"Damned stuff! Why did it have to get in the way? Can't change the whole plan now... Why didn't Survey examine the site better?"
His eyes showed the tension of the mishaps that had afflicted us. He had a purpose to fulfill, a settlement to build according to the precise specifications of the Colonial Office. And the lusty lot of us, cooped up too long in The Solar Mote, had been hollering for more comfortable quarters. Besides, in common with many who live long with discipline, I suspect that he was rather rigid in his thinking. What could ancient artifacts mean, when balanced against all this? Oh—I got his viewpoint, all right...
"Keep on with the work," he ordered the dozermen.
Several of them leaned to it with a will, and with wide grins—like barbarians on a binge.
The dozers shoved and bit deep. Steel met glazed porcelain—blue and white, with touches of red. Rich mosaics that had lain hidden and preserved by dust, and by the almost airlessness of Mercury, snapped and crumbled. The outline of a Martian structure came into view. And the chink-like compartments, and the cells they slept in—resembling those of a great honeycomb—useless to man except in knowledge and art. Laid bare, too, were the gardens that they had loved, once lush and glassed-over, but now showing only the dried, preserved stumps, where once there had been the perfume of weird Martian flowers.
I saw Mark's heavy face go thundery, even though he was never specially known for his gentleness and love of beauty. So there must have been a very special reason, indeed. Maybe for that same reason, a sick anger was rising in me. Or had I gone a little Mercury-nuts?
I heard Frane say further: "Nothing near as well preserved as this was ever found on Mars itself. There was more weather there, to wear things down. And the war with that other world, destroying everything. This was a mining settlement, too, I suppose—made beautiful. Or were the Martians who came here the last survivors of the war, fleeing, seeking refuge? No—they must have been mine colonists. We've seen the shafts... Maybe they went home when their planet was in danger..."
Frane stopped musing. Then he did what a small, studious, quiet guy might be expected to do. He went over to our Old Man and said, "If you please, Sir?" and waited for recognition.
"What is it, Frane?" Nelson snapped.
"I wish to protest this action, Sir," Frane said. "I believe that a means could be found to avoid operations in this area, until it is cleared carefully by archeologists. For instance, our settlement might be extended in another direction—with some re-designing, and not too much inconvenience. Otherwise, a great deal of cultural knowledge may be lost forever."
Nelson eyed him, then answered very formally: "I have weighed these considerations, Frane, and made my decisions. We are builders, under specific orders, with a task to complete. Nonetheless, thank you for an opinion, Frane."
The dozers kept grinding on. Another wall crumpled near us. A lacy bit of metal, part of a frieze of gold, later to be picked up in bent fragments, crumpled and broke. Treasures hidden under dust, piled up through the ages by ghost-thin Mercutian winds, were smashed beneath the dozer treads.
Now I heard Mark muse: "Like Ma's crochetted lace..."
He went over to the Old Man and said bluntly: "Let me add my protests to those of Mr. Frane, Sir." His voice was almost a growl.
I'll concede that Nelson had no wish to represent vandalism in our minds. But in addition to other things, he must have been frayed out and dog-tired.
"Harvey," he said. "Unless you go back to your assigned duties, I will consider you insubordinate."
That, and several other finely balanced circumstances, did it. Mark and I were never heroes; but we were still impulsive. I thought of Ma, and of her love of sheltered peace and beauty—which had no conception of distances or strangeness like those of Mercury or Mars. And of her violent end. And I thought of this beauty that was here, being smashed, conceived and wrought by beings of which she had been scarcely aware; though in a way their artifacts were like her own pretty things, and so she would have defended them from destruction.
She was inside my flesh, and in my memory. Maybe it was more than she. It was the thing in most any mother's son, that reacts against the crude vandal urge. It was in my blood and race, I'm glad to say—steadying and protective. But for me, it came back to her, as my symbol. Yet it was furious, too. Perhaps even Ma would have fought fire with fire.
I acted almost before I knew it. Maybe, as I've said, I was a bit Mercury-nuts. Anyway, I leaped ahead of the nearest bulldozer, and stood my ground. Its driver stopped it. But then an order came from Nelson, and it ground on. I toppled with the moving dust and rock, and was dragged along. Scrambling up, I jumped ahead of the dozer again.
This time, I drew my pistol. We were all armed; because who knew what other countries on Earth had ambitions to take over at least part of Mercury, or what their attitude would be, or at what moment they would act?... I had no wish to kill; but I fired at the dozer's blade to emphasize my stand.
As I tumbled and scrambled once more, I saw Mark doing the same as I was, in front of another dozer. And Frane was on his feet, defying a third!
We rose, we fell again; we rose, we fired... And I heard Nelson say softly, without rancor:
"This is mutiny, boys. The penalty is hanging..."
For once I controlled my fury—or really there wasn't much of it to control, now. Rather, it was cold doggedness. Or could one call it a gentle anger?
"Not mutiny," I heard myself declare. "I'll obey orders anywhere, except in matters like this... This is different—maybe some of it is impractical. But the thing behind it is what makes the human race as good as it is. If it prevails, it'll be the one thing that keeps our kind from eventual self-destruction..."
I flopped again. My weapon was empty. I saw that Mark's own blood had reddened his armored shoulder. Little Frane was half buried, uprising. But I ducked down in front of the dozer, and thus got a little protection. Once more I was knocked down, bruised, and half buried. But I could see that Frane and my brother were still in the fight. Falling, struggling up, weaker and weaker—but always game—and for not too much purpose except principle.
I guess that the gameness was more eloquent than words. Because a couple of dozer men stopped their vehicles of their own accord. But before that happened, there were other men beside me, facing my dozer, and others confronting other machines. They were grim, tough young men, for the most part not overly inclined toward intellectual interests.
Nelson called a halt to the gruesome business. "All right, fellas," he said, almost in relief. "I didn't know that there was so much personnel with archeological sympathies in this expedition. Good. I'm glad... Now if you can stand the extra delay in getting the town redesigned, and set up in another direction, and back me up at the home office for the change, everything is fine. All right?"
The enthusiastic shouts were an uplifting indication that our errant and savage kind was a better candidate to inherit the future than some might have thought. Fury had helped man to struggle up from nothing. He had used it even as a tool for building. To fight for the future had a primitive sound. Yet it was a force that could be controlled and directed, with wisdom.
Nelson did press charges against Mark and me, and Frane, and the others. Our punishment was extra duty, digging into the Martian ruins carefully, with shovels. It was a punishment to satisfy the records, so that there could be no later claim that we had not expiated any misdeeds.
Soon our settlement was a going concern, metals spurting to incandescence in the great sun-furnace, as the mines began to operate. When the next ship arrived, there were even girls among the new personnel.
But with our contract ended, Mark and I were free to go home.
"We ought to go, Chet," Mark said.
We did go home. The country around Pine Crest was as peaceful and pretty as a summer dream. It showed no memory of winter harshness, nor of all its ages of savage history, marked by storm and lightning and sudden death. It smiled innocentl
y—insincere. It could fool you, the way it had fooled Ma. But Ma and Pa weren’t alive anymore.
One of the last things that Pa had done was to write a letter to an important scientific foundation, inviting them to investigate the big hill behind our house, which Ma had always thought so peaceful...
Well, a party of their men was there when we arrived, and we saw an ugly fossil that they had unearthed—a dinosaur about the size of a horse, with its legs straddled apart, and its whole viscera obviously eaten, those millions of years ago. Barbarians that we were, this brutal evidence of drama unthinkably remote kind of thrilled Mark and me, though our Ma wouldn’t have approved.
Then Mark and I went to the cemetery. We just put a bouquet of flowers on Pa’s grave, and bowed our heads, and didn't say anything, because he had been too much like ourselves—big and ugly, and full of sullen, savage fire.
But with Ma it had to be different. First we pushed a strip of Mercutian gold, wrought like lace by Martians, into the sod of her grave.
"You'd like the looks of that gold-work, Ma—even though you never cared for such terrible distance," Mark said.
That gentle anger came over me again, as at a nice child who has somehow failed to meet life on its own terms. It was like regret.
To what Mark had said, I added:
"Ma, you didn’t see that dinosaur that another dinosaur murdered, right there under your special, quiet hill. It was there all the time, and long before... This region, like the whole world and universe, has always been something like that, Ma. A car killed you, here... Well, I guess there's no argument between you and us, because I think you didn't want to know. Or did you see farther than we can?... We've got to go on, knowing the fury, and kind of liking it, Ma. We'd be bored stiff, otherwise. Because we're savages inside, Mark and me. But we hope we've done some good, and will do more, helping to add a little to knowledge and wisdom Thanks, Ma, for being you, and for being like an ideal..."
The following evening, Mark and I, being what we were, had ourselves a time in the honkytonk amusement area at the edge of the Arizona spaceport. Then, gleefully, we signed on, on a ship going out to explore the rings and moons of Saturn...
The End
**********************************
Here are seven collections of Gallun fiction with no overlap between them:
The Old Faithful Saga, Raymond Z. Gallun, Renaissance eBooks 2004 (c, ebook) - 46800 words
Introduction, Jean Marie Stine, (in) *
Old Faithful [*Old Faithful], (nv) Astounding Dec. 1934 - 14768
The Son of Old Faithful [*Old Faithful], (nv) Astounding July 1935 - 14207
Child of the Stars [*Old Faithful], (na) Astounding April 1936 - 17913
A First Glimpse and Other SF Classics, Raymond Z. Gallun, Renaissance eBooks 2006 (c, ebook) - 94,500 words or so
Introduction, Jean Marie Stine, (in) *
Comet’s Burial, (ss) Science Fiction Stories #1 1953 – 6766
Hotel Cosmos, (ss) Astounding July 1938
Prodigal’s Aura, (nv) Astounding April 1951
Stamped Caution, (nv) Galaxy Aug. 1953 – 11618
Davy Jones’ Ambassador, (nv) Astounding Dec. 1935
Brother Worlds, (nv) Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb. 1951
Seeds of the Dusk [*When Earth is Old], (nv) Astounding June 1938 – 10703
Invaders of the Forbidden Moon, (nv) Planet Stories Summer 1941 – 16507
A First Glimpse, (nv) Analog Feb. 1980
Mind Over Matter: A Collection of Short Fiction, Raymond Z. Gallun, Tom's eBooks May 2021 (c, ebook) - 110,900 words
Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *
The Crystal Ray, (ss) Air Wonder Stories Nov. 1929 – 5917
Space Flotsam, (ss) Astounding Feb. 1934 - 3606
The Machine from Ganymede, (ss) Astounding Nov. 1934 - 3926
Mind Over Matter, (ss) Astounding Jan. 1935 - 4324
Blue Haze on Pluto, (ss) Astounding June 1935 - 4382
Saturn’s Ringmaster, (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec. 1936 – 3881
Eyes That Watch, (ss) Comet Dec. 1940 - 5449
The Raiders of Saturn’s Ring, (nv) Planet Stories Fall 1941 - 11941
Space Oasis, (ss/nv) Planet Stories Fall 1942 - 9579
The Eternal Wall, (ss) Amazing Nov. 1942 – 4144
Operation Pumice, (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1949 - 5126
Asteroid of Fear, (nv) Planet Stories March 1951 – 13896
ü Return of a Legend, (ss) Planet Stories March 1952 - 5529
ü Big Pill, (nv) Planet Stories Sep. 1952 – 7705
Captive Asteroid, (nv) Science-Fiction Plus April 1953 - 11231
Give Back a World, (nv) Planet Stories May 1953 - 8837
Bonus Story:
Bright Message, (vi) Collier's Weekly May 18 1946 - 1493
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas, Raymond Z. Gallun, Tom's eBooks May 2021 (c, ebook) - 115,100 words
Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *
The Revolt of the Star Men, (na) Wonder Stories Quarterly Winter 1932 - 27606
Godson of Almarlu, (na) Astounding Oct. 1936 - 18984
Fires of Genesis, (na) Astounding March 1937 - 16777
Iszt—Earthman, (nv) Astounding April 1938 - 16072
Coffins to Mars [*Demigods], (na) Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1950 - 20015
Legacy from Mars, (nv) Science Fiction Adventures July 1953 - 15666
Bibliography of Gallun collections
Ten (Stories) to the Stars: Another Collection of Short Fiction, Raymond Z. Gallun, Tom's eBooks June
2021 (c, ebook) - 109,100 words
Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *
P.S.’s Feature Flash, (bg) Planet Stories Summer 1941
Meet the Authors: Raymond Z. Gallun, (bg) Amazing Stories June 1942
The Space-Dwellers, (ss) Science Wonder Stories Nov. 1929 - 6259
Avalanche, (ss) Astounding Dec. 1935 {as by "Dow Elstar"} - 3455
SFE3: basis for "Dawn of the Demigods", unconfirmed
Terror Out of the Past, (nv) Amazing Stories March 1940 - 14590
Stepson of Space, (ss) Astonishing Stories Oct. 1940 - 5687
The Achilles Heel, (ss) Amazing Stories Nov. 1940 - 3093
Ten to the Stars, (na) Science Fiction Adventures March 1953 - 22030
Dawn of the Demigods [*Demigods], (na) Planet Stories Summer 1954 - 25287
later expanded, as People Minus X, Simon & Schuster 1957 / Ace 1958 - 52500
Trail Blazer, (ss) Fantastic Story Magazine Fall 1951 - 7218
A Step Farther Out, (nv) Super Science Stories March 1950 - 13225
Sort of Like Atlas, (ss) Astro-Adventures #7 April 1989 - 7007
Bonus Story:
Final Rite, (vi) Collier's Weekly July 6 1946 - 1294
Interview: Raymond Gallun, Jeffrey M. Elliot, (iv) Thrust #17 Summer 1981
Bibliography of Gallun collections
Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction, Raymond Z. Gallun, Tom's eBooks June 2021
(c, ebook) - 105,200 words
Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *
The Lunar Chrysalis, (nv) Amazing Sep. 1931 - 14334
Waves of Compulsion, (nv) Wonder Stories March 1932 - 15929
Derelict, (ss) Astounding Oct. 1935 - 5303
Nova Solis, (ss) Astounding Dec. 1935 {as by "E. V. Raymond"} - 5078
The Scarab, (ss) Astounding Aug. 1936 - 3790
A Menace in Miniature, (ss) Astounding Oct. 1937 - 6761
Magician of Dream Valley, (ss) Astounding Oct. 1938 - 5692
The Shadow of the Veil, (ss) Astounding Feb. 1939 - 4300
Guardian Angel, (ss) Super Science Stories May 1940 – 5651
The First Long Journey [*Demigods], (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1951 - 5117
The Restless Tide [*Demigods], (ss) Marvel Science Fiction Nov. 1951 - 6437
Double Identity, (nv) Dynamic Science Fiction June 1953 - 14984
Th
en and Now [*Demigods], (nv) Analog Dec. 1977 - 11799
Bibliography of Gallun collections
Hell-Stuff for Planet X! and Other Old-Timey Space Opera, Raymond Z. Gallun, Tom's eBooks July 2021
(c, ebook) - 102,300 words
Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *
The Moon Mistress, (nv) Wonder Stories May 1932 - 11654
Moon Plague, (nv) Wonder Stories Jan. 1934 - 9677
Dawn-World Echoes, (nv) Astounding July 1937 - 10143
Red Shards on Ceres, (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec. 1937 - 4228
Strange Creature, (ss) Science Fiction Aug. 1939 - 4010
The Lotus-Engine, (ss) Super Science Stories March 1940 - 6971
Death and the Dictator, (ss) Science Fiction Oct. 1940 - 4607
Secret of the Comet, (nv) Thrilling Wonder Stories Jan. 1941 - 9937
Gears for Nemesis, (ss) Startling Stories Jan. 1942 - 7012
Hell-Stuff for Planet X, (ss) Startling Stories June 1943 - 5767
Bluff Play, (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec. 1950 - 4547
The Great Idea, (ss/nv) Startling Stories Jan. 1952 - 7740
The Guthrie Method, (nv) Science Fiction Quarterly May 1954 - 9972
The Gentle Anger, (ss) Astro-Adventures #5 Oct. 1988 - 6041
Bibliography of Gallun collections
************************************
Other collections by Raymond Z. Gallun:
The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun, ed. John J. Pierce, Ballantine Aug. 1978 (c, pb)
Raymond Z. Gallun, The Quiet Revolutionary, John J. Pierce, (in) *
Old Faithful [*Old Faithful], (nv) Astounding Dec. 1934
Derelict, (ss) Astounding Oct. 1935
Davy Jones’ Ambassador, (nv) Astounding Dec. 1935
Godson of Almarlu, (na) Astounding Oct. 1936
A Menace in Miniature, (ss) Astounding Oct. 1937
Seeds of the Dusk [*When Earth is Old], (nv) Astounding June 1938 – 10703
Hotel Cosmos, (ss) Astounding July 1938
Hell Stuff For Planet X Page 33
