Somewhere high above them, a Cepheid winked. Knowingly.
A Gift for Terra
The good Martian Samaritans rescued Johnny Love and offered him “the stars”. Now, maybe, Johnny didn’t look closely enough into the “gift horse’s” mouth, but there were others who did . . . and found therein the answer to life . . .
HIS HEAD hurt like blazes, but he was alive, and to be alive meant fighting like hell to stay that way.
That was the first thing returning consciousness told him. The next was that his helmet should have been cracked wide open when the bum landing had wrenched the acceleration hammocks out of their suspension sockets and heaved his suited body across the buckled conning deck. It should’ve been, but it wasn’t.
The third thing he knew was that Ferris’ helmet had been smashed into a million pieces, and that Ferris was dead.
Sand sifted in a cold, red river through the gaping rent in the side of the ship, trying to bury him before he could stand up and get his balance on the crazily tilted deck. He shook loose with more strength than he needed, gave the rest of the muscles in his blocky body a try, and there wasn’t any hurt worse than a bruise. Funny. Ferris was dead.
He had a feeling somewhere at the edge of his brain that there was going to be more to it than just checking his oxygen and food-concentrate supply and walking away from the ship. A man didn’t complete the first Earth-Mars flight ever made, smash his ship to hell, and then just walk away from it. His astrogeologer-navigator was dead, and the planet was dead, so a man just didn’t walk away.
There was plenty of room for him to scramble through the yawning rip in the buckled hullplates—just a matter of crawling up the river of red sand and out; it was as easy as that.
Then Johnny Love was on his feet again, and the sand clutched at his heavy boots as though to keep him from leaving Ferris and the ship, but it didn’t, and he was walking away . . .
Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain was too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was too still.
Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemed too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. He looked back, and the plume of still-rising smoke from the broken thing that had been his ship was like a solid black pillar that had been hastily built by some evil djinn.
How far had he walked; how long?
He turned his back on the glinting speck and made his legs move again, and there was the hollow sound of laughter in his helmet. Here he was, Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of the strength in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forward and no backward, no direction at all; breathing when there was no purpose in breathing.
Why not shut off the valves now?
He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. Alone, but never without hope! And here there was no hope, for there was no life, and no man had ever lived where there was not life!
But he had come to see, and he was seeing, and in the remaining hours left to him he would see what no man had seen in a half a million years.
Harrison and Janes or Lamson and Fowler would not be down for twenty days at the inside; that had been the time-table. Twenty days, twenty years . . . he heard himself laugh again. Time-table!
He and Ferris first. Then Harrison and Janes. Then Lamson and Fowler, all at twenty-day intervals. If all landed safely, they would use Exploration Plan I, Condition Optimum. If only two crews made it down, Plan II; Condition Limited. And if only one made the 273-day journey from the orbit of Terra—that would be Plan III; Condition Untenable, Return. The twenty-day interval idea had come from some Earth-bound swivel-chair genius who had probably never even set foot in a Satellite operations room. Somebody had impressed on him when he was young that egg-carrying was a safer mission with a multiplicity of baskets; it was common sense that if anything happened to Mars-I touching down, at least it wouldn’t happen to II and III at the same time.
Common sense, Johnny thought, and he laughed again. Space was not common, and it was not sensible. And nobody had ever taught it the rules men made.
He kept walking, seeing, thinking and breathing.
For a long time. He fell once or twice and picked himself up again to walk some more, and then he fell a final time, and did not get up. Red sand whispered over him, danced lightly, drifted . . .
THE FLAT, wide-tracked vehicle swerved in a tight arc, throwing up low ruby-colored clouds on either side. Its engines throbbed a new note of power, and it scuttled in a straight line across the desert floor like a fleck of shiny metal drawn by an unseen magnet. Behind it rose a thinning monument of green-black smoke, and between its tracks was a wavering line of indentations in the sand already half-obliterated by the weight of their own shallow walls. But they became deeper as the vehicle raced ahead; and then at length they ended, and the vehicle halted.
There was a mound of sand that the winds, in their caprice, would not have made alone, for they sculptured in a freer symmetry. And the child-like figures seemed to realize that at once.
With quick precision they levelled the mound and found Johnny Love. They took him into their vehicle, and deftly matched and replenished the waning gas mixture in the cylindrical tanks on his back.
Then they drove away with him.
“Ferris?”
“Ferris was your astrogeologer-navigator. He died when you crashed.”
“Harrison . . . Janes?”
“Harrison and Janes are not due for nine more days. But you are in no danger.”
There was darkness and warmth; his throat was dry and it burned. It was hard to talk, and Ferris was dead. Harrison and Janes were not due for nine more days. Somebody said so. Nine more days and then everything would be—
Panic shook him, sent blood throbbing to his head and brought consciousness back hard. His eyes opened and he was suddenly sitting bolt upright.
“But Lamson, you were twenty days behind—” And the racing thought froze solid in his fumbling brain. Then there was a torrent of thoughts and memory overran them, buried them, and red desert was rushing up to engulf him. He screamed and fell back with his hands clawing at his eyes.
“You are in no danger. You had thought our planet lifeless; it was an error. We live underground, John Love. That is why you did not see us, or surface indications of our existence. A group of us speak your language, because for eleven days we have been studying your brain and analyzing your thought-patterns.”
Johnny was bolt upright again, and now his eyes were wide and his hands were knotted, and where there had been only light and shadow before there was full sight now. Swiftly he was off the low cot and on his feet looking for the speaker, arms ready to lash out and hit.
But he was alone in the small, sterile-looking chamber, and his muscles were so much excess baggage. He tried to recover his balance: he had forgotten about the slight gravity. He tried too hard, and his body crashed, confused, into a wall. A—damn them, a padded wall!
He regained his feet. Stood still, and raced his eyes about him. There it was—above the cot. A small round, shuttered opening—some sort of two-way communication system. He wondered if they could see him, too. If they could, that part of it worked only one way.
“All right, whoever you are, so you’ve analyzed me!” He had to direct his sudden anger at something, so he shouted at the shuttered aperture. “Now what . . .”
There was silence for a tiny eternity, and he could feel them probing, evaluating him, as a human scientist would study a rare species in a cage. The feeling ignited a new anger in him, and made him want to curse the teachings that had conditioned his lifetime of thinking to the belief that Man was more than
an animal.
He’d been sold short . . .
“Damn you! God damn you, what are you going to do to me?”
In a corner of his mind he was aware of a gentle hissing sound, but he did not listen. The fear and terror had to be broken. Make them tell, make them tell . . .
His muscles grew heavy and his face was feverish with his effort, and his eyes stung. Something . . . like roses. But there were no roses on dead planets—
“Earthman, can you still hear?”
“I can hear,” Johnny said. It was suddenly easier to talk. Even easier to understand. They had done something . . .
“We are surprised that your state of shock was not more severe. In the process of analyzing you, we discovered that you were totally unprepared for Space-flight, and therefore—”
“Unprepared? What do you think all those months of physical conditioning were for? Yeah, and all those damned textbooks? You think that barrel I cracked up was built in a Kindergarten class—”
“Space-flight requires but a relative minimum of those things, Earthman. Required most is psychological and philosophical conditioning.”
“To what?”
“To all things unreal. Because they are the most real; infinity applies to probability and possibility far more directly than to simple Space and Time. But—are you calm now?” The voice was growing deeper, and seemed almost friendly. Johnny tried his muscles; they weren’t paralyzed—he could move easily, and his head was clear. And there was no anger, now. No “shock.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Our examination of you has indicated that your race is a potentially effective one, with a superior survival factor. We feel that, properly instructed and assisted, such a race might be of great value as a friend and ally. In short, we receive you in peace and friendship, Earthman. Will you accept us in like manner?”
Johnny tried to think. Hard thoughts, the way men were supposed to think. What kind of game was it? What were the strings? The angles . . . the gimmicks. What did they really want?
His lips were dry and barely moved over his teeth, but the words came easily. “Who says you’re a friend?”
“We would have learned as much about you by examining your corpse, Earthman.”
So he was alive, and that had to prove something. And it might have been a lot of trouble to keep him that way. The hell of it was you couldn’t know . . . Anything . . . you couldn’t know anything when you were tossed into the middle of the impossible. He felt the skin on the back of his neck chill and tighten.
But who held out their hand like this?
Whoever did anything like that?
No.
“We wish to help you, Earthman, and your race. We have observed your kind at close quarters, yet we have never landed among you nor attempted communication because of fear for ourselves. But with proper help, there need be no fear between us. We offer you friendship and progress.”
“You keep talking about what we get out of it.” Johnny stared upward at the ceiling, got his eyes off the little shuttered aperture. He wished he had a cigarette. “You sound too damned much like a politician.”
“Perhaps at this point you should be informed that your ship is completely repaired, and ready for your return to Earth whenever you desire.”
“So, it’s—You said Harrison and Janis would be here in nine days! That means I’ve been out for nearly two weeks! For a nap that’s a long time, but nobody could get that bucket back in one piece in eleven days! Not after what I did to it—”
“Your ship is completely repaired, Earthman.”
Johnny knew somehow that the voice wasn’t lying. So maybe when you got off of Earth miracles did happen. He just didn’t know enough.
“We wish to give you data to take back to your Earth which will banish disease for you—all disease. Data which will give you spacecraft that match our own in technical perfection. Data that will make you the undisputed masters of your environment. We offer you the stars, Earthman.”
He shut a thousand racing thoughts out of his head. “Maybe I’ll believe this fairy tale of yours on one condition,” Johnny said, “because I can’t intelligently do otherwise.”
“And that—condition?”
“Tell me why.”
There was a pause, and it was as though something forever unknowable to men hung in the silence.
“Picture, if you can, Earthman,” the answer came at last, “several small islands in the center of a great sea; all without life, save two. The men on one have learned to build boats which can successfully sail the sea within certain limits—they can visit the other islands, but are too frail and too limited in power to venture past the horizon. It is infinitely frustrating to them. The only places to which they may go are dead places. Save for one—only one, and it becomes magnified in importance—it becomes an entire raison d’etre in itself. For without it, the men with the boats sail uselessly . . .
“We are old, Earthman. We have watched you—waited for you for a long time. And now you have grown up. You have burst your tiny bubble of human experience. You have set out upon the sea yourselves . . .”
“You guys should give graduation talks. I didn’t ask for a scaled-down philosophy. You tell me that you want to give us every trick in your hat—for free, no questions asked. So I asked why. And the question isn’t changing any.”
“The answer should be self-evident, Earthman. We are old. And we are lonely.”
THERE was a logic at work somewhere in his brain even during the dream. It told him that he was exhausted from the day’s tour with the child-like men of Mars, and that the dream was only the vagaries of a reeling, tired mind of a badly jarred subconscious. It told him that the things he had seen had been too alien for his relatively inflexible adult Earth mind to accept without painful reaction, and this was the reaction.
This, the dream. That was all it was; his logic said so.
Faith spread out before the undisciplined eye of his dreaming brain, and the near-conscious instant of logic faded. The fertile plains that once had been yellow desert-land mounted golden fruits to a temperate sun, and beyond the distant green of gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities as gracefully civilized beyond the untroubled horizon.
And in the dream, these were all things men had done, as though sanity had invaded their minds overnight. It was the Earth that men had intended, rather than that which they had built.
The sun dimmed. The air chilled, and the grains and fruits wilted, and the rolling hills were a darker hue than green as the shadow lengthened, spread to the gleaming cities beyond and then as it touched them and ran soundlessly the length and breadth of their wide malls, there were other changes . . .
Skeletons, reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky.
The horizon split into jagged, broken moats of dark flame, and Earth was no longer what men had built, but what they eternally feared they must one day create . . .
Then Johnny Love was suddenly awake bolt upright in his cot and his eyes were open wide. His muscles were taut and cramped. And he was afraid although the men of Mars had offered friendship and told him that there was nothing for him to fear.
Slowly, he lay down again. And gradually, the cold perspiration that had encased him vanished; his body relaxed, and the fear subsided.
The day’s tour had been exhausting both mentally and physically, and there was the excitement of knowing that in five more days Harrison and Janes would land. If they did not, his own ship would carry him safely back to Earth on the day following, for the little men had miraculously repaired it; they had shown him. They had shown him, and he wanted to go home.
Johnny Love rolled over on the wide, soft cot, sighed, and went back to sleep.
“He sleeps again, Andruul.”
“Yes, but the damage is probably done.”
“No, or he would not sleep again so easily. His kind do not have such emotional control.”
The two turned
away from the fading transparency of the sleeping-room wall, and their short, thin bodies were in incongruous contrast to the spaciousness of the metal-sheathed corridor down which they walked.
“Psychoanalysis showed up the difference in his brain structure—that apparently accounts for the poor efficiency our screens are showing. What does Kaarn say?”
“He says we should never have allowed the theft.”
Andruul cursed. “Allowed it! Those nomadic scum are like flies! No matter how many you exterminate, they never fail to come back in double their number. And they strike at the precise moment you are certain the bones of the last one are sinking beneath the sand. Somehow Central Patrol has got to get that unit back.”
“You’re certain it was a theft, then?”
“Don’t be an idiot. Since when can those gypsies build anything more complex than a crude electrical generator? Let alone a psibeam unit? They’ve forgotten what little their civilization ever knew.”
“They are clever enough at evading directed over-surface missiles.”
Andruul muttered something, and lapsed into silence.
“Well there is one thing for certain at any rate . . . A psibeam unit is unaccounted for, and despite our protective screening, the Earthman was visibly disturbed in his sleep. His encephalotapes show that clearly. They know about him, Andruul, and they’re making their bid. Central Patrol had better be quick and certain this time.”
Andruul kept his silence. But he thought. He thought Central Patrol was getting less efficient and more stupid every day.
It was a strange feeling; a feeling with which no human was emotionally equipped to deal.
Johnny looked at his flawlessly renovated ship, poised like a snub-nosed bullet against the blue-black brittleness of the Martian sky, and then looked behind him at the crescent-shaped formation of tracked vehicles that had escorted him back across the sucking red sand to this place. With each heavy-booted step away from them he closed the short distance between them and his ship, and there was not enough time to think about the feeling. Or about the heavy sealed tube they had given him to take back to his people.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 49