Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  It was all a stymied promise that made no more difference in ultimate mortality than the difference between peace under cool green grass and the same peace beneath drifting red dust—though, being still alive, he knew desperately which end he preferred. There was gut-twisting panic in that, once more.

  So, being warned, he retreated into the mind-saying refuge of reverie. About his own street and about the Virginia creeper vines on the porch from which he had been dispossessed.

  Yet what was that reverie itself but another symptom of the nostalgia that could kill? And yet, what was that strange guilt in him? About the gift of vita, which no previous generations had known? If the Martians had had the equivalent of vita, still they had mismanaged it for they were gone.

  In the late afternoon, Rube Jackson wound up back in Port Smitty and at the airlock of Porter Smith’s habitation. But if he sought guidance there Smitty’s cynically gentle eyes denied it to him though they made him welcome.

  The hut’s interior was utterly cluttered. The sealed-up air reeked of stale tobacco smoke and cooking odors. Canned goods were stacked high on shelves. The rest of the place showed a curious combination of traits in its master—the slovenliness of the lout in personal matters and the precise reconstructive skills of the scientist.

  “You need not tell me your name for I will not remember,” said Smitty. “But does it make any difference? When I return to Earth I shall have much to write about. Did you know, for instance, that the skeletons of the dominant Martians were very simple—having the form of a spiral and being a kind of continuous rib?” Smitty pointed to a white fossil, carefully mounted. Its helical structure bellied like a jug.

  “It is like the rib-cage in man,” Smitty went on. “To protect the vitals. But against the weak gravity the limbs did not need tones. Did you know that on Mars, in its remotest past, no true coal was formed—only lignite? Again it was the weak gravity—not providing enough pressure under ground to produce coal of high density as on Earth.

  “But one wonders more about the thought of the beings of Mars, shown for example by their inventions. Principles are forced to be the same by Nature with its universal physical laws. A simple Martian lens for a camera or a telescope of glass, of quartz, or of synthetically produced diamond, can scarcely be distinguished from earthly counterparts.

  “But in more complex devices, the variations of detail are odd. In the reciprocating steam-engine, the electric generator, the wireless, the electric battery, there are some strange differences. It is like what I notice of the oldest Martian pottery—it bears the marks of the digits that molded it. They are not whorls, as in human fingerprints. They are something similar, that is cross-hatch. Look around if you like.”

  Rube obeyed. Metal had been cleared of rust and oiled, even put into working order. From the brooding, lumpy masses of machines, some as old as the dinosaurs on Earth, he caught echoes of other minds thinking.

  There were heavy disc wheels without spokes.

  There were odd copper arms, ornately tooled. There were enamel-lined vats, which must have been for acid or caustic substances. There were thin rods, which clearly had the function of electric wires. Just to look was a strange, abhorrently fascinating experience.

  “One thing I never found,” Smitty said, “though I always hoped, was a photograph or picture of the ancient Earth, seen through a telescope from this distance.”

  This simple statement whitened Rube’s cheeks and he felt as if he had suddenly found himself poised at the brink of some impossible abyss. Mentally he lunged back and recovered.

  “I am sorry,” Smitty chuckled. His faded eyes were gentle and amused and understanding, so that no one could take offense.

  Then, with hands that matched the battered wood; he took up his violin. He played fragments from Beethoven, then skipped to another mood in Foster’s I Dream of Jeannie. With the music, strange smokes coiled in Rube’s mind. He felt shaken and yet, at the same time, some part of him felt at peace, able to accept the inevitable without flinching.

  “Thanks, Smitty,” he said when the music was finished. “I guess I’d better go now. Thanks again.”

  Smitty didn’t protest that he should stay. He only made what might seem an irrelevant remark, with a sympathetic gentleness, “Umm-m—yes! The equinoctial storms will come any day now. They are worse here in the Southern Hemisphere.

  “Did you know that the climate of the Southern Hemisphere of Mars is different from that of the Northern? That the winters are colder, and the summers milder? It is that Mars’ orbit is so eccentric—when it is summer here we are nearest to the sun. In winter we are farthest away. The Southern Polar Cap grows much bigger than the Northern.”

  Rube ate his supper in the mess-hall with Hardy, Doc Warren and a few of the other colonists who had proven to be most rugged. Helen Sands was present, her toothpaste-ad smile borne like a brave and tattered banner. George was there, offering that the spaceship was being repaired.

  What other conversation there was, descended mostly to platitudes. The company ate listlessly but at least they ate. On a comparative basis perhaps that was a good sign. No one mentioned that there were five more dead. The cause—space nostalgia.

  Hardy and Doc and Rube had a talk again that night in the dormitory tent. “The-return-to-earth rumor medicine is working some, Rube,” Hardy offered. “Bob Walsh was one of the stiffs you talked to last night. Well—he’s improved. Maybe you didn’t notice but he was with us at supper. As for Roland—I think he’ll crack and give in.”

  “You’re an optimist,” Rube commented dryly. “Wait and see.”

  CHAPTER VII First Blow

  In the morning Carl Roland gave a loud and violent harangue over the sound system. “The tales one hears are foolish!” he yelled unsteadily. “Did we journey millions of miles on a picnic trip that is to end at sundown?

  “Our craft is being reconditioned for the reason that spaceships represent an enormous investment which must be saved. Also its remaining freight can then be flown here without unloading. And it is best that the craft be docked here in camp!”

  Hardy’s eyes took on the gleam of murder. “Heh-heh,” he chuckled sardonically, from his blankets. “Roland wants the ship here so that it’ll be handy for him and a few of his friends to skip out with if the going gets too rough!”

  Rube shrugged wearily. But in his taut nerves he felt an overpowering need to be doing something to occupy his energies.

  After breakfast he wandered for a minute along the main street of Port Smitty, looking at a weirdly different Martian morning. The usually dehydrated air had acquired some humidity during the last few days. According to reports the Polar Cap had been melting.

  So now the dry ground was rimed with frost. The ultramarine sky wore a thin cold-looking veil of pearl—it was the polar murk of springtime. At the horizon it was mixed with suspended dust. In the east the rising sun changed its streamers to trains of fire. But as yet the thin air was still.

  Rube went to the administration office and asked to be put to work. Very promptly he was laboring over hot metal in the just-completed forge shop. Old skills flowed back into his big hands. His task helped him to control muddled thinking, even gave him a certain pride. He was making parts to repair the damage done the spaceship. Hmm!

  Was it that quick efficient youth, used to the swift assembly of perfectly matched parts, still was prompted to appeal to the talents of older generations when it came to the more flexible business of improvisation? He found a savage satisfaction in the thought.

  At noon he found out that both Hardy and Doc had followed his example. Hardy, lacking special manual skills, was, at the moment, helping cynically to outfit apartments. Doc was with chemical supply. “Good spots in which to wait and watch,” was Hardy’s comment.

  The wind had begun to keen. Only one-ninth as dense as Earth-wind at the surface it could still lift columns of powder-fine dust against the weak Martian gravity. Daylight grew rusty and dim. When night
settled the whine of the storm was a tenuous tortured whistle, as steady as the hum of a generator. It plucked stridently at nerves that had never before known what it was like.

  The solid matter in it blotted out the stars, till the darkness was absolute. Drifts of dust piled up unseen. Mars seemed to become some Stygian netherworld trap a hundred million miles beyond hell. The stout tent, where Rube and his companions lay, stood against it but the mind-effect needed no help of physical harm to make it deadly.

  Rube, for his part, struggled to keep a strange double-vision from his thoughts—of a fuzzy opalescent globe with a tiny blob of ochre creeping near its pole—Mars, that was, seen through a telescope from Earth, showing one of its famous dust storms—and of this reality.

  For the contrast of the pretty bubble with its minute, dusty smear, hinting at a remote ungraspable region, and the gigantic fact of the storm itself at close quarters held in it the seeds of grasping an understanding of distance from all old familiar things.

  It was a grasping of the impossible—of a strangeness which still-primitive human nerves could not accept. Until he controlled it it brought to Rube that scared-cat panic. And even then cold sweat beaded his forehead.

  Little Hardy, speaking at his shoulder, said: “He’ll crack, Rube. Roland’ll crack like a piece of glass. He’s not as tough as we are. Then when the ship’s repaired we’ll all leave.”

  “We hope,” Doc whispered unsteadily. And that in fact was what kept them going—the hope of seeing Earth again, whatever the price of return might be.

  But during that weird night the sustaining hope that had been kindled by only a rumor died out in many hearts. When dawn brought smoky light through the undiminished holocaust the new hospital was already full of cases whose raving hysteria had to be subdued by drugs.

  Nor were all of these patients rejuvenates—simpler folk who for the most part had lived their long lives far from the dream of human cities across space. Some who were brave and who had cherished that mighty romance were among its victims too.

  Three bodies were found that wild morning out in the open, scattered along the central thoroughfare of Port Smitty. All were clad in space-suits—minus oxygen helmets, which had been discarded in hysteria.

  Two were rejuvenates, a bulky man, and a little woman whose peeling cheeks showed signs of returning prettiness. And a young man—a real youth. Nineteen, maybe. Blond. A guard. One whose purpose was to help take care of the aged exiles—get them acclimated to Mars.

  All of these bodies were frozen stiff as wood in the awful cold. The faces were now rigid masks that showed terror and the anguish of asphyxia. But the faces were no longer just frozen. The wind, utterly moisture-less now, had sublimated the ice-crystals out of the flesh till they were partly mummified. That was Mars.

  Rube, Doc and Hardy saw the bodies being picked up. They turned away. Rube spoke softly into the talkie in his helmet, the plastic window of which was already blurred with clinging dust. “Some work still goes on, I see. So we’ll work too—keep ourselves busy. That Roland didn’t spiel on the sound-system this morning is a healthy sign. If nothing happens by noon I’ll do something.”

  What Rube meant did not happen. So at noon he fought his way through the storm to the administration building airlock. Controlled fury gained him entrance. “I want to talk to Carl Roland, that is all,” he growled at the two young guards. “I mean him no harm—yet. To make sure hold onto my arms while I am with him!”

  Rube was a big man who spoke with complete lucidity. The guards were awed. They had troubles of their own and they did not love their boss, Carl Roland. Maybe in some way they even liked Rube. So, in a moment, he stood before Roland as he had wished.

  “You know why I am here,” he snapped levelly. “Why anyone would be here. It is too bad that a plan failed. There may be some other way to make it work—even though the evidence of medical statistics is against it. But that is not the point, now.

  “It is that lives are being lost and that every extra day will mean more, leading to catastrophe so complete that plans similar to yours will be discredited forever. I add my voice to the voices of others, demanding the withdrawal of all persons on Mars that wish it.”

  Rube was looking at the thin pallid face that few here had ever seen. The truth was that he’d come here to look and to find out what sort of person he had to deal with, more than he had come to talk.

  Rube supposed that, by properly directed self-publicity, a man could build himself a reputation as a brilliant theorist that was not quite valid. But now he was not sure how much this applied to Carl Roland. How much of prissy pride in his own ideas went into Roland’s rigid and stupid stand?

  How much of cowardice and vanity made him hide behind armor plate and guards, while he talked to people through a microphone? How much had he been brilliant and how much had Mars damaged him, as it damaged any other man? Rube was not sure that he could guess.

  But Rube saw the sweat on Roland’s lips and the vagueness in his eyes, which hinted that he no longer understood reality. It was not an obvious madness for which he could be deposed from control—it was worse. Rube sensed, even before the man spoke, that Roland had cracked—but in the wrong form. Monomania!

  “I don’t know you or why you’ve burst into my private sanctum,” Roland clipped out prissily. “All I know is that things will go on just as planned. In fact I’ve ordered more subjects in suspended animation to be revived. Apply by number in the vita office if you have a wife whom you wish to see. That is all! Now I’ll squelch that silly rumor of return to Earth, once and for all!”

  Rube didn’t answer. But as he put on his helmet and left he was not depressed. Instead he was almost elated, for what had to be done was clear. Roland would be blabbing again now on the sound system, trying to cut the last threads of hope that was all that maintained the rejuvenates and doubtless many of his young henchmen top in a semblance of sanity. So hope had to be maintained at all costs.

  Back in the forge shop Rube proceeded to pick his plan from those he had held in reserve at the back of his brain. Something simple it had to be, something with the least chance of miscarriage. Something that perhaps, made use of disintegrating morale among the guards, due to Mars and to Roland’s mismanagement.

  To check up he listened with his talkie, wavelength band opened wide, to the babble of shouts, cries and scraps of conversation that came to him from all over the camp.

  Inevitably under strain and with difference of privilege so clear inter-age group blows had already been struck sporadically. Curses of Roland were common among the guards. Still there was a harder core that would hold to discipline and could only be mastered by force. Good fellas.

  Rube saw some of them from the forge shop windows, their armor grimed with dust, their ionic pistols readied in their holsters. They wouldn’t want to kill any more than he. They were supposed to be the agents of a benign society—but they would uphold Roland as they had sworn to.

  Rube chose a plan that looked best for the circumstances and showed the least likelihood of producing mass death—though nothing, he felt, must stop him.

  While he hammered a small but significant piece of copper down to a thin plate there in the forge shop he saw the spaceship groping through the storm by instrument like a vast airplane. Bulking and vague it came down on the landing field. It had been repaired enough to fly as an aircraft already.

  “Good that it’s here,” he muttered. “Joanie’s on board.”

  Before supper he went to the vita office. He did not know that he was wise to ask for Joan’s revival. He only knew that, in view of what lay ahead, he wanted her with him, tangible and alive, not lost and inert among the stacks of capsules aboard the spaceship.

  At the mess hall he studied the airlock mechanism again just to make sure. But he knew his gadgets pretty well.

  That night he outlined his scheme to his three best friends there in the sleeping tent. “If you know a better way, we’ll use that instead,�
� he ended.

  “I could get some guards themselves in on it, Rube,” Hardy offered. “Good guys.”

  Rube shook his head. “Most of them are good guys,” he whispered. “No use trusting any of them too much though—beyond hoping for their passive support. And it would be no favor to them to ask them to incriminate themselves in our revolt.

  “If we wind up in prison back home—well, life is supposed to be longer now. All we need for our job tomorrow is about twenty men. I think you can pick ’em from the rejuvenates, Hardy.”

  “Sure—but how about the really good folks from among the keeper-class, Rube? George and some others, especially Cousin Helen Sands?” Little Hardy looked anxious. “Helen’s a swell kid,” he added. “We wouldn’t want her hurt.”

  “No,” Rube answered. “And none of the others if we can help it. They’ll be somewhat uncomfortable. But what can we do? Keep the rumor going, Hardy—it’s like the smell of Earth-clover around here—no, it’s the breath of life. But don’t give details away to anyone you don’t have to.”

  “I’ll be waiting tomorrow then at about one o’clock—you know where,” Doc Warren said, checking up.

  “I’ll see you a lot sooner than that, tomorrow morning,” Rube told him. “Special personal job I’ve got for you—at the apartment they gave me—one hundred and seventeen. What would you call it—rebirth, on the march?” He chuckled. “I’m sleeping there tonight.”

  Through the seething storm he carried a capsule marked UF19276. It weighed hardly more than a third of what it would have on Earth. He made another trip from Supply, bringing canned goods and utensils. He turned on the electric heaters.