One in 300

by J. T. McIntosh

  "Now I'll have to beat him," I said wearily, "and if we don't watch them day and night he'll take it out of Betty. Until finally he kills her. Then we can shoot or hang Morgan, and the air around here will be a little cleaner."

  "He's not going to kill Betty!" exclaimed Leslie fiercely.

  "I don't see how we can stop him," I said. "She won't leave him, even now. We can't execute him, or put him in prison, or extradite him. All we can do is wait till he kills someone, and then by ordinary, common-sense law we can execute him to stop him from killing anyone else."

  I went on in weary bitterness: "God, to think I did this. I could have done better by picking the first lounger I saw in the street -- "

  Betty stirred and opened her eyes. She looked up at us, searched our faces, and then suddenly felt the breeze on her skin. With a convulsive movement she sat up, wincing, and grabbed at her suit.

  "Let me do it," said Leslie. She eased the garment carefully over the bruised flesh.

  "I fell," said Betty quickly. "It was during the gale yesterday -- "

  "Hell, you're not going to cover up for Morgan now, are you?" I demanded.

  "It wasn't Morgan. It was -- "

  "How did he do it?" I asked.

  She capitulated. She burst into tears, crying as I had never seen a woman cry before. She didn't weep with passion, but with grief and misery and hopelessness.

  Through her tears, in choked phrases, she told us what had happened.

  Morgan had taken her far out in the desert the night before, just after sunset. He had told her she mustn't have her baby. If she did, he would kill it. She had been crying, begging, screaming, but he slapped her face until she was quiet. He asked her if she knew how to arrange a miscarriage. She didn't. It hadn't occurred to her that any woman had ever tried to arrange a miscarriage. Even slapping her face couldn't stop her crying and pleading again.

  He threw her down and started hitting her with a round stone, sitting on her chest to hold her down. Betty didn't know how long that went on. She thought she had been unconscious for a while, but when she revived he was still beating her with the stone. Finally he said, "That ought to do it," threw the stone away, and let her get up, when she could.

  "But why, Betty?" said Leslie wonderingly. "Did he say why?"

  Through a fresh flood of tears Betty said: "He said he's going to have Aileen Ritchie. He said he didn't want me and a kid I could say was his always hanging around his neck. Now I'll lose my baby and -- "

  "You won't," I said. "Not if you keep away from Morgan in future and don't give him another chance."

  The tears stopped abruptly. "I won't lose my baby?" Betty asked incredulously.

  "I don't think so. Morgan doesn't know a thing about it, which is just as well. Keep clear of him and you'll have your baby all right."

  "But I can't keep clear of him! I love him."

  I knew that. I'd thought about it already. I sighed. "Make sure he never has a chance to do anything like that again, then."

  Betty looked almost happy. "Then we can forget all about it?" she asked hopefully.

  Leslie's eyes met mine. "No, Betty," I said sadly. "We can never forget all about it. A man can beat his wife or throw her about a bit and it's nobody's business but their own. But when a man does what Morgan's done to you, it's everybody's business."

  "Please," Betty pleaded. "Let Morgan and me -- "

  "No, Betty," I repeated patiently. "Do you want Morgan to kill you and your baby?"

  When Morgan appeared that evening I waited until his paid deputy had gone, and then drew the whole group together in the husk of the building we were helping to erect. I wasn't dramatic. I told them simply what was going to happen and precisely why. Morgan went ashen and tried to run for it, but Sammy was right behind him.

  I made Betty show them all what Morgan had done to her. I had to do that, because Betty was quite capable of denying, at some future date, that Morgan had ever assaulted her at all. At the gasps and cries and murmurs of anger that were loosed I surveyed Morgan to see if there was any sign of regret. There was none -- only fear of what was going to happen to him.

  Well, fear it would have to be, then. He would have to leave Betty alone because he was afraid to touch her, if that was the only restraint that could be put on him.

  I didn't ask them to stay while I whipped Morgan. The only purpose in public punishment is to deter others, and the others didn't need deterring. Sammy stayed, that was all. I got Leslie to take Betty away.

  Sammy had said he always thought I was a hard nut. When I whipped Morgan I discovered quite definitely that I wasn't. Each time he screamed, and he screamed often, the sound crawled in my guts. I couldn't see what pleasure anyone could get in hurting other people. It made me sick.

  I had to keep reminding myself, as I'd told Morgan again and again, that this wasn't punishment for the past, it was warning for the future. Any time he wanted to act like a beast in the future, I told him over and over again, he would have to decide whether it was worth being beaten half to death afterward.

  When it was over Morgan was moaning and crying together. I didn't blame him for that. I'd given him just about all he could take.

  And once again I tried to drive the lesson home. "The next time, Morgan," I said quietly, "it will be worse.

  Sammy and I left him. I wouldn't meet Sammy's eyes. I still felt it had had to be done, but I wasn't proud of having done it.

  "If you'd carried on just a little longer," Sammy said, "you might have left him feeling so low that he'd have killed himself."

  I stared at him in surprise.

  "It would he much better that way," said Sammy moodily. "Morgan's never going to be any use to anybody."

  I thought of that as an epitaph, and shuddered.

  MORGAN SMITH He was never any use to anybody.

  For once, all the lieutenants were called together to vote on some of the big questions. It was time we had a properly constituted government. There was no question of that.

  It was some meeting. There were nearly two thousand present, in the biggest hall at the research station and in dozens of other rooms around it, hearing what was going on by a big public-address link-up. Every room had to have a sort of chairman to keep his group in order and not have the P.A. system choked with babble.

  One of the things we did was vote ourselves out of power, as lieutenants. Some of us were pretty fed up with the job anyway. We had a little power and a lot of extra work. Others knew that though they might have been the right men to command lifeships, they weren't the right men for the job they had now. We agreed that the groups of eleven, the lifeship crews, should stay units for the moment, but each should elect its own leader. Representatives would also be returned in the same way by the big ships' complements and by the members of the original colony.

  There was a long discussion about whether it was a good thing to keep representation in three groups like that. Somebody said we should have government for the whole population, not representatives who stood for the special interests of different groups. But it was agreed in the end that there were no special interests. It no longer mattered whether people had been on Mars all along or had come in the big ships or in the lifeships.

  We were building a new council from scratch, at last, instead of trying to patch up some existing organization. Nobody imagined it would be perfect. It would be better, that was all. The next council, we hoped, would be better still.

  We might have gone back and held our elections right away, so that it would be the new council who settled the other problems we had before us. However, on another vote we decided that, rather than throw the new council in at the deep end, we'd give them soinething to work on and amend. We'd make the decisions and go on giving the orders for a week longer before throwing the council open to everybody. We had some experience of command, after all. The new members would have to learn how to apply it.

  We agreed that the laby system was out of our control. We could avoid wh
at might be called inflation and deflation, that was all.

  Marriage was abolished temporarily. There had been a lot of trouble over that, people wanting someone to marry them, people wanting someone to give them divorces, people living together without marriage, people formally married sneering at people informally married and saying they were living in sin. It seemed that the best answer was not to elevate formal marriage and give away or refuse divorces, but at one bold stroke to destroy immorality and leave sex relations to -- of all things -- common sense.

  Then there was another long discussion on the problem of language, race, and nation.

  Our twenty thousand plus was composed of white men, black men, brown men, and yellow men, speaking English, French, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Arabic, Swahili, and scores of other languages. Agreement on English as the standard language was surprisingly easy, but agreement that the other languages should die was as difficult as anyone would have expected.

  You couldn't blame the Spaniards, with their Cervantes, the Greeks, with their glorious classical age, the Germans, with their Goethe and Sculler and Heine, for objecting. I don't have to put their case, it's so obvious. However, the case for English as not merely the standard language but the only language was pretty good too. Without language barriers we'd have a much better chance of real unity than Earth ever had.

  We didn't settle that question. It was clear we couldn't, just then. But it would probably work itself out. If people had to speak English to be understood, the other languages would die, year by year, generation by generation.

  Again, it was with surprisingly little trouble that we agreed that mating between any female and any male should be permitted, outside the blood relationships which would exist again in the next generation. Some of the Americans, Germans, and Africans were violently against miscegenation. The French didn't give a damn. The South Africans and Australians wouldn't even talk about it. The English thought it would be a good thing, in theory.

  And it was in theory that we agreed on it. We couldn't solve a problem like that merely by voting on it. But the vote meant that we hoped the Martian colony would one day comprise one people and one race, speaking one language.

  It all sounded very fine.

  We decided to go on as at present with soil preparation and building as the two over-all priorities. We formed a banking unit to supervise laby transactions, a medical unit to check on a few new (fortunately mild) illnesses that were appearing in the new conditions, and an exploration unit to survey Mars, chiefly for rich soil.

  5

  Came the day of the great storm, which modified most of our plans.

  It started like any ordinary gale. I was out alone, about half a mile from the research station, looking for another vein of the red rock we'd been using. When the wind started I dropped flat. Usually the winds didn't last. You waited for a calm period and then made for shelter.

  The first indication I had that this wasn't an ordinary wind was when I was lifted like a feather, whirled in the air, swept along about twenty yards, and then dashed to the ground. I was lucky in being dropped on one of the thickest patches of lichen. I was only jarred from tip to toe. No bones were broken.

  Presently I wasn't so sure that I had been lucky in my landing ground. The lichen offered no purchase at all. At least the rocks were something to hang onto. Another gust came and I was lifted again. I spun crazily, touched the ground with one foot, somersaulted, and bounced off the lichen again. I was bowled along, half lifted, half rolled, for fully a hundred yards. This time, however, I came to a stop against a spur of rock to which I clung grimly.

  The gale, insofar as it had direction, was coming from Winant. Fairly safe for the moment, I looked to see what was being blown from there -- and there was plenty. There were sheets of metal, tarpaulins, doors, bits of masonry -- and people, little black, struggling things whirling like confetti from an electric fan. I was thankful that my group was working in the vast hole in front of the station. They would be safe, if anyone was.

  A naked body shot past me, twenty feet in the air. I knew the man was dead, because his head was flapping from side to side like a flag. He still wore his shoes, but his suit had been torn off him. Fifty yards to the right a woman was swept past. She was still alive -- she saw me and made a wild gesture of appeal. I could do nothing, of course. The only hope anyone had in a storm like that was to find an anchor, as I had done, and stay put.

  Just for an instant, and then it was gone, I heard a distant crash. I scanned Winant, my eyes stung by the wind, streaming with tears. The gale had actually lifted a lifeship and cast it down again across half a dozen others. As I looked, another lifeship was torn loose and spun crazily along across the plain.

  I wondered if this was going to be the end of it all for Winant and for the people from Earth. My arms were aching; an extra-strong gust and I should be swept away again. No one else could be in much better state except the people in the pit, and those in the station itself. Even if the storm stopped at once, the toll must be enormous.

  The fate of the community was going to depend very largely on the number of people who happened to be in the pit and the station at the time. I had no up-to-date information on who was working where. If there had been only a thousand actually at the station and fifty in the pit -- which was possible -- Winant might drop in one day below the critical level for survival.

  As if to show that even the people in the pit weren't safe, the wind suddenly threw up a vast black cloud of dust which completely obscured Winant. Hundreds of tons of dust and sand must be showering into the excavations.

  I was trying not to see the things and people flying past me. Winant I could do nothing about, but it seemed that I should at least try to help the poor wretches who were blown past, helpless, most of them dead but some all too obviously still alive. I felt guilty because I was safe.

  In a black shower, what seemed like half Winant hurled across the plain two hundred yards away. There were cattle, helpless in the gale; men and women, clawing wildly at the air, desperately seeking something to hang on to; loose stones, clothing, and thousands of small objects I couldn't identify. As I watched, unable to look away, the whole dark cloud was dashed to the ground, disintegrated like a bombed house, and swept on in a dozen streamlets.

  I saw one man grasp a rock as I had done. He took a firm hold with both arms. Just for an instant relief must have flooded him. Then a big, dark object that might have been part of a wall struck him in the back with such force that it broke the rock through him, and all together they swept on before the gale -- masonry, broken rock, and indeterminate pieces of animal tissue.

  A youth whose mind must have given way flew past gracefully, flapping his arms like a bird's wings and laughing in ecstasy. I watched him into the distance, still beating his arms as if he had discovered the secret of flight.

  Far out to my right I saw a speck high in the air, higher than any debris I had seen so far. It had thin, waving tendrils that must be arms and legs. Abruptly it fell as the wind, which had supported it, died for an instant. I saw it plummet down almost to the ground. Then it was swept away again, only a few feet above the plain, as if the gale was playing with it.

  When I looked back toward Winant I saw three people quite near me rolling in line across the plain, like a grotesque act in an acrobatic show. I started when I saw the middle one clearly for an instant. It was Aileen Ritchie. Dust blinded me for long seconds. When I could see again, two of the three were gone, but Aileen was clinging to the same spur of rock as I was, forty yards away. As I saw her, she nearly lost her grip. She seemed to be hurt, which was no surprise at all.

  I had been able to ignore the people I didn't know, treating them as puppets in the wild, mad scene, no more aidable than the shadows on a movie screen. But crazy though it might be to move from my comparatively safe anchorage, I had to try to help someone I did know. I started clawing my way along the ridge to Aileen.