Stowaway to Mars

by John Wyndham

  When she had married Dale, she had partially understood him, and had managed to work up a sympathy with his interests. Now, she was forced to admit, she understood him better and had lost sympathy with those interests. In rare moments of complete frankness she admitted her jealousy of those other interests and her resentment of other people’s share in him.

  Ten years ago, when he was just twenty four, he had won the first non stop Equatorial Flight and for that thousands of people had begun to idolise him. And it had only been the start of a fantastic record of success. He had gone on to triumph after triumph, collecting prizes and further acclamation in his spectacular career. Since then he had lowered the Equatorial record three times and still held it, together with the Greenwich to Greenwich Meridian record, and goodness knew how many more. Partly through luck, but mostly by hard work and endurance he had grown in the public view to the stature of a fabulous superman: the stuff of which the old world would have made a demigod.

  She had regretted, but accepted the tact that the mass could give him something which she as an individual could not. Curiously, it was his preoccupation with inanimate things which caused her more active resentment. Once, in a state of depression, she had confided to a friend:

  ‘With Dale it is not people who are my rivals so much as things. Things, things, things! Why do men think so much of things? Big, restless and to them such absorbing things. Why are they always wanting to change and invent more machines, more and more machines? I hate their machines! Sometimes I think they are the natural enemies of women. Often when I see a rocketplane go by, I say to myself: “Mary, that is your rival it can give him more than you can. It has more of his love than you have.” No, it’s not nonsense. If I were to die now, he would turn to his machines and forget all about me in making them. But if his machines were taken away, he would not devote himself to me he would mope and be miserable. I hate his machines. I’d like to smash them all into little bits. They frighten me, and sometimes I dream of them. Big wheels whirling round and round and long steel bars sliding up and down with Dale standing in among them, laughing at me because I can’t get at him, and there are rows and rows of cogs waiting to grind me up if I try. All I can do is to stand there and cry while Dale laughs and the machines rattle at me. I hate them, I tell you. I hate them!’

  It had not been wise, she realised now, to extract that promise from him that he would give up racing rocketplanes and only enter contests for lightweights of the flipabout class. He had given it only grudgingly and it had fretted him though he had tried at first to hide it. Now she knew he was going to break it so, apparently, did the newspapers.

  Her thoughts were broken into by a crunching of gravel beneath hurrying feet. Voices, mostly male, shouted incomprehensible sentences to one another. There was a dull throbbing of engines followed by the whirr of revolving sails as the gyrocurts and other flipabouts on the lawn began to take the air.

  The door opened and Dale came in. He bent over and kissed her. Seating himself on the side of the bed, he took one of her hands in his own and apologised for his lateness. Mary lay back, watching his face. She heard scarcely a word that he said. He looked so young, so strong and full of energy; it made her feel that despite the ten years between them; she was the elder. Impossible to think of him as anything but an adventurous youth. It came to her with a sudden stab that he was looking happier than he had for a long time.

  ‘Dale,’ she interrupted, ‘what did all those reporters want?’

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second.

  ‘We had a little trouble down at the shops last night. Nasty business. They wanted to know all about it, darling. You know how they’re always after every little detail.’

  She looked steadily into his eyes.

  ‘Dale, please be honest with me. Weren’t they much more interested in that?’ She picked up the paper and pointed to the final paragraph. He read it, with a worried look on his face.

  ‘Well, yes perhaps they were.’

  ‘And now that you’ve told the whole world, don’t you think you might tell your own wife?’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. I wasn’t telling anyone at all nobody would have known anything about it for months yet if it hadn’t been for that business last night. Then they were on to it at once=they couldn’t be stopped.’

  ‘Dale. You promised me you would give up rocket racing.’

  He dropped his eyes and played with the fingers of the hand that he held.

  ‘It’s not exactly rocket racing,’ he began. She shook her head.

  ‘But you promised me.’

  He got up and crossed to the window, pushing both his hands deep in his trouser pockets.

  ‘I must. I didn’t know what I was saying when I promised that. I thought I could settle down and give it all up. I’ve tried, but I’m not cut out to be a designer of other men’s machines. Hang it all, I’m still young. These last two years I’ve designed and built some of the best rocket planes in the world and then I’ve had to sit by like an old fogy of eighty while young fools lose races with them, crash them by damn bad flying and God knows what else. Do you think it’s been easy for me to watch them being mishandled while all the time I know what they are capable of and could make them do it? This last year has been just hell for me down at the shops; it’s been like, like giving birth to one stillborn child after another.’

  ‘Dale!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary darling.’ He turned back to her. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.

  But can’t you see what it means to me? It’s taking all my life away. Try to see it, dear. Look, all your life you’ve wanted the baby you’re going to have; suppose you were suddenly told that you couldn’t have it after all – could never have a baby at all. Wouldn’t everything become worthless for you? Wouldn’t the bottom just drop out of life? That’s how I’ve felt. I promised you I would give up the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life the thing I’ve been doing all my life until I met you. Well, I’ve tried, I’ve done my best, but I can’t keep that promise….’

  Mary lay silent. She did not understand: did not want to understand. He was selfish and stupid. To compare a smashed machine with a stillborn child. Talking as if his passion for speed and more speed could be compared with the urge to bear a child. What nonsense l He spoke like a child himself. Why couldn’t he understand what it meant to her…?

  He was going on now. Something about her creating with her body and he with his mind. That neither of them should be permitted to ban the other’s right to creation. Well, she had never said that he should not create rocket planes only that he should not fly them. It was not fair… It was his child that she was going to bear. His child that was making her feel so old and ill…

  ‘What are you going to do with this new rocket?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Have a shot at the Keuntz Prize,’ he said, shortly.

  Mary sat up suddenly. Her eyes widened in a horrified stare.

  ‘Oh, Dale, no.’ Her voice trailed away as she fell forward in a faint.

  Chapter 3. Repercussions

  Tuesday’s evening papers made considerable play with Dale’s announcement, but a citizenry hardened through the years to seeing the sensations of one day’s end amended or ignored at the beginning of the next, received the news on Wednesday morning as a novelty. It was impossible to ignore the headlines which erupted from Fleet Street.

  CURTANCE TO DARE DEATH FLIGHT shrieked the Daily Hail. ‘CURTY’ TO ATTEMPT KEUNTZ PRIZE roared the Daily Excess, and the Views Record followed up with BRITISH AIRMAN TO CHALLENGE SPACE. The Poster and the Telegram printed leaders upon British pluck and daring with references to Nelson, General Gordon and Malcolm Campbell. (The Poster also revealed that Dale had once ridden to hounds.)

  The Daily Socialist, after a front page eulogy very similar to that in the Hail, wondered, in the course of a short article in a less-exposed part of the paper, whether the cost of such a venture might not be more profitably devoted to the social servic
es. The Daily Artisan told the story under the somewhat biased heading: ‘Millionaire out for Another Million.’

  The Thunderer referred in a brief paragraph to ‘this interesting project’. At nine o’clock in the morning the Evening Banner brought out special contents bills:

  AIRMAN’S PLANS

  To which the Stellar replied: CAN HE DO IT?

  At ten o’clock the editor’s telephone in the Daily Hail offices buzzed again. A voice informed him that Mrs. Dale Curtance wished to see him on urgent business.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Shoot her up.’

  At ten twenty he began to hold a long and complicated telephone conversation with Lord Dithernear, the proprietor of the Concentrated Press. At approximately ten forty he shook hands with Mrs. Curtance and returned to his desk with a revised policy.

  At eleven o’clock, Mr. Fuller, on behalf of Mr. Curtance, told an agency that he was in need of half a dozen competent secretaries.

  At twelve o’clock one Bill Higgins, workman, employed upon the construction of the Charing Cross Bridge, knocked off for lunch. As he fed his body upon meat pie and draughts of cold tea he regaled his mind with the world’s news as rendered by the Excess. Working gradually through the paper, he arrived in time at the front page. There he was impressed by a large photograph of Dale Curtance skilfully taken from a low viewpoint to enhance the heroic effect. His eyes wandered up to the headline whereat he frowned and nudged his neighbour.

  ‘What is this ‘ere Keuntz Prize. Alf?’ he demanded.

  ‘Coo!’ remarked Alf, spitting neatly into the Thames below. ‘You never ‘eard of the Keuntz Prize? Coo!’

  ‘No, I ‘aven’t,’ Bill told him. He was a patient man.

  Alf explained, kindly. ‘Well, this bloke, Keuntz, was an American. ‘E ‘ad the first fact’ry for rocket planes in Chicago, it was, and ‘e got to be a millionaire in next to no time. But it wasn’t enough for ‘im that ‘is blasted rocket planes was banging and roarin’ all over the world; ‘e didn’t see why they couldn’t get right away from the world.’

  ‘Whadjer mean? The Moon?’ Bill inquired. ‘Yus, the Moon and other places. So in 1970 or thereabouts ‘e goes and puts down five million dollars what’s more’n a million pahnds for the first bloke wot gets to a planit and back.’

  ‘Coo! A million pahnds!’ Bill was impressed. ‘And nobody ain’t done it yet?’

  ‘Naow not likely,’ Alf spoke with contempt. ‘Nor never will, neither,’ he added, spitting once more into the Thames.

  At one o’clock two gentlemen with every appearance of being well fed were sitting down to more food at the Cafe Royal. ‘I see,’ remarked the taller, chattily, ‘that that nephew of yours has more or less signed his death warrant. Think he’ll go through with it?’

  ‘Dale? Oh, yes, he’ll have a shot at it, all right. I’ll say this for him, he’s never yet scratched in any event if he had a machine capable of starting.’

  ‘Well, well. I suppose that means you’ll come in for a pretty penny?’

  ‘Never count my chickens. Besides, Dale’s no fool. He knows what he’s doing.

  He might even make it, you know.’

  ‘Oh, rot. You don’t really believe that?’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Someday someone’s going to do it. Why not Dale?’

  ‘Nonsense! Get to another planet and back! It’s impossible. It is to this age what the philosopher’s stone was to an earlier one. It’s fantastic – chimerical.’

  ‘So was flying once.’ At two o’clock a young schoolmaster looked earnestly at his charges.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a history lesson. I wonder what history really means to you. I should like you to see it as I do not as a dull procession of facts and dates, but as the story of Man’s climb from the time when he was a dumb brute: a story that is still being told. If any of you saw the newspapers this morning, I wonder if it struck you as it struck me that within a year or so we may see a great piece of history in the making. You know what I refer to?’

  ‘Curty’s rocket flight, sir?’ cried a shrill voice.

  The schoolmaster nodded. ‘Yes. Mr. Curtance is going to try to win the Keuntz Prize for the first interplanetary flight. Mr. Curtance, as you know, is a very brave man. A lot of people have already tried to win that prize, and, as. far as we know, they have all died in the attempt.

  ‘Many men lost their lives in trying to reach the Moon, and most people said it was impossible for them to do it there was even a movement to get their attempts banned. But the men went on trying. Duncan, K. K. Smith and Sudden actually got there, but they crashed on the surface and were killed. Then came the great Drivers. In 1969 he managed to take his rocket right round the Moon and bring it safely back to Earth. Everybody was astounded, and for the first time they really began to believe that we could leave the Earth if we tried hard enough. Mr. Keuntz, who lived in Chicago, said: “If man can reach the Moon, he can reach the planets.” And he put aside five million dollars to be given to the first men who should get there and back.

  ‘The first one to try was Jornsen. His rocket was too heavy. He fell back and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Then the great Drivers tried. He got up enough speed not to fall back, like Jornsen, but he wasn’t fast enough to get right away, and he stuck. His rocket is still up there; sometimes they catch a glimpse of it in the big telescopes, circling round the Earth for ever, like a tiny moon.’

  ‘Please, sir, what happened to Drivers himself?’

  ‘He must have starved to death, poor man unless his air gave out first. He had a friend with him, and perhaps theirs is the worst of all the tragedies trapped in an orbit where they could look down on the world, knowing that they would never get back.

  ‘After that came Simpson whose rocket was built in Keuntz’s own works. He took off somewhere in Illinois, but something went wrong. It fell on the lake shore, just outside Chicago, and blew up with a terrible explosion which wrecked hundreds of houses and killed I don’t know how many people.

  ‘Since then there have been ten or more attempts. Some have fallen back, others have got away and never been heard of since.’

  ‘Then somebody may have done it already, without our knowing it, sir?’

  ‘It is possible. We can’t tell.’

  ‘Do you think Curty will do it, sir?’

  ‘One can’t tell that, either. But if he does he will make a more important piece of history than did even Columbus.’

  At three o’clock Mr. Jefferson, physics master in the same school, demonstrated to an interested if rather sceptical class that rocket propulsion was even more efficient in a vacuum than in air.

  ‘Newton taught us,’ he began, ‘that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction….’ At four o’clock the news came to a bungalow half way up the side of a Welsh mountain. The girl who brought it was breathing hard after her climb from the village below, and she addressed the middle aged man in the bungalow’s one sitting room excitedly.

  ‘Daddy, they’re saying that Dale Curtance is going to try for the Keuntz Prize.’

  ‘What? Let me see.’ He pounced on the copy of the Excess which protruded from her shopping bag, and settled down to it with a kind of desperate avidity. ‘At last,’ he said, as he reached the end of the column, ‘at last. Now they will find out that we were right. We shall be able to leave here, Joan. We shall be able to go back and look them in the face.’

  ‘Perhaps, but he hasn’t done it yet, Daddy.’

  ‘Young Curtance will do it if anyone can. And they’ll have to believe him.’

  ‘But, Daddy dear, it doesn’t even say that he is going to try for Mars. Venus is much nearer; it’s probably that.’

  ‘Nonsense, Joan, nonsense. Of course it’s Mars. Look here, it says he intends to start sometime in October. Well, Mars comes into opposition about the middle of April next year. Obviously he’s working on Drivers’ estimates of just under twelve weeks for the outward journey and under eleven for the return
. That will give him a few days there to prospect and to overhaul his machine. He can’t afford to leave the return a day past opposition. You see, it all fits in.’

  ‘I don’t see, darling, but I’ve no doubt you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right, it’s as plain as can be. I’m going to write to him.’ The girl shook her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t do that. He might hand it over to one of the newspapers and you know what that would mean.’

  The man paused in his elation, and frowned. ‘Yes. Perhaps he would. We’ll wait, my dear. We’ll wait until he tells them what he’s found there. Then we’ll go back home and see who laughs last….’

  At five o’clock a telephone conversation between Mrs. Dale Curtance and her mother in law was in progress.

  ‘…But, Mary dear, this is useless,’ the elder Mrs. Curtance was saying.

  ‘You’ll never be able to stop him. I know Dale. Once he’s made his mind up to a thing like this, he can’t be stopped.’

  ‘But he must be stopped. I can’t let him do it. I’ll move everything to stop him. You don’t know what it means to me.’

  ‘My dear, I know what it means to me and I am his mother. I also know something of what it means to him. We’ve just got to suppress our own selfishness.’

  ‘Selfishness! You call it selfishness to try to stop him killing himself?’

  ‘Mary, don’t you see what you are doing? You’re losing him. If you did manage to stop him, he’d hate you for it, and if you go on as you are doing, he’ll hate you for trying to stop him. Please, please give it up, Mary. It’s not fair on Dale or yourself or the child. In your condition you can’t afford to behave like this. All we can do is what most women have to do make the best of it.’