Authors: Space Pioneers
other
things—many more than we could have probed
and understood by brief and tentative scrutiny.
We
pitched our tent again. And with our radio we hurled the news of all that we
had found and found out, back to Copernicus, and out to that other encampment,
of our potential enemies.
"You'll
see for yourselves," Kopplin said into the mike, "if you haven't seen
already. These others may have had cities here on the Moon—even on Earth. They
might have reached the stars long ago. Instead they worked it wrong—and
perished."
He
said a lot more. Maybe when he was finished talking the tightrope path to a
great future was a little tighter and steadier. But you can't end all the
danger of the years and of chance and of opposed life or factions with mere
fright and example.
We were back in Camp Copernicus, staggering
tired, before the Lunar midnight. Frank and I slept. Joe must have too. But
when we awoke, he was gone. Joe wasn't the kind of guy to ask permission from
anybody to do anything. If anybody tried to block his way by force he'd just
watch his chance and slip past the obstacles by stealth. I was scared for him
but what good did that do?
I had my mineralogy job—the thing I'd signed
up for—to look after. And Frank was tied up with his air-conditioning. But Joe
had his work cut out for him. It was all he could do here.
He was gone a full terrestrial week that
first solo trip. I hardly believed it when the news came that he was back. For
I was sure by then—with a lump in my throat—that he was gone for good—that his
naivete where science was concerned had tripped him up in an environment where
there were so many horrible ways of dying if you didn't know exactly what you
were doing.
But evidently Joe had learned enough of
space-suits and things by observation, during our first excursion of discovery,
to keep alive if nothing went too wrong.
He
almost grinned at Kopplin, Frank and
myself
as he unloaded
his pack in Kopplin's quarters. And it came to me that he hadn't changed
much—it was as though that pack of his was full of skins from a trapping season
and he was back at the trading post.
He
had bits of queer fabric, colored blue. He had a wonderful camera. He had
pieces of
plating, that
might have come from a
blown-up space-ship. And he had some jeweled ornaments worth a dozen fortunes
as artwork.
"You did fine,
Joe," Colonel Kopplin said.
"Sure," Joe answered and I knew
that there was a certain vanity in him. "I go back right away."
A
few hours later we saw him trudging off across the crater-bottom, a lonely but
contented figure, forever devoted to the wilderness—on Earth or elsewhere.
This
time his luck, his intuition or his guardian demon seemed to desert him.
For he did not return.
After a Lunar day—almost an
Earth-month—we went to look for him. Far out from Copernicus his tracks ended
at the edge of an expanse of flaky ash more treacherous than quicksand. Even
our probing radar-beams couldn't locate his remains at its bottom.
So long, Joe Whiteskunk.
You were a true trail-blazer. You came much farther than you could ever
have realized.
A year passed. Camp Copernicus became a
little city, with all the comforts of civilization—with beautiful gardens
even-under shining domes. It was the seed of the glory of the future —if our
luck held.
Of trans-spatial empire.
Mines began really
to produce. Great factories began to work. But of course our human dreams and
plans were already far ahead.
Girls came to the Moon to work in offices, as
lab technicians. And that, of course, was the surest sign of the success of our
colony. One girl—a tiny dark-haired dynamo with the love of strangeness and
millions of miles in her eyes—smiled at me. But how I happened to smile back
and how we became Joan and Dave to each other is really another story.
In
our factories on the Moon men of Earth built their first true interplanetary
craft.
From knowledge learned by their
own right—and from what they were able to glean from wreckage left by the
Martians and Asteroidians.
Mars was that craft's goal—or, more
specifically, the deepest part of Syrtis Major, that great dark marking near
its equator. A sea-bottom—verdant, compared to the cold Martian deserts.
Once densely populated—a seat of culture.
We knew that much
from the fragment of a map that we had found.
I was one of a hundred men who said good-by
to all that we knew. Frank, my twin, and Colonel Kopplin were others. And there
was one little gray jolly man named Dimitri Vasiliev —from that other nation.
A noted physicist.
Was it a compliment to the practicality
of the Brotherhood of Man and a promise of the great future of humanity, after
the failure of the Martians and the Asteroidians, that he was one of us and our
friend?
"On
to Mars—on to mystery," he laughed—and his eyes shone with the same hopes
that were ours. Proving again that there are fewer villains than some would
have us believe—and that, from close up, people are just people.
Oh,
yes—it sounds good. And we felt the triumphant vanity of it. But maybe it is an
over-simplification. That path to the future is a tightrope in more ways than
one. Everything is a gamble. And the bigger goal—not just Mars—was far, far
off. Not just cities in the star-systems.
But dreams that we
couldn't clearly see.
Immortality—cosmic
greatness to which we knew that only the minds of our distant descendants could
ever be equal. We were still too primitive. Still, we were on the right track
and might win, where the Asteroidians and Martians had failed. We'd seen their
ruined and deserted fortresses—triumphs of technology that had not been
enough.
Maybe
our greatest encouragement was the fabulous sum that was paid just for
motion-picture rights of what we would see on Mars. Aside from food, comfort
and love, nothing is easier to sell, even to the timidest stay-at-home, than
high romance.
Our
luck held. We left the Moon in
a
blaze
of atomic fire. Several months were spent hurtling in
a
great arc that joined two planetary orbits. We laughed, we speculated,
we worried, we cursed, we grew bored—but Mars swelled to a great murky opal, at
once ugly and beautiful, and we landed in the deepest part of Syrtis Major just
as we had intended. Ah, but we were a proud lot then, looking back at our
conscious determination, courage and skill]
They say that pride goeth before a fall. And
so, by a little oversight somewhere, it happened. Maybe in space, under the
electro-magnetic emanations of the sun, or even by the friction of our ship's
hull with the atmosphere of two worlds, we acquired an electric charge, which
became the cause of a hot spark just as we touched the Martian soil. We'll
never know just what
was the cause
.
Ever try to imagine a flash-fire inside a
space-ship, where all your stores and your oxygen are sealed up? We could have
all died very quickly. Eleven of us did. The rest of us got out of the ship in
space-suits, most of us burned in various degrees. But were we any better off?
To
the individual death is the end of the universe. The triumph of now and the
triumphs of the far future can't matter much. And all we were, here on the Red
Planet, was a bunch of blundering fools, as good as dead, without the best
part of our supplies.
No,
Mars isn't dead like the Moon. The sky we stared at was not black but deep
blue. Go to a fifty-thousand-foot altitude on Earth and you've got about the
same air-pressure—but still a lot more oxygen than on Mars. Want to try to
breathe that thin desiccated atmosphere, even though a comfortable noon-day
temperature of nearly seventy degrees might encourage you?
Nope—you're not built right—you'd be the
devil's own fool. The Martians are gone—they aren't there anymore to keep that
atmosphere healthy with their science.
Colonel
Kopplin was yelling, "Get the stuff outl
Got
to
salvage what we can!" And those of us who were able were trying to obey.
The fire was out soon, smothered by the Martian air mostly. But almost all of
our oxygen supply was gone. And our water tank had been ripped open by the
explosion of a big oxygen flask, weakened by the heat. The last of the precious
liquid dribbled away into the powdery soil.
At last we stood panting and helpless. Inside
myself I was saying, "Good-by, Jan. Good-by, dreams."
The
scene around us, I guess, was beautiful. Ruins were everywhere—fused down to
lumpy masses of glassy stuff, millions of years ago, by atomic heat in that
last war. And everything was overgrown with blue-green papery
vegetation, that
stirred idly in a thin breeze. The
sea-bottom that was Syrtis Major spread for miles all around and far off in the
sunlight to the east we could see the ochre line of the desert.
"To
find water is our only chance," Kopplin was saying. "We've still got
the equipment to electrolyze it—to free the oxygen in it to breathe. But where,
short of the polar regions, will you find water on a planet whose remaining
total supply wouldn't more than fill a couple of our Great Lakes?"
"We
could find the lowest ground here," Frank growled. "Try to dig a
well."
Vasiliev
nodded. He was a plucky little man. Maybe we were all plucky or we wouldn't
have been where we were. But what good was that against grinding
homesickness—besides all the rest of our misfortunes?
But
we began to get the necessary equipment together. We figured we had maybe five
hours' air-supply left. A space-suit can be equipped for a long jaunt afield.
But running for your life from a fire you can't always be fully prepared. A
seal is made imperfectly. An air-purifier lacks adjustment. And if you've got
anything to share part of it goes to pals who aren't
so
fortunate as you.
Wishful
thinking at a time of despair, they say, can produce strange delusions. So now
I saw a ghost stepping out from behind some weird Martian shrubbery. Lord
knows that was all I could think then—because I couldn't know the simple train
of events that had made the impossible true.
Yeah, I saw Joe Whiteskunk. And he wasn't
even wearing space-armor. But from a disc strapped to the top of his head a
faintly luminous aura flowed down over his ragged shirt and dungarees. A
Martian invention—I didn't even think about it then. But that was the way it
was.
An aura which took up all the functions of our clumsy
space-suits—protection from cold, air-purification, maintenance of pressure.
He was surrounded by a
tough bubble of energy.
"Hi,
Dave," he said and his voice was hoarse and rustling and dry.
"Yup—me.
Joe." He was as thin and brown and
withered as a dry root. And he staggered a little. But his eyes were clear.
Funny how his voice reached me through my helmet phones though I saw no
transmitter. But that's ancient Martian science.
"No water down in valley," Joe
croaked. "Little spring close by too small.
Too many
men.
Water always bitter.
So what? Sometimes I
smell water higher up toward desert. I never look though. Now do, eh? Glad to
see you boys again. Hi, Frank."
He showed us the twenty-foot hole he'd dug.
There were a couple of spoonfuls of brackish muck at its bottom. Wildly we dug
further, only to find dry sand into which the trickle vanished.
"Just spoil
spring," Joe grumbled. "Now we go look."
"Toward the desert?"
Kopplin growled. "That's against both
science and common sensel I'll take a digging party down to lower ground."
"Okay,"
I said.
"Fair enough.
Just on the chance that Joe
is right I'll take another party and go with him."
We were too intent on water and survival even
to ask how Joe happened to be here, even though it seemed more impossible than
any miracle. But I got around to inquiry as our group—which included
Vasiliev—started out.
"Gonna tell us about
you, Joe?" I asked.
"Sure,"
he said. "I found Mars space-ship on Moon. Nothing broke. I crawl inside.
Press wrong button. Ship start for home.
Big city here once
in this valley.
Home to machine that