Marooned on Mars

by Lester Del Rey

  The engineer laughed softly. “I’m not thinking. Chuck. But in a new ship like this, there are lots of things to do. Vance can’t be bothered radaring back right now for a ship to come get you. Come on, I’ll have to lock you up until he can see you.”

  Chuck went along, quite content. He dropped into a hammock in the little crew-quarters with a groan of relief. Dick grinned at him and went out, locking the door behind.

  Vance would send word back, of course. But it wouldn’t be until they were too far for any ship to pick up Chuck. The boy went over to the tiny microfilm library fastened to one wall and began catching up on his reading. He’d missed three issues of The Outlander, and it was time he caught up with that “Martian bandit” and his exploits;

  once they were actually on Mars, all the stories about the planet were probably going to seem silly. He had to read them while he could still get a kick out of them.

  It was hours later when he heard the door open. Captain Vance slipped in, pushed himself to one of the hammocks, and threw a restraining strap over himself.

  “I was just informed you stowed on board,” he told Chuck, his voice severe. “Naturally, I reported it at once, but we’ve passed beyond the area where you could be taken off. So it seems you’re to be with us. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, sir. It means I’m going to Mars.”

  “It means you’re asking every man here to give up one-seventh of his supplies and chances for living to make room for you! You didn’t think of that, did you? You should have thought of it. This ship was meant for six men, not for seven! It means we have to carry a man along who has no specific work to do. And it means that you’ll be under arrest until we return to the Moon, where your case will be up to the Space Commission. Officially, I can’t condone your conduct, Charles Svensen. But there’s nothing I can do about it. So, as you say, you’re going to Mars.”

  Chuck looked for any sign of joking in the captain’s face, and found none. He thought carefully—and it wasn’t a joke. He had decreased the chances for the others. He pulled himself down to a hammock opposite the captain and tried to think of something to say. Nothing seemed adequate.

  Suddenly Vance laughed.

  “Okay, Chuck, you needed the lecture, and its true enough too. But who do you think reminded Jeff Foldingchair of the time he’d stowed away? Who do you think got a lunkhead like Red Echols appointed for guard duty? Officially, we resent your stowing away. But the whole crew meant to have you go, and you’re here. If we worried that much about giving up a little of our chance for survival, we’d never have volunteered for the trip.”

  “But the Space Commission—” Chuck began.

  Vance laughed again. “Chuck, there probably isn’t a man on Earth or the Moon who isn’t tickled pink that you’re with us—it makes a whale of a good story. As for your arrest, the terms are that you will be confined to this ship until we reach Mars! To pay your passage, you’ll help any one of us who needs help. Now come on to dinner.”

  Chuck was still trying to find some way to thank Vance as they came into the tiny mess hall, off the galley. A general shout went up as he came in. He looked at them, grinning sheepishly. Lew Wong was beaming; the others seemed just as pleased.

  Nat Rothman usually carried the worries of the world on his face. The pilot was a medium-built man of dark ‘complexion, with the only mustache in the crew. Tonight, the mustache stretched out over a smile broad enough to show his teeth, matching the grin of Dick Steele beside him. Even tiny Dr. Paul Sokolsky seemed completely happy. His red hair was a blaze around his head, without weight to hold it in place, and he kept trying to smooth it down. But he was the first to reach Chuck and began pumping his hand.

  Then the voice of Ginger Parsons cut through the greetings.

  “Chuck, you’re just what I need. Come back here and help me feed these space-happy bums!”

  Chuck went back into the galley, where the cook and photographer of the expedition was busy. The man’s homely Irish face was a study of thought as he fussed over the heaters with the sealed cans of food. “What’s a cook for, anyway? If I tried to do any real cooking here, the liquids would jump out of the pans, and the solids would float around, burning us all to death. But you’re cook’s helper, anyhow. Pass it out.”

  It was an odd meal. Liquids came in little plastic bags with nipples through which the contents could be sucked. All other food had to be kept in plates with lids on them, and speared quickly, before the cover was snapped down. Since anything not fastened down was sure to be a menace to them all, the tables were metal, with forks and knives magnetized to stay in place. Yet it was the happiest meal Chuck had eaten.

  Vance stood up, holding onto a brace when he had finished his dinner. “All right, men, this was a celebration. From now on, we begin regular routine—and you’ll find it’s just that; shipboard life isn’t going to be exciting, at best. I’ve left the ship on automatic controls this time, to prove to you that it can be done.

  “You’ll need that confidence in the Eros. From now on, though, we keep regular watches. I’ll take the first from eight to four with Parsons; Nat, you and Wong get the four to midnight; and Dick, Chuck and Doc will hold midnight to eight.”

  He grinned at Chuck. “Except tonight. I’ve noticed you limping around, so you’ll get Doc to bandage you, and go to bed. Orders.”

  Chuck had smiled inwardly at the idea of anything being routine on the Eros, but the first week taught him the folly of such ideas. The Moon shrunk to a pinprick behind them, and Mars remained only a tiny red dot. The stars were the same ones he had always seen. And outside, the eternal blackness of space gave them no indication that they weren’t frozen motionlessly.

  The only change came from the occasional drop of liquid that got free somehow and collected into a little round ball in mid-air. Chasing after it and trying to trap it gave some exercise, but is wasn’t a very pleasant kind—particularly when the liquid was hot.

  Even that came to an end when Vance decided to set the ship spinning so that they might be able to lead a more normal life. The spinning would throw them out against the hull like a weight whirled on the end of a string. Centrifugal force wasn’t the same as gravity, but the feeling. would be the same. It would make navigation harder, but there was little need for that until they reached Mars.

  Chuck heard the wheels of the gyroscope start to spin, turning up to three thousand revolutions per minute. Here in space, every motion in one direction by any part of the ship was automatically compensated for by an opposite motion on the rest of the ship—Newton had stated it in his second law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It took 10,000 turns of the little six-pound wheel to turn the 60,000-pound ship once; and the whole ship began spinning, slowly at first, and then fester and faster.

  When they seemed to weigh about ten pounds each, Vance let it stay, and set them to moving equipment to use the hull as their floor. The ship had been equipped for that. From then on, cooking went back to normal. In the hub, or central well of the ship, they were still weightless, but elsewhere they could walk if they were careful to take it easy.

  Chuck found his niche. Half of his watch was spent in the hydroponic gardens, clipping the plants, tending them, and turning the clippings into a fresh batch of chemicals by means of the little chamber where bacteria reduced it all to liquid form. On board ship everything could be reused, over and over again; there was no loss, only change and that could be controlled. In theory they could have gone on forever, provided there was enough energy to maintain the processes.

  The rest of his working time was spent in cleaning and in helping Ginger with the galley work. He was a combination cook, cleaning boy, and farmer.

  Most of the communication was done on Vance’s shift, and he rarely saw the radar set. The few times when the alarm told of a signal coming through, it was of a purely technical nature, and not particularly interesting. Once he talked briefly to his father; he’d
been sure that his family wouldn’t mind his running away, but it was nice to hear it confirmed. They were all” proud of him.

  As they drew farther away from the moon, the radar took more and more energy to operate, and Vance discouraged using it. The atomic engine could operate for years to come, but the generators were subject to wear; all had been designed to weigh as little as possible, and there were only a minimum of replacements.

  Most of the free time was spent in various games or in reading. Ginger had suggested a rough version of hockey down in the central shaft, where the absence of weight made it possible to leap from end to end if the initial push was Judged correctly. It provided exercise and amusement and soon became a regular part of their lives.

  Finally, there was sleep. By the time Chuck went to bed, he was usually tired enough to drift off without trouble, and to sleep soundly through a full eight hours.

  He was asleep, three weeks out from the Moon, when the first trouble came.

  The gong suddenly cut through his dreams, wakening him so sharply that he fell from the hammock onto the “deck.” Without time to get back, he felt the rocket suddenly go on with the full thrust of the jets. His body slid down the length of the decks to crash into the steel plates. Only the shortness of the blast saved him from injury.

  Then a call came from the control room. “All hands to control. Meteorites!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Meteorites!

  Chuck found Dick ahead of him and the others at his heels as he plunged into the little control room where Vance and Lew were busy. There was hardly room for all, but they had no time to worry about that sort of inconvenience.

  “Chuck, take radar!” Vance began barking out orders to the others, but Chuck didn’t hear the words. He was sliding into the seat Lew had given up, and his eyes were tracing the lines that now seemed to dart across the screen. With more credits in radar interception than Lew, he was the logical man for the job now.

  Nat Rothman stood over him, working a small computing machine, while Vance handled the controls.

  Each of the streaks on the screen represented a tiny object ahead—the size was indicated by the brightness. Chuck snapped his eye to the indicator, and saw that it

  was set to show pea-sized objects as medium brightness. Another screen indicated distance. “Link ‘em,” Rothman told him. He brought both images together, each in a separate color, on a third screen, and began setting up the first to show the probable speed of the meteorites in relation to the ship. This required compensating for the spin of the ship.

  “There!” He pointed to one that was the size of a small marble and much too close. Rothman nodded at Vance, holding up one finger. The ship blasted forward for a tenth of a second. They waited perhaps another second, but no sound reached them from the walls.

  “Missed,” Vance said tersely. “But we can’t keep it up. We…”

  There was a sound like a rifle bullet hitting a steel shed, and a harsher sound immediately after it. One, smaller than a pea, had gotten through to them, drilling through the ship and out again. At speeds measured in miles per second, even the smallest particle was dangerous. Apparently all these were small—too small for the Lunar observatory to have seen them—-but there must have been thousands or more in the space ahead.

  “Patch it,” Vance ordered. Steele, Lew, and Sokolsky nodded and were gone. They’d have to find the first tiny hole and the second larger one, slap plates over them, and weld them in place before the air could rush out into space.

  The swarm had thinned out for a time. Chuck kept his eyes on the plate,, but there were only a few seconds of grace before they began to run into more.

  “That first one must have been as big as a melon,” Rothman told Chuck. “The automatic alarm went on and Lew didn’t have time to set things up. We were simply lucky. Or we’re in bad luck. There isn’t supposed to be one chance in fifty of running into a meteorite between here and Mars. They’re mostly spread out pretty thin, and we’re a small target for all that space.”

  Although the meteorites swung about the sun in orbits like the planets, they were comparatively rare. There had been only one case of trouble in all the trips to the Moon from Earth. But the Eros seemed jinxed.

  Now they were approaching the other edge of the swarm where they .were thicker again. Someday there would be fully automatic machinery that figured their courses automatically and instantly, to drive ships safely out of their paths. But that was still in the future. Everything now depended on the accuracy of Chuck’s compensations, and the skill of Rothman in interpreting the little data he could get.

  “Two!” Chuck called, and Rothman signaled Vance quickly.

  This time the Eros seemed to go wild as the full power of her jets flashed on, and cut off. But it had not been successful, for however close Rothman’s guess had been, placing the ship exactly between both was too much to expect

  Something hit the wall of the ship with a shriek of rock against metal. It flashed by Chuck’s nose, not a foot away, already white hot from the friction of its passage. It splatted against the control board, hissed, and disappeared, leaving a six-inch hole in the wall opposite the tiny half-inch hole it had made on entering.

  Air began sighing out. Chuck snapped up the thin ship’s log and slapped it down over the larger hole, where air pressure forced it into tight contact. Vance had already covered the smaller hole with an eraser.

  Steele came in with Lew and Sokolsky. All three showed signs of bruises from the slamming around they had taken when the rockets went on, but none seemed to realize it. They slid quickly cut sections of metal under the crude stoppers and began work with a small electric welder. In a few minutes, the holes were sealed.

  The last of the streaks had vanished from the screens. Chuck turned the radar back to Lew, and reported the fact to Vance, who nodded slowly.

  The captain was-staring at the wreck the meteorite had made of part of the control board. He moved to the panel and began testing, while Steele dropped down to study it directly.

  “Some of the rocket-firing controls are damaged— you’ll have an unsteady blast. And that first meteorite wrecked the gyroscopes. We’re in a fine pickle.”

  “Yeah. We’re probably safe enough now, until we reach Mars. But we’ll have to do some beautiful repair work if we’re going to make a safe landing there. Chuck, you did a good job—finer than could be expected. It’s not your fault—or yours either, Nat We came through better than we had any right to. Now the question is, how much and how soon can we repair things?”

  He turned to Steele. The engineer shook his head. “I can get the gyroscopes remounted, but they won’t hold as high a speed, and I can’t promise how long the bearings will work. Chuck, you helped install this mess—take a look at it.”

  Chuck bent down to the damaged wiring. It was a complete mess. Everything would have to be torn out and completely redone—enough following diagrams and re-soldering to last for months. He reported it, while Vance

  searched through the papers in one of the wall safes for the diagrams.

  “All right,” the captain told them finally. “Get busy. We’ve got a lot of time left, fortunately. But we can’t tell when we may need things again. Probably we won’t even get another meteorite signal on our screens. But I’m not betting on anything.”

  All the men on the ship were trained at several things. Vance was a fair substitute for any of the men, as was Steele. Rothman was a fairly skilled geologist, capable of estimating the mineral resources of Mars, as well as being a pilot. Doctor Sokolsky was as much of a biologist as a medical doctor. From working with has father. Chuck had most of his father’s skill at engineering. “Lew had made a skilled hobby of archaeology. And even Ginger Parsons, who claimed only to be the world’s best photographer and-a fair cook, had a good grounding in science and mathematics.

  But this was a job for two men only, since there was room for no more. The control panel work fell to Chuck and Lew automatically; Va
nce or Rothman would be with them, to operate the ship when needed, but they would ‘have to reconstruct the wiring by themselves.

  Chuck went for his space suit, preferring from experience to do his soldering without air around; it didn’t make a great deal of difference, except for the more delicate work; but there, even the finest wire could be handled with a hot iron without fear of damage. Lew was awkward at first, but once the air was pumped out of the control room, he soon caught the knack.

  It was tricky work. The original wiring had been done in sections, using complicated, specialized tools; the sub-assemblies had then been welded into place and hooked up. Now they had to begin work directly, trusting to extensions on their tools to get into the cramped space, and trying to organize it so that they would finish each section as they went along.

  Twice the first day. Chuck had to pull out most of what had been done, in order to get in with parts that had seemed simple enough in the diagrams, but simply couldn’t be inserted as they had planned.

  There was wire enough, and most of the parts were in stock in the big supply rooms along the central well. But many of the coils had been left out on the theory that they could be wound when needed; it was a good theory, if only one or two coils had to be made. But coil-winding was slow and tedious work.

  There were tables that showed how the coils should be wound. But handwork is never exact. The prepared coils had to be tested on Q-meters and other instruments. Sometimes they were satisfactory. More often, time was spent in adding a few turns, removing turns, or squeezing and pulling the coils into the correct behavior. There Chuck’s work with his homemade set proved excellent experience; Lew had worked only with standard parts, and was less able to cut and manipulate parts into operating condition.

  One section was finally finished, and Vance tried it out, It worked—but it would have taken long hours of practice to figure out how to compensate for small errors.

  “It’s wired right—I know it is. And everything in it meets the limits set in the specifications,” Chuck told his captain. “It should be working exactly as it did before.”