Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars

by William Sloane

  “What are its symptoms?”

  “You go hot and dizzy. You get black swellings in the armpits. In forty-eight hours you’re dead. Old ones get it first. The kids then catch it unless you make away from them mighty fast.”

  “It is nothing familiar to me,” said Fander, unable to recognize cultured bubonic. “In any case, I’m not a medical expert.” He eyed Graypate. “But you seem to have avoided it.”

  “Sheer luck,” opined Graypate. “Or maybe I can t get it. There was a story going around during the war that some folk might develop immunity to it, durned if I know why. Could be that I’m immune, but don’t count on it.”

  “So you keep your distance from these children?”

  “Sure.” He glanced at Speedy. “I shouldn’t really have come along with this kid. He’s got a lousy chance as it is without me increasing the odds.”

  “That is thoughtful of you,” Fander put over softly. “Especially seeing that you must be lonely.”

  Graypate bristled and his thought-flow became aggressive. “I ain’t grieving for company. I can look after myself, like I have done since my old man went away to curl up by himself. I’m on my own feet. So’s every other guy.”

  “I believe that,” said Fander. “You must pardon me —I’m a stranger here myself. I judged you by my own feelings. Now and again I get pretty lonely.”

  “How come?” demanded Graypate, staring at him. “You ain’t telling me they dumped you and left you, on your own?”

  “They did.”

  “Man!” exclaimed Graypate fervently.

  Man! It was a picture resembling Speedy’s conception, a vision elusive in form but firm and human in face. The oldster was reacting to what he considered a predicament rather than a choice, and the reaction came on a wave of sympathy.

  Fander struck promptly and hard. “You see how I’m fixed. The companionship of wild animals is nothing to me. I need someone intelligent enough to like my music and forget my looks, someone intelligent enough to—

  “I ain’t so sure we’re that smart,” Graypate chipped in. He let his gaze swing morbidly around the landscape. “Not when I see this graveyard and think of how it looked in Grandpop’s days.”

  “Every flower blooms from the dust of a hundred dead ones,” answered Fander.

  “What are flowers?”

  It shocked the Martian. He had projected a mind-picture of a trumpet lily, crimson and shining, and Graypate’s brain had juggled it around, uncertain whether it were fish, flesh or fowl.

  “Vegetable growths, like these.” Fander plucked half a dozen blades of blue-green grass. “But more colorful, and sweet-scented.” He transmitted the brilliant vision of a mile-square field of trumpet lilies, red and glowing.

  “Glory be!” said Graypate. “We’ve nothing like those.”

  “Not here,” agreed Fander. “Not here.” He gestured toward the horizon. “Elsewhere may be plenty. If we got together we could be company for each other, we could learn things from each other. We could pool our ideas, our efforts, and search for flowers far away —also for more people.”

  “Folk just won’t get together in large bunches. They stick to each other in family groups until the plague breaks them up. Then they abandon the kids. The bigger the crowd, the bigger the risk of someone contaminating the lot.” He leaned on his gun, staring at the other, his thought-forms shaping themselves in dull solemnity. “When a guy gets hit he goes away and takes it on his own. The end is a personal contract between him and his God, with no witnesses. Death’s a pretty private affair these days.”

  “What, after all these years? Don’t you think that by this time the disease may have run its course and exhausted itself?”

  “Nobody knows—and nobody’s gambling on it.”

  “I would gamble,” said Fander.

  “You ain’t like us. You mightn’t be able to catch it.”

  “Or I might get it worse, and die more painfully.”

  “Mebbe,” admitted Graypate, doubtfully. “Anyway, you’re looking at it from a different angle. You’ve been dumped on your ownsome. What’ve you got to lose?”

  “My life,” said Fander.

  Graypate rocked back on his heels, then said, “Yes, sir, that is a gamble. A guy can’t bet any heavier than that.” He rubbed his chin whiskers as before. “All right, all right, I’ll take you up on that. You come right here and live with us.” His grip tightened on his gun, his knuckles showing white. “On this understanding: the moment you feel sick you get out fast, and for keeps. If you don’t, I’ll bump you and drag you away myself, even if that makes me get it too. The kids come first, see?”

  The shelters were far roomier than the cave. There were eighteen children living in them, all skinny with their prolonged diet of roots, edible herbs and an occasional rabbit. The youngest and most sensitive of them ceased to be terrified of Fander after ten days. Within four months his slithering shape of blue ropiness had become a normal adjunct of their small, limited world.

  Six of the youngsters were males older than Speedy, one of them much older but not yet adult. He beguiled them with his harp, teaching them to play, and now and again giving them ten-minute rides on the load-sled as a special treat. He made dolls for the girls, and queer, cone-shaped little houses for the dolls, and fan-backed chairs of woven grass for the houses. None of these toys were truly Martian in design, and none were Terrestrial. They represented a pathetic compromise within his imagination: the Martian notion of what Terrestrial models might have looked like had there been any in existence.

  But surreptitiously, without seeming to give any less attention to the younger ones, he directed his main efforts upon the six older boys and Speedy. To his mind, these were the hope of the world—and of Mars. At no time did he bother to ponder that the non-technical brain is not without its virtues, or that there are times and circumstances when it is worth dropping the short view of what is practicable for the sake of the long view of what is remotely possible. So as best he could he concentrated upon the elder seven, educating them through the dragging months, stimulating their minds, encouraging their curiosity, and continually impressing upon them the idea that fear of disease can become a folk-separating dogma unless they conquered it within their souls.

  He taught them that death is death, a natural process to be accepted philosophically and met with dignity—and there were times when he suspected that he was teaching them nothing, he was merely reminding them, for deep within their growing minds was the ancestral strain of Terrestrialism which had mulled its way to the same conclusions ten or twenty thousands of years before. Still, he was helping to remove this disease-block from the path of the stream, and was driving child-logic more rapidly toward adult outlook. In that respect he was satisfied. He could do little more.

  In time, they organized group concerts, humming or making singing noises to the accompaniment of the harp, now and again improvising lines to suit Fander’s tunes, arguing out the respective merits of chosen words until by process of elimination they had a complete song. As songs grew to a repertoire and singing grew more adept, more polished, Old Graypate displayed interest, came to one performance, then another, until by custom he had established his own place as a one-man audience.

  One day the eldest boy, who was named Redhead, came to Fander and grasped a tentacle-tip. “Devil, may I operate your food-machine?”

  “You mean you would like me to show you how to work it?”

  “No, Devil, I know how to work it.” The boy gazed self-assuredly into the other’s great bee-eyes.

  “Then how is it operated?”

  “You fill its container with the tenderest blades of grass, being careful not to include roots. You are equally careful not to turn a switch before the container is full and its door completely closed. You then turn the red switch for a count of two hundred eighty, reverse the container, turn the green switch for a count of forty-seven. You then close both switches, empty the container’s warm pulp into the en
d molds and apply the press until the biscuits are firm and dry.”

  “How have you discovered all this?”

  “I have watched you make biscuits for us many times. This morning while you were busy, I tried it myself.” He extended a hand. It held a biscuit. Taking it from him, Fander examined it. Firm, crisp, well-shaped. He tasted it. Perfect.

  Redhead became the first mechanic to operate and service a Martian lifeboat’s emergency premasticator. Seven years later, long after the machine had ceased to function, he managed to repower it, weakly but effectively, with dust that gave forth alpha sparks. In another five years he had improved it, speeded it up. In twenty years he had duplicated it and had all the know-how needed to turn out premasticators on a large scale. Fander could not have equaled this performance for, as a non-technician, he’d no better notion than the average Terrestrial of the principles upon which the machine worked, neither did he know what was meant by radiant digestion or protein enrichment. He could do little more than urge Redhead along and leave the rest to whatever inherent genius the boy possessed—which was plenty.

  In similar manner, Speedy and two youths named Blacky and Big-ears took the load-sled out of his charge. On rare occasions, as a great privilege, Fander had permitted them to take up the sled for one-hour trips, alone. This time they were gone from dawn to dusk. Graypate mooched around, gun under arm, another smaller one stuck in his belt, going frequently to the top of a rise and scanning the skies in all directions. The delinquents swooped in at sunset, bringing with them a strange boy.

  Fander summoned them to him. They held hands so that his touch would give him simultaneous contact with all three.

  “I am a little worried. The sled has only so much power. When it is all gone there will be no more.”

  They eyed each other aghast.

  “Unfortunately, I have neither the knowledge nor the ability to energize the sled once its power is exhausted. I lack the wisdom of the friends who left me here—and that is my shame.” He paused, watching them dolefully, then went on, “All I do know is that its power does not leak away. If not used much, the reserves will remain for many years.” Another pause before he added, “And in a few years you will be men.”

  Blacky said, “But, Devil, when we are men we’ll be much heavier and the sled will use so much more power.”

  “How do you know that?” Fander put it sharply.

  “More weight, more power to sustain it,” opined Blacky with the air of one whose logic is incontrovertible. “It doesn’t need thinking out. Ifs obvious.”

  Very slowly and softly, Fander told him, “You’ll do. May the twin moons shine upon you someday, for I know you’ll do.”

  “Do what, Devil?”

  “Build a thousand sleds like this one, or better—and explore the whole world.”

  From that time onward they confined their trips strictly to one hour, making them less frequently than of yore, spending more time poking and prying around the sled’s innards.

  Graypate changed character with the slow reluctance of the aged. Leastways, as two years then three rolled past, he came gradually out of his shell, was less taciturn, more willing to mix with those swiftly growing up to his own height. Without fully realizing what he was doing he joined forces with Fander, gave the children the remnants of Earthly wisdom passed down from his father’s father. He taught the boys how to use the guns of which he had as many as eleven, some maintained mostly as a source of spares for others. He took them shell-hunting; digging deep beneath rotting foundations into stale, half-filled cellars in search of ammunition not too far corroded for use.

  “Guns ain’t no use without shells, and shells don’t last forever.”

  Neither do buried shells. They found not one.

  Throughout the course of history, Martian, Venusian or Terrestrial, some years are more noteworthy than others. The twelfth one after Fander’s marooning was outstanding for its series of events each of which was pitifully insignificant by cosmic standards but loomed enormously in this small community life.

  To start with, on the basis of Redhead’s improvements to the premasticator, the older seven—now bearded men—contrived to repower the exhausted sled and again took to the air for the first time in forty months. Experiments showed that the Martian load-carrier was now slower, could bear less weight, but had far longer range. They used it to visit the ruins of distant cities in search of metallic junk suitable for the building of more sleds, and by early summer they had constructed another, larger than the original, clumsy to the verge of dangerousness, but still a sled.

  On several occasions they failed to find metal but did find people, odd families surviving in under-surface shelters, clinging grimly to life and passed-down scraps of knowledge. Since all these new contacts were strictly human to human, with no weirdly tentacled shape to scare off the parties of the second part, and since many were finding fear of plague more to be endured than their terrible loneliness, many families returned with the explorers, settled in the shelters, accepted Fander, added their surviving skills to the community’s riches.

  Thus local population grew to seventy adults and four hundred children. They compounded with their plague-fear by spreading through the shelters, digging through half-wrecked and formerly unused expanses, and moving apart to form twenty or thirty lesser communities each one of which could be isolated should death reappear.

  Growing morale born of added strength and confidence in numbers soon resulted in four more sleds, still clumsy but slightly less dangerous to manage. There also appeared the first rock house above ground, standing four-square and solidly under the gray skies, a defiant witness that mankind still considered itself a cut above the rats and rabbits. The community presented the house to Blacky and Sweet-voice, who had announced their desire to associate. An adult who claimed to know the conventional routine spoke solemn words over the happy couple before many witnesses, while Fander attended the groom as best Martian.

  Toward summer’s end Speedy returned from a solo sled-trip of many days, brought with him one old man, one boy and four girls, all of strange, outlandish countenance. They were yellow in complexion, had black hair, black, almond-shaped eyes, and spoke a language that none could understand. Until these newcomers had picked up the local speech, Fander had to act as interpreter, for his mind-pictures and theirs were independent of vocal sounds. The four girls were quiet, modest and very beautiful. Within a month Speedy had married one of them whose name was a gentle clucking sound which meant Precious Jewel Ling.

  After this wedding, Fander sought Graypate, placed a tentacle-tip in his right hand. “There were differences between the man and the girl, distinctive features wider apart than any we know upon Mars. Are these some of the differences which caused your war?”

  “I dunno. I’ve never seen one of these yellow folk before. They must live mighty far off.” He rubbed his chin to help his thoughts along. “I only know what my old man told me and his old man told him. There were too many folk of too many different sorts.”

  “They can’t be all that different if they can fall in love.”

  “Mebbe not,” agreed Graypate.

  “Supposing most of the people still in this world could assemble here, breed together, and have less different children; the children breed others still less different. Wouldn’t they eventually become all much the same—just Earth-people?”

  “Mebbe so.”

  “All speaking the same language, sharing the same culture? If they spread out slowly from a central source, always in contact by sled, continually sharing the same knowledge, same progress, would there be any room for new differences to arise?”

  “I dunno,” said Graypate evasively. I’m not so young as I used to be and I can’t dream as far ahead as I used to do.”

  “It doesn’t matter so long as the young ones can dream it.” Fander mused a moment. “If you’re beginning to think yourself a back number you’re in good company. Things are getting somewhat out of hand
as far as I’m concerned. The onlooker sees the most of the game and perhaps that’s why I’m more sensitive than you to a certain peculiar feeling.”

  “To what feeling?” inquired Graypate, eyeing him. “That Terra is on the move once more. There are now many people where there were few. A house is up and more are to follow. They talk of six more. After the six they will talk of sixty, then six hundred, then six thousand. Some are planning to haul up sunken conduits and use them to pipe water from the northward lake. Sleds are being built. Premasticators will soon be built, and force-screens likewise. Children are being taught. Less and less is being heard of your plague and so far no more have died of it. I feel a dynamic surge of energy and ambition and genius which may grow with appalling rapidity until it becomes a mighty flood. I feel that I, too, am a back number.”

  “Bunk!” said Graypate. “If you dream often enough you’re bound to have a bad one once in a while.”

  “Perhaps it is because so many of my tasks have been taken over and done better than I was doing them. I have failed to seek new tasks. Were I a technician I’d have discovered a dozen by now. Reckon this is as good a time as any to turn to a job with which you can help me.”

  “What is that?”

  “A long, long time ago I made a poem. It was for the beautiful thing that first impelled me to stay here. I do not know exactly what its maker had in mind, nor whether my eyes see it as he wished it to be seen, but I have made a poem to express what I feel when I look upon his work.”

  “Humph!” said Graypate, not very interested.

  “There is an outcrop of solid rock beneath its base which I can shave smooth and use as a plinth on which to inscribe my words. I would like to put them down twice: in the script of Mars and the script of Earth.” Fander hesitated a moment, then went on. “Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but it is many years since I wrote for all to read—and my chance may never come again.”

  Graypate said, “I get the idea. You want me to put down your notions in our writing so you can copy it.”