weakly. “I don’t know. I meant to do something, but I forgot.”

  Scott rose and took a bottle of water from a case. Wetting his handkerchief, he bathed the bloodied face. His hands ran over Jimmy’s body but found no broken bones. It was a wonder the man hadn’t been killed outright. Some more Baldwin luck!

  “Where are we, Scott?” Jimmy asked.

  “We’re in space,” said Scott. “We’re going out to Mars.” No use of telling him anything but the truth.

  “Space,” said Jimmy. “I use to go out in space. Then something happened.” He shook his head wearily. Mercifully, the memory of that something had been wiped from his brain.

  Half dragging, half carrying, Scott got him to the assistant pilot’s seat, strapped him in, gave him a drink of water. Jimmy’s eyes closed and he sank back into the cushions. Scott resumed his chair, leaned forward to look out into space.

  There was little to see. Space, viewed from any angle, unless one was near a large body, looked pretty much the same. The Moon was still out of his range of vision. It would be hours before it would move upward to intersect the path of the rocket’s flight.

  Scott leaned back and looked at Jimmy. Apparently the man had sneaked aboard just before the take-off. No one paid much attention to him. Everyone was kind to him and he was allowed to do as he pleased. For he was not insane. The tragedy of those few minutes years before had merely wiped out his memory, given him the outlook of a child.

  Perhaps when he had gotten into the ship he had held some reason for his action, but now even that purpose had escaped him. Once again Jimmy Baldwin was a bewildered child’s brain in the body of a man.

  “Anyway,” said Scott, half speaking to himself, half to the silent form, “y
ou’re the first rocket stowaway.”

  They would miss Jimmy back at the camp, would wonder what had happened to him. Perhaps they’d organize a posse and search for him. The possibility was they would never know what happened, for there was slight chance, Scott told himself, that he or Jimmy or the ship would ever get back to Earth again.

  Someone else would have to tend Jimmy’s flowers now, but probably no one would, for his flowers were the Martian lilies. And Martian lilies no longer were a novelty.

  It had been the lilies that started the whole thing, this crazy parade of men who went into space and died.

  Slightly over twelve years ago, Dr. Steven Alexander reported that, from his observatory on Mt. Kenya, he had communicated with Mars by ultrashort wave radio. It had been a long and arduous process. First the signals from Earth, repeated in definite series, at definite intervals. And then, finally, the answer from the Red Planet. After months of labor slow understanding came.

  “We send you,” signaled the Martians. “We send you.” Over and over again. A meaningless phrase. What were they sending? Slowly Alexander untangled the simple skein of thought. Mars finally messaged: “We send you token!” That word “token” had been hard. It represented thought, an abstract thought.

  The world waited breathlessly for the token. Finally it came, a rocket winging its way across space, a rocket that flashed and glinted in the depth of space as it neared Earth. Kept informed of its location by the Martians, Earth’s telescopes watched it come. It landed near Mt. Kenya, a roaring, screaming streak of light that flashed across the midnight sky.

  Dug up, it yielded an inner container, well-insulated against heat and cold, against radiation and shock. Opened, it was found to contain seeds. Planted, jealously guarded, carefully tended, the seeds grew, were the Martian lilies. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly over the Earth.

  Back on Earth today the Martian lilies grew in every hamlet, clogged the fence rows of every farm. Relieved of whatever natural enemies and checks they might have had on their native planet, they flourished and spread, became a weed that every farmer cursed whole-heartedly.

  Their root structure probed deep into the soil. Drought could not kill them. They grew rapidly, springing to full growth almost overnight. They went to unkillable seed. Which was what might have been expected of any plant nurtured on the stubborn soil of Mars. Earth, to the Martian lilies, was a paradise of air and water and sunlight.

  And, as if that first token-load had not been enough, the Martians kept on sending rocket loads of seeds. At each opposition the rockets came, each announced by the messages from the Martian transmitter. And each of them landed almost precisely on the spot where the first had landed.

  That took mathematics! Mathematics and a superb knowledge of rocketry. The rockets apparently were automatic. There was no intelligence to guide them once they were shot into space. Their courses must have been plotted to the finest detail, with every factor determined in advance. For the Martian rockets were not aimed at Earth as one broad target but at a certain spot on Earth and so far every one of them had hit that mark!

  At the rocket camp each Martian rocket was awaited anxiously, with the hope it would bring some new pay load. But the rockets never brought anything but seeds … more Martian lily seeds.

  Jimmy stirred restlessly, opened his eyes and looked out the vision plate. But there was no terror in his eyes, no surprise nor regret.

  “Space?” he asked.

  Scott nodded.

  “We’re going to the Moon?”

  “To the Moon first,” said Scott. “From there we go to Mars.”

  Jimmy lapsed into silence. There was no change upon his face. There never was any change upon his face.

  I hope he doesn’t make any trouble, Scott told himself. It was bad enough just to have him along. Bad enough to have this added responsibility.

  For space flight was a dangerous job. Ever since the International Mars Communication Center had been formed, with Alexander in charge, space had flung men aside. Ship after ship, pilot after pilot. The task, alone, of reaching the Moon had taken terrible toll.

  Men had died. Some had died before they reached the Moon, some had died on the Moon but mostly they had died heading back for Earth. For landing on Earth, jockeying a rocket through Earth’s dense atmosphere, is a tricky job. Others had died en route to Mars, ships flaring in space or simply disappearing, going on and on, never coming back. That was the way it had been with Hugh.

  And now his brother, Scott, was following the trail that Hugh had blazed, the trail to the Moon and out beyond. Following in a bomb of potential death, with a blank-faced stowaway in the chair beside him.

  Half way to Mars and the ship was still intact. Running true to course, running on schedule, flashing through space under the thrust of momentum built up during the blast-off from the Moon.

  Half way to Mars and still alive! But too early yet to hope. Perhaps other men had gotten as far as this and then something had happened.

  Scott watched the depths of space, the leering, jeering emptiness of star-studded velvet that stretched on and on.

  There had been days of waiting and of watching. More days of waiting and of watching loomed ahead.

  Waiting for that warning flicker on the instrument panel, that split second warning before red ruin struck as cranky fuel went haywire.

  Waiting for the “tick” of a tiny meteor against the ship’s steel wall … the tiny, ringing sound that would be the prelude to disaster.

  Waiting for something else … for that unknown factor of accident that would spatter the ship and the two men in it through many empty miles.

  Endless hours of watching and of waiting, hastily snatched cat-naps in the chair, hastily snatched meals. Listening to the babbling Jimmy Baldwin who wondered how his flowers were getting on, speculated on what the boys were doing back in the rocket camp on Earth.

  One thing hammered at Scott Nixon’s brain … the message of the Martian radio, the message that had been coming now for many years. “No. No. No come. Danger.” Always that and little else. No explanation of what the danger was. No suggestion for circumventing or correcting that danger. No helpfulness in Earthmen’s struggle to cross the miles of space between two neighboring planets.

  Almost as if the Martians didn’t want Earthmen to come. Almost as if they were trying to discourage space travel. But that would hardly be the case, for the Martians had readily cooperated in establishing communications, had exhibited real intelligence and earnestness in working out the code that flashed words and thoughts across millions of miles.

  Without a doubt, had they wished, the Martians could have helped. For it was with seemingly little effort that they sent their own rockets to earth.

  And why had each Martian rocket carried the same load each time? Could there be some significance in those Martian lily seeds? Some hidden meaning the Earth had failed to grasp? Some meaning that the things from Mars hope would be read with each new rocket-load?

  Why hadn’t the Martians come themselves? If they could shoot automatic rockets across the miles of space, certainly they could navigate rockets carrying themselves.

  The Martian rockets had been closely studied back on Earth but had yielded no secrets. The fuel always was exhausted. More than likely the Martians knew, to the last drop, how much was needed. The construction was not unlike Earth rockets, but fashioned of a steel that was hardened and toughened beyond anything Earth could produce.

  So for ten years Earthmen had worked unaided to cross the bridge of space, launching ships from the Earth’s most favored take-off point, from the top of Mt. Kenya, heading out eastward into space, taking advantage of the mountain’s three mile height, the Earth’s rotation speed of 500 yards per second at the equator.

  Scott reviewed his flight, checked the clocklike routine he had followed. Blast-off from Earth. Lan
ding in the drear, desolate Mare Serenitatis on the Moon, refueling the ship from the buried storage tanks, using the caterpillar tractor from the underground garage to haul the rocket onto the great turn-table cradle. Setting the cradle at the correct angle and direction, blasting off again at the precise second, carrying a full load of fuel, something impossible to do and still take off from Earth. Taking advantage of the Moon’s lower gravity, its lack of atmosphere. Using the Moon as a stepping stone to outer space.

  Now he was headed for Mars. If he landed there safely, he could spend two days, no more, no less, before he blasted off for Earth again.

  But probably he wouldn’t reach Mars. Probably he and Jimmy Baldwin, in the end, would be just a few more bones to pave the road to Mars.

  III

  A gigantic building, rising to several hundred feet in height, domed, without door or window, stood lonely in the vastness of the red plain that stretched to the far-off black horizon.

  The building and nothing more. No other single sign of habitation. No other evidence of intelligent life.

  The Martian lilies were everywhere, great fields of them, bright scarlet against the redness of the sand. But in its native soil the Martian lily was a sorry thing, a poor apology for the kind of flower that grew on Earth. Stunted, low-growing, with smaller and less brilliant flowers.

  The sand gritted under Scott’s boots as he took a slow step forward.

  So this was Mars! Here, at the North pole … the single building … the only evidence of intelligence on the entire planet. As the ship had circled the planet, cutting down its tremendous speed, he had studied the surface in the telescopic glass and this building had been the only habitation he had seen.

  It stood there, made of shimmering metal, glinting in the pale sunlight.

  “Bugs,” said Jimmy, at Scott’s elbow.

  “What do you mean, bugs?” asked Scott.

  “Bugs in the air,” said Jimmy. “Flying bugs.”

  Scott saw them then. Things that looked like streaks of light in the feeble sunshine. Swarms of them hovered about the great building and others darted busily about.