But most of all it was like knowing that men like Uncle Henry were already going to such impossible places—because now there were ways to master forces beside which the lightning was only a flicker. And there, there was a furious yearning and a promise, for us.
Out of that ruined tree came another sign of savagery that was gone, or perhaps only changed. It also had romance. As Mark and I drew our crosscut saw through the heart of that great trunk, the shiny teeth snarled suddenly, and sparks jetted out along with the sawdust. Then came a sliver of flint...
We showed it to Ma at dinnertime. Our eyes were shining. In our imaginations, brown, painted faces, more than a century gone, peered wickedly from the bushes, out over Ma's well-kept gladiolas. Warriors, hunters, killers!
"Indians, Ma!" I enthused. "Right here near Pine Crest! One shot an arrow into the oak when it was just a little tree!"
She looked at us as if she wished that we were less sun-browned and earthy and pagan—less like the chipmunks in the woods. She looked at us as if the frightening monsters we spoke of could never have been, here in this well-ordered, industrious region.
"Indians!" she said, as if trying futilely to picture them. "There aren't any... And why can't you wash your hands a little cleaner when you come to the table?..."
Yep—that was the way she was.
There was one more incident which I remember especially. During the next March, when the snow was melting. On a breathless night, with a hazy moon, and humid warmth. Water gurgled. I awoke in our bed, all cold and sweaty and quivering, as if I'd had a terrible nightmare, which I couldn't quite remember.
Mark whispered from beside me: "Did you hear that, Chet?"
"Wait," I growled.
After a few seconds, the sound came again. It wasn't loud; it was ominous and soft. But it made the house tremble:
"Ump-pp-klum-p-p-p!... Ump—klump-p-p!..."
Ma and Pa were talking tensely in the hall.
"What is it, John? Where does it come from? We've got to find out!..." Ma's voice sounded all uneven and scary.
Pa growled back: "How do I know! I'm looking, am I not?"
It came again and again and again—every minute or so. The luminous dial of our alarm clock, glowing in the dark, said three, and then three-thirty. About then, the noise ended. In some ways it was the most terrible sound I have ever heard. For its mystery defied explanation. It seemed to begin deep in the ground, as if in some well, or unknown cavern. It was like a heartbeat of the Earth, or of Nature. Were there caverns down under Ma's neat, civilized house? Frightening, unimaginable places? Wild and lonely?
Years later, we still haven't explained that sound. But one thing Pa found out the next day. The lake of snow-water that usually covers our rear ten acres in early spring had vanished in the night .
"Figured there was a sink-hole there," Pa said.
That same spring Ma got a telegram. Telegrams bothered her. This one made her turn pale. "He's sick," Ma said. "He's coming home. Darned fool should never have gone..."
"Who?" Mark and I wanted to know.
"Uncle Henry, of course," Ma answered. "He won't be here right away, boys. He'll have to be in a hospital out in Los Angeles for a while, first..."
Did I say that Mark and I had a special place in the esteem of the kids of the neighborhood, because Henry Davis was our uncle? Most of us had never seen a real spaceship, except now and then their rocket trails, high and enigmatic in the sky. Pa had promised to take Mark and me out to the Arizona Spaceport. But so far it hadn't happened.
Yet, along with other kids, we could dream of wild, wonderful unknowns. We read magazine articles, and basked in the glory that came our way, because our uncle had been on the moon and Mars and Venus, and even farther. To us, as to the others, he was like a breath of the nameless. He walked with big explorers, like Thompson. And he had helped build the first human dome-settlements on fabulous Mars. So, to all of us kids, he was a legend, a shadowy half-god.
"When's he comin', Chet? When's he comin', Mark?..." My brother and I got plenty of that; and it made us swell up with pride and cockiness till we might have burst.
When he did arrive he came in a new car, which he drove himself, like anybody. But all of a sudden I wasn't cocky anymore; I had stage-fright, as if I was going to meet the president, or somebody. It was the same with Mark. But pretty soon our awe began to be disappointed. I know I darn near got into a fight over it. Mark and I led a gang of kids to peek into our frontroom window that same evening, at Uncle Henry.
"Aw," Slats Cawkins growled contemptuously. "He looks like anybody—less, even. He looks dumb and little! And can you hear what he's talking about to your folks? 'How's Aunt Minnie's bad leg? How are her grandchildren?... Five years I've been out of real contact...' Shucks, Chet—is your uncle a member of the old ladies' sewing circle?"
"How'd you like a poke in the nose?" I snarled.
"Go kick yourself in the rear!" Slats answered. "I gotta have a reason to fight. I don't see any. Come on, gang—let's all go home. Even sleep's more interesting."
I felt murderous. But bitter, too. Because what Slats Cawkins had said seemed pretty true. Uncle Henry had always been a much smaller man than Pa. And he was sort of plain, like Ma. I could just dimly remember that he used to talk a lot. Now it was just "Hello, boys," in an offhand, tired way, as if endless, primal space had beaten him down. His face looked weathered and sad, though he wasn’t thirty yet. And he seemed to walk around in a daze, as if he couldn't quite believe he was on Earth; as if some earthly habits had been sort of lost in five years' time, and that he was fumbling to get them back.
Sometimes he seemed mean, too, even. Quite naturally Mark and I wanted to explore his trunk, as if for us it contained all the wild, unknown universe. But Uncle Henry caught us at it, before we could get started.
"Get out of there, you lousy brats!" he yelled at us, his voice like breaking glass.
Later, Ma said to him: "You'll be staying here now, Henry. You just have to start over. I'll bet you could get a fine job in the First National Bank."
He chuckled sourly at that, and I didn't blame him; though Ma couldn't understand. "You just don't step out of space as easily as that, Nell," he told her. "I only got a little weak in my nerves out there, that's all."
After that, he was more friendly to us twins. He opened his trunk for us. His treasures were exposed to our hungry gaze. We were more avid than ancient Goths sacking Rome. We saw carven stones and hammered gold. We smelled the smoky pungence of dried weeds from Mars. We saw photographs of structures fused down to glassy lumps by the nuclear heat of interplanetary war, fifty million years ago—between Mars and the world that had been blown apart to become the asteroids—proof that cultures more advanced than our own, and with gentle aspects, too, could end in fury. We saw the dried tentacle of a Martian. Our minds groped at thin, Martian winds, and at the hot mountains and deserts beneath Venus' blanket of murk and acid fumes. We saw Uncle Henry's clothes, worn when he lived in a spaceship, or somewhere else, Out There.
He even put on his space armor for us. As he did so, he was in no daze at all. Like bear cubs learning from an elder, we watched his every quick, precise movement, as he snapped this or that into place. The great bulging attire covered the little man, hid his smallness and his almost rustic plainness, and gave him the aspect of some immortal demon, at home among the stars.
So Mark and I, who had felt let down before, got the thrills back, and the furious beat of our blood, that made us want to penetrate the strangest of the strange.
"I'm going back the day after tomorrow, Nell," Uncle Henry told Ma quietly. "I've made up my mind. A man has to live with his times, and with the way he is..."
So it was. He drove away in his car. But it seemed to Mark and me that he drove straight out into the western sky and the sunset, and vanished there, like a genie.
Ma? There was a big hill just a short distance behind our house. First she climbed up there. Pa used to say that it
was an interesting geological formation, and that he wished scientists would dig into it. But to Ma it was "The most peaceful thing I ever saw." She used to go there to think, and maybe to pray for our souls, and, in springtime, to pick birdfoot violets.
Later that evening, we found her in our room, just looking around, her eyes kind of misty. At the new paint over patched plaster. At our old bed, our clothes, our baseball stuff, the pictures we cut out of magazines, and at the crude spaceship models we had put together .
"What's up, Ma?" I asked.
She looked embarrassed; but then she was frank.
"I was just thinking, boys," she said. "About how it'll be when both of you are gone—out after your Uncle Henry. A few years more..."
We wanted to be kind to her. "Chet and I aren't going, Ma," Mark piped up. "We're both gonna get jobs in the First National Bank, and everything'll be the same as always, forever."
"No—you're wrong, boys," she answered. "I ought to accept it. There's a bright, shining devil inside of most of you youngsters. I wish it could be stopped. But maybe that wouldn't be any good. It's your destiny—especially yours. Especially now, when everything just rushes on and on..."
For that single moment, Ma seemed almost to understand us.
Later, still, Pa said something to us, too:
"Your mother's a wonderful woman. But most women have a streak of the same thing in them—wanting a sheltered life, where things stay put. Living dangerously is out of line with that. But don't listen to them too much, fellas. Look at me. Once I wanted to move us all to Alaska, to better opportunity—maybe. Your mother talked me out of it—said we'd work things out at home. So we're still stuck on this stony farm..."
Pa had his own bitterness—his maybe's and his might-have-been's.
So Mark and I did what we could do, followed our wild impulses, and the force that can be either constructive or destructive. Out of high school at seventeen, we signed up, and went away to learn more of what we needed to know. About nuclear reaction motors, in which man controls the power that gives him the distance. About quick action, precise and keen, that can save your life out there, or the lives of your friends. About metal pressed into sharkish shapes—wild poetry of form. About what one needs to know far from Earth, where even simple instinctive actions, like walking, can seem a little wrong... All this to help keep the times moving onward, to satisfy the primitive urge to probe the unknown, and to satisfy the curiosity in blood and bone and mind.
Many thousands of other young men and women throughout the world were following the same track. It was a current in the spirit of the age that couldn't be stopped.
They sent us first to Venus, not verdant and beautiful as a more sunward twin of Earth should be, but smothered with dust, heat, carbon dioxide, and sulphuric acid, all at a pressure of ninety atmospheres. There were vast deserts under the dust clouds, where the winds blew forever. Here was a world which somehow had never received its rightful portion of water.
There on Venus, in a camp of low metal buildings, sealed against the poisoned air, they kept us for several months, to toughen our muscles, nerves, and minds. We met and lived with strangeness. We enlarged the camp. We dug for ores.
Then the Colonial Office picked a few of us, to send us farther. Mark and I had come out rugged, the rough corners knocked off and smoothed down a little. To reach farther into space, they needed big, cool, primal men, with a hard, realistic viewpoint. Nor was ours the only human nation groping beyond the Earth. In that, there was the usual savage danger.
We were going on, sunward, to Mercury. But a little while after our ship, The Solar Mote, left, news reached Mark and me. Poor Ma. She hadn't escaped violence even in her own end. She couldn't even die in bed. Pa and she were killed in a car-wreck. But maybe it had happened too quickly for her to know... Maybe the real cause was the recklessness of frustration deep inside Pa. So, in a way, they had died as furiously as Uncle Henry had. He had been lost long ago in a ship that fell into the boiling methane-and-ammonia atmosphere of Jupiter. It had been unable to pull away from the tremendous gravity.
We, the wild Harvey twins, stood together for a minute with bowed heads. But then life, with all the fury that makes it alive, had to go on.
The Solar Mote with its five hundred men shot on for Mercury. Nearer the sun, the increased radiation, itself, becomes a barrier. Even spacecraft, brightly polished to reflect heat, can be ovens inside. Ingenuity had to be used to make travel possible here. So our ship moved in the center of a cloud of smoke—finely divided carbon particles—to provide it with shade.
We were not the first humans to reach Mercury. Smaller exploring parties, sent out by various nations including our own, had preceded us. Ages before that, beings had come—from Mars, and from that other, small, swiftly developing planet. But we were here to colonize, and to exploit the metallic resources, and to make a speck of Mercury's surface a little like the Earth, so that people could live there.
Long ago, solar gravity slowed Mercury's rotation, so that for about half of its eighty-eight terrestrial-day year, its sunward hemisphere often receives almost nine times as much heat and light as the Earth does. But then Mercury's very gradual axial turning brings on an equally long night, and close to absolute zero cold.
We landed in the region of creeping sunrise—relatively cool then. Of atmosphere there is only a trace on Mercury—not even a whisper—mostly argon and helium. In the slanting light, masses of old lava cast shadows across the dun plain.
We came down into this region of quiet and sadness and dun hues. We came into a valley, previously selected by an exploring party, a year before. For Mark and me and others, it was still a place of wonder.
But right away our bunch met with bad luck. Landing sternward, sliding down gently backward on our jets, was standard procedure. But as we were going down, our main stabilizing gyroscope quit. So our ship did not stand vertically; it tipped over, like a tree falling.
I heard the dying whine of the gyro-rotor; then that treacherous sway. Then men shouting in alarm. Then the slow, sideward fall, and the jolting crash—even in the slight gravity. The injured screamed, and there was a sizzle of air escaping from between sprung plates in our hull.
It wasn't absolute catastrophe, of course. Mark grinned at me from his acceleration hammock. He and I and most of the others had managed to stay in our hammocks, and were safe. A few men were thrown out of them, and had gotten bounced around and injured. I don't think that any got panicky, and climbed out of their own accord. We were too well trained and well picked a crowd for that.
Our Old Man, Captain Nelson, got on the ball right away, directing repairs. Promptly, we were busy, welding and patching leaks. Outside, in space armor, we assembled the great hoist, with which we eventually brought our ship back to the vertical again. But it took hours, and much work; and worst of all it frayed nerves and dispositions.
Besides, we had lost considerable air. And one of our water tanks had been ripped wide open and emptied into the thirsty dust of Mercury. But the worst was a kind of pall of nerve-tension and annoyance which settled over us. We'd started off with the wrong foot. It soured everything, a little. When you throw the coordinated mechanism that is a spaceship a bit out of kilter in one respect, a lot of other things are apt to be affected, too. For one thing, for a while the galley went haywire. Our food came out burnt, or half cold.
Really we were lucky. We were following a plan, of course. Or would you call it a dream? Our ship carried it, and we'd all seen it—the model of a mining town—sealed barracks, houses, offices, machinery, gardens, a recreation center, everything—in lightweight metal. And we had the real, pre-fabricated makings of that tiny town, in the bowels of our ship, packed away.
And within a few hundred yards of our landing spot was the part of the valley that had been pre-selected for us to set up our settlement. Borings had shown the explorers that rich ores were not far under the valley floor. In deeper pockets, there was even a considerable tr
ace of water in the seemingly parched rock, for our solar stills to remove for our use.
Most of the valley was in the welcome shadow of the mountains. But there was a high mesa of rock at its center, on which to mount the reflectors of our great solar smelting furnace, that, except during the rare dips of the huge sun below the horizon, would give us a hundred-yard circle of heat, hotter than the solar surface.
"You all know your precise jobs," Captain Nelson told us. "So hop to it..." He was a grim, rigid sort of man, fifty or so, and as efficient as they come.
Construction and destruction can have the same lusty mood and rhythm. Ato-bulldozers went to work, pushing the accumulated dust of ages aside, digging down to bedrock and levelling it. As soon as this was done in a given area, we moved in with the parts of buildings, bolting them together. But our method, which aimed at smooth speed of operation, had a flaw. We should have cleared and levelled the entire area before we started construction at all...
The town was more than a third built before little Armand Frane, one of our communications men, remarked to me: "Artifacts have been found in various places on Mercury before. And we are by no means the first beings to come to this valley, Chet."
In his space-gloved hand he held a fragment of mirror-glass—part of some sun-furnace's reflector, no doubt.
"I recognize the workmanship as old Martian," little Frane said. "They were here—how long ago?—before they were destroyed in the war with the Asteroid Planet. And there's a lot more than this. Come on and see. It's all going to pieces now, under the dozers..."
Since there were many dangers, our expedition was operating in a very military manner. Interest took possession of me, of course. But I said:
"Can't go now, Frane. I'm building houses."
Mark had come over by us. "There's a break in ten minutes, Chet," he said. "We'll have a look then. "
We found Nelson, in his captain's white armor, directing operations. His square face showed strain. Through my helmet-phones, I heard him mutter, in some mixture of regret and exasperation:
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