01-Human Space Read online

  “Don’t count on it. But I won’t need to. Noon tomorrow, you’ll be chasing me. You need to breathe, just like I do.”

  “Watch this,” said Carter. The 0-tank resting against his knee was empty. He tipped it over the side and watched it roll away.

  “I had an extra tank,” he said. He smiled in relief at his release from that damning weight. “I can live four hours longer than you can. Want to turn back, Alf?”

  “No.”

  “He's not worth it, Alf. He was nothing but a queer.”

  “Does that mean he’s got to die?”

  “It does if the son of a bitch propositions me. Maybe you’re a little that way yourself?”

  “No. And Lew wasn’t queer till he came here. They should have sent half men, half women.”

  “Amen.”

  “You know, lots of people got a little sick to their stomachs about homosexuals. I do myself, and it hurt to see it happening to Lew. But there’s only one type who goes looking for ‘em so he can beat up on ‘em.”

  Carter frowned.

  “Latents. Guys who think they might turn queer themselves if you gave ‘em the opportunity. They can’t stand queers around because queers are temptation.”

  “You’re just returning the compliments.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, the town has enough problems without things like that going on. This whole project could have been wrecked by someone like your brother.”

  “How bad do we need killers?”

  “Pretty badly, this time.”

  Suddenly Carter knew that he was now his own defense attorney. If he could convince Alf that he shouldn’t be executed, he could convince the rest of them. If he couldn’t—then he must destroy the bubble, or die. He went on talking as persuasively as he knew how.

  “You see, Alf, the town has two purposes. One is to find out if we can live in an environment as hostile as this one. The other is to contact the Martians. Now there are just fifteen of us in town —”

  “Twelve. Thirteen when I get back.”

  “Fourteen if we both do. Okay. Each of us is more or less a necessary to the functioning of the town. But I’m needed in both fields. I’m the ecologist, Alf. I not only have to keep the town from dying from some sort of imbalance, I also have to figure out how the Martians live, what they live on, how Martian life forms depend on each other. You see?”

  “Sure. How ‘bout Lew? Was he necessary?”

  “We can get along without him. He was the radio man. At least a couple of us have training enough to take over communications.”

  “You make me so happy. Doesn’t the same go for you?”

  Carter thought hard and fast. Yes, Gondot in particular could keep the town’s life-support system going with little help. But—“Not with the Martian ecology. There isn’t—”

  “There isn’t any Martian ecology. Jack, has anyone ever found any life on Mars besides that man-shaped mummy? You can’t be an ecologist without something to make deductions from. You’ve got nothing to investigate. So what good are you?”

  Carter kept talking. He was still arguing as the sun dropped into the sea of sand and darkness closed down with a snap. But he knew now it was no use. Alf’s mind was closed.

  By sunset the bubble was taut, and the tortured scream of incoming breathing-air had dropped to a tired sigh. Lieutenant-Major Shute unfastened the clamps at his shoulders and lifted his helmet, ready to jam it down fast if the air was too thin. It wasn’t. He set the helmet down and signaled thumbs-up to the men watching him.

  Ritual. Those dozen men had known the air would be safe. But rituals had grown fast where men worked in space, and the most rigid was that the man in charge fastened his helmet last and unfastened it first. Now suits were being removed. Men moved about their duties. Some moved toward the kitchen to clean up the vacuum-induced havoc so Hurley could get dinner.

  Shute stopped Lee Cousins as he went by. “Lee, could I see you a minute?”

  “Sure, Mayor.” Shute was “the Mayor’ to all bubbletown.

  “I want your help as a writer,” said Shute. “I’m going to send in a quite controversial report when we get within range of Earth, and I’d like you to help me make it convincing.”

  “Fine. Let’s see it.”

  The ten streetlamps came on, dispelling the darkness which had fallen so suddenly. Shute led the way to his prefab bungalow, unlocked the safe, and handed Cousins the manuscript. Cousins hefted it. “Big,” he said. “Might pay to cut it”

  “By all means, if you can find anything unnecessary.”

  “I’ll bet I can,” Cousins grinned. He dropped on the bed and began to read.

  Ten minutes later he asked, “Just what is the incidence of homosexuals in the Navy?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Then it’s not powerful evidence. You might quote a limerick to show that the problem’s proverbial. I know a few.”

  “Good.

  A little later Cousins said, “A lot of schools in England are coeducational. More every year.”

  “I know. But the present problem is among men who graduated from boys’ schools when they were much younger.”

  “Make that clearer. Incidentally, was your high school coeducational?”

  “No.”

  “Any queers?”

  “A few. At least one in every class. The seniors used to use paddles on the ones they suspected.”

  “Did it help?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Okay. You’ve got two sets of circumstances under which a high rate of homosexuality occurs. In both cases you’ve got three conditions: a reasonable amount of leisure, no women, and a disciplinary pecking order. You need a third example.”

  “I couldn’t think of one.”

  “The Nazi organization.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll give you details.” Cousins went on reading. He finished the report and put it aside. “This’ll cause merry hell,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “The worst thing about it is your threat to give the whole thing to the newspapers. If I were you I’d leave that out,”

  “If you were me you wouldn’t,” said Shute. “Everyone who had anything to do with WARGOD knew they were risking everything that’s happened. They preferred to let us take that risk rather than risk public opinion themselves. There are hundreds of Decency Leagues in the United States. Maybe thousands, I don’t know. But they’ll all come down on the government like harpies if anyone tried to send a mixed crew to Mars or anywhere else in space. The only way I can make the government act is to give them a greater threat.”

  “You win. This is a greater threat.”

  “Did you find anything else to cut out?”

  “Oh, hell yes. I’ll go through this again with a red pencil. You talk too much, and use too many words that are too long, and you generalize. You’ll have to give details or you’ll lose impact.”

  “I’ll be ruining some reputations.

  “Can’t be helped. We’ve got to have women on Mars, and right now. Rufe and Timmy are building up to a real spitting fight. Rufe thanks he caused Lew’s death by leaving him. Timmy keeps taunting him with it.”

  “All right,” said Shute. He stood up. He had been sitting erect throughout the discussion, as if sitting at attention. “Are the buggies still in radio range?”

  “They can’t hear us, but we can hear them. Timmy’s working the radio.”

  “Good. We’ll keep him on it until they go out of range."

  "Shall we get dinner?”

  Phobos rose where the sun had set, a scatttering of moving dots of light, like a crescent of dim stars. It grew brighter as it rose: a new moon becoming a half-moon in hours. Then it was too high to look at. Carter had to keep his eyes on the triangle of desert lit by his headlights. The headlight beams were the color of earthly sunlight, but to Carter’s Mars-adapted eyes they turned everything blue.

  He had chosen
his course well. The desert ahead was flat for more than seven hundred miles. There would be no low hills rising suddenly before him to trap him into jet-jumping in faint moonlight or waiting for Alf to come down on him. Alf’s turnover point would come at high noon tomorrow, and then Carter would have won.

  For Alf would turn back toward the bubble, and Carter would go on into the desert. When Alf was safely over the horizon, Carter would turn left or right, go on for an hour, and then follow a course parallel to Alf's. He would be in sight of the bubble an hour later than Alf, with three hours in which to plan.

  Then would come the hardest part. Certainly there would be someone on guard. Carter would have to charge past the guard—who might be armed with a flare pistol—tear the bubble open, and somehow confiscate the supply of 0-tanks. Ripping the bubble open would probably kill everyone inside, but there would be men in suits outside. He would have to load some of the 0-tanks on his buggy and open the stopcocks of the rest, all before anyone reached him.

  What bothered him was the idea of charging a flare pistol … But perhaps he could just aim the buggy and jump out. He would have to see.

  His eyelids were getting heavy, and his hands were cramped. But he dare not slow down, and he dared not sleep.

  Several times he had thought of smashing the come-hither in his suit radio. With that thing constantly beeping, Alf could find him anytime he pleased. But Alf could find him anyway. His headlights were always behind, never catching up, never dropping away. If he ever got out of Alf's sight, that come-hither would have to go. But there was no point in letting Alf know that. Not yet.

  Stars dropped into the black western horizon. Phobos rose again, brighter this time, and again became too high to watch. Deimos now showed above the steady shine of Alf’s headlights.

  Suddenly it was day, and there were thin black shadows pointing to a yellow horizon. Stars still glowed in a red-black sky. There was a crater ahead, a glass dish set in the desert, not too big to circle around. Carter angled left. The buggy behind him also angled. If he kept turning like this, Alf couldn’t help but gain on him. Carter sucked water and nutrient solution from the nipples in his helmet, and concentrated on steering. His eyes felt gritty, and his mouth belonged to a Martian mummy.

  “Morning,” said Alf.

  “Morning. Get plenty of sleep?”

  “Not enough. I only slept about six hours, in snatches. I kept worrying you’d turn off and lose me.”

  For a moment Carter went hot and cold. Then he know that Alf was needling him. He’d no more slept than Carter had.

  “Look to your right,” said Alf.

  To their right was the crater wall. And—Carter looked again to be sure—there was a silhouette on the rim, a man-shaped shadow against the red sky. With one hand it balanced something tall and thin.

  “A Martian,” Carter said softly. Without thinking he turned his buggy to climb the wall. Two flares exploded in front of him, a second apart, and he frantically jammed the tiller bar hard left.

  “God damn it, Alf! That was a Martian! We’ve got to go after it!”

  The silhouette was gone. No doubt the Martian had run for its life when it saw the flares.

  Alf said nothing. Nothing at all. And Carter rode on, past the crater, with a murderous fury building in him.

  It was eleven o’clock. The tips of a range of hills were pushing above the western horizon.

  “I’m just curious,” Alf said, “but what would you have said to that Martian?”

  Carter’s voice was tight and bitter. “Does it matter?”

  “Yah. The best you could have done was scare him. When we get in touch with the Martians, we’ll do it just the way we planned.”

  Carter ground his teeth. Even without the accident of Lew Harness’ death, there was no telling how long the translation plan would take. It involved three steps: sending pictures of the writings on the crematory wells and other artifacts to Earth, so that computers could translate the language; writing messages in that language to leave near the wells where Martians would find them; and then waiting for the Martians to make a move.

  But there was no reason to believe that the script on the wells wasn’t from more than one language, or from the same language as it had changed over thousands of years. There was no reason to assume the Martians would be interested in strange beings living in a glorified balloon, regardless of whether the invaders knew how to write. And could the Martians read their own ancestors’ script?

  An idea ... “You’re a linguist,” said Carter. No answer.

  “Alf, we’ve talked about whether the town needed Lew, and we’ve talked about whether the town needs me. How about you? Without you we’d never get the well-script translated.”

  “I doubt that. The CalTech computers are doing most of the work, and anyhow I left notes. But so what?”

  “If you keep chasing me you force me to kill you. Can the town afford to lose you?”

  “You can’t do it. But I’ll make you a deal if you want. It’s eleven now. Give me two of your 0-tanks, and we’ll go back to town. We’ll stop two hours from town leave your buggy, and you’ll ride the rest of the way tied up in the air bin. Then you can stand trial.”

  “You think they’ll let me off?”

  “Not after the way you ripped the bubble open on your way out. That was a blunder, Jack.”

  “Why don’t you just take one tank?” If Alf did that, Carter would get back with two hours to spare. He knew, now, that he would have to wreck the bubble. He had no alternative. But Alf would be right behind him with the flare gun …

  “No deal. I wouldn’t feel safe if I didn’t know you’d ran out of air two hours before we got back. You want me to feel safe, don’t you?”

  It was better the other way. Let Alf turn back in an hour. Let Alf be in the bubble when Carter returned to tear it open.

  “Carter turned him down,” said Timmy. He hunched over the radio, holding his earphones with both hands, listening with every nerve for voices which had almost died into the distance.

  “He’s planning something,” Gondot said uneasily.

  “Naurally,” said Shute. “He wants to lose Alf, return to the bubble, and wreck it. What other hope has he?”

  “But he’d die too,” said Timmy.

  “Not necessarily. If he killed us all, he could mend the new rip while he lived on the 0-tanks we’ve got left. I think he could keep the bubble in good enough repair to keep one man alive.”

  “My Lord! What can we do?”

  “Relax, Timmy. It’s simple math.” It was easy for Lieutenant-Major Shute to keep his voice light, and he didn’t want Timmy to start a panic. “If Alf turns back at noon, Carter can’t get here before noon tomorrow. At four he’ll be out of air. We’ll just keep everyone in suits for four hours.” Privately he wondered if twelve men could repair even a small rip before they used up the bottled air. It would be one tank every twenty minutes … but perhaps they wouldn’t be tested.

  “Five minutes of twelve,” said Carter. “Turn back, Alf. You’ll only get home with ten minutes to spare.”

  The linguist chuckled. A quarter mile behind, the blue dot of his buggy didn’t move.

  “You can’t fight mathematics, Alf. Turn back”

  “Too late.”

  “In five minutes it will be.”

  “I started this trip short of an 0-tank. I should have turned two hours ago.”

  Carter had to wet his lips from the water nipple before he answered. “You’re lying. Will you stop bugging me? Stop it!”

  Alf laughed. “Watch me turn back.”

  His buggy came on quickly"

  It was noon, and the chase would not end. At twenty-five miles per, two Marsbuggies a quarter of a mile apart moved serenely through an orange desert. Chemical stains of green rose ahead and fell behind. Crescent dunes drifted by, as regular as waves on an ocean. The ghostly path of a meteorite touched the northern horizon in a momentary white flash. The hills were higher now,
humps of smooth rock like animals sleeping beyond the horizon. The sun burned small and bright in a sky reddened by nitrogen dioxide and, near the horizon, blackened by its thinness to the color of bloody India ink.

  Had the chase really started at noon? Exactly noon? But it was twelve-thirty now, and he was sure that was too late.

  Alf had doomed himself—to doom Carter.

  But he wouldn’t.

  “Great minds think alike,” he told the radio.

  “Really?” Alf’s tone said he couldn’t have cared less.

  “You took an extra tank. Just like me.”

  “No I didn’t, Jack.”

  “You must have. If there’s one thing I’m sure of in life, it’s that you are not the type to kill yourself. All right, Alf, I quit. Let’s go back.

  “Let’s not.”

  “We’d have three hours to chase that Martian.”

  A flare exploded behind his buggy. Carter sighed raggedly. At two o’clock both buggies would turn back to bubbletown, where Carter would probably be executed.

  But suppose I turn back now?

  That’s easy. Alf will shoot me with the flare gun.

  He might miss. If I let him choose my course, I’ll die for certain.

  Carter sweated and cursed himself, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t deliberately turn into Alf’s gun.

  At two o’clock the base of the range came over the horizon. The hills were incredibly clear, almost as clear as they would have been on the Moon. But they were horribly weathered, and the sea of sand lapped around them as if eager to finish them off, to drag them down.

  Carter rode with his eyes turned behind. His watch hands moved on, minute to minute, and Carter watched in disbelief as Alf’s vehicle continued to follow. As the time approached and reached two-thirty, Carter's disbelief faded. It didn’t matter, now, how much oxygen Alf had. They had passed Carter’s turnover point.

  “You’ve killed me,” he said.

  No answer.

  “I killed Lew in a fistfight. What you’ve done to me is much worse. You’re killing me by slow torture. You’re a demon, Alf.”