"Watch your step, Morgan," I warned him. "From what I hear it's no good appealing to your better nature. So I'll just say the next time I find you stepping out of line I'll beat the hell out of you. Now get back to work."
"Work!" he exclaimed, his voice quivering with impotent resentment. Blood was streaming from his nose and he nursed his ankle theatrically. "How can I -- "
"That's for you to find out," I said dispassionately. "If you're not up in five seconds I'll kick you in the ribs."
He was up and around the other side of the storage pile well inside the five seconds, limping dramatically but moving quickly all the same.
"That may be the way to treat him," Leslie admitted. "If he's scared of you, you may be able to handle him. But don't count on it. I've had twisted kids -- the more you beat Johnny, the more he had to beat little Jimmy. If you half killed Johnny, that was just too bad for little Jimmy."
"What's the answer?"
She shook her head. "There isn't an answer. At least, the only answer's in psychotherapy, and pretty well hidden at that."
"This time there was another answer," I said, frowning. "Not bringing Morgan along. I should have found it."
She'd been arguing with me, but at that she changed sides at once. "You couldn't know everything, Bill," she said warmly. "It's not your fault that Morgan -- "
"If bringing Morgan here was a mistake," I said, "it was my mistake. We argued about this before, back on Earth, and we didn't agree then. You thought all the biggest, the best, the greatest, the cleverest people should come along. I thought -- "
"You were right, Bill. You were supposed to pick ten decent, ordinary people, and Morgan looked like a decent, ordinary person."
I nodded, and we didn't say any more about the matter. But I went on thinking about it, as I went back with her and found where everybody was and what they were doing, and what I was supposed to do.
The disaster had been a great chance to build a really worth-while community. Back on Earth we'd always had the excuse that we couldn't destroy the criminals, the insane, the psychotics, and the weak-minded, and so we could never have a perfect community. When the disaster came, we lieutenants had had that chance. We could just quietly ignore the criminals, the insane, the psychotics, and the weak-minded, and make sure that if we didn't have saints we had at least eliminated the worst of the sinners. And I hadn't taken that chance, apparently.
Leslie obviously thought Morgan was bad through and through. I hoped she was wrong.
In a way, all Mars, the whole future of the human race, depended on the lieutenants' choice. Decent, reasonable people would build a decent, reasonable community -- and it would go on being what it was at the start. The future isn't what happens to happen, remote, untouchable. The future is what we have now, what we do, what we want, what we are.
The future was Leslie, Sammy, the Austrian doctor at the hospital, Alec Ritchie, the gum-chewing girl from Brooklyn -- and Morgan.
I hoped it was a good future. I wasn't going to judge Morgan on hearsay -- even on what Leslie said. I would give him every chance.
However, from what I'd seen I could only hope that a future with Morgan in it would be a good future. I couldn't count on it.
3
Things for the most part went fairly smoothly. It's not worth detailing all the jobs Work Party 94 did; there were too many of them, and we rarely saw much of anyone. It was a pity the different work parties couldn't be taken into the planning more and given some over-all impression of the work they were helping to do. People work better when they have a clear purpose and a set goal.
But there was no time for explanations yet. It was a case of "Do this until I tell you to stop," "Carry all that stuff from here to there," "Dig here until someone comes and tells you what else to do," and after a long, backbreaking day of toil in which nothing obvious was accomplished, a hot, stuffy, restless night in one of the corridors at the research station.
The nights were worse than the days. As far as temperature was concerned, there was no happy medium. Outside, it was below freezing; inside, the ventilating system planned to cope with seven thousand people labored hopelessly in its efforts to supply fresh, clean, cool air for three times that number.
We split up at night. Sammy and Harry Phillips were in one of the annexes with no less than ninety-eight other single men. Bessie was in one children's dormitory, Jim Stowe in another -- the best accommodation naturally went to growing children. Leslie's status had changed since I left the hospital. She and I, the Stowes, and three other couples shared a tiny room which had once been a reading room -- but nobody had any time for reading any more. Betty and Morgan were with five other couples in another tiny room somewhere.
I wondered sometimes how the research station staff, the people who had been there before the disaster, felt about this invasion. In those early days I seldom met any of them to find out, or if I did I didn't know it. For now the state of all of us was the same -- a pair of hands and an aching back -- whether we had come in the spaceships or lifeships or had been there all the time.
The main difficulty about the building situation was that the prevailing conditions didn't allow of temporary housing at all. The gales would blow tents and huts away. Light, flimsy structures weighed so little that it didn't take much of a wind to tear them away from the loose surface of Mars. When a house was built, the first essential was a deep, strong foundation. There was clay lower down, but the surface was shifting sand or fine dust.
By this time, the people who had been there longer than we had were telling us, the weather was really beginning to settle down. Though it rained every day, they pointed out that at least it was fairly clean rain.
A lot of the dust was out of the atmosphere now, though there were strange, beautiful effects at sunset and sunrise. The gales were not quite so fierce as they had been at first, and there were hardly any whirlwinds any more. Mars, after all, had few mountains, which was a factor tending toward stability; the ground and the air above it were heated pretty evenly. There were occasional calm periods. Sometimes Mars was like California in June. But only sometimes.
I soon saw the reason for the simple one-piece garment that nearly everyone wore. I saw it on my first day in the open.
Leslie and I were checking stores. Suddenly it was raining. There was no warning at all. I looked quickly around for shelter.
"You don't shelter on Mars," Leslie told me. "Not from rain. It's the wind that drives us under cover."
It was undoubtedly true that by the time we reached shelter we'd be too wet to care. I wondered why I was so wet so quickly. Then I saw why. I looked inquiringly at Leslie.
She nodded. "The rain's almost horizontal," she said. "It often is."
With only two fifths of Earth's gravity and much the same wind velocity, the rain didn't so much pour down as sweep along like the wind. Used to Earth, you felt it was raining up at you. It made raincoats ridiculous. It went down your collar, up your legs, and in a matter of seconds you were as wet as if you'd plunged into a lake.
Leslie went on working unconcernedly. I was just about to make some comment when the rain stopped almost as quickly as it had begun. It had lasted only about three minutes.
It stands to reason that a wind following a rainstorm is a wet wind. It's blowing over wet ground, drying it, picking up water of evaporation.
Well, on Mars that doesn't follow. Conditions on Mars are so different from those of Earth that you have to forget all your weather lore and start again before you can predict anything. On Mars the wind wheels so often that if there's one thing you can be reasonably certain about, it's that you'll have a dry wind following rain. That is, a dry wind sweeping in from an angle.
About sixty seconds after the last drops of rain had fallen, Leslie's legs were dry. A few minutes later her clothes were only slightly damp.
"That's why you wear that outfit?" I asked. "It's loose and it dries quickly?"
"Oh no," she said. "You'll see the r
eason for that in a minute." She looked at my shirt and slacks and smiled faintly.
"It could be a reason," I said. "My pants are still wet at the knees."
It was half an hour before a real wind came. I staggered when it hit me. Leslie, who knew how to brace herself, wasn't visibly perturbed.
"We take cover now," she said calmly, "if we can. If not, we lie down."
We fought our way to the pile of stores where the others were huddled. All the way my trouser legs billowed and flapped like blankets left out in a storm. Twice the wind dragged my shirt out from under my waistband. It did it in little sharp tugs, an inch at a time. Before I could get my shirt to stay put I had to tighten my belt until it was cutting me in two.
"You see why we wear a one-piece suit?" said Leslie breathlessly, as we joined the other members of 94 in the shelter of two head-high walls at right angles.
It was obvious now. The only thing to wear in a swirling wind like that was something simple, strong, and molded to the body, something that didn't catch the wind and couldn't be torn open and off. My legs were tired with the effort of moving them. My pants had acted like sails.
"Where's Betty?" said Leslie suddenly, sharply. "Look, Bill -- catch her!"
I was still pondering over the effects of a strong wind with only two fifths Earth gravity to hold things down. I turned wildly, startled, not knowing what I was looking for.
Leslie and I were strong and had plenty of power in our legs. Betty wasn't and hadn't. She was a featherweight at best; in a wind like that she was utterly helpless.
When I turned she was about twenty yards away. A second later she was less than ten. Somehow she was keeping herself upright, looking as if she was running but really being swept before the wind like a straw.
I leaped out and caught her -- and we nearly knocked ourselves senseless. It was like when I hit Morgan. Gravity seems almost nothing, but inertia is still the same as ever. If Betty had run into a wall at the speed she had been going, she could have killed herself. I was quite hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
"Thanks, Bill," she gasped. "Oh, I was scared!"
"How often have I told you," Morgan snapped, "to lie down and stay put when a wind like that starts?"
"I know, Morgan," said Betty penitently. "But I couldn't. I was -- "
"Then you're not going to last long on this unprintable world," said Morgan.
I considered slapping his head for that, but decided against it. Morgan had never sworn before. It was apparently part and parcel of his new self-assertion that he had to do everything that would shock or hurt or irritate the people around him. I had to be careful what evidences of it I noticed, or I'd be nagging at him the whole time.
Sammy was quite prepared to comment, though. "That's funny," he said in a tone of mild surprise. "I thought you came from a good home, Morgan."
Morgan pretended not to hear him.
That was a fair sample of the Martian weather. What really caused its extreme volatility was the steady rotation of the planet and the absence of large, open tracts of water, which would heat and cool fairly slowly. The red desert and the air over it were heated to at least 90° Fahrenheit, then spun into darkness at something below zero. The days on Mars would always be hot, the nights freezing. There would always be winds sweeping and swirling from the twilight zone. That was permanent.
However, in about twenty years, we were told, much of the temporary climatic upheaval would be over and Mars would begin to settle down to a less violent, more comfortable existence.
That would be fine for our children.
Crops came up rapidly in the few areas of good soil. There was enough water and plenty of heat. If these had been the only things that were needed Mars would have been choked by the grain yield, despite the wind.
But crops also needed soil, something better than the sterile dust and sand which covered most of the surface of Mars. Where good earth existed the crops blazed up like ignited kerosene -- not quite the grain we had known, for it had to adapt and be adapted to the new conditions, but still usable. There wasn't enough of this good soil, however. Half the people on Mars were kept busy on the land.
The other half were busy building. That was our job, for the most part.
Except for Morgan we had no personnel problems in 94. As I expected, Leslie's worry and dissatisfaction disappeared with her responsibility. "Now you can do the worrying, Bill," she said cheerfully, "and I'll make the sympathetic, understanding remarks. But you don't worry, do you?"
"Not more than I can help," I said. "Leads to ulcers. And who wants ulcers?"
Yes, Leslie was a simple, straight-thinking, sunny character. She wasn't capricious or moody. I suppose I'd try to cover up Leslie's faults if she had any, but really there isn't any covering up to do. Back on Earth she hadn't always shown up too well, but that was when I didn't know her and she didn't know me. As we grew into each other's ways, it became almost impossible for us to have any serious disagreement, so long as I remembered -- and I did -- to tell Leslie every so often how much I loved her.
As for Sammy, he worked hard, made only the routine complaints, and didn't seem nearly so certain now that it would have been a good idea never to have been born.
"What's come over you, Sammy?" Leslie asked him once. "I haven't heard you prophesying disaster for weeks now. Did it take all the wind out of your sails when Bill got the lifeship down safely?"
Sammy grunted. "Mark my words," he said darkly, "there'll be dirty work or catastrophe or tragedy yet. I don't know what's going to happen, but something will."
Though he spoke with his own pessimistic brand of humor, it was clear that he half meant what he said.
"The leopard," Leslie sighed, "doesn't change his spots, I see. But I think I know what's the trouble with you, Sammy. It's celibacy."
"Perhaps," Sammy agreed. "If you've got a dictionary handy, I'll tell you."
"Get yourself a girl, Sammy," Leslie advised.
Sammy's brow clouded for a moment, and I knew he was thinking of a girl who must be dead now -- but a girl he'd lost long before that. However, he rallied at once.
"You leaving Bill?" he asked. "I was wondering when you'd realize what a mistake you'd made. I'll think it over, Leslie. If I decide to accept your offer, I'll let you know."
Leslie merely grinned.
The Stowes, Caroline and John, were very self-sufficient. They did all that had to be done without complaining. They were always ready to help anyone who needed help, but they never asked for help themselves. Caroline, like Leslie and Betty, was pregnant, but unlike them, she didn't like anyone to mention it. Though she wasn't ashamed of the fact, it wasn't the sort of thing one talked about.
"She's still Miss Wallace, really," Leslie commented, without malice. "One of those women who can be a respectable matron and an old maid at the same time."
I grinned, because the remark was so just. Nevertheless I couldn't help saying: "Don't be rude about Caroline, Leslie. Did I ever tell you she came to me in Simsville and begged me to take you to Mars?"
"Did she?" asked Leslie, astonished. "I always thought she disapproved of me. Incidentally, did that influence you?"
"No," I said. "You and she were already on my list at the time."
Leslie started to say something, then stopped. That was something we still didn't talk about.
Jim Stowe was fourteen now, and with his first birthday on Mars he felt he was a man. He continued to be my personal assistant. His quick intelligence was soon known at all the stores and depots. I saw no reason to revise my idea that one day Jim would be a big man in the Martian settlement.
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