Norton, Andre - Anthology (10 page)

 
          
 
Lanvin has no satellite, so the quarantine
station was located on
Mount
Helithon
. Dr. Leland Donaldson was Quarantine
Officer for the Public Health Service. Because he passed pratique on commercial
and government vessels, he knew all officials of the big companies and the
local brass hats of the service.

 
          
 
He called Admiral Gates, crusty commandant of
the yard, and invited him to his lofty station for some beer. Not Lanvin's
synthetic stuff, but real, old-fashioned beer from Earth.

 
          
 
The admiral looked over his foamy mug at the
quarantine officer. His thick jaws crunched on a salt stick. His wrinkled eyes
held a glitter like freshly cut steel. He liked Donaldson, but sometimes he
wondered if he didn't like his beer better.

 
          
 
"Has the 136 left yet?" Donaldson asked,
after their second stein.

 
          
 
"The 136T the admiral hesitated
. "
That's young Corbett's ship. They're
Earthing
tomorrow."

 
          
 
"Did you go aboard her?"

 
          
 
"Me? Go aboard her?" The admiral
looked shocked. "Why should I? I have a staff to do that sort of thing,
you know. They brought out a lot of stuff for the Colonial Office. Tractors,
you know, harrowers, things they use to make things grow in the ground, seeds,
and well, you know." He waved his stein about the room, slopping some of
the beer on Donaldson's tesselated floor.

 
          
 
"Seeds," Donaldson started to laugh.

 
          
 
"Why laugh?" Admiral Gates snorted
testily. "One of my lieutenants went aboard, came back reporting the ship
was spotless, decks like polished glass. Not even so much as a hull scratch.
Outer skin a bit burned but perfectly normal. But perfectly normal, you know.
He said he left you one patient, chap by the name of Bickley or Bikeford or
something.
Civilian, politician.
You know about that
sort of thing. The lieutenant said Corbett would go places in the Service, had
fertile imagination, fertile, you know."

 
          
 
"Fertile," Donaldson chirped.
"Then you don't know?"

 
          
 
"Then I don't know what?" Admiral
Gates' eyes grew frosty. "Of course, I don't know. How should I know? What
should I know?"

 
          
 
Donaldson told him. "About a hundred days
out from Earth, they were just reaching terminal velocity, and their chlorophyl
went sour and started to decay."

 
          
 
"No
trouble there,
ships always carry
spare stuff. It's electron fever that gets me. Hate
the stuff, you know, high speed, space-free electrons going through the skin.
It's bad." He shivered and rubbed the wrinkled, red skin of his face.

 
          
 
His brows puckered, and his lids closed to
tiny slits. "Why did their chlorophyl go bad?"

 
          
 
"They had a psychopath aboard.
A civilian who was placed in charge at the last minute to manage
their air.
Had a record of police arrests a mile long, family shipped
him out here hoping he would turn over a new leaf or something." Donaldson
snorted rudely, "As if a psychopath would. This guy got mad at the ship
and all inside it and spit in their chlorophyl. It got infected but
quick!"

 
          
 
"But they had spare stuff."

 
          
 
"They didn't though," Donaldson
pointed out. "Bickford gave it all away.
Traded it all
for some tools or something to gain favor with some rich dodo.
They were
really in a spot."

 
          
 
"A psychopath aboard," the admiral
shook his head. "That's bad. They're dangerous. They crawl into positions
of responsibility, and then when you need 'em, they blow up, tear your ship to little
meteors.
Happens too often.
The space surgeons should
be more careful. They didn't have any spare chlorophyl, you say. Their own
lungs were going bad." He took a big swallow of beer. Then he exploded.
"Then how in the name of Great Space did they get here?"

 
          
 
"Well," Donaldson spoke slowly, as
if tasting every word. "Their stuff was decaying fast. They couldn't
recharge their tanks. Asphyxiation was shaking hands with the boys. The space
surgeon was set to make things easy at the end with poison in the food or
something. Then the skipper's fertile imagination comes through with a
roar."

 
          
 
"Don't say 'skipper,'
"
Admiral
Gates interrupted petulantly, "hate the word. Makes me
think of sail boats, sea, and water, things like that, you know. Go ahead, tell
the story," he wagged his finger, "but if Corbett has done something
wrong, I want the report in writing and officially and not over beer."

           
 
"Well, the captain," Donaldson said
in an annoyed tone, "got together with Stacker, the ship's space surgeon, and
they put half their crew to sleep with narcotol, left them that way for weeks,
I guess. Cut down oxygen expenditure, you see."

 
          
 
"And," Admiral Gates shouted.

 
          
 
"The rest of them turned gardener."

 
          
 
"What! You said gardener!"

 
          
 
"They turned gardeners, but big. They
pulled their sewage tanks, dried the stuff in the ship's ovens, spread the slew
over the recreation deck.
They rigged actinic generators over
that, shunted their venous air straight through that room, and planted seed in
their synthetic ground.
They had hydroponic gardens all over the
ship."

 
          
 
"Would it grow fast enough to convert
carbon dioxide to oxygen?"

 
          
 
"Well, it did," the port doctor said
succinctly. "They were having fresh, green vegetables from their own
garden by the time they planeted at quarantine."

 
          
 
The wrinkles around the admiral's eyes
unfolded. "Maybe it's a good thing to have a psychopath aboard, keeps a
guy on his toes, you know. Corbett claimed
a five-hour delay
over
Central
Sea
after leaving quarantine
wash
. Wanted to empty
and clean ship.
Makes him a better captain.
Yep, it's
a good thing—"

 
          
 
"It's a good thing he did have a fertile
imagination, or else you would be writing letters to his family."

 
          
 
Lieutenant Nord Corbett stood at attention
before the blue-iced eyes of the admiral. Through the port behind the
commandant, he could see his cradled ship. The ground crew had finished the
hull polish, and in the glare from Lanvin's hot, white sun, it glittered like a
platinum flame.

 
          
 
"May I have my clearance for Earth,
sir?"

 
          
 
The admiral's bushy brows furrowed.
"Ready to blow; taking back fifty passengers, you know. Got plenty of
water and air?" He rumbled. "Checking them all in?"

 
          
 
"Yes, sir."
Nord's face crimsoned under the icy stare of the admiral. "They're all checked.
Dr. Stacker, my space surgeon, is giving them psychophysicals now."

 
          
 
"Civilians, too," the commandant
frowned, "against regulations, you know."

 
          
 
"Purely caution against infectious
disease, sir. The doctor requested it, and I do not argue with the medical
officer of the ship. His duty is to prevent illness and—"

 
          
 
"Good idea, you know.
Prevents
dangerous guys aboard, too."

 
          
 
"I'm ready to drop my ground tackle,
float free, and blow," Nord said stiffly.

 
          
 
"Glad to hear you youngsters like space
so well. No hazard at all now. Was a time it was dangerous. Astrogation was
bad, air management
poor,
crew went crazy being cooped
up so long.
Purely routine now, purely routine spacing."
His eyes took on a knowing glitter. "Did you have a good trip out?"
he asked. "Experience any difficulty?"

 
          
 
"No, sir."
He said it very stiffly, eyes directed at the admiral. "Usual sort of
trip. Little trouble with the air about halfway out, but on the whole a rather
boring trip."

            
We are told that we
are a product of the sun that warms us, the food grown in the soil of this
planet, the air we breathe. Elements, some nearly untraceable except to the
most delicate and complicated equipment, have made us physically and mentally
as we now are. However, the pioneer from Terra under the brilliant rays of
another sun, a sun less shielded by the atmosphere, eating food forced to ripen
in an alien soil, breathing new trace elements—would he in the end still be
Terran, or something else new, strange, more fitted to his new world? This
story produces a picture of the slow mutation of man, the birth of a new race.

            
The rocket metal
cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior
stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away
across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

            
The man felt his hair
flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the
center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke.

 
          
 
The children, small seeds, might at any
instant be sown to all the Martian climes.

 
          
 
The children looked up at him, as people look
to the sun, to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.

 
          
 
"What's wrong?" asked his wife.

 
          
 
"Let's get back on the rocket."

 
          
 
"Go back to Earth?"

 
          
 
"Yes! Listen!"

 
          
 
The wind blew as if to flake away their
identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow
comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve
his intellect and burn away his past.

 
          
 
They looked at Martian hills that time had
worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost like thin
children in their meadows, lying like children's delicate bones among the
blowing lakes of grass.

 
          
 
"Chin up, Harry," said his wife.
"It's too late. We've come at least thirty-five million miles or
more."

 
          
 
The children with their dandelion hair
hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing
hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

 
          
 
He picked up the luggage in his cold hands.
"Here we go," he said—a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to
wade in and be drowned.

 
          
 
They walked into town.

 
          
 
Their name was Bittering.
Harry
and his wife Cora; Tom, Laura, and David.
They built a small white
cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It
lay
with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden
partner at every
midnight
talk, at every dawn awakening.

 
          
 
"I feel like a salt crystal," he
often said, "in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don't belong
here. We're Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven's
sake, Cora, let's buy tickets for home!"

 
          
 
But she only shook her head. "One day the
atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we'll be safe here."

 
          
 
"Safe and insane!"

 
          
 
Tick-tock,
seven o'clock
, sang the voice-clock; time to get up. And
they did.

 
          
 
Something made him check everything each morning—
warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums—precisely as if he expected something to be
amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the
six a.m.
Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted
it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.

 
          
 
"Colonial days all over again," he
declared. "Why, by God, in another year there'll be a million Earthmen on
Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we'd fail. Said the Martians would
resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we
found their empty cities, but no one in them.
Right?"

 
          
 
A river of wind submerged the house. When the
windows ceased rattling, Mr. Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

 
          
 
"I don't know," said David.
"Maybe there're Martians around we don't see. Sometimes nights I think I
hear 'em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see
those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long time ago.
And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those
Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won't do something to us for
coming here."

 
          
 
"Nonsense!"
Mr. Bittering looked out the windows. "We're clean, decent people."
He looked at his children. "All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them.
Memories, I mean." He stared at the hills. "You see a staircase and
you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and
you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a
memory. It's quite natural.
Imagination."
He
stopped. "You haven't been prowling up in those ruins, have you?"

            
"No, Papa." David looked
at his shoes. "See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam."

            
"Just the same," said
little David, "I bet something happens."

 
          
 
Something happened that afternoon.

 
          
 
Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying.
She dashed blindly onto the porch.

 
          
 
"Mother, Father—the war, Earth!" she
sobbed. "A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit
New York
! All the space rockets blown up! No more
rockets to Mars, ever!"

 
          
 
"Oh, Harry!" The mother held onto
her husband and daughter.

 
          
 
"Are you sure, Laura?" asked the
father quietly.

 
          
 
Laura wept. "We're stranded on Mars,
forever and ever!"

 
          
 
For a long time there was only the sound of
the wind in the late afternoon.

 
          
 
Alone, thought Bittering.
Only
a thousand of us here.
No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from
his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hotness of his
fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, "No, you're lying! The rockets will
come back!" Instead, he stroked Laura's head against him and said,
"The rockets will get through, some day."

 
          
 
"In five years maybe.
It takes that long to build one. Father, Father, what
will we
do!"

 
          
 
"Go about our business, of course. Raise
crops and children. Wait. Keep things going until the war ends and the rockets
come again."

           
 
The two boys stepped out onto the porch.
"Children," he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, "I've
something to tell you."

           
 
"We know," they said.

 
          
 
Bittering wandered into the garden to stand
alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space,
he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: Tomorrow, if I
want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.

 
          
 
But now: The web gone, the rockets lying in
jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the
strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like
gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian
winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had
waited for. Now it would eat them.

 
          
 
He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a
spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.

 
          
 
He glanced up from the garden to the Martian
mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on
those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers,
Martian seas left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities,
named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas.
Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen
had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.

 
          
 
Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label.
The names were given.

 
          
 
Mr. Bittering felt very alone in his garden
under the Martian sun, an anachronism bent here, planting Earth flowers in a
wild soil.

 
          
 
Think. Keep thinking.
Different
things.
Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war, the lost rockets.

 
          
 
He perspired. He glanced about.
No one watching.
He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he
thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree
he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.

 
          
 
He returned to his philosophy of names and
mountains. The Earthmen had changed names. Now there were Hormel Valleys,
Roosevelt Seas, Ford Hills, Vanderbilt Plateaus,
Rockefeller
Rivers on Mars. It wasn't right. The American settlers had shown wisdom, using
old Indian prairie names: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Ohio, Utah, Milwaukee,
Wau-kegan,
Osseo
.
The old names, the
old meanings.

 
          
 
Staring at the mountains wildly, he thought:
Are you up there?
All the dead ones, you Martians?
Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We're helpless!

 
          
 
The wind blew a shower of peach blossoms.

 
          
 
He put out his sun-browned hand, gave a small
cry. He touched the blossoms, picked them up. He turned them; he touched them
again and again. Then he shouted for his wife.

 
          
 
"Cora!"

 
          
 
She appeared at a window. He ran to her.

 
          
 
"Cora, these
blossoms!"

 
          
 
She handled them.

 
          
 
"Do you see? They're different, they've
changed! They're not peach blossoms any more!"

 
          
 
"Look all right to me," she said.

 
          
 
"They're not. They're wrong! I can't tell
how.
An extra petal, a leaf, something; the color, the
smell!"

 
          
 
The children ran out in time to see their
father hurrying about the garden, pulling up radishes, onions, and carrots from
their beds.

 
          
 
"Cora, come look!"

 
          
 
They handled the onions, the radishes, the
carrots among them.

           
 
"Do these look like carrots?"

 
          
 
"
Yes .
..
No." She hesitated. "I don't know."