Space Station 1

18

CORRISTON walked out into the central square and stood there. For a moment no one said a word. One of the doctors was there with him. He’d had a sandwich and coffee before leaving the hosiptal and his nerves felt steady and his Voice was pitched low.

“I don’t know a single one of these men, Dr. Tomlinson”, he said. “I spent a week in the colony four years ago, but I just don’t see anyone I recognize. I’m afraid you’ll have to introduce me around”.

It took a full hour to really get acquainted, to plan what had to be done, to check over the tractors, the ammunition supplies, the equipment of each and every man.

They had to cross eighty-seven miles of desert to a heavily guarded cave and then move on perhaps to Ramsey’s fortress. They had to be prepared for any eventuality.

The morale was good. Corriston could tense the grim determination in every man, the faith in their mission, the anger. It cheered him.

He walked around between the tractors, listening to stray bits of talk, getting better acquainted with everyone as the minutes sped by.

He took out his watch and looked at it and decided that time was running short.

Give each and every man twenty minutes, he thought. Then we get rolling. Thirty caterpillar tractors and two hundred and ten men. And in the ship are two men holed up — possibly three now — with all the portable fighting equipment of a two thousand ton spaceship at their disposal. And if Henley has returned” —

Suddenly Corriston found himself sweating in the silence, despite the cold, despite the hoar frost that was beginning to collect on the rim of his oxygen mask. There was a split second of shouting from one of the tractors and then it started up, with a coughing and spitting that drowned out the human voices.

All along the wide, rust-red street other tractors came to life. In the thin air of Mars, in the pale sky, a single blue cloud hung suspended.

It was wispy thin, incredibly thin, a hollow mockery of a cloud. But the scene below would have been less remarkable had the sky remained cloudless, for then Mars would have seemed completely unlike Earth and the human drama less compelling.

There was something tremendous in the forward march of the tractors, in the clatter and the rising dust, the shouts of the men at the controls and the women who ran swiftfooted along the sand to urge them to greater fortitude. The women knew that endurance would be needed, for twenty-first century weapons of warfare could destroy a hundred tractors and spatter the desert with blood before retaliation could become complete and justice be fully satisfied.

So the women did not weep or lament. They ran parallel with the tractors, urging their men onward, stifling their own inner fears in the greatness of the moment.

Corriston waited for the last tractor to come abreast of him before he leapt aboard it. There was the smell of acrid grease in the air, a smell of burning. The mechanical parts set up a dull rumbling, and as Corriston swung himself aboard, a voice said: “I’m Stanley Gregor. If I had any sense I wouldn’t take part in this. I came to Mars with the second expedition. I’m sixty-two years old but somehow today I feel young. There’s no longer any doubt in my mind that Henley is a scoundrel. Why we trusted him I don’t know. I’m here to do my part in rectifying an error”. “Sure”, Corriston said, settling down at the side of a big, awkward-looking man with red hair. “Sure, I understand. Take it easy. We’re all in this together”.

“We’ve got eighty-seven miles of desert to cross. It’s going to be tough. Have you seen the fortress Ramsey built to protect himself?”.

“No”, Corriston said.

“There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses — photoelectric eye installations. They spot you when you’re a half-mile away. Try to storm those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you’ll be pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of energy weapons, and you’ll be electrocuted. You’ll hang suspended on barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant”. “I’ve thought it over”, Corriston said. “We won’t have to storm the fortress unless they’ve taken Ramsey’s daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in danger. And if he is in danger, he’ll welcome our help. We’re going to the ship first and there are only two men on the ship”.

“But they’ve got plenty of ammunition, haven’t they? They’ve got the ship’s military installations. Anyway you slice it, it’s a dangerous gamble”.

“I never thought it was anything else”, Corriston said.