Explorers of Space

by Anthology

  A coupé pulled up, and Miss Graham opened the door. She was a brown-haired girl, not especially good-looking, but the kind you think of as a nice girl, a very nice girl.

  She said, “You look so tired, that I feel guilty now about asking you to stop.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “And it’s no trouble stopping over a couple of places on my way back to Ohio.”

  As we drove across the little town, I asked her if Jim hadn’t had any family of his own here.

  “His parents were killed in a car-crash years ago,” Miss Graham said. “He lived with an uncle on a farm outside Grandview, but they didn’t get along, and Jim came into town and got a job at the power station.”

  She added, as we turned a corner, “My mother rented him a room. That’s how we got to know each other. That’s how we—how we got engaged.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  It was a big square house with a deep front porch, and some trees around it. I sat down in a wicker chair, and Miss Graham brought her mother out. Her mother talked a little about Jim, how they missed him, and how she declared he’d been just like a son.

  When her mother went back in, Miss Graham showed me a little bunch of blue envelopes. “These were the letters I got from Jim. There weren’t very many of them, and they weren’t very long.”

  “We were only allowed to send one thirty-word message every two weeks,” I told her. “There were a couple of thousand of us out there, and they couldn’t let us jam up the message-transmitter all the time.”

  “It was wonderful, how much Jim could put into just a few words,” she said, and handed me some of them.

  I read a couple. One said, “I have to pinch myself to realize that I’m one of the first Earthmen to stand on an alien world. At night, in the cold, I look up at the green star that’s Earth and can’t quite realize I’ve helped an age-old dream come true.”

  Another one said, “This world’s grim and lonely, and mysterious. We don’t know much about it, yet. So far, nobody’s seen anything living but the lichens that Expedition One reported, but there might be anything here.”

  Miss Graham asked me, “Was that all there was, just lichens?”

  “That, and two or three kinds of queer cactus things,” I said. “And rock and sand. That’s all.”

  As I read more of those little blue letters, I found that now that Jim was gone, I knew him better than I ever had. There was something about him I’d never suspected. He was romantic, inside. We hadn’t suspected it, he was always so quiet and slow, but now I saw that all the time he was more romantic about the thing we were doing than any of us.

  He hadn’t let on. We’d have kidded him, if he had. Our name for Mars, after we got sick of it, was The Hole. We always talked about it as The Hole. I could see now that Jim had been too shy of our kidding to ever let us know that he glamorized the thing in his mind.

  “This was the last one I got from him before his sickness,” Miss Graham said.

  That one said, “I’m starting north tomorrow with one of the mapping expeditions. We’ll travel over country no human has ever seen before.”

  I nodded. “I was on that party, myself. Jim and I were on the same half-trac.”

  “He was thrilled by it, wasn’t he, Sergeant?”

  I wondered. I remembered that trip, and it was hell. Our job was simply to run a preliminary topographical survey, checking with Geigers for possible uranium deposits.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, if the sand hadn’t started to blow.

  It wasn’t sand like Earth sand. It was ground to dust by billions of years of blowing around that dry world. It got inside your breathing-mask, and your goggles, and the engines of the half-tracs, in your food and water and clothes. There was nothing for three days but cold, and wind, and sand.

  Thrilled? I’d have laughed at that, before. But now, I didn’t know. Maybe Jim had been, at that. He had lots of patience, a lot more than I ever had. Maybe he glamorized that hellish trip into wonderful adventure on a foreign world.

  “Sure, he was thrilled,” I said. “We all were. Anybody would be.”

  Miss Graham took the letters back, and then said, “You had Martian sickness too, didn’t you?”

  I said, Yes, I had, just a touch, and that was why I’d had to spend a stretch in Reconditioning Hospital when I got back.

  She waited for me to go on, and I knew I had to. “They don’t know yet if it’s some sort of virus, or just the effect of Martian conditions on Earthmen’s bodies. It hit forty percent of us. It wasn’t really so bad—fever and dopiness, mostly.”

  “When Jim got it, was he well cared for?” she asked. Her lips were quivering a little.

  “Sure, he was well cared for. He got the best care there was,” I lied.

  The best care there was? That was a laugh. The first cases got decent care, maybe. But they’d never figured on so many coming down. There wasn’t any room in our little hospital—they just had to stay in their bunks in the aluminum Quonsets when it hit them. All our doctors but one were down, and two of them died.

  We’d been on Mars six months when it hit us, and the loneliness had already got us down. All but four of our rockets had gone back to Earth, and we were alone on a dead world, our little town of Quonsets huddled together under that hateful, brassy sky, and beyond it the sand and rocks that went on forever.

  You go up to the North Pole and camp there, and find out how lonely that is. It was worse, out there, a lot worse. The first excitement was gone long ago, and we were tired, and homesick in a way nobody was ever homesick before—we wanted to see green grass, and real sunshine, and women’s faces, and hear running water; and we wouldn’t until Expedition Three came to relieve us. No wonder guys blew their tops, out there. And then came Martian sickness, on top of it.

  “We did everything for him that we could,” I said.

  Sure we had. I could still remember Walter and me tramping through the cold night to the hospital to try to get a medic, while Breck stayed with him, and how we couldn’t get one.

  I remember how Walter had looked up at the blazing sky as we tramped back, and shaken his fist at the big green star of Earth.

  “People up there are going to dances tonight, watching shows, sitting around in warm rooms laughing! Why should good men have to die out here to get them uranium for cheap power?”

  “Can it,” I told him tiredly. “Jim’s not going to die. A lot of guys got over it.”

  The best care there was? That was real funny. All we could do was wash his face, and give him the pills the medic left, and watch him get weaker every day till he died.

  “Nobody could have done more for him than was done,” I told Miss Graham.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I guess—it’s just one of those things.”

  When I got up to go she asked me if I didn’t want to see Jim’s room. They’d kept it for him just the same, she said.

  I didn’t want to, but how are you going to say so? I went up with her and looked and said it was nice. She opened a big cupboard. It was full of neat rows of old magazines.

  “They’re all the old science-fiction magazines he read when he was a boy,” she said. “He always saved them.”

  I took one out. It had a bright cover, with a spaceship on it, not like our rockets but a streamlined thing, and the rings of Saturn in the background.

  When I laid it down, Miss Graham took it up and put it back carefully into its place in the row, as though somebody was coming back who wouldn’t like to find things out of order.

  She insisted on driving me back to Omaha, and out to the airport. She seemed sorry to let me go, and I suppose it was because I was the last real tie to Jim, and when I was gone it was all over then for good.

  I wondered if she’d get over it in time, and I guessed she would. People do get over things. I supposed she’d marry some other nice guy, and I wondered what they’d do with Jim’s things—with all those old magazines nobody was ever coming back to read.<
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  3

  I would never have stopped at Chicago at all if I could have got out of it, for the last person I wanted to talk to anybody about was Walter Millis. It would be too easy for me to make a slip, and let out stuff nobody was supposed to know.

  But Walter’s father had called me at the hospital, a couple of times. The last time he called, he said he was having Breck’s parents come down from Wisconsin so they could see me too, so what could I do then but say, Yes, I’d stop. But I didn’t like it at all, and I knew I’d have to be careful.

  Mr. Millis was waiting at the airport and shook hands with me and said what a big favor I was doing them all, and how he appreciated my stopping when I must be anxious to get back to my own home and parents.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “My dad and mother came out to the hospital to see me when I first got back.”

  He was a big, fine-looking important sort of man, with a little bit of the stuffed shirt about him, I thought. He seemed friendly enough, but I got the feeling he was looking at me and wondering why I’d come back and his son Walter hadn’t. Well, I couldn’t blame him for that.

  His car was waiting, a big car with a driver, and we started north through the city. Mr. Millis pointed out a few things to me to make conversation, especially a big atomic power station we passed.

  “It’s only one of thousands, strung all over the world,” he said. “They’re going to transform our whole economy. This Martian uranium will be a big thing, Sergeant.”

  I said, Yes, I guessed it would.

  I was sweating blood, waiting for him to start asking about Walter, and I didn’t know yet just what I could tell him. I could get myself in dutch plenty if I opened my big mouth too wide, for that one thing that had happened to Expedition Two was supposed to be strictly secret, and we’d all been briefed on why we had to keep our mouths shut.

  But he let it go for the time being, and just talked other stuff. I gathered that his wife wasn’t too well, and that Walter had been their only child. I also gathered that he was a very big shot in business, and dough-heavy.

  I didn’t like him. Walter, I’d liked plenty, but his old man seemed a pretty pompous person, with his heavy business talk.

  He wanted to know how soon I thought Martian uranium would come through in quantity, and I said I didn’t think it’d be very soon.

  “Expedition One only located the deposits,” I said, “and Two just did mapping and setting up a preliminary base. Of course, the thing keeps expanding, and I hear Four will have a hundred rockets. But Mars is a tough set-up.”

  Mr. Millis said decisively that I was wrong, that the world was power-hungry, that it would be pushed a lot faster than I expected.

  He suddenly quit talking business and looked at me and asked, “Who was Walter’s best friend, out there?”

  He asked it sort of apologetically. He was a stuffed shirt; but all my dislike of him went away, then.

  “Breck Jergen,” I told him. “Breck was our sergeant. . .he sort of held our squad together, and he and Walter cottoned to each other from the first.”

  Mr. Millis nodded, but didn’t say anything more about it. He pointed out the window at the distant lake, and said we were almost to his home.

  It wasn’t a home, it was a big mansion. We went in and he introduced me to Mrs. Millis. She was a limp, pale-looking woman, who said she was glad to meet one of Walter’s friends. Somehow I got the feeling that even though he was a stuffed shirt, he felt it about Walter a lot more than she did.

  He took me up to a bedroom and said that Breck’s parents would arrive before dinner, and that I could get a little rest before then.

  I sat looking around the room. It was the plushiest one I’d ever been in, and seeing this house and the way these people lived, I began to understand why Walter had blown his top more than the rest of us.

  He’d been a good guy, Walter, but high-tempered, and I could see now he’d been a little spoiled. The discipline at Training Base had been tougher on him than on most of us, and this was why.

  I sat and dreaded this dinner that was coming up, and looked out the window at a swimming-pool and tennis court, and wondered if anybody ever used them now that Walter was gone. It seemed a queer thing for a fellow with a set-up like this to go out to Mars and get himself killed.

  I took the satin cover off the bed so my shoes wouldn’t dirty it, and lay down and closed my eyes, and wondered what I was going to tell them. The trouble was, I didn’t know what story the officials had given them.

  “The Commanding Officer regrets to inform you that your son was shot down like a dog—”

  They’d never got any telegram like that. But just what line had been handed them? I wished I’d had a chance to check on that.

  Damn it, why didn’t all these people let me alone? They started it all going through my mind again, and the psychos had told me I ought to forget it for a while, but how could I?

  It might be better just to tell them the truth. After all, Walter wasn’t the only one who’d blown his top out there. In that grim last couple of months, plenty of guys had gone around sounding off.

  Expedition Three isn’t coming!

  We’re stuck, and they don’t care enough about us to send help!

  That was the line of talk. You heard it plenty, in those days. You couldn’t blame the guys for it, either. A fourth of us down with Martian sickness, the little grave-markers clotting up the valley beyond the ridge, rations getting thin, medicine running low, everything running low, all of us watching the sky for rockets that never came.

  There’d been a little hitch back on Earth, Colonel Nichols explained. (He was our CO now that General Rayen had died.) There was a little delay, but the rockets would be on their way soon, we’d get relief, we just had to hold on—

  Holding on—that’s what we were doing. Nights we’d sit in the Quonset, and listen to Lassen coughing in his bunk, and it seemed like wind-giants, cold-giants, were bawling and laughing around our little huddle of shelters.

  “Damn it, if they’re not coming, why don’t we go home?” Walter said. “We’ve still got the four rockets—they could take us all back.”

  Breck’s serious face got graver. “Look, Walter, there’s too much of that stuff being talked around. Lay off.”

  “Can you blame the men for talking it? We’re not story-book heroes. If they’ve forgotten about us back on Earth, why do we just sit and take it?”

  “We have to,” Breck said. “Three will come.”

  I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t have happened, what did happen, if we hadn’t had that false alarm. The one that set the whole camp wild that night, with guys shouting, “Three’s here! The rockets landed over west of Rock Ridge!”

  Only when they charged out there, they found they hadn’t seen rockets landing at all, but a little shower of tiny meteors burning themselves up as they fell.

  It was the disappointment that did it, I think. I can’t say for sure, because that same day was the day I conked out with Martian sickness, and the floor came up and hit me and I woke up in the bunk, with somebody giving me a hypo, and my head big as a balloon.

  I wasn’t clear out, it was only a touch of it, but it was enough to make everything foggy, and I didn’t know about the mutiny that was boiling up until I woke up once with Breck leaning over me, and saw he wore a gun and an MP brassard now.

  When I asked him how come, he said there’d been so much wild talk about grabbing the four rockets and going home, that the MP force had been doubled, and Nichols had issued stern warnings.

  “Walter?” I said, and Breck nodded. “He’s a leader and he’ll get hit with a court-martial when this is over. The blasted idiot!”

  “I don’t get it—he’s got plenty of guts, you know that,” I said.

  “Yes, but he can’t take discipline, he never did take it very well, and now that the squeeze is on he’s blowing up. Well, see you later, Frank.”

  I saw him later, but not the w
ay I expected. For that was the day we heard the faint echo of shots, and then the alarm-siren screaming, and men running, and half-tracs starting up in a hurry. And when I managed to get out of my bunk and out of the hut, they were all going toward the big rockets, and a corporal yelled to me from a jeep, “That’s blown it! The damn fools swiped guns and tried to take over the rockets and make the crews fly ’em home!”

  I could still remember the sickening slidings and bouncings of the jeep as it took us out there, the milling little crowd under the looming rockets, milling around and hiding something on the ground, and Major Weiler yelling himself hoarse giving orders.

  When I got to see what was on the ground, it was seven or eight men and most of them dead. Walter had been shot right through the heart. They told me later it was because he’d been the leader, out in front, that he got it first of the mutineers.

  One MP was dead, and one was sitting with red all over the middle of his uniform, and that one was Breck, and they were bringing a stretcher for him now.

  The corporal said, “Hey, that’s Jergen, your squad-leader!”

  And I said, “Yes, that’s him.” Funny, how you can’t talk when something hits you—how you just say words, like “Yes, that’s him.”

  Breck died that night without ever regaining consciousness, and there I was, still half-sick myself, and with Lassen dying in his bunk, and five of us were all that was left of Squad Fourteen, and that was that.

  How could HQ let a thing like that get known? A fine advertisement it would be for recruiting more Mars expeditions, if they told how guys on Two cracked up and did a crazy thing like that. I didn’t blame them for telling us to keep it top secret. Anyway, it wasn’t something we’d want to talk about.

  But it sure left me in a fine spot now, a sweet spot. I was going down to talk to Breck’s parents and Walter’s parents, and they’d want to know how their sons died, and I could tell them, “Your sons probably killed each other, out there.”