Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction

by Sam Moskowitz

  “I like it,” said Marilyn. “In a way it's sad, but it isn't saddening. A song can be like that some-times. It soothes you and makes you feel at peace.”

  Franklyn's concern over her news was greater than Marilyn's, and he blamed himself for the state of affairs. His anxiety irritated her slightly. And it was no good trying to place blame, she pointed out. All that one could do was to accept the situ-ation and take every sensi-ble care.

  The settlement doctor backed that up. James Forbes was a young man, and no saw-bones. He was there because a good man was needed in a place where un-usual effects might be expected, and strange condi-tions called for careful study. And he had taken the job because he was interested. His line now was matter of fact, and encouraging. He refused to make it remarkable.

  “There was nothing to worry about,” he assured them. “Ever since the dawn of history there have been women produ-cing babies in far more incon-venient times and places than this — and getting away with it. There's no reason at all why every-thing should not be perfectly normal.”

  He spoke his professional lies with an assu-rance which greatly increased their confi-dence, and he main-tained it steadily by his manner. Only in his diary did he admit worry-ing speculations on the effects of lowered gravi-tation and air-pressure, the rapid tempe-rature changes, the possi-bility of unknown infections and the other hazard-ous factors.

  Marilyn minded little that she lacked the luxu-ries that would have attended her at home. With her coloured maid, Helen, to look after her and keep her company she busied herself with sewing and small matters. The Martian scene retained its fascination for her. She felt at peace with it as though it were a wise old coun-sellor who had seen too much of birth and death to grow vehe-ment over either. Jannessa, Marilyn's daughter, was born with no great trial upon a night when the desert lay cold in the moon-light, and so quiet that only an occa-sional faint chime from the tinker-bells disturbed it. She was the first Earth baby to be born on Mars. A perfectly normal six and a half pounds —Earth — and a credit to all concerned. It was afterwards that things started to go less well. Dr. Forbes' fears of strange infect-ions had been well grounded, and despite his scrupu-lous pre-cau-tions there were compli-ca-tions. Some were suscept-ible to the attacks of peni-cillin and the complex sulfas, but others resisted them. Marilyn, who had at first appeared to be doing well, weakened and then became seriously ill.

  Nor did the child thrive as it should, and when the repaired Andro-meda at last took off, it left them behind. Another ship was due in from Earth a few days later. Before it arrived, the doctor put the situa-tion to Franklyn.

  “I'm by no means happy about the child,” he told him. “She's not putting on weight as she should. She grows, but not enough. It's pretty obvious that the condi-tions here are not suiting her. She might survive, but I can't say with what effect on her constitution. She should have normal Earth condi-tions as soon as possible.”

  Franklyn frowned.

  “And her mother?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Godalpin is in no condi-tion to travel, I'm afraid.”

  “It's out of the quest-ion. In her present state, and after so long in low gravi-tation, I doubt whether she could stand a G of acce-lera-tion.”

  Franklyn looked bleakly unwilling to compre-hend.

  “You mean—?”

  “In a nutshell, it's this. It would be fatal for your wife to attempt the journey. And it would probably be fatal for your child to remain here.”

  There was only one way out of that. When the next ship, the Aurora, came in it was decided to delay no longer. A passage was arranged for Helen and the baby, and in the last week of 1994 they went on board.

  Franklyn and Marilyn watched the Aurora leave. Marilyn's bed had been pushed close to the window, and he sat on it, holding her hand. Together they watched her shoot up-wards on a narrow cone of flame and curve away until she was no more than a twinkle in the dark Martian sky. Marilyn's fingers held his tightly. He put his arm around her to support her, and kissed her.

  “It'll be all right, darling. In a few months you'll be with her again,” he said. Marilyn put her other hand against his cheek, but she said nothing. Nearly seven-teen years were to pass before any-thing more was heard of the Aurora, but Marilyn was not to know that. In less than two months she was resting for ever in the Martian sands with the tinker-bells chiming softly above her. When Franklyn left Mars, Dr. Forbes was the only member of the original team still left there. They shook hands beside the ramp which led up to the latest thing in nuclear-powered ships. The doctor said:

  “For five years I've watched you work, and overwork, Franklyn. You'd no busi-ness to survive. But you have. Now go home and live. You’ve earned it.”

  Franklyn withdrew his gaze from the thriving Port Gilling-ton which had grown, and was still grow-ing out of the rough settle-ment of a few years ago.

  “What about your-self? You've been here longer than I have.”

  “But I've had a couple of vaca-tions. They were long enough for me to look around at home and decide that what really interests me is here.” He might have added that the second had been long enough for him to find and marry a girl whom he had brought with him, but he just added: “Besides I've just been working, not over-working.”

  Franklyn's gaze had wandered again, this time beyond the settle-ment, towards the fields which now fringed the water-way. Among them was a small plot marked with a single up-right stone.

  “You're still a young man. Life owes you some-thing,” the doctor said. Franklyn seemed not to have heard, but he knew that he had. He went on: “And you owe some-thing to life. You hurt only your-self by resisting it. We have to adapt to life.”

  “I wonder—?” Franklyn began, but the doctor laid a hand on his arm.

  “Not that way. You have worked hard to forget. Now you must make a new beginning.”

  “No wreckage of the Aurora has ever been reported, you know,” Franklyn said. The doctor sighed, quietly. The Ships that disappeared without trace consider-ably out-numbered those that left any.

  “A new beginning,” he repeated, firmly.

  The hailer began to call “All aboard.”

  Dr. Forbes watched his friend into the entrance port. He was a little surprised to feel a touch on his arm, and find his wife beside him.

  “Poor man,” she said, softly. “Maybe when he gets home—”

  “Maybe,” said the doctor, doubtfully. He went on: “I’ve been cruel, mean-ing to be kind. I should have tried my best to crush that false hope and free him from it. But ... well, I couldn't do it.”

  “No,” she agreed. “You'd nothing to give him to take the place of it. But some-where at home there'll be some-one who has — a woman. Let's hope he meets her soon.”

  Jannessa turned her head from a thought-ful study of her own hand, and regarded the slaty-blue arm and fingers beside her.

  “I'm so different,” she said, with a sigh. “So different from every-body. Why am I different, Telta?”

  “Everybody's different,” Telta said. She looked up from her task of slicing a pale round fruit into a bowl. Their eyes met, Jannessa's china blue in their white setting look-ing questioningly in Telta's dark pupils which floated in clear topaz. A small crease appeared between the woman's delicate silvery brows as she studied the child. “I'm different. Toti's different. Melga's different. That's the way things are.”

  “But I'm more different. Much more different.”

  “I don't suppose you'd be so very different where you came from” Telta said, resuming her slicing.

  “Was I different when I was a baby?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Jannessa reflected.

  “Where do babies come from, Telta?”

  Telta explained. Jannessa said, scorn-fully:

  “I don't mean like that. I mean babies like me. Different ones.”

  “I don't know. Only that it must have been somewhere far, far away.”

  “Somewhere outside; in t
he cold?”

  “Yes, Telta.”

  “Well, it must have been one of those twinkles that you came from. But nobody knows which one.”

  “Truly, Telta?”

  “Quite, truly.”

  Jannessa sat still a moment, thinking of the infinite night sky with its myriads of stars.

  “But why didn't I die in the cold ?”

  “You very nearly did, dear. Toti found you just in time.”

  “And was I all alone?”

  “No, dear. Your mother was holding you. She had wrapped you round with every-thing she could to keep the cold away. But the cold was too much for her. When Toti found her she could only move a little. She pointed to you and said:

  ‘Jannessa! Jannessa!’ So we thought that must be your name.”

  Telta paused, remem-bering how when Toti, her hus-band, had brought the baby down from the surface to the life-giving warmth it had been touch and go. A few more minutes out-side would have been fatal. The cold was a dread-ful thing. She shuddered, recalling Toti's account of it, and how it had turned the un-fortu-nate mother black, but she did not tell that to the child.

  Jannessa was frowning, puzzled.

  “But how? Did I fall off the star?”

  “No, dear. A ship brought you.”

  But the word meant nothing to Jannessa.

  It was difficult to explain to a child. Diffi-cult, for that matter, for Telta herself to believe. Her ex-pe-rience included only the system she lived in. The surface was a grim, in-hospi-table place of jagged rocks and kill-ing cold which she had seen only from the protected domes. The history books told her of other worlds where it was warm enough to live on the sur-face, and that her own people had come from such a world many gene-ra-tions ago. She believed that that was true, but it was never-the-less unreal. More than fifty ances-tors stood between her and life on a planet's surface, and it is difficult for anything that far away to seem real. Never-the-less, she told Jannessa the story in the hope that it would give her some con-so-la-tion.

  “Because of the cold?”

  “That — and other things. But in the end they made it possible for you to live here. They had to work very hard and cleverly for you. More than once we thought we were going to lose you.”

  “But what were they doing?”

  “I don't understand much of it. But you see you were intended for a diffe-rent world. It must have been one where there was more weight, thicker air, more humi-dity, higher tempe-ra-ture, different food and — oh, lots of things you'll learn about when you're older. So they had to help you get used to things as they are here.”

  Jannessa considered that.

  “It was very kind of them,” she said, “but they weren't very good, were they?”

  Telta looked at her in surprise.

  “Dear, that's not very grateful. What do you mean?”

  “If they could do all that, why couldn't they make me look like other people?

  Why did they leave me all white, like this? Why didn't they give me lovely hair like yours, instead of this yellow stuff?”

  “Darling, your hair's lovely. It's like the finest golden threads.”

  “But it's not like anyone else's. It's different. I want to be like other people. But I'm a freak.”

  Telta looked at her, unhappily perplexed.

  “Being of another kind isn't being a freak,” she said.

  “It is if you're the only one. And I don't want to be different. I hate it,” said Jannessa.

  A man made his way slowly up the marble steps of the Venturers' Club. He was middle-aged, but he walked with a clumsy lack of certainty more appro-priate to an older man. For a moment the porter looked doubt-ful, then his expression cleared.

  “Good evening, Dr. Forbes,” he said.

  Dr. Forbes smiled.

  “Good evening, Rogers. You've got a good memory. It's twelve years.”

  “So now you're home for good — and loaded with medical honours,” Franklyn said.

  “It's a curious feeling,” Forbes said. “Eighteen years altogether. I'd been there almost a year when you came.”

  “Well, you've earned the rest. Others got us there, but it's your work that's enabled us to build there and stay there.”

  “There was a lot to learn. There's a lot yet.”

  “You never remarried?” he asked.

  “No.” Franklyn shook his head.

  “You should have. I told you, remember? You should have a wife and family. It's still not too late.”

  Again Franklyn shook his head.

  “I've not told you my news yet,” he said. “I've had word of Jannessa.”

  Forbes stared at him. If he had ever thought any-thing more un-likely he could not recall what it was.

  “Had word,” he repeated, care-fully. “Just what does that mean?”

  Franklyn explained.

  “For years I have been adver-tising for news of the Aurora. The answers came mostly from nuts, or from those who thought I was crazy enough for them to cash in on — until six months or so ago.”

  “The man who came to see me then was the owner of a spaceman's hostel in Chicago. He'd had a man die there a little while before, and the man had some-thing he wanted to get off his chest before he went out. The owner brought it to me for what it was worth.”

  “The dying man claimed that the Aurora was not lost in space, as every-one thought; he said that his name was Jenkins and he had been aboard her, so he ought to know. According to his story, there was a mutiny on the Aurora when she was a few days out from Mars. It was on account of the captain deciding to hand some of the crew over to the police on arrival, for crimes un-speci-fied. When the muti-neers took over they had the support of all but one or two of the officers, and they changed course. I don't know what the ulti-mate plan was, but what they did then was to lift from the plane of the ecliptic, and hop the asteroid belt, on a course for Jupiter.”

  “The owner got the impression that they were not so much a ruth-less gang as a bunch of despe-rate men with a grie-vance. They could have pushed the officers and the passengers out into space since they had all quali-fied for a hang-ing any-way. But they didn't. Instead, like other pirates before them, they elected to maroon the lot and leave them to make out as best they could — if they could.”

  “According to Jenkins, the place chosen was Europa, somewhere in the region of its twentieth parallel, and the time some-where in the third or fourth month of 1995. The party they stranded consisted of twelve persons — including a coloured girl in charge of a white baby.”

  Franklyn paused.

  “The owner bears a quite blame-less character. The dying man had nothing to gain by fabri-ca-tion. And, on looking up the sailing list, I find that there was a space-man named Evan David Jenkins aboard the Aurora”

  He concluded with a kind of cau-tious triumph, and looked expec-tantly across the table at Forbes. But there was no enthu-siasm in the doctor's face.

  “Europa,” he said, reflectively. He shook his head.

  Franklyn's expression hardened.

  “Is that all you have to say?” he demanded.

  “No,” Forbes told him, slowly. “For one thing I should say that it is more than unlikely — that it is almost impos-sible that she can have survived.”

  “Almost is not quite. But I am going to find out. One of our pros-pect-ing ships is on her way to Europa now.”

  Forbes shook his head again.

  “It would be wiser to call her off.”

  Franklyn stared at him.

  “After all these years — when at last there is hope—”

  The doctor looked steadily back at him.

  “My two boys are going back to Mars next week,” he said.

  “I don't see what that has to do with it.”

  “But it has. Their muscles ache conti-nu-ally. The strain of that makes them too tired either to work or to enjoy life. The humidity here also exhausts them. They com-plain that the air feels like a thick soup all
around and inside them. They have never been free of catarrh since they arrived. There are other things, too. So they are going back.”

  “And you stay here. That's tough.”

  “It's tougher on Annie. She adores those boys. But that's the way life is, Frank.”

  “Meaning?”

  'That it's conditions that count. When we produce a new life, it is some-thing plastic. Inde-pen-dent. We can't live its life as well as our own. We can't do more than to see that it has the best condi-tions to shape it the way we like best. If the condi-tions are in some way beyond our control, one of two things happens; either it becomes adapted to the condi-tions it finds — or it fails to adapt, which means that it dies.

  “We talk airily about conquering this or that natural obstacle — but look at what we really do and you'll find that more often than not it is our-selves we are adapting.”

  “My boys have been accli-ma-tized to Martian condi-tions. Earth doesn't suit them. Annie and I have sustained Martian con-di-tions for a while, but, as adults, we were in-cap-able of thorough adapt-ation. So either we must come home — or stay there to die early.”