And that was that. They turned the microphone over to international affairs then, and Dave frowned. Even to him, it was obvious that the amount of words used had no relation to the facts covered. Already they were beginning to clamp down the lid, and that meant things were heading toward a crisis again. The sudden outbreak of the new and violent plague in China four years before had brought an end to the former crisis, as all nations pitched in through altruism or sheer self-interest, and were forced to work together. But that hadn’t lasted; they’d found a cure after nearly two million deaths, and there had been nothing to hold the suddenly created co-operation of the powers. Maybe if they had new channels for their energies, such as the planets—
But it wouldn’t wash. The Atlantic Nations would have taken over Mars on the strength of his landing and return, and they were in the lead if another ship should be sent. They’d gobble up the planets as they had taken the Moon, and the other powers would simply have more fuel to feed their resentment, and bring things to a head.
Dave frowned more deeply as the announcer went on. There were the usual planted hints from officials that everything was fine for the Atlantic Powers—but they weren’t usual. They actually sounded super-confident—arrogantly so. And there was one brief mention of a conference in Washington, but it was the key. Two of the names were evidence in full. Someone had actually found a way to make the lithium bomb work, and—
Dave cut off the radar as it hit him. It was all the human race needed—a chance to use what could turn into a self-sustaining chain reaction. Man had finally discovered a way to blow up his planet.
He looked up toward the speck that was Earth, with the tiny spot showing the Moon beside it. Behind him, the air machine clicked busily, metering out oxygen. Two and a half weeks. Dave looked down at that, then. Well, it might be long enough, though it probably wouldn’t. But he had that much time for certain. He wondered if the really bright boys expected as much for themselves. Or was it only because he wasn’t in the thick of a complacent humanity, and had time for thinking that he could realize what was coming?
He slapped the air machine dully, and looked up at the Earth again. The fools! They’d asked for it; let them take their medicine now. They liked war better than eugenics, nuclear physics better than the science that could have found his trouble and set his glands straight to give him the body he should have had. Let them stew in their own juice.
He found the bottle of sleeping tablets, and shook it. But only specks of powder fell out. That was gone, too. They couldn’t get anything right. No whiskey, no cigarettes that might use up the precious air, no more amytal. Earth was reaching out for him, denying him the distraction of a sedative, just as she was denying herself a safe and impersonal contest for her clash of wills.
He threw the bottle onto the floor and went down to the air lock. Queekle was there—the faint sounds of scratching proved that. And it came in as soon as the inner seal opened, squeaking contentedly, with its plants moving slowly behind it. They’d added a new feature—a mess of rubbish curled up in the tendrils of the vines, mixed sand and dead plant forms.
“Make yourself to home,” Dave told the creature needlessly. “It’s all yours, and when I run down to the gasping point, I’ll leave the locks open and the power on for the fluorescents. Somebody might as well get some good out of the human race. And don’t worry about using up my air—I’ll be better off without it, probably.”
“Queeklrle.” It wasn’t a very brilliant conversation, but it had to do.
Dave watched Queekle assemble the plants on top of the converter shield. The bright boys had done fine, there—they’d learned to chain radiation and neutrons with a thin wall of metal and an intangible linkage of forces. The result made an excellent field for the vines, and Queekle scooted about, making sure the loads of dirt were spread out and its charges arranged comfortably, to suit it. It looked intelligent—but so would the behavior of ants. If the pressure inside the ship bothered the creature, there was no sign of it.
“Queeklrle,” it announced finally, and turned toward Dave. He let it follow him up the steps, found some chocolate, and offered it to the pseudopods. But Queekle wasn’t hungry. Nor would the thing accept water, beyond touching it and brushing a drop over its fuzzy surface.
It squatted on the floor until Dave flopped down on his cushions, then tried to climb up beside him. He reached down, surprised to feel the fuzz give way instantly to a hard surface underneath, and lifted it up beside him. Queekle was neither cold nor warm; probably all Martian life had developed excellent insulation, and perhaps the ability to suck water out of the almost dehydrated atmosphere and then retain it.
For a second, Dave remembered the old tales of vampire beasts, but he rejected them at once. When you come down to it, most of the animal life wasn’t too bad—not nearly as bad as man had pictured it to justify his own superiority. And Queekle seemed content to lie there, making soft monotonous little squeaks, and letting it go at that.
Surprisingly, sleep came quickly.
Dave stayed away from the ship most of the next two days, moving aimlessly, but working his energy out in pure muscular exertion. It helped, enough to keep him away from the radar. He found tongs and stripped the lining from the tubes, and that helped more, because it occupied his mind as well as his muscles. But it was only a temporary expedient, and not good enough for even the two remaining weeks. He started out the next day, went a few miles, and came back. For a while then, he watched the plants that were thriving unbelievably on the converter shielding.
Queekle was busy among them, nipping off something here and there and pushing it underneath where its mouth was. Dave tasted one of the buds, gagged, and spat it out; the thing smelled almost like an Earth plant, but combined all the quintessence of sour and bitter with something that was outside his experience. Queekle, he’d found, didn’t care for chocolate—only the sugar in it; the rest was ejected later in a hard lump.
And then there was nothing to do. Queekle finished its work and they squatted side by side, but with entirely different reactions; the Martian creature seemed satisfied.
Three hours later, Dave stood in the observatory again, listening to the radar. There was some music coming through at this hour—but the squiggly reception ruined that. And the news was exactly what he’d expected—a lot of detail about national things, a few quick words on some conference at the United Nations, and more on the celebration in Israel over the anniversary of becoming an independent nation. Dave’s own memories of that were dim, but some came back as he listened. The old United Nations had done a lot of wrangling over that, but it had been good for them, in a way—neither side had felt the issue offered enough chance for any direct gain to threaten war, but it kept the professional diplomats from getting quite so deeply into more dangerous grounds.
But that, like the Chinese plague, wouldn’t come up again.
He cut off the radar, finally, only vaguely conscious of the fact that the rocket hadn’t been mentioned. He could no longer even work up a feeling of disgust. Nothing mattered beyond his own sheer boredom, and when the air machine—Then it hit him. There were no clicks. There had been none while he was in the tip. He jerked to the controls, saw that the meter indicated the same as it had when he was last here, and threw open the cover. Everything looked fine. There was a spark from the switch, and the motor went on when he depressed the starting button. When he released it, it went off instantly. He tried switching manually to other tanks, but while the valves moved, the machine remained silent.
The air smelled fresh, though—fresher than it had since the first day out from Earth, though a trifle drier than he’d have liked.
“Queekle!” Dave looked at the creature, watched it move nearer at his voice, as it had been doing lately. Apparently it knew its name now, and answered with the usual squeak and gurgle.
It was the answer, of course. No wonder its plants had been thriving. They’d had all the carbon dioxide and water vapor th
ey could use, for a change. No Earth plants could have kept the air fresh in such a limited amount of space, but Mars had taught her children efficiency through sheer necessity. And now he had six months, rather than two weeks.
Yeah, six months to do nothing but sit and wait and watch for the blowup that might come, to tell him he was the last of his kind. Six months with nothing but a squeaking burble for conversation, except for the radar news.
He flipped it on again with an impatient slap of his hand, then reached to cut it off. But words were already coming out:
“… Foundation will dedicate a plaque today to young Dave Mannen, the little man with more courage than most big men can hold. Andrew Buller, backer of the ill-fated Mars Rocket, will be on hand to pay tribute—”
Dave kicked the slush off with his foot. They would bother with plaques at a time like this, when all he’d ever wanted was the right number of marks on United States currency. He snapped at the dials, twisting them, and grabbed for the automatic key as more circuits coupled in.
“Tell Andrew Buller and the whole Foundation to go—”
Nobody’d hear his Morse at this late stage, but at least it felt good. He tried it again, this time with some Anglo-Saxon adjectives thrown in. Queekle came over to investigate the new sounds, and squeaked doubtfully. Dave dropped the key.
“Just human nonsense, Queekle. We also kick chairs when we bump into—”
“Mannen!” The radar barked it out at him. “Thank God, you got your radar fixed. This is Buller—been waiting here a week and more now. Never did believe all that folderol about it being impossible for it to be the radar at fault. Oof, your message still coming in and I’m getting the typescript. Good thing there’s no FCC out there. Know just how you feel, though. Darned fools here. Always said they should have another rocket ready. Look, if your set is bad, don’t waste it, just tell me how long you can hold out, and by Harry, we’ll get another ship built and up there. How are you, what—”
He went on, his words piling up on each other as Dave went through a mixture of reactions that shouldn’t have fitted any human situation. But he knew better than to build up hope. Even six months wasn’t long enough—took time to finish and test a rocket—more than he had. Air was fine, but men needed food, as well.
He hit the key again. “Two weeks’ air in tanks. Staying with Martian farmer of doubtful intelligence, but his air too thin, pumps no good.” The last he let fade out, ending with an abrupt cut-off of power. There was no sense in their sending out fools in half-built ships to try to rescue him. He wasn’t a kid in an airplane, crying at the mess he was in, and he didn’t intend to act like one. That farmer business would give them enough to chew on; they had their money’s worth, and that was that.
He wasn’t quite prepared for the news that came over the radar later—particularly for the things he’d been quoted as saying. For the first time it occurred to him that the other pilot, sailing off beyond Mars to die, might have said things a little different from the clicks of Morse they had broadcast. Dave tried to figure the original version of “Don’t give up the ship” as a sailor might give it, and chuckled.
And at least the speculation over their official version of his Martian farmer helped to kill the boredom. In another week at the most, there’d be an end to that, too, and he’d be back out of the news. Then there’d be more long days and nights to fill somehow, before his time ran out. But for the moment, he could enjoy the antics of nearly three billion people who got more excited over one man in trouble on Mars than they would have out of half the population starving to death.
He set the radar back on the Foundation wave length, but there was nothing there; Buller had finally run down, and not yet got his breath back. Finally, he turned back to the general broadcast on the Lunar signal. It was remarkable how Man’s progress had leaped ahead by decades, along with his pomposity, just because an insignificant midget was still alive on Mars. They couldn’t have discovered a prettier set of half-truths about anybody than they had from the crumbs of facts he hadn’t even known existed concerning his life.
Then he sobered. That was the man on the street’s reaction. But the diplomats, like the tides, waited on no man. And his life made no difference to a lithium bomb. He was still going through a counter-reaction when Queekle insisted it was bedtime and persuaded him to leave the radar.
After all, not a single thing had been accomplished by his fool message.
But he snapped back to the messages as a new voice came on: “And here’s a late flash from the United Nations headquarters. Russia has just volunteered the use of a completed rocketship for the rescue of David Mannen on Mars, and we’ve accepted the offer. The Russian delegation is still being cheered on the floor! Here are the details we now have. This will be a one-way trip, radar guided by a new bomb control method—no, here’s more news! It will be guided by radar and an automatic searching head that will put it down within a mile of Mannen’s ship. Unmanned, it can take tremendous acceleration, and reach Mannen before another week is out! United Technical Foundation is even now trying to contact Mannen through a hookup to the big government high-frequency labs where a new type of receiver—”
It was almost eight minutes before Buller’s voice came in, evidently while the man was still getting Dave’s hurried message off the tape. “Mannen, you’re coming in fine. O.K., those refractories—they’ll he on the way to Moscow in six hours, some new type the scientists here worked out after you left. We’ll send two sets this time to be sure, but they test almost twenty times as good as the others. We’re still in contact with Moscow, and some details are still being worked on, but we’re equipping their ship with the same type of refractories. Most of the other supplies will come straight from them—”
Dave nodded. And there’d be a lot of things he’d need—he’d see to that. Things that would be supplied straight from them. Right now, everything was milk and honey, and all nations were being the fool pilots rescuing the kid in the plane, suddenly bowled over by interplanetary success. But they’d need plenty later on to keep their diplomats busy—something to wrangle over and blow off steam that would be vented on important things, otherwise.
Well, the planets wouldn’t be important to any nation for a long time, but they were spectacular enough. And just how was a planet claimed, if the man who landed was taken off in a ship that was a mixture of the work of two countries?
Maybe his theories were all wet, but there was no harm in the gamble. And even if the worst happened, all this might hold off the trouble long enough for colonies. Mars was still a stinking world, but it could support life if it had to.
“Queekle,” he said slowly, “you’re going to be the first Martian ambassador to Earth. But first, how about a little side trip to Venus on the way back, instead of going direct? That ought to drive them crazy, and tangle up their interplanetary rights a little more. Well? On to Venus, or direct home to Earth?”
“Queeklrle,” the Martian creature answered. It wasn’t too clear, but it was obviously a lot more like a two-syllable word.
Dave nodded. “Right! Venus.”
The sky was still filled with the nasty little stars he’d seen the first night on Mars, but he grinned now as he looked up, before reaching for the key again. He wouldn’t have to laugh at big men, after all. He could look up at the sky and laugh at every star in it. It shouldn’t be long before those snickering stars had a surprise coming to them.
METEOR
by William T. Powers
TOBIAS HENDERSON, MASTER OF THE BRITISH FREIGHTER, BRONSON, was relaxing at tea. The Callisto-Mars run was long and dull, but Tobias knew how to be comfortable. In fact, getting comfortable was the one thing at which Tobias was better than average. He had to be. Free-flight and Martian sauces had combined their effects to make him the third largest item on the Bronson, and one might have debated the advantage held by the computer-detector.
For reasons other than jealousy, Tobias hated the computer. The main d
rive might flatten him somewhat on take-off and landing, but the computer had been known to snatch the Bronson from under its master’s feet, causing him to misname countless safety-engineers, just to avoid some pebble. Today, as usual, Tobias squinted at the computer before he injected his cream into the tea bag. Promptly, a red light popped on.
“Coward!” Tobias muttered. “It won’t come within a hundred miles!” The red light went out. Tobias creased his face in brief triumph, then pulled the stopper out of the tea bag and inserted a straw, an uncivilized process made necessary by free-flight. The red light popped on again. Hopefully, Tobias ignored it.
Something clicked rapidly in the bulkhead where the monster was hidden; Tobias sighed and braced himself for the recoil of the blasters. Unfortunately, a grip on the desk was not enough to save him. The Bronson shuddered sideways, skittering out of its orbit to let something too big to blast go by. Tobias, unable to express himself, oscillated to a stop in his triple harness and glared in black silence at the globules of tea quivering off the bulkheads. After a suitable pause, the computer went ahem and slid a card out where Tobias could see it.
The lettering was red.
The meteor was out of sight of the Bronson in a few seconds, plunging on toward the orbit of Mars, aimed a little above the Orion nebula. This was a fast meteor from outside the system, nearly zero Kelvin, six miles across. One flat side might have been a plain at one time; the other surfaces were harsh and jagged, signs of a cataclysm. The sun lit all exposed stratum, picking out the fossil of an ancient tree.
Thirty miles a second the meteor traveled. In twenty-four hours, it would have gone the twenty-five hundred kilomiles separating it from the orbit of Mars. The intersection point was no more than a thousand miles from the place where Mars’ advancing limb would be tomorrow.
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 65
