Hell Stuff For Planet X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Now he started his explorations and studies. First his gloved hands dug deep in the felted layers of fallen vegetation, beside the great stone cog. Something superficially like a large tawny caterpillar, but much more active, twittered, and scurried out of sight. In the porous, unrotted stuff, so it was said, oxygen released by green plant life, was trapped: and here the last animals of Mars had sought refuge.

  Farther down, he found a hollow ball of fuzz. A nest? Below that were shreds of rust—all that remained of the metal that had once anchored that huge circular mass of rock. Perhaps it was no cog at all, but a channelled valve that had belonged to the irrigation system of the “canals”. For here the water of the melting snows had once been deep, and not shrunken to a comparative trace, as at present.

  Five feet down, he reached true soil, gritty, crystalled with salt. In a bit of stone were clustered fossils of what must have been marine animals, a billion or more years ago. The shells were not spiral, but straight, like small capsules. Guthrie found, too, a tiny rod of bronze, greened with patina, and a curved bit of glass that might almost have been from a broken electric bulb. What could its Martian history have been?

  Reaching the end of interest here for the moment, he left his excavation and looked for more “flowers.” But his attention was diverted; from an opening in a mass of sticks, a marble-sized globe of shiny black tugged itself upward tediously with a single clawed and jointed member. Guthrie watched, as the little creature braved the almost-oxygenless upper air, and seemed to seek the sun; when it was out in the open, the one limb it possessed waved as if in worship, and the red dot in its flank waxed and waned like an eye blinking. Then, with the same sluggishness, the thing crept back into its burrow. Guthrie let it go, chuckling benignantly.

  HOURS PASSED. Guthrie found more to examine. The sun crept, degree by degree, around the sky, dipping a little but never setting. Healthy hunger gripped Guthrie, and he went back to his ship; he unthawed beef and vegetables, cooked a meal and ate ravenously. Then he slept.

  When he awoke, he emerged again onto that misty plain. Only once did he feel a twinge, almost panic; that was when he looked on the greenish star—visible in the thin atmosphere, even in daylight—following the sun. Earth. Home after all. Would he ever be cured enough to go back here? Or would all his remaining days have to be spent here? Just for the moment, and even so soon, the chill in him became a little too cold...

  But he laughed at last. Now was now. On the crest of a knoll were wavering papery things on stalks, and tumbled rocks that had not been hewn square by nature. Eagerly he hurried over the resilient ground, to examine traces of blue and green paint on the yellow stone, marking out a half-bent figure, the size of a man but not human, beside columns of nameless hieroglyphics.

  So the pattern of life was set for the Long Daylight, the polar summer of Mars—nearly twice as long as the summers of Earth. The magic his mind put on his surroundings was durable—it didn’t tarnish easily. He began to work as a scientist—with camera, microscope, notebook, and specimen-box. As the Martian thickets sprouted quickly around him, he was the alien intruder and prowler, the student introvert with joy in his mind, and little thought of time.

  Finally, perhaps in restlessness, Guthrie took off in his ship, and flew far north to the equator; he landed there, in the scraggy belt of a dead sea bottom. There the sun rose and set regularly. There, amid spiny growths that could draw only a minute quantity of moisture from the atmosphere, were ruins—painted, carven, tumbled, blasted, or just weathered away. Domes, arches, heaps of rust, strange underground cells, ceramic fragments—all hinting at what had been, though not now to be clearly seen except by long toil and study. There he remained for weeks, poking around, growing tougher. Here the days were warmer, but the nights, lit by two fragmentary moons, were fearfully cold.

  At last, Guthrie took off again, and flew on to the north polar night, still as eternity, star-shot, fanged with incredibly long crystals of hoarfrost, slowly building a whitecap. But depression soon gripped him, there; after an hour of wandering, he launched his rocket once more, with the feeling that he was fleeing from death.

  Re-crossing the equator, he saw his first sign of other human intrusion—the whirling blades of a helicopter only a couple of miles away. His ship was flying far too fast for a hail, or a landing and a palaver, and the odd thought hit him that maybe that was good. He sought a reason for his half-longing, half-fearing, half-resenting. Twice, on Mars, when he had least expected it, he had felt a dizziness, and a stabbing pang in his chest—for all his general increase in vigor. Was it then the thought that others could leave if they wanted to, and the fear of learning that he himself must stay? Was it this sense of difference between himself and these others?

  His ship roared on, back to the shrinking south polar cap, and his original stamping-grounds. Vegetation was dense, now; some of the tall, stalky plants already bore strange fruit.

  AND SO Guthrie went back to his studies, still fascinated, but with a weariness beginning at the fringes of his mind—as if he’d been living with one mood for too long. A boyhood searching, projected to the man, as a scientist, was one part of life. But there was certainly another side to himself—social, and needing music, voices, and love... Did he have to cling to this gift-existence, borrowed for him from death by space and Mars, because it was all that he was reasonably sure he possessed? Or could he go home, eventually? Sometime he would have to find out. But his doubts made him procrastinate, and now they put a touch of half-bitterness deep in his brain. It made him reckless, tempting him to defy fate. Thus, in the pastel-tinted landscape, brooding and quiet, his excursions afoot took him farther and farther from the safety represented by his ship and his supplies.

  Perhaps it was that the strangeness of the Red Planet, made for no man, was affecting him, too, by its own intrinsic nature. He knew that he looked rough, odd—a creature that somehow blended more and more with his surroundings. He was a hermit, who almost seemed to belong to these hills and plains and ruins, for all of his days.

  Finally he forced himself to think of searching out the nearest settlement. But before he could act willingly, circumstances forced his hand. He was farther afield than he’d ever been before, when, a half-mile away, he saw a figure—much like his own—moving erratically, as if at the point of exhaustion.

  Guthrie hurried ahead in the long leaps that the low gravity permitted, here. He soon reached the old man, whose lips were purpling with cyanosis, behind the plastic window of his helmet. His air-purifiers were giving out, but still the faded eyes could show an unreasoning defiance. Guthrie heard the words, faintly: “You can’t take me back to town! I won't stay on Mars...”

  With compassion, Guthrie tackled the old man, and threw him to the ground. “Just relax, Friend,” he said.

  From his own pack Guthrie took a new air-rejuvenator cartridge, and clipped it into the vagrant’s breath-kit. Then, baring the scrawny forearm for an instant, he used a sedative needle. The rest, he thought, should be easy. This tired old man, with the classic features, could not have come far, he was sure. Guthrie could see some of his foot-tracks in the soggy ground; they led back along the strip of moisture and growth that ringed the bed of the ice-cap. All that he had to do was follow that strip until he saw the settlement, which must be nearer than he had believed. There was no need to retrace his way with a burden, to the now-distant ship.

  So he began to march; but as the hours went by, and the sun’s position shifted, it became evident that the ancient waif, driven by some potent compulsion, had wandered many more miles from the settlement than he had at first imagined.

  But Guthrie hurried on, always led by the thought that his goal must be beyond the next thicket or ridge. Then, too, there was that taint of recklessness in him, that took risks with a kind of angry willfulness.

  TWICE, Guthrie had to pause, to drug his struggling captive again. The sun circled the whole sky once—that meant a whole Martian day passed. Exhaustion cre
pt over him; his chest ached just faintly, bringing a familiar worry; and he stopped to rest, and to swallow a little water from his canteen, and some food-tablets. Then he had to be on his way again, for he had no more spare rejuvenators for his own breath-kit. Exhaustion deepened. Guthrie thought that this was his last adventure. But then, after more than forty hours of plodding on, he saw the place he sought built on a rise of ground—low houses of Martian stone, but sealed with Earthly metal to keep them airtight; a single fragment of a street, and long, low sheds to house shops, and hydroponic gardens.

  Guthrie saw it all through the blur of weary mind and body. The settlement looked utterly out of place in this pastel scene of forgotten history. It was bleak and barren. Yet he looked upon it with reserved elation. His thought was that his heart had been strained, coming here—yet he had not dropped! Maybe this meant that it was well again, after all!

  He went down the street. A man, younger than himself, and clad in the helmet and heavy garments which everyone had to wear while out of doors here, came up and helped him with his burden, without a smile and with scant words: “Thanks, Mister. Landron—biologist—likes Mars, but gets goofy streaks. Nine years here. Too long. Almost seventy... Here’s the hospital.”

  Guthrie had warm hopes and nostalgic yearnings—for city movement, again, Earthly trees and sky, talk among old friends, the theatre, the rumpus of a party, girls... At the end he amended, almost aloud: “Thanks, Mars—I hope. I’ll always love you, of course...”

  The doctor, professional, friendly, and a little rough, gave Guthrie a bed to sleep in for a while, after he had told some of his story. Later, the examination was performed. Then came the demanded frankness, the slow shaking of the head: “You’re healed up inside, Guthrie. You’re all right—for Mars. On Earth you might last a year without another breakdown, but I doubt it. Professor Landron we can send home—if he really wants to go. Not you: there’s not enough sound muscle tissue left, ever to stand up under Earthly gravity. I’m sorry...”

  Guthrie’s face, with the wide mouth, strong jaw, and deep-set grey eyes, didn’t change. In spite of optimism, he had still kept himself braced for a jolt like this. “Well, I know now, Doctor,” he said. “Thanks.”

  4

  BUT HIS internal battle was not so easily won as that. Guthrie wandered out into the street, aware of the maturing summer of polar Mars, the haze; the soft colors; the flatness; the low-swinging sun; the faintly-wavering fronds of strange vegetation, beyond the bleak aspect of the town, itself. He had loved what was here; and yet how close are love and hate together? Words were in his mind: Gift-life—and be grateful. This, or a marker on a hillside, remember? But is it that easy to reason with feelings? With the fact of exile? What do I do now? Try to fit in, here at the settlement, or wander back to my locked ship and my archeological and biological specimens, and try to work things out in my own lonesome way? Well, at least I’m at the settlement...

  He walked up and down the street a few times, trying to feel the mood of the place. It seemed lost, asleep, limited, provincial. Men, and a few women, worked under the plastic roofs of the hydroponic gardens that grew terrestrial vegetables. A truck came into town, loaded with a starchy Martian fruit that he knew. He watched another truck jog shakily over a trail, back toward a deep pit, where the ancient past of this planet was being brought to light.

  Guthrie shrugged, and walked toward the airlock of a building which bore a sign, saying: “Municipal Welfare, South Search. What a name for a village! Yeah—South Search!...”

  He went inside. The girl behind the rough counter was rather pretty. Her hair was yellow as corn—lighter than her browned skin—and it looked very soft. She might have been beautiful, except for a hard and flippant poise of jaw. She looked aggressively cheerful—or was that just bravado? And what did a girl want on Mars, anyway? Some crazy romanticism—some thoughts not too different from those of his own boyhood—had brought her here, no doubt. Right now, Guthrie’s attitude was cynical.

  His face must have gone sour, now, he knew. But he removed his helmet politely.

  “Hi, Mister,” the girl said; but behind the casual greeting was a flaunting air which announced her dislike of him on sight. And did he care? “What will it be?” she asked.

  “A place to sleep, and a job to do, Miss,” he answered; “I’m not very particular.”

  “Then you’ll be easy to take care of, Mister,” she told him. “Sign your name here...”

  She countersigned the slip, and gave him the carbon copy. Marion Tandran was her name. “The barracks are just past the museum,” she said. “And at half past eight—in three hours—there’ll be a little gathering at the new recreation building. For some people such things are fun; I’m supposed to tell newcomers about our social events.”

  “Thanks,” Guthrie said stiffly.

  Sitting on a narrow bunk, under a curved steel roof, he wrote a letter to Charlie Bonner, his physician friend: “...I’m in perfect health—for Mars—Charlie... Now I’m trying to get used to the idea, and square myself around...” He dropped the letter in the house-box; it would go out by tiny unmanned mail-rocket, that travelled very fast.

  GUTHRIE ate well enough at the community mess-hall. At the rec-building, music from recordings lifted nostalgically, and a few couples danced. In South Search, women were much in the minority. Men moved around, talking—drinking a mild brew made from the stalks of an aromatic Martian plant. There were hard young chaps, looking rustic in spite of the intellectual mark. Guthrie heard one say to another with subdued rapture: “The Mannering Fellowship—six whole months I can spend on this planet. Think of it!...” But the other answered; “Yeah—maybe you’ll want to go home, Dave—before it's over...”

  In his bitter mood, Guthrie smirked inside himself. Only six months... Time and freedom made a lot of difference.

  There were other older men, looking learned and somewhat preoccupied. One grinned and said, “Oh, yes—you’re Guthrie, the newcomer who brought poor Landron in. That makes us appreciate you more, Guthrie. Many come and go; I hope that you find what you came for. We, on Mars, are all a rather strange breed, I’m afraid, or we would not be here. There is a personal quest always involved.”

  Guthrie’s smile was bright and cold. “I suppose so,” he said,

  Some minutes later he caught Marion Tandran, momentarily without a dancing partner, and said, “Have you wind enough left to favor me, too, Miss Tandran?”

  She nodded almost formally. “Though perhaps I shouldn’t,” she commented. “Because—maybe you’re not very nice. You blew in on your own power. You can always leave the same way...”

  So Jay Guthrie sensed how much she was groping for something, too, that eluded her—her swift and not-quite-fair defiance of him betrayed her own failure. Momentarily he restrained his own irritation.

  “Yes—maybe I could leave,” he said. “I’ll try to be more agreeable and abstract—honestly. But why are you here, I wonder? Why is anybody here—when, superficially, Mars doesn’t seem to offer much, except to the archeologist, the biologist, and the abstract scientist? It’s a cold desert world with an atmosphere unable to sustain human life. It’s long past its prime, and not—one would think—a very good place to live. There are archeological treasures, worth money—sure; but that is a small item, economically. There aren’t even any ore-deposits that aren’t surpassed in value on Earth, minus the need of hauling them so far. So what have we—here?”

  As they danced, Marion Tandran caught his eyes with a hard look. “You promised to be nice, and now you’re trying to rib me, Guthrie,” she accused. “Because you’ve got the answer, or you never would be here, either. It’s the distance—beyond the hill, or the sky. The unknown, and learning about it, and making it part of ourselves—fitting in. There’s that restless instinct in our human minds and nerves. Maybe Mars is worth little, in a material way; but it always had an appeal, and the hint of a promise beyond that. Dealing with unknowns, you can’t be crass and
materialistic, Mr. Guthrie, and ask what a place or thing is good for, before you search and learn and find out! So, let’s drop the whole subject, and quit pretending to be friends!”

  She broke away from him, then. And had he seen, at the last moment, tears glistening in her eyes? So it was clearer that she wasn’t as experienced, here, as she pretended. She was young and unsure, and hadn’t been here very long, and hadn’t found what she wanted. The mood, the magic, or whatever it was, had slipped through her fingers.

  Guthrie wanted to apologize to her, while they thought things out together. But his own disorientation came in the way. What could he, caught on Mars, say to a sound and free girl from Earth, anyway? Their paths weren’t the same.

  “Go home, Miss,” he advised, both with gentleness and honesty, and yet with some bitterness of his own. “You don’t belong here. Maybe nothing human does; maybe Mars was never made for people.”

  He shrugged, grimaced, and stalked back across the floor.

  AFTER THAT his life was work and sleep and thought, while summer crept toward an end. Green vegetation began to turn russet and red and tawny. The sun would dip briefly beneath the horizon in promise of stark nights to come, bringing twilight and killing cold. Guthrie helped harvest edible Martian fruits. But since toil was rotated to avoid routine, he also worked in the shops, and at constructing new buildings, and over the machines that electrolyzed water to supply the habitations with oxygen to breathe, and that recharged the air-rejuvenator cartridges used in the helmets while afield. And like everyone else—including, of course, Armand and Gladys Springer, the very young and very earnest pair of archeologists—he dug in the deep pit, where more of Martian civilization was coming to light. One of the last cities had been there.