My knees wobbled under me as I hit the floor. Young Lassen, beside me, tried to say something and then crumpled up. Jim bent over him, but Breck was at the door yelling, “Let him go! Come on!”
The whistles screeching at us all the way down the ladders of the well, and the mask clip hurting my nose, and down at the bottom a disheveled officer yelling at us to get out and join Squad Five, and the gangway reeling under us.
Cold. Freezing cold, and a wan sunshine from the shrunken little sun up there in the brassy sky, and a rolling plain of ocherous red sand stretching around us, sand that slid away under our feet as our squads followed Captain Wall toward the distant metal bulk that lay oddly canted and broken in a little shallow valley.
“Come on, men—hurry! Hurry!”
Sure, all of it a dream, the dreamlike way we walked with our lead-soled shoes dragging our feet back after each step, and the voices coming through the mask resonators muffled and distant.
Only not a dream, but a nightmare, when we got up to the canted metal bulk and saw what had happened to Rocket Seven—the metal hull ripped like paper, and a few men crawling out of the wreck with blood on them, and a gurgling sound where shattered tanks were emptying, and voices whimpering, “First aid! First aid!”
Only it hadn’t happened, it hadn’t happened yet at all, for we were still back in Rocket Four coming in, we hadn’t landed yet at all but we were going to any minute.
“We’re coming down. . . .”
I couldn’t go through it all again. I yelled and fought my hammock straps and woke up, and I was in my plane seat and a scared hostess was a foot away from me, saying, “This is Omaha, Sergeant. We’re coming down.”
They were all looking at me, all the other passengers, and I guessed I’d been talking in the dream—I still had the sweat down my back like all those nights in the hospital when I’d keep waking up.
I sat up, and they all looked away from me quick and pretended they hadn’t been staring.
We came down to the airport. It was midday, and the hot Nebraska sun felt good on my back when I got out. I was lucky, for when I asked at the bus depot about going to Cuffington, there was a bus all ready to roll.
A farmer sat down beside me, a big young fellow who offered me cigarettes and told me it was only a few hours’ ride to Cuflington.
“Your home there?” he asked.
“No, my home’s back in Ohio,” I said. “A friend of mine came from there. Name of Clymer.”
He didn’t know him, but he remembered that one of the town boys had gone on that second expedition to Mars.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was Jim.”
He couldn’t keep it in any longer. “What’s it like out there, anyway?”
I said, “Dry. Terrible dry.”
“I’ll bet it is,” he said. “To tell the truth, it’s too dry here, this year, for good wheat weather. Last year it was fine. Last year . . .”
Cuffington, Nebraska, was a wide street of stores, and other streets with trees and old houses, and yellow wheat fields all around as far as you could see. It was pretty hot, and I was glad to sit down in the bus depot while I went through the thin little phone book.
There were three Graham families in the book, but the first one I called was the right one—Miss Ila Graham. She talked fast and excited, and said she’d come right over, and I said I’d wait in front of the bus depot.
I stood underneath the awning, looking down the quiet street and thinking that it sort of explained why Jim Clymer had always been such a quiet, slow-moving sort of guy. The place was sort of relaxed, like he’d been.
A coupé pulled up, and Miss Graham opened the door. She was a brown-haired girl, not especially good-looking, but the kind you think of as a nice girl, a very nice girl.
She said, “You look so tired that I feel guilty now about asking you to stop.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “And it’s no trouble stopping over a couple of places on my way back to Ohio.”
As we drove across the little town, I asked her if Jim hadn’t had any family of his own here.
“His parents were killed in a car crash years ago,” Miss Graham said. “He lived with an uncle on a farm outside Grandview, but they didn’t get along, and Jim came into town and got a job at the power station.”
She added, as we turned a comer, “My mother rented him a room. That’s how we got to know each other. That’s how we—how we got engaged.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
It was a big square house with a deep front porch, and some trees around it. I sat down in a wicker chair, and Miss Graham brought her mother out. Her mother talked a little about Jim, how they missed him, and how she declared he’d been just like a son.
When her mother went back in, Miss Graham showed me a little bunch of blue envelopes. “These were the letters I got from Jim. There weren’t very many of them, and they weren’t very long.”
“We were only allowed to send one thirty-word message every two weeks,” I told her. “There were a couple of thousand of us out there, and they couldn’t let us jam up the message transmitter all the time.”
“It was wonderful how much Jim could put into just a few words,” she said, and handed me some of them.
I read a couple. One said, “I have to pinch myself to realize that I’m one of the first Earthmen to stand on an alien world. At night, in the cold, I look up at the green star that’s Earth and can’t quite realize I’ve helped an age-old dream come true.”
Another one said, “This world’s grim and lonely, and mysterious. We don’t know much about it yet. So far, nobody’s seen anything living but the lichens that Expedition One reported, but there might be anything here.”
Miss Graham asked me, “Was that all there was, just lichens?”
“That, and two or three kinds of queer cactus things,” I said. “And rock and sand. That’s all.”
As I read more of those little blue letters, I found that now that Jim was gone I knew him better than I ever had. There was something about him I’d never suspected. He was romantic inside. We hadn’t suspected it, he was always so quiet and slow, but now I saw that all the time he was more romantic about the thing we were doing than any of us.
He hadn’t let on. We’d have kidded him, if he had. Our name for Mars, after we got sick of it, was the Hole. We always talked about it as the Hole. I could see now that Jim had been too shy of our kidding to ever let us know that he glamorized the thing in his mind.
“This was the last one I got from him before his sickness,” Miss Graham said.
That one said, “I’m starting north tomorrow with one of the mapping expeditions. We’ll travel over country no human has ever seen before.”
I nodded. “I was on that party myself. Jim and I were on the same half-track.” x
“He was thrilled by it, wasn’t he,' Sergeant?”
I wondered. I remembered that trip, and it was hell. Our job was simply to run a preliminary topographical survey, checking with Geigers for possible uranium deposits.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, if the sand hadn’t started to blow.
It wasn’t sand like Earth sand. It was ground to dust by billions of years of blowing around that dry world. It got inside your breathing mask, and your goggles, and the engines of the half-tracks, in your food and water and clothes. There was nothing for three days but cold, and wind, and sand.
Thrilled? I’d have laughed at that before. But now I didn’t know. Maybe Jim had been, at that. He had lots of patience, a lot more than I ever had. Maybe he glamorized that hellish trip into wonderful adventure on a foreign world.
“Sure, he was thrilled,” I said. “We all were. Anybody would be.”
Miss Graham took the letters back, and then said, “You had Martian sickness too, didn’t you?”
I said, yes, I had, just a touch, and that was why I’d had to spend a stretch in reconditioning hospital when I got back.
She waited for me to go on, and I
knew I had to. “They don’t know yet if it’s some sort of virus or just the effect of Martian conditions on Earthmen’s bodies. It hit forty per cent of us. It wasn’t really so bad—fever and dopiness, mostly.”
“When Jim got it, was he well cared for?” she asked. Her lips were quivering a little.
“Sure, he was well cared for. He got the best care there was,” I lied.
The best care there was? That was a laugh. The first cases got decent care, maybe. But they’d never figured on so many coming down. There wasn’t any room in our little hospital— they just had to stay in their bunks in the aluminum Quonsets when it hit them. All our doctors but one were down, and two of them died.
We’d been on Mars six months when it hit us, and the loneliness had already got us down. All but four of our rockets had gone back to Earth, and we were alone on a dead world, our little town of Quonsets huddled together under that hateful, brassy sky, and beyond it the sand and rocks that went on forever.
You go up to the North Pole and camp there, and find out how lonely that is. It was worse out there, a lot worse. The first excitement was gone long ago, and we were tired, and homesick in a way nobody was ever homesick before—we wanted to see green grass, and real sunshine, and women’s faces, and hear running water; and we wouldn’t until Expedition Three came to relieve us. No wonder guys blew their tops out there. And then came Martian sickness, on top of it.
“We did everything for him that we could,” I said.
Sure we had. I could still remember Walter and me tramping through the cold night to the hospital to try to get a medic, while Breck stayed with him, and how we couldn’t get one.
I remember how Walter had looked up at the blazing sky as we tramped back, and shaken his fist at the big green star of Earth.
“People up there are going to dances tonight, watching shows, sitting around in warm rooms laughing! Why should good men have to die out here to get them uranium for cheap power?”
“Can it,” I told him tiredly. “Jim’s not going to die. A lot of guys got over it.”
The best care there was? That was real funny. All we could do was wash his face, and give him the pills the medic left, and watch him get weaker every day till he died.
“Nobody could have done more for him than was done,” I told Miss Graham.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I guess—it’s just one of those things.”
When I got up to go she asked me if I didn’t want to see Jim’s room. They’d kept it for him just the same, she said.
I didn’t want to, but how are you going to say so? I went up with her and looked and said it was nice. She opened a big cupboard. It was full of neat rows of old magazines.
“They’re all the old science fiction magazines he read when he was a boy,” she said. “He always saved them.”
I took one out. It had a bright cover, with a space ship on it, not like our rockets but a streamlined thing, and the rings of Saturn in the background.
When I laid it down, Miss Graham took it up and put it back carefully into its place in the row, as though somebody was coming back who wouldn’t like to find things out of order.
She insisted on driving me back to Omaha, and out to the airport. She seemed sorry to let me go, and I suppose it was because I was the last real tie to Jim, and when I was gone it was all over then for good.
I wondered if she’d get over it in time, and I guessed she would. People do get over things. I supposed she’d marry some other nice guy, and I wondered what they’d do with Jim’s things—with all those old magazines nobody was ever coming back to read.
3.
I would never have stopped at Chicago at all if I could have got out of it, for the last person I wanted to talk to anybody about was Walter Millis. It would be too easy for me to make a slip and let out stuff nobody was supposed to know.
But Walter’s father had called me at the hospital, a couple of times. The last time he called, he said he was having Breck’s parents come down from Wisconsin so they could see me, too, so what could I do then but say, yes, I’d stop. But I didn’t like it at all, and I knew I’d have to be careful.
Mr. Millis was waiting at the airport and shook hands with me and said what a big favor I was doing them all, and how he appreciated my stopping when I must be anxious to get back to my own home and parents.
“That’s all right,” I said. “My dad and mother came out to the hospital to see me when I first got back.”
He was a big, fine-looking important sort of man, with a little bit of the stuffed shirt about him, I thought. He seemed friendly enough, but I got the feeling he was looking at me and wondering why I’d come back and his son Walter hadn’t Well, I couldn’t blame him for that.
His car was waiting, a big car with a driver, and we started north through the city. Mr. Millis pointed out a few things to me to make conversation, especially a big atomic-power station we passed.
“It’s only one of thousands, strung all over the world,” he said. “They’re going to transform our whole economy. This Martian uranium will be a big thing, Sergeant.”
I said, yes, I guessed it would.
I was sweating blood, waiting for him to start asking about Walter, and I didn’t know yet just what I could tell him. I could get myself in Dutch plenty if I opened my big mouth too wide, for that one thing that had happened to Expedition Two was supposed to be strictly secret, and we’d all been briefed on why we had to keep our mouths shut.
But he let it go for the time being, and just talked other stuff. I gathered that his wife wasn’t too well, and that Walter had been their only child. I also gathered that he was a very big shot in business, and dough-heavy.
I didn’t like him. Walter I’d liked plenty, but his old man seemed a pretty pompous person, with his heavy business talk.
He wanted to know how soon I thought Martian uranium would come through in quantity, and I said I didn’t think it’d be very soon.
“Expedition One only located the deposits,” I said, “and Two just did mapping and setting up a preliminary base. Of course, the thing keeps expanding, and I hear Four will have a hundred rockets. But Mars is a tough setup.”
Mr. Millis said decisively that I was wrong, that the world was power-hungry, that it would be pushed a lot faster than I expected.
He suddenly quit talking business and looked at me and asked, “Who was Walter’s best friend out there?”
He asked it sort of apologetically. He was a stuffed shirt; but all my dislike of him went away then.
“Breck Jergen,” I told him. “Breck was our sergeant. He sort of held our squad together, and he and Walter cottoned to each other from the first.”
Mr. Millis nodded, but didn’t say anything more about it. He pointed out the window at the distant lake and said we were almost to his home.
It wasn’t a home, it was a big mansion. We went in and he introduced me to Mrs. Millis. She was a limp, pale-looking woman, who said she was glad to meet one of Walter’s friends. Somehow I got the feeling that even though he was a stuffed shirt, he felt it about Walter a lot more than she did.
He took me up to a bedroom and said that Breck’s parents would arrive before dinner, and that I could get a little rest before then.
I sat looking around the room. It was the plushiest one I’d ever been in, and, seeing this house and the way these people lived, I began to understand why Walter had blown his top more than the rest of us.
He’d been a good guy, Walter, but high-tempered, and I could see now he’d been a little spoiled. The discipline at training base had been tougher on him than on most of us, and this was why.
I sat and dreaded this dinner that was coming up, and looked out the window at a swimming pool and tennis court, and wondered if anybody ever used them now that Walter was gone. It seemed a queer thing for a fellow with a setup like this to go out to Mars and get himself killed.
I took the satin cover off the bed so my shoes wouldn’t dirty it, and lay dow
n and closed my eyes, and wondered what I was going to tell them. The trouble was, I didn’t know what story the officials had given them.
“The Commanding Officer regrets to inform you that your son was shot down like a dog . .
They’d never got any telegram like that. But just what line had been handed them? I wished I’d had a chance to check on that.
Damn it, why didn’t all these people let me alone? They started it all going through my mind again, and the psychos had told me I ought to forget it for a while, but how could I?
It might be better just to tell them the truth. After all, Walter wasn’t the only one who’d blown his top out there. In that grim last couple of months, plenty of guys had gone around sounding off.
Expedition Three isn't coming!
We're stuck, and they don't care enough about us to send help!
That was the line of talk. You heard it plenty, in those days. You couldn’t blame the guys for it, either. A fourth of us down with Martian sickness, the little grave markers clotting up the valley beyond the ridge, rations getting thin, medicine running low, everything running low, all of us watching the sky for rockets that never came.
There’d been a little hitch back on Earth, Colonel Nichols explained. (He was our C.O. now that General Rayen had died.) There was a little delay, but the rockets would be on their way soon, we’d get relief, we just had to hold on.
Holding on—that’s what we were doing. Nights we’d sit in the Quonset and listen to Lassen coughing in his bunk, and it seemed like wind-giants, cold-giants, were bawling and laughing around our little huddle of shelters.
“Damn it, if they’re not coming, why don’t we go home?” Walter said. “We’ve still got the four rockets—they could take us all back.”
Breck’s serious face got graver. “Look, Walter, there’s too much of that stuff being talked around. Lay off.”
“Can you blame the men for talking it? We’re not storybook heroes. If they’ve forgotten about us back on Earth, why do we just sit and take it?” •
A Century of Science Fiction Page 11