Authors: Space Pioneers
"We'll knock off from work now—get in
the tent, eat supper, maybe sleep . . ."
But he was remembering
Neely's
promise to return tonight.
In another minute the small but dazzling sun
had disappeared behind the broken mountains, as Vesta, unspherical and
malformed, tumbled rather than rotated on its center of gravity. And several
hours later, amid heavy cooking odors inside the now inflated plastic bubble
that was the tent, Endlich was sprawled on his stomach, unable, through
well-founded worry, even to remove his space suit or to allow his family to do
so, though there was breathable air around them. They lay with their helmet
face-windows open. Rose and Evelyn breathed evenly in peaceful sleep.
Bubs, trying to be very much a man, battled
slumber and yawns, and kept his dad company with scraps of conversation.
"Let 'em come, Pop," he said cheerfully. "Hope they do. We'll
shoot 'em all. Won't we, pop? You got the rifle and the pistol ready, Pop . . ."
Yes,
John Endlich had his guns ready beside him, all right— for what it was worth.
He wished wryly that things could be as simple as his hero-worshipping son
seemed to think. Thank the Lord that Bubs was so trusting, for his own peace of
mind—the prankish and savage nature of certain kinds of men, being what it was.
For John Endlich, having been, on occasion, mildly kindred to such men, was
well able to understand that nature. And understanding, now, chilled his
blood.
Peering from the small plastic windows of the
tent, he kept watching for hulking black shapes to silhouette themselves
against the stars. And he listened on his helmet phones, for scraps of telltale
conversation, exchanged by short-range radio by men in space armor. Once, he
thought he heard a grunt, or a malicious chuckle. But it may have been just
vagrant static.
Otherwise, from all around, the stillness of
the vacuum was absolute. It was unnerving. On this airless piece of a planet,
an enemy could sneak up on you, almost without stealth.
Against that maddening silence, however, Bubs
presently had a helpful and unprompted suggestion: "Hey, Popl" he
whispered hoarsely. "Put the side of your helmet against the tent-floor,
and listen!"
John
Endlich obeyed his kid. In a second cold sweat began to break out on his body,
as intermittent thudding noises reached his ear. In the absence of an
atmosphere sounds could still be transmitted through the solid substance of the
asteroid. It took Endlich a moment to realize that the noises came, not from
nearby, but from far away, on the other side of Vesta. The thudding was
vibrated straight through many miles of solid rock.
"It's
nothing, Bubs," he growled.
"Nothing but the
blasting in the mines."
Bubs
said "Oh," as if disappointed. Not long thereafter he was asleep,
leaving his harassed sire to endure the vigil alone. Endlich dared riot doze
off, to rest a little, even for a moment. He could only wait. If an evil
visitation came—as he had been all but sure it must—that would be bad, indeed.
If it didn't come—well—that still meant a sleepness night, and the postponement
of the inevitable. He couldn't win.
Thus
the hours slipped away, until the luminous dial of the clock in the tent—it had
been synchronized to Vestal time-told him that dawn was near. That was when,
through the ground, he heard the faint scraping.
A rustle.
It might have been made by heavy space-boots. It came, and then it stopped. It
came again, and stopped once more. As if
skulking
forms paused to find their way.
Out
where the ancient and ghostly buildings were, he saw a star wink out briefly,
as if a shape blocked the path of its light. Then it burned peacefully again.
John Endlich's hackles rose. His fists tightened on both his rifle and pistol.
He fixed his gaze on the great box, looming
blackly,
the
box that contained the means of survival
for his family and himself, as if he foresaw the future, a moment away. For
suddenly, huge as it was, the box rocked, and began to move off, as if it had
sprouted legs and come alive.
John Endlich scrambled to action. He slammed
and sealed the face-windows of the helmets of the members of his family, to
protect them from suffocation. He did the same for himself, and then unzipped
the tent-flap. He darted out with the out-rushing air.
This was a moment with murder poised in every
tattered fragment of it. John Endlich knew. Murder was engrained in his own
taut-drawn
nerves, that
raged to destroy the trespassers
whose pranks had passed the level of practical humor, and become, by the
tampering with vital necessities, an attack on life itself. But there was a
more immediate menace in these space-twisted roughnecks . . . Strike back at
them, even in self-defense, and have it provenl
He had not the faintest doubt
who
they were—even though he could not see their faces in
the blackness. Maybe he should lay low—let them have their way . . . But how
could he—even apart from his raging temper, and his honor as a man—when they
were making off with his family's and his own means of survival?
He had to throw Rose and the kids into the
balance—risking them to the danger that he knew lay beyond his own possible
ignoble demise. He did just that when he raised his pistol, struggling against
the awful impulse of the rage in him—lifted it high enough so that the
explosive bullets that spewed from it would be sure to pass over the heads of
the dark silhouettes that were moving about.
"Damn
you, Neelyl" Endlich yelled into his helmet mike, his finger tightening on
the trigger. "Drop that stuff!"
At that moment the sun's rim appeared at the
landscape's jagged edge, and on this side of airless Vesta complete night was
transformed to complete day, as abruptly as if a switch had been turned.
Alf
Neely
and John Endlich blinked at each other. Maybe
Neely
was embarrassed a little by his sudden exposure; but
if he was, it didn't show. Probably the bully in him was scared; but this he
covered in a common manner—with a studiedly easy swagger, and
a bravado
that was not good sense, but bordered on childish
recklessness. Yet he had a trump card-by the aggressive glint in his eyes, and
his unpleasant grin, Endlich knew that
Neely
knew that
he was afraid for his wife, and wouldn't start anything unless driven and
goaded sheerly wild. Even now, they were seven to his one.
"Why,
good morning, Neighbor Pun'kin-head!"
Neely crooned, his
voice a burlesque of sweetness.
"Glad to oblige!"
He
hurled the great box down. As he did so, something glinted in his gloved paw.
He flicked it expertly into the open side of the wooden case which contained so
many things that were vital to the Endlichs—
It was only a tiny nuclear priming-cap, and
the blast was feeble. Even so, the box burst apart. Splintered crates, sealed
cans, great torn bundles and what not, went skittering far across the plain in
every direction, or were hurled high toward the stars, to begin falling at last
with the laziness of a descending feather.
Neely and his companions hadn't attempted to
move out of the way of the explosion. They only rolled with its force, protected
by their space suits. Endlich rolled, too, helplessly, clutching his pistol and
rifle; still, by some superhuman effort, he managed to regain his feet before
the far more practiced Neely, who was hampered, no doubt, by a few too many
drinks, had even stopped rolling. But when
Neely
got
up, he had drawn his blaster, a useful tool of his trade, but a hellish weapon,
too, at short range.
Still, Endlich retained the
drop on him.
Alf
Neely
chuckled.
"Fourth of July!
Hallowe'en, Dutch," he said sweetly. "What's the matter? Don't you
think
it's
fun? Honest to gosh—you just ain't
neighborly!"
Then
he switched his tone. It became a soft snarl that didn't alter his insolent and
confident smirk—and a challenge. He laughed derisively, almost softly. "I
dare you to try to shoot straight, pal," he said. "Even you got more
sense than that."
And
John Endlich was spang against his terrible, blank wall again.
Seven to one.
Suppose he got three. There'd be four
left—
and more in the camp. But the four would
survive him.
Space crazy lugs.
Anyway
half drunk.
Ready to hoot at the stars, even, if they
found no better diversion.
Ready to push even any of their own
bunch
around who seemed weaker than they.
For
spite, maybe.
Or just for the lid-blowing hell of it—as a reaction
against the awful confinement of being out here.
"I
was gonna smear you all over the place, Greenhorn," Neely rumbled.
"But maybe this way is more fun, hunh? Maybe we'll be back tonight. But
don't wait up for us. Our best regards to your family."
John
Endlich's blazing and just rage was strangled by that same crawling dread as
before, as he saw them arc upward and away, propelled by the miniature
drive-jets attached to the belts of their space-suits. Their return to camp,
hundreds of miles
distant,
could be accomplished in a
couple of minutes.
Rose
and the kids were crouched in the deflated tent. But returning there, John
Endlich hardly saw them. He hardly heard their frightened questions.
To
the trouble with
Neely
, he could see no end—just one
destructive visitation following another. Maybe, already, mortal damage had
been done. But Endlich couldn't lie down and quit, any more than a snake,
tossed into a fire, could stop trying to crawl out of it, as long as life
lasted. Whether doing so made sense or not, didn't matter. In Endlich was the
savage energy of despair. He was fighting not just
Neely
and his crowd, but that other enemy—which was perhaps Neely's main trouble,
too.
Yeah—the stillness, the nostalgia, the harshness.
"No—don't
want any breakfast," he replied sharply to Rose's last question.
"Gotta work . . ."
He was like an ant-swarm, rebuilding a
trampled nest—oblivious to the certainty of its being trampled again. First he
scrambled and leaped around, collecting his scattered and damaged gear. He
found that his main atomic battery—so necessary to all that he had to do—was
damaged and unworkable.
And he had no hope that he could repair it.
But this didn't stop his feverish activity.
Now
he started unrolling great bolts of a transparent, wire-strengthened plastic.
Patching with an adhesive where explosion-rents had to be repaired, he cut
hundred-yard strips, and, with Rose's help, laid them edge to edge and fastened
them together to make a continuous sheet. Next, all around its perimeter, he
dug a shallow trench. The edges of the plastic were then attached to massive
metal rails, which he buried in the trench.
"Sealed
to the ground along all the sides, Honey," he growled to Rose. "Next
we fit in the airlock cabinet, at one corner. Then we've got to see if we can
get up enough air to inflate the whole business. That's the tough part—the way
things are . . .
By
then the sun was already high. And Endlich was panting raggedly—mostly from
worry. After the massive airlock was in place, they attached their electrolysis
apparatus to the small atomic battery, which had been used to run the
well-driller. The well was in the area covered by the sheet of plastic, which
was now propped up here and there with long pieces of board from the great box.
Over their heads, the tough, clear material sagged like a tent-roof which has
not yet been run up all the way on its poles.
Sluggishly the electrolysis apparatus broke
down the water, discharging the hydrogen as waste through a pipe, out over the
airless surface of Vesta—but freeing the oxygen under the plastic roof. Yet
from the start it was obvious that, with insufficient electric power, the
process was too slow.
"And
we need to use heat-coils to thaw the ground, Johnny," Rose said.
"And to keep the place warm.
And to bring nitrogen gas
up out of the soil. The few cylinders of the compressed stuff that we've got
won't be enough to make a start. And the carbon dioxide . . ."
So
John Endlich had to try to repair that main battery. He thought, after a while,
that he might succeed—in time. But then
Rose opened the
airlock,
and the kids came in to bother him. With all the triumph of a favorite puppy
dragging an over-ripe bone into the house, Bubs bore a crooked piece of a black
substance, hard as
wood and
more gruesome than a
dried and moldy monkey-pelt.
"A tentacle!"
Evelyn shrilled. "We were up to those old buildings! We found the
people! What's left of them!
And lots of stuff.
We saw
one of their cars! And there
was lots
more. Dad— you
gotta come and see! . . ."
Harassed as he was, John Endlich yielded—because
he had a hunch, an idea of a possibility. So he went with his children. He
passed through a garden, where a pool had been, and where the blackened remains
of plants still projected from beds of dried soil set in odd stone-work. He
passed into chambers far too low for comfortable human habitation. And what did
he know of the uses of most of what he saw there?
The niches
in the stone walls?
The slanting, ramplike object of
blackened wood, beside which three weird corpses lay?
The
glazed plaque on the wall, which could have been a religious emblem, a calendar
of some kind, a decoration, or something beyond human imagining?
Yeah—leave such stuff for Cousin Emest, the school teacher—if he ever got here.
In
the cylindrical stone shed nearby, John Endlich had a look at the car—low
slung, three-wheeled, a tiller,
no
seats.
Just a flat platform.
All he could figure out about the
motor was that steam seemed the link between atomic energy and mechanical
motion.
Beyond the car was what might be a small tractor.
And a lot of odd tools.
But the thing which interested
him most was the pattern of copper ribbons, insulated with a heavy glaze,
similar to that which he had seen traversing walls and ceiling in the first
building he had entered. Here, as before, they connected with queer apparatus
which might be stoves and non-rotary motors, for all he knew.
And also with the globes overhead.
The
suggestiveness of all this was plain. And now, at the far end of that
cylindrical shed, John Endlich found the square, black-enamelled case, where
all of those copper ribbons came together.
It was sealed, and apparently self-contained.
Nothing could have damaged it very much, in the frigid stillness of millions of
years. Its secrets were hidden within it. But they could not be too unfamiliar.
And its presence was logical.
A small, compact power unit.
Nervously, he turned a little wheel. A faint vibration was transmitted to his
gloved hand. And the globe in the ceiling began to glow.
He
shut the thing off again. But how long did it take him to run back to his
sagging creation of clear plastic, while the kids howled gleefully around him,
and return with the end of a long cable, and pliers? How long did it take him
to disconnect all of the glazed copper ribbons, and substitute the wires of the
cable-attaching
them
to queer terminal-posts? No—not
long.
The
power was not as great as that which
his own
large
atomic battery would have supplied. But it proved sufficient. And the current
was direct—as it was supposed to be. The electrolysis apparatus bubbled
vigorously. Slowly the tentlike roof began to rise, under the beginnings of a
tiny gas-pressure.
"That does it,
Pops!" Bubs shrilled.
"Yeah—maybe so," John Endlich
agreed almost optimistically. He felt really tender toward his kids, just then.
They'd really helped him, for once.
Yes—almost
he was hopeful.
Until he glanced at the rapidly declining
sun.
An all-night vigil.
No.
Probably
worse.
Oh Lord-how long could he last like this?
Even
if he managed to keep Neely and Company at bay?
Night after night
...
All that he had accomplished seemed
useless. He just had so much more that could be wrecked—pushed over with a
harsh laugh, as if it really was something funny.
John Endlich's flesh crawled. And in his
thinking, now, he went a little against his own detenninations.
Probably because, in the present state of his disgust, he needed a
drink—bad.
"Nuts!" he growled lugubriously.
"If I'd only been a little more sociable . . . That was where the trouble
started. I might have got broke, but I would've made friends. They think I'm
snooty."
Rose's
jaw hardened, as if she took his regrets as an accusation that she had led him
along the straight and narrow path, which— by an exasperating shift in
philosophical principle—now seemed the shortest route to destruction. But he
felt very sorry for her, too; and he didn't believe that what he had just said
was entirely the truth.
So he added: "I don't
mean it, Honey. I'm just griping."
She
softened. "You've got to eat, Johnny," she said. "You haven't
eaten all day. And tonight you've got to sleep. I'll keep watch. Maybe it'll be
all right. . ."
Well,
anyway it was nice to know that his wife was like that.
Yeah—gentle,
and fairminded.
After they had all eaten supper, he tried hard to keep
awake. Fear helped him to do so more than ever. Their tent was now covered by
the rising plastic roof—but beyond the clear substance, he could still watch
for starlight to be stopped by prowling forms, out there at the jagged rim of
Vesta. It was hell to feel your skin puckering, and yet to have exhaustion
pushing your eyelids down
inexorably .
..
Somewhere
he lost the hold on himself. And he dreamed that Alf
Neely
and he were fighting with their fists. And he was being beaten to a pulp. But
he was wishing desperately that he could win. Then they could have a drink, and
maybe be friends. But he knew hopelessly that things weren't quite that simple,
either.
He awoke to blink at blazing sunshine. Then
his whole body became clammy with perspiration, as he thought of his lapse from
responsibility; glancing over, he saw that Rose was sleeping as soundly as the
kids. His wide eyes searched for the disaster that he knew he'd find . . .
But the wide roof was all the way up,
now—intact. It made a great, squarish bubble, the skin of which was specially
treated to stop the hard and dangerous part of the ultra-violet rays of the
sun, and also the lethal portion of the cosmic rays. It even had an inter-skin
layer of gum that could seal the punctures that grain-of-sand-sized meteors
might make. But meteors, though plentiful in the asteroid belt, were curiously
innocuous. They all moved in much the same direction as the large asteroids,
and at much the same velocity—so their relative speed had to be low.
The walls of the small tent around Endlich
sagged, where they had bulged tautly before—showing that there was now a firm
and equal pressure beyond them. The electrolysis apparatus had been left active
all night, and the heating units. This was the result.
John Endlich was at first almost unbelieving
when he saw that nothing had been wrecked during the night. For a moment he was
elated. He woke up his family by shouting: "Look! The bums stayed away!
They didn't come! Look! We've got five acres of ground, covered by air that we
can breathe!"
His
sense of triumph, however, was soon dampened. Yes— he'd been left
unmolested—for one night. But had that been done only to keep him at a
fruitless and sleepless watch?
Probably.
Another delicate form of hazing.
And it meant nothing for
the night to come—or for those to follow. So he was in the same harrowing
position as before, pursued only by a wild and defenseless drive to get things
done.
To find some slight illusion of security by working to
build a sham of normal, Earthly life.
To shut out the
cold vacuum, and a little of the bluntness of the voidal stars.
To make
certain reassuring sounds possible around him.
"Got
to patch up the pieces of the house, first, and bolt 'em together, Rose,"
he said feverishly. "Kids—maybe you could help by setting out some of the
hydroponic troughs for planting. We gotta break plain ground, too, as soon as
it's thawed enough. We gotta . . ." His words raced on with his flying
thoughts.
It
was a mad day of toil. The hours were pitifully short. They couldn't be
stretched to cover more than a fraction of all the work that Endlich wanted to
get done. But the low gravity reduced the problem of heavy lifting to almost
zero, at least. And he did get the house assembled—so that Rose and the kids
and he could sleep inside its sealed doors. Sealed, that is, if
Neely
or somebody didn't use a blaster or an explosive cap
or bullet—in an orgy of perverted humor . . . He still had no answer for that.
Rose and the children toiled almost as hard
as he did. Rose even managed to find a couple of dozen eggs, that—by being
carefully packed to withstand a spaceship's takeoff—had withstood the effects
of
Neely's
idea of fun. She set up an incubator, and
put them inside, to be hatched.
But,
of course, sunset came again—with the same pendent threat as before.
Nerve-twisting.
Terrible.
Arid a
vigil was all but impossible. John Endlich was out on his feet—far more than
just dog-tired . . .
"That
Neely
,"
he groaned, almost too weary even to swallow his food, in spite of the luxury
of a real, pullman-style supper table. "He doesn't lose sleep. He can pick
his time to come here and raise hob I"
Rose's glance was strange—almost guilty.
"Tonight I think he might have to stay home—too," she said. John
Endlich blinked at her.
"All right," she answered, rather
defensively. "So to speak, Johnny, I called the cops.
Yesterday—with
the small radio transmitter.
When you and Bubs and
Evelyn were up in those old buildings.
I reported
Neely
and his companions."
"Reported
them?"
"Sure.
To Mr. Mahoney,
the boss at the mining camp.
I was glad to find out that there is a
little law and order around here. Mr. Mahoney was nice. He said that he
wouldn't be surprised if they were cooled in the can for a few days, and then
confined to the camp area. Matter of fact, I radioed him again last night. It's
been done."
John Endlich's vast sigh of relief was
slightly tainted by the idea that to call on a policing power for protection
was a little bit on the timid side.
"Oh," he grunted.
"Thanks. I never thought of doing that."
"Johnny."
"Yeah?"
"I kind of got the notion, though—from
between the lines of what Mr. Mahoney said—that there was heavy trouble brewing
at the camp.
About conditions, and home-leaves, and increased
profit-sharing.
Maybe there's danger of riots and whatnot, Johnny.
Anyhow, Mr. Mahoney said that we should Tceep on exercising all reasonable
caution.'"
"Hmm-m—Mr.
Mahoney is
very
nice, ain't he?" Endlich growled.
"You stop that,
Johnny," Rose ordered.
But
her husband had already passed beyond thoughts of jealousy. He was thinking of
the time when
Neely
would have worked out his
sentence, and would be free to roam around again—no doubt with increased
annoyance at the Endlich clan for causing his restraint.
If a
riot or something didn't spring him, beforehand.
John Endlich itched to
try to tear his head off. But, of course, the same consequences as before still
applied . . .
As it turned out, the Endlichs had a reprieve
of two months and fourteen days, almost to the hour and figured on a strictly
Earth-time scale.
For what it was worth, they accomplished a
great deal. In their great plastic greenhouse, supported like a colossal bubble
by the humid, artificially-warmed air inside it, long troughs were filled with
pebbles and hydroponic solution. And therein tomatoes were planted, and
lettuce, radishes, com, onions, melons—just about everything in the vegetable
line.
There
remained plenty of ground left over from the five acres, so John Endlich
tinkered with that fifty-million-year-old tractor, figured out its
atomic-power-to-steam principle, and used it to help harrow up the ancient soil
of a smashed planet. He added commercial fertilizers and nitrates to it—the
nitrates were, of course, distinct from the gaseous nitrogen that had been
held, spongelike, by the subsoil, and had helped supply the greenhouse with
atmosphere. Then he harrowed the ground again. The tractor worked fine, except
that the feeble gravity made the lugs of its wheels slip a lot. He repeated his
planting, in the old-fashioned manner.