Andre Norton (ed)

by Space Pioneers

  "We can't get out of here!" she exclaimed. "There's water all around the house."

  Ken eyed the widening reaches of the water. "The bed's pretty well filled up down below so that it won't drain, but it won't be more than six or seven feet deep at the most."

  "But how'll we ever get across?"

  He grinned as if he were now in the midst of something he could enjoy. "We'll swim, of course."

  "No. Your grandfather has the boat he takes to the lake for fishing. They can pull it up here on the trailer and take us off."

  "All that trouble? Come on, let's swim across. There's no need to wait for the rain to quit. We couldn't get any wetter than well be crossing."

  Sarah looked down at the roiling water with distaste. "They'll come looking for us soon. There's no sense in trying to make it across now."

  Ken was halfway across the porch. He turned and looked back with boyish pleading in his eyes. "Oh, come on, Mom. Let's not do it for sense. Let's do it for funl"

  For a moment she had a chilling impression that somewhere a key had turned within a lock. She halted in her movement towards him.

  To her eyes, resting on his, it seemed as if understanding flared between them—as if some window had opened, letting her see for the first time through the murky turmoil between them. Let's do it for fun-It was so simple she wanted to cry. She had sought for a thousand complex answers to explain the lives of the men who baffled her so.

  Let's do it for fun—

  They had crossed oceans and prairies in ages past. And now they circled the Earth and reached out to the planets, and Ken already had thoughts of other stars beyond the sun. Their far horizons—they crossed them for fun.

  Let's do it for fun—It was so simple, but was it true? How long had it been since she had done anything for fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Her memory ranged back over the years and they seemed barren of anything but a dread intensity that hovered in the sky on the wings of rockets.

  Ken was alarmed by the sudden, half-hysterical giggle that escaped her as she put her hands up to her face and hid her eyes from his sight for a moment.

  "What is it, Mom? What's the matter—?"

  She looked at him again, and her eyes were shining in a way that he had never seen before. "Come on—" she said.

  It was a crazy thing—they could just as well wait—and she knew if she stopped to think about it she would never go through with it.

  There was only one way to find out if it were true—if it were possible to do anything for fun any more.

  She stripped off her coat and outer clothing and raced down the slope clad only in her underthings. She stopped at the edge of the water and waved to Ken who struggled with his shirt on the porch. He was grinning in pleased astonishment.

  "Wait a minute," he called. "We can put a rock in these and throw them across."

  He made a couple of bundles of their clothes and hurled them across the stream. They landed with a squashy sound on the other side.

  "Now we've got to go!"

  It wasn't cold. The rain was still falling, and it seemed warm on her bare skin. She looked down at herself. She wasn't old, but she couldn't remember another time when she had stood almost naked in the rain. She opened her mouth to taste it. She wondered how many other things that were fun she had missed.

  Ken took her hand and they walked into the water. It was colder than the raindrops and closed like circling ice about her legs and waist and chest. But it felt good. She felt as if thirty years' terror had been stripped away with her clothes.

  Her father had been so busy crossing his own horizons that he had never thought to explain why they had to be crossed. He had forgotten to tell her that it was fun and she had never sensed it through her dread.

  It had taken Ken's impulsive, naive wisdom to explain it to her—and this simple adventure to prove it. And now she knew it was true.

  Ken was grinning but puzzled. The puzzlement didn't matter, for she was seeing him really alive for the first time in years. All his joy and life had been suppressed in her presence before now, and she had not known it.

  Abruptly, her feet slipped on the grassy slope and she went down. Ken grabbed her and buoyed her up, and then they were both laughing and swimming and sputtering their way towards the opposite slope.

  The sky was breaking as they started wading again, and Sarah saw the figures coming towards them, her mother and father and Rick. Rick broke into a run.

  Ken squeezed her hand hard, and looked at her as if he understood the feeling that was in her. "Aren't you glad we didn't wait for them, Mom?"

  Then Rick was grasping her hand and pulling her towards him, wrapping his own dry coat about her wet shoulders. She looked up into his worried face.

  "I've got a surprise for you, darling," she said. "We're going to Mars, all of us. It will be funl"

  He scowled in wonder. "I don't know what that's got to do with this, but if it's true it's wonderful."

  She didn't get to say more. Her mother was bustling up insisting that Ken take her coat against his wishes.

  "Dad knew that dam couldn't take a rain like this. He knew it was weak and ordered rain anyway. Now look at the expense of building the pond again," she complained.

  At first the words didn't register through the cold and unpleasantness that was beginning to settle upon Sarah. Then their significance cut sharply. She looked at her father and her son. She caught the momentary glance that passed between them.

  And then she understood. A fantastic scheme, a play of their production in which she had been assigned a role without her knowledge. It had worked. They had shown her that the narrow restrictions she called her world could hold the same uncertainties as the vaster universe in which they lived.

  But it was Ken's impulsive, unrehearsed invitation that gave her the insight she needed.

  Let's do it for fun.

  She smiled at her father as he caught her watching them

  so intently. He flushed as if he guessed she understood what they had done.

  She nodded. "It's a lovely vacation, Dad. I'm going to remember it when we're on Mars. And today, I think I've crossed my own horizon."

  J? ARMING on an asteroid: The government furnished every would-be settler with a complete kit—machines, shelter, supplies, instructions—everything—but the courage to use it. On a piece of blasted planet John Endlich attempted to build a home for his family. But to do that he had to battle not only hostile nature but his own race and kind.

  RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

  The space ship landed briefly, and John Endlich lifted the huge Asteroids Homesteaders Office box, which contained everything from a prefabricated house to toothbrushes for his family, down from the hold-port without help or visible effort.

  In the tiny gravity of the asteroid, Vesta, doing this was no trouble at all. But beyond this point the situation was—bitter.

  His two kids, Bubs, seven, and Evelyn, nine—clad in space-suits that were slightly oversize to allow for the growth of young bodies—were both bawling. He could hear them through his oxygen-helmet radio-phones.

  Around him, under the airless sky of space, stretched desolation that he'd of course known about beforehand—but which now had assumed that special and terrible starkness of reality.

  At his elbow, his wife, Rose, her heart-shaped face and grey eyes framed by the wide face-window of her armor, was trying desperately to choke back tears, and be brave.

  "Remember—we've got to make good here, Johnny," she was saying. "Remember what the Homesteaders Office people told us—that with modern equipment and the right frame of mind, life can be nice out here. It's worked on other asteroids. What if we are the first farmers to come to Vesta? . . . 228

  Don't listen to those crazy miners! They're just kidding us! Don't listen to them! And don't, for gosh sakes, get sore . . ."

  Rose's words were now like dim echoes of his conscience, and of his recent grim determination to master his hot temper, his sensitiveness, his wa
nderlust, and his penchant for poker and the social glass—qualities of an otherwise agreeable and industrious nature, that, on Earth, had always been his undoing. Recently, back in Illinois, he had even spent six months in jail for all but inflicting murder with his bare fists on a bullying neighbor whom he had caught whipping a horse. Sure— but during those six months his farm, the fifth he'd tried to run in scattered parts of North America, had gone to weeds in spite of Rose's valiant efforts to take care of it alone . . .

  Oh, yes—the lessons of all that past personal history should be strong in his mind. But now will power and Rose's frightened tones of wisdom both seemed to fade away in his brain, as jeering words from another source continued to drive jagged splinters into the weakest portion of his soul: ,

  "Hi, you hydroponic pun'kin-head! . . . How yuh like your new claim? . . . Nice, ain't it? How about some fresh turnips? . . . Good luck, yuh greenhorn . . . Hiyuh, papa! . . . Let the poor dope alone, guys . . . Snooty . . . Won't take our likker, hunh? Won't take our money . . . Wifey's boy! Let's make him sociable . . . Haw-Haw-haw . . . Hydroponic pun'kin-head! . . ."

  It was a medley of coarse voices and laughter, matching the row of a dozen coarse faces and grins that lined the viewports of the ship. These men were asteroid miners, space-hardened and space-twisted. They'd been back to Earth for a while, to raise hell and freshen up, and spend the money in their then-bulging pockets. Coming out again from Earth, across the orbit of Mars to the asteroid belt, they had had the Endlichs as fellow passengers.

  John Endlich had battled valiantly with his feebler side, and with his social inclinations, all through that long, dreary voyage, to keep clear of the inevitable griefs that were sure to come to a chap like himself from involvement with such characters. In the main, it had been a rather tattered victory. But now, at the final moment of bleak anticlimax, they took their revenge in guffaws and ridicule, hurling the noise at him through the radiophones of the space-suit helmets that they held in their laps—space-suits being always kept handy beneath the traveler-seats of every inter-planetary vessel.

  ". . . Haw-haw-hawl Drop over to our camp sometime for a little drink, and a little game, eh, pantywaist? Taint far. Sure—just drop in on us when the pressure of domesticity in this beootiful country gets you down . . . When the turnips get you down! Haw-haw-haw! . . . Just ask for me—Alf Neely! Haw-haw-hawl"

  Yeah, Alf Neely was the loudest and the ugliest of John Endlich's baiters. He had gigantic arms and shoulders, small squinty eyes, and a pendulous nose. "Haw-haw-hawl . . ."

  And the others, yelling and hooting, made it a pack: "Man— don't he wish he was back in Podunkl . . . What!—no tomatas, Dutch? . . . What did they tell yuh back at the Homestead office in Chicago?—that we were in de-e-esperate need of fresh vegetables out here? Well, where are they, papa? . . . Haw-haw-haw! . . ."

  Under the barrage John Endlich's last shreds of common-sense were all but blotted out by the red murk of fury. He was small and broad—a stolid-looking thirty-two years old. But now his round and usually placid face was as red as a fiery moon, and his underlip curled in a snarl. He might have taken the savage ribbing more calmly. But there was too much grim fact behind what these asteroid miners said. Besides, out here he had thought that he would have a better chance to lick the weaknesses in himself—because he'd have to work to keep his family alive; because he'd been told that there'd be no one around to distract him from duty. Yahl The irony of that, now, was maddening.

  For the moment John Endlich was speechless and strangled —but like an ignited firecracker. Uhunh—ready to explode.

  His hard body hunched, as if ready to spring. And the baiting waxed louder. It was like the yammering of crows, or the roar of a wild surf in his ears. Then came the last straw. The kids had kept on bawling—more and more violently. But now they got down to verbal explanations of what they thought was the matter:

  "Wa-aa-aa-a-ahh-hl Papa—we wanna-go-o-o—hom-m-mm-el ..."

  The timing could not have been better—or worse. The shrieks and howls of mirth from the miners, a moment ago, were as nothing to what they were now.

  "Ho-ho-ho! Tell it to Daddy, kids! . . . Ho-ho-ho! That was a mouthful . . . Ho-ho-ho-hol Wowl . . ."

  There is a point at which an extremity of masculine embarrassment can lead to but one thing—mayhem. Whether the latter is to be inflicted on the attacked or the attacker remains the only question mark.

  Til get you, Alf Neeryl" Endlich snarled. "Right nowl And I'll get all the rest of you guys!"

  Endlich was hardly lacking in vigor, himself. Like a squat but streamlined fighting rooster, rendered a hundred times more agile by the puny gravity, he would have reached the hold-port threshold in a single lithe skip—had not Rose, despairing, grabbed him around the middle to restrain him. Together they slid several yards across the dried-out surface of the asteroid.

  "Don't, Johnny—please don't!" she wailed.

  Her begging could not have stopped him. Nor could her physical interference—for more than an instant. Nor could his conscience, nor his recent determination to keep out of trouble. Not the certainty of being torn limb from limb, and not hell, itself, could have held him back, anymore, then.

  Yet he was brought to a halt. It certainly wasn't cowardice that accomplished this. No.

  Suddenly there was no laughter among the miners. But in a body they arose from their traveler-seats aboard the ship. Suddenly there was no more humor in their faces beyond the

  viewports. They were itching to be assaulted. The glitter in Alf Neely's small eyes was about as reassuring as the glitter in the eyes of a slightly prankish gorilla.

  "We're waitin' for yuh, Mr. Civilization," he rumbled softly.

  After that, all space was still—electrified. The icy stars gleamed in the black sky. The shrunken sun looked on. And John Endlich saw beyond his own murder. To the thought of his kids—and his wife—left alone out here, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, and real law and order. Coldness crawled into John Endlich's guts, and seemed to twist steel hooks there, making him sick. The silence of a vacuum, and of unthinkable distances, and of ghostly remains which must be left on this fragment of a world that had blown up, maybe fifty million or more years ago, added its weight to John Endlich's feelings.

  And for his family, he was scared. What hell could not have accomplished, became fact. His almost suicidal impulse to inflict violence on his tormenters was strangled, bottled-up— brutally repressed, and left to impose the pangs of neurosis on his tormented soul. Narrowing domesticity had won a battle.

  Except, of course, that what he had already said to Alf Neely and Friends was sufficient to start the Juggernaut that they represented, rolling. As he picked himself and Rose up from the ground, he saw that the miners were grimly donning their space-suits, in preparation to their coming out of the ship to lay him low.

  "Oh—tired, hunh, Punkin-head?" Alf Neely growled. Tt don't matter, Dutch. We'll finish you off without you liftin' a finger!"

  In John Endlich the rage of intolerable insults still seethed. But there was no question, now, of outcome between it and the brassy taste of danger on his tongue. He knew that even knuckling down, and changing from man to worm to take back his fighting words, couldn't do any good. He felt like a martyr, left with his family in a Roman arena, while the lions approached. His butchery was as good as over . . .

  Reprieve came presumably by way of the good-sense of the pilot of the space ship. The hold-port was closed abruptly by a mechanism that could be operated only from the main control-board. The rocket jets of the craft emitted a single weak burst of flame. Like a boulder grown agile and flighty, the ship leaped from the landscape, and arced outward toward the stars, to curve around the asteroid and disappear behind the scene's jagged brim. The craft had gone to make its next and final stop—among the air-domes of the huge mining camp on the other side of Vesta—the side of torn rocks and rich radioactive ores.

  But before the ship had vanished from sight
, John Endlich heard Alf Neely's grim promise in his helmet radiophones: "We'll be back tonight, Greenhorn. Lots of times we work night-shift—when it's daytime on this side of Vesta. We'll be free. Stick around. I'll rub what's left of you in the dust of your claim!"

  Endlich was alone, then, with the fright in his wife's eyes, the squalling of his children, and his own abysmal disgust and worry.

  For once he ceased to be a gentle parent. "Bubs! Evelyn!" he snapped. "Shud-d-d—up-p-p! . . ."

  The startled silence which ensued was his first personal victory on Vesta. But the silence, itself, was an insidious enemy. It made his ears ring. It made even his audible pulsebeats seem to ache. It bored into his nerves like a drill. When, after a moment, Rose spoke quaveringly, he was almost grateful:

  "What do we do, Johnny? We've still got to do what we're supposed to do, don't we?"

  Whereupon John Endlich allowed himself the luxury and the slight relief of a torrent of silent cussing inside his head. Damn the obvious questions of women! Damn the miners. Damn the A.H.O.—the Asteroids Homesteaders Office—and their corny slogans and posters, meant to hook suckers like himself! Damn his own dumb hide! Damn the mighty urge to get drunk! Damn all the bitter circumstances that made doing so impossible. Damn! Damn! Damn!

  Finished with this orgy, he said meekly: "I guess so, Hon."

  All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at the weird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flashed a picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders' School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given several weeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, he had been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had of course seen it from space.

  It was not round, like a major planet or most moons. Rather, it was like a bomb-fragment; or even more like a shard of a gigantic broken vase. It was several hundred miles long, and half as thick. One side of it—this side—was curved; for it had been a segment of the surface of the shattered planet from which all of the asteroids had come. The other side was jagged and broken, for it had been torn from the mesoderm of that tortured mother world.