“Calm down, Learoyd,” sighed the doctor.
“Greener!” taunted the old-timer. “Call yourself Marsmen!”
“You can call us anything you want, Learoyd,” said the doctor. “Only we’ve got to straighten this thing out. When did you last take marcaine? It won’t—”
“You don’t even know where you are!” quavered the old man. “Lake-us Sole-us, my eye! You’re right on the edge of Ryan’s Plain and you don’t even know it. He was here first and he had a right to name it! Old Jim Ryan . . .”
PATIENTLY Tony tried to explain: “Brenner says somebody Stole the hundred kilos of marcaine two days ago. It could have been any of us. You were around, so we’ve got to be able to tell Commissioner Bell—”
“Another greener—a politician greener. The Law on Mars!” Learoyd’s voice was heavily satirical. “When there was twenty, ‘thirty’ of us, we didn’t need no law; we didn’t go around thieving! We got here ahead of you all, you and the farmers, too. What for did you have to come crowding in?”
“When did you-take that last belt of marcaine?”
The old pork-and-beaner sighed brokenly. “It was more’n two years ago. I ain’t got money for marcaine. I ain’t a panhandler and I do a good job hauling for you, don’t I?”
“Sure, Learoyd.”
“Then why do you have to come bothering me? We was here first! He collapsed into the chair by the black box, grieving for the past of the red planet, before this damn OxEn, when Marsworthy lungs were a man’s passport to adventure where no mail had ever been before, where a mountain range was your mountain range and nobody else’s, where Jim Ryan died in the middle of great, flat, spreading Ryan’s Plain, starved to death out there when his halftrack broke down.
Learoyd chuckled, not feeling the electrodes they were putting to his head. He’d got off a good one—five years on Mars and these ten greeners landed. They wanted to be heroes, the little greeners, but he told them. He sure told them.
“Call yourselves Marsmen? In six months half of you’ll be dead. And the other half’ll wish they was.”
Jim Granata was in that bunch—a sly one, pumping him, making notes, making sketches, but he wasn’t a Marsman. He went back to Earth and made him a pot full of money with books and—what did they call it?—Granata’s Combined Interplanetary Shows. Little Jim, he called himself Red Sand Jim Granata, but he was never a Marsman.
The Marsmen came first. Sam Welch surveyed Royal Range, the Palisades. Amby McCoy—he got killed by eating Mars plants; they found him with his food run out, curled up with the agony of poisoning. A thousand dollars a day they got then, when a thousand dollars was a thousand.
It was in ’07 he told off those greeners twenty-eight years ago. Only one rocket every couple years then, and sometimes they didn’t get through. Jim Granata, he never set foot on Mars after ’18 with his money and all; he wasn’t a Marsman. They were here first. Nobody could take that away from them.
Sant Welch, Amby McCoy, Jim Ryan. Why not die too? Learoyd wondered bitterly. A thousand dollars a day they paid him when a thousand dollars was a thousand, and look at him now. Where had it gone? Why was he living by hauling dirt for the greeners when he had been here first? His lip trembled and he wiped his mouth.
SOMEBODY was shaking his shoulder and saying: “That’s all, Learoyd. You’re in the clear. Nothing to worry about.”
The old man slouched through the crowd and out of the I.ab, shaking his head and muttering what sounded like curses.
Tony hadn’t been very far from hoping that Learoyd would turn out to be the thief. The law would have to go easy on him and it would clean up the Colony’s problem.
Colonist after colonist seated himself in the chair and cleared himself by revealing marcaine-negative brainwaves to the e.e.g. Tony didn’t dare to think of what it meant. The last of them, the boy from the radio shack, was relieved to take his turn.
“That’s the lot,” Tony reported to Nick when young Tad, too, was cleared by the machine, and had gone back to his job.
Cantrella refused to share the doctor’s gloom. “It’s just what we needed,” he insisted, smacking his fist into his palm. “Face it, man. There isn’t any marcaine thief. Bell thinks he can run us off Mars by cutting off our import-export. Let them cut us off! We’ll barter for OxEn. We’ll damn well do without the Earthside enzymes and immunizers. We’ll get tough with Mars, lick it on its own ground! We’ll have to eventually; why not right now?”
“I don’t know, Nick. I think you’re going too fast,” Tony demurred. “Look at old Learoyd he’s us, only a little worse.”
“The pork-and-beaners imported their food, clothes, fuel, and look at them!” Nick insisted. “They failed. They didn’t strike roots. They didn’t adapt!”
“I don’t know, Nick,” the doctor repeated unhappily. “I’ve got to go see Polly and the baby now.”
ii
TONY lugged the e.e.g. back to his hospital-shack and found Anna holding the hand of a white, trembling, terrified Polly. Polly’s other arm was around the baby, clutching the red-faced little thing as if it were on the edge of a precipice.
Without a word he took the child, snapped on his stethoscope and sounded its heart, which was normal. In spite of the red-faced creature’s squirming, the minute oxygen mask was in place.
Baffled, he replaced the baby and demanded of the women: “What’s wrong?”
“I have to work,” said Anna abruptly. She patted Polly’s hand and slipped out.
“I saw something,” Polly whispered. Her eyes were crazy.
Tony sat on the side of the bed and picked up the hand Anna had been holding. It was cold.
“What did you see, Polly?” he asked kindly. “Spot’s on the baby? A rash?”
She disengaged her hand and pointed at the window in line with the bed and two meters from its foot.
“I saw a brownie. It wanted to steal my baby.” She clutched the child again, not taking her eyes off the window.
Normally Tony would have been amused and not shown it. Under the strain of the day, he fought down a violent anger. The little idiot! At a time when the whole Colony was in real and deadly peril, she was making no effort to distinguish between a dream and reality.
“You must have drowsed off,” he said, not as harshly as he felt. “It was just a nightmare. With your history, of course you’re afraid that somehow you’ll lose this baby too. You’ve heard all this pork-and-beaner and homesteader nonsense about brownies, so in your dream your fear took that form. That’s all there is to it.”
Polly shook her head. “Gladys was staying with me,” she recited monotonously, “and she had to go to that test in the Lab and she said she’d send somebody who’d been tested as soon as she got there, just when I heard the door close, this face came up outside the window. It was a brownie face. It had big thin ears and big eyes, with thin eyebrows, and it was bald and leathery.
“It looked at me and then it looked at my baby. I screamed and screamed but it just looked at my baby. It wanted to steal my baby. And then it got down below the window sill just before Anna came in. Even after she put my baby here with me, I couldn’t stop Shaking”
Anger was getting the better of him. “Do you realize that your story is perfectly ridiculous if you insist on claiming it really happened, but perfectly logical if you admit it was a dream?”
SHE began to cry and hug the baby. “I saw it! I saw it! I’m afraid!”
Tony relaxed; tears were the best medicine for her tension. To help them along, he rose and got her a sedative and a glass of water.
“Take this,” he said, putting the capsule to her mouth.
“I don’t want to go to sleep!” she sniffled. But she swallowed it and in a minute or two felt under her pillow for a handkerchief.
When she had wiped her eyes and blown her nose, the doctor said quietly: “I can prove it was a dream. The brownies are just the kind of thing the pork-and-beaners and the homesteaders would invent to scare them
selves with. And the myth got exploited in the Sunday supplements and on TV, of course. But there can’t be any brownies because there isn’t any animal life on Mars.
“We’ve been exploring this planet up, down and sideways for 40 years now. We found a weed you can make dope out of; we found you can make liquor-out of Mars plants; we found a lot of ores and minerals. But not one trace of animal life. Think of it, Polly—40 years and nobody has found any animal life on Mars.”
She reasoned, a little fuzzy with the sedative: “Maybe brownies could stay out of people’s way. If they’re smart they could.”
“That’s right. But what did the brownies evolve from in that case? You know that if you have a higher form of life, it evolved from a lower form. Where are all the lower forms of life that evolved into brownies? There aren’t any. Not so much as one puny little-amoeba. So if there’s no place the brownies could have come from, there are no brownies.”
Her face relaxed a little, and Tony talked on doggedly. “You got a bad scare and no mistake. But you. scared yourself, like the homesteaders that started this nonsense.” A sudden notion struck him. He put it in the urgent file, and went on. “You were afraid your bad luck would catch up with you and take your baby away. This is Mars, so you symbolized it as a brownie. The vividness doesn’t mean anything—you probably saw a scary picture in the papers of a baby-stealing Martian brownie and stored it in your memory, and out it popped at the right time.”
Polly cracked a sleepy smile arid said, “I’m sorry,” and closed her eyes.
She’ll be all right, thought Tony, and it’s a good thing it turned up to remind me of the homesteaders—Thaler? Toller?
Whoever they were, the old couple on the wretched “farm” to the South. Toller, that was. right. He hadn’t seen them for a year, but he was going to see them today.
Anna was in the other, residential, half of the shack. “I think I talked her out of it,” he said. “You’ll stay here?”
“Yes. Where are you off for?” He was lugging the e.e.g. out again.
“That old couple, the Tollers. I wouldn’t put the marcaine theft past them and they’re close enough to our general area. Before the last dozen Sun Lakers arrived, I had enough time on my hands to run out and see how they were coming along. If I just tell them it’s time for another checkup, I’m pretty sure I can persuade them to give me a brainwave reading. That may break the case.”
He strapped the black box to his bicycle and set off.
iii
THE Tollers were a different type from old Learoyd, and driven to Mars by a different urge. Learoyd had fancied himself an explorer and adventurer who would make a sudden strike and, after a suitably romantic life of adventure, retire to his wealth.
The Tollers laid the longer, slower-maturing plans of peasants: In two years, when I have saved up seven schilling three groschen, I will buy Bauer’s bull calf, which will service the cows of the village; Fritz by then will be big enough to take care of the work. Zimmerman, the drunkard, will go into debt to me for service of his cows and pledge his south strip, so Fritz need not marry his Eva. Schumacher’s Gretel has a. harelip but there’s no escaping it—his west pasture adjoins mine . . .
It hadn’t worked out for the Tollers—the steady, upward trend of land values, the slow improvement of the soil, the dozen sons and daughters to work it, the growing village, town, city—
All that happened was they had scratched out a living, had one son and gone a little dotty from hardship. Both had Marsworthy lungs. If she had not, Mrs. Toller would, like hundreds of other wives, have lived as matter-of-factly in an oxygen mask as her many-times-removed great-grandmother had lived in a sunbonnet.
The husband, by now, was stone-blind. Data from him and hundreds of others had helped to work out the protective shots against ultraviolet damage to the eyes, a tiny piece in the mosaic of research that had made real colonization at all possible.
Still, Tony dreaded visiting them. He didn’t see their mangy goat, last of a herd, that had been browsing wiregrass on his last trip. They must have slaughtered it to augment the scanty produce of their heavily manured kitchen garden.
He knocked on the door of the hut and went in, carrying the black box. Mrs. Toller was sitting in the dark, crammed little room’s only chair. Toller was in bed.
“Why, it’s Doctor Tony, Theron!” the old lady explained to her husband. Not bad, thought Tony, since he hadn’t been able to remember their names in a flash.
“Say hello to Doctor Tony, Theron. He brought us the mail!”
Mail? “No, Mrs. Toller—” he began.
The old man started out of a light doze and demanded: “Did the boy write? Read me what he wrote.”
“I didn’t bring any mail,” said Tony. “The rocket isn’t due for two weeks.”
“Junior will write in two weeks, Theron,” she told her husband. “These are our letters to him,” she said, producing three spacemailers from her bodice.
Tony started to protest, thought better of it, and glanced at them. All three were identical.
Our Dear Son,
How are you getting along? We are all well and hope you are well. We miss you here on the farm and hope that some day you will come back with a nice girl because one day it will all be yours when we are gone and it is a nice property in a growing section. Some day it will be all built up. Please write and tell us how you are getting along. We hope you are well and miss you.
Your Loving Parents
ON THE other side, the envelope side of spaceman blanks, Tony saw canceled fifty-dollar stamps and the address to “Theron Pogue Toller, Junior, R.F.D. Six, Texarkana, Texas, U.S.A., Earth.” The return address was: “Mr. and Mrs. T.P. Toller, c/o Sun Lake City Colony, Mars.” Stamped heavily on each was a large, red notice: “DIRECTORY SEARCHED, ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN, RETURNED TO SENDER.”
The old man croaked, “Did the boy write?”
“I’ve come to give you a physical checkup,” said Tony loudly, oppressed by the squalid walls and the senile dementia they housed.
“Isn’t that nice of Doctor Tony, Theron?” asked Mrs. Toller, tucking the letters back into her dress. But the old man had fallen asleep again.
Tony clipped the electrodes on and joggled Toller awake for a reading. Marcaine-negative.
“We came in such a beautiful rocket ship,” rambled Mrs. Toller as he put the e.e.g. on her. “It was quite an adventure, wasn’t it, Theron? We were so young, only 23 and 24, and we sold our place in Missouri. It was such a lovely rocket we came in, a little one, not like the ones today, but this was before Mars got built up. We had quite a fright when one of the steering jets went bad while Mars was ahead, just like a big moon, and the poor crewmen had to go outside in their suits. It was quite an adventure, wasn’t it, Theron?
“I often wonder, Doctor Tony, whether Junior has ever been back to the old place in Missouri. We had him our first year here, you know; he’s 19. He wanted to see the Earth, didn’t he, Theron? So when he was 17 we went all the way to Marsport to see him off. It was quite an adventure, wasn’t it, Theron? And he sent us his address right away—”
Marcaine-negative brainwave.
He was too sickened to stay, and the birdlike chatter of Mrs. Toller never stopped as foe said good-by and wheeled off to Sun Lake.
Their horrible deterioration during the past year to senility in the mid-forties answered Nick Cantrella’s plan to establish the colony immediately as self-sustaining.
It simply couldn’t be done. It was bad enough now—the damn dull, monotonous, primitive, regulated existence of the colony. How long was it now since he’d eaten an egg? How long since he’d drunk a cup of coffee, real coffee, with cream and sugar? How long since he had worn underclothes or had a real bath? How long since he’d had a highball after a good day’s work? Or smoked his pipe without frantic puffing to keep it lit in the thin, cold, oxygen-poor air?
But life on Mars without even the minimum of supplies, immunization and adaptation shots
was out of the question. If they asked his medical advice, his answer would have to be:
“If we are forbidden Earth supplies we must go back to Earth.”
TONY groped in his pocket for his pipe, and clenched it between his teeth. All right then, he thought, go back to Earth—go back and get yourself a decent cup of coffee in the morning. Go back—
Back to what? To a clinic in an industrial town where he could give slapdash time-clocked attention to the most obvious ills of men, women, and children whose fears and deprivations began in the womb and ended only in the grave? Cure a kid’s pneumonia, then send him back to the drafty apartment again? Fix up an alcoholic factory-worker, and return him to the ugliness that will put him on dope or in the schizo ward next year? No, he’d tried the clinics already, and they wouldn’t do.
Back to the Office, maybe? An office like the one he’d had, briefly, in the penthouse of a New York apartment building. Take your patients one at a time, give them plenty of attention, they’re easy to cure if you understand them—the ulcers and piles and false pregnancies, the thousand-and-one diseases of the body that grew out of the prevailing disease of the mind—fear.
Go back? He bit hard on his empty pipe. It would be consoling to stand again on Earth, and fill his pipe and light it, puff clouds of smoke—while he waited for the crowded, psychotic planet to blow itself up and put an end to man once and for all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HANK RADCLIFF shook Tony awake a little before dawn.
“I got the stuff, Doc,” he grinned. “Just came in on foot from Pittco. The half-track broke down twenty miles out of Mars Machine on the way back, and I bummed a ride on a Pittco plane, headed this way. The half-track’s still at Rolling Mills and—”
The doctor shook his head groggily and thought of giving Hank hell for the abrupt awakening. But it was hard to stay mad at him, and Tony would have been roused by his alarm clock fox the Lab check in a quarter-hour anyway. Did the Lab check matter? Did the medication for Joan matter? No. They were all heading back for Earth before long.
Collected Short Fiction Page 111
