Men Against the Stars - [Adventures in Science Fiction 01]

by Edited By Martin Grrenburg

  “Hell, no,” Sparks rasped. Then his voice softened. “I mean, Angus, you had better stay here and help me through the emergency lock when I come back.”

  “Aye, lad,” McIlrath answered. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Sparks waited until deep darkness had fallen. Then he slipped through the emergency lock.

  ~ * ~

  A globe of witchfire floated outside the lock. Sparks eyed it. All over his body he felt his skin writhe. What if one of those things caught him? He knew the answer to that. His heart would stop beating, just as Orsatti’s heart had stopped, just as—

  He watched the gas ball. It floated away toward the stern of the ship. He slipped to the sand and dropped on his face, crawling up against the hull. A thin whine sounded as another of the creatures passed. Or perhaps it was the same one. Perhaps it had sensed his presence and had returned. He held his breath. Death went on by.

  He waited until everything was clear and then dashed across the sand. Panting for breath in the thin, dry air, he reached the shelter of the buildings—and saw a luminosity coming toward him.

  He dived headfirst into the sand. Dust rose in choking clouds. The gas ball passed. He lay still, fighting for breath. The dust irritated his nostrils. He began to worm his way forward.

  Two hours later he was back at the ship, a bound-and-gagged Martian over his shoulder. He took one look at the vessel, and his heart sank. It was surrounded by hundreds of balls of fire mist. Swirling over the hull, squirming against the ports, eating their way through to the food that lay inside. Hundreds of them. And others were coming.

  Had they already penetrated the hull?

  He lay down flat on his face and began to worm his way across the open space, the Martian still over his shoulder. The Martian had seen the gas balls. He was whimpering like a badly frightened child.

  Would he reach the ship? Or would they see him and dart at him in a swarming cloud? He was now only ten feet from the flier. A quick dash would take him to the lock. He took a deep breath, and lifted himself for the dash.

  Then it happened. A gas ball, passing over him, suddenly whined angrily, and looped back toward him, hovering over him like a buzzard investigating carrion. Other luminosities, attracted by the action of the first one, came swirling downward.

  They had discovered him.

  It was the end. He didn’t have a chance in a million. The gas balls were darting at him from all directions. He leaped to his feet, tried to race toward the emergency lock, knowing he couldn’t make it.

  He tripped and fell. Everything went black. Acid seemed to bite at his nose. He couldn’t see. Dimly he wondered—did death come like this, a sudden rushing blackness? He felt no pain.

  Something touched him. He screamed. A sharp voice said, “This way, lad.”

  Sparks gulped in thankfulness. McIlrath! He knew now what had happened. The engineer had been watching from the lock, a smoke projector ready. That rushing wave of blackness was smoke. Smoke! He could hear the gas balls whining as they groped through it. McIlrath guided him to the lock. The outer door clanged shut behind them.

  ~ * ~

  In all his life Sparks had never been so miserable. When he had succeeded in returning to the ship with the Martian, he had thought they now had a chance to live. Instead he had learned that they were doomed. Doomed!

  Two hours had passed since he returned. They were all in the cramped galley. Death was eating at the walls around them, death that now was only minutes off.

  “I tried to tell you when you left, lad,” McIlrath said softly, “but you thought I was trying to keep you from going, and wouldn’t listen.”

  “I know,” Sparks nodded glumly, “but hell, I didn’t think about this. All I could think was that maybe the Martians knew some way to fight these devils.”

  “I know, lad,” McIlrath answered. “Don’t be feeling bad about it. ‘Twas a brave thing that ye did. And maybe they do know some way—”

  “Yeah,” Sparks answered gloomily. “Maybe they do.”

  He glanced across the galley at the Martian. He was alive all right. Scared half to death but alive. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his arms and legs bound. His bright, fear-filled eyes darted restlessly over the room. Occasionally he said something in a high, singsong tone of voice. He knew what was eating through the walls of the ship, and he might know something to do about it. Every time he spoke he might be telling them how to whip the radium suckers.

  The trouble was—they couldn’t understand what he said.

  The men of Earth and the men of Mars had met, under desperate circumstances with the future of the planet depending on them, and they couldn’t understand each other. The languages were different. John Orms, language expert, had spent eleven years trying to crack the written Martian language, and had failed.

  In time, now that they had found a Martian, they would be able to understand each other. But there wasn’t time.

  Seconds ticked away into nothingness. A red blot appeared on the wall of the galley. McIlrath slapped a wad of putty over it, and looked down at the diminishing supply. There was very little putty left.

  Sutter twitched nervously. McIlrath calmly sat down. Sparks glowered at the Martian. To have safety so near, and yet so far away. It was maddening!

  Frome, lying on the floor, tried to sit up and fell back. “Could I,” he whispered, “have a drink of water?”

  They had plenty of water. Sparks drew a cupful from the cooler. The eyes of the Martian followed him as he lifted Frome to a sitting position. The captain drank. “Any luck, lad?” he said weakly.

  “No,” Sparks answered, “but we’re not finished yet. There’s some way to lick these damned things and I know it.” He rose to his feet. He was lying to himself, trying to lie to them. They were finished. And when the rescue expedition came after them, as it certainly would, it would be finished too. The bones of men would lie with the bones of Martians in the dry deserts, in the dust of the deserted cities. The exploration of the planet, so bravely begun, might well end here. The labor of the men who had fought space to reach Mars, the daring of the pioneers who had braved the deserts, would have resulted only in death.

  Then Sutter screamed, an inarticulate screech, the yell of a man who has seen death coming, and knows he cannot stop it.

  A red dot, the size of the end of a lead pencil, had appeared on the outer wall. It began to grow in size.

  Slowly the archaeologist slumped to the floor. He had fainted. The pressure had got too much for him. They let him lie. Death would come easier if he did not know it was coming.

  The red dot grew. The galley was silent. In the silence men breathed heavily.

  The Martian screeched. Another red dot had appeared on the wall.

  “Damn you, shut up!” Sparks rasped. “We’re in the same boat—”

  He broke off to stare at the Martian. A sudden savage hope sent his heart pounding.

  The Martian seemed to be having a fit. He was twisting and turning and trying to free himself from his bonds. His eyes were darting continuously from the two men to another object in the room. He looked like a dog trying to warn his master that a grizzly bear is lurking on the trail ahead. And like a dog he could only tell what he knew by howling and begging with his eyes.

  “He’s trying to tell us something,” Sparks whispered tensely. He leaped across the galley and cut the ropes that bound the native. The Martian struggled to his feet. He leaped across the room toward—Sparks caught his breath—the water cooler. He drew a cupful of the liquid, turned and splashed it across the red dots growing on the wall.

  Something hissed like an angry snake. Hissed and drew away. The dots stopped growing.

  “Water,” Sparks gulped. “The one thing this damned planet has always needed and never had. Water I Those damned gas balls have evolved in a desert. They can’t stand water; it kills them. Sutter was right. The Martians went into frozen sleep because their water supply had given out. The answe
r was right under our eyes all the time. The very dust that choked us should have told us what to do.”

  He was screaming now. “There’s always a cure for every evil. But you’ve got to find that cure. And we’ve found it. Take that, damn you! And that.”

  He was splashing water on the walls, wetting them down. McIlrath and the Martian were helping him. The putty began to slip and fall away. Luminosities tried to surge through the holes. When water struck them, they sizzled like a skillet full of hot grease, burst into steam, and steaming died.

  Two Earthmen and a Martian fought side by side, and they used as a weapon the one thing of which Mars for centuries had never had enough—water.

  ~ * ~

  When the rescue ship came knifing down out of the sky, the surprised captain found four weary, happy Earthmen to greet him. Two of them supported the man he recognized as captain of this ill-fated expedition. But when he came to greet Frome, it was Sparks who stepped forward, and gravely saluted.

  “Avery, sir, acting captain of the rescue ship Kepler, reporting.”

  The puzzled captain acknowledged his salute. They told him what had happened. “I get that,” he said. “You did a swell job. But,” he gestured toward the other group. “Who are these?”

  “The men of Mars,” Sparks announced. “We’ve found them.”

  They had awakened the Martians from their frozen sleep. They stood in a large group apart from the Earthmen.

  “But what’s the matter with them?” the captain asked. “What are they acting like that for?”

  The Martians were waving their hands in the air, turning somersaults, twisting and contorting their bodies.

  “They’re trying to tell you how happy they are to see you,” Sparks answered. “They haven’t learned how to talk to us yet —but they sure know how to make signs.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  H. B. Fyfe

  LOCKED OUT

  Life on the spaceways was ever perilous—especially when men could still make silly, careless mistakes.

  ~ * ~

  T

  he odds were who knows how many million to one, but it had happened.

  “It would be me,” grumbled Keith. “Just my luck. No matter where that damned pebble was going, I’d have been right in the way. And on top of that, I have to go and make it worse!”

  He swore. That was before he had begun to realize how serious his situation really was.

  Here he was, three days out of Mars, a quarter of the way to the nearest asteroids, sitting on the outside hull of his rocket. And likely to stay there because he was locked out.

  It had started when Keith, an asteroid prospector on his way from Mars, had put on his spacesuit and gone outside to see what had happened when a diminutive meteor had glanced off his small, one-man rocket. From the feel of the blow, he had judged it to have hit on or near the port air lock. Then he had found that the lock would not open from the inside.

  In a rush to detect any injury to his craft, Keith had hurried to the other port on the opposite side of the ship. He had passed through and paused briefly to close the outer door by means of the external control lever set into a hollow beside the port. That was when he had fixed things.

  He must have pulled the lever too roughly in his haste. The port, instead of swinging neatly shut, had jammed while still ajar. Something had gone wrong with the operating mechanism.

  Keith had been annoyed but not worried. The port would neither close completely nor open, but he had decided to leave it until he had seen the other damage.

  Judging from the groove in the metal of the hull, a meteor about the size of a football had struck the rocket a glancing blow. The whole port was dented, and where the groove crossed the edge of it to continue across the hull, the door was fused tight.

  Fortunately, there was no air leak.

  So now, he was locked out. Keith sat cross-legged on the hull beside the port and contemplated it glumly. He was not worried yet, but he did not know just what to do. All he had with him in the way of tools was an iron bar he had carried with some vague idea that he might need to pry out the meteor if it had penetrated. There was a six-inch knife in a sheath at his belt, part of his suit equipment, and he had, of course, his flashlight; but they did not seem to be of much use.

  The port, a cylinder two feet thick, closed flush with the hull. Its narrow, half-inch-thick rim fitted snugly into the hull around the entrance where there was a corresponding depression in the streamlined metal. True, there was a deep groove in it, but he did not see how he could get a purchase for his iron bar. He fervently prayed that no other prospector might come along the same curve from Mars and catch him in this ridiculous plight. The story would spread to every spaceport in the system: how Tom Keith, the space-dopey prospector, had locked himself out of his own ship.

  ~ * ~

  Tired of sitting there idle, he rose and walked across the top of the ship to the starboard air lock. This was open about two inches. Here the ruddy glow of the hull, faintly lit by the red planet beyond the stern, was supplemented by the gleam of the electric bulb inside the air lock. Since the outer door was still partly open, this had not been automatically turned off. The projecting rim, two feet or more from the hull—the thickness of the door plus the inches it was open—offered him an opportunity.

  “And then,” pondered Keith, “there might be something to be done with the wiring of the control lever.”

  He had a pocketknife with an assortment of blades that included a screwdriver, but it was where it naturally would be when he wanted it—in his pocket, under the spacesuit. Maybe he could use his sheath knife if he had to.

  Taking a small mirror that hung on a chain from his neck, he looked at the dial of the oxygen tank on his back. His oxygen, he estimated, was good for two hours. Meanwhile, he had better be doing something.

  Keith took a grip on his bar and tried to insert it into the opening left by the jammed port. He cursed a blue streak when he found that the bar was a fraction of an inch too thick. With the persistence of anger he attempted to force it. With the result, not unnatural, that it slipped, allowing him to project himself into space as the resistance suddenly disappeared.

  “Oh, hell!” swore Keith as the metal of the hull receded. He knew he would float back, given time, since the ship was the only matter hereabouts to attract him. Nevertheless, it was hard to watch himself losing contact with the only haven he had, the only solid, material thing anywhere near him.

  He floated there in the dark of space, with a million sparkling gems of light surrounding him, making it all seem like a dream. He felt fear creeping upon him, and almost reached out for something in reaction to man’s age-old instinctive fear of falling.

  It was nearly fifteen minutes before his eager feet stood once more on the hull. He resolved to be more careful in the future.

  This time he moved farther around the port, where the gap between the rim and the hull was less. He fitted the end of the bar under the projecting rim. He soon found that it was too narrow to hold the end of the bar when he lifted up on his end, and he had no weight to speak of with which to push it down. There was no space he could get leverage.

  “Let’s see,” he muttered to himself, “I wonder if I can put the bar lengthwise under the rim and pull on both ends. Maybe I just ought to slam it one, and trust to the jar to loosen it. Still, I think I’d better not try that yet—” He felt along the rim with clumsy gloves. “I hope to Sol none of the other boys come along this curve and find me like this before I have a chance to get in. I doubt it, though. I took off ahead of them all, and I’m still going.”

  Yes, he was still going. Now that he would be willing to turn back to Mars, as he should have immediately he was struck by the meteor, he could not reach the controls.

  He took one end of the bar in each hand, bent, and slipped the middle under the rim, tangent to the main cylinder of the door. Then he pulled hard to straighten up. A man’s strength in space, fre
e of gravity, was considerable; perhaps he could force the port into a plane parallel with the hull.

  ~ * ~

  Unfortunately, gravity—or its absence—did not much affect the present situation. The port resisted with all its powers of friction and insisted on remaining jammed. Keith had a second’s exultation when he felt something give slightly, but he discovered that he had merely bent the rim. He bent it in two other places, then gave up.

  “Well,” he thought, “I’ll see about that lever.”

  He drew his sheath knife and focused his flashlight on the control lever. He confirmed what he already knew: that the lever moved easily enough but without producing any results. He began to unscrew the metal fitting that protected its base. Perhaps the wiring—