by Various
Terry!--
Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air--
Terry ...
--probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ...
Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God?
* * * * *
The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside.
Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed.
Martha did not move. Please God, she thought, let it be Terry, even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then--
"Good evening, ma'am."
She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew--
"The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago--but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?"
"Yes. I'm all right."
"I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel."
"It's all right."
"We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth."
"No," she said.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am?"
She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher--and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet--and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ...
"No," she said again.
The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they."
"More beautiful than they've ever been," she said.
* * * * *
After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house.
THE END
* * *
Contents
THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY
By Arthur L. Zagat
Darl Thomas mopped the streams of perspiration from his bronzed face and lean-flanked, wiry body, nude save for clinging shorts and fiber sandals. "By the whirling rings of Saturn," he growled as he gazed disconsolately at his paper-strewn desk. "I'd like to have those directors of ITA here on Mercury for just one Earth-month. I'll bet they wouldn't be so particular about their quarterly reports after they'd sweated a half-ton or so of fat off their greasy bellies. 'Fuel consumption per man-hour.': Now what in blazes does that mean? Hey, Jim!" He swiveled his chair around to the serried bank of gauge-dials that was Jim Holcomb's especial charge, then sprang to his feet with a startled, "What's the matter?"
The chunky, red-haired control-man was tugging at a lever, his muscles bulging on arms and back, his face white-drawn and tense. "Look!" he grunted, and jerked a grim jaw at one of the dials. The long needle was moving rapidly to the right. "I can't hold the air pressure!"
"Wow, what a leak!" Darl started forward. "How's it below, in the mine?"
"Normal. It's the Dome air that's going!"
"Shoot on the smoke and I'll spot the hole. Quick, man!"
"Okay!"
Thomas' long legs shot him out of the headquarters tent. Just beyond the entrance flap was one of the two gyrocopters used for flying within the Dome. He leaped into the cockpit and drove home the starter-piston. The flier buzzed straight up, shooting for the misted roof.
* * * * *
The Earthman fought to steady his craft against the hurricane wind, while his gray eyes swept the three-mile circle of the vault's base. He paled as he noted the fierce speed with which the white smoke-jets were being torn from the pipe provided for just such emergencies. His glance followed the terrific rush of the vapor. Big as a man's head, a hole glared high up on the Dome's inner surface. Feathered wisps of tell-tale vapor whisked through it at blurring speed.
"God, but the air's going fast," Darl groaned. The accident he had feared through all the months he had captained Earth's outpost on Mercury had come at last. The Dome's shell was pierced! A half-mile high, a mile across its circling base, the great inverted bowl was all that made it possible for man to defy the white hell of Mercury's surface. Outside was an airless vacuum, a waste quivering under the heat of a sun thrice the size it appears from Earth. The silvered exterior of the hemisphere shot back the terrific blaze; its quartz-covered network of latticed steel inclosed the air that all beings need to sustain life.
Darl tugged desperately at the control-stick, thrust the throttle over full measure. A little more of this swift outrush and the precious air would be gone. He caught a glimpse of the Dome floor beneath him and the shaft-door that gave entrance to the mine below. Down there, in underground tunnels whose steel-armored end-walls continued the Dome's protection below the surface, a horde of friendly Venusians were laboring. If the leak were not stopped in a few minutes that shaft door would blow in, and the mine air would whisk through the hole in its turn. Only the Dome would remain, a vast, rounded sepulcher, hiding beneath its curve the dead bodies of three Earthmen and the silent forms of their Venusian charges.
* * * * *
Darl's great chest labored as he strove to reach the danger spot. Invisible fingers seemed to be clamped about his throat. His eyes blurred. The gyrocopter was sluggish, dipped alarmingly when it should have darted, arrow-like, to its mark. With clenched teeth, the Terrestrian forced the whirling lifting vanes to the limit of their power. They bit into the fast thinning air with a muffled whine, raised the ship by feet that should have been yards.
By sheer will he forced his oxygen-starved faculties to function, and realized that he had reached the wall. He was drifting downward, the hole draining the Dome's air was five feet above him, beyond his reach. The driven vanes were powerless to stem the craft's fall.
One wing-tip scraped interlaced steel, a horizontal girder, part of the vault's mighty skeleton. Darl crawled along the wing, dragging with him a sheet of flexible quartzite. The metal foil sagged under him and slanted downward, trying like some animate thing to rid itself of the unwonted burden. He clutched the beam, hung by one leg and one arm as his craft slid out from beneath him. The void below dragged at him. He put forth a last tremendous spurt of effort.
Two thousand feet below, Jim Holcomb, dizzy and gasping, manipulated the controls frenziedly, his eyes fastened on the dropping pressure-gauge. From somewhere outside the tent a dull thud sounded. "Crashed! Darl's crashed! It's all over!" Hope gone, only the instinct of duty held him to his post. But the gauge needle quivered, ceased its steady fall and began a slow rise. Jim stared uncomprehendingly at the dial, then, as the fact seeped in, staggered to the entrance. "That's better, a lot better," he exclaimed. "But, damn it, what was that crash?"
* *
* * *
The headquarters tent was at one edge of the circular plain. Jim's bleary eyes followed the springing arch of a vertical girder, up and up, to where it curved inward to the space ship landing lock that hung suspended from the center of the vaulted roof. Within that bulge, at the very apex, was the little conning-tower, with its peri-telescope, its arsenal of ray-guns and its huge beam-thrower that was the Dome's only means of defense against an attack from space. Jim's gaze flickered down again, wandered across the brown plain, past the long rows of canvas barracks and the derrick-like shaft-head. Hard by the further wall a crumpled white heap lay huddled.
"My God! It was his plane!" The burly Earthman sobbed as his ten-foot leaps carried him toward the wreck.
Darl was his friend as well as Chief, and together they had served the Interplanetary Trading Association, ITA, for years, working and fighting together in the wilds of the outer worlds. A thought struck him, even as he ran. "What in th' name o' Jupiter's nine moons stopped th' leak?" He glanced up, halted, his mouth open in amazement. "Well, I'm a four-tailed, horn-headed Plutonian if there ain't th' boy himself!"
Far up in the interlaced steel of the framework, so high that to his staring comrade he seemed a naked doll, Darl stood outstretched on a level beam, his tiny arms holding a minute square against the wall. Lucky it was that he was so tall and his arms so long. For the saving plate just lapped the upper rim of the hole, and stemmed the fierce current by only a half-inch margin.
* * * * *
The throbbing atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that curved up and in, to swing down and merge with the bulge of the air-lock's wall.
"Like a bloomin' monkey! Can't he wait till I get him down with th' spare plane?"
But Darl wasn't thinking of coming down. Something he had seen through the translucent repair sheet was sending him to the look-out tower within the air-lock. Hand over hand he swung, tiny above that vast immensity of space. In his forehead a pulse still jumped as his heart hurried new oxygen to thirsty cells. He held his gaze steadily to the roof. A moment's vertigo, a grip missed by the sixteenth of an inch, the slightest failure in the perfect team-play of eye and brain, and rippling muscle, and he would crash, a half mile beneath, against hard rock.
At last he reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed through the air.
Breathless, Jim saw the far-off figure flick across the chasm toward the jutting platform. He saw Darl strike its edge, bit his lip as his friend teetered on the rim and swayed slowly outward. Then Darl found his balance. An imperative gesture sent the watcher back to his post, his sorrel-topped head shaking slowly in wonderment.
* * * * *
Darl Thomas ran headlong up the staircase that spiralled through the dim cavern. "No mistake about it," he muttered. "I saw something moving outside that hole. Two little leaks before, and now this big one. There's something a lot off-color going on around here."
Quickly he reached the little room at the summit. He flung the canvas cover from the peri-telescope screen. Tempered by filters as it was the blaze of light from outside hit him like a physical blow. He adjusted the aperture and beat eagerly over the view-table.
Vacation jaunts and travel view-casts have made the moon's landscape familiar to all. Very similar was the scene Darl scanned, save that the barren expanse, pitted and scarred like Luna's, glowed almost liquid under the beating flame of a giant sun that flared in a black sky. Soundless, airless, lifeless, the tumbled plain stretched to a jagged horizon.
The Earthman depressed the instrument's eye, and the silvered outside of the Dome, aflame with intolerable light, swept on to the screen disk. The great mirror seemed alive with radiant heat as it shot back the sun's withering darts. The torrid temperature of the oven within, unendurable save to such veterans of the far planets as Darl and Jim Holcomb, was conveyed to it through the ground itself. The direct rays of the sun, nearer by fifty million miles than it is to Earth, would have blasted them, unprotected, to flaked carbon in an eye-blink.
An exclamation burst from Darl. A half-inch from the Dome's blazing arc, a hundred yards in actuality, the screen showed a black fleck, moving across the waste! Darl quickly threw in the full-power lens, and the image leaped life-size across the table. The black fleck was the shadow of a space-suited figure that lumbered slowly through the viscous, clinging footing. How came this living form, clad in gleaming silver, out there in that blast-furnace heat? In one of the space suit's claw-like hands a tube flashed greenly.
* * * * *
Darl's hand shot out to the trigger of the beam-thrower. Aimed by the telescope's adjustment, the ray that could disintegrate a giant space flier utterly flared out at his finger's pressure. Against the lambent brown a spot glowed red where the beam struck. But, warned by some uncanny prescience, the trespasser leaped aside in the instant between Thomas' thought and act. Before Darl could aim and fire again the foe had dodged back and was protected by the curve of the Dome itself.
Two white spots showed on either side of Darl's nostrils. His mouth was a thin white slit, his eyes gray marbles. Standing against the wall beside him was a space suit, mirror-surfaced and double-walled against the planet's heat. In a few moments he was encased within it, had snatched a pocket ray-gun from the long rack, and was through the door to the auxiliary air-lock. The air soughed out in response to his swift thrust at a lever, a second door opened, and he was on the outside, reeling from the blast of that inferno of light and heat.
For a moment the Earthman was dazzled, despite the smoked quartz eye-pieces in his helmet. Then, as his eyes grew used to the glare, he saw, far below, the erect figure of the stranger. The man was standing still, waiting. His immobility, the calm confidence with which he stood there, was insolently challenging. Darl's rage flared higher at the sight.
* * * * *
Scorning the ladder that curved along the Dome to the ground, he threw himself at the polished round side of the great hemisphere. With increasing speed he slid downward, the gleaming surface breaking only slightly the velocity of his fall. On Earth this would have been suicidal. Even here, where the pull of gravity was so much less, the feat was insanely reckless. But the heat-softened ground, the strength of his metal suit, brought Darl safely through.
He whirled to meet the expected onslaught of the interloper. The green tube was aimed straight at him! The Earthman started to bring his own weapon up when something exploded in his brain. There was a moment of blackness; then he was again clear-minded. But he could not move--not so much as the tiny twist of his wrist that would have brought his own weapon into play.
Frozen by this strange paralysis, Darl Thomas saw the giant figure approach. The apparition bent and slung him to its shoulder. Glowing walls rose about him, dimmed. The Terrestrian knew that he was being carried down into one of the myriad openings that honeycombed the terrain. The luminescence died; there was no longer light enough to penetrate to his helmet's darkened goggles.
Frantic questions surged through the captured Earthman's mind. Who was his captor? From where, and how, had he come to Mercury? Jim, Angus McDermott, and himself were the only Terrestrians on the planet; of that he was certain. Only one or two of the reptile-skinned Venusian laborers had sufficient intelligence to manipulate a space suit, and they were unquestionably loyal.
This
individual was a giant who towered far above Darl's own six feet. The Mercurian natives--he had seen them when ITA's expedition had cleaned out the burrows beneath the Dome and sealed them up--were midgets, the tallest not more than two feet in height. Whatever he was, why was the stranger trying to destroy the Dome? Apparently Thomas himself was not to be killed offhand: the jolting journey was continuing interminably. With enforced patience the Earthman resigned himself to wait for the next scene in this strange drama.
* * * * *
In the headquarters tent Jim's usual grin was absent as he moved restlessly among the switches and levers that concentrated control of all the Dome's complex machinery. "Darl's been gone a devilish long time," he muttered to himself. "Here it's almost time for shifts to change and he's not back yet."
A bell clanged, somewhere up in the mass of cables that rose from the control board. For the next ten minutes Holcomb had no time for worry as he rapidly manipulated the innumerable wheels and handles in accord with the vari-colored lights that flickered on a huge ground-glass map of the sub-Mercurian passages. On the plain outside there was a vast rustling, a many-voiced twittering and squeaking that was not quite bird-like in tone. Through the opened tent-flap one could see the stream of Venusian workers, their work-period ended, pouring out of the shaft-head and filing between the ordered ranks of others whose labors were about to begin.
They were queer-looking specimens, these gentle, willing allies of the Earthmen. Their home planet is a place of ever-clouded skies and constant torrential rains. And so the Venusians were amphibians, web-footed, fish-faced, their skin a green covering of horny scales that shed water and turned the sharp thorns of their native jungles. When intrepid explorers discovered in the mazes of Mercury's spongy interior the surta that was so badly needed as a base material for synthetic food to supply Earth's famine-threatened population, it was to these loyal and amiable beings that ITA's engineers turned for workers who could endure the stifling heat of the underground workings.
