And don't blame any remarks they may make on Emily Post.
When all that extra heat from the new, brighter sun first hit Mars, practically all the water on the planet, whether it was ice, liquid, or mixed with the dust of erosion in the dull, bodiless mud of Mars, had been lifted right up into the atmosphere. A lot of the dust went with it. There were black clouds, sandstorms, dust storms, and, as soon as the particle-laden water vapor hit streams of colder air, torrents of muddy rain. It couldn't have been an altogether pleasant time for the seven thousand people who had been on Mars at the time -- the colony which had existed before the big migration became necessary.
But at that time I had been mainly concerned with getting my lifeship and the ten people in it to Mars, whatever the conditions there were like. That was enough to worry about without looking for more.
Well, I'd done that. That worry was over. Now all I wanted to do was stay in bed for twenty years or so, smiling modestly when people came to visit me and tell me what a magnificent job I'd done.
Sammy came to visit me and told me: "You've been swinging the lead long enough, Bill. While you still had those bandages over your eyes there might have been some excuse, but now it's high time you stopped malingering and started earning your keep."
Behind me, Ritchie laughed uproariously. "That's telling him," he spluttered happily.
"This is a private discussion, mister," said Sammy coldly. "Bill's a friend of mine. We've been through a lot. We understand each other. If we did happen to want your opinion, we'd ask for it."
Sammy clearly didn't like Ritchie either. Ritchie merely laughed again. He never lost his temper.
"Where's Leslie?" I asked Sammy.
"She's working, pinhead. Don't you know yet only one can get away from the job at a time? Work Party No. 94 can't spare two people to come and hold your hand, even if you are pretending to be dying."
"What's the job you're doing?"
"Digging holes," said Sammy succinctly.
"And filling them in again?" I asked, because that seemed to be the implication.
"No, we don't have to do that. The wind does it for us."
"Who's in charge?"
"Of the whole show, or just 94?"
In the hospital we didn't know much about the general situation. No one had time to explain it to us.
"You tell me, Sammy," I suggested, "taking it I know but nothing."
"You don't have to tell me that," Sammy assured me. "You always were an ignorant cuss. Well, such government as there is at the moment is on the additive principle. You know, you start with a hut, build two rooms onto it, then a corridor all around, then an east wing, then a hall, a west wing, some more corridors and an annex, all carefully planned so that every time you want to go to the lavatory you have to go up and down six flights of stairs and walk three miles along passages.
"Viz -- the original colony had its own administration, of course, and when the big spaceships got here the top brass added themselves onto that, and when the lifeships arrived the lieutenants were added onto that, so that now -- "
He interrupted himself and asked belligerently: "Do you follow that, or can't you understand a simple explanation?"
I grinned. "Now tell me who's in charge of 94."
"Me, until they throw you out of here. Leslie, when I'm not around."
"So I'm still the boss, am I?"
"I wouldn't say that, but you're still supposed to take the rap for anything that goes wrong, if that's what you mean. Lifeship crews are staying together as units, lieutenants in charge. Sometimes a work party wants a different lieutenant, or a lieutenant wants a different work party, and there's a switch. But that isn't happening often."
"Surprising," I commented, "but good to hear all the same."
"You mean, Sammy," said Ritchie from the next bed, "that as far as the work parties are concerned these so-called lieutenants are still the little tin gods -- no chance for anyone else to step in and run things? No offense, Bill."
Sammy turned a cold eye on Ritchie again. "I thought I told you this was a private discussion," he observed. "And my name's Hoggan."
"Pleased to meet you," said Ritchie affably. "My name's Ritchie."
Sammy's sense of humor almost got the better of him. He nearly laughed. He was hard put to it to remember he didn't like Ritchie and retort bluntly: "All right, Ritchie. You have my permission to exist. But do it quietly, will you? I want to talk to Bill."
"Go ahead," said Ritchie airily.
Sammy stared at him for a moment, then turned back to me. "Seriously," he said, "there isn't much need for government just now, and by the time we do need it there'll be something better. On the whole, things would be all right but for -- Holy Moses, what's this?"
We looked around at a sudden uproar of whistles and wolf calls from the other men in the ward. Sammy hadn't heard it before, but I had. It meant Leslie or Aileen had just come in.
This time it was Leslie. She hurried along the ward, paying no attention to the chorus of approbation, and stopped at the foot of my bed.
"I need you, Sammy," she said breathlessly, ignoring me. "It's Morgan again."
"What's he doing now?" Sammy sighed, hoisting himself up in a way that showed how glad he must have been to sit down.
"It's what he's not doing," she told him. "I've done all I can, with no result. Now you'll have to come and clout his ear."
"You might have done that yourself, without bothering me," Sammy grumbled. "Surely you didn't let a little thing like that stop you?"
"That" was the sling supporting her right arm.
"Frankly, I did," said Leslie. "Morgan's looking ugly." She took a couple of quick steps, bent over, and pecked me briefly on the cheek. There was uproar in the ward again. Then she hustled Sammy out. Apart from that quick peck she hadn't even glanced at me.
And odd though it might seem, I was pleased. I hadn't thought Leslie was going to be as businesslike and brisk and good at handling people as it seemed she was. I should have known, I suppose. She had been a schoolteacher, and handling twenty to thirty boisterous kids was probably good practice for handling a work party.
So Morgan Smith was giving trouble again, which meant he had been giving trouble before.
"Who's this fellow who's making a nuisance of himself?" asked Ritchie curiously.
"Morgan Smith. Why?"
"Oh, sometimes it's useful to know about people who make a nuisance of themselves."
I grunted and went back to my thoughts.
Morgan had been a gamble, but so had they all. I had known all along the risk that some of the men and women I chose, instead of being the people who most deserved to live, would be the people above all who should have been left behind.
Sammy hadn't been serious, I knew, when he said I was malingering, but when I looked around the ward it seemed that everyone else there was so much more seriously hurt than I was that it was high time I was up and earning my keep, as Sammy said. Besides, if there was any strong-arm stuff to be done in my work party, I should be the one to do it. Sammy was tough enough, but slightly built. Leslie, normally, could look after herself, but not with a broken ulna. John Stowe and Harry Phillips were much older than Morgan. I was the only one so much stronger and tougher than Morgan that he'd be ill advised to give me any trouble.
No one seemed to he asleep. I bellowed: "Nurse!"
She appeared at once, a rather hard-faced woman who had once, I believed, been matron of a big London hospital. When she saw who had called for her she frowned. We knew she had three other wards to look after. We weren't supposed to bother her more than we could help, and people like me weren't supposed to bother her at all.
"I know you're busy, Nurse," I said. "I just want to remove myself from your charge. Seems there's trouble in my work party, and . . ."
"Lieutenant," she said wearily, "there's trouble in every work party. People don't like working fourteen hours a day. When you join your group, you'll have to give orders, and yo
u'll have to be fit."
"I know, but . . ."
"People who can't take orders generally aren't very good at giving them. Wait till the doctor sees you. When he says you can go, you'll go."
She didn't wait to hear what I had to say to this, but made her way out of the ward again.
"That seems to be that," said Ritchie.
I ignored him.
Now that I knew I had to stay where I was, I was even more impatient to get out of the hospital. Things were going on; Mars was being reshaped, my ex-crew, now Work Party 94, was working on a job, and I wasn't with them.
The rain started again soon after that. Considering how little water there was on Mars, compared with Earth, it was astonishing what the planet could do with it. I hadn't seen the rain yet, for there were no windows in our ward, but I'd heard it. Often.
None of us in the ward knew at first hand what conditions outside were like, for the recent history of all of us was the same. We had all been injured in lifeship landings on Mars, and brought straight to the hospital.
This time the rain sounded worse than usual. I wasn't surprised when Leslie came back and the whistles sounded again.
Men are like that. Some of the patients in the ward were pretty badly smashed up, but show them an attractive girl and they'd holler and whistle, just to show they weren't dead yet. Even those who moaned and whined and tossed about at other times made a gallant effort to look happy and well when Leslie or Aileen was in the ward. That sort of thing could give you a lump in the throat if you let it.
"We've knocked off for a bit," Leslie told me, sitting on the bed. There was nowhere else to sit. "We couldn't do anything. We can hardly see." She sighed. "I'll be glad when you're back, Bill."
"I tried to get out of here but was slapped down. What exactly is the trouble, Leslie? What's wrong?"
She pulled herself together and smiled brightly -- the too quick smile of so many women when the last thing they feel like doing is smiling. "Oh, nothing really," she said. "Don't bother about it now. Just get well, Bill, and don't worry. We'll be all right."
"Tell me," I insisted.
She hesitated, then it all came out in a rush. "It's not one thing, Bill. It's about a hundred things, all piling up. It's the rain, and the winds, and the dust, and the heat. Sand and dust in everything, grit in your mouth and eyes and hair. It's the work -- digging out foundations for buildings, and the wind filling them with sand and dust. Everybody grumbling, saying the same things over and over again. It's trying to sleep in a corridor, packed like sardines, with the sweat running all over you."
She tried to stop, but the words came pouring out of her. "Then there's the food, things you can't identify, things that taste like string. No milk. No coffee. No eggs. No meat. No hot drinks, because water boils when it's lukewarm. Washing in muddy water, because we've only enough clean water for drinking and cooking.
"Everybody coming to you with their troubles. Betty afraid that with all this work she's going to lose her baby. Little Bessie always in the way. Jim working far too hard, the only one we have to stop working sometimes. People from other crews trying to drag us into their quarrels. Back-breaking days that go on and on and on until you really believe there's never going to be an end to them, though you're so tired your brain's buzzing. Being hot, cold, drenched, parched, tired, and restless, all within an hour or so. Oh, I could scream!"
"Don't scream here," I said, "but cry if you like -- you might enjoy that better than screaming."
"I expect so," Leslie said moodily, "but you need training to cry in front of all these people, and I haven't got it. Any- way, there's all that, and Morgan."
"Yes?" I said. "What about Morgan?"
"Morgan's a kind of last straw. I don't really mind the weather or the food or sleeping with nineteen other women, because no one can do anything about it. And the work's got to be done. There can't be any improvements until we've put up more buildings, grown more crops, and all the rest of it. But Morgan . . ."
"Well, what's he doing?" I asked a little impatiently.
She shook her head. "Wait till you see for yourself."
"Why the mystery? If he's a nuisance, he must be doing something. What is it?"
"Just being a heel," said Leslie, "in every possible, conceivable way. He's making Betty's life hell, though the poor kid tries to hide it. Whatever he ought to do, he does the exact opposite. No, I knew I couldn't describe it so you'd understand. You'll know soon enough."
She looked up as Aileen came in to see Ritchie. She and Aileen nodded to each other.
"You know her?" I murmured.
"She's in 92, working near us. And she's one of the nineteen women I sleep with. After eight hours crushed up against someone, you feel you know her."
I grinned. "I know it's easy for me to be cheerful," I said, "but is everything really as black as all that? Just look back. On Earth all that mattered was getting a place on a lifeship. People would have given anything for that."
"I know," she said gloomily. "You needn't remind me how I tried to bribe you."
She must really he feeling low if she took it that way. I pretended she hadn't said anything.
"Then when we were on the lifeship," I went on quickly, "we just wanted to get safely to Mars. Nothing else mattered. Even if we'd been told about this, we'd have thought it was heaven. Now we're here, and in no immediate danger any more, yet we're -- "
"I know," she said, still in the same gloomy tone. "We're waiting for something worse. At least, I am. Can you blame me, Bill? All along we've thought -- if only we get through this all right, everything will be wonderful. And it never is."
"When something like this happens," I said quietly, "no one has any right to think things are going to be wonderful. You have to be satisfied just to be alive. After a big smack like this, things even out only gradually. You've got to be patient."
I grinned again. "It's just as well I know you, Leslie, or I'd be doing you an injustice. You're only unloading all this on me because you've been cheerfully accepting everything that everybody else unloaded on you. You feel you ought to have a chance to moan about things too."
She smiled despite herself. "There may be something in that. Oh, damn, hear that? I think the rain's off. I'll have to go back."
She stood up straight with an effort. "Hurry and come back, Bill," she said. "I miss you."
"That's nice," I said. "But do it with moderation. Don't miss me too much."
Aileen didn't go when Leslie did. Apparently it was Aileen's rest period. With Leslie gone, I looked idly at Aileen, who was talking quietly with Ritchie.
She was certainly a good-looking girl, rather like Leslie in some ways. They were both blondes for a start, Aileen very light, Leslie a deeper gold. Neither of them was the model type. They both had the slim waist and long, slender legs of a model, but they didn't have the exaggeration of breast and hip. They both looked intelligent -- in fact, intelligent rather than pretty. And they moved with the same lithe assurance.
The redheaded youth across from me kept trying to catch Aileen's eye and making mildly erotic gestures. That sort of thing never bothered Leslie, but it was obviously annoying Aileen. I heard her murmur to Ritchie: "So help me, I'm going to blister that character's ears on my way out." Ritchie chuckled.
I noticed that Aileen and Ritchie never touched each other. Her manner toward him was more that of a rather nervous secretary than of a loving daughter.
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