Space Service Read online

  “When we get back I’ll make it all up to you, Doran,” Joe kept insisting.

  There was a fear in him—of conforming for too long to the demands of this weird environment and of somehow losing a human heritage.

  “I’m reading your mind, Joe,” Doran laughed. “Don’t worry. We both love the smell of coffee and bacon, too much. And music, and nice furniture, and walks in the park. We’re not like Frank was, or young Will perhaps still is. No, this will make us want such things more—tie us tighter to Earth.”

  At dawn they blundered on. During their third night underground they were raided while they slept. Some chocolate bars and other food-concentrates disappeared. And a pencil of Joe’s. Their two-way radio would no longer work. The chuckling, chirping inquisitive creatures of the Martian soil had crept into its case and broken it.

  Thus the Daytons, out of contact with Port Laribee, did not hear how Danny Bryant staggered back, dazed, frost-bitten, and halfsmothered, to his parents’ arms.

  The storm ended after five days. The small sun blazed in the steely sky, which seemed as brittle as frozen air. There was a sharp lifting of mood. Go back to Port Laribee? The Daytons were tempted. But they had not yet found the boys. Besides, they were far afield. And with much of their supplies used up or stolen, the work of mere survival consumed time and energy and slowed travel. So it was almost as well to push on, wasn’t it?

  It seemed that they were always using pointed pipette and compressor to refill oxygen flasks from the hollow parts of vegetation. At dawn they collected hoar-frost crystals, wrung from the arid atmosphere by the nocturnal cold, for drinking water. They ate underground fruit and the starchy pulps of certain roots. Wary of poison, they tasted untried things cautiously.

  Mars hogs that tunneled in an eternal blind search for food were fair game in the darkness beneath the thicket leaf-carpets. Dayton had a tiny ato-stove that served for their meager cooking.

  Weeks passed and a strange life-pattern was set as the Daytons moved south, deeper into broadening Sytris Major. Maybe it was a bit warmer. Some paper-dry growths were still blue-green. More were brown from the winter dryness. Necessities were harder to find.

  Sometimes, among the pastel-tinted thickets and low hills, there were patches of real Martian desert, red and lifeless.

  Night followed exhausting day, and how welcome was the warmth of a burrow where one could nurse the frostbites acquired in the frigid dawn.

  Several times footprints, large-booted but short-paced, led the Daytons on, only to be lost in rocky ground and lichen.

  Twice Joe and Doran crossed the war-fused wrecks of huge cities. Fallen hothouse roofs littered the ruins. The piles of rust must have been irrigation pumps, space-ship ramps, climate-controlled apparatus.

  In tower, storehouse, and avenue were the skeletons, with their odd, vertical ribs to house huge lungs.

  Some devices still worked. Joe found a rod, probably of corrosion-resistant platinum. He pressed its stud and for an instant, before it became useless, it flashed fire that melted part of a fanciful wall-carving.

  The struggle to survive harshened further. Once it was bitter water, oozing up from some deep irrigation pipe, that staved off death by thirst.

  Several times oxygen was obtained only by lying prone over a teeming colony of the chitinous creatures whose instinct was to roof with a protecting airdome of gluten, anything that promised to be food. These Mars ants—ordinarily to be avoided—admitted air to the domes they built from their deepest buried tunnels and chambers.

  Often Joe looked at his wife, knowing that they both had changed. They were tattered, and a little like the bas-relief figures. They were Dave Kort, and Frank and Will Terry over again. Doran’s teeth were very white in a face browned by sunshine filtered only by the rare Martian air. She was very thin, but there was an oblique charm in her features. Or had his very conceptions of beauty altered subtly, conforming to a now-familiar environment?

  Thinking back to Port Laribee and Earth itself was often like recalling substanceless dreams, so different were such memories. And was the fading of revulsion for even the scurrying builders of the air-domes occasion for deeper fear because it represented the loss of another part of one’s natural self?

  Joe often worried. Others had been drawn to Mars too, eager to search out the mysteries of its past and people—all of this an intriguing fabric—but most Earthmen had the sense to realize in time that it was a graveyard world, unfit for humans. For to live the life of Mars you had to stop being human. Conditioning grimed into you like the red dust.

  Nor was the trap just imaginary. The most frightening part was knowing that Doran was with child. Damn the pulse-beats of life that had no regard for circumstances!

  Joe could be glad only that she remained human enough to be pettish and optimistic by turns.

  “We can’t get back, can we, Joe?” she’d say. “But maybe it’ll be all right. It’s a long time, yet.”

  Should they try to hole up, somewhere? That wasn’t much good, either. Even in spring there wouldn’t be enough resources in one place to sustain life for long. They had to keep moving. So when again they saw those boot-tracks, they felt free to follow.

  Milder days came. At noon the temperature reached fifty degrees, F. The country brightened in pastel beauty after the vernal storms. There were gorgeous flowerlike growths. The tracks would vanish and appear again, seeming to mark no single trail but a series of excursions from somewhere among the hills to the south.

  Once Doran and Joe heard a thin halloo or scream of defiance.

  One of their two air-compressors quit beyond repair, making it twice the job to fill their oxygen flasks. This could be fatal, now.

  Soon after they entered the hill-gorges there was a rock-fall, too close to be a thing of accident or coincidence. Later there was a swift-dying flicker that turned a spot of dust incandescent.

  Later that afternoon, amid blue-shadows from towering monoliths, Joe met an attack as sudden and savage as a bobcat’s. The creature sprang down at him from a ledge, clawing, kicking, striking with a knife. Joe had a bad time until his greater strength won.

  Doran helped hold her nephew down. Will Terry was battered, hardened, scarred—scarcely recognizable with his teeth bared.

  But, oddly, Joe knew just what to say to soothe him.

  “Will, you can see that we’re like you. Maybe we don’t want to be, but we are, now. We can’t drag you back again to Port Laribee.”

  The kid relaxed a little. His pale eyes turned puzzled but wary.

  “About the other boy, Will—Danny Bryant?” Doran asked.

  Will’s lip curled. “He was weak and dumb,” he said, fumbling with unused words. “I took him back long ago.”

  “You did fine, Will,” Joe said. “Now what have you found here in the hills? You’ve been camping in one place for a while. Show us.”

  Joe had to use harsh command against the sullenness still in the boy. He did so bluntly, driven by grim hope and need.

  Thus, before sunset, Doran and he found something they needed.

  “Dad wanted such a place,” the kid said, half-proudly.

  It was less than optimism promised—just a small, deep valley, pretty as a painting, but quietly forbidding, too. Joe had seen others almost like it. Martian growths clogged it, sprouting new blue-green leaves. The ruins were far less damaged than in the cities. There were countless little domes of the ant-creatures, indicating some underground water.

  Nimbly Will led the way downward and across the valley to a stout structure. It was not very unusual, just another relic in a region away from the fiercest path of war. Here might have been a last refuge, after the death of millions, the breakdown of machinery, and the rapid worsening of Martian climatic conditions. Crystal roofs lay shattered around the ornate central massiveness. But one wing with thick glaze still stood—sealable.

  Doran’s eyes lighted as she and Joe and her nephew went into the deserted interior through the dou
ble doors of an airlock which some last, fleeing Martian had not closed.

  Hardy wilderness plants had intruded into this hothouse but there still were troughs of soil, proving that this had been a garden sealed against cold, a place of fruit and flower.

  “We might try to use this, Joe,” Doran said, her voice thin in the heavy stillness.

  He nodded. But his gratitude was tinged with scared and bitter overtones. He hurried to explore the central edifice, which must have been closed before the kid came, for the preservation of things inside was good. There were odd cyclindrical cells, niches dark and dusty, cubicles piled with metal boxes. There was even what seemed a kind of machine-shop.

  And there was a valve which, from the footprints in the dust, Will had tried to turn. Joe accomplished this now with a levering metal bar. Out in the dry hothouse pool a spout jetted rusty water.

  “The underground storage cisterns are intact,” Joe was soon explaining. “I prayed there’d be some.”

  Joe Dayton was grateful, yet not happy.

  Grimly he began again the bitter toil of survival, the others helping. Like bizarre harvesters they tore up great bundles of roots and stalks and piled them inside the hothouse. Briefly the blue sunset shadows were long, over that weird, beautiful valley. Then the dusk came, and the faint frost haze of the always frigid nights.

  “We’d better hurry before we freeze,” Joe growled irritably. “When we get a lot of this stuff inside we’ll tramp on it to break the oxygen-capsules. By morning there should be breathable atmosphere under this roof. Later, vegetation planted inside will keep it fresh.”

  Joe Dayton’s mood now had a taint of despair. Forced to try to settle in this place, he felt more than ever trapped. More than ever he felt as if the souls of those eon-dead beings depicted on carven walls that Phobos, the nearer moon, now illuminated, had been crowding into his human flesh and brain to push his own ego out. No, it was not witchcraft—it was simpler. Mars had shaped its ancient inhabitants. Now it was working on Earthly material with the same subtle, ruthless fingers.

  When the task in the hothouse was finished, Joe went with his wife and nephew to burrow again away from the cold, and to eat and to sleep all in the manner which Mars compelled.

  Joe wanted Doran and his child to keep their human ways. His child. That was his worst thought, now.

  His mind pictured Will—tattered, wild, strange in thought and feeling. He had lived his first years on Earth. So how would it be with a child born on Mars? Joe cursed into his burry beard—cursed the distance to Port Laribee which might as well not be there at all, so out of reach was it, so ineffectual, and so soon probably to be left deserted. Though bone weary, Joe did not sleep well that quiet night.

  The next day, bathed and smiling, Doran still did not look quite Earthly to him. She was browned by Martian sun but the real difference that had come into her strong beauty was a thing of multiple detail, like the mark of persons used to the sea contrasted with those born to the plains—but deeper.

  Scrubbed fairly clean, Will remained an urchin of Mars. Also scrubbed, and shaved, Joe felt more comfortable. Yet he knew that basically this restored nothing.

  A day later he was wandering around outside the hothouse, trying to plan needed agricultural projects, when a faint scrape of pebbles made him wheel warily.

  “People! Rescue!” were his first eager thoughts. But then he saw that the three figures, two large and one small, were creatures attuned to Mars in the same way as himself, and as helpless.

  Yet when old friends were recognized, in spite of the deep changes, Joe Dayton felt a joyous lift.

  “Doc Lorring!” he shouted. “Kettrich. And Tillie. Hey! Hey, Doran! Will! Come here!”

  Doc Lorring’s tomboy daughter, a bit younger than Will, showed a grinning dirty face through a battered air-hood, and said “Hi.”

  “We were trying to follow you most of the time, Dayton,” Lorring stammered. “We hoped to find you and Doran, and maybe the Terry boy. But our tractor broke down, and we had to live off the land. While we still had the vehicle there didn’t seem much reason why Tillie shouldn’t come along. We’d begun to give up hope of finding any of you alive.”

  Minutes were spent questioning and explaining. They all went into the sealed hothouse. Kettrich, the biologist, had even saved a little coffee.

  “For a celebration, if we ever located any of you missing ones,” he said to Joe and Doran.

  Kettrich sighed and went on, “Chief Vitrac, Lorson, and a dozen others are the only old-timers left at the Port. The others have all gone, with Dolph Terry and the tourists. Humans are about done with Mars though I suppose a few will trickle out here from time to time.”

  With contemplative relish Doran sipped coffee brewed with crudely filtered water on an auto-stove. She smiled like any woman who has her man, and has found a place and a purpose.

  “Not for humans,” she mused. “That’s one way of putting it. Still, it doesn’t necessarily mean us. Let’s face facts,” she continued. “A natural selection was going on all the time. Thousands of people left, disgusted. A very few stayed grimly, or got trapped. On Earth I never thought much about Mars, but now I’ve been here so long. We’re different, perhaps proudly so. Oh, we still like the things that Earth-people like, maybe more than ever. But the Old Ones here also had their comforts. We have Earth flesh and bone, we’ll never be like them that way, and I’m glad. You can either say that Terrans are supremely adaptable, or that we are no longer quite human, and that there are Martians again. Because one has to be that to really live here, doesn’t one? Mars won’t be left wasted and sad. We’re some of its first new people. Among the explorers there must be others. More and more will come. Gradually, through the centuries, we’ll build Mars back toward what it was.”

  Dayton stared at his wife, then down at the ancient flagging, then at the others. Tillie tittered. She was as brown as Will Terry and almost as attached to the Red Planet. Around her mended glove a fuzzy creature twined, chirping. Will and Tillie were children of Mars.

  Doran’s assessment of a situation in plain talk took away its dread for Joe, giving his Mars-love a chance. He began to feel at home. “Is my wife talking sense?” he asked puzzledly.

  Kettrich and Lorring had both been fascinated by this world, too—willing to devote years to it.

  “Well, we can still radio Port Laribee,” Lorring chuckled. “But in any case we’re stuck here for a long time. Meanwhile, there’s food growing wild around us. There’s water. There are tools, machines, and supplies to puzzle out. And a valley to reclaim as a start. Beyond that, the job gets bigger and more interesting.”

  Before sunset that day, Joe and Doran Dayton walked alone in the valley. The Earth-star was already silvery in the dark blue west. The hills were dun-hued and peaceful. The domes of the Mars-ants gleamed. Fantastic spring flowers wavered in the wind. Small dust-whirls stirred among the ruins.

  Joe Dayton looked forward, gladly now, to the birth of his child on the Red Planet.

  “I hope that the Neo-Martians won’t become so separate that they’ll forget to be friends with Terrans,” Doran mused.

  Joe nodded as his arm crept around her waist. To him legendary history and present fact had merged. The wind’s rustle was no longer the whisper of the dead past.

  10 GALACTIC INTERPRETER: Herald Allen

  A hundred thousand worlds all with their own speech,

  customs, laws. The far trader, the diplomat,

  the traveler, cannot hope to cope

  with such semantic, ethical and legal mazes. So came

  the heralds, men of peace and of words. And this

  was Herald Alen’s first mission.

  That Share of Glory

  BY C.M. KORNBLUTH

  Young Alen, one of a thousand in the huge refectory, ate absent-mindedly as the reader droned into the perfect silence of the hall. Today’s lesson happened to be a word-list of the Thetis VIII planet’s sea-going folk.

 
“Tlon—a ship,” droned the reader.

  “Rtlo—some ships, number unknown.

  “Long—some ships, number known, always modified by cardinal.

  “Ongr—a ship in a collection of ships, always modified by ordinal.

  “Ngrt—first ship in a collection of ships; an exception to ongr.”

  A lay brother tiptoed to Alen’s side. “The Rector summons you,” he whispered.

  Alen had no time for panic, though that was the usual reaction to a summons from the Rector to a novice. He slipped from the refectory, stepped onto the northbound corridor and stepped off at his cell, a minute later and a quarter-mile farther on. Hastily, but meticulously, he changed from his drab habit to the heraldic robes in the cubicle with its simple stool, washstand, desk, and paperweight or two. Alen, a level-headed young fellow, was not aware that he had broken any section of the Order’s complicated Rule, but he was aware that he could have done so without knowing it. It might, he thought, be the last time he would see the cell.

  He cast a glance which he hoped would not be the final one over it; a glance which lingered a little fondly on the reel rack where were stowed: “Nicholson on Martian Verbs,” “The New Oxford Venusian Dictionary,” the ponderous six-reeler “Deutsche-Ganymediche Konversasionslexikon” published long ago and far away in Leipzig. The later works were there, too: “The Tongues of the Galaxy—An Essay in Classification,” “A Concise Grammar of Cephean,” “The Self-Pronouncing Vegan II Dictionary”—scores of them, and, of course, the worn reel of old Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”

  Enough of that! Alen combed out his small, neat beard and stepped onto the southbound corridor. He transferred to an east-bound at the next intersection and minutes later was before the Rector’s lay secretary.

  “You’d better review your Lyran irregulars,” said the secretary disrespectfully. “There’s a trader in there who’s looking for a cheap herald on a swindling trip to Lyra VI.” Thus unceremoniously did Alen learn that he was not to be ejected from the Order but that he was to be elevated to Journeyman. But as a herald should, he betrayed no sign of his immense relief. He did, however, take the secretary’s advice and sensibly reviewed his Lyran.