by Ray Bradbury
Good blood. Good leucocyte. Good Ayres.
Mars come up ahead, the first really intense gravity I had felt since leaving earth and moon behind. It came up like a ruddy drop of dried blood on the void. Mass is the sexual drive of space, and gravity the intensified yearning of that mass, the gravitic libido of one tremendous body for the love, the following of any and all smaller bodies who transgress its void boundaries. I have heard the simple men within me speak of a planet as one speaks of a queen bee. The ultimate gravity toward which all smaller gravities and bodies yearn. Merciless harlot, mating with all, leading all on to destruction. Queen bee followed by the swarms. And now I was part of a swarm, the first of many yet to follow, answering the urge of one gravity, refusing another.
But still the poison was in me. And no way possible for Captain Lamb's crew to know of it. Time ticked on my console-chronometers and swung by, imperceptibly majestic in the moves of stars.
Captain Lamb went down to the engine rooms, examined my heart and my auxiliaries. Bitingly, he commented and instructed, interspersing that with vituperative barks. Then he hopped up the rungs to the galley for something to eat.
Belloc and Larian stayed below. "First now, Belloc, you checked the life-boats?"
"I did. Number Three boat's ready. I fixed it an hour ago."
"Good. Now…."
The Slop put out a bowl of soup for Captain Lamb. Lamb pursed his lips to a spoon of it, and smacked them in appreciation. "Slop?"
"Yes, sir?" Slop wiped greasy hands on a large towel.
"Did you invent the gravity soup-bowl and gravity spoon?"
Slop looked at his feet. "I did, sir."
"An admirable invention, Slop. I recall the day when all rocket liquids were swilled by suction from a nippled bottle. Made me feel like a god-damned baby doing it."
Slop chuckled deep, as he returned to cleaning the mess-plates. "Ship gravity wasn't strong enough to hold soup down, so I thunk up the gravity spoon in my spare time. It helped."
The captain ate in silence. After a moment he said, "I must be getting old, Slop. I think I'm sick."
"Captain!"
Lamb waved his spoon, irritated. "Oh, nothing as bad as all that. I mean I'm getting soft-headed. Today, I feel — how should I put it? Dammit to hell, it's hard finding words. Why did you come along on this war-rocket, Slop?"
Slop twisted his towel tight. "I had a little job to do with some Martians who killed my parents three years ago."
"Yes," said the captain.
Belloc and Larian were down below.
Slop looked at his chief. At the tight little brown face that could have been thirty-five as easily as forty or fifty.
Lamb glared up at him, quick. Slop gulped. ''Pardon me."
"Uh?"
"I was just wondering…?
"About…?"
Belloc. Larian. Belloc down below. Larian climbing rungs, on his way to get the time-bombs. Mars looming ahead. Time getting shorter, shorter.
In a dozen parts of my body things were going on at an oblivious, unsuspecting norm. Computators, gunners, engineers, pilots performed their duties as Lamb and Slop talked casual talk in the galley. While Larian muscled it up the rungs toward his secreted time-explosives.
Slop said, "About why you became captain on a war-rocket, yourself, sir?"
"Me?" Lamb snorted, filled his mouth half a dozen times before answering very slowly. "Five years ago I was in a Blue Canal liquor dive on Mars. I met a Martian girl there…"
"Oh, yes…"
"Yes, nothing, you biscuit-burner! Damn but she was sweet. With a temper like a very fine cat-animal, and morals to match. Hair like glossy black spider-silk, eyes like that deep cold blue canal water. I wanted to bring her back to Earth with me. The war came, I was recalled and—"
"And someday," finished Slop, "when you've helped get the war over, you'll go looking for her. And being at Deimos-Phobos Base, maybe you can sneak down and kidnap her sometime."
Lamb ate awhile, making motions. "Pretty childish, isn't it?"
"No, I guess it's all right if she's still waiting."
"She is — if I know Yrela, she is." Ayres in Computation.
Mars off in space, blood-red and growing.
Lamb in the galley.
Hillary and Conrad in control room One!
And down below, where all of my power grew and expanded and burst out into space, I felt the vibration of Belloc. And coming up the ladder to the supply room — Larian.
Larian passed through the galley. "Sir."
Lamb nodded without looking up from his meal.
Larian proceeded up to Computation, passed through Computation, whistling, and lingered in Supply AC.
Space vibrated with my message.
* * *
My guns were being trimmed, oiled and ready. Ammunition passed up long powered tracks from Locker Five to Blister Fourteen. Scarlet ammunition. Men sweated and showed their teeth and swore. Belloc waited down below, his face twitching its nerves, in the engine room. The captain ate his meal. I drove through space, Ayres computated. Belloc waited. Captain, eating. Space. Larian. Time-bombs. Captain. Belloc. Guns. Waiting. Waiting. Driving.
The metal of my structure was sickened, stressing, striving inward, trying to shout, trying to tell all that I knew in my positive-negative poles, in my sub-atomic awareness, in my neutronic vibrations.
But the blood of my body moved with a mind of its own, pulsing from chamber to chamber in their sweating, greasy togs, with their waiting, tightened faces. Pulsing nervously. Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, not knowing that soon poison might spread through every and all of my compartments.
And there was a girl named Alice waiting in York Port. And the memory of two parents dead. And on Mars a cool-eyed Martian dancing girl, still dancing, perhaps, with silver bells on her thumbs, tinkling. Mars was close. I made an angry jolt and swerve in space. I leaped with metal frustration!
Around and around and around went my coggery, the flashing, glinting muscles of my soul's heart. Oil surged through my metal veins. And Belloc was down below, smoking one cigarette after another.
I thought about Ayres, about Captain Lamb and the way he barked, about Ayres and the way he kneeled and felt what he had to feel. About Hillary and Conrad thinking about a woman's lips. About The Slop troubling to invent a gravity soup plate.
I thought about Belloc waiting.
And Mars getting near. And about the war I had never seen but always heard about. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to get there with Lamb and Hillary and The Slop!
The Slop took away the plate the captain had cleansed with his spoon. "More?"
Lamb shook his head. "No. just a hunk of fruit now. An apple or something." He wiped his small mouth with the back of his hand.
"Okay," said The Slop.
At that moment there was a hiss, an explosion.
Somebody screamed, somewhere.
I knew who it was and where it was.
The captain didn't. "Dammit to hell!" he barked, and was out of the galley in three bounds. Slop dropped a soup kettle, following.
* * *
Warning bells clamored through me. Ayres, in Computation, grinding out a parabolic problem, jerked his young, pink face and fear came into it instantly. He arose and tried walking toward the drop-rungs, but he couldn't do it. He didn't have legs for the job.
Conrad scuttled down the rungs, yelling. He vanished toward the engine room; the floor ate him up.
Hillary grabbed the ship-controls and froze to them, listening and waiting. He said one word. "Alice—"
Slop and the captain got there first in Section C.
"Cut that feed valve!" yelled Lamb. The Slop grasped a valve-wheel glinting on the wall in chubby fingers, twisted it, grunting.
The loud, gushing noise stopped. Steam-clouds billowed in my heart, wrapping Captain Lamb and The Slop tight and coughing. Conrad fell the rest of the way down the ladder into my heart, and the steam began to clear away as m
y vacuum ventilators began humming.
When the steam cleared they saw Belloc.
The Slop said, "Gahh. That's bad. That's very bad."
Conrad said, "How'd it happen? Looks like he died quick."
Lamb's leather-brown face scowled. "Quick is the word. That oil-tube burst, caught him like a steel whip across the bridge of his nose. If that hadn't killed him, scalding oil would have." Crumpled there, Belloc said not a word to anybody. He just bled where the oil pipe had caught him on the nose and cheek and plunged on back into his subconscious. That was all there was to him now.
Captain Lamb cursed. Conrad rubbed his cheek with the trembling flat of his hand. "I checked those oil-lines this morning. They were okay. I don't see—"
Footsteps on the rungs. Larian came down, feet first, quick, and turned to face them. "What happened…?" He looked as if somebody had kicked him in the stomach when he saw Belloc lying there. His face sucked bone-white, staring. His jaw dropped down and he said, emptily, "You — killed him. You — found out what we were going to do — and you killed him…"
The Slop's voice was blank. "What?"
"You killed him," repeated Larian. He began to laugh. He opened his mouth and let the laughter come out in the steam-laden room. He darted about suddenly and leaped up the rungs. "I'll show you!"
"Stop him!" said Lamb.
Conrad scuttled up at Larian's heels. Larian stopped and kicked. Conrad fell, heavy, roaring. Larian vanished. Conrad got up, yelling, and pursued. Captain Lamb watched him go, not doing anything himself, just watching. He just listened to the fading feet on the rungs, going up and up.
The deck and hull quivered under Lamb's feet.
Somebody shouted.
Conrad cried, from far off, "Watch it!"
There was a thumping noise.
Five minutes later Conrad came down the ladder lugging a time-bomb. "It's a good thing that oil-pipe burst, Cap. I found this in Supply AC. That's where Larian was hiding it. Him and Belloc—"
"What about Larian?"
"He tried to escape through an emergency life-boat air-lock. He opened the inner door, slammed it, and a moment later when I opened that same inner door, I almost got killed the same way—"
"Killed?"
"Yeah. The damned fool must have opened the outer door while he was still standing in the middle of the air-lock. Space suction yanked him right outside. He's gone for good."
The Slop swallowed thickly. "That's funny, he'd do that. He knew how those air-locks work, how dangerous they are. Must've been some mistake, an accident, or something…"
"Yeah," said Captain Lamb. "Yeah."
They held Belloc's funeral a few hours later. They thrust him overboard, following Larian into space.
My body was cleansed. The organic poison was eliminated.
Mars was very close now. Red. Bright red.
In another six hours we would be engaged in conflict.
* * *
I had my taste of war. We drove down, Captain Lamb and his men inside me, and I put out my arms for the first time, and I closed fingers of power around Martian ships and tore them apart, fifteen of them — who tried to prevent our landing at Deimos-Phobos Base. I received only minor damage to my section F. Plates.
Scarlet ammunition went across space, born out of myself. Child out of metal and exploding with blazing force, wounding the stratas of emptiness in the void. I exhilarated in my new found arms of strength. I screamed with it. I talked rocket talk to the stars. I shook Deimos Base with my ambitious drive. I dissected Martian ships with quick calm strokes of my ray-arms, and spunky little Cap Lamb guided my vitals, swearing at the top of his lungs!
I had come into my own. I was fully grown, fully matured. War and more war, plunging on for month after month.
And young Ayres collapsed upon the computation deck one day, just like he was going to say a prayer, with a shard of shrapnel webbed in his lungs, blood dropping from his parted lips instead of a prayer. It reminded me of that day when first he had kneeled there and whispered, "Hell, I got the captain's time beat all hollow!"
Ayres died.
They killed Conrad, too. And it was Hillary who took the news back to York Port to the girl they had both loved.
After fourteen months we headed home. We landed in York Port, recruited men to fill our vacancies, and shot out again. We knocked holes in vacuum. We got what we wanted out of war, and then, quite suddenly one day space was silent. The Martians retreated, Captain Lamb shrugged his fine-boned little shoulders and commanded his men down to the computation room:
"Well, men, it's all over. The war's over. This is your last trip in this damned nice little war-rocket. You'll have your release as soon as we take gravity in York Port. Any of you want to stay on — this ship is being converted into cargo-freighting. You'll have good berths."
The crew muttered, shifting their feet, blinking their eyes. Cap said: "It's been good. I won't deny it. I had a fine crew and a sweet ship. We worked hard, we did what we had to do. And now it's all over and we have peace. Peace."
The way he said that word it meant something.
"Know what that means?" said Lamb. "It means getting drunk again, as often as you like; it means living on earth again, forgetting how religious you ever were out in space, how you were converted the first trip out. It means forgetting how non-gravity feels on your guts. It means a lot. It means losing friends, and the hard good times brawling at Phobos-Deimos Base.
"It means leaving this rocket." The men were silent.
"I want to thank you. You, Hillary. And you, Slop. And you, Ayres, for signing on after your brother died. And you, Thompson, and McDonald and Priory. And that's about all. Stand by to land!"
* * *
We landed without fanfare.
The crew packed their duffles and left ship. Cap lingered behind awhile, walking through me with his short, brisk strides. He swore under his breath, twisted his small brown face. After awhile he walked away, too.
I wasn't a war-rocket anymore. They crammed me with cargo and shipped me back and forth to Mars and Venus for the next five years. Five long years of nothing but spider-silk, hemp and mineral-ore, a skeleton crew and a quiet voyage with nothing happening. Five years.
I had a new captain, a new, strange crew, and a strange peaceful routine going and coming across the stars.
Nothing important happened until July 17th, 2243.
That was the day I cracked up on this wild pebbled little planetoid where the wind whined and the rain poured and the silence was too damned silent.
The crew was crushed to death inside me, and I just lay here in the hot sun and the cold night wind, waiting for rescue that never seemed to come.
My life blood was gone, dead, crushed, killed. A rocket thinks in itself, but it lives through its crew and its captain. I had been living on borrowed time since Captain Lamb went away and never came back.
I lay here, thinking about it all. Glorious months of war, savage force and power of it. The wild insanity of it. I waited. I realized how out of place I was here, how helpless, like a gigantic metal child, an idiot who needs control, who needs pulsing human life blood.
Until very early one morning after the rain I saw a silver speck on the sky. It came down fast — a one-man Patrol inspector, used for darting about in the asteroid belt.
The ship came down, landing about one hundred yards away from my silent hulk. A small man climbed out of it.
He came walking up the pebbled hill very slowly, almost like a blind man.
He stood at my air-lock door. I heard him say, "Hello—"
* * *
And I knew who it was. Standing there, not looking much older than when first he had clipped aboard me, little and lean and made of copper wire and brown leather.
Captain Lamb.
After all these years. Dressed in a black patrol uniform. An inspector of asteroids. No cargo job for him. A dangerous one instead. Inspector.
His lips moved.
"I heard you were lost four months ago," he said to me, quiet-like. "I asked for an appointment to Inspector. I thought — I thought I'd like to hunt for you myself. Just — just for old time's sake." His wiry neck muscles stood out, and tightened. He made his little hands into fists.
He opened my air-lock, laughing quietly, and walked inside me with his quick, short strides. It felt good to have him touch me again, to hear his clipped voice ring against my hull again. He climbed the rungs to my control room and stood there, swaying, remembering all the old times we had fought together.
"Ayres!"
"Aye, sir!"
"Hillary!"
"Aye, sir!"
"Slop!"
"Aye, sir!"
"Conrad!"
"Aye, sir!'
"Where in hell is everybody? Where in hell is everybody?" raged Lamb, staring about the control room. "Where in the God-blamed hell—!"
Silence. He quit yelling for people who couldn't answer him, who would never answer him again, and he sat down in the control chair and talked to me. He told me what he'd been doing all these years. Hard work, long hours, good pay.
"But it's not like it used to be," he told me. "Not by a stretched length. I think though — I think there'll be another war soon. Yes, I do." He nodded briskly. "And how'd you like to be in on it, huh? You can, you know."
I said nothing. My beams stretched and whined in the hot sun. That was all. I waited.
"Things are turning bad on Venus.
Colonials revolting. You're old-fashioned, but you're proud and tall, and a fighter. You can fight again."
He didn't stay much longer, except to tell me what would happen. "I have to go back to Earth, get a rescue crew and try to lift you under your own power next week. And so help me God, I'll be captain of you again and we'll beat the bloody marrow out of those Venerians!"
He walked back through my compartments, climbed down into my heart. The galley. The computation. The Slop, Ayres. Larian. Belloc. Memories. And he walked out of the airlock with eyes that were anything but dry. He patted my hull.
"After all, now — I guess you were the only thing I ever really loved…"