Space Station 1
his fists.
He swayed suddenly and realized that he was at the end of his
endurance, and now would in all probability make a complete fool of
himself. He would commit the unforgivable folly of issuing a challenge
that he couldn't back up.
He shook his head violently, trying to clear it, but his dizziness
increased. The landscape about him began to pinwheel and he saw the
streets of the colony through a wavering yellow mist. The store fronts
danced, the rusting and discarded machinery on a side street began to
move and come to life, to clatter and waltz about.
A woman moving toward him seemed to grow in height, her oxygen mask
widening out, overspreading her face. For a moment she seemed like an
impossible ballet figure in a _danse macabre_, pivoting about on her
toes as a caterpillar tractor came rushing toward her through the thin
air of Mars.
Then two colonists were supporting him, holding him tightly by the
elbows, refusing to let him collapse. It was outrageous, because he
_wanted_ to collapse. He wanted to sink down, to let sleep wash over
him, to forget all of his troubles in merciful oblivion.
But the two colonists were very stubborn. They refused to let him
collapse. He only wanted to go to sleep, to forget all of his troubles,
but the two colonists were like doctors in a hospital, very stern, very
patient, and seemingly determined to keep him on his feet.
Somehow they must have failed. They must have failed because when
he became fully conscious again he was lying between cool white
sheets, and a woman in a white nurse's uniform was bending over him.
By straining his eyes he could see two men who looked like doctors
standing just beyond her.
The two men appeared to be discussing him, but when he struggled to
a sitting position and stared hard at them they came toward him with
reassuring smiles, and one of them said: "Take it easy, now. You're
going to be all right."
"I ... I must have passed out," he stammered. "I was ready to pass out
before I started talking. Is this a hospital? I guess it is. I should
have come here immediately. Forty hours in the desert and I arrive
half-delirious and make a fool of myself."
"Take it easy," one of the doctors said. "You didn't make a fool of
yourself. Quite the contrary."
Oh, brother, he thought. They're lying to me to spare me, or something.
"I have a vague recollection of not being able to stand, of talking my
head off and then collapsing and making a complete fool of myself, of
accomplishing nothing at all. I swung hard at two or three people. I
knocked one man down, flat on his back. But that was a crazy thing to
do. It's no way to win the confidence or respect of anyone."
"Look," one of the doctors said, taking firm hold of his shoulder
and shaking him gently. "Don't go reproaching yourself. You've got
nine-tenths of the colony behind you."
"You mean--"
"Sure, you convinced almost everyone. And that was a miracle in itself,
considering how close to collapse you were. You were running a high
fever. You were dehydrated. Your skin was as dry as a parched lichen.
Yet you stood there and convinced them. That's the gospel truth."
"They've chosen you as their leader," the second doctor said. "They're
going after Henley before it's too late. They feel exactly as you
do about Ramsey's daughter. Not about Ramsey perhaps--but about the
kidnapping of a helpless girl. None of them have any liking for Henley
now."
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 hospital 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 sense 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 swift-footed 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.
19
Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the
wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness,
to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.
Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first
thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to
remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.
In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man
does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are
no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead
of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star,
of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter
beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow
drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars.
It would always be that way, it could never change.
Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are
risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be
proud.
All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on.
They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely
crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing
himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was
now a member of the 210 man rescue team.
"Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself.
If a man has children--well, Mars is simply no place for children."
"That's right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help
him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When
I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection
of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for
roughing up my clothes.
"Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy.
We're buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness
of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don't really belong to a
planet smaller than Earth. But they're here and we accept them. We pit
our technical brilliance--or lack of it--against the rugged grandeur of
the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our
stride. But to bring a kid here--"
"Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn't want to put his son
in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the
Colony."
"That doesn't excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men."
"How many of them could step into Drever's shoes and grow to his
stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You're
forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary
screening. It's rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only
insist that he be good; they want him to be the best."
"That's true enough, I suppose. And now that he's here he probably
couldn't be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for
a man. And _to_ a man, if you like."
"I'm simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of
Freddy's age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust.
He couldn't ride a bike on Mars--if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has
no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like
this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?"
Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr.
Drever's son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire.
They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was
stamped on the faces of at least two of them.
Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. "Nonsense!"
he said.