Andre Norton (ed) (34 page)

And then she understood. A fantastic scheme,
a play of their production in which she had been assigned a role without her
knowledge. It had worked. They had shown her that the narrow restrictions she
called her world could hold the same uncertainties as the vaster universe in
which they lived.

But
it was Ken's impulsive, unrehearsed invitation that gave her the insight she
needed.

Let's do it for fun.

She smiled at her father as
he caught her watching them

so
intently. He flushed as if he guessed she
understood what they had done.

She nodded. "It's a lovely vacation,
Dad. I'm going to remember it when we're on Mars. And today, I think I've
crossed my own horizon."

J?
ARMING
on
an
asteroid:
The
government
furnished
every would-be
settler
with
a
complete
kit—machines,
shelter, supplies,
instructions—everything—but
the
courage
to
use it.
On
a
piece
of
blasted
planet
John
Endlich
attempted to
build
a
home
for
his
family.
But
to
do
that
he had
to
battle
not
only
hostile
nature
but
his
own race
and
kind.

RAYMOND
Z.
GALLUN

The space ship landed briefly, and John
Endlich lifted the huge Asteroids Homesteaders Office box, which contained
everything from a prefabricated house to toothbrushes for his family, down from
the hold-port without help or visible effort.

In the tiny gravity of the asteroid, Vesta,
doing this was no trouble at all. But beyond this point the situation
was—bitter.

His
two kids, Bubs, seven, and Evelyn, nine—clad in space-suits that were slightly
oversize to allow for the growth of young bodies—were both bawling. He could
hear them through his oxygen-helmet radio-phones.

Around
him, under the airless sky of space, stretched desolation that he'd of course
known about beforehand—but which now had assumed that special and terrible
starkness of reality.

At his elbow, his wife, Rose, her
heart-shaped face and grey eyes framed by the wide face-window of her armor,
was trying desperately to choke back tears, and be brave.

"Remember—we've
got
to make good here, Johnny," she was saying. "Remember what the
Homesteaders Office people told us—that with modern equipment and the right
frame of mind, life can be nice out here. It's worked on other asteroids. What
if we are the first farmers to come to Vesta? . . .
228

Don't listen to those crazy miners! They're
just kidding us! Don't listen to them! And don't, for gosh sakes, get sore . .
."

Rose's words were now like dim echoes of his
conscience, and of his recent grim determination to master his hot temper, his
sensitiveness, his wanderlust, and his penchant for poker and the social
glass—qualities of an otherwise agreeable and industrious nature, that, on
Earth, had always been his undoing. Recently, back in Illinois, he had even
spent six months in jail for all but inflicting murder with his bare fists on a
bullying neighbor whom he had caught whipping a horse. Sure— but during those
six months his farm, the fifth he'd tried to run in scattered parts of North
America, had gone to weeds in spite of Rose's valiant efforts to take care of
it alone . . .

Oh,
yes—the lessons of all that past personal history should be strong in his mind.
But now will power and Rose's frightened tones of wisdom both seemed to fade
away in his brain, as jeering words from another source continued to drive
jagged splinters into the weakest portion of his soul:
   
,

"Hi, you hydroponic pun'kin-head!
. . . How yuh like your new claim? . . .
Nice, ain't it? How about some fresh turnips? . . . Good luck, yuh greenhorn .
. . Hiyuh, papa! . . . Let the poor dope alone, guys . . . Snooty . . . Won't
take our likker, hunh? Won't take our money . . . Wifey's boy! Let's make him
sociable . . . Haw-Haw-haw . . . Hydroponic pun'kin-head! . . ."

It was a medley of coarse voices and
laughter, matching the row of a dozen coarse faces and grins that lined the
viewports of the ship. These men were asteroid miners, space-hardened and
space-twisted. They'd been back to Earth for a while, to raise hell and freshen
up, and spend the money in their then-bulging pockets. Coming out again from
Earth, across the orbit of Mars to the asteroid belt, they had had the Endlichs
as fellow passengers.

John
Endlich had battled valiantly with his feebler side, and with his social
inclinations, all through that long, dreary voyage, to keep clear of the
inevitable griefs that were sure to come to a chap like himself from
involvement with such characters. In the main, it had been a rather tattered
victory. But now, at the final moment of bleak anticlimax, they took their
revenge in guffaws and ridicule, hurling the noise at him through the
radiophones of the space-suit helmets that they held in their laps—space-suits
being always kept handy beneath the traveler-seats of every inter-planetary
vessel.

". . . Haw-haw-hawl Drop over to our
camp sometime for a little drink, and a little game, eh, pantywaist? Taint far.
Sure—just drop in on us when the pressure of domesticity in this beootiful
country gets you down . . . When the turnips get you down! Haw-haw-haw! . . .
Just ask for me—Alf Neely! Haw-haw-hawl"

Yeah,
Alf
Neely
was the loudest and the ugliest of John
Endlich's baiters. He had gigantic arms and shoulders, small squinty eyes, and
a pendulous nose.
 
"Haw-haw-hawl . .
."

And
the others, yelling and hooting, made it a pack: "Man—
don't
he wish he was back in Podunkl . . . What!—no tomatas, Dutch? . . . What did
they tell yuh back at the Homestead office in Chicago?—that we were in de-e-esperate
need of fresh vegetables out here? Well, where are they, papa? . . .
Haw-haw-haw! . . ."

Under the barrage John Endlich's last shreds
of common-sense were all but blotted out by the red murk of fury. He was small
and broad—a stolid-looking thirty-two years old. But now his round and usually
placid face was as red as a fiery moon, and his underlip curled in a snarl. He
might have taken the savage ribbing more calmly. But there was too much grim
fact behind what these asteroid miners said. Besides, out here he had thought
that he would have a better chance to lick the weaknesses in himself—because
he'd
have
to work to keep his family alive; because he'd been told that there'd be
no one around to distract him from duty. Yahl
The
irony of that, now, was maddening.

For the moment John Endlich was speechless
and strangled —but like an ignited firecracker.
  
Uhunh—ready to explode.

His hard body hunched, as if ready to spring.
And the baiting waxed louder. It was like the yammering of crows, or the roar
of
a wild
surf in his ears. Then
came
the last straw. The kids had kept on bawling—more and more violently. But now
they got down to verbal explanations of what they thought was the matter:

"Wa-aa-aa-a-ahh-hl Papa—we
wanna-go-o-o—hom-m-mm-el ..."

The timing could not have been better—or
worse. The shrieks and howls of mirth from the miners, a moment ago, were as
nothing to what they were now.

"Ho-ho-ho!
Tell it to Daddy, kids! . . . Ho-ho-ho! That was a mouthful . . .
Ho-ho-ho-hol Wowl . . ."

There
is a point at which an extremity of masculine embarrassment can lead to but
one thing—mayhem. Whether the latter is to be inflicted on the attacked or the
attacker remains the only question mark.

Til get you, Alf Neeryl" Endlich
snarled. "Right nowl And I'll get all the rest of you guys!"

Endlich
was hardly lacking in vigor, himself. Like a squat but streamlined fighting
rooster, rendered a hundred times more agile by the puny gravity, he would have
reached the hold-port threshold in a single lithe skip—had not Rose, despairing,
grabbed him around the middle to restrain him. Together they slid several
yards across the dried-out surface of the asteroid.

"
Don't
,
Johnny—please don't!" she wailed.

Her begging could not have stopped him.
Nor could her physical interference—for more than an instant.
Nor could his conscience, nor his recent determination to
keep out of trouble.
Not the certainty of being torn limb from limb, and
not hell, itself, could have held him back, anymore, then.

Yet he was brought to a halt. It certainly
wasn't cowardice that accomplished this. No.

Suddenly there was no laughter among the
miners. But in a body they arose from their traveler-seats aboard the ship.
Suddenly there was no more humor in their faces beyond the

viewports
. They were itching to be assaulted. The
glitter in Alf
Neely's
small eyes was about as
reassuring as the glitter in the eyes of a slightly prankish gorilla.

"We're waitin' for
yuh, Mr. Civilization," he rumbled softly.

After
that, all space was still—electrified. The icy stars gleamed in the black sky.
The shrunken sun looked on. And John Endlich saw beyond his own murder. To the
thought of his kids—and his wife—left alone out here, hundreds of millions of
miles from Earth, and real law and order. Coldness crawled into John Endlich's
guts, and seemed to twist steel hooks there, making him sick. The silence of a
vacuum, and of unthinkable distances, and of ghostly remains which must be left
on this fragment of a world that had blown up, maybe fifty million or more
years ago, added its weight to John Endlich's feelings.

And
for his family, he was scared. What hell could not have
accomplished,
became fact. His almost suicidal impulse to inflict violence on his tormenters
was strangled, bottled-up— brutally repressed, and left to impose the pangs of
neurosis on his tormented soul. Narrowing domesticity had won a battle.

Except, of course, that what he had already
said to Alf
Neely
and Friends was sufficient to start
the Juggernaut that they represented, rolling. As he picked himself and Rose up
from the ground, he saw that the miners were grimly donning their space-suits,
in preparation to their coming out of the ship to lay him low.

"Oh—tired, hunh, Punkin-head?" Alf
Neely
growled.
Tt don't matter, Dutch.
We'll finish you off without you liftin' a finger!"

In John Endlich the rage of intolerable
insults still seethed. But there was no question, now, of outcome between it
and the brassy taste of danger on his tongue. He knew that even knuckling down,
and changing from man to worm to take back his fighting words, couldn't do any
good. He felt like a martyr, left with his family in a Roman arena, while the
lions approached. His butchery was as good as over . . .

Reprieve came presumably by way of the
good-sense of the pilot of the space ship. The hold-port was closed abruptly by
a mechanism that could be operated only from the main control-board. The rocket
jets of the craft emitted a single weak burst of flame. Like a boulder grown agile
and flighty, the ship leaped from the landscape, and arced outward toward the
stars, to curve around the asteroid and disappear behind the scene's jagged
brim. The craft had gone to make its next and final stop—among the air-domes of
the huge mining camp on the other side of Vesta—the side of torn rocks and rich
radioactive ores.

But
before the ship had vanished from sight, John Endlich heard Alf
Neely's
grim promise in his helmet radiophones: "We'll
be back tonight, Greenhorn. Lots of times we work night-shift—when it's daytime
on this side of Vesta. We'll be free. Stick around. I'll rub what's left of you
in the dust of your claim!"

Endlich was alone, then, with the fright in his wife's eyes, the
squalling of his children, and his own abysmal disgust and worry.

For once he ceased to be a gentle parent.
"Bubs!
Evelyn!" he snapped.
"Shud-d-d—up-p-p!
. . ."

The startled silence which ensued was his
first personal victory on Vesta. But the silence, itself, was an insidious
enemy. It made his ears ring. It made even his audible pulsebeats seem to ache.
It bored into his nerves like a drill. When, after a moment, Rose spoke
quaveringly, he was almost grateful:

"What
do we do, Johnny? We've still got to do what we're supposed to do, don't
we
?"

Whereupon John Endlich allowed himself the luxury and the slight relief
of a torrent of silent cussing inside his head.
Damn the obvious questions of women! Damn
the miners. Damn the A.H.O.—the Asteroids Homesteaders Office—and their corny
slogans and posters, meant to hook suckers like himself! Damn
his own
dumb hide! Damn the mighty urge to get drunk! Damn
all the bitter circumstances that made doing so impossible. Damn!
 
Damn! Damn!

Finished with this orgy, he
said meekly: "I guess so, Hon."