Marooned on Mars

CHAPTER 10 Marooned on Mars

Chuck’s eyes turned from one to another, looking for some explanation. Their bruised faces were blank, and their scratched and dirt-covered hands remained motionless. As one, they sat waiting for Vance to go on, to laugh at his own joke.

But he didn’t laugh. He waited with them, until he was sure that he’d have to speak first Then his hand reached out slowly for the porcelain shard. “Maybe this is important,” he said slowly. “I don’t know. Maybe Sokolsky’s three-sexed plants are more important than we are. And maybe we’re dead, and this is a hell of our own imagining. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I’m not pretending to know anything.

“But while you’ve been learning something, I’ve been hearing it all. That’s why military law is necessary.”

He tossed the automatic out onto the middle of the table. “I don’t feel like a leader. If someone else is better, select him; or select me, if you must. But whoever leads from now on will have to keep that as a symbol that his word is final. We can’t waste time on argument or divided authority. We can’t have men staying ten minutes for any reason when they’re ordered to return in five. There’s the gun—I want everyone who’s willing to accept the responsibility to put his hand on it, and we’ll take a vote on who it will be.”

He waited again, but no hands moved. Finally he reached out and put his own hand on the automatic again; there was no other offer. Vance sighed, and pulled it back to him.

“Very well. Tomorrow well go and look at the ruins. We need one day without any duties, even if it makes us feel guilty to shirk what we consider our dudes. And from there on, nobody can leave the ship without my permission. You’ll remove the radios from your suits when indoors, and you’ll call me before doing anything on your own, unless ifs work you’ve been assigned.

“You see—it’s worse than we thought. You know about the broken girder, the ripped seam, the damaged goods. Some of you even realize we have the nearly impossible job of getting the ship—more than ten tons of it here—back on its fins. Most of you haven’t asked how we’ll straighten out the bent frame before we weld it, but it’s obvious we’ll have to do it by digging sand out from below some parts and jacking up others; probably cutting and rewelding.

“I’ve been figuring out the time. Four of us will have to do at least one hundred days’ work here; part of the work can’t be done, except by those four, so the three remaining will have work for perhaps half the time. Rothman, Steele, Chuck and I know how to handle welders— and that means we have full-time jobs. We’re figuring on one hundred days’ work at twenty hours a day—-and we have to be done in less than ninety days.

“Otherwise, we’re marooned here—and we can’t live until another chance comes for us to go back to Earth. That’s all.”

He waited for an argument. Chuck looked at the others, and nodded slowly. Silently they agreed, one by one.

Vance smiled suddenly, a weak, dead smile. He broke open the automatic and tossed the empty cartridge clip onto the table. “Good. If you’ll accept the idea, you obviously won’t need the threat that I used to drive home the seriousness of this. Go to bed, and well look at the ruins tomorrow.”

He stood up slowly, took three steps forward, and collapsed onto the floor. Sokolsky was at his side at once.

“Strain, fatigue, and loss of blood,” the doctor told them. “He didn’t tell you he cut an artery in his arm in the landing. Hell be all right with a little rest.”

Chuck followed Steele out toward the little bunk room. He was slowly figuring out the fact that Vance had deliberately made one-man rule seem as unpleasant as he could so that they would object to it at once, if they wanted to, and that the captain now felt sure of their obedience. But he hadn’t figured some other things out.

“What are our chances, Dick?” he asked. “Honestly.”

Dick dropped slowly onto his hammock, and closed his eyes. His voice was almost as tired as that of Vance. “About one in a million. Chuck. Probably less. We’re marooned. We might as well face it. But we don’t have to take it without fighting back. Go to sleep.”

Chuck barely beard the last words, because he was already following them. A whole Martian city, restored to life, wouldn’t have changed his actions.

Breakfast was a hodgepodge affair—Ginger was following the orders not to do any work that day without knowing whether he was doing right or wrong, but determined to try. Everyone woke up when they could sleep no longer and stumbled out into the mess hall, where Ginger’s sign said: “Help Yourself.” Chuck was fairly early. He found-a can of protein-vitamin-mineral concentrate and sprinkled it onto some starchy substance in a bowl, figuring it would be a balanced meal. Surprisingly, the combination tasted good, and several others followed his example, though some simply made a quick salad out of vegetables from the gardens.

Vance came tottering in, weak, but obviously back to his normal self. He grinned weakly at them. “Sorry I went West Point drama school on you, boys. Must have been out of my mind. But I still mean it. What’s fit to eat in here?”

He followed Chuck’s suggestion, washing the food down with a cup of cold instant coffee. “How about the city you found? Who’s going along?”

Everybody was going, it seemed. Vance motioned Chuck to lead. They came out of the ship into a late Martian morning. Around them, the sand was still as barren as before, and the little cup into which the ship had settled cut them off from the rest of the planet. The sky above was a deep purple, with two thin wisps of cloud in it.

“We can breathe the air,” Steele commented. “That is, we can if well compress it enough and moisten it Right now, it’s so dry it’d suck the liquid out of your bodies in a few hours. The ozone layer they talked about seems to be farther up—and that’s lucky. We’ve got oxygen, nitrogen, and pretty much the same stuff as Earth here-only not enough of it”

He turned around, showing the back of his suit. He’d been the last to leave, so no one had noticed it. But there were no tanks. Instead, a set of batteries and a pump was attached. “One for each suit back in the ship. I’ll couple them on later.”

It was a help. The batteries were lighter and would last longer than the air tanks, and it would save their own oxygen.

They came up to the top of the dune. Chuck caught his breath at the sight below. The plants were an spread out to the sun now, covering almost every square inch. There were no visible flowers, though Sokolsky insisted something similar was at the end of each leaf. But there was a peculiar beauty to the waxy sheen of the green leaves.

Sokolsky went about, turning up the leaves, which promptly rolled into tight balls. He came back shaking his head. “Nothing like bugs. I was hoping I’d find some.”

“Couldn’t this stuff be eaten?” Vance asked.

Sokolsky shook his head. “It’s unlikely. I didn’t have much time but the tests I made indicate poisons in it that we aren’t used to. Anyhow, the leaves are dryer than facial tissues even if they do look succulent”

Rothman pointed toward the north. “I saw a canal up that way about thirty miles. But there was a lot of desert between here and there. Where’s this city, Chuck?”

Seen in the clear light of day, even by the weak and distant sun that could only raise the temperature to about seventy degrees at midday, the city looked less imposing than at night From a few hundred feet, it seemed nothing but a mass of stone.

Chuck led the way into it There were perhaps three hundred buildings, all obviously once single-story, and most of them of only one room. The buildings had been made of dressed stone, fitted without cement, but many of them still stood. One, with a sloping stone roof, was almost intact

The floors were of the greatest interest Many were inlaid in little colored squares, like a mosaic. Some had geometrical designs, and one showed odd animals, something like a cat-headed buffalo. But toward the center of the city, where the house with the roof stood, they stumbled on the prize treasure of them all.

Something that might -have been a tree was worked into the center. They cleaned some of the dirt and rubble away to examine it more closely, and Sokolsky let out a shout

“Humanoid!”

It was true enough. Standing around the tree were about a dozen creatures, each vaguely manlike. They carried themselves upright, with a rounded head, two arms, and two legs. Sokolsky pointed out that the elbow and knee joints were similar to those of men—a remarkable case of parallel evolution. “Probably didn’t look this much like us—all we’re seeing is silhouettes in rather bad art—but they are still more like us than you’d think. Look—is that a spear?”

They studied it while Ginger took endless pictures, but couldn’t make up their minds. Lew drew out a knife from his tool pouch and started to dig out some of the mosaic.

Vance stopped him. “Let it alone. If people have to vandalize this planet so that future generations who know more won’t have any real evidence, we’re not going to be the ones to start it. We can take back pictures, if we get back—but we won’t destroy the evidence.”

There were no idols, or evidence of religion, unless the tree thing was worshiped. It might have been, though Lew thought that it was probably another geometrical design, showing some relationship among peoples or tribes.

Nor was there any evidence of what had happened to the Martians; they might have vanished, or they might simply have moved on to other locations. Steele didn’t believe the last He pointed to the wear on the stones. “It must have been at least ten million years ago when this was built. That’s hard stone, and there’s only the thin wind and sand to wear it away. They must have died off. Maybe that basin over there held some of the last of their water, and when it went from the atmosphere, they couldn’t adapt. ‘Gone with the snows of yesteryear’ would be more truth than poetry in their case.”

Night was falling when they turned back. They knew now as much as they had known before, and no more, except that the original people might have looked vaguely human. But Vance had proved right. The day of rest had been more important than even the pressure of the work.

Ginger broke down enough to tell them where a few precious canned steaks were hidden, and they made a sort of community picnic out of it, broiling them over the little hot plates. The tomatoes and lettuce from the gardens hadn’t been seriously hurt, and the salad was officially tossed by Vance.

Rothman alone seemed to have gained no lift from the day. He moved off, still worrying, toward the control room. Apparently the only trace of a sense of humor in his make-up came out only under extreme danger. Chuck followed. His own family had been on his mind more than he’d cared to let the others see, and the radar set might be repaired more easily than much of the rest of the equipment. After all, it wasn’t really work; electronics had always been a hobby.

He found Rothman fussing over the communications set The man jerked up quickly, his dark face flushing faintly. Chuck looked at what he had been doing, and lifted his eyebrows.

“No test instruments?” he asked.

Rothman shrugged. “I worked my way through college— eight years of it—designing these things for a little electronics firm. You get a sixth sense about the inside of them, even if you can’t make them sit up and purr. You’ve lost one of those tubes—someday they’ll make them out of nothing but crystals—I’d say; what do you think?”

Chuck wondered how many other talents the man held in check, but he simply nodded. “Maybe. Either that, or (here’s real trouble. I’ve been thinking about it. If the spare isn’t ruined, well soon know.”

He located it, and could see no evidence of damage to the case in which it was so carefully packed. At better than $4,000 Earth price for the little thing, it should have been packed well. If it had been solid diamond, it couldn’t have been so precious. Yet in his own rig, he was using something that could be picked up on Earth for a couple of dollars; the chief difference lay in the fact that his tube stood some four inches tall, while this took up less than half a cubic inch. Weight-saving cost money.

He plugged it in with the little tool needed to handle it, and cut on power. The indicator light flashed on, and a hum began to come from the small speaker.

“Eros calling,” he repeated half a dozen times, and switched to receive. It would be several minutes before the message could reach Earth and return, even at the 186,000 miles per second light and radio waves traveled. “Any message to send?”

Rothman nodded. “Just that I’m fine—my wife…”

He saw the surprise in Chuck’s eyes, and nodded again. “I got married three days before take-off; I didn’t lie to the Commission when I said I was single. She insisted on it I suppose it doesn’t matter now who knows.” 91

Vance found them there just as the answering signal came through with its frantic excitement. They’d been given up as dead. Chuck sent quick assurances and a brief report before demanding connection to the Space Commission. Then he turned the instrument over to Vance, who began reeling off facts and figures. They were in luck—there was almost no static.

The others were doing odd jobs; now that some of the shock and fatigue were gone, they couldn’t be expected to escape the work completely when they couldn’t turn around without seeing something that desperately needed doing. But they were carefully avoiding physical effort as much as possible. Vance had apparently decided to accept the compromise.

The captain came down later, to join them in (he mess hall, which was slowly being turned into the chief room. A couple of the inflatable plastic chairs had been set up, and the table had been folded back into the wall. Nothing could make the stem, utilitarian walls of the ship look like home. No room which is designed so that any one of its six walls may be the deck can be given a homey touch. But it was better than the narrow alcoves where their hammocks were set up.

Vance shook his head. “They’re trying to figure out the margin I have with the fuel left. It would take us two days to get an approximation, but they’ll let us know tonight.”

He dropped onto a bench with the fatigue back on his face, though not as badly as the day before. Sokolsky made a gesture toward him and then checked it Vance would probably worry more in bed than out, his expression said.

But Chuck had gotten fed up with the depression. He’d been hit hard enough himself, and his mood was still one of loose ends and futile gestures. Still, sitting around and watching other men go back to their blues didn’t help. He turned toward the hammocks to lie and think by himself, or to sleep if he could.

Suddenly a high, keen wailing sound cut through the room, seeming to come from outside. Chuck felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle. He jumped to the hull, placing his ear against, it while the others rushed over to follow his example.

There was nothing for a few minutes. Then it came again—a thin, piping sound that rose to a quivering shriek and died away slowly.

Their faces were gray and taut as they faced each other. “It came from out there,” Chuck said, unnecessarily.

The others nodded. Sokolsky laughed nervously. “The wind—there must be a hollow stone. No living lungs could have power enough to make that carry through this atmosphere!”

“There’s no wind,” Vance told him quietly. “Up in the control room, I could see the sand out there lying completely still”

The doctor shrugged. “It must be blowing out there, even if it isn’t here. It’s just the wind.”

Nobody could dispute him, though Chuck wondered what force of wind would be needed.

Vance stood up and moved back to the control room. Chuck started toward the hammocks, and then swung after his captain. He arrived just in time to hear the speaker come to life. There was a long preamble about the difficulty of getting exact estimates, but the message finally got down to brass tacks.

“You have fuel enough to reach Earth it you take off in seventy days. Otherwise, you’ll have to use too much to reach us, and won’t be able to land.”

Vance cut the set off sharply and snapped off the lights. He sat staring out toward the desert as Chuck turned and moved softly back toward his hammock.

Seventy days to do work that couldn’t be done in a hundred! And if they couldn’t do it, they’d have to wait month after month until their supplies ran out before they had another chance.

Suddenly he sat bolt upright, cursing himself. With six mouths to feed, they might make the long wait, if they had to. But his extra burden on their partly ruined supplies would, probably weigh the scales against them. Vance’s first lecture came back, accusingly. He had no right on Mars. The others had been sent, but he’d stolen his place, and bad no rightful claim on the food and water he’d consume.

He got to sleep finally, but it wasn’t a restful sleep. His dreams were worse than his waking thoughts had been.

He saw six graves out in the red Martian desert. There should have been seven, but someone had built a gallows instead, and a straw image of himself was hung there with the accusing details of his murder of the others written on it. As he looked, the straw man came to life and ran after him shrieking in a high wail that his ears couldn’t stand.