Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  I was tired, and even with my suit-heaters going full tilt it was a cold, long ride; sometimes I wondered if Kruger had a heart at all. Then I kicked myself for thinking like a kid, because I knew he was knocking himself out to get us both home as soon as he could, and with all the information we had tape for. But I still couldn’t help thinking that the guy had been born with a molybdenum slide-rule in his mouth, both guaranteed never to wear out.

  The star-shine on the long, rolling dunes, and the quick, silent transit of Phobos and Deimos across the sharp blackness of the sky cooled my temper as I pushed the track toward the E-M-1, and by the time I could make out her stubby, torpedo-nose silhouette against the pale glow of the larger moon, my thoughts were off Kruger and on what I was going to tell the eager-beavers back home. We’re doing swell—big success—hurry up and build more ships, it’s a gold-mine up here . . . sure, we’ll be able to rejuvenate the atmosphere, sell Mars the most wonderful industrial technology it’s ever seen—do ’em a big favor, revitalize the deserts . . . at the new, low, bargain rate of . . .

  The joker again, and all of a sudden, clearly, this time. And part of the “now” that I was itching so badly to get at. The Martians themselves had the science. And the ability, and certainly the desire . . . why were they so damned content inside the Enclosures? Necessary respite at one time, of course—but as they’d advanced, surely they could look forward to the time when they could bring their tired planet back to the bloom of its youth. And spacetravel; even now, Kruger was going over one of their best ships with a fine-tooth comb. Why—why did they stay here, cooped up, a mere fraction of their former number? I felt I could see them dwindling . . .

  Those were the questions I’d been wanting to ask, and why in hell I hadn’t after four months of asking everything else conceivable I didn’t know. Why Kruger hadn’t I couldn’t guess. Unless they were that much smarter. Unless my questions were things guided completely beyond my awareness, and it was something they didn’t want us to know. But I would ask tomorrow, first things first go to hell . . . I damn well would ask tomorrow . . .

  I hauled up within ten feet of the E-M-1’s stern, my tracks spurting a small sand-storm, and almost hit the Martian track broadside.

  Something flipped over in my stomach, and a little of the fifty-below-zero Martian night started crawling up my spine. Kruger wouldn’t have come out here anyway—and if he had decided to, he’d have taken our own track and left a second message for me with the service engineers.

  And suddenly I was the not-born-yesterday guy all over again, and reached for the gun-belt that hung behind the driver’s seat. I got it strapped on, got the long-barreled ion-G out of its holster and then rammed it back in again. If this was the way it was going to be, I’d let whoever it was sweat me to the draw. And they wouldn’t win, either.

  MY ENGINE had been heard, so I made a slow, deliberate business of getting out of the track, and started walking toward the E-M-1’s stern port.

  The Martian track was empty and I kept going. It was quiet—an electric, awful sort of quiet, with just the moan of the slow, cold desert winds playing an invisible blind-man’s buff with the shadowy dunes.

  I got to the port, then switched on the suit’s corn-unit.

  “This is LaTharn. Who else is here?” There was an edge on my voice and I didn’t try to take it off.

  No answer. So I was going to give ’em the business in the next sentence, and that was when the port swung open, starlight streaming through the glassite helmet of the space-suited figure that walked through it.

  “I—I do not know how to ask your forgiveness, Mr. LaTharn. I—I’m deeply ashamed.”

  There was a catch in her voice, and the star-shine was doing funny things with her eyes.

  “Lya-Younger,” I murmured. “Please—I am certain you could have meant no harm.” I wasn’t certain of anything, but what the hell could I say? I dropped my arms to my sides, anyway, and tried to cover up the ion-G that should’ve been hanging back in the track where it belonged. “I am surprised, of course. You need only have asked, and either Dr. Kruger or myself would have been glad to give you and your colleagues an extensive tour of our ship. You’ll understand if we thought—”

  “You are very kind, Mr. LaTharn. Very kind.” And she turned her head away, her voice a tight, little thing, suddenly silent.

  “We can talk in the ship if you’d like,” I said. Everything I said then was automatic, because I was suddenly mixed up, balled up, and wondering what kind of game Kruger and I had stumbled into, and just how far over our heads it was.

  “I owe you a tremendous debt of explanation, I know . . .” she was saying with apologetic overtones.

  “Well, it’s pretty-cold out here, even in a well-insulated suit. And I can get the UHF room warmed up in a jiffy. You certainly don’t have to stay, of course . . .” I tried a smile, and it didn’t come too hard.

  She didn’t look at me, but turned and went back through the port, like a child caught with her hand stuck in the cookie-jar. And suddenly, I was glad Kruger had been busy. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the situation, but I didn’t think I’d have been too happy about how Kruger might have handled it, however that might’ve been. Besides which—

  Besides which, I was suddenly getting new respect for the “detached, scientific” approach.

  Brother, I needed it . . .

  WHEN I got the UHF cubicle warmed up and had helped Lya out of her suit she was still silent, but even though the ship’s cold-cathodes had replaced the star-shine, the look was still in her eyes, as though a torrent of words was dammed up behind them, and the dam was near breaking.

  I got a cigarette lit, and felt awkward as hell. She knew it, of course, and as was so typical of her people, took the immediate initiative regardless of the difficulty involved to save a stranger his embarrassment. And for Lya, it must have been the most difficult thing she’d ever tackled.

  “Mr. LaTharn, I cannot of course ask you or Dr. Kruger to forgive me. I have behaved—I have behaved as we would not permit our children to behave, and I know that to say that I am sorry is infinitely far from adequate. I want to explain, I think you know that. I wish I knew how I could . . .”

  And then I really went overboard. Picture me, Earthman, gun at my hip—“No explanation is necessary, Learned One,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever used the Martian title of respect for a Teacher, but somehow I thought, under the circumstances, it might help.

  She did smile, and the smile said “thank you” better than any words she might have used. I felt better right then.

  “You are not of Mars,” she began softly, “and to you—to you there should be little reason to regard me as anything more than a strange being, in a strange place, a long way from your own kind. Dr. Kruger thinks of us all as just such, I know, and it is hardly to be expected that he would regard us otherwise. Rut I want to tell you why I came here, why I came the way I did—if I can—if you want to hear . . .”

  The words tumbled out, slurred a little with their rapidity, hushed almost to inaudibility with the acute sense of shame from which they welled.

  “Please go on,” I said. “And you are to know that you’re to say only those things you wish to say. Any single word will be more than sufficient, believe me.”

  No, I’d never talked that way to a woman—to anyone, in all my life. In fact, I didn’t know I could.

  “I came because—because in this ship of yours, here, in this radio set, in your control-room, in the parts of your ship where your books and records are—they’re all part of a great well of abundant life, of energy, of warmth and strength that soon will be gone for us, Mr. LaTharn—”

  Her voice broke, and she kept her lips tightly together. I didn’t understand, and I kept my big mouth shut. I wanted to do something, I wanted to do anything to take the agony out of her eyes. All I could do was sit there. Teacher, yes—Learned One, of a truly great race—yes, all that—and at the same time a
young girl, scared. Awfully scared of something, and scared helpless . . .

  “Mr. LaTharn, it’s—it’s so odd that you came when you did, here, to Mars. If it had been a hundred, or even fifty, ten years ago—or one or a hundred years from now—

  “Just—coincidence, that’s all it can be called. Or irony, perhaps . . . that now, out of all the hundreds of years of development and progress of both our civilizations—now, of all times, it’s so—” she hesitated a long moment. And then, “We’re dying, Mr. LaTharn. Dying before your eyes—” her face was a small, tight thing—“and in three to six more months—perhaps less, but certainly no more—we shall all be dead on this planet . . .

  “You weren’t supposed to know. It is an inhospitable thing, to inflict one’s own hardships on a guest.”

  Hardships, she called it. I just stayed sitting, trying to let it sink in. Trying to make it something I could understand, could comprehend. Yes, they were an ancient race, had been forced to great lengths for self-preservation—had, nonetheless, been reduced through the years to hardly a hundredth of their former number, which had at its height been small by Earth standards. Yes, all that made sense. But dying, in a matter of months . . .

  No, no! Five million people just didn’t die like that. Not so calmly, so—

  Yes. Yes, perhaps so quietly.

  I LOOKED at her face, and it struggled to be a mask, fought for the composure that was the hallmark of the exquisite mind behind it. Rut the large, green eyes were wet, and the red, delicate lips were almost of the whiteness of the smooth flesh around them, and taut in a hard little controlled line.

  And that was when I learned that Martians, like anyone else, could cry. “Lya—”

  “Please, Mr. LaTharn, please hear me out . . . I realize that your mind is the quick inventive mind of a civilization in youth, and that perhaps already you have a thousand questions and as many answers at the tip of your tongue. But what is before us is not so simple a thing as the problem of survival that once beset our ancestors. When our forebears realized that we were or soon would be at the limit of our physical adaptability to our steadily deteriorating environment, the Enclosures were at once designed and begun.

  “I mean to detract nothing from their great achievement; it was a thing of inspired genius, and a thing of which our race has rightfully been proud for centuries. It took five hundred years to build and equip the Enclosures—there are, in all, three hundred of them—and as they were built, new cities were simultaneously constructed within them . . .”

  For a moment, she was a Teacher again, patiently explaining to a somewhat less-than-apt pupil.

  “It was a monumental step—bordering on the fantastic as it did—but after the Enclosures were occupied, one by one, the race was safe.

  “Impossible—yes, it is easy enough to say ‘impossible’ until life begins to run out. And then—then all there is in you fights. And if there is enough in you, you win . . .

  “They would not let go, Mr. LaTharn. They would not let go, not slip for an inch, for even then they knew that theirs was not the time of dying, that theirs was not the ultimate defeat—for they were, but part-zvay expended; fulfillment and death for us of Mars was yet a long, long way off . . .”

  IV

  SOMEHOW I knew I was not understanding, not grasping something, but there would be time for my questions later. My questions, if I could phrase the questions that would bring the answers I wanted. Somehow I suddenly felt a lack in me somewhere—a lack that would make my questions awkward, groping things.

  Her eyes were dry, now, and she faced me as she spoke. Beyond that I cannot describe it. Unreal beyond all reality. And as real as today, as living, as sweating to earn to live is real.

  “As you know, we developed spaceflight, and we used it to the utmost of what advantage it could give us. There were—are—twelve solar systems within the reach of our best ships, Mr. LaTharn. They are capable of one-third the speed of light—faster, as you know, and the artificial entropy created within them as a result of their immense energy-consumption would make their use impracticable. A crew gone for one year even at half-light speed would return to find two of its own centuries passed . . .” She paused, then said, “In a way, we are like our ships . . . there is a limit, beyond which all there is must be used up.

  “At any rate, all those things we have. Our Enclosures, which were built to house and sustain us until the planet itself had reverted to dust. Our science, which has indeed helped us to perhaps more than our share of physical security. Our ships of space, which could take us to almost countless places of our choosing, but are, as we have always been aware, no escape . . .”

  There was a wan smile playing on her lips. Words jumped to my own.

  “What—what is this thing that afflicts you, Lya? A—a plague, a—”

  “No. No, not as a plague can be generally conceived, although there is a certain—a certain biological effect, a corrosion, a—a breakdown, if you will, for which no remedy is possible. It cannot be halted, any more than entropy—the gradual running-down of the Universe—can be halted.

  “We have known of it for many generations. We have timed it exactly. We of my generation were born with the irrefutable knowledge that there would be only fourteen trips around the Sun to our lives. Acceptance of the fact has been a part of our living. So that if we laugh, if we smile—if we are gay, as once all Mars was gay, it is a rare—it is a very rare and difficult thing. And you must understand that it is not that we are weak . . .”

  Her voice trailed into silence, and I made another, more determined effort to make my question, although still far from sure that I fully understood what I was asking. But I let fly anyway.

  “Good Lord, woman, we’ve been right next door all the time! You’ve visited us, you’ve learned at least three of our languages, you know us and our planet perhaps even better than we do! There’s room—five million people? At the rate we multiply we’re used to finding room for five million more!” And then without letting her stop me I really got into the feel of it. I began making promises all over the place for my people. For you and you—I made promises for all of you. Yes, I flattered you to the point of lying. “We’d get along—somehow, we’d get along,” I said. The words had a hollow ring. We, who cannot get along with our own! I felt the hollowness and it hurt, but I rushed headlong despite it, for if humans do not have much to offer, there is a thing about them, sometimes . . . there are some who will offer whatever they have, however little. And so I made the promises; I am of you, I am human, I am a man. And in my way, proud.

  “Look, Lya,” I said. “Max and I—we’ll escort the biggest fleet you’ve got to Earth. Take you to our great oceans, our tall mountains, our broad fields. If we’re not the best there is in the Universe, at least . . . well, at least—”

  BUT I let the words trail off. There was still the hollowness to them, but it was not that. For I saw the pain coming back into the whiteness of her face, and knew that somehow I’d missed, had overlooked something . . . and I had no more words, hollow or otherwise, that I could think of to say. Somehow, I just hadn’t made it at all.

  And then, as though it grew from somewhere deep inside her, the small smile was pushing the strained whiteness of her face aside, and there was a softness in it that had not been there before.

  “You are kind. But so forgetful, Mr. LaTharn. For have I not said that the best of our ships can offer us no escape? Do you not understand what it is from which we have no turning, no shrinking back or away?”

  “Not a—plague, or disease, you said. Nothing that your own medical science can halt—you said it could not be halted. You likened it to a kind of entropy . . . I don’t understand, Lya. I—”

  “There is a thing that blesses us all with Life, Mr. LaTharn. You call it God. We have our own term. But throughout the Universe, it is the same, and the term is but a matter of semantics, of concept.

  “There is a force to this Life—a complex of forces—that i
s beyond our knowledge. Beyond yours, as Earthmen, and beyond ours, as Martians who have reached the epitome of scientific learning. We know of it, and that is the extent of our knowledge, save that in knowing of it, we have been able to understand its effects, and, in a sense, to measure it. It is common throughout the Universe, Mr. LaTharn; each race, as each individual, has its share, as each has his share of Life itself.

  “There is no word in your language for it. You have come close—you have said ‘soul,’ and that is a part of it. You have said ‘spirit’ and ‘being’ too, and you have known of ‘mind’ and ‘heart.’ They are all a part of it.

  “You have written of love and of hatred, of courage and weakness, of cruelty and compassion . . . they are a part of it.

  “But all added together they still do not finish for us the complete sum that is Life, for there is more that is not given us to know. Yet we recognize these forces, this half-understood complex of—of Life-stuff, and we know that as it sustains our drive for survival, as it makes us perpetuate ourselves through so many countless todays and tomorrows—as it makes us rise from the primal state to the very apex of our being, it is being used. Not limitless, not infinite—Cod-given, but not God-like!

  “When we are young, it makes of us aggressive, competitive, social cannibals. As we grow older—as we use it—it helps us to perpetuate ourselves into the full blossom of our being; matured, full-grown, truly civilized. And it is then that we are near our limit, have used up our share of this force with which our race was born, and must prepare to die.

  “Do you understand, Mr. LaTharn? Perhaps you see. Neither beings—no, I shall say men!—neither men nor their races are immortal! For to be immortal is to be—the Almighty.”

  She was silent, then, looking at me, and there was a deep, almost a longing hope in her eyes, and I felt like a bumbling schoolboy, wanting to grasp the all-important things she was telling me, and half-afraid that I could not. We of Earth have never seen a race die . . .