Far below the disembarkation section was in high gear, and the clatter of it, the rushings to and fro, the grinding and screeching of giant cranes, and atomic tractors, and rising platforms crowded to capacity with specialized robots, most of them scissor-thin and all of them operated by remote control…would have half-deafened me if I’d been standing a hundred feet lower down.
Even from the top of the spiral the clamor had to be heard to be believed. But what astounded me most was the newness, brightness, sharply delineated aspect of everything within range of my vision. I could see clear to the edge of the spaceport, and the four other securely-berthed rockets stood out with a startling clarity, their nose cones gleaming in the bright Martian sunlight. The big lifting cranes stood out just as sharply, and although the zigzagging tractors looked like painted toys, red and blue and yellow, I would have sworn under oath that not one of them cast a shadow.
The twenty-five or thirty human midgets who were moving in all directions across the field, between machines that seemed too formidable to be trusted had the brittle, sheen-bright look of figures cut out of isinglass.
Another illusion, of course. There had to be shadows, because there was nothing on Mars that could have brought about that big a change in the laws of optics. But by the same token the length and density of shadows can be altered a bit by atmospheric conditions, making light interception turn playful. So I didn’t strain my eyes searching for deep purple halos around the human midges.
My only immediate concern was to reassure Joan in a calm and forceful way and escort her safely down to ground level, without letting her suspect that I shared her misgivings as to the stability of the spiral.
It was ridiculous on the face of it. But, as I’ve said, you can’t argue with a feeling that whispers that your remote, dawn age ancestors must have felt the same way when they climbed out on a limb overhanging a precipice, and felt the whole tree begin to sway and shake beneath them.
“Hold tight to the rail and don’t look down,” I cautioned. “There’s no real danger…because a first-rate welding job was done on this structure. Barring an earthquake, it should be just as safe a century from now.”
I shot a quick, concerned glance at her along with the warning. I guess I must have thought she’d be more shaken than she was, for she smiled when she saw the look of surprise in my eyes. It took me half a minute to realize that my guess as to how she’d be taking it hadn’t gone so wide of the mark. Her pallor gave her away.
“A century would be much too long to wait,” she breathed. “Another five minutes would be too long. If it’s going to collapse, I’d rather find out right now.”
I nodded and we started down. Several other passengers had emerged from the port and were looking up at the sky or downward as I’d done. Three men and a woman had emerged ahead of us and were almost at the base of the spiral. So far nothing had happened to them.
I’ve often toyed with the thought that there may be windows in the mind we can see out of sometimes—at oblique angles and around corners and without turning our heads. I could visualize the passengers who were descending behind us more clearly than you usually can in a mind’s eye picture. Each face was in sharp focus and there was no blurring of their images as they moved. It was as if I was staring straight up at them through a crystal-clear pane of glass.
In that astonishingly bright inner vision—why look up and back when I did not doubt its accuracy?—Commander Littlefield was wasting no time in setting a good example. He’d descended the spiral so many times that great height meant nothing to him. He’d be ascending and descending at least ten more times just in the next few hours. But this was his big moment. I could already picture him striding across the disembarkation section to the Administration Unit with his shoulders held straight, and announcing officially, with a ring of pride in his voice, that the trip had been completed in record time, and the rocket had been berthed successfully. He was descending now with a confident smile on his lips, his Mars’ legs buoyantly supporting him.
Behind him came the small group who had been closest to us in space. They were doing their best to stay calm, but there was a slight flicker of apprehension in their eyes. Our section had been the first to disembark, because Littlefield had agreed with me that it might have seemed a little strange if I’d been accorded that privilege and it had been denied to the others. Why give anyone who might have outwitted every screening precaution the idea that I might be a man apart, with so big a job awaiting me on Mars that getting started on it without delay was damned important to me. It was natural enough for one or two sections to be cleared fast and emerge with the Commander. But others would have to await their turn in line and quarantine checkups could drag along for hours.
“It’s funny how long it takes to get even a little lower when you’re this high up,” Joan said, her fingers tightening on my arm. “We’re not anything like as high as when we started. But nothing down below looks any larger.”
“We’re not a fourth of the way down, and the human eye is a very poor judge of distances,” I said, reassuringly. “It would be better if you let go of my arm and just kept your right hand on the rail. We sway more this way.”
“When you look down from the observation roof of the North-Western University Building you can see all of New Chicago, and practically half of Lake Michigan,” she complained breathlessly. “But it never made me feel as giddy as this.”
“You had a firmer support under you,” I said. “But not a safer one. There’s no danger at all. You can be absolutely sure of that. What could happen to us?”
It was one of those silly questions you sometimes ask when you want to reassure someone you’re a little concerned about. But a silly question can sometimes be answered in a totally unexpected way—suddenly, terribly and with explosive violence. It can be answered by a voice of thunder out of the sky, or a wild, savage cry in the night, or in a quieter way, but with just as terrifying an outcome. There are a hundred cataclysms of nature which can give the lie to what you thought was only a silliness.
No matter where you are or how secure you feel, never ask what could happen in a world where nothing is sure, where no one is ever completely safe. Death is death. From end to end of his big estate may be a lifetime’s journey for some men. But he can cover the distance with the speed of light, because Death is one space traveler—the only one—who knows exactly how to outdistance light.
Even if you’re alone in a steel-walled vault it’s a dangerous question to ask. It’s ten times as dangerous when you’re descending a swaying metal corkscrew forty million miles from Earth and there may be someone eighty feet above you who has failed twice as Death’s emissary and would be covered with shame if it happened again.
I felt hardly anything for an instant when the dart sliced deep into the soft flesh between my shoulder blades. I didn’t even know it was a dart and kept right on walking. It was as if a bee had stung me—a tired bee who couldn’t sting very hard. There was just a little stab of pain, a burning sensation that lasted less than a second.
I felt it, all right. But it didn’t startle me enough to stop me dead in my tracks. A thing like that seldom does, if you’re moving steadily forward. It takes a second or two after you’ve felt the pain for the implications to dawn on you.
When they did the pain was back, and this time it was excruciating. My whole shoulder was laced with fire, as if a red-hot iron had been laid against it. If right at that moment I’d smelled an odor of burning flesh I’d have been sure there could be no other explanation, despite its transparent absurdity.
Even then I kept right on walking. I staggered a little but I bit down hard on my underlip to avoid crying out. I didn’t want to alarm Joan until I was sure. It could still have been just a very severe muscular spasm—the kind of agonizing cramp that can hit you in the leg sometimes in the middle of the night, so that you awake out of a deep sleep bathed in cold sweat, and with you
r teeth chattering.
That was what seemed to be happening now. My teeth started chattering and I could feel sweat oozing out all over me. There was only one difference. The pain was in my shoulder, not my leg, and it wasn’t easing up the way spasm pain does after a minute or two. It couldn’t have gotten worse, because it had been excruciating from the beginning. But other things started getting worse fast. The burning sensation spread to my lungs and my throat muscles started constricting, so that every breath I drew was an agony.
I couldn’t pretend any longer, and I didn’t try to. I went down on my knees, clutching at my chest and swaying back against the rail. I suppose I must have groaned or made some sort of sound, because Joan swung about and was kneeling beside me in an instant, her face ashen.
I must have looked terrible, or all of the color would not have drained out of her face so fast, or her eyes gone quite so wide with alarm.
I made a half-hearted try at straightening up, but only succeeded in bringing my collapse closer to zero-count by sagging more heavily back against the rail.
“Darling, what is it? Tell me!” Her voice was demanding, wildly insistent. “Please…i’ve got to know. If it’s your heart—”
I shook my head. I went through a kind of little death just trying to get a few words out. “Something struck me…in the back. See…what it is. Feel around with your hand.”
“All right, darling. Just don’t move. No—you’ll have to lift yourself up a little more. Try, darling. Your back’s right against the rail.”
I did more than try. I helped her by gritting my teeth and flopping over on my stomach. But the pain that lanced through my chest made me almost black out for an instant.
There was a clamor above us now, and I thought I heard Littlefield’s voice raised in a shout, followed by a scream of terror. Possibly someone had seen me slump and jumped to the conclusion that the spiral was collapsing.
There was no chance of that, so I couldn’t have cared less how close to panic the people up above were. Right at the moment it didn’t concern me. I was only concerned with what Joan might find when her fingers started probing. If a bullet had ploughed into me and her fingers came away wetly red I’d know for sure whether it was as bad as I feared. It helps to know, when there’s a tormenting uncertainty in your mind along with the physical pain.
I could feel her hand fumbling with my shirt, getting it loosened. Then they were moving up, down and across my back. Cautiously, gently, with the nurselike competence which women usually manage to summon to their aid in an emergency, no matter how shaken they are.
After a moment her fingers stopped moving and she drew in her breath sharply.
Being in agony and on the verge of blacking out carries with it a penalty. You can’t always hear what someone close to you may be saying, even when it’s of life-and-death importance.
I caught a few words, however, just enough to know it was a dart before I lost consciousness. And her look told me what kind of dart it was.
Or maybe it wasn’t her look, just what I knew about darts in general. The kind of dart that’s in common use today as a weapon is quite unlike the primitive blowgun darts of South American Indians a century ago. Science, like everything else, progresses, especially in the field of weapons. The modern dart is just as simple, in a way, but you take it out of a wafer-thin metal case as you would a hypodermic needle and you fit the three parts very carefully together and you use a liquid propellant to blow it out of a very slender tube of gleaming metal. And there’s space in it for poison.
It’s handier, tidier than the small robot killers with their intricate internal gadgetry, even though it requires precision aiming and you’re much more likely to be observed while you’re taking aim, and be compelled to pay the customary penalty for murder.
I’d managed to roll back on my side, and lying then in agony, trying to catch what Joan was saying, sort of telescoped all that for me, so that it registered in my mind in a more rapid way than it does when you’re trying to explain it academically. Everything I knew about darts came sweeping into my mind, and I remembered something else that helped to explain the agony.
The modern dart changes shape the instant it enters a man’s body, opening up like a pair of six-bladed scissors, cutting, slashing, severing veins and muscles and nerve ganglions. And if it strikes an artery—
It doesn’t even have to be a poisoned dart to kill a man. The feathered part remains in the wound, only slightly embedded. But if you have any sense you resist an impulse to pull it out, because when you do that it’s very difficult to stop the bleeding. It’s a job for a skilled surgeon and Joan’s look told me that there was no time to be lost. The wisest thing I could do was to put my complete trust in Commander Littlefield. The quicker he got one of the passengers or a crewman to help him carry me down to ground level and bundle me into an ambulance the better my chances would be.
Joan seemed to be one jump ahead of me, for she leapt up quickly and started back up the spiral. She didn’t even press my hand in reassurance, but that was all right with me. I knew why she hadn’t. Every second counted, and she loved me too much to be anything but firmly practical about it.
I remember thinking, just before I blacked out, how adequate are the hospital facilities here? And what about the surgeons? Oh God, what if they are fifth-raters, what if the hospital is understaffed? What if they bungle it, but good?
When you black out and stay blacked out for a long period, questions like that lose most of their tormenting aspects. You may still feel emotionally disturbed by them, when the darkness lifts a little and you remember having asked yourself questions someone somewhere should have answered—if you’d only stayed around long enough to make a lot of friends and influence people and make them eager to oblige you in every possible way. But it isn’t too disturbing, because you can’t even remember what the questions were.
The trouble was…i didn’t stay blacked out. Not completely. I woke up at intervals and heard snatches of conversation and I even saw—the Mars Colony.
I saw quite a bit of the Colony before they eased me down in a hospital bed, and covered me with warm blankets and I blacked out again.
I saw the streets I’d traveled forty million miles to visit, and the people I’d come to make friends with, and the kids in their space helmets, looking precisely as they did on Earth. (What further frontier did they hope to explore…alpha Centauri or just one of the giant outer planets?) I saw the prefabricated metal buildings, four, eight and twenty stories high, with their slanting roofs, rust-red and verdigris-green blue in the early morning sunlight and the stores that were all glass and the strange looking supermarkets with their almost cathedral-like domes. And just for good measure, eight or ten bar-flanked streets with big parking lots where the bars gave way to barracks that straggled out into the desert and had a primitive, twentieth century, shanty-town look.
There were people everywhere, but when you’re propped up on a cot in a speeding ambulance you can’t tell whether the people who go flying past look just the way people do on Earth, or have a more robust, happier look. Or a more restless and discontented look. It’s even hard to tell whether young people or middle-aged people predominate, or just how many very old people there are. Or how many infants in arms, except that there did seem to be an exceptionally large number of children, either being wheeled or carried or toddling along in the wake of their parents, or playing games with the fierce competitiveness of twelve-year-olds in fenced-in sand lots which no one had taken the trouble to pave.
There were theaters too—places of amusement, anyway—which you could tell featured lively entertainment just from the gaudy blue and yellow posters on their facades.
That there were machines clattering past goes without saying. A tremendous amount of new construction was under way in every part of the Colony and if you just say “Mars” in a word association test one man or wom
an in three will come right back with “Machinery.”
There were pipes, too—huge and branching, big, shining metal tubes that arched above buildings and ran parallel with almost every street in the Colony. A tremendous brood of writhing snakes was what they reminded me of—the artificial kind that kids delight in scaring people with at birthday parties, all mottled over with the bronze sheen of copperheads, but looking more like boa constrictors in their tremendous girth.
Another kind of snake image flashed into my mind as I stared out through the windows of the ambulance at that interlocking power-fuel network. It came swimming right out of the history books I’d poured over in fascination when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Sure, they were Diamond Back rattlesnakes and the Mars Colony was right out of the Old West of covered-wagon and gold-prospecting days.
Of course it wasn’t, because the twenty-first century technology had made it completely modern in some respects. But it was like the Old West in a good many other ways. It had the same rugged, mirage-bright pioneer look, as if the desert sands were blowing right into the heart of the colony, swirling about, filling the windy places and the sand lots where the kids were playing with a haze that could just as easily have been gold dust that some careless, giant-size prospector had spilled by accident when he’d brought it in from the hills for weighing.
Actually, there’s nothing on Earth or Mars that can completely shatter that cyclic aspect of history. There’s nothing so new that you can look at it and say, “There’s nothing of the past here. The break is complete and the past is gone forever and can never return again.”
It’s just not true. The past does return, shining brightly beneath the bold new pattern, the daring new way of life that Man likes to think he has chiseled from a block of marble that human hands have never touched or human eyes rested upon before.
There’s no such block of marble in all the universe of stars. Not really, because what Man can visualize he has already seen and it has become a part of his heritage and the past of that heritage goes flowing into it and he starts off with a veined monolith that is brimming over with human memory patterns, with not a few buried deep in the stone.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 25
