Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  There were hundreds of further tests to be made. Of wind-velocities, of the relative color-strengths of the sunlight, soil-composition, of everything. Not to mention the taking of thousands of photographs. And he had to prepare somehow, to live here. But he was too tense for any work.

  He wanted to go back into his ship, which had become a little like a home to him during the months of the Journey—a refuge. But that was no good. He would have no rest.

  Yet there was a vagueness in his mind—a sort of veil—a natural defense that dulled realization. Knowing this made prickles dart through his stomach and across his hide and up into his throat.

  “If I ever understood completely that I'm here on Mars, that would be the end,” he told himself. “It’s inconceivable. I'd just wither up inside.”

  He started to walk, driven by strain. It could easily become panic-stricken running. The stillness seemed to close in around him like the deeper substance of his nostalgia. It was blunt, stony. It was part of his human heritage—just as the promise of a dream had been—and its frustration. The beauty of probing, reaching out. A kind of ecstasy it should have been—but wasn't.

  Finding yourself too small and narrow to have what the technology of your own people could give you. Because the familiar was beautiful too—because it was needed peace. And out here in all this difference it was impossible to have the peace you needed to know the charm.

  Ross viewed his inner defeat with almost weary disinterest. Tension sucked away his strength. He supposed that, in a relaxed mood that could never happen here, the weird scene around him might also be beautiful. With its expanse of white and its tawny duns—its steely sky and its motion of withered whorls in tenuous wind.

  But the pendant unknowns promised nothing familiar to rest in, away from eternal stumbling and alertness against the nameless that might mean anything that you could not foresee. It was like a quiet menace, perhaps not directly harmful to the body. But a steady passive grinding—with but one clear outcome.

  He imagined time passing in a succession of Martian days, twenty-four-and-a-half hours long. Months ... How soon would his cracking mind begin to people the landscape with—say—friendly daisies? How long would it be before other men came here to find his camp and—soon—the same primitive limitation? A thing common to the Earthborn, a locked circle, a treacherous trap that could do you to death, a split in human nature ...

  ROSS ambled on, drunkenly. Off to the left was the polar cap—endless but shallow, seeming less than a yard deep. The shadows of the rocks sticking through it were blue and long. Ahead lay the nearest clump of dry growths. Beyond it rose the ridge, or dyke, that hid the rounded formation—and the glint. But between him and those winter-deadened plants a white arm extended from the main mass of the cap, which was fifty yards away—a sort of peninsula ...

  Like a man smelling smoke in his house at night, Ross still needed to know things. So he plodded on to that white projection, and into it. Needles of hoarfrost broke like brittle fur around his knees. He looked at it, and then up at the sky again, at the pearly haze that hung there against the steel-hard blue. The sun pinked that frigid murk a little, like clouds.

  And then Ross saw something else. Somehow it produced in him a slow puzzlement and confusion in the way he felt. It was a phenomenon long suspected to belong to Mars. Half worried, he looked down at his armored arms and at his gloved palms. He glanced back at his boot-tracks in the frost. They looked like boot-tracks.

  The thing that bothered him was the idea that what was happening to him now had happened to him many times before. Though this was Mars, where no other man had ever been.

  But then, of course, he began to understand. He was up against a fact he had certainly known—one so simple that its implications had been elusive. You had to see to understand. He spread his palms again—and in spite of the cold atmosphere that no man could breathe, there beyond his armor-shell he began to be aware of the reawakening of a lost kind of warmth in him. It was timid and faint at first. But it began to crack the tautness of his nerves, to bring him shadows of humor and whimsy.

  He remembered his kid-days with a sled. A crazy thought to have here. “You’re a fool,” he said aloud. He wasn’t yet ready to smile. Too recently had he been in hell. But the process now started in him progressed like a retarded chain-reaction.

  Ross began to see that the whorls of the fantastic plants ahead of him moved with a rhythm common to all treelike things when blown by the wind, that a little wisp of dust looked just like a wisp of dust—anywhere, proving how universal is physical law. As, of course, he had really known all along.

  By no means did Ross feel all right yet. But the jagged edge had been scraped from the newness. Now environmental charm might have a chance. Within him he began to feel facets of himself and of life—facets that had seemed for always incompatible—coming together, blending without conflict. Home and peace and distance and adventure.

  He began to see that things could be as he had wanted them. Here he would work and study, and dig into mysteries. It would be wonderful.

  He was eager for a closer look at those Martian plants and at the ridge beyond them—at all the thousands of other things, nearby or far beyond his present horizon.

  But right now he set all of this aside for a more important subject, the thing that had begun his emancipation. He felt sheepish as if for a ridiculous error.

  From the cold murk above him white flecks were drifting down slowly. They were tiny and dry but as they landed on his gloved hands he continued to marvel that they had the patterns of Earthly snowflakes. This had to be ...

  Out to the planets of the farthest stars natural laws, including those governing the crystallization of water, had to be the same. In his mind he walked again with Helen Collins on a university campus while fine snow sifted lightly on their shoulders. Even here he had that much of home. And people could have it much farther away.

  “Everything’s all right, Helen,” he said. “And I’ll be back.”

  For several minutes more he stood catching flakes. It was as though he were witnessing a humble miracle, that had given him and his kind the universe....

  The End

  ********************************************

  The Restless Tide,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Marvel Science Fiction Nov. 1951

  Short Story - 6437 words

  And now a United World having turned war

  into a myth, and the labs having mastered

  the mysteries of youth and age and diseases

  and the human psyche....

  OUTSIDE, it was two below zero by his antique Fahrenheit thermometer. He had just looked. Frost made lacework on the plastic windowpanes, the way some people would always think it should on New Year’s Eve. But he remembered that some had liked the thought of Florida winters better. So, fifty years ago it had been different.

  Yet had it been wholly right that palm fronds should rustle near New York on the first of January? It had been an enchantment then—a luxury, a miracle of the weather-control towers that increased the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, enabling it to retain more of the sun’s heat. But time had changed the charm of that to weariness. The crisp vigor of snow had become a nostalgia for the old. Now perhaps the memory of those balmy winds was a wistfulness once more. Forever there was a shifting tide in man....

  He stopped his nervous pacing across his living room. But this meant neither relaxation nor the end of thinking. He felt his big hands knobbing into fists. It had happened often, lately. Peace of mind had worn out with overuse, like the appeal of the frescoes now on the walls—bison and deer copied from a paleolithic cave to lend a primitive overtone to Brenda’s latest choice of decor.

  She sat there on the divan, looking up at him. She reminded him somehow of crystal. And in these last moments of waiting for another century to die he was very aware of her scrutiny. It was cool yet scared. Perhaps it showed contempt of him. But maybe adm
iration, too. It was fine-drawn and knowing, as with lifetimes of sophistication. Yet it was primitive. And somehow these last two qualities seemed the same. He felt far away from her, and out of step. Together they had seen so much that was different from the present. Was it right that he should almost hate her now?

  Her smile probed and mocked him. Yet it was gentle.

  "It’s like counting off before an explosion, isn't it, Ben?" she said. "Four—three—two—one—zero! It’s twenty-three hundred A.D. now, Benny Boy! On and on we go. Whither?"

  Then he heard the New Year’s bells. Iron pounding iron. Bronze beating bronze. From what shaggy progenitor did the thrill of clanging metal spring? Or had it been tom-toms hewn from hollow logs and headed with rawhide first? And could the tingling reaction be any less now, with all the refined comfort, safety, and diversion which a crescendoing technology could provide? Did the chromium towers of the cities, miles high, make any difference? Or the United World, having turned war into a myth? Or the laboratories that had mastered the mysteries of youth and age? Or the space liners going to the colonial planets? Or the culture? Or, perhaps most important of all, the deeper understanding of the human psyche—its side of gentleness, its fury, and the points where its yearnings touched crude soil, in spite of itself?

  No. In fact the appeal of the bells’ beat became part of his sickness of frustration that had lasted too long. Ease was wonderful after hardship. For a while. Then boredom came. Besides, a man had to feed his pride in himself. Soon there was more to despise than the slight padding of fat over his stomach. It was only a symbol, removable by sports and by the simpler potions of medical science. Yet its taint remained, naming him: useless, pampered fool ...

  He chuckled. With all the skills and wisdom of his era behind him, he still felt hemmed in by the primal laws of nature. There was built-up force behind his words when he spoke:

  "Twenty-five years of this are long enough, Brenda."

  He was braced for his wife’s reaction, which he knew would disagree. But she went into combat like one who makes a game of it, and has plenty of time. Her smile teased.

  "Umhm-m, Ben," she said. "Cycle’s end or beginning. Change is the wisdom and pattern of our civilization. And its spice. I know."

  She shrugged. Already she had touched a little silver boss on the table beside her. The tinkle of ice mingled with liquid sounds and a soft whirring. How much should one hate the servant gadgetry that once had been things of pride?

  Brenda offered him a glass, and picked up hers.

  "One final time?" she said with mock dramatic elegance. "A toast. According to custom. To the new year—our first in twenty-five without convivial company. By your request, Ben. To Auld Lang Syne. To whatever you think that you want, now. New Year’s is supposed to be especially an occasion for changes, isn’t it? But I’m not quite ready for any wild adventures, Ben."

  Her defiance was quiet and almost playful—yet definite. He knew his Brenda, yet he did not know her. How could you really grasp the skills, the deviousness, the simplicities of speech that were silken traps, and all the other tools that two centuries of living and learning could give a woman? Such a fine weave of personality didn’t used to happen. Yet, like everything, it still had flaws.

  He kept looking at her, seeing what he’d seen thousands of times before. She’d allowed herself to age a little. It didn’t have to occur, and it could be erased endlessly in the rejuvenation centers. But it was a style, now—part of an always restless and changing mode. So she looked, not twenty, but thirty-five. There was silver in her hair, and it was part of beauty.

  And what she was was blended with all that was around her, and its projections. Like everybody, she clutched at a richness of life that was now so much widened. In her, still, this took the form of soft beautiful things and moods matching. The curved and tasteful line, the chip of music. The luxury whose quiet swiftness bestowed a sense of power, wielded casually as some lesser god might do. He knew the appeal of all that. In a childish gayety you became like an elf among elfin companions. But when you were through with the spirit of this, it assumed the fuzzy taste of an ancient hangover, infinitely extended. It omitted too much. And time was too long, now.

  He wondered if women had greater resistance to this kind of boredom than men. Perhaps here they were more civilized. He could see how it was with Brenda. It was her job to design beauty. Then she had her social life, her tennis, and most of all, her house. Here were the elements of a woman’s psychological castle—anciently, now, and forever. The peaceful, narrow nest; the place for children. It marked out civilized security against bewildering vastness. Yet it was to be defended savagely.

  How old was the conflict between this kind of feminine stubbornness and man’s nomad impulse, shaggy and improvident? Still, how often had men yielded their heritage to follow their mates’ scheme of things, like tame lap-dogs? How many of them had been grateful for this balancing force? And yet, in more mortal times, how many had entered the twilight of life regretting that they had missed so much?

  "It isn’t fair to you, is it, Ben?" Brenda said, as if she probed his mind. Her motherly tease was tainted with hard sarcasm.

  He gulped a third of his drink, then chuckled. "So you know what I'm thinking," he remarked.

  "Umhm-m, Ben. More or less. Maybe even about The War—if that isn't too far back and too awful. But more likely about the memories from before twenty-five years ago. When we were helping to colonize and develop another world. Before you—we—got utterly fed up with that."

  He nodded and grinned. "Right," he admitted.

  For an instant his mind drew back recollections of that last great conflict of so long ago. The righteous rage against arrogance and oppression. And the heady thrill of being part of the might that opposed it. The longing to rip and blast it apart, and to spill the blood of the fools that supported it. Then the action that relieved pent-up drives. The thrills of swooping speed as one struck. The fear. Then the sounds. The roar that masked screams. The primitive crackle of fire.

  But somewhere along the line the triumphant savagery had become mixed with revulsion. And before the glory of victory the flames had sucked him in, mauled him, torn him, in terrible surprise and pain that were like the end of the universe, until oblivion took him.

  Such inglorious hell would have blanked out in his conscious memory, except that the doctors who had patched and spliced his body together again had also insisted that for the health of his mind he must not bury horror in his subconscious.

  Then there were the long years of rebuilding the world—in the form of utopia this time. Those years were busy and great. For the tide had swung. The heart and soul of man was behind peace and plenty in a shape and a newness never seen before. But with its attainment, much of the novelty had rubbed off. So another cycle had started. He had lulled Brenda into it. Out beyond the Earth....

  "Remember, Brenda?" he said. "The smell of cigarettes and sweat inside the helmet of a space armor. The deep blue sky of Mars. The ruins. It was a cold, dry little planet. But we and the others scraped up the thin hoarfrost and snow with shovels, there at the south polar cap, to get water to drink. Our bunch put up one of the first twenty airdomes. We began a settlement, sealed away from the dead atmosphere. We worked like slaves with our own blessed hands, and loved it. We felt that maybe we were accomplishing something...."

  "And then," Brenda commented, "after seven Terran years with the colonial crowd, you swore that you'd never leave Earth again. That people struggled to build civilization, and that, by gosh, you'd become civilized at last! That you'd have a house, a garden, and work your hour a day at the controls of a factory, and that, aside from tennis and fishing, you'd spend all of your other time in cultural pursuits—studying, reading, writing—and maybe even learning to play the medieval lute! No, I'm not arguing, Ben. The proof of never being settled for long is too old."

  Sharp guilt dug into him. But his laugh tried to soothe the bitterness behind her humo
r.

  "Right again, my lady," he said. "Fumbling with that lute was golden rest and living during the first year. Later, so was guiding and scolding two small sons—born of your own body, Brenda, and not popped out of warm fluids in a gestation vat, as might have happened. But Nubs and Joe are men, now—flown from the coop like our earlier offspring. So that’s another reason—"

  Her smile was like a thin, sharp wire. "Don’t go on, Ben," she told him softly. "I've heard all that you’re going to say, before. And I accept the truths of psychology. Men are barbarians, apes, children. They fool with a dream. They cement a few stones together. Then they lose interest, and want to kick them over. They used to struggle for peace. But the meaning of struggle is grimed into our blood and bone, so we hear. It brought us up from nothing. Now, if its force isn’t sublimated, it could wipe us out."

  "All that is logic," he offered.

  "Of course it’s logic!" she answered. "Stiff, and true, I suppose. The only trouble is that I’m sick of logic, too! All right, maybe I'm scared to conform—to go out there into space again! But there’s more! Civilization was built up to be happy and safe in, wasn’t it? So why all the crude lunging and melodramatics? Helping to spread human sway across the solar system is not for me, Ben!"

  In her outburst, Brenda looked savage, herself. Strange, wasn’t it? Her pale eyes glittered. Or was it the beginning of tears? She was being emotional—not using her head. Or perhaps with a deeper logic, even beneath her conscious self, she was using emotion as a tool. He felt his masculine clumsiness and guilt. A woman’s hurt and power, even when it was partly a fake. Especially if, with the woman concerned, you had memories of a million moods close to the heart. A comradeship remembered urged one toward loyalty and a wish to restore nearness and agreement, didn’t it?