As the pilot up ahead guided the plane above a wide valley or “canal” it lurched slightly and the cup wavered in Rube’s shaky hand. So she helped him with it and he let her do it.
She said earnestly in a low tone and in a manner quite different from her previous banter: “Too bad things didn’t go as planned for you folks, Mr. Jackson. The people still in Suspended won’t be revived till everything is ready for them. And just a few at a time. They’re lucky. The shock won’t be so great. But you folks’ll make out all right.”
George grinned. He was a big blond kid. He looked good-natured. His arms, hands, and shoulders were built for handling people who got out of line. “Sure, Pop,” he remarked. “My two cents worth says the same as Cousin Helen’s. You’ll be fine.”
Somehow Rube knew that they didn’t believe it—that they both lied.
Helen was across the aisle now, spreading the cheer again—this time to a little man who still looked wizened. “Hello, Beautiful!” she said. It’s strange how folks pick a clown to talk to. But there is nothing so unfunny as a clown in real despair.
Rube saw, without normal surprise that it was Orville Hardy, the little ex-salesman and ex-acrobat who had been such a talkative good-mixer at the vita camp. He accepted coffee automatically, seeming not to know what he did, fumbled with the cup, dropped it, mumbled and then tried vaguely to rub the mess off the floor with the heel of his hand . . .
“Nix, Beautiful—not like that!” Helen chided. But her kidding tone had a crack, right through the center.
She had no more customers for coffee nor did she ask for any.
But undaunted, she attacked her problem of morale-building from another direction. She broadened her smile. “I’m a heck of a hostess,” she laughed. “Did I tell you people that this place was Mars? Or did you guess?
“Right now we’re taking a slow ten-minute ride in this old tub of a transport to where your space ship was supposed to land—only didn’t. Port Smitty, they call the joint, after its founder and oldest resident, Porter Smith. Wait till you see him. Real sourdough of these parts. Famous archeologist. Nuts about Mars. Plays the violin for fun. Eighteen years here. Going home for a vacation, soon.
“About Port Smitty, it’s still Mars’ only human settlement. Its population was six specialists. It’s the survey station, established by the Science Council. Porter’s pals have all gone home already but the joint’s population has jumped. Wait till you see. Regular boom-town!”
Helen’s voice rose hopefully but her audience didn’t show any interest. Retreating into themselves from realities that had no kinship with the quiet lives they had known, they remained like zombies—living dead, whose future met no promise of renewed life with fresh opportunity, but hung before them as a grinding sameness of strange confusions, that led, perhaps, to an end more blurry and dismal than the red dust that coated the windows of this old plane.
Did she blame them? She couldn’t. For how did she feel herself? Even with advantages over them. For in a few months she’d be home again.
Rube had come up a little out of a reverie of sunshine coming through leaves, of playing with a great-great-grandchild in a park, while Joan looked on, to hear clearly what the girl had said. A faint shame for weakness touched him, a faint questioning about Porter Smith. Eighteen years here? How did the guy do it?
What the drives in Rube were trying to latch onto was some kind of hope or goal to reach for and to believe in. Basically he was a man of action. He’d been big, and strong. But the groping in him remained feeble and finally stopped. He was tired out. He dropped back into reverie.
Helen didn’t give up. Maybe she asked herself how big a supply of trying a homesick wench from Tulsa was supposed to have. Well, maybe it just went on forever. Lots of people had probably done a lot more of it. Her smile was getting shopworn and anxious, so she threw it away.
“Ninnies!” she shouted. “All of you—just a lot of big ninnies, feeling sorry for yourselves!” Lord knew it wasn’t the truth but maybe it would help. In her head were silent words of apology to these poor things around her.
No good—it was tough on a girl to be cajoling and grinning and shouting—throwing it all against a bunch of poor doomed critters who sensed their doom and didn’t even listen. Especially when you knew that it was all for nothing—that the whole theory behind this particular resettlement project had already proved itself to be stupid beyond words.
The Dr. Carl Roland scheme. Ah—nuts! She’d learned. Old folks—just gentle rocking-chair lizards for years. To Mars! It was a frightening enormity, when you thought of it like that. It was awful. Even the Martians, who had evolved in the place, who were conditioned to its harshness and who had had a considerable science to protect them, just weren’t here any more and hadn’t been for millions of years.
What could you do with these people? Well, you could put them into a complete stupor with one kind of dope or make them drunk and silly and forgetful with another—for a little while. But using dope on them was restricted both in quantity and type. And what good was it in the long run anyway?
These old duffers probably hated your insides and maybe they had a point there because you were young and were the cause of their being dispossessed of all they had owned—and shipped here! And glory—just how were you supposed to feel about that?
Cousin Helen’s next try at the hopeless task of perking her charges up had desperation—in fact almost despair—in it. Roland was still with the damaged space ship and when she’d seen him just a few minutes ago he’d instructed her to keep the radio on the plane open.
“Because I intend to speak to the colonists, Miss Sands,” he had intimated. So far she had pointedly neglected to carry out orders. But maybe—just maybe—he had by now learned enough to say something sensible. He was supposed to be smart. He was supposed, even, to be a competent psychologist.
“George,” she said wearily. “Let’s take an awful chance. Put the Genius on the speaker. But stand by to strangle him.” His eyes were anxious.
Carl Roland’s voice boomed in clipped tones through the cabin of the transport. His delivery had all the pomp displayed by some after-dinner orators.
“There has been a mishap,” he was saying. “Unfortunate—but we must consider it—ah—slight. This is the planet Mars. We are here for several very important reasons. First—to find a real answer to a pressing social problem on Earth—establishing here—a truly effective outlet—for the dangerous burden of overpopulation—which another great triumph of mankind’s efforts—perhaps fortunately and not unfortunately—makes certain to be more pressing. That—is the more immediate—practical phase of our purpose.”
Cousin Helen’s eyes grew hollow from the failure of a hope against hope. What she had heard so far was just the usual Roland hogwash and pomposity. To these exiles, if they listened at all, it must be the crassest of mockeries, and the most stupid and unknowing of cruelties.
On Earth he might be all right at convincing a bunch of stay-at-home legislators. Here he just didn’t have any sense. His hollow bookish theorizing fell flat on its face. And his phoniness was limned against the undercurrent of uncertainty and scare behind his words, making it more hateful and ridiculous. It seemed as if his ego just couldn’t come down or adjust.
Helen would have had George cut him off before more harm could be done. Only there was no particular sign that his audience here, heard him. Helen shrugged. Let him go on a little more.
“Second, we have the purpose of fulfilling the possibilities of progress. For instance—Vita is a kind of limited immortality. It must not become—by limitations in other fields—in any phase—a difficulty or burden. Other progress—must be made—to match it—to give it room to fulfill—its fullest success. . . . Mankind’s old dream of expansion to the planets—and toward the stars—is the obvious—next step.
“This is Mars. We have landed—near its south polar cap—because there—we are close to—the best supply—of water. Here y
ou will have homes. That is our third purpose. You will build more homes. The principles of—human survival here are well known. Pressurized gardens—under glass—giving food—and oxygen to breathe. Water distilled when necessary from gypsum.
“One settlement—will be built. Then another and another—and more and more. More colonists will come. Technology can answer all problems. Extensive irrigation will be reestablished—after millions of years. Mars is small—but large too. Its surface—all land—equals the land area of Earth.
“The few dozen men who have been here before us could not be expected to have explored in any real detail more than a fraction of so much territory. So Mars is new—though it is old—and full of geology and history all its own. Picture how it will be a hundred years from now—how you will see it with cities under airdomes of crystal. Populous, rich, lesser earth. Verdant—with people in its parks. Children—”
George cut the speaker-switch at a gesture from Helen and Roland’s pretty monologue was broken off. Helen’s cheeks seemed to have sagged. Just then she looked almost old.
In a corner seat of the cabin a little woman, who had been staring blankly, burst into wild laughter. Then she buried her face in her hands and began to sob hysterically.
“Rats!” someone growled venomously. It was small wizened Orville Hardy.
Helen went to the woman, thinking bitterly that Carl Roland was the dreamer of melodramatic dreams and that these people were what he had meant to be the doers. What a difference in viewpoint! He’d been out to Mars just once before, tonight—on a survey ship that had stayed less than a week. Otherwise he was an enthusiast of Mars via other people’s travelogues.
Helen glanced through the grimed window. The plane was starting its glide for a landing now toward a flat-bottomed valley. The hills at its edge looked too desolate even to harbor a mirage. The wind, passing the gliding transport, made a dry sough.
Rube Jackson growled under his breath. Roland’s words had got to him to rekindle his fury. Most of it did not last but there was a kind of path leading from it—through knowledge now of how hollow Roland and his scheme were, through release at last from a kind of duty to law simply by having been imposed upon a little too much.
What remained after that was a faint thready glow of rebellious purpose like the dim light at the far end of a long tunnel. He could see no means at all of accomplishing his objective. Perhaps none would ever come. Still he had a purpose, a hope, and though it denounced all that was here it put a small steady spark of life into him.
As the plane descended toward a landing he watched from the window, seeking to learn all he could. In the valley he saw mile on mile of sere ragged plants. Straight ahead, just touched by the brilliant morning sun, was what he took to be—what had the girl called it?—Port Smitty.
CHAPTER V Homesickness
There were a few old structures, hemicylindrical and probably of corrugated iron. They were so dust-coated that except for their shape they might have been taken for natural parts of the landscape.
But around them, already bolted together to form the skeletal beginnings of buildings, bright new girders glinted. Several new structures seemed already completed. And there were rows of tents of the kind that he had already seen.
The landing field was wide and it looked freshly rolled. And just beyond this strange settlement, dwarfing it, rose a vast mound. One side of it was broken away to reveal arching rock-strata, an index, no doubt, of scarcely counted ages of Martian natural history. The mound’s top was rounded. On it stood ruins—broken down by time and ancient disaster to vague and glassy fragments.
The lower stages of a wall here—a rising monolith, there—strange spiral—a perforated dome. You did not know what they were for but Rube thought of how the buildings of men matched the forms of men—that, for instance, there are stairways because humans have legs of a certain structure—and so it must be here. It had been a city—if you did not want to call it a colony as you would call a community of bees that built, not houses, but combs.
He warned himself to take it easy—to try not to think too deeply—as he had before.
There was already a plane on the field—the one that had brought in the injured. Glancing back Rube saw that another—a new one—was following. When the wheels beneath him hit the ground he tried clumsily to put on his helmet himself as if some strange spark of power drove him.
“Well, Gramps—Mr. Jackson!” Helen Sands exclaimed, sounding surprised and pleased—in a ragged sort of way, for it still seemed to her that something in her nerves was about to snap. “What wonder is this?”
He grunted uncivilly, then thought better of it. This girl had been kind. He remembered his manners from—how long ago was it and how far away? “Thanks for trying, Miss,” he said. He didn’t tell her that the wonder in him, that made him different, was the simple hope of walking on the green grass of Earth again or on a pavement there or even in—say—in a tunnel of its deepest darkest mine.
The transport taxied to the end of the field where the buildings sprawled. Young men in space suits ran toward it. Its passengers, once again wearing their oxygen helmets, filed forth, stepping with dull caution because of the treacherously feeble gravity. Of them only Rube had recaptured some inner gleam to live for here in this dust-choked graveyard world. No—maybe there was another too—Orville Hardy.
Standing quietly for a moment in the boot-printed dust Rube looked around him—almost searching for someone. Not Hardy but a legend. And then he saw the man standing by, smirking with a cynical kind of gentleness. An introduction wasn’t needed.
In the first place he wore no space suit. Just a heavy jacket and sweater, much mended, old boots and, it seemed, several pairs of trousers. Of course the sun was warming up the ground and thin air fast now. But an oxygen helmet remained indispensable and this man’s was old and dented.
The face behind the scratched window was so browned and gnarled that it seemed as if the substance of Mars had been engrained into it. The narrow brow, under the scraggles of white hair, seemed like an echo of a cloistered life on some quiet campus long ago. Bookish and undoubtedly with some poetic reaching toward the stars, carried in his case to the point of fanaticism.
But in the face there were signs of old pain and punishment for this too. Little glints crawled like bugs in the faded blue eyes. The humor of those glints was dry and kindly. But they also showed what seemed an eternal puzzled questioning—a groping to clutch an elusive truth that was forever not quite tangible.
It suggested deeper understandings of certain things than is ever possessed by the average person. But it proved, too, that the punishment-scars extended, deep and blurring, into the cortex of the man’s brain.
Rube studied him keenly for a moment, possessed of a curiosity and a wonder as to why and more especially how this guy had managed to live on Mars for eighteen years. Rube opened the switch of the talkie in his helmet, wide, letting in a roar of many voices. He was about to speak—when instead he was spoken to in thin precise tones.
“Yes, Mister, I am Porter Smith. Welcome and good luck. Come and see me in my workshop before I go. I won’t be here too long any more. No doubt you’ve already heard. I am returning to Earth. I have grown very tired of the Red Planet. I believe that I have earned some time to be spent on Earth after I have been vitaed.
“I miss my native Colorado—I miss Los Angeles—the people, the noise, the trees. And most of all I miss the ocean. I will listen to other musicians’ music. I am sorry that I can suggest nothing that might help you vitaed colonists in the great trouble you now feel. Though there may be some good in the rebellious idea that I think must have occurred to you, personally. Good luck again!”
The speech ended with a dry and gentle titter.
Helen Sands, whose nerves had been tautened to the cracking point by her struggle with events during the last few hours, made a sound a little like the protest of a wounded bird. “Smitty—you too!” she complained tiredly. �
�Why can’t somebody build these people up and sell them Mars instead of saying everything to break them completely!”
Just then a tall man from among the rejuvenates tore off his helmet and began to run, the breath rushing out of his lungs in a thin scream. George and some other young guards dived and he went down, hard-hit. Their purpose was rescue. But their pity was tinged with exasperation—almost anger.
Physical action gave it a kind of restrained savagery. He was very fuddled. They were much more sure. Both sides could deny any blame for the have-versus-have-not conflict that was here. Rube knew that in this case at least it was just life. Still there was passive anger in him that stood at a fellow being’s shoulder.
Smitty’s talk about going back to Earth might have shattered him just as it had seemed to shatter this poor wretch. But now it did not. Instead it seemed to brace him. “Rebellious idea,” Smitty had said. Keen old guy! His knowledge of how people reacted to Mars was so sharp that it made him appear almost telepathic. As Rube moved along with the column of exiles he wore a faint grim smile.
He was thinking of return to Earth—for Joan, who mercifully was still in Suspended, for himself, perhaps even for all of his companions. That the obstacles seemed insurmountable—that it was against the law for them—that it was against his former ideas of justice—that as yet he had not the faintest idea of how to begin accomplishing his objective—that, trying, he might be killed in some weird way—that even if, by great good-fortune, they somehow reached Earth they would undoubtedly be arrested—all this was unimportant.
The key point was that the goal was something to live for and fight for. It was not a promise of immortality, turned into a living death, that must become real death soon under dust.
With the others, Rube passed through an airlock and into a large room that was sealed and pressurized. The sexes were separated, and all submitted to brief examinations by an impersonal young doctor. Hot soup was passed out, which some seemed hardly to notice but which Rube ate grimly because he knew he needed strength. He was not one of those who was fed intravenously.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 28
