Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

bring most of the airframe into sharp focus on the viewplate, and pinpoint his every movement."

It came as such a shock to me that I felt I had a good chance of suffocating, just from the way my throat tightened up and my heart started pumping blood at twice its usual rate.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to follow him at a distance of not more than fifteen feet, down three intership ladders and along four branching passageways, without once stopping to get my breath back. I doubt if I could have done that anyway.

Right foot, then left, right left, right left, Ralphie boy, and don't give up the ship. Never give up the ship when there's a chance to save it. There's nothing painful about being vaporized in space. Remember that, keep it firmly in mind. Nothing painful, nothing sad ... just a quick end to all you've had.

I don't know why I thought the Chart Room looked deserted, like a big, unoccupied mausoleum with tiers for coffins—dozens of coffins—running up both of its sides. No coffins yet, just the empty shelves, for burial time had not yet arrived. But how could the Chart Room have looked deserted, when it wasn't at all?

There were a dozen officers standing in front of the big lighted screen and when we crossed the room to join them without announcing our arrival—well, that made fourteen.

I can't even explain how I got the idea there was a chill in the air that seemed to wrap itself around me in moist, clinging folds, because no section of the sky ship was more comfortably heated.

I didn't spend more than a minute or two trying to puzzle it out, because the "furious sick shapes of nightmare," to quote from a poem I wasn't sure I'd ever read, only disturb you when you give them more encouragement than they're entitled to.

The only really important thing was that we could see him in bent light on the big screen—a tiny, spacesuited figure climbing along the airframe, laden down with something cumbersome that he kept pushing before him in a completely weightless way as he inched further and further toward the rocket's stern.

All at once, I knew what was going to happen to him. I was as sure of it as I am that I have two big toes that point a little inward and that Joan sometimes tenderly jokes about.

Between Earth and Mars space isn't empty. It hasn't been empty for more than half a century, which is a pretty good record on the survival scale for man-made, mechanical implants. The early Sputniks didn't last one-tenth as long.

I knew without waiting for Commander Littlefield to finish what he was saying to one of the officers and issue a command that the needle frequencies scattered throughout the void on all sides of us were the only composite weapon we could count on to save the sky ship and all the people between its decks who didn't want to be vaporized. And that took in practically everyone on board.

Sure, I know. Everyone had thought that the millions of filament-thin wires which had been put into orbit around Earth in the seventh and eighth decades of the twentieth century and later into orbit around Mars and far out into interstellar space would only be used for purposes of communication. Project Needles, or, if you want to be strictly technical, Project West Ford.

God grant that they may some day be used in no other way. But when a man climbs out on the airframe of a sky ship, for the sole purpose of blowing it up——

There is only one way I can do justice to the speed with which it happened and the awful, mind-numbing finality of it. It is not something which should be recorded in a paragraph, a page, but in two sentences at most.

Commander Littlefield issued a command, and a light on the instrument panel blinked, and a million magnetized filaments converged, united and so united, converged again on the airframe of the sky ship. There was a blinding flash of light and the tiny human figure was gone.

The first words Commander Littlefield spoke, after that, were to me.

"Whoever he was, he must have wanted her dead pretty badly ... to have been willing to blow up the sky ship and kill himself in the process."

There was a strange look on his face and his gray eyes met mine with a question in them.

Then he spoke the question aloud. "Or was it you, Ralph, whom he had in mind?"

9

The clang of the opening port was still ringing in my ears when I walked out of the sky ship with Joan on my arm and looked down over the big metal corkscrew directly beneath me. I knew straight off I'd made a mistake. I should have looked up at the sky instead. I should have squared my shoulders, drawn the crisp, tangy air deep into my hangs and established rapport with Mars more gradually.

A delay of only a moment or two would have spared me the too sudden shock of finding myself three hundred feet in the air, dazzled by an unexpected brightness, and supported by nothing I'd have cared to trust my weight to on Earth.

We were standing on a thin strip of metal, a mere spiderweb tracery, and if I'd lost my balance and gone crashing through the guard rail there would have been no mountaineer's rope to save me. What was worse, I'd have taken Joan with me.

The danger was illusionary, of course ... solely in my mind. The underwriters go to a great deal of expense and trouble to make sure there will be no tragic accidents when the big risks have been left behind in space.

The guard rail was chest-high and sturdy enough, and no one had ever gone crashing through it. But you can't reason with a feeling, and for an instant the yawning emptiness beneath me made me feel that I was already past the rail, twisting and turning, flailing the air in a three-hundred-foot plunge.

I was sure that Joan was experiencing the same kind of irrational giddiness, for she drew in her breath sharply and a shiver went through her. A fear of great heights is one phobia that is shared by practically everyone.

The big metal corkscrew beneath us was the landing frame into which the rocket had descended and we were standing high up on that enormous spiral, which curved down and outward like an immense silvery cocoon.

A figure of speech, sure. But not as wide of the mark as most of the images that flash across your mind when you're keyed up abnormally and a lot of new colors, and sights and sounds rush in on you and upset all of your calculations as to how sober-minded you're going to stay. Your grasp on reality slips a little, as if you were holding it right before your eyes like a book, and wearing glasses so strong that the print blurs. You're in a fantasy world of your own creating, seeing things that can't be blamed on whoever wrote the book. A fussy, unimaginative little guy, perhaps, who has spent most of his life within sight of his own doorstep and has never felt the great winds of space blowing cold upon him.

There's a big, night-flying Sphinx moth with death-heads on each of its wings, and there were times when I'd thought of the Mars ship as not so different from that kind of moth. And now it was as if the sky ship had turned back into a caterpillar again, and spun a cocoon for itself, and was quietly reposing in the pupa stage, its rust-red end vanes folded back, its long length mottled and space-eroded where the atomic jets had seared it.

There was nothing wrong in giving my imagination carte-blanche to go into free fall like that, because when you're standing on a dizzy height staring down at a new world forty million miles from Earth you've got to let the strangeness and bursting wonder of it ... along with the dire forebodings ... take firm hold of you. Otherwise you won't feel yourself to be a part of it, won't be equipped with what it takes to probe beneath the surface of things in a realistic way and feel like a native son even in the presence of the unknown.

Three hundred feet below me more activity was taking place than I had ever seen crowded into an area of equal size on Earth. Just as a guess, I'd have said that the spaceport's disembarkation section was about six hundred feet square. But right at that moment I had no real stomach for guessing games—only a hollowness where my stomach was supposed to be.

Far below the disembarkation section was in high gear, and the clatter of it, the rushings to and fro, the grinding and screeching of giant cranes, and atomic tractors, and rising platforms crowded to capacity with specialized robots, most of them scissor-thin and all of them operated by remote control ... would have half-deafened me if I'd been standing a hundred feet lower down.

Even from the top of the spiral the clamor had to be heard to be believed. But what astounded me most was the newness, brightness, sharply delineated aspect of everything within range of my vision. I could see clear to the edge of the spaceport, and the four other securely-berthed rockets stood out with a startling clarity, their nose cones gleaming in the bright Martian sunlight. The big lifting cranes stood out just as sharply, and although the zigzagging tractors looked like painted toys, red and blue and yellow, I would have sworn under oath that not one of them cast a shadow.

The twenty-five or thirty human midgets who were moving in all directions across the field, between machines that seemed too formidable to be trusted had the brittle, sheen-bright look of figures cut out of isinglass.

Another illusion, of course. There had to be shadows, because there was nothing on Mars that could have brought about that big a change in the laws of optics. But by the same token the length and density of shadows can be altered a bit by atmospheric conditions, making light interception turn playful. So I didn't strain my eyes searching for deep purple halos around the human midges.

My only immediate concern was to reassure Joan in a calm and forceful way and escort her safely down to ground level, without letting her suspect that I shared her misgivings as to the stability of the spiral.

It was ridiculous on the face of it. But, as I've said, you can't argue with a feeling that whispers that your remote, dawn age ancestors must have felt the same way when they climbed out on a limb overhanging a precipice, and felt the whole tree begin to sway and shake beneath them.

"Hold tight to the rail and don't look down," I cautioned. "There's no real danger ... because a first-rate welding job was done on this structure. Barring an earthquake, it should be just as safe a century from now."

I shot a quick, concerned glance at her along with the warning. I guess I must have thought she'd be more shaken than she was, for she smiled when she saw the look of surprise in my eyes. It took me half a minute to realize that my guess as to how she'd be taking it hadn't gone so wide of the mark. Her pallor gave her away.

"A century would be much too long to wait," she breathed. "Another five minutes would be too long. If it's going to collapse, I'd rather find out right now."

I nodded and we started down. Several other passengers had emerged from the port and were looking up at the sky or downward as I'd done. Three men and a woman had emerged ahead of us and were almost at the base of the spiral. So far nothing had happened to them.

I've often toyed with the thought that there may be windows in the mind we can see out of sometimes—at oblique angles and around corners and without turning our heads. I could visualize the passengers who were descending behind us more clearly than you usually can in a mind's eye picture. Each face was in sharp focus and there was no blurring of their images as they moved. It was as if I was staring straight up at them through a crystal-clear pane of glass.

In that astonishingly bright inner vision—why look up and back when I did not doubt its accuracy?—Commander Littlefield was wasting no time in setting a good example. He'd descended the spiral so many times that great height meant nothing to him. He'd be ascending and descending at least ten more times just in the next few hours.