But there was nothing he could do.
The days turned into weeks. The Ellie May did not seem to move. Yet Sam knew they were traversing the uncharted deep at a steady clip of several hundred miles per second. The rockets had kicked them into the required velocity, and now they were coasting along on momentum. Only occasionally the stern rockets blasted off to overcome the diminishing pull of the far-distant Sun.
Jupiter fell steadily away, and became once more but a star in the blackness of the void. Saturn burned with a slowly increasing luster. It was frightening—that tremendous jump into the unknown.
Even the members of the crew felt the tension. The doctor snapped irritable commands on his daily inspection of the exiles for signs of the plague. The guards, who brought their food, growled sullen monosyllables to all Sam’s attempts at conversation, and withdrew with all possible haste. The tainted passengers fell into an even deeper stupor. It seemed even difficult for them to swallow the food. And Sam sat on, day after day, trying to figure out some plan of escape until his brain would ache with utter futility, and he would fling himself exhausted across his bunk to fall into uneasy, unrefreshing slumber.
Sometimes he thought of the dead lad whose identity and fate he had assumed. It had been a sudden impulse on his part; an impulse that would very probably cost him his life. At times he raged at himself for having been a blithering, romantic fool; then the sight of his fellow exiles, their tragic faces wavering before him, stirred something inside of him, and he grinned mirthlessly. He supposed he would do it all over again, if the occasion arose.
The weeks passed, and Saturn began to assume a commanding position in the illimitable waste ahead. It grew on the sight until it became the dominating factor in the immensities. It was incredibly beautiful. Even the lackluster outcasts began to revive; to crowd around the view ports for the first time in weeks. They began to talk again. Ripples of excitement invaded their speech.
Tension mounted throughout the vessel. Those few members of the crew who came in contact with the untouchables lost their gruffness, their abrupt aloofness.
For one thing, Dr. Semmes announced joyfully that all his cultures taken from the outside of the Ellie May, as they swept through space, had been negative for the past five days. Which meant that they had passed beyond the area of the terrible subvirus molecules and there was no longer any chance of infection.
For another, the thrill of having come to a hitherto-unexplored planet, where no human being had ever ventured before, gave a feeling of camaraderie to all engaged in such an overwhelming journey.
And Saturn was a sight that hushed all human differences in the glory of its marvelous beauty. The planet was tilted to them so that the full splendor of the rings was exposed to view. Saturn itself was a pearly disk, shot through with parallel bands of delicate mauves and blues and pale reds. But the rings were a flashing, scintillating halo that whipped swiftly around the equator, shifting their colors through the entire gamut of the spectrum, blazing with an eerie iridescence that reminded the breathless reporter of the tints to be found in the depths of a magnificent fire-opal.
In the grandeur of that picture, never before seen so close or in such precious detail, he forgot his situation and the fate that awaited them all. He was a discoverer, a worshiper at the shrine of a tremendous spectacle.
He was rudely awakened, however, to a sense of the realities of the occasion. Captain Johnny Garth did the awakening. He stalked into the prison-hold, sure of himself, superior, arrogant. Three guards followed him, wellarmed, wary. They no longer feared infection, and they were prepared for any possible mutiny.
Garth stared around at the astonished exiles, flicked Sam White with scornful glance.
“Get your stuff together,” he growled. “We’re landing within the next half dozen hours.”
“Where?” Sam demanded. Inevitably he was the spokesman of these frightened people. He could feel them shrink once more within themselves; he could see the swift relapse into their former lethargic state.
“On Titan. I’m giving you all a break. It’s the largest of the Saturnian satellites, solid to the core, and our electro-scanners have found evidences of pocketed depressions and black shadows in the rock that indicate the presence of caverns.”
“How about air? How about water?”
“You want a hell of a lot,” Garth sneered. “What did the first colonists on Europa find? Water and air indeed! You’re too damn soft. You’ll find plenty of ice, and plenty of oxygenbearing rocks. You’ll do what every interplanetary pioneer has done. You’ll seal yourselves in, melt the ice, and crack down the sulphates, carbonates and aluminates to release a breathable air. The Council has been damn good to you. They’ve furnished you with complete space outfits: spacesuits, small atomic furnaces, blasting and cutting arcs, food, clothing and supplies to keep you going on your own for a year. Seeds, too, for grain to be grown in pulverized rock. If you don’t make a go of it, you don’t deserve to survive.”
Sam slid his gaze around the hunched, delicate bodies of these compulsory colonists. What he saw sent cold shivers through him. They did not have the stuff that made pioneers. They’d just huddle and die as soon as the oxygen tanks in their spacesuits gave out.
Anger burned in his veins. Not so much for himself, as for these poor victims of a fear-psychosis. He shook his fist at the imperturbable captain. “It’s murder, pure and simple,” he shouted. “You know that as well as I do.”
Garth shrugged his shoulders. “Bah! I could make a go of it. So could any group that has guts. Let’s see what you are made of. Remember, we land in six hours.” He left the room.
They spiraled close to the overwhelming round of Saturn to make the landing. Then they slid down to the bleak, stony face of Titan in a series of ever-narrowing circles, braking steadily with the forward rockets to slacken their tremendous momentum.
It was, Sam thought as he stared down at the dizzily turning landscape, going to be a tremendously difficult affair. Titan’s surface was puckered into gigantic folds. Huge, spiked mountains tumbled in every direction intersected with deep ravines and twisting gorges. Nowhere could Sam see any level spot where the ship might level off and land in cushioning gases. Garth was an experienced and skillful navigator, Sam had to acknowledge, but this task—
Seven times the Ellie May circumnavigated the inhospitable moon before the level plateau was spotted. That is, it was level compared to the rest of the terrain. On Earth it would have been a desert intersected by gullies, ditches and dotted with mesas.
Why the devil doesn’t he try another moon?—Sam thought resentfully. There were plenty of them around, spangling the black heavens where Saturn didn’t take up the picture. “Heartless brute, that’s what he is,” he raged. “He had determined on Titan, and Titan it would be, no matter what happened.”
The Ellie May shivered with the thunder of the retarding exhausts. It slanted downward, leveled off to a lesser angle. Flame smothered the ship, obscured the view ports. They were going to land.
There was a small, popping sound. Then a sundering crash that jarred the freighter from stem to stem. Clang—boom—bam!
The next moment there was a greater crash. Sam was flung headlong across a suddenly static hold into a tangle of screaming people and flying equipment.
They had made a forced landing that might well prove disastrous.
Death stared them all in the face. Death for the exiles, and death for the officers and crew of the Ellie May. They huddled in the still-intact recesses of the motionless freighter, no longer untouchable to each other, bound together by the common fate that threatened them all.
Outside, the bleak and frozen terrain of a dead planet mocked them with a scenery that outpaced the eeriest fantasies of a Dore. A stony waste of incredible heights and depths, sharp-rimmed in perpetual semitwilight. Saturn whirled over canyons and peaks like a tremendous jewel, and the Sun journeyed swiftly across a circumscribed horizon like a minor star.
For three short Titanian days the engineers had worked, without ceasing, to discover the cause of the Ellie May’s sudden crash. Then Chief Engineer Green broke the tragic news. His face was grim underneath its load of grease and fatigue.
“It’s the firing pin of the main stern rocket chamber, sir,” he reported to Garth. “It cracked and blasted off just as we were about to land, sir.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen it happen before. Those pins are guaranteed for the life of the ship.”
“Then put in a new pin, you idiot,” Garth yelled. “What are you holding us up for?”
Green’s face tightened. “Sorry, sir, but we haven’t any spares. They’re made of the rarest element in the System—miraculum. The only known source of supply is on little Phobos, the Martian satellite. It’s more expensive than radium-superX.” He grimaced. “That’s why the owners thought the Ellie May didn’t need a spare.”
“Can’t you make a new pin of some other material?”
“Nothing that would last a minute in the new fuel we’re using. Those temperatures’d crack wide any other metal.”
Garth stood rigid. “Then you mean,” he said slowly, “we can’t take off from Titan until we locate a vein of miraculum ore, and that in all the System only Phobos is known to have a supply?”
“Yes, sir.”
Everyone had heard it. Everyone knew what it meant. They were marooned on Titan—exiles and crew alike. The equipment and supplies, estimated to last a year of Earth time for the outcasts, would have to take care of double the number. And Garth himself had been compelled to face the realization that Titan was not another Europa. The satellite was sheer granite—a solid block without any of the characteristic veinings and striations that disclose a mineral content; without any of the clayey deposits that could be worked up into a usable soil. Titan was utterly sterile, unfit for the hardiest or boldest of pioneers. Nor could the Ellie May’s radio equipment bring help. Saturn and its rings blanketed. surrounding space with a strong magnetic field which made long-distance transmission impossible. No one would ever know what happened to them.
Sam’s harsh laugh rose jaggedly above the stunned silence. “Welcome, Captain Garth,” he jeered, “to our little Paradise. Surely you can make a go of it. Didn’t you tell us softies that not so long ago?”
Garth purpled, but he did not answer. “All right, Green,” he said to the engineer. “We’ll have to find some miraculum on Titan. We’ll use the two-man space boat to go scouting. You know, of course, what the ore looks like?”
Green looked sick. “No, sir. The stuff’s pretty closely guarded. Very few have ever seen the ore. How about you, captain?”
The purple faded to a curious gray. “Never saw it in my life,” Garth said at last. He raised his voice. “Any of you men know what miraculum ore is like?”
No one answered. A dead silence blanketed the marooned people.
Sam White was enjoying himself immensely. The irony of fate, he grinned to himself. First he had been caught in the toils; and now it was the hard-boiled Garth and his gang of tough eggs, who hadn’t been at all concerned in the fate of those they had intended to dump unceremoniously on bleak Titan. Let them see how they liked it for a while.
Then his smile faded. The poor exiles would never be able to fend for themselves. Garth and his men would monopolize the supplies, and the fatalistic, physically soft outcasts would die. He stepped forward.
“I’ve seen miraculum ore,” he said quietly.
Garth stared at him. His burly, weather-beaten face was suspicious. “You, White!” He forgot his pretense of Atshir Jones. “Where did you see it?”
“On Phobos, naturally. You don’t remember, evidently. I was the reporter who sent the newscast of its discovery throughout the System.”
Garth took a deep breath. He remembered it now. “All right,” he growled. “Then come with me.”
Sam smiled. “I’ll make a deal with you, captain. If I help you find the ore, you’re to take every one of us back to Earth. I’ll take the responsibility with the Council.”
Garth’s eyes snapped. “I make no deals.”
“O.K.,” Sam said amiably. “No deal; no miraculum.”
Garth took out an Allerton; fingered it. “That’s mutiny. Under the space code I have a right to kill you.”
“Go ahead. That won’t get you off Titan.”
Garth considered that. “No, it won’t,” he admitted. “But I have another idea. I’ll commandeer all supplies for the benefit of the crew only. Your Martians will be the first to die.”
The two men’s glances clashed. Sam felt a hot flush of anger at the callousness of the man. But he had no illusions. Garth had both the will and the power to make good his threat.
Sam relaxed. “You win, Garth,” he said evenly. “Let’s start.”
It took two weeks of steady exploration in the small space boat to convince Sam that there was none of the precious ore on Titan. Two weeks in which the two men, enemies, hating each other’s guts, were confined to the narrow limits of the tiny boat, forced upon each other’s company day and night.
At the end of that period they returned to the Ellie May, compelled to confess defeat. They found on board a strange situation that had arisen in their absence.
Both crew and exiles were mingling, working together on a comradely basis. New life seemed to have been instilled into the hapless passengers; a queer selflessness into the hard-boiled crew.
Under Green’s direction even the women and children had forgotten their whining and were toiling at tasks side by side with the men. The atomic motors and blasting tools had been removed from the ship. Clad in ungainly spacesuits that made them look like strange antediluvian monsters, they were engaged in hollowing out the natural crevices in the rock, enlarging them into livable dimensions, sealing them with roofs of fused granite.
“Just in case,” Green explained. “Any luck, captain?”
“Ask White,” growled Garth. “He’s refused to describe the stuff to me.”
“I’m taking no chances,” Sam retorted. Then he shook his head. “Not a sign of it anywhere.”
Green was taken aback. “Then what are we going to do? We’ve six months’ supplies on tap—figuring everyone.” His eyes wandered from the grim captain. His tone was apologetic. “The crew, sir, are beginning to like these people. They insist on share and share alike.”
Garth’s face seemed carved out of the stone planet itself. “Well?” he asked noncommittally.
“I’ve tested all the borings, sir. Even with the fertilizer, this pulverized stuff couldn’t grow a single seed. Once the supplies are gone—” He shrugged. He didn’t have to say any more. They understood.
They were stranded on a planet where no human being had ever come before; where none would come for possibly a generation more. Six Earth months between themselves and death, granting even that the oxygen could be extracted from the refractory rock!
Sam wrinkled his forehead. “I still don’t like you, Garth,” he said quietly. “But we haven’t reached the end of our collective rope yet. There are other satellites of Saturn. The space boat can go that far, can’t it?”
Garth looked at the reporter with a thoughtful air. “Only to one and back at the most,” he said finally. “There’s a slow leak in the hull plates. It won’t last much longer.”
“Hm-m-m!” Sam considered. “Then even if we find better conditions elsewhere, we can’t transport our colony. They’ve got to stay here.”
“If you find the miraculum, we could shift you over in the Ellie May,” the captain pointed out.
“Still no deal about taking us back to Earth?” demanded Sam.
“Still no deal!”
They took off for Japetus the following day. Since the little craft would be capable of only one more trip, the choice of the satellite to be visited was a matter of careful discussion.
Japetus was chosen for several reasons. Though farther out, it was next to Titan in size, and its surfa
ce in the electro-scanners seemed more regular than any of the others. Furthermore, the high albedo indicated the presence of ice and snow. That might mean frozen water, or at the worst, carbon-dioxide snow. In either case there should be weathered rock underneath, and certainly there was more chance of finding a variety of materials than in the igneous lump that Titan had turned out to be.
The journey across the gulf was made in silence. Mere monosyllables sufficed between the two men. Speech was used only in case of necessity, and even then with considerable reluctance. It was difficult to keep the supply of air at normal density. The metal plates were defective. The precious oxygen breathed out in infinitesimal quantities, but at an inexorable rate. Yet Sam had noted that Garth had refused to take along additional oxygen tanks for replenishment of the failing supply. There was little enough for the use of the marooned colony on Titan, and once gone, it might never be replaced. Granite was a tough material from which to extract oxygen even under favorable laboratory conditions.
On the trip across, Sam asked curiously: “You’re not afraid to take me along, Garth? I might knock you down and take the ship away from you.”
The captain tapped his Allertons significantly. “While I’m awake I have these little babies.”
“How about when you’re asleep?” Garth stared at him. Finally he said: “I hate your guts, White, for what you did to me. But you’re not that sort of a man.”
Sam thought it over. Then he said wryly: “I’m afraid you’re right. You can sleep easy. But any other time—”
The exploration of Japetus was a different job from that of Titan. A thick blanket of snow and ice submerged the actual surface of the planet, so that it was impossible to cruise over the terrain and search for outcroppings of the ore. Here it would have to be by the more tedious and far more laborious method of haphazard borings in likely-looking rock formations.
They landed on a desolate plateau where the ice upheaved in minor imitation of the precipitous peaks of Titan.
When The Future Dies Page 25