“They’ve got barracks, rec-halls, hydroponic gardens, even a library—bored under the pumice plain and provided with a sealed-up atmosphere. Moonbase is civilized and close to home. It’s just a few hours flight back to America. And this trip is just a long step farther out.”
Chet Ross could soothe himself a little, talking like that. But the calm never penetrated the depths of him. It sometimes seemed that the urge to get acquainted with the unknown, older than the cavemen’s first scared though fascinated toying with fire, was finally reaching too far for its own strength. That it would cease to give a thrill and a boost to progress but would bog down and wither in a nostalgia that could have no past equal.
It seemed that instinct and ages of conditioning had tied even the adventurous to Earth, till elsewhere even their reflexes seemed out of step—till in spite of dreams they couldn’t really belong anywhere else. Till one’s being far beyond the Earth—and far beyond the Moon—was somehow inconceivable.
Often, of course, Ross slipped into reverie—thinking of a hayfield full of daisies under a summer sun, for instance. Though he used to dislike daisies. Or, better yet, remembering a certain evening of walking on a university campus while fine friendly snow fell.
Walking with a little dark girl named Helen Collins. Helen who was pretty but slightly shabby. Whose earnestness was almost grim, though gentle. Who had the bug of deep distance in her eyes too. But who, perhaps like all women, put the vine-covered cottage and kids first. That evening of fine snow was when the news came that Crobert had landed the first manned rocket on the Moon.
Then talk of that time came back to Ross silently. “Yeah, Helen—but here are two urges that don’t match. You gotta choose—high or low, hard or easy. Anyway, we’ll write letters.”
He still had her last letter, crumpled up in a pocket of his dirty dungarees. Saying that she might be rocketed out at last—to an office job at Moonbase. Should he remember a choice with bitterness now in a harsh present that did not match a dream—and ask for comfort? Or should he stand his ground?
In his pipelike cabin he talked often to Helen as if she were there too. He’d look through the alloy-ribbed window ahead, toward where he was going.
Once he said, “Now it’s the size of an agate bead, Helen—with a white dot at one end. The south polar cap ...”
The days were clicked off on his chronometer and his ship continued on outward, adding more millions of miles away from everything that he knew best. Until his destination was really getting close.
IT LOOKED like a big rusty bubble. Fuzzy mottlings of grey-green belted its equator. It was ugly and beautiful. The polar cap, blurred at the edges, was tilted half into view. It looked the size of a dinner plate now. This being earliest spring there, it was at its greatest extent—almost two thousand miles across. The dimensions of things, still dwarfed by distance, continued to hide unmeasured detail.
The whole view was like a colored photograph of the planet Mars, taken through a telescope. Which was not remarkable.
“The trouble is, Helen,” Ross said, “how can a guy convince his insides that he’s going to mingle his physical self with something from an astronomer’s picture very soon? They just can’t believe it. They’re plodding and skeptical and primitive—unlike one’s imagination. They’re too used to knowing that the planets are forever out of reach. To insist that they’re wrong only scares hell out of them.”
Ross had a vision then—himself, at about fifteen years of age, sitting in a public library with a book full of colored plates of Mars. Trying to imagine what wonders the distance and the blurring concealed, but still hinted at. While the text gave suggestions to whet one’s romantic appetite.
That Mars was small—little more than half the diameter of the Earth. It was half again as far from the sun—hence colder. Its air at the surface was perhaps as rare as at a fifty-thousand-foot terrestrial altitude. It was arid and senile. Its noonday temperature rarely rose much above fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
It was probably too harsh a place ever to have evolved thinking inhabitants—not to say men. But almost certainly the grey-green areas, waxing and waning and changing color regularly with the seasons, revealed hardy plant-life. That, at the very least.
Oh, sure—take that yearning of the youngster, safe in a library, to walk on those plains, to see, to know—to add to human culture. To be perhaps the first. Match all that with now and with the next hour to come.
“You see how it is, Helen,” Chet Ross said for the tenth time. “Here imagination and fact are nothing alike. One is pleasant. The other is—well—what would you call it? And back there, there’s a million kids, just like the kid I was. Who’d make fun of them while they reach for a new frontier? Even if there’s a cheat in their own bodies? Why can’t dream and truth get together on this—or at least not be so far apart?”
Ross sounded very plaintive again. “But I’ll blunder through if I live, Helen,” he insisted doggedly. “And who’s scared of getting killed? Lots of people have got killed. That’s not new—not new as everything else is going to be ...”
His words, he saw, touched upon some deep human fear.
And he riffled back through the events of his past again, to the way he used to riffle through the pages of science-fiction magazines.
“We used to think we’d be darting around the whole Solar System, Helen,” he went on, “as soon as somebody worked out the last mechanical obstacles. We didn’t know that perhaps the real obstacle to that much range might be in us, the yappers, the romantics—in human nature, that needs shelter from things too harsh and unfamiliar.
“The black sky of space—the hard stars—could a man live for a year in a steel shell at the bottom of the ocean with plenty of food and air but in darkness and silence? Could he stand it? Maybe this is the same or worse. And sometimes we even wanted to be on intimate terms with the stars.”
His voice wavered. He wondered if he was getting irrational. Better hang on tight. He still had a hope. He hated to see a key-principle going to pot—that seeking to learn what seemed unknowable was the best of life.
He kept watching Mars. It was growing faster now. It looked huge. The murk over the polar cap had extended a foggy finger down beyond its brim. It meant slow winds moving, carrying thin tawny clouds, half dust, perhaps, and half moisture, squeezed out of the dryness by cold.
On the far side of the equator, just for a fleeting instant, he thought he saw several fine lines, artificial-looking, straight as a ruler’s edge and just at the limit of visibility. Then they were gone, lost in the wavering of the atmosphere. And an old riddle turned dully and yet nervously in his tired mind, prodded not by eager interest, but by something kindred to dread.
Were the Canals of Mars real—the great irrigation system that Percival Lowell had once visualized? Or were they optical illusions as most other astronomers had claimed? Not even the best new telescopes had been able to answer that for sure, through magnified atmospheric irregularities.
"Last minutes of pure not-knowing,” Ross told himself, this time silently. It was not a thrill now. Rather, it was like too much adrenalin, straining his heart.
WITHIN a matter of moments Mars would cease to resemble a true globe, would become more like a tremendous dome that flattened visibly as he hurtled toward it. He could imagine—though he would not be watching....
He hurried to don his vacuum armor and oxygen helmet, to strap himself prone—supposed precautions against accident, part of a plan. He beat the retard-jets’ blasting to brake his many-miles-per-second velocity by fifteen seconds.
The jets cut loose automatically, controlled by the robot piloting devices that, groping with radar, could find a goal, calculate timing and needed strength and direction of forces, could bring a ship in—all much more efficiently than any human agent.
Streams of tenuous radioactive gases, heated to 50,000 degrees, shot forward at a sizable fraction of the speed of light. From the zero-poundage of free-fall, Ross
' weight increased enormously, dragging him toward the window. He might have seen the fringes of the flame but he did not want his retinas seared by such a glare. He lay with his helmeted head between his arms, waiting for the thrust of deceleration to end.
An instrument clicked slowly, warning of a leak of radiation through the shielded hull. It was not enough to be dangerous.
During part of the fifteen minutes, Ross wished helplessly that the jets could roar on until they pushed him back to Earth. As if you could reverse a ship locked in a trajectory across space. Or as if, during the Journey, his native planet hadn’t moved out of favorable range, which only the better part of a year of orbital movement could restore.
The silence came abruptly. With a soft whir the ship’s retractable wings slid out of their sockets. Its course flattened. There was a rising whisper—a few bouncing jolts—and the Tin Can was airborne. Here, at least, was an atmosphere to fly in. It wasn’t like the Moon, where you had to lower your rocket precariously on its jet-streams.
Ross began to pilot the ship manually, as was expected of him. In a way he was glad to be alone. One man could keep his own secrets of funk. Some Army psychologists were pretty smart.
Without a plan he would hardly have known what to do. He was grateful that his training and so much of his private imagining had been aimed at this moment. He was flying south across the desert, avoiding the grey-green areas that his map showed. Reason said that there could be no harm in those regions. Yet the desert seemed simpler, less likely to produce surprises impossible to foresee. Beneath him all that was visible were thin trains of dust, marching across the plain with the wind.
He switched on his radio. Of course he was completely out of range of terrestrial stations. Yet an idea scrambled in his nerves like a clutch of mice. On Mars, how could he distinguish the scratchy twitter of static that he heard from real messages? Even speech? This world had been separate from Earth since their coincident birth two billion years ago. Everything had to be different.
More such nervous gropings were inevitable here. The best man-made theories seemed less substantial than smoke beside the unknown. The improbable myth of Martian super-beings, whose science enabled them to live comfortably on a dying world, began to haunt him. Had his ship already been seen? Maybe—if life here, sprung from a necessarily far different path of evolution, had developed eyes. What would a radar instrument, developed by an extra-terrestrial intelligence, look like?
Ross floundered deeper and deeper into imponderables, his hide puckering. How could he know that there was nothing to attack him when even his habits of reasoning seemed to have lost their validity? What form unfriendly action might take was equally beyond guessing.
He tried an old argument on himself, speaking aloud, “If Mars has inhabitants, why didn’t they visit Earth long ago? Space travel would be easier for them—blasting off against a gravity only thirty-eight percent of the terrestrial.
“Besides, Mars, being smaller than the Earth, had cooled sooner, could have produced life and intelligence sooner. The Martians—if they existed—could be millions of years ahead of us in science. Why didn’t they come?”
But the answers that came to Ross were old and led nowhere—except to stir up more the diseased speculation that was his main trouble now. “How do you know that they didn’t visit Earth? And if they didn’t, why should they? For conquest? For metals that they could make by transmutation in their labs?
“Or, like us, to know the unknown—for understanding, for more complete awareness? How do you know that their drives, their psychology, are anything like ours? Unless they’re tied to Mars, as we have been to Earth. So—trying to figure things out—you’re just lost. Yet—better wait and see.”
THUS Ross tried to stop the wheels that were going around in his head. But shadows still moved there. A memory of an old story that he’d felt vividly. About engines and pumps and a thing like a bundle of leather, the color of dust, whose complicated breathing organs rasped in the tenuous atmosphere and whose I.Q. was around 250.
That vision tried to answer something—giving form to a formless possibility and thus reducing the strain of a complete enigma. But it accomplished the opposite. For he told himself that such a mind-image was silly and naive—that the truth, if there were or ever had been such a truth, would be unlike anything that his own or any other human fancy could conceive.
Such an eerie idea could not add to his comfort. Nor was the alternate probability of being on an unpeopled world much better. No Earth-creature had ever been so utterly cut off and alone as he. With all of his kind so far away that it was hard to think of them as still living in the same plane of time. They might have died out a thousand years ago.
Ross flew on, Mars unrolling beneath him. Not dead like the Moon, not as harsh. But the Moon had had a simple volcanic history. It held no pendant secrets, no crushing strangeness.
For a few minutes the polar cap remained out of sight, sunk beneath the southern horizon. But presently, as Ross was pushed on by occasional bursts from his stern-jets, it reappeared again—a flat thin line of white, blurred by a cold-looking haze.
Ironic, wasn’t it, that on an arid unknown planet he still knew just where to go to find water—for the months that, according to plan, he was supposed to stay here—had to stay here?
He shot on, circling high above the dun-colored plain, that met the cap under a fog-blanket. Radar told him that the ground below was solid enough. So he circled lower and began to glide in for a landing.
Approaching the ground he glimpsed details that distance had once hidden. Granite pinnacles sticking through the shallow white expanse—and on the plain a low straight-edged ridge. It might have been a dyke, modern or as ancient as its extinct builders. And a humped, roundish thing—probably a great boulder—though it could be something else. On Earth structures matched the form of man. For instance, they had stairways because human legs were made a certain way. But there again there was no yardstick for comparison.
Near the humped shape something glinted for an instant in the light of the small, dazzling sun. Metal—or just crystals of a quartz outcropping? As Ross’ ship settled both the rounded mass and the glint were hidden behind the ridge.
To one side of the plain itself, clearly in view, were clumps of grey stalks, leaved with tattered whorls that looked as dry as paper. No doubt they were lifeless in the cold before the real spring came.
Now Ross’ landing wheels were jolting across the plain. This was supposed to be his moment of triumph—the moment people would want to know about, to celebrate. It should have something poetic in it, representing a widened horizon, a deepened knowledge.
He still had cherished a hope that somehow it would be like that at the end. But what was left of the hope began to fade. For his key-feeling was a grinding tension. In part it was almost embarrassment, as if, having pried his way with vast effort through a wrong door, he was where he had no right or excuse to be. Like some deep-sea fish who had aspired to behold the sun.
As he had suspected the tether was shorter than the urge to reach out—and far short of the glamour. He was blocked and defeated. The lack of scope lay deep in his own primitive flesh. And his nerves were supposed to be more rugged than most. Men would never hold other worlds. The newness and strangeness were too much—though they should have been rich.
Here were two billion years of different history, written in the rocks. Paleontology, biology—more than enough, even if there had never been intelligence. Clearer hints, even, of the birth and development of planets. Stuff for eager study. That was the way he had imagined it—the way people wanted it back home. High romance ...
But the way it was was this other way. Even his regret flattened out and lost itself dully in an overpowering homesickness. On Earth he had hardly known that such a thing existed. What was around him now seemed like a book that he did not want to read. It repelled him even while it still fascinated him.
EVEN the smiles of his pinup
girls looked sardonic and out of place here. “You see how it is, Helen?” he muttered, reaching for the comfort of a habit. But the good of it was gone, as if the emotions that went with it were impossible in a region as remote as this. Yeah—people could reach even for the stars. And here was the answer to that.
It was more than ever fortunate that at least he had a plan to follow. Mixed with the choked sensation around his heart, was a dull gratitude that the metal of his ship, though wrought in lines that made it kindred to the universe, still had been mined on Earth.
He slammed the face-window of his oxygen helmet shut on its hinge, picked up a case of instruments, undogged an airtight door in the curved padded wall of his cabin. It was the inner portal of his exit airlock. In another moment he stepped forth, armored and seeming outwardly almost to belong here.
Threads of frigid mist coiled around him. The ground looked water-scored like a dry river bed. Gravel and dust were mixed with what must be layer on layer of fallen vegetation, for the ground gave under his tread like old felt. There were little holes in it that might have been burrows of some kind.
Ross had to be the trained scientist now. He looked at his aneroid barometer. It registered just over a pound and a half of air-pressure as compared to the Earthly sea-level figure of fifteen pounds to the square inch.
His quick-registering thermometer, graduated to both Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales, showed fifty-eight below zero, F.—almost matching this high southern latitude, at the edge of the polar cap, which far overran the antarctic circle.
Next, pursuing other data, which he was supposed to and had been eager to obtain, he drew a ribbon of paper from a small sealed cylinder and exposed it to the air. A segment of it, treated chemically in a certain way, browned slightly with oxidation. So there was more than a trace of oxygen here.
Another segment was blued by a hint of water-vapor. A third segment yellowed strongly under the effects of nitrogen. And a fourth was pinked by the acid action of carbon-dioxide. This atmosphere was much like that of Earth except for its poverty of oxygen. But it was far too thin for human lungs. A man would gasp and die in it in a minute.
Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction Page 22