by John Wyndham
The First Officer called Duncan into the navigating room to take a look at his future home.
‘There it is,’ he said, waving his hand at a watch-screen.
Duncan looked at the jagged-surfaced crescent. There was no scale to it: it could have been the size of Luna, or of a basket-ball. Either size, it was still just a lump of rock, turning slowly over.
‘How big?’ he asked.
‘Around forty miles mean diameter.’
‘What’d that be in gravity?’
‘Haven’t worked it out. Call it slight, and reckon there isn’t any, and you’ll be near enough.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Duncan.
On the way back to the mess-room he paused to put his head into the cabin. Lellie was lying on her bunk, with the spring-cover fastened over her to give some illusion of weight. At the sight of him she raised herself on one elbow.
She was small – not much over five feet. Her face and hands were delicate; they had a fragility which was not simply a matter of poor bone-structure. To an Earthman her eyes looked unnaturally round, seeming to give her permanently an expression of innocence surprised. The lobes of her ears hung unusually low out of a mass of brown hair that glinted with red among its waves. The paleness of her skin was emphasized by the colour on her cheeks and the vivid red on her lips.
‘Hey,’ said Duncan. ‘You can start to get busy packing up the stuff now.’
‘Packing up?’ she repeated doubtfully, in a curiously resonant voice.
‘Sure. Pack,’ Duncan told her. He demonstrated by opening a box, cramming some clothes into it, and waving a hand to include the rest. Her expression did not change, but the idea got across.
‘We are come?’ she asked.
‘We are nearly come. So get busy on this lot,’ he informed her.
‘Yith – okay,’ she said, and began to unhook the cover.
Duncan shut the door, and gave a shove which sent him floating down the passage leading to the general mess and living-room.
Inside the cabin, Lellie pushed away the cover. She reached down cautiously for a pair of metallic soles, and attached them to her slippers by their clips. Still cautiously holding on to the bunk, she swung her feet over the side and lowered them until the magnetic soles clicked into contact with the floor. She stood up, more confidently. The brown overall suit she wore revealed proportions that might be admired among Martians, but by Earth standards they were not classic – it is said to be the consequence of the thinner air of Mars that has in the course of time produced a greater lung capacity, with consequent modification. Still ill at ease with her condition of weightlessness, she slid her feet to keep contact as she crossed the room. For some moments she paused in front of a wall mirror, contemplating her reflection. Then she turned away and set about the packing.
‘– one hell of a place to take a woman to,’ Wishart, the ship’s cook, was saying as Duncan came in.
Duncan did not care a lot for Wishart – chiefly on account of the fact that when it had occurred to him that it was highly desirable for Lellie to have some lessons in weightless cooking, Wishart had refused to give the tuition for less than £50, and thus increased the investment cost to £2,360. Nevertheless, it was not his way to pretend to have misheard.
‘One hell of a place to be given a job,’ he said, grimly.
No one replied to that. They knew how men came to be offered way-load jobs.
It was not necessary, as the Company frequently pointed out, for superannuation at the age of forty to come as a hardship to anyone: salaries were good, and they could cite plenty of cases where men had founded brilliant subsequent careers on the savings of their space-service days. That was all right for the men who had saved, and had not been obsessively interested in the fact that one four-legged animal can run faster than another. But this was not even an enterprising way to have lost one’s money, so when in came to Duncan’s time to leave crew work they made him no more than the routine offer.
He had never been to Jupiter IV/II, but he knew just what it would be like – something that was second moon to Callisto; itself fourth moon, in order of discovery, to Jupiter; would inevitably be one of the grimmer kinds of cosmic pebble. They offered no alternative, so he signed up at the usual terms: £5,000 a year for five years, all found, plus five months’ waiting time on half-pay before he could get there, plus six months afterwards, also on half-pay, during ‘readjustment to gravity’.
Well – it meant the next six years taken care of; five of them without expenses, and a nice little sum at the end.
The splinter in the mouthful was: could you get through five years of isolation without cracking up? Even when the psychologist had okayed you, you couldn’t be sure. Some could: others went to pieces in a few months, and had to be taken off, gibbering. If you got through two years, they said, you’d be okay for five. But the only way to find out about the two was to try …
‘What about my putting in the waiting time on Mars? I could live cheaper there,’ Duncan suggested.
They had consulted planetary tables and sailing schedules, and discovered that it would come cheaper for them, too. They had declined to split the difference on the saving thus made, but they had booked him a passage for the following week, and arranged for him to draw, on credit, from the Company’s Agent there.
The Martian colony in and around Port Clarke is rich in ex-spacemen who find it more comfortable to spend their rearguard years in the lesser gravity, broader morality, and greater economy obtaining there. They are great advisers. Duncan listened, but discarded most of it. Such methods of occupying oneself to preserve sanity as learning the Bible or the works of Shakespeare by heart, or copying out three pages of the Encyclopaedia every day, or building model spaceships in bottles, struck him not only as tedious, but probably of doubtful efficacy, as well. The only one which he had felt to show sound practical advantages was that which had led him to picking Lellie to share his exile, and he still fancied it was a sound one, in spite of its letting him in for £2,360.
He was well enough aware of the general opinion about it to refrain from adding a sharp retort to Wishart. Instead, he conceded:
‘Maybe it’d not do to take a real woman to a place like that. But a Mart’s kind of different …’
‘Even a Mart –’ Wishart began, but he was cut short by finding himself drift slowly across the room as the arrester tubes began to fire.
Conversation ceased as everybody turned-to on the job of securing all loose objects.
Jupiter IV/II was, by definition, a sub-moon, and probably a captured asteroid. The surface was not cratered, like Luna’s: it was simply a waste of jagged, riven rocks. The satellite as a whole had the form of an irregular ovoid; it was a bleak, cheerless lump of stone splintered off some vanished planet, with nothing whatever to commend it but its situation.
There have to be way-load stations. It would be hopelessly uneconomic to build big ships capable of landing on the major planets. A few of the older and smaller ships were indeed built on Earth, and so had to be launched from there, but the very first large, moon-assembled ship established a new practice. Ships became truly spaceships and were no longer built to stand the strains of high gravitational pull. They began to make their voyages, carrying fuel, stores, freight and changes of personnel, exclusively between satellites. Newer types do not put in even at Luna, but use the artificial satellite, Pseudos, exclusively as their Earth terminus.
Freight between the way-loads and their primaries is customarily consigned in powered cylinders known as crates; passengers are ferried back and forth in small rocket-ships. Stations such as Pseudos, or Deimos, the main way-load for Mars, handle enough work to keep a crew busy, but in the outlying, little-developed posts one man who is part-handler, part-watchman is enough. Ships visited them infrequently. On Jupiter IV/II one might, according to Duncan’s information, expect an average of one every eight or nine months (Earth).
The ship continued to slow, coming in on a sp
iral, adjusting her speed to that of the satellite. The gyros started up to give stability. The small, jagged world grew until it overflowed the watch-screens. The ship was manoeuvred into a close orbit. Miles of featureless, formidable rocks slid monotonously beneath her.
The station site came sliding on to the screen from the left; a roughly levelled area of a few acres; the first and only sign of order in the stony chaos. At the far end was a pair of hemispherical huts, one much larger than the other. At the near end, a few cylindrical crates were lined up beside a launching ramp hewn from the rock. Down each side of the area stood rows of canvas bins, some stuffed full of a conical shape; others slack, empty or half-empty. A huge parabolic mirror was perched on a crag behind the station, looking like a monstrous, formalized flower. In the whole scene there was only one sign of movement – a small, space-suited figure prancing madly about on a metal apron in front of the larger dome, waving its arms in a wild welcome.
Duncan left the screen, and went to the cabin. He found Lellie fighting off a large case which, under the influence of deceleration, seemed determined to pin her against the wall. He shoved the case aside, and pulled her out.
‘We’re there,’ he told her. ‘Put on your space-suit.’
Her round eyes ceased to pay attention to the case, and turned towards him. There was no telling from them how she felt, what she thought. She said, simply:
‘Thpace-thuit. Yith – okay.’
Standing in the airlock of the dome, the outgoing Superintendent paid more attention to Lellie than to the pressure-dial. He knew from experience exactly how long equalizing took, and opened his face-plate without even a glance at the pointer.
‘Wish I’d had the sense to bring one,’ he observed. ‘Could have been mighty useful on the chores, too.’
He opened the inner door, and led through.
‘Here it is – and welcome to it,’ he said.
The main living-room was oddly shaped by reason of the dome’s architecture, but it was spacious. It was also exceedingly, sordidly untidy.
‘Meant to clean it up – never got around to it, some way,’ he added. He looked at Lellie. There was no visible sign of what she thought of the place. ‘Never can tell with Marts,’ he said uneasily. ‘They kind of non-register.’
Duncan agreed: ‘I’ve figured this one looked astonished at being born, and never got over it.’
The other man went on looking at Lellie. His eyes strayed from her to a gallery of pinned-up terrestrial beauties, and back again.
‘Sort of funny shape Marts are,’ he said, musingly.
‘This one’s reckoned a good enough looker where she comes from,’ Duncan told him, a trifle shortly.
‘Sure. No offence, Bud. I guess they’ll all seem a funny shape to me after this spell.’ He changed the subject. ‘I’d better show you the ropes around here.’
Duncan signed to Lellie to open her face-plate so that she could hear him, and then told her to get out of her suit.
The dome was the usual type: double-floored, double-walled, with an insulated and evacuated space between the two; constructed as a unit, and held down by metal bars let into the rock. In the living-quarters there were three more sizable rooms, able to cope with increased personnel if trade should expand.
‘The rest,’ the outgoing man explained, ‘is the regular station stores, mostly food, air cylinders, spares of one kind and another, and water – you’ll need to watch her on water; most women seem to think it grows naturally in pipes.’
Duncan shook his head.
‘Not Marts. Living in deserts gives ’em a natural respect for water.’
The other picked up a clip of store-sheets.
‘We’ll check and sign these later. It’s a nice soft job here. Only freight now is rare metalliferous earth. Callisto’s not been opened up a lot yet. Handling’s easy. They tell you when a crate’s on the way: you switch on the radio beacon to bring it in. On dispatch you can’t go wrong if you follow the tables.’ He looked around the room. ‘All home comforts. You read? Plenty of books.’ He waved a hand at the packed rows which covered half the inner partition wall. Duncan said he’d never been much of a reader. ‘Well, it helps,’ said the other. ‘Find pretty well anything that’s known in that lot. Records there. Fond of music?’
Duncan said he liked a good tune.
‘H’m. Better try the other stuff. Tunes get to squirrelling inside your head. Play chess?’ He pointed to a board, with men pegged into it.
Duncan shook his head.
‘Pity. There’s a fellow over on Callisto plays a pretty hot game. He’ll be disappointed not to finish this one. Still, if I was fixed up the way you are, maybe I’d not have been interested in chess.’ His eyes strayed to Lellie again. ‘What do you reckon she’s going to do here, over and above cooking and amusing you?’ he asked.
It was not a question that had occurred to Duncan, but he shrugged.
‘Oh, she’ll be okay, I guess. There’s a natural dumbness about Marts – they’ll sit for hours on end, doing damn all. It’s a gift they got.’
‘Well, it should come in handy here,’ said the other.
The regular ship’s-call work went on. Cases were unloaded, the metalliferous earths hosed from the bins into the holds. A small ferry-rocket came up from Callisto carrying a couple of time-expired prospectors, and left again with their two replacements. The ship’s engineers checked over the station’s machinery, made renewals, topped up the water tanks, charged the spent air cylinders, tested, tinkered and tested again before giving their final Ok.
Duncan stood outside on the metal apron where not long ago his predecessor had performed his fantastic dance of welcome, to watch the ship take off. She rose straight up, with her jets pushing her gently. The curve of her hull became an elongated crescent shining against the black sky. The main driving jets started to gush white flame edged with pink. Quickly she picked up speed. Before long she had dwindled to a speck which sank behind the ragged skyline.
Quite suddenly Duncan felt as if he, too, had dwindled. He had become a speck upon a barren mass of rock which was itself a speck in the immensity. The indifferent sky about him had no scale. It was an utterly black void wherein his mother-sun and a myriad more suns flared perpetually, without reason or purpose.
The rocks of the satellite itself, rising up in their harsh crests and ridges, were without scale, too. He could not tell which were near or far away; he could not, in the jumble of hard-lit planes and inky shadows, even make out their true form. There was nothing like them to be seen on Earth, or on Mars. Their unweathered edges were sharp as blades: they had been just as sharp as that for millions upon millions of years, and would be for as long as the satellite should last.
The unchanging millions of years seemed to stretch out before and behind him. It was not only himself, it was all life that was a speck, a briefly transitory accident, utterly unimportant to the universe. It was a queer little mote dancing for its chance moment in the light of the eternal suns. Reality was just globes of fire and balls of stone rolling on, senselessly rolling along through emptiness, through time unimaginable, for ever, and ever, and ever …
Within his heated suit, Duncan shivered a little. Never before had he been so alone; never so much aware of the vast, callous, futile loneliness of space. Looking out into the blackness, with light that had left a star a million years ago shining into his eyes, he wondered.
‘Why?’ he asked himself. ‘What the heck’s it all about, anyway?’
The sound of his own unanswerable question broke up the mood. He shook his head to clear it of speculative nonsense. He turned his back on the universe, reducing it again to its proper status as a background for life in general and human life in particular, and stepped into the airlock.
The job was, as his predecessor had told him, soft. Duncan made his radio contacts with Callisto at prearranged times. Usually it was little more than a formal check on one another’s continued existence, with perhaps an exc
hange of comment on the radio news. Only occasionally did they announce a dispatch and tell him when to switch on his beacon. Then, in due course, the cylinder-crate would make its appearance, and float slowly down. It was quite a simple matter to couple it up to a bin to transfer the load.
The satellite’s day was too short for convenience, and its night, lit by Callisto, and sometimes by Jupiter as well, almost as bright; so they disregarded it, and lived by the calendar-clock which kept Earth time on the Greenwich Meridian setting. At first much of the time had been occupied in disposing of the freight that the ship had left. Some of it into the main dome – necessities for themselves, and other items that would store better where there was warmth and air. Some into the small, airless, unheated dome. The greater part to be stowed and padded carefully into cylinders and launched off to the Callisto base. But once that work had been cleared, the job was certainly soft, too soft …
Duncan drew up a programme. At regular intervals he would inspect this and that, he would waft himself up to the crag and check on the sun-motor there, et cetera. But keeping to an unnecessary programme requires resolution. Sun-motors, for instance, are very necessarily built to run for long spells without attention. The only action one could take if it should stop would be to call on Callisto for a ferry-rocket to come and take them off until a ship should call to repair it. A breakdown there, the Company had explained very clearly, was the only thing that would justify him in leaving his station, with the stores of precious earth, unmanned (and it was also conveyed that to contrive a breakdown for the sake of a change was unlikely to prove worth while). One way and another, the programme did not last long.
There were times when Duncan found himself wondering whether the bringing of Lellie had been such a good idea after all. On the purely practical side, he’d not have cooked as well as she did, and probably have pigged it quite as badly as his predecessor had, but if she had not been there, the necessity of looking after himself would have given him some occupation. And even from the angle of company – well, she was that, of a sort, but she was alien, queer; kind of like a half-robot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun. There were, indeed, times – increasingly frequent times, when the very look of her irritated him intensely; so did the way she moved, and her gestures, and her silly pidgin-talk when she talked, and her self-contained silence when she didn’t, and her withdrawnness, and all her differentness, and the fact that he would have been £2,360 better off without her … Nor did she make a serious attempt to remedy her shortcomings, even where she had the means. Her face, for instance. You’d think any girl would try to make her best of that – but did she, hell! There was that left eyebrow again: made her look like a sozzled clown, but a lot she cared …
