[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March
1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _All space was electrified as that harsh challenge rang
out ... but John Endlich hesitated. For he saw beyond his own murder--saw
the horror and destruction his death would unleash--and knew he dared
not fight back!_]
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 radiophones.
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?... 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! Tied to baby's diaper suspenders!... 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 view-ports 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 interplanetary vessel.
"... Haw-haw-haw! Drop over to our camp sometime for a little drink, and
a little game, eh, pantywaist? Tain't 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! Bring the wife along....
She's kinda pretty. Ought to have a man-size fella.... Just ask for
me--Alf Neely! Haw-haw-haw!"
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-haw!..."
And the others, yelling and hooting, made it a pack: "Man--don't he wish
he was back in Podunk!... 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. Yah! 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-h! Papa--we wanna-go-o-o--hom-m-mm-e!..."
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-ho! Wow!..."
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.
"I'll get you, Alf Neely!" Endlich snarled. "Right now! And I'll get all
the damned, hell-bitten 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 view-ports. 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--with these lugs. These guys who had been starved emotionally, and
warped inside by raw space. 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, Pun'kin-head?" Alf Neely growled. "It 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 seemed 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!