Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  A million things went with them—provisions, machines, prefabricated house parts, tools, books and a trained crew. Real training had not been given to the aged exiles. To do so had been judged useless and time-wasting, away from their destination.

  Out there they could be revived from suspended animation in small numbers as things were made as ideally ready for their training under actual conditions as possible. Everything had been minutely planned—like an invasion—maybe too minutely planned.

  The ship leaped from the ground and accelerated, with its unknowing passengers. The long months of motion at tremendous speed passed. Then there was a slight slip-up.

  One thing that the theorists had perhaps not given enough thought to was the fact that reducing a space ship’s velocity of many miles per second gradually and bringing it down lightly on a given landing area on a strange world, is a job of infinitely careful timing and balancing of forces. Only the hard-faced young pilots realized.

  Their error was almost trivial. They missed their goal by fifty miles and came down just hard enough to crumple a landing wheel and crush a few of the ship’s belly-plates.

  CHAPTER III Crack-Up

  Rube Jackson became Rube Jackson again in utter darkness, and in pain. His heart hammered as from the effects of a strong stimulant and his hands struggled against curved metal that crowded close to his face and at one point thrust a sharp fold against his chest. With a terrific heave and some outside help, he freed himself.

  Above him, in an almost black sky a thousand stars blazed. Meteors traced misty lines of light against them. Rube did not know but here, closer to the asteroid belt, full of the wreckage of a world that had exploded a billion years ago, meteors were very common.

  He had no time to consider such things, for the air, a moment ago at normal sea-level pressure, as it is known on Earth, sighed out of his lungs and he was gasping in a thinness equal to that of a fifty-thousand-foot altitude. Someone was trying to get hold of him but panic seized him and he attempted to scramble to his feet.

  The gravity, but thirty-eight percent of what he was used to, seemed hardly more suited to human muscles than the air was to human lungs. He floundered in it, as a bird that is meant to fly in air flounders in water. Meanwhile the dry cold of eighty below zero bit info his naked flesh, and congealed some of the moisture on his eyelids. He tripped and fell in the inky darkness that shrouded most of the ground.

  All impressions had the vagueness and horror of a nightmare. There was a great weakness in his flesh. Lights flashed around him and shapes moved and his painfully bulging eardrums detected dim sounds. During those moments his mind was never clear and asphyxia in the thinness was pushing it back toward oblivion again.

  But even so a glimmer of the truth forced its way to him as by sheer insistent importance. The memory of photographic plates of a distant planet seemed to coalesce with the reality of being there—and the idea seemed to twist his Earthbound intestines.

  The result in him was like the panic of a cat whom someone is trying to throw into a fire. He writhed against the inconceivable fact. He got to his feet again and tried to run as if there was some escape. Ordinarily Rube had been a cool, courageous man. Here his very soul seemed to shrivel in a place that was too strange for it to live.

  It looked as though death, which a wonderful laboratory process was meant to stave off indefinitely, was going to be his refuge. He had one more terrible realization—that his wife, accustomed to house and garden, visits with neighbors, and other harmless events, must be somewhere here, too. He tried to call her name. It was a tenuous squeak. Then he fell again. Mercifully, his oxygen-starved body cells dimmed his consciousness still more.

  But this was not yet the end. He was grabbed, not gently, and pinned down. A hard casing was thrust over his head. Then he was carried. Clothing was pulled over his body. Then flexible armor. There was a hiss and he could breathe again.

  He lay panting. He was in a kind of tent, with outward-bulging sides, as if it was inflated. As from far away he heard a voice, saying, “Easy, Pop,” half gently and half with exasperation. “Think we can trust you outside? Guess so—you’re winded.”

  After that, he was under the stars again, but he was warm, and he could breathe. Other armored figures were hurrying about. Flashlight beams moved this way and that, revealing ground that was scored, like the bed of a dry river. The soil looked like scraps of old paper and rusty dust mixed.

  For an instant a knotted dried thing, with great ragged whorls, was revealed. A face flashed momentarily into view, behind the glassite front of an oxygen helmet. Young, hard, masculine—but with strain showing in it. Then, for another instant there was another face—feminine and pretty but also hard and worried.

  Someone was rigging a floodlight, and now the flank of the space ship came into view. A great rubber landing wheel was jammed against a stone that might have been carven once, though it was so eroded by dust and wind and eons of time that it was hard to be sure.

  The retractable wings, useful for atmospheric flight during takeoff or landing, were extended and undamaged. The hull showed only an ominous crumpling on its downward curve. Since the smash-up a section of the plating had been cut away. Beyond the dark opening tiers of capsules glinted. Some of the lower ones were crushed.

  Rube’s ears were full of voices—loud now in the radiophone of the helmet over his head. Shouts—orders—curses. “Get them out—fast!” someone was yelling. He thought he knew the tones—those of the leader, Carl Roland. Someone else was hollering for a wrench of a certain size. The prone shapes of others rescued lay near Rube.

  A woman was screaming, “John! Where’s my John? He’s in there! There! What place is this? Where—” The sounds mingled with disordered patches of intense light and inky shadow as the armored crew milled about, struggling with emergency.

  Rube thought again of his Joan being here someplace too—and the protective impulse seemed more like a reflex writhing of his nerves and muscles than a willed action of his muddled and disoriented mind. But he was awfully weak. “Joanie!” he croaked.

  A small gloved hand pushed him back to the ground and a girl’s voice said, “Cool down, Gramps. Cousin Helen—that’s me—will look after you. You’re okay now. The space suit keeps you warm, the helmet gives you air and you can say bright things to me by talkie, so why worry? Unlax! There!

  “I turn this knob and tune your talkie, so that it doesn’t pick up any voices but mine. That’s better. Tsk, tsk! What happened was that we missed our landing and cracked up a little. You should be sleeping tight in Suspended, out of the way and no trouble to yourself or anybody maybe for months yet.

  “Only your capsule got dented and was leaking, so to save your skin we had to revive you. Same with some other people. Just turn a control on the lid of each capsule with a key and the revivor gas is released. Be good, Gramps? Everything’s okay and we don’t need your help. Wups! Six other people are yelling. Boy, has everybody’s poor Cousin Helen got troubles!”

  As she moved away from him Rube’s eyes photographed the ionic pistol that dangled at the belt around her armor. The weapon could be set either to stun or kill. He saw her toothpaste-ad smile, unaware how theatrical it was. Now she was addressing someone as “Milady” and repeating more or less the same indulgent kidding protective spiel that he had just heard.

  Rube had to find out who “Milady was. His numbed fingers in a space glove touched the control on his helmet, spreading the wavelength band of the talkie again. But “Milady” ’s voice was not his wife’s voice.

  A couple of other rejuvenates lunged toward where the crew-members were working under the floodlight. The crewmen pushed them back, growling orders. “Out of the way, Pop. Let us do our job.” A shot of some narcotic vapor into the breath-vents of their helmets quieted the two hysterics and they were carried back to where Rube and the others, who had already been rescued from the damaged capsules, were sprawled.

  Rube felt helpless and wor
thless. He was exhausted. His common sense, which he tried to cling to, pointed only to a dull acceptance of things, and to a vague search for understanding.

  As more capsules were brought out of the damaged ship, he watched for one marked with Joan’s number—UF19276. He saw the two airtight tents, their entrances fitted with airlocks, that had been set up. It was in one of these that he had been clothed and fitted with a pressure suit and helmet

  Capsules were still being carried in through the airlocks of the two tents, while squirming figures were carried out. The tents must have genders—masculine, feminine. Rube wondered vaguely why he had awakened in the open, to gasp in the tenuous frigid atmosphere.

  The process of reawakening must take at least an hour. So the capsules must be piled high inside the tents. Or else the process was started outside the tents. Had he awakened before he could be taken to shelter?

  He didn’t really care to know. The babble of voices went on in his talkie. “John. John!” And another voice saying, “Rejuvenation! So this is it. Gawd!” Rube shut the talkie off entirely. Sounds became very dim.

  His thinking was like a running comment on a nightmare, but his reason was a little clearer. Almost overhead he noticed a dazzling constellation of stars—the famous Southern Cross. Strange that it must look almost the same here. Some other southern hemisphere then.

  When a particularly large meteor blazed silently in the sky, he looked back, away from the spaceship. The flat plain was broken by a few low, eroded hills. And there were clumps of strange sere growths. Beyond was a tremendous expanse of white.

  For an instant then he cupped the whole truth in his mind with a stark lucidity that seemed to force him to the ragged edge of madness. The colored photograph of a planet in an astronomy book, delicately tinted, fuzzy and pretty, with a little white button covering its south pole and extending far down into its temperate zone, matched in his mind the impossible reality of being here, maybe two hundred yards from the edge of that button!

  It was a double image of the same thing, again with the awful difference of distance expressed by the difference of size, and with the dreamlike unreality of so remote a region, contrasted with harsh and present fact.

  Words flowed in his head—Mars—the south polar cap—huge in earliest Spring—but tiny in the picture. Just a little white button. How far out of my natural place am I? How far is fifty million miles? Oh, God—there’s a difference between knowing and realizing!

  Only for an instant that sharp-cut clarity lasted. The claustrophobic terror of it might have torn a tendon by the violent muscular reflex it produced. Such things happened in insanity. But he fought the image away from him in time, let the vividness in his mind be masked a little as a scab protects a physical wound. Never again, if he could help it—it wouldn’t make sense!

  But as he lay there panting he remembered things about Mars. Four-fifths desert—beyond any Earthly conception of deserts. One-fifth dried sea-bottom and gorge-bottom—“canal-bed” if you liked—where vegetation still grew sluggishly. Utterly hardy plants— “Lichenlike,” someone had suggested, when they were still only a blue-green color, seen through a telescope.

  But except for the basic vital process of all green plants—the conversion of water and carbon dioxide into starch and free oxygen under the action of sunlight—how could you compare things Martian with anything so Earthly as a lichen? These Martian growths were dormant during the driest, coldest seasons.

  In summer, shortage of even atmospheric moisture, and shortage of warmth, kept the chemical changes in them slow, so that they could not maintain much more than a trace of oxygen in the thin air.

  Mars—once inhabited, but not by men. How long ago? A million years or a hundred million? Beings with a larval stage in their development—not insects though. Again the comparison with terrestrial things fell flat.

  Leathery creatures with complex breathing organs—they had thought and invented and waged war. And that, it seemed, was how they had died rather than directly by the harshened conditions of their aging planet. The melted-down ruins of the queer structures they had built were still said to show a trace of radioactivity.

  The real Mars, not an adventurer’s paradise! Too many of the old imaginative stories that he used to read had been too glib. Could cocky young men in vacuum armor flit so blithely from world to world? And Mars was supposed to become a colony—an outlet for overcrowding. A boon to age and youth alike!

  Rube waited helplessly, furiously, out of the way, kept warm by the space armor that had been put on him as if he were a baby, by young people who had treated him with compassion. But in their belts were weapons that they did not use. Theirs was the power to compel. They were free to go home when their work was done. They were the haves beside the have-nots.

  He did not see Joan’s number on any of the capsules and he was glad. She was not one of those who was now aware.

  He sat on alien ground, listening or talking to no one. Quite soon it was dawn. The black sky turned deep ultra-marine. The hills and scattered rocks and clumps of dormant growths, showed soft grays and rusty reds. A thin wind raised little plumes of dust.

  Low in the north, small, and unnoticed by Rube, gleamed Deimos, the outer moon. Phobos, the inner moon, was never seen at this high southern latitude, for it was hidden by the curvature of the planet.

  But there was a dawn star, which Rube saw, in fact had looked for. As bright as Venus as he had known it, but attended by a tiny speck that was Luna. Earth. “Damn!” he muttered, cursing himself. He’d just had a warning, hadn’t he—about letting his thoughts dig too deeply?

  The small sun, half again as far away as at home, rose with a blaze of brilliance, gilding the fine suspended dust that explained the old mystery of why the rarefied air of Mars was so resistant to ultra-violet rays.

  A minute later a plane appeared, hurtling nearer, driven by its thin jet of nuclear fire. It flew out those who had been injured in their crumpled capsules, those who had gone really psychotic.

  CHAPTER IV Disillusion

  Rube was pushed aboard the second plane, with some of the others, and took a seat passively. He was being as passive as he could, hoping that that was the way to make a little sense out of a senseless situation. Just ride. Take it easy.

  In the pressurized cabin, hands unfastened Rube’s helmet, and set it down beside him. “Hi, Gramps!” the girl said. “Cousin Helen—Helen Sands of Tulsa, Oklahoma, if anybody’s interested, is along. Nursemaid, tourist-guide, mother confessor, diaper changer, welcoming committee and right at this moment dispenser of coffee—with George’s assistance, of course.

  “Everybody meet George Jones . . . Some of you gave George a bad time a little while ago, when you tried to take off for the ice cap. Yeah—you especially, Gramps.”

  Rube only glared at her dully as the plane took to the air. And he glared at the genial-faced but rather tense young man who tried now to throw a friendly grin at him, pat the girl’s shoulder.

  Helen’s helmet, of course, was off, exposing the bars of authority on the shoulders of her tunic. She had the pride and duty which went with things like that and the front, gaily off-hand now. The latter represented putting her best foot forward, though even that might be hateful now to some of these rejuvenates for whom she was responsible and she knew it.

  The scare in her, behind the toothpaste-ad smile, was maybe hard to notice, even in broad daylight. That smile was a phony, and in part the reason was anybody’s reason—anybody who had spent a lousy few days on Mars months ago with Roland’s Survey Group and had just come back. Even the real prep-crew at Port Smitty had had only about six weeks here. And to think she’d wanted adventure.

  “Coffee?” she was chanting. “Here—it—is! Who’ll have—caw-fee-e-ee. Oh—by the way, don’t anybody quote me, but I think that close relatives and friends of all present on this plane are still safely in Suspended. Only some hundred and seventy capsules out of several thousand were damaged, anyway. Of the folks
inside there were five dead and nineteen injured and next of kin here were either informed or left to sleep. So who feels better and wants coffee?”

  Rube perked up just a little. He saw the faces of his fellow exiles around him, not young but peeling and ugly, as if they were like insects, shedding a chrysalis. His face must be like that too. But it was the expressions that were bad. These were good people, who, for the most part, had lived ordinary lives, and had wanted to believe in the future. But how could they belong here?

  They were dazed and bewildered. Some were under drugs. And the eyes of some held fixed in them that scared-cat look. The cat afraid of being burned alive or dropped from a height. A man was sobbing. A little woman was making chirping sounds—it was hard to know that she was praying. Nobody said anything to the girl.

  But it came to Rube that she was rather brave—trying to cheer up a bunch like this, trying no doubt to sell their fate to them—himself naturally included. Uhunh—he’d always been pretty good at figuring people. Her brilliant forced smile didn’t fade but in her eyes there was worry and something that was like the pity shown a beggar.

  Aware of the difference between him and oneself—with the advantage in you by a circumstance that wasn’t your fault. Aware too of some flow of animal resentment from him to you—while your own guilty resentment radiated back to him, in spite of yourself. Rube knew how it was from his own past experience.

  This girl and this George too were on the opposite side of the fence from his companions and him. Moreover, Rube knew that his old stolid sense of justice was being forced into another shape by circumstance. Yet for one moment he was generous. His stomach didn’t want coffee but he signaled with his hand.

  Cousin Helen filled a glassite cup from the thermos, and her smile of gratitude and success was like a little girl’s. “Right here, Mr. Jackson!” she said. So she must have been looking up names. He muttered thanks.