Space Station 1, Frank Belknap Long [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

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.

A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.

"Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn't we get started?"

"We should and we will," Corriston said. "But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don't arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where's Freddy? Have you seen him?"

The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: "Over there," he said. "His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of."

Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.

Dr. Drever's son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.

Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf