When at last Aileen rose to go, she looked across at the red-haired youth, obviously intending to go over and tell him what she thought of him.
"Aileen!" I said sharply.
She turned, a little startled. She had never spoken to me. But when I beckoned she came and bent over me.
"He's going to die tonight or tomorrow night," I said quietly.
She straightened abruptly. "Oh," she said, and her face went pink. "Thanks for telling me -- Lieutenant Easson, isn't it?"
I nodded. She walked away along the ward. She must have flashed a friendly smile at the redhead, from the reaction of the other men in the ward, but as her back was to me I didn't see it.
Ritchie grinned. "Why did you have to spoil it?" he asked playfully. "Why didn't you let her blister his ears and then find out?"
I frowned. "You think that would have been funny?" I asked incredulously.
"Yes. But then, I've been told I have a peculiar sense of humor."
"You have," I told him, and pointedly looked away. I heard Ritchie chuckle, meaninglessly.
The doctor wouldn't clear me that day, or the next. The day after that I was given my clothes and told I could go, but to take it easy.
The way it was said made it clear that it was said from habit, not because the doctor thought I would take it easy, or that anyone could afford to nurse himself with things as they were.
Before I went, when it was known I was going, Ritchie made me a proposition.
"Ever struck you, Bill, that this is the greatest chance ever for smart businessmen?" he asked.
"What is?"
"The setup here. Rebuilding. Starting again. It's better than getting in on the ground floor. It's a chance to move into the basement."
"Money doesn't exist any more," I said shortly, a little disgusted at the idea of making capital out of mankind's greatest disaster.
Ritchie shrugged his heavy shoulders. "What's money? All that ever mattered was what you could get for it. This is a chance to get it. Now, you're still a lieutenant, Bill. You have power, and any little piece of power you have is a chance to get more. If you and I work together, starting not when it's too late, but right now -- "
"Not interested," I said flatly. I was going to say more, angrily, but Ritchie's smooth, pleasant voice cut in.
"Listen, Bill, I understand your idealism. I like you for it. But don't you see what's going to happen? If you're not ambitious, someone else will be. You want to make Mars a safe place, a good place. Fine. And while you're doing it someone will be building himself up so that when you've made Mars a safe place, a good place, he'll be able to step in and take it from you."
I stared at him.
"I'm not suggesting," said Ritchie earnestly, "that you shouldn't work for the good of everybody. Of course you will. But don't forget, while you're doing it, that human beings aren't perfect. Don't forget that you can't rely on everyone to be as honest and unselfish and idealistic as you. Look after your interests -- no one else will. Come in with me, help me, and you and I will -- "
"You're making quite a lot of sense," I said, "but the answer's still no. Build your own empire, Ritchie."
"All right," said Ritchie evenly. "I will."
So before I was even out of the hospital I should have been pretty well prepared for the many battles which I knew were coming. I knew about Mars, though not at first hand. I knew about the people who were trying to make it a world fit to live in. I knew about Morgan Smith. And I knew about Alec Ritchie. I wouldn't have had to be much of a prophet to have a general picture of what was going to happen.
I wasn't much of a prophet. Or I didn't think. What happened hardly ever found me better prepared than anyone else.
2
When I came out of the hospital, alone, I stood still for a long time at the door and just looked around me.
This was the future home of the human race -- now and for a long time to come. Mercury, Venus, and Earth would be too hot for human beings for millions of years. Science would have to advance about twice as far as it had already come from zero before Jupiter or any of the other outer planets could be forced to provide a comfortable environment for mankind. There would be little settlements, undoubtedly, on asteroids and satellites. But now and for untold generations Mars was the only place for men and women to live.
That made grumbles about the world itself absolutely pointless. It was now of purely academic interest that there had once been a world on which water boiled at 100° C.
If the pre-space-travel calculations had been correct and Mars had had an atmosphere too thin and with too little oxygen to support human life, human life would simply have ceased to exist when the sun underwent its change. As it was, we could only be thankful that Mars had just enough air, water, and whatever else we needed to enable us to live fairly comfortably on it until we were once more in a position to take command of our environment.
That wouldn't be soon. We had left a highly mechanized culture back on Earth, but it would be some time before we had climbed to the same point on Mars. For a year or two at least things would be very primitive. Hydroelectric power was out of the question, and the use of oil, gasoline, or coal for generating electricity was just as impracticable. We simply had to use the new source of power, the one we didn't know very much about -- atomic power.
That meant that there would be plenty of power when we had any at all.
Nuclear physics had come a long way since the time when the power of the atom could only be used to make a big bang. But it hadn't come anywhere near the beautiful simplicity of really efficient technology. Atom power was still huge, clumsy, and uncertain.
None of the spaceships was atom-powered. It was a pity, in a way, that such a wonder fuel as moluone had been discovered, back in the fifties. Instead of having to plug away at atomic power to make space travel possible, the interplanetary pioneers had turned their backs on it, since they didn't need it, and now we had to start from scratch. Moluone was a wonder fuel for space travel, all right, but it was no earthly use for ground-based industry. If there had been just one experimental atom-powered ship, it might have saved twenty thousand people ten years of toil.
I sighed and moved away from the door of the research station. People were going in and coming out, and I was in the way. Nobody paid any attention to me, apart from a few people who glanced curiously at my uniform, as if they had never seen such a thing before.
Nobody else was wearing anything like my uniform, certainly. Every other person I saw, of either sex, wore a sort of smock, except a few men who wore only shorts. The improvised garment which was so generally worn was like shorts and a sleeveless shirt except that it was in one piece. If existing shorts and shirts were used, they were sewn together at the waist. So far I didn't know why. There was seldom any attempt, even in the case of the women, to make the one-piece suits attractive. There were none with halter tops or bare backs or low necklines. They were plain and strong and simple. But of course the girls who were attractive looked attractive anyway.
I made my way slowly to where Party 94 was working. I'd been told where to go. No one around had so little to do that he had time to come and show me the way. As I went I continued my first survey of the Martian scene.
There had been a colony of about seven thousand people on Mars before the disaster. That didn't seem many now, but it had been a lot when Mars was a dead world, a mere research station for astronomers, physicists, metallurgists, geologists, archaeologists, botanists, and scores of other ists.
With all the people that the regular spaceships and the lifeships had been able to bring from the doomed Earth in the time available, there still weren't many more than twenty thousand people on Mars, including all the ists.
From the short-term point of view, it was just as well that there weren't any more. The fact that there had been permanent accommodation for seven thousand people for a start meant that there was some sort of temporary accommodation for the whole twenty thousand.
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The settlement had been called Winant, after the first man to land on Mars, and it looked as if the town that was going to grow up around it would be called Winant too. So many people had so many different ideas about what to call the first Martian township that the easiest way out of the impasse seemed to be to use the existing name.
The Winant scene was typical of all Mars. The sun was bright, surrounded and diffused by a strong haze. Mars would always have a lot of dust in the atmosphere. It was warm but not unbearably hot; the air generally was so dry that people could be comfortable at much higher temperatures than could have been borne on Earth. The smaller effort that the reduced gravity called for was another thing that made the heat bearable.
The sky was deep, luminous blue -- deeper than it had ever been on Earth. The ground was colorful, though flat and almost featureless -- red, yellow, green, and brown. Most of the rocks near the surface had been worn long ago into sand and dust. But here and there were little ridges of rock and stone, eroded to mere remnants of the mountains they must once have been.
Mars hadn't had an earthquake for millions of years. The ground surface was very much as it must have been in the time of the first Cro-Magnon on Earth. There was nothing much to see on Mars itself -- there never was. The only native form of life was plant life, lichen and a few varieties of moss. There was plenty of that.
Anything of interest had to be supplied by the people from Earth. Around Winant there was plenty. First there were the long, flat buildings of the research station, built not for this new Mars but for the cold, dark, sterile world Mars had been before the sun stepped up its output. There were hardly any windows.
All around the station buildings were piles of equipment, stones, metal from broken-up lifeships, stores of all kinds -- mostly fastened down firmly so that the gales, of which there was no sign at present, couldn't scatter them all over the landscape. Drawn up behind the station were about a hundred lifeships, being used for temporary accommodation. Behind them again were the larger spaceships, the ships that had been in existence before the emergency was known.
Among the ships were corralled the cattle which had been brought from Earth. It seemed crazy to bring cattle to Mars instead of human beings, but unless such provision had been made we would have had to manage henceforth without meat, milk, leather, and wool. As it was, we had none of these things at the moment; we couldn't allow the cattle to breed until we had fodder for them. They ate the sparse Martian lichen, but it wasn't enough. They needed Earth-type grass, which was only now being introduced to Mars.
In front of the station, about a hundred yards from it, thousands of people were engaged on what looked already like vast excavations. We had heard blasting frequently in the hospital.
I stopped a tall girl who was on her way toward the huge hole in the rock. "What's going on there?" I asked.
Miraculously, even here she was chewing something. It couldn't be gum; there wasn't any.
"Just out of the hospital, Lieutenant?" she said in the well-remembered accents of Brooklyn. "You want to know what we're doing? We're digging out a cliff face. When we've got it, we're going to dig caves in it. Now I got to run."
"Thanks," I said.
"You're welcome," said Brooklyn.
There was more sense in it than appeared at first. We could live on the surface, but we wanted greater atmospheric pressure if we could get it. We could get it, by digging for it. A mile or two down, conditions would be appreciably nearer what we were used to. Besides, long ago our ancestors had found that caves made very comfortable houses. Dig a hole in a perpendicular face of rock, find some way of closing it behind you, and you have a very fair house.
But I had spent long enough getting my bearings in this new world. I picked my way among the piles of material in search of Work Party 94. I was lightheaded, stiff, a little uncertain on my feet, and had a dull ache in my temples. But in what proportion my lightheadedness was owing to the light air pressure of Mars and to my convalescence I didn't know. My lungs weren't troubled at all. There was slightly more oxygen in the Martian mixture than there had been in the Terran variety of air. Some of it had been released recently by the extra heat warming the many surface oxides.
When I found 94 I didn't have time for any greetings. Harry Phillips, Caroline and Jim Stowe turned and saw me. They didn't show any sign of welcome, only of relief.
Harry said: "Son, I think you'd better get around the back fast."
"What's the matter?"
"If I were you I wouldn't waste any time finding out."
I didn't. "Around the back" was behind a stone wall about ten feet high. I was still unsteady, but on Mars I could run. I did run.
Morgan had his back to me. I could see Leslie's face over his shoulder, but not, at first, what he was doing. She didn't see me either. She was scared.
Then I saw Morgan was picking and pulling and jabbing at her injured arm, holding her other wrist so that she couldn't get away. He wasn't so much hurting her as trying to frighten her, and in that he was succeeding very well.
I didn't rush in at once. I waited until I was quite sure what was going on, and that Morgan wasn't merely defending himself against some ill-considered attack by Leslie, and until I was good and mad. Then I stepped forward, swung Morgan around, and planted my fist hard on his nose. What happened was more of a surprise to me than to him.
I had grown used to the light gravity of Mars but hadn't had much opportunity to learn all its effects. With the force of the blow Morgan and I staggered away from each other. Morgan was the one who was unlucky. His foot caught on a stone and he went over hard, the force of his fall being caused more by his momentum than by gravity. I saw he was out and turned to Leslie.
"Where's Sammy?" I demanded.
"At the stores." She pushed back her disheveled hair and straightened herself abruptly as if to shake the fright out of herself. "He can't always be around. Glad to see you, Bill."
"Has this sort of thing happened often?"
She shrugged. "All the time, more or less. Not that exactly, but something like it."
"But why don't the rest of you gang up on Morgan?"
She shrugged again. "We have, occasionally. He always gets his own back. So generally we don't."
I exploded. "For heaven's sake! Morgan's just a cheap would-be tough guy. He can't build himself up into a menace unless you let him."
"Not," said Leslie patiently, "if you happen to be stronger than he is. We're not."
"Two of you are.
"If there're two around. You don't know much about the ordinary, typical child bully, do you, Bill? I do. He doesn't do anything when he isn't going to get away with it. Little Jimmy comes home crying, and Johnny gets a beating. Next day Johnny takes it out of little Jimmy. And this time little Jimmy knows better than to come home crying and blame it on Johnny. That's Morgan -- a naughty boy, cruel, selfish, and petty, grown up physically but not mentally. He likes people to be afraid of him. He has to show he's the boss. He -- "
I shook my head brusquely. "If that's all we'll soon knock it out of him."
"There speaks," said Leslie ironically, "the bigger and stronger boy."
"I don't say you can beat consideration for others into someone who doesn't have any. But you can make him toe the line, and that's what Morgan will have to do."
"All right," said Leslie with a wry grin. "You try it."
"I will," I said. "Better have a look and make sure he hasn't broken his skull."
"I sincerely hope he has."
Morgan came to as we looked at him. His eyes burned at me. He didn't have to say anything. His look spoke his hate.
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