good things. They found that masculine guardedness and laziness went
well together. They ate themselves full. Like Mitch Storey had once
done, they all started hydroponic gardens inside their bubbs. In the
pleasant, steamy sun-warmth of those stellene interiors, they bounced
back and forth from elastic wall to elastic wall, with gravity
temporarily at zero because they had stopped the spin of their bubbs.
Thus they loosened their muscles, worked up a sweat. Afterwards they
dozed, slept, listened to beamed radio music or taped recordings of
their own. They smiled at pin-up pictures, read microfilmed books
through a viewer, looked at the growing plants around them.
There was an arrogance in them, because they had succeeded in bringing
so much of home out here. There was even a mood like that of a lost,
languid beach in the tropics. And how was that possible, with only a
thin skin of stellene between them and frigid nothing?
Ramos said just about what he had said--long ago, it seemed, now.
"Nuts--the Big Vacuum ain't so tough." But he amended quickly, "Yeah, I
know, Frank--don't scowl. When you aren't looking, it can up and kill
you. Like with my Uncle José, only worse. He was a powder monkey in
Mexico. It got so he thought dynamite was his friend. Well, there wasn't
even anything to put in his coffin..."
The luxurious interlude passed, and they reverted mostly to Spartan
meals of space-gruel, except for some fresh-grown lettuce. Mars became
an agate bead, then a hazy sphere with those swirled, almost fluid
markings, where the spores of a perhaps sentient vegetable life followed
the paths of thin winds, blowing equatorward from the polar caps of
hoarfrost.
The three stellene rings bumped lightly on the ten mile chunk of
captured asteroidal rock and nickel-iron that was Phobos, Mars' nearer
moon. Gravitation was almost nil. There was no need, here, for rockets,
to land or take off. The sun-powered ionics were more than enough.
A small observatory, a U.N.-tended between ground-and-orbit rocket port,
and a few hydroponic garden domes nestled in the jaggedness were about
all that Phobos had--other than the magnificent view of the Red Planet,
below.
Gimp Hines' freckled face shone in the ruddy light. "_I'm_ going down,"
he declared. "Just for a few days, to look around near the Survey
Station. You guys?"
Ramos shrugged, almost disinterested. "People have been there--some
still are. And what good is poking around the Station? But who wants to
goof up, going into the thickets? Others have done that, often enough.
Me for Pallastown, and maybe lots farther, pal."
Frank Nelsen wasn't that blasé. On the Moon, he had seen some of the old
Mars of advanced native technology, now long extinct. But there was also
the recent Mars of explorers and then footloose adventurers, wondering
what they could find to do with this quiet, pastel-tinted world of
tremendous history. Then had come the colonists, with their tractors and
their rolls of stellene to make sealed dwellings and covered fields in
that thin, almost oxygenless atmosphere.
But their hopes to find peace and isolation from the crowded and
troubled Earth by science and hard work even in so harsh a place, had
come into conflict with a third Mars that must have begun soon after the
original inhabitants had been destroyed. Though maybe it had had its
start, billions of years before, on the planets of another star. The
thickets had seemed harmless. Was this another, _different_
civilization, that had risen at last in anger, using its own methods of
allergy, terrible repellant nostalgia, and mental distortions?
Frank felt the call of mystery which was half dread. But then he
shrugged. "Uh-uh, Gimp. I'd like to go down, too. But the gravity is
twice that of the Moon--getting up and down isn't so easy. Besides, once
when I made a stopover in space, after a nice short hop, I got into
trouble. I'll pass this one up. I'd like to talk to Mitch Storey,
though."
They all tried to reach him, beaming the Survey Station at the edge of
Syrtis Major, the great equatorial wedge of blue-green growths on the
floor of a vanished ocean, first.
"Mitchell Storey is not around right now," a young man's voice informed
them. "He wandered off again, three days ago. Does it often... No--we
don't know where to reach him..."
Widening their beams over the short range of considerably less than four
thousand miles, they tried to call Mitch directly. No luck. Contact
should have been easy. But of course he could be wandering with his
Archer helmet-phone turned off.
Considering the reputation of Mars, Nelsen was a bit worried. But he had
a perhaps treacherous belief that Mitch was special enough to take care
of himself.
Ramos was impatient. "We'll hook old Mitch on our party line, sometime,
Frank," he said. "Right now we ought to get started. Space is still nice
and empty ahead, toward the Kuzaks and Pallastown. That condition might
not last... Gimp, are you honest-to-gosh set on going down to this
dried-up, museum-world?"
"Umhmm. See you soon, though," Gimp answered, grinning. "I'll leave my
bubb and my load of supplies up here on Phobos. Be back for it probably
in a week. And there'll be a freight-bubb cluster, or something, for me
to join up with, and follow you Out..."
Nelsen and Ramos left Gimp Hines before he boarded the winged skip-glide
rocket that would take him below. Parting words flew back and forth.
"See you... Take care... Over the Milky Way, suckers..."
Then they were standing off from Mars and its two moons. During the next
several Earth-days of time, they accelerated with all the power that
their bubb ionics could wring out of the sunshine, weakened now, with
distance. They knew about where to find the Kuzaks. But contact was
weeks off. When they were close enough, they could radio safely,
checking the exact position of Art's and Joe's supply post. And they
knew enough to steer clear of Ceres, the largest Asteroid, which was
Tovie-occupied. All the signs were good. They were well-armed and
watchful. They should have made the trip without trouble.
Ahead, dim still with distance, but glinting with a pinkish, metallic
shine which made it much brighter than it would otherwise have been, was
Pallas, which Ramos watched like a beacon.
"Eldorado," he said once, cockily, as if he remembered something from
the Spanish part of his background.
They got almost three-quarters across that unimaginable stretch of
emptiness before there was a bad sign. It was a catcall--literally--in
their helmet phones. "Meow!" It was falsely plaintive and innocuous. It
was a maliciously childish promise of trouble.
A little later, there was a chuckle. "Be cavalier, fellas. Watch
yourselves. I mean it." The tone had a strange intensity.
Ramos was on lookout, then, with eyes, radar and rifle. But the spoken
message had been too brief to get a fix on the direction of its radio
waves.
Ramos stiffened. With his phone power turned very low, he said,
"Frank--lots of people say 'Be cavalier', nowadays. But that includes
one of the old Bunch. The voice _might_ match, too."
"Uh-huh--Tiflin, the S.O.B.," Nelsen growled softly.
For ten hours, nothing else happened. Then there were some tiny
radar-blips, which could have indicated meteors. Nelsen and Ramos
changed the angle of the ion guides of their ionic motors to move their
bubbs from course, slightly, and dodge. During the first hour, they were
successful. But then there were more blips, in greater numbers.
Fist-sized chunks flicked through their vehicles almost simultaneously.
Air puffed out. Their rings collapsed under them--the sealer was no good
for holes of such size. At once, the continued spin of the bubbs wound
them, like limp laundry, into knots.
While Nelsen and Ramos were trying to untangle the mess, visible specks
appeared in the distance. They fired at them. Then something slammed
hard into the fleshy part of Nelsen's hip, penetrating his armor, and
passing on out, again. The sealing gum in the Archer's skin worked
effectively on the needle-like punctures, but the knockout drug had been
delivered.
As his awareness faded, Nelsen fired rapidly, and saw Ramos doing the
same--until his hand slapped suddenly at his side...
After that there was nothing, until, for a few seconds, Frank Nelsen
regained a blurred consciousness. He was lying, unarmored, inside a
bubb--perhaps his own, which had been patched and reinflated. All around
him was loud laughter and talk, the gurgle of liquor, the smells of
cooked meat, a choking concentration of tobacco smoke. Music blared
furiously.
"Busht out shummore!" somebody was hollering. "We got jackpot--the whole
fanshy works! I almost think I'm back in Sputtsberg--wherever hell that
is... But where's the wimmin? Nothing but dumb, prissy pitchers! Not
even _good_ pitchers...!"
There were guys of all sizes, mostly young, some armored, some not. One
with a pimply face stumbled near. Frank Nelsen choked down his fury at
the vandalism. He had a blurred urge to find a certain face, and almost
thought he succeeded. But everything, including his head, was a fuzzy
jumble.
"Hey!" the pimply guy gurgled. "Hey--Boss! Our benefactors--they're half
awake! You should shleep, baby greenhorns...!"
A large man with shovel teeth ambled over. Frank managed half to rise.
He met the blow and gave some of it back. Ramos was doing likewise,
gamely. Then Nelsen's head zeroed out again in a pyrotechnic burst...
He awoke to almost absolute silence, and to the turning of the whole
universe around him. But of course it was himself that was
rotating--boots over head. There was a bad smell of old sweat, and
worse.
His hip felt numb from the needle puncture. In all except the most vital
areas, those slim missiles would not usually cause death, or even
serious injury; but soon the wound would ache naggingly.
First, Frank Nelsen hardly knew where he was. Then he understood that he
was drifting free in space, in an armor. He thought it was his own until
he failed to recognize the scuffed, grimy interior. Even the workshirt
he was wearing wasn't the new blue one he had put on, it seemed only
hours ago. It was a greasy grey.
Etched into the scratched plastic of the helmet that covered his head,
he saw "Archer III--ser. no. 828211." And casually stuck into the
gasketted rim of the collar, was a note, pencilled jaggedly on a scrap
of paper:
"Honest, Greenie, your a pal. All that nice stuff. Thanks a 1,000,000!
Couple of my boys needed new Archies, bad. Thanks again. You and your
buddie are not having so bad a brake. These old threes been all over
hell. They will show you all about Asteroid hopping and mining. So will
the load-hauling net and tools. Thanks for the little dough, too. Find
your space fitness card in shirt pocket. We don't need it. Have lots of
fun. Just remember me as The Stinker."
Frank Nelsen was quivering with anger and scare. He saw that a mended
steel net, containing a few items, had got wrapped around him with his
turning. He groped for the ion-guide of the ancient shoulder-ionic, and
touched a control. Slowly his spin was checked. Meanwhile he untangled
himself, and saw what must be Ramos, adrift like himself in a battered
Archer Three, doing the same.
Gradually they managed to ion glide over to each other. Their eyes met.
They were the butts of a prank that no doubt had been the source of many
guffaws.
"Did you get a letter, too, Frank?" Ramos asked. For close
communication, the old helmet-phones still worked okay.
"I did," Nelsen breathed. "Why didn't they just knock us off? Alive, we
might tell on them."
"Not slow and funny enough, maybe," Ramos answered dolefully. "In these
broken-down outfits, we might not live to tell. Besides, even with these
notes for clues, who'd ever find out who they are, way out here?"
Nelsen figured that all this was probably the truth. In the Belt, life
was cheap. Death got to be a joke.
"There was an ox of a guy with big teeth!" he hissed furiously. "Thought
I saw Tiflin, too--the S.O.B.! Cripes, do I always land in the soup?"
"The bossman with the teeth, I remember," Ramos grated. "Tiflin I don't
know about. Could be... Hell, though--what now? I suppose we're going in
about the same direction and at the same speed as before? Have to watch
the sun and planets to make sure. Did they leave us any instruments?
Meanwhile, we might try to decelerate. I'd like to get out to Pluto
sometime, but not equipped like this."
"We'll check everything--see how bad off they left us," Nelsen said.
So that was what they did, after they had set their decrepit
shoulder-ionics to slow them down in the direction of the Belt.
Each of their hauling nets contained battered chisels, hammers, saws for
metal, a radiation counter, a beaten-up-looking pistol, some old
position-finding instruments, including a wristwatch that had seen much
better days to be used as a chronometer. There were also two large
flasks of water and two month-supply boxes of dehydrated
space-gruel--these last items obviously granted them from their own, now
vanished stores. Here was weird generosity--or perhaps just more
ghoulish fun to give them the feeble hope of survival.
Now they checked each other's Archer Threes as well as they could while
they were being worn. No use even to try to communicate over any
distance with the worn-out radio transmitters. The nuclear batteries
were ninety-percent used up, which still left considerable
time--fortunately, because they had to add battery power to the normally
sun-energized shoulder-ionics, in order to get any reasonable
decelerating effect out of them. Out here, unlike on the Moon at night,
the air-restorers could also take direct solar energy through their
windows. They needed current only for their pumps. But the green
chlorophane, key to the freshening and re-oxygenation of air, was
getting slightly pale. The moisture-reclaimers were--by luck--not as bad
as some of the other vital parts.
Ramos touched his needled side. His wry grin showed some of his reckless
humor. "It's not utterly awful, yet," he said. "How do you feel?"
Nelsen's hip hurt. And he found that he had an awful hangover from the
knockout drug, and the slapping around he had received. "Bad enough," he
answered. "Maybe if we ate something..."
They took small, sealed packets of dehydrated food in through their
chest airlocks, unsleeved their arms, emptied the packets into plastic
squeeze bottles from the utensil racks before them, injected water from
the pipettes which led to their shoulder tanks, closed the bottles and
let the powdered gruel swell as it reabsorbed moisture. The gruel turned
out hot all by itself. For it was a new kind which contained an
exothermic ingredient. They ate, in the absence of gravity, by squeezing
the bottles.
"Guess we'll have to become asteroid-hoppers--miners--like the slob
said," Nelsen growled. "Well--I _did_ want to try everything..."
This was to become the pattern of their lives. But not right away. They
still had an incomplete conception of the vast distances. They hurtled
on, certainly decelerating considerably, for days, yet, before they were
in the Belt. Even that looked like enormous emptiness.
And the brightened speck of Pallas was too far to one side. Tovie Ceres
was too near on the other side--left, it would be, if they considered
the familiar northern hemisphere stars of Earth as showing "up"
position. The old instruments had put them off-course. Still, they had
to bear even farther left to try to match the direction and the average
orbital speed--about twelve miles per second--of the Belt. Otherwise,
small pieces of the old planet, hurtling in another direction--and/or at
a different velocity--than themselves, could smash them.
Maybe they thought that they would be located and picked up--the gang
that had robbed and dumped them had found them easily enough. But there,
again, was a paradox of enormity. Bands might wait for suckers somewhere
beyond Mars. Elsewhere, there could be nobody for millions of miles.
They saw their first asteroid--a pitted, mesoderm fragment of
nickel-iron from middle-deep in the blasted planet. It was just drifting
slightly before them. So they had achieved the correct orbital speed.
They ion-glided to the chunk, and began to search clumsily for
worthwhile metal. It was fantastic that somebody had been there before
them, chiselling and sawing out a greyish material, of which there was a
little left that made the needles of their radiation counters swing
wildly.
They got a few scraps of the stuff to put into the nets which they were
towing.
"For luck," Ramos laughed. "Without it we'll never pay J. John."
"Shut up. Big deal," Nelsen snapped.
"Okay. Shut up it is!" Ramos answered him.
So they stayed silent until they couldn't stand that, either. Everything
was getting on their nerves.
Their next asteroids were mere chips a foot long--core fragments of the
planet, heavy metals that had sunk deep. No crust material of any
normally formed world could ever show such wealth. It gleamed with a
pale yellow shine, and made Ramos' sunken eyes light up with an ancient
fever, until he remembered, and until Nelsen said:
"Not for the gold, anymore, pal. Common, out here. So it's almost
worthless, everywhere. Not much use as an industrial metal. But the
osmium and uranium alloyed with it are something else. One hunk for each
of our nets. Too bad there isn't more."
The uranium was driving their radiation-counters wild.
"Could we drag it, if there was more?" Ramos growled. "With just
sun-power on these lousy shoulder-ionics?"
Everything was going sour, even Ramos. After a long deceleration they
were afraid to draw any more power for propulsion from their weakened
batteries. They needed the remaining current for the moisture-reclaimers
and the pumps of the air-restorers--a relatively much lighter but vital
drain. The sunlight was weak way out here. Worse, the solar
thermocouples to power the ionics were almost shot. They tried to fix
them up, succeeding a little, but using far more time than they had
expected. Meanwhile, the changed positions of the various large
asteroids, moving in their own individual orbits, lost them any definite
idea of where the Kuzaks' supply post was, and the dizzying distance to
Pallas, with only half-functioning ionics to get them there, fuddled
them in their inexperience.
Soon their big hope was that some reasonable asteroid-hoppers would come
within the few thousand mile range of their weakened transmitters. Then
they could call, and be picked up.
Mostly to keep themselves occupied, they hunted paymetal, taking only
the very best that they could find, to keep the towage mass down. Right
from the start they cut their food ration--a good thing, because one
month went, and then two, as near as they could figure. Cripes, how much
longer could they last?
Often they actually encouraged their minds to create illusions. Frank
would hold his body stiff, and look at the stars. After a while he would
get the soothing impression that he was swimming on his back in a lake,
and was looking up at the night sky.
Mostly, they were out of the regular radio channels. But sometimes,
because of the movement of distant bubb clusters that must be kept in
touch, they heard music and news briefly, again. They heard ominous
reports from the ever more populous Earth. Now it was about areas of
ocean to become boundaried and to be "farmed" for food. Territorial
disputes were now extending far beyond the land. Once more, the weapons
were being uncovered. Of course there were repercussions out here. Ceres
Station was beaming pronouncements, too--rattling the saber.
Nelsen and Ramos listened avidly because it was life, because it was
contact with lost things, because it was not dead silence.
Their own tribulations deepened.
"Cripes but my feet stink!" Ramos once laughed. "They must be rotten.
They're sore, and they itch something awful, and I can't scratch them,
or change my socks, even. The fungus, I guess. Just old athlete's foot."
"The stuff is crawling up my legs," Nelsen growled.
They knew that the Kuzaks, maybe Two-and-Two, Reynolds, Gimp, Storey,
must be trying to call them. They kept listening in their helmet-phones.
But this time Frank Nelsen knew that he'd gotten himself a real haystack
of enormity in which to double for a lost needle. The slender beams
could comb it futilely and endlessly, in the hope of a fortunate
accident. Only once they heard, "Nelsen! Ra..." The beam swept on. It
could have been Joe Kuzak's voice. But inevitably, somewhere, there had
to be a giving up point for the searchers.
"This is where I came in," Nelsen said bitterly. "Damn these beam
systems that are so delicate and important!"
They did pick up the voices of scattered asteroid-hoppers, talking
cautiously back and forth to each other, far away. "... Got me
pinpointed, Ed? Coming in almost empty, this trip. Not like the last...
Stake me to a run into Pallastown...?" Most of such voices sounded
regular, friendly.
Once they heard wild laughter, and what could have been a woman's
scream. But it could have been other things, too.
On another occasion, they almost believed that they had their rescue
made. Even their worn-out direction and distance finders could place the
ten or so voices as originating not much over a hundred miles away. But
they checked their trembling enthusiasm just in time. That was sheerest
luck. The curses, and the savage, frightened snarls were all wrong. "If
we don't catch us somebody, soon..."
Out here, the needs could get truly primitive. Oxygen, water, food,
repair parts for vital equipment. Cannibalism and blood-drinking could
also be part of blunt necessity.
Nelsen and Ramos were fortunate. Twenty miles off was a haze against the
stars--a cluster of small mesoderm fragments. Drawing power for their
shoulder-ionics from their almost spent nuclear batteries, they glided
toward the cluster, and got into its midst, doubling themselves up to
look as much like the other chunks as possible. They were like hiding
rats for hours, until long after the distant specks moved past.
While he waited, Frank Nelsen's mind fumbled back to the lost phantom of
Jarviston, Minnesota, again. To a man named Jig Hollins who had got
married, stayed home. Yellow? Hell...! Nelsen imagined the comforts he
might have had in the Space Force. He coaxed up a dream girl--blonde,
dark, red-headed--with an awful wistfulness. He thought of Nance Codiss,
the neighbor kid. He fumbled at the edge of a vast, foggy vision, where
the wanderlust and spacelust of a man, and needs of the expanding race,
seemed to blend with his home-love and love-love, and to become,
impossibly, a balanced unit...
Later--much later--he heard young, green asteroid-hoppers yakking
happily about girls and about how magnificent it was, out here.
"Haw-haw," he heard Ramos mock.
"Yeah," Nelsen said thickly. "Lucky for them that they aren't near
us--being careless with their beams, that way..."
Frank Nelsen sneered, despising these innocent novices, sure that he
could have beaten and robbed them without compunction. That far he had
come toward understanding the outlaws, the twisted men of the Belt.
Ramos and he seemed to go on for an indefinite period longer. In a
sense, they toughened. But toward the last they seemed to blunder
slowly in the mind-shadows of their weakening body forces. They had a
little food left, and water from the moisture-reclaimers. At
zero-gravity, where physical exertion is slight, men can get along on
small quantities of food. The sweetish, starchy liquid that they could
suck through a tube from the air-restorers--it was a by-product of the
photosynthetic process--might even have sustained them for a
considerable interval.