Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “We?” Dave stared. “I didn’t suppose you were going, Dr. Callahan—”

  The old man laughed, almost soundlessly. “After all these years of working and waiting, do you think I’ll miss going to Mars? Certainly the doctors say the acceleration will kill me. But alive or dead, I’m going to be with the first men to land on another planet.”

  “The first men—” Dave stopped; one of the assistants, a young fellow named Dawson, had laid a hand on his arm and squeezed it hard and urgently. He swallowed, and looked hard at the old scientist, “I understand perfectly,” he managed to say.

  “For fifty years,” said Callahan, “I have wanted to be the one to conquer space. When I was a boy, I read imaginary tales of adventure on the other worlds. But there was something in me which was not satisfied with reading. I swore an oath to myself, by the holiness of science, that I would be the first seeker to land on Mars.”

  He passed on into the inner chamber, through the great steel doors that gave access to the rocket. Dave goggled at Dawson and passed a hand over his brow. It was hot in the caisson.

  “Since the teleports were started,” said Dawson. “He won’t read the newspapers, won’t hear of the Martian colonization. Nobody know’s whether he’s really insane or not—and nobody has the heart to find out.”

  “But when the ship gets to Mars,” gulped Dave, “and the colonists come out with native-grown floral wreaths—”

  “He’ll not live to get there,” said Dawson flatly. He shrugged his youthful shoulders, and he, too, turned toward the ship.

  The ports were sealed with a stuff like rubber, a nameless new stuff that would remain air-tight alike at 1° K. or under the unshielded radiation of the Sun. Strapped and cushioned in for the acceleration, Dave Barkley had a sense of nightmare. He yearned frantically to be back on Mars, in the editorial office of the Colonist, with Elders shouting at him.

  Abruptly the ship thundered and leaped. His heart staggered and darkness washed before his eyes. The wished-for image of Elders seemed to come out of the darkness, swelling to huge size and cursing him in a voice as of Apocalyptic trumpets. Dave passed out.

  It was only a matter of moments, and he suffered abominably—more mentally than physically, to be sure—throughout the rest of the hours of terrific acceleration that took them off the Earth. For that matter, he suffered abominably during the rest of the flight as well—two weeks of hell. He developed an acute claustrophobia, something he had never felt before. The others seemed without emotions, mere extensions of the instruments they manipulated unweariedly. They hardly spoke, and that helped to madden Dave. The other newspaperman aboard, Carlson of the New York Sun, was just another man of iron like the rest. He took notes with a steady pencil; his most human remark was to wish to Heaven he had a typewriter.

  It slowly became apparent, though, that they were going to make it; that is, if the rocket could land without smashing. It had done so before, in the Arizona desert. There would be a field leveled, near Aresia.

  Often during those two weeks Dave crept laboriously up the ladder within the shell—up, because the acceleration continued at one Earth gravity to the midpoint of the trajectory, then the ship turned end for end, in a neat maneuver, to use its great stern rockets as brakes—up the ladder to the cabin where Callahan lay. At least the old man would talk, when his weakness let him, and, thought Dave, he was good society to go crazy in.

  He heard over and over the story of Callahan’s dreams, his trials and failures and successes. He heard his wheezing laughter of triumph as he prophesied that he would yet live to reach Mars.

  “They wanted to bring along the embalming fluid to squirt into me after acceleration!” chortled Callahan feebly. “I told them, ‘No, thank you. I’ll stink as much as I please.’ ” He went off into a spasm of gasping chuckles. His old heart was throbbing irregularly now, like a worn and abused engine.

  There came a time when Mars was only two days ahead, they told him. It was always the same inside the ship, hot, stifling, with the rockets never silent in their steady rumble, slowing the projectile.

  Dawson came down from the mobile observation turret, his eyes reddened from squinting through the six-inch refractor. His face looked puzzled, that was all; a sort of abstract scientific bewilderment.

  He spoke to Peters, at the control panel: “That’s funny. We should be able to see the light signals by now when it’s night in Aresia.” Peters jerked his head around, his jaw dropping half an inch. “You can’t see the signal?”

  Dawson rubbed his blond-stubbled chin abstractedly. “Not a blink. It must be that the atmosphere has the qualities-of one-way opacity suggested by Cooper to explain the apparent phenomenon of the ‘canals,’ whose nonexistence exploration has finally proved. But that’s the funniest thing. I was about to tell you: the ‘canals’ show up from the turret as plain as the nose on your face.”

  “I want to see that,” said Peters stonily. He flipped a switch, locking the controls, and went up into the turret with a scramble.

  “What does that mean?” asked Dave Barkley fearfully, eying Dawson as if the latter had hydrophobia.

  “Mean? Nothing much. Even if the signaling apparatus has gone haywire, or the atmosphere is too opaque, our course will carry us to Aresia with a probable error of not over fifty miles all ways. We can correct for that much in the stratosphere; we carry a small but adequate fuel reserve for that purpose, and we’ll have a radio signal to guide us then.”

  “I see,” said Dave, somewhat relieved.

  “If you and Dr. Callahan get to talking again, don’t mention this to him. Naturally, he’s not expecting any signal.”

  “Sure,” said Dave.

  But it was not long thereafter that he realized they were afraid. Those cool and certain young men, who could not crack because they knew exactly what the score was, were beginning to crack now. Their knowledge had failed them. He saw Dawson, now, with a blind look of near-panic in his eyes, mirroring the apparent blindness of the telescope. For, a scant two hundred thousand miles from Mars, they still saw nothing.

  Nothing, that is, but the atmospheric illusion of the canals. Those dark streaks and stripes, geometrically crossing the great red disk, only grew plainer as they hurtled near. By now, Dawson admitted, they should be able to see the new-built works of man on Mars, his farms and roads and his cities of Aresia and Spaceport and Xanadu, But there was nothing. Nothing—but they saw what seemed to be great tawny dust-whirls crossing the brick-colored surface. Those, too, which had been observed early in the present century, had long since been written off as upper-atmospheric phenomena. There were no dust storms on Mars; the deserts there, utterly barren of life, were smooth wastes of red sandstone. Only where men had shattered the stone with explosives had the fossil desert become sand and soil again.

  “We’ll have to go ahead and land blind,” said Dawson, passing a hand across his smarting eyes. There was something painful about the way he said the last word. These, thought Dave, were the men of science, the seeing men. I’m not much more scared than I was when I started. That’s because I didn’t know anything to begin with.

  Callahan, in his cabin behind the control chamber, knew that they were approaching the red planet and could talk of nothing but of the nearness of his great triumph. He was sure, now, that he would live through the deceleration. He could not die yet.

  When Dave was strapped into the cushions once more, and the brain-numbing thunder began, he thought of the old man up there, grappling with death by the strength of his will, and perhaps it was the thought of Callahan that gave him strength to remain conscious this time.

  The spaceship plunged through emptiness toward a mystery-shrouded Mars. Dave hung on against the threatening darkness and the stifling heat that leaked through the insulation, and thought of the easy-chair and the long cool drink he would have in the Colonial Club in Aresia. And now, fortified by that drink and maybe some more, he would tell Elders just what he thought of that job.
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  After hours of that battle, the thrust of the drive waxed briefly, then fell off, and he knew they were not far from the surface. His stomach lurched as side thrusts swung the ship, but as it rode briefly on an even keel he could feel at last the blessed, steady pull of planetary gravity. Then, minutes later, the rocket teetered down, pillowed on flaming gases, to contact solidity once more.

  The jar of landing set bells ringing in Dave’s head; they had hardly stopped chiming when Peters was bending over his bunk to set him free of his protecting bonds. He could hear a sizzling sound, and a pungent smell of burning told him that someone was flaming open the ports.

  Dave sat up as Peters unstrapped his legs, and mopped sweat out of his eyes. He asked limply, “Is Doc Callahan still—”

  The other nodded briefly; he turned away, toward the flickering light of the torch that was burning away the seal, and spoke with an intensity of feeling that surprised Dave:

  “I wish they’d hurry up and get that open. We couldn’t observe after we started deceleration, and the radio beam didn’t come through. We used our sending equipment to come in on soundings. But up to the last minute when we could use the telescope, we couldn’t get the light signal or any familiar feature outside the polar cloud caps. And—those—canals—were—still—there!”

  Dave straightened stiffened arms and legs; it was such sheer luxury to be able to move that he paid only half attention to what the technician was saying. Then the port clanged open.

  Peters, already wearing his Martian respirator, vanished toward the exit. When Dave got his on and wriggled through the three-foot opening in the air-tight shell, three of the five crew members were already standing on the Martian plain; Dawson was among them, but neither he nor any of the others even glanced around as Dave dropped to the ground on unsteady legs.

  He looked at them, then followed their eyes, and froze as they had.

  There, where the city of Aresia should have lain within view of their planned landing place, surrounded by its green fields and radiating white highways, was—a city. A city, yes, but a city in ruin. And they all stared as if paralyzed in the act of looking, for not only was it wholly, staggeringly unexpected, but—never before had man of Earth seen such a ruin.

  To begin with, the city had been tremendous, and it was still a colossal shell. Above the rubble-mounds rose skeletons and splinters of what had been sky-pointing towers, buildings to rival the hugest skyscrapers of New York. Walls stood absurdly alone, gaping windows. Four-leveled traffic ways had fallen to add their debris to the stupendous wreck, and among the tangle were what might have been the remains of smashed vehicles. A tough and scanty vegetation grew here and there on sandy mounds.

  The city began perhaps half a mile away across the desert, and the Martian air was clear. Every detail stood out as if just before them, and wish as you might you could not doubt your eyes. Mirage? But a mirage is an image of something that exists elsewhere, and no such city existed anywhere.

  Someone else came grunting through the port and dropped to the ground; it was Carlson, the New York newsman. When he saw the city he stopped short like the rest, but his arrival broke the spell on them. They stared at each other; it was Dawson who broke the silence, in a voice whose strained tenseness came even through the distortion of the thin Martian air: “We must have missed our point of landing, and come down in some remote area. But those ruins—Barkley, you’re from Mars; do you know anything about them?”

  Dave shook his head, feeling incapable of speech.

  “Then,” put in another, “we must have come down in some region hitherto unexplored.”

  “Mars has been completely mapped from the air,” Dave said, swallowing. “They couldn’t have missed a landmark this size.” Carlson found his tongue. “That looks like a city that’s been bombed,” he said in an unbelieving voice. “Bombed with something that would make TNT look like a match sputtering.”

  Not far away, there was a chasm in the red desert that must have been easily a hundred feet across. For far around it the sand carpet was strewn with large and small masses of rock, split and shattered as if by a blast of titanic violence.

  Someone else scrambled out the port, another of the boys of the crew. He, too, stopped and stared wide-eyed at the scene; then, at a call from within, he turned hastily, and with shaking hands helped maneuver a folding stretcher through the narrow opening. On it lay Callahan, his eyes half closed, on his seamed face a shadow of exhaustion and a light of victory.

  But his eyes opened behind the respirator mask as they set him down on the red soil. Someone, even in that stunned moment, brought a cushion from the ship and put it behind his head so that he could sit up. Callahan saw the city, and he lay there quiescent, feasting his eyes upon that ruin as if he were St. Augustine regarding the City of God.

  “A dead city,” he whispered almost inaudibly. “The remnant of a mighty civilization, ancient, older than man. That is what I dreamed of finding here on Mars, but I never dared hope.” He paused, turned his head slightly toward the huddled group of his assistants; he did not seem to notice the disturbance in their faces. “Take me there. If I die—leave me there, when you go back.” He chuckled, an eerie sound through his helmet and the thin air. “The first—permanent—outpost of man on Mars.”

  They looked at each other, drawing closer together. Dawson, looking years older, jerked his thin shoulders nervously inside his insulator suit.

  “We might as well investigate,” he said. “We might find something—anything—to—” His voice trailed off; he could not think of anything that might help them.

  Nevertheless, they walked that half-mile across the red sand to the ruined city, leaving one man behind to guard the spaceship—a pointless precaution, since they had no smallest weapon, and there were no signs of life here save for the struggling, drab-green plants—but that city unknown to man had inspired with a nameless fear, with visions of unimaginable beings that might still haunt its ruined towers. Two of the crew lifted Callahan on the stretcher and carried him between them in the midst.

  Halfway there, he died.

  After a few moments, the two young men took up their burden again, wordlessly, and they tramped on. They crossed highways built of a stuff like cement and like rubber, with a surface of velvet—blasted and torn. They passed buildings that lay in the outskirts, mostly fallen; and at last, when the wreckage-strewn ground had become well-nigh impassable, they came to the canal.

  It had cut a swath as straight as an arrow through the heart of the city, and outside the city it angled away to the west across the desert, as far as the eye could see. It was not only a canal, but along its sides had gone passenger walks and many-speed traffic ways, and the great highway had followed the canal into the desert. Along its margins the scrubby vegetation grew in greater profusion, and there were even dwarfish trees.

  Now it was choked with debris that had slid and fallen to countless tons from above and around, and here and there it was almost obliterated by a direct hit of whatever terrific weapon had destroyed the city. And the bottom, where otherwise clear, was caked with a layer of fine sand, blown and drifted; that, too, must have been a product of the explosions.

  Beyond the canal rose mountainous kitchen-middens, heaps of wreckage so shattered and confused that it was obvious they could go no further. The party halted, and the bearers laid the stretcher on the ground.

  “The canals!” exclaimed Dawson all at once, as if to himself. “The canals!”

  “There’s nothing like that on Mars,” said Dave.

  Dawson whirled on him. “But we are on Mars! We flew a foolproof trajectory, plotted by mathematics. Everything was perfect . . . perfect—” He broke off suddenly, teeth sinking into his lower lip; he was shaking a little.

  Dave wondered if in a minute the numbness would leave him and he would be scared, too. He turned away, toward Callahan’s bier, and said loudly:

  “Dr. Callahan’s last wish was to be left somewhere in this cit
y. I suggest we do as he asked, then start worrying about getting out of here—when we find out where here—”

  The two men hesitated briefly, then lifted the stretcher. Dave cast about, and saw not far away, on the brink of the broad canal, a massive block of red Martian sandstone, rough-hewn, placed there long ago for some unguessable purpose. He gestured toward it, and said simply, “There ought to do.”

  They lifted Callahan to the top of that mighty slab, and laid him there with his face to the burning Martian sky. As Dave started to turn away—feeling curiously his lack of a hat to take off—his foot struck something which gave way brittlely, and he looked down to see a human skeleton.

  A naked sunburnt skeleton which must have been a woman’s, by the smallness of the bones and the smoothness of the skull. There was a ring on one of the fingers. He stared down at it, feeling no shock for a moment at the token of death in that dead city—then it struck him.

  “A human,” he said stupidly. “A human skeleton, in a city men never built.”

  None of them were capable of much more surprise.

  “Perhaps men did build this city,” said Dawson. He had regained his self-control and was holding it with a great effort. “There must be an explanation—”

  It was then that Dave caught sight of the letters cut into one of the weathered faces of the stone block. He stared for an instant, then beckoned to Dawson; the latter stooped, and read the carving aloud.

  “Aresia, 2115 A. D.”

  When Dawson straightened, his was the only face there that was not as blank as the ancient stone. His was white with a struggle of comprehension and an effort not to believe.

  “What does it mean, Dawson?” asked Dave, catching his eye and holding it, unwilling. “What does it mean in mathematics—the name of my home town, and a date over a hundred years in the future?”