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

by William Sloane

  “What do those mean?” asked Physician Traith, pointing.

  “Do not disturb,” guessed Rdina carelessly. Pushing open the door, he let the other enter first, closed it behind him to keep all others outside.

  They reappeared an hour later. The total population of the city had congregated outside the cave to see the Martians. Rdina wondered why they had not permitted his crew to satisfy their natural curiosity, since it was unlikely that they would be more interested in other things—such as the fate of one small poet. Ten thousand eyes were upon them as they came into the sunlight and fastened the cave’s door. Rdina made contact with Speedy, gave him the news.

  Stretching himself in the light as if reaching toward the sun, Speedy shouted in a voice of tremendous gladness which all could hear.

  “He will be out again within twenty days.”

  At that, a mild form of madness seemed to overcome the two-leggers. They made pleasure-grimaces, piercing mouth-noises and some went so far as to beat each other.

  Twenty Martians felt like joining Fander that same night. The Martian constitution is peculiarly susceptible to emotion.

  COURTESY

  CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  ★ ★

  Whatever else the explorers of space take with them on their journeys to the stars, the most complex apparatus of all will never appear on the cargo list. Human character is intangible, but it will determine the success or failure of expeditions, and sometimes the very lives of their members. There will be times, too, when the crucial point will not be what the space voyagers think about the inhabitants of other worlds, but what those beings think about men.

  The big virtues—bravery, honesty, loyalty, piety—are the easier ones to write about, but sometimes the smaller ones can be crucial. Perhaps it is even stretching a point to say that courtesy is a virtue at all; Mr. Simak doesn’t make that claim for it in his story. Instead, he creates a situation in which courtesy turns out to have survival value.

  Not many science-fiction stories are as deftly constructed and simply told as this one, but a very large number of them are concerned with the same point this story makes. Character, virtue, morality—call it anything you like—is a part of human nature. Voyages to the stars will demand the utmost of the men who make them—not merely the utmost in strength and intelligence and endurance and discipline, but also the utmost in character and virtue.

  However, as the reader will instantly discover, Mr. Simak did not set out to write a fictionalized sermon. This is a powerful story of an expedition to a remote and bleak planet, and what happened to the men who made it. They are the kind of men who have always opened up the new frontiers of Earth, and they are the kind of men who will go first to the stars. They have courage and strength and self-discipline. And one of them had something more… .

  ★ ★

  The serum was no good. The labels told the story.

  Dr. James H. Morgan took his glasses off and wiped them carefully, cold terror clutching at his innards. He put the spectacles back on, probing at them with a thick, blunt finger to settle them into correct position. Then he took another look. He had been right the first time. The date on the serum consignment was a good ten years too old.

  He wheeled slowly, lumbered a few ponderous steps to the tent flap and stood there, squat body framed in the triangular entrance, pudgy hands gripping the canvas on either side.

  Outside, the fantastic lichen moors stretched to gray and bleak horizons. The setting sun was a dull red glow in the west—and to the east, the doctor knew, night already was beginning to close in, with that veil of purplish light that seemed to fall like a curtain upon the land and billow rapidly across it.

  A chill wind blew out of the east, already touched with the frigidity of night, and twitched the canvas beneath the doctor’s fingers.

  “Ah, yes,” said Dr. Morgan, “the merry moors of Landro.”

  A lonely place, he told himself. Not lonely only in its barrenness nor in its alien wildness, but with an ingrained loneliness that could drive a man mad if he were left alone with it.

  Like a great cemetery, he thought, an empty place of dead. And yet without the cemetery’s close association, without the tenderness and the inevitability of a cemetery. For a cemetery held in scared trust the husks of those who once had lived and this place was an emptiness that held no memory at all.

  But not for long, said Dr. Morgan. Not for long now.

  He stood looking at the barren slope that rose above the camp and he decided that it would make an eminently satisfactory cemetery.

  All places looked alike. That was the trouble. You couldn’t tell one place from another. There were no trees and there were no bushes, just a fuzzy-looking scrub that grew here and there, clothing the naked land in splotches, like the ragged coat that a beggar wears.

  Benny Falkner stopped on the path as it topped the rise and stood rigid with the fear that was mounting in him. Fear of the coming night and of its bitter cold, fear of the silent hills and the shadowed swales, and the more distant and yet more terrible fear of the little natives that might this very moment be skulking on the hillside.

  He put up his arm and wiped the sweat off his brow with his tattered sleeve. He shouldn’t have been sweating, he told himself, for it was chilly now and getting colder by the minute. In another hour or two it would be cold enough to freeze a man unprotected in the open.

  He fought down the terror that choked his throat and set his teeth a-chatter and for an instant stood stock-still to convince himself he was not panic-stricken.

  He had been going east and that meant he must go west to reach the camp again. Although the catch was that he couldn’t be absolutely sure he had been going east all the time—he might have trended north a little or even wandered south. But the deviation couldn’t have been enough, he was sure, to throw him so far off that he could not spot the camp by returning straight into the west.

  Sometime soon he should sight the smoke of the Earthmen’s camp. Any ridge, the next ridge, each succeeding hummock in the winding trail, he had assured himself, would bring him upon the camp itself. He would reach higher ground and there the camp would be, spread out in front of him, with the semicircle of white canvas gleaming in the fading light and the thin trail of smoke rising from the larger cook tent where Bat Ears Brady would be bellowing one of his obscene songs.

  But that had been an hour ago when the sun still stood a good two hands high. He remembered now, standing on the ridge-top, that he had been a little nervous, but not really apprehensive. It had been unthinkable, then, that a man could get himself lost in an hour’s walk out of camp.

  Now the sun was gone and the cold was creeping in and the wind had a lonely sound he had not noticed when the light was good.

  One more rise, he decided. One more ridge, and if that is not the one, I’ll give up until morning. Find a sheltered place somewhere, a rock face of some sort that will give me some protection and reflect a campfire’s heat—if I can find anything with which to make a campfire.

  He stood and listened to the wind moaning across the land behind him and it seemed to him there was a whimper in the sound, as if the wind were anxious, that it might be following on his track, sniffing out his scent.

  Then he heard the other sound, the soft, padding sound that came up the hill toward him.

  Ira Warren sat at his desk and stared accusingly at the paperwork stacked in front of him. Reluctantly he took some of the papers off the stack and laid them on the desk.

  That fool Falkner, he thought. I’ve told them and I’ve told them that they have to stick together, that no one must go wandering off alone.

  A bunch of babies, he told himself savagely. Just a bunch of drooling kids, fresh out of college, barely dry behind the ears and all hopped up with erudition, but without any common sense. And not a one of them would listen. That was the worst of it, not a one of them would listen.

  Someone scratched on the canvas of the tent.

 
“Come in,” called Warren.

  Dr. Morgan entered.

  “Good evening, commander,” he said.

  “Well,” said Warren irritably, “what now?”

  “Why, now,” said Dr. Morgan, sweating just a little. “It’s the matter of the serum.”

  “The serum?”

  “The serum,” said Dr. Morgan. “It isn’t any good.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Warren. “I have troubles, doctor. I can’t play patty-cake with you about your serum.”

  “It’s too old,” said Morgan. “A good ten years too old. You can’t use old serum. You see, it might …”

  “Stop chattering,” commanded Warren, sharply. “The serum is too old, you say. When did you find this out?”

  “Just now.”

  “You mean this very moment?”

  Morgan nodded miserably.

  Warren pushed the papers to one side very carefully and deliberately. He placed his hands on the desk in front of him and made a tent out of his fingers.

  “Tell me this, doctor,” said Warren, speaking cautiously, as if he were hunting in his mind for the exact words which he must use, “how long has this expedition been on Landro?”

  “Why,” said Morgan, “quite some time, I’d say.” He counted mental fingers. “Six weeks, to be exact.”

  “And the serum has been here all that time?”

  “Why, of course,” said Morgan. “It was unloaded from the ship at the same time as all the other stuff.”

  “It wasn’t left around somewhere, so that you just found it? It was taken to your tent at once?”

  “Of course it was,” said Morgan. “The very first thing. I always insist upon that procedure.”

  “At any time in the last six weeks, at any given moment in any day of that whole six weeks, you could have inspected the serum and found it was no good? Isn’t that correct, doctor?”

  “I suppose I could have,” Morgan admitted. “It was just that…”

  “You didn’t have the time,” suggested Warren, sweetly.

  “Well, not that,” said Morgan.

  “You were, perhaps, too pressed with other interests?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “You were aware that up to a week ago we could have contacted the ship by radio and it could have turned back and took us off. They would have done that if we had let them know about the serum.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you know now that they’re outside our radio range. We can’t let them know. We can’t call them back. We won’t have any contact with the human race for the next two years.”

  “I,” said Morgan, weakly, “I…”

  “It’s been lovely knowing you,” Warren told him. “Just how long do you figure it will be before we are dead?”

  “It will be another week or so before we’ll become susceptible to the virus,” Morgan said. “It will take, in certain stubborn cases, six weeks or so for it to kill a man.”

  “Two months,” said Warren. “Three, at the outside. Would you say that was right, Dr. Morgan?”

  “Yes,” said Morgan.

  “There is something that I want you to tell me,” Warren said.

  “What is it?” Morgan asked.

  “Sometime when you have a moment, when you have the time and it is no inconvenience to you, I should like to know just how it feels to kill twenty-five of your fellow men.”

  “I,” said Morgan, “I…”

  “And yourself, of course,” said Warren. “That makes twenty-six.”

  Bat Ears Brady was a character. For more than thirty years now he had been going out on planetary expeditions with Commander Ira Warren, although Warren had not been a commander when it started, but a second looey. Today they were still together, a team of toughened planet-checkers. Although no one on the outside would have known that they were a team, for Warren headed the expedition and Bat Ears cooked for them.

  Now Warren set out a bottle on his desk and sent for Bat Ears Brady.

  Warren heard him coming for some time before he finally arrived. He’d had a drink or two too many and he was singing most obscenely.

  He came through the tent entrance walking stiff and straight, as if there were a chalked line laid out for him to follow. He saw the bottle on the desk and picked it up, disregarding the glasses set beside it. He lowered the bottle by a good three inches and set it back again. Then he took the camp chair that had been placed there for him.

  “What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “You never send for me unless there’s something wrong.”

  “What,” asked Warren, “have you been drinking?”

  Bat Ears hiccupped politely. “Little something I cooked up.”

  He regarded Warren balefully. “Use to be we could bring in a little something, but now they say we can’t. What little there is you keep under lock and key. When a man gets thirsty, it sure tests his ingen … ingen … ingen …”

  “Ingenuity,” said Warren.

  “That’s the word,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word, exactly.”

  “We’re in a jam, Bat Ears,” said Warren.

  “We’re always in a jam,” said Bat Ears. “Ain’t like the old days, Ira. Had some he-men then. But now…”

  “I know what you mean,” said Warren.

  “Kids,” said Bat Ears, spitting on the floor in a gesture of contempt. “Scarcely out of didies. Got to wipe their noses and…”

  “It isn’t that kind of a jam,” said Warren. “This is the real McCoy. If we can’t figure this one out, we’ll all be dead before two months are gone.”

  “Natives?” asked Bat Ears.

  “Not the natives,” Warren told him. “Although more than likely they’d be glad to do us in if there was a chance.”

  “Cheeky customers,” said Bat Ears. “One of them sneaked into the cook tent and I kicked him off the reservation real unceremonious. He did considerable squalling at me. He didn’t like it none.”

  “You shouldn’t kick them, Bat Ears.”

  “Well, Ira, I didn’t really kick him. That was just a figure of speech, kind of. No sir, I didn’t kick him. I took a shovel to him. Always could handle a shovel some better than my feet. Reach farther and…”

  He reached out and took the bottle, lowered it another inch or two.

  “This crisis, Ira?”

  “It’s the serum,” Warren told him. “Morgan waited until the ship had got too far for us to contact them before he thought to check the serum. And it isn’t any good—it’s about ten years too old.”

  Bat Ears sat half stunned.

  “So we don’t get our booster shots,” said Warren, “and that means that we will die. There’s this deadly virus here, the … the—oh, well, I can’t remember the name of it. But you know about it.”

  “Sure,” said Bat Ears. “Sure I know about it.”

  “Funny thing,” said Warren. “You’d expect to find something like that on one of the jungle planets. But, no, you find it here. Something about the natives. They’re humanoid. Got the same kind of guts we got. So the virus developed an ability to attack a humanoid system. We are good, new material for it.”

  “It don’t seem to bother the natives none now,” said Bat Ears.

  “No,” said Warren. “They seem to be immune. One of two things: They’ve found a cure or they’ve developed natural immunity.”

  “If they’ve found a cure,” said Bat Ears, “we can shake it out of them.”

  “And if they haven’t,” said Warren, “if adaptation is the answer—then we’re dead ducks for sure.”

  “We’ll start working on them,” said Bat Ears. “They hate us and they’d love to see us croak, but we’ll find some way to get it out of them.”

  “Everything always hates us,” Warren said. “Why is that, Bat Ears? We do our best and they always hate us. On every planet that Man has set a foot on. We try to make them like us, we do all we can for them. But they resent our help. Or reject our friendliness. O
r take us for a bunch of suckers—so that finally we lose our patience and we take a shovel to them.”

  “And then,” said Bat Ears, sanctimoniously, “the fat is in the fire.”

  “What I’m worried about is the men,” said Warren. “When they hear about this serum business…”

  “We can’t tell them,” said Bat Ears. “We can’t let them know. They’ll find out, after a while, of course, but not right away.”

  “Morgan is the only one who knows,” said Warren, “and he blabs. We can’t keep him quiet. It’ll be all over camp by morning.”

  Bat Ears rose ponderously. He towered over Warren as he reached out a hand for the bottle on the desk.

  “I’ll drop in on Morgan on my way back,” he said. “I’ll fix it so he won’t talk.”

  He took a long pull at the bottle and set it back.

  “I’ll draw a picture of what’ll happen to him if he does,” said Bat Ears.

  Warren sat easily in his chair, watching the retreating back of Bat Ears Brady. Always there in a pinch, he thought. Always a man that you can depend on.

  Bat Ears was back in three minutes flat. He stood in the entrance of the tent, no sign of drunkenness upon him, his face solemn, eyes large with the thing he’d seen.

  “He croaked himself,” he said.

  That was the solemn truth.

  Dr. James H. Morgan lay dead inside his tent, his throat sliced open with a professional nicety that no one but a surgeon could have managed.

  About midnight the searching party brought in Falkner.

  Warren stared wearily at him. The kid was scared. He was all scratched up from floundering around in the darkness and he was pale around the gills.

  “He saw our light, sir,” said Peabody, “and let out a yell. That’s the way we found him.”

  “Thank you, Peabody,” said Warren. “I’ll see you in the morning. I want to talk to Falkner.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Peabody. “I am glad we found him, sir.”