II

He was in space. Headed for the Moon and from there for Mars. But

even the realization of this failed to rouse him from the lethargy of

battered body and tortured brain.

Taking off in a rocket was punishment. Severe, terrible punishment.

Only men who were perfect physical specimens could attempt it. An

imperfect heart would simply stop under the jarring impact of the

blast-off.

Some day rockets would be perfected. Some day rockets would rise gently

from the Earth, shaking off Earth's gravity by gradual application of

power rather than by tremendous thrusts that kicked steel and glass and

men out into space.

But not yet, not for many years. Perhaps not for many generations. For

many years men would risk their lives in blasting projectiles that

ripped loose from the Earth by the sheer savagery of exploding oxygen

and gasoline.

A moan came from the rear of the ship, a stifled pitiful moan that

brought Scott upright in the chair, tearing with nervous hands at the

buckles of his belt.

With belt loosened, body tensed, he waited for a second, hardly

believing he had heard the sound. It came again, a piteous human cry.

Scott leaped to his feet, staggered under the lack of gravitation. The

rocket was coasting on momentum now and, while its forward motion gave

it a simulation of gravity, enough so a man could orient himself, there

was in actuality no positive gravity center in the shell.

A bundle of heavy blankets lay in a corner formed by a lashed down

pile of boxes ... and the bundle was moving feebly. With a cry in his

throat, Scott leaped forward and tore the blankets aside. Under them

lay a battered man, crumpled, with a pool of blood soaking into a

blanket that lay beneath him. Scott lifted the body. The head flopped

over and he stared down into the vacant, blood-streaked face of Jimmy

Baldwin.

Jimmy's eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Scott squatted on his

heels, wild thoughts hammering in his head. Jimmy's eyes opened again

and regarded the pilot. He raised a feeble hand in greeting. The lips

moved, but Jimmy's voice was faint.

"Hello, Scott."

"What are you doing here?" Scott demanded fiercely.

"I don't know," said Jimmy weakly. "I don't know. I meant to do

something, but I forgot."

Scott rose and took a bottle of water from a case. Wetting his

handkerchief, he bathed the bloodied face. His hands ran over Jimmy's

body but found no broken bones. It was a wonder the man hadn't been

killed outright. Some more Baldwin luck!

"Where are we, Scott?" Jimmy asked.

"We're in space," said Scott. "We're going out to Mars." No use of

telling him anything but the truth.

"Space," said Jimmy. "I use to go out in space. Then something

happened." He shook his head wearily. Mercifully, the memory of that

_something_ had been wiped from his brain.

Half dragging, half carrying, Scott got him to the assistant pilot's

seat, strapped him in, gave him a drink of water. Jimmy's eyes closed

and he sank back into the cushions. Scott resumed his chair, leaned

forward to look out into space.

There was little to see. Space, viewed from any angle, unless one was

near a large body, looked pretty much the same. The Moon was still out

of his range of vision. It would be hours before it would move upward

to intersect the path of the rocket's flight.

* * * * *

Scott leaned back and looked at Jimmy. Apparently the man had sneaked

aboard just before the take-off. No one paid much attention to him.

Everyone was kind to him and he was allowed to do as he pleased. For

he was not insane. The tragedy of those few minutes years before had

merely wiped out his memory, given him the outlook of a child.

Perhaps when he had gotten into the ship he had held some reason for

his action, but now even that purpose had escaped him. Once again Jimmy

Baldwin was a bewildered child's brain in the body of a man.

"Anyway," said Scott, half speaking to himself, half to the silent

form, "you're the first rocket stowaway."

They would miss Jimmy back at the camp, would wonder what had happened

to him. Perhaps they'd organize a posse and search for him. The

possibility was they would never know what happened, for there was

slight chance, Scott told himself, that he or Jimmy or the ship would

ever get back to Earth again.

Someone else would have to tend Jimmy's flowers now, but probably no

one would, for his flowers were the Martian lilies. And Martian lilies

no longer were a novelty.

It had been the lilies that started the whole thing, this crazy parade

of men who went into space and died.

Slightly over twelve years ago, Dr. Steven Alexander reported that,

from his observatory on Mt. Kenya, he had communicated with Mars by

ultrashort wave radio. It had been a long and arduous process. First

the signals from Earth, repeated in definite series, at definite

intervals. And then, finally, the answer from the Red Planet. After

months of labor slow understanding came.

"_We send you_," signalled the Martians. "_We send you._" Over and over

again. A meaningless phrase. What were they sending? Slowly Alexander

untangled the simple skein of thought. Mars finally messaged: "_We send

you token!_" That word "token" had been hard. It represented thought,

an abstract thought.

The world waited breathlessly for the token. Finally it came, a rocket

winging its way across space, a rocket that flashed and glinted in the

depth of space as it neared Earth. Kept informed of its location by the

Martians, Earth's telescopes watched it come. It landed near Mt. Kenya,

a roaring, screaming streak of light that flashed across the midnight

sky.

Dug up, it yielded an inner container, well-insulated against heat and

cold, against radiation and shock. Opened, it was found to contain

seeds. Planted, jealously guarded, carefully tended, the seeds grew,

were the Martian lilies. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly over

the Earth.

Back on Earth today the Martian lilies grew in every hamlet, clogged

the fence rows of every farm. Relieved of whatever natural enemies and

checks they might have had on their native planet, they flourished and

spread, became a weed that every farmer cursed whole-heartedly.

Their root structure probed deep into the soil. Drought could not kill

them. They grew rapidly, springing to full growth almost overnight.

They went to unkillable seed. Which was what might have been expected

of any plant nurtured on the stubborn soil of Mars. Earth, to the

Martian lilies, was a paradise of air and water and sunlight.

And, as if that first token-load had not been enough, the Martians kept

on sending rocket loads of seeds. At each opposition the rockets came,

each announced by the messages from the Martian transmitter. And each

of them landed almost precisely on the spot where the first had landed.

That took mathematics! Mathematics and a superb knowledge of rocketry.

The rockets apparently were automatic. There was no intelligence to

guide them once they were shot into space. Their courses must have been

plotted to the finest detail, with every factor determined in advance.

For the Martian rockets were not aimed at Earth as one broad target but

at a certain spot on Earth and so far every one of them had hit that

mark!

At the rocket camp each Martian rocket was waited anxiously, with the

hope it would bring some new pay load. But the rockets never brought

anything but seeds ... more Martian lily seeds.

* * * * *

Jimmy stirred restlessly, opened his eyes and looked out the vision

plate. But there was no terror in his eyes, no surprise nor regret.

"Space?" he asked.

Scott nodded.

"We're going to the Moon?"

"To the Moon first," said Scott. "From there we go to Mars."

Jimmy lapsed into silence. There was no change upon his face. There

never was any change upon his face.

I hope he doesn't make any trouble, Scott told himself. It was

bad enough just to have him along. Bad enough to have this added

responsibility.

For space flight was a dangerous job. Ever since the International Mars

Communication Center had been formed, with Alexander in charge, space

had flung men aside. Ship after ship, pilot after pilot. The task,

alone, of reaching the Moon had taken terrible toll.

Men had died. Some had died before they reached the Moon, some had

died on the Moon but mostly they had died heading back for Earth. For

landing on Earth, jockeying a rocket through Earth's dense atmosphere,

is a tricky job. Others had died enroute to Mars, ships flaring in

space or simply disappearing, going on and on, never coming back. That

was the way it had been with Hugh.

And now his brother, Scott, was following the trail that Hugh had

blazed, the trail to the Moon and out beyond. Following in a bomb of

potential death, with a blank-faced stowaway in the chair beside him.

* * * * *

Half way to Mars and the ship was still intact. Running true to course,

running on schedule, flashing through space under the thrust of

momentum built up during the blast-out from the Moon.

Half way to Mars and still alive! But too early yet to hope. Perhaps

other men had gotten as far as this and then something had happened.

Scott watched the depths of space, the leering, jeering emptiness of

star-studded velvet that stretched on and on.

There had been days of waiting and of watching. More days of waiting

and of watching loomed ahead.

Waiting for that warning flicker on the instrument panel, that split

second warning before red ruin struck as cranky fuel went haywire.

Waiting for the "tick" of a tiny meteor against the ship's steel

wall ... the tiny, ringing sound that would be the prelude to disaster.

Waiting for something else ... for that unknown factor of accident that

would spatter the ship and the two men in it through many empty miles.

Endless hours of watching and of waiting, hastily snatched cat-naps

in the chair, hastily snatched meals. Listening to the babbling Jimmy

Baldwin who wondered how his flowers were getting on, speculated on

what the boys were doing back in the rocket camp on Earth.

One thing hammered at Scott Nixon's brain ... the message of the

Martian radio, the message that had been coming now for many years.

"_No. No. No come. Danger._" Always that and little else. No

explanation of what the danger was. No suggestion for circumventing or

correcting that danger. No helpfulness in Earthmen's struggle to cross

the miles of space between two neighboring planets.

Almost as if the Martians didn't want Earthmen to come. Almost as if

they were trying to discourage space travel. But that would hardly be

the case, for the Martians had readily co-operated in establishing

communications, had exhibited real intelligence and earnestness in

working out the code that flashed words and thoughts across millions of

miles.

Without a doubt, had they wished, the Martians could have helped. For

it was with seemingly little effort that they sent their own rockets to

earth.

And why had each Martian rocket carried the same load each time? Could

there be some significance in those Martian lily seeds? Some hidden

meaning the Earth had failed to grasp? Some meaning that the things

from Mars hoped would be read with each new rocket-load?

Why hadn't the Martians come themselves? If they could shoot automatic

rockets across the miles of space, certainly they could navigate

rockets carrying themselves.

The Martian rockets had been closely studied back on Earth but had

yielded no secrets. The fuel always was exhausted. More than likely the

Martians knew, to the last drop, how much was needed. The construction

was not unlike Earth rockets, but fashioned of a steel that was

hardened and toughened beyond anything Earth could produce.

So for ten years Earthmen had worked unaided to cross the bridge of

space, launching ships from the Earth's most favored take-off point,

from the top of Mt. Kenya, heading out eastward into space, taking

advantage of the mountain's three mile height, the Earth's rotation

speed of 500 yards per second at the equator.

Scott reviewed his flight, checked the clocklike routine he had

followed. Blast-off from Earth. Landing in the drear, desolate Mare

Serenitatis on the Moon, refueling the ship from the buried storage

tanks, using the caterpillar tractor from the underground garage to

haul the rocket onto the great turn-table cradle. Setting the cradle

at the correct angle and direction, blasting off again at the precise

second, carrying a full load of fuel, something impossible to do

and still take off from Earth. Taking advantage of the Moon's lower

gravity, its lack of atmosphere. Using the Moon as a stepping stone to

outer space.

Now he was headed for Mars. If he landed there safely, he could spend

two days, no more, no less, before he blasted off for Earth again.

But probably he wouldn't reach Mars. Probably he and Jimmy Baldwin, in

the end, would be just a few more bones to pave the road to Mars.