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

by William Sloane

“Yes.”

  “Give me your stylus and pad.” Taking them, Graypate squatted on a rock, lowering himself stiffly, for he was feeling the weight of his years. Resting the pad on his knees, he held the writing instrument in his right hand while his left continued to grasp a tentacle-tip. “Go ahead.”

  He started drawing thick, laborious marks as Fander’s mind-pictures came through, enlarging the letters and keeping them well separated. When he had finished he handed the pad over.

  “Asymmetrical,” decided Fander, staring at the queer letters and wishing for the first time that he had taken up the study of Earth-writing. “Cannot you make this part balance with that, and this with this?”

  “It’s what you said.”

  “It is your own translation of what I said. I would like it better balanced. Do you mind if we try again?”

  They tried again. They made fourteen attempts before Fander was satisfied with the perfunctory appearance of letters and words he could not understand.

  Taking the paper, he found his ray-gun, went to the base-rock of the beautiful thing and sheared the whole front to a flat, even surface. Adjusting his beam to cut a V-shaped channel one inch deep, he inscribed his poem on the rock in long, unpunctuated lines of neat Martian curlicues. With less confidence and much greater care, he repeated the verse in Earth’s awkward, angular hieroglyphics. The task took him quite a time and there were fifty people watching him when he finished. They said nothing. In utter silence they looked at the poem and at the beautiful thing, and were still standing there brooding solemnly when he went away.

  One by one the rest of the community visited the site next day, going and coming with the air of pilgrims attending an ancient shrine. All stood there a long tine, returned without comment. Nobody praised Fander’s work, nobody damned it, nobody reproached him for alienating something wholly Earth’s. The only effect—too subtle to be noteworthy—was a greater and still growing grimness and determination that boosted the already swelling Earth-dynamic.

  In that respect, Fander wrought better than he knew.

  A plague-scare came in the fourteenth year. Two sleds had brought back families from afar and within a week of their arrival the children sickened, became spotted.

  Metal gongs sounded the alarm, all work ceased, the affected section was cut off and guarded, the majority prepared to flee. It was a threatening reversal of all the things for which many had toiled so long, a destructive scattering of the tender roots of new civilization.

  Fander found Graypate, Speedy and Blacky, armed to the teeth, facing a drawn-faced and restless crowd.

  “There’s most of a hundred folk in that isolated part,” Graypate was telling them. “They ain’t all got it. Maybe they won’t get it. If they don’t, it ain’t so likely you’ll go down either. We ought to wait and see. Stick around a bit.”

  “Listen who’s talking,” invited a voice in the crowd. “If you weren’t immune you’d have been buried thirty-forty years ago.”

  “Same goes for near everybody,” snapped Gray-pate. He glared around, his gun under one arm, his pale blue eyes bellicose. “I ain’t much use at speechifying, so I’m just saying flatly that nobody goes before we know whether this really is the plague.” He hefted his weapon in one hand, held it forward. “Anyone fancy himself at beating a bullet?”

  The heckler in the audience muscled his way to the front. He was a swarthy man of muscular build, and his dark eyes looked belligerently into Graypate’s. “While there’s life there’s hope. If we beat it we live to come back, when it’s safe to come back, if ever—and you know it. So I’m calling your bluff, see?” Squaring his shoulders, he began to walk off.

  Graypate’s gun already was halfway up when he felt the touch of Fander’s tentacle on his arm. He lowered the weapon, called after the escapee.

  “I’m going into that cut-off section and the Devil is going with me. We’re running into things, not away from them. I never did like running away.” Several of the audience fidgeted, murmured approval. He went on, “We’ll see for ourselves just what’s wrong. We mightn’t be able to put it right, but we’ll find out what’s the matter.”

  The walker paused, turned, eyed him, eyed Fander, and said, “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll get it yourself—and a heck of a lot of use you’ll be dead.”

  “What, and me immune?” cracked Graypate, grinning.

  “The Devil will get it,” hedged the other.

  Graypate was about to retort, “What do you care?” but altered it slightly in response to Fander’s contacting thoughts. He said, more softly, “Do you care?”

  It caught the other off-balance. He fumbled embarrassedly within his own mind, avoided looking at the Martian, said lamely, “I don’t see the reason for any guy to take risks.”

  “He’s taking them because he cares,” Graypate gave back. “And I’m taking them because I’m too old and useless to give a darn.”

  With that, he stepped down, marched stubbornly toward the isolated section, Fander slithering by his side, tentacle in hand. The one who wished to flee stayed put, staring after them. The crowd shuffled uneasily, seemed of two minds whether to accept the situation and stick around, or whether to rush Graypate and Fander and drag them away. Speedy and Blacky made as if to follow the pair but were ordered off.

  No adult sickened; nobody died. Children in the affected sector went one after another through the same routine of liverishness, high temperature and spots until the epidemic of measles had died out. Not until a month after the last case had been cured by something within its own constitution did Graypate and Fander emerge.

  The innocuous course and eventual disappearance of this suspected plague gave the pendulum of confidence a push, swinging it farther. Morale boosted itself almost to the verge of arrogance. More sleds appeared, more mechanics serviced them, more pilots rode them. More people flowed in; more oddments of past knowledge came with them.

  Humanity was off to a flying start with the salvaged seeds of past wisdom and the urge to do. The tormented ones of Earth were not primitive savages, but surviving organisms of a greatness nine-tenths destroyed but still remembered, each contributing his mite of know-how to restore at least some of those things which had been boiled away in atomic fires.

  When, in the twentieth year, Redhead duplicated the premasticator, there were eight thousand stone houses standing around the hill. A community hall seventy times the size of a house, with a great green dome of copper, reared itself upon the eastward fringe. A dam held the lake to the north. A hospital was going up in the west. The nuances and energies and talents of fifty races had built this town and were still building it. Among them were ten Polynesians and four Icelanders and one lean, dusky child who was the last of the Seminoles.

  Farms spread wide. One thousand heads of Indian corn rescued from a sheltered valley in the Andes had grown to ten thousand acres. Water buffaloes and goats had been brought from afar to serve in lieu of the horses and sheep that would never be seen again—and no man knew why one species survived while another did not. The horses had died; the water buffaloes lived. The canines hunted in ferocious packs; the felines had departed from existence. The small herbs, some tubers and a few seedy things could be rescued and cultivated for hungry bellies; but there were no flowers for the hungry mind. Humanity carried on, making do with what was available. No more than that could be done.

  Fander was a back number. He had nothing left for which to live but his songs and the affection of the others. In everything but his harp and his songs the Terrans were way ahead of him. He could do no more than give of his own affection in return for theirs and wait with the patience of one whose work is done.

  At the end of that year they buried Graypate. He died in his sleep, passing with the undramatic casualness of one who “ain’t much use at speechifying.” They put him to rest on a knoll behind the community hall, and Fander played his mourning song, and Precious Jewel, who was S
peedy’s wife, planted the grave with sweet herbs.

  In the spring of the following year Fander summoned Speedy and Blacky and Redhead. He was coiled on a couch, blue and shivering. They held hands so that his touch would speak to them simultaneously.

  “I am about to undergo my amafa”

  He had great difficulty in putting it over in understandable thought-forms, for this was something beyond their Earthly experience.

  “It is an unavoidable change of age during which my kind must sleep undisturbed.” They reacted as if the casual reference to his kind was a strange and startling revelation, a new aspect previously unthought-of. He continued, “I must be left alone until this hibernation has run its natural course.”

  “For how long, Devil?” asked Speedy, with anxiety.

  “It may stretch from four of your months to a full year, or—”

  “Or what?” Speedy did not wait for a reassuring reply. His agile mind was swift to sense the spice of danger lying far back in the Martian’s thoughts. “Or it may never end?”

  “It may never,” admitted Fander, reluctantly. He shivered again, drew his tentacles around himself. The brilliance of his blueness was fading visibly. “The possibility is small, but it is there.”

  Speedy’s eyes widened and his breath was taken in a short gasp. His mind was striving to readjust itself and accept the appalling idea that Fander might not be a fixture, permanent, established for all time. Blacky and Redhead were equally aghast.

  “We Martians do not last forever,” Fander pointed out, gently. “All are mortal, here and there. He who survives his amafa has many happy years to follow, but some do not survive. It is a trial that must be faced as everything from beginning to end must be faced.”

  “But—”

  “Our numbers are not large,” Fander went on. “We breed slowly and some of us die halfway through the normal span. By cosmic standards we are a weak and foolish people much in need of the support of the clever and the strong. You are clever and strong. Whenever my people visit you again, or any other still stranger people come, always remember that you are clever and strong.”

  “We are strong,” echoed Speedy, dreamily. His gaze swung around to take in the thousands of roofs, the copper dome, the thing of beauty on the hill. “We are strong.”

  A prolonged shudder went through the ropy, bee-eyed creature on the couch.

  “I do not wish to be left here, an idle sleeper in the midst of life, posing like a bad example to the young. I would rather rest within the little cave where first we made friends and grew to know and understand each other. Wall it up and fix a door for me. Forbid anyone to touch me or let the light of day fall upon me until such time as I emerge of my own accord.” Fander stirred sluggishly, his limbs uncoiling with noticeable lack of sinuousness. “I regret I must ask you to carry me there. Please forgive me; I have left it a little late and cannot … cannot … make it by myself.”

  Their faces were pictures of alarm, their minds bells of sorrow. Running for poles, they made a stretcher, edged him onto it, bore him to the cave. A long procession was following by the time they reached it. As they settled him comfortably and began to wall up the entrance, the crowd watched in the same solemn silence with which they had looked upon his verse.

  He was already a tightly rolled ball of dull blueness, with filmed eyes, when they fitted the door and closed it, leaving him to darkness and slumber. Next day a tiny, brown-skinned man with eight children, all hugging dolls, came to the door. While the youngsters stared huge-eyed at the door, he fixed upon it a two-word name in metal letters, taking great pains over his self-imposed task and making a neat job of it.

  The Martian vessel came from the stratosphere with the slow, stately fall of a grounding balloon. Behind the transparent band its bluish, nightmarish crew were assembled and looking with great, multifaceted eyes at the upper surface of the clouds. The scene resembled a pink-tinged snow-field beneath which the planet still remained concealed.

  Captain Rdina could feel this as a tense, exciting moment even though his vessel had not the honor to be the first with such an approach. One Captain Skhiva, now long retired, had done it many years before. Nevertheless, this second venture retained its own exploratory thrill.

  Someone stationed a third of the way around the vessel’s belly came writhing at top pace toward him as their drop brought them near to the pinkish clouds. The oncomer’s signaling tentacle was jiggling at a seldom used rate.

  “Captain, we have just seen an object swoop across the horizon.”

  “What sort of an object?”

  “It looked like a gigantic load-sled.”

  “It couldn’t have been.”

  “No, Captain, of course not—but that is exactly what it appeared to be.”

  “Where is it now?” demanded Rdina, gazing toward the side from which the other had come.

  “It dived into the mists below.”

  “You must have been mistaken. Long-standing anticipation can encourage the strangest delusions.” He stopped a moment as the observation band became shrouded in the vapor of a cloud. Musingly, he watched the gray wall of fog slide upward as his vessel continued its descent. “That old report says definitely that there is nothing but desolation and wild animals. There is no intelligent life except some fool of a minor poet whom Skhiva left behind, and twelve to one he’s dead by now. The animals may have eaten him.”

  “Eaten him? Eaten meat?” exclaimed the other, thoroughly revolted.

  “Anything is possible,” assured Rdina, pleased with the extreme to which his imagination could be stretched. “Except a load-sled. That was plain silly.”

  At which point he had no choice but to let the subject drop for the simple and compelling reason that the ship came out of the base of the cloud, and the sled in question was floating alongside. It could be seen in complete detail, and even their own instruments were responding to the powerful output of its numerous flotation-grids.

  The twenty Martians aboard the sphere sat staring bee-eyed at this enormous thing which was half the size of their own vessel, and the forty humans on the sled stared back with equal intentness. Ship and sled continued to descend side by side, while both crews studied each other with dumb fascination which persisted until simultaneously they touched ground.

  It was not until he felt the slight jolt of landing that Captain Rdina recovered sufficiently to look elsewhere. He saw the houses, the green-domed building, the thing of beauty poised upon its hill, the many hundreds of Earth-people streaming out of their town and toward his vessel.

  None of these queer, two-legged life-forms, he noted, betrayed the slightest sign of revulsion or fear. They galloped to the tryst with a bumptious self-confidence which would still be evident any place the other side of the cosmos.

  It shook him a little, and he kept saying to himself, again and again, “They’re not scared—why should you be? They’re not scared—why should you be?”

  He went out personally to meet the first of them, suppressing his own apprehensions and ignoring the fact that many of them bore weapons. The leading Earthman, a big-built, spade-bearded two-legger, grasped his tentacle as to the manner born.

  There came a picture of swiftly moving limbs. “My name is Speedy.”

  The ship emptied itself within ten minutes. No Martian would stay inside who was free to smell new air. Their first visit, in a slithering bunch, was to the thing of beauty. Rdina stood quietly looking at it, his crew clustered in a half-circle around him, the Earth folk a silent audience behind.

  It was a great rock statue of a female of Earth. She was broad-shouldered, full-bosomed, wide-hipped, and wore voluminous skirts that came right down to her heavy-soled shoes. Her back was a little bent, her head a little bowed, and her face was hidden in her hands, deep in her toil-worn hands. Rdina tried in vain to gain some glimpse of the tired features behind those hiding hands. He looked at her a long while before his eyes lowered to read the script beneath, ignoring the Earth-l
ettering, running easily over the flowing Martian curlicues:

  Weep, my country, for your sons asleep,

  The ashes of your homes, your tottering towers.

  Weep, my country, O, my country, weep!

  For birds that cannot sing, for vanished flowers,

  The end of everything, The silenced hours.

  Weep, my country!

  There was no signature. Rdina mulled it through many minutes while the others remained passive. Then he tinned to Speedy, pointed to the Martian script.

  “Who wrote this?”

  “One of your people. He is dead.”

  “Ah!” said Rdina. “That songbird of Skhiva’s. I have forgotten his name. I doubt whether many remember it. He was only a very small poet. How did he die?”

  “He ordered us to enclose him for some long and urgent sleep he must have, and—”

  “The amafa,” put in Rdina, comprehendingly. “And then?”

  “We did as he asked. He warned us that he might never come out.” Speedy gazed at the sky, unconscious that Rdina was picking up his sorrowful thoughts. “He has been there nearly two years and has not emerged.” The eyes came down to Rdina. “I don’t know whether you can understand me, but he was one of us.”

  “I think I understand.” Rdina was thoughtful. He asked, “How long is this period you call nearly two years?”

  They managed to work it out between them, translating it from Terr an to Martian time-terms.

  “It is long,” pronounced Rdina. “Much longer than the usual amafa, but not unique. Occasionally, for no known reason, someone takes even longer. Besides, Earth is Earth and Mars is Mars.” He became swift, energetic as he called to one of his crew. “Physician Traith, we have a prolonged amafa case. Get your oils and essences and come with me.” When the other had returned, he said to Speedy, “Take us to where he sleeps.”

  Reaching the door to the walled-up cave, Rdina paused to look at the names fixed upon it in neat but incomprehensible letters. They read: DEAR DEVIL.