* * * * *
All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at the
weird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flashed
a picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders'
School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given several
weeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, he
had been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had of
course seen it from space.
It was not round, like a major planet or most moons. Rather, it was like
a bomb-fragment; or even more like a shard of a gigantic broken vase. It
was several hundred miles long, and half as thick. One side of it--this
side--was curved; for it had been a segment of the surface of the
shattered planet from which all of the asteroids had come. The other
side was jagged and broken, for it had been torn from the mesoderm of
that tortured mother world.
From the desolation of his own thoughts, in which the ogre-form of Alf
Neely lurked with its pendent promise of catastrophe soon to come, and
from his own view of other desolation all around him, John Endlich was
suddenly distracted by the comments of his kids. All at once, conforming
to the changeable weather of children's natures regardless of
circumstance, their mood had once more turned bright and adventurous.
"Look, Pop," Bubs chirped, his round red face beaming now from his
helmet face-window, in spite of his undried tears. "This land all around
here was fields once! You can even see the rows of some kind of stubble!
Like corn-stubble! And over there's a--a--almost like a fence! An' up
there is hills with trees on 'em--some of 'em not even knocked over. But
everything is all dried-out and black and grey and dead! Gosh!"
"We can see all that, Dopey!" Evelyn, who was older, snapped at Bubs.
"We know that something like people lived on a regular planet here,
awful long ago. Why don't you look over the other way? There's the
house--and maybe the barn and the sheds and the old garden!"
Bubs turned around. His eyes got very big. "Oh! O-ooh-h-h!" he gasped in
wonder. "Pop! Mom! Look! Don't you see?..."
"Yeah, we see, Bubs," John Endlich answered.
For a long moment he'd been staring at those blocklike structures.
One--maybe the house--was of grey stone. It had odd, triangular windows,
which may once have been glazed. Some of the others were of a blackened
material--perhaps cellulose. Wood, that is. All of the buildings were
pushed askew, and partly crumpled from top to bottom, like great
cardboard cartons that had been half crushed.
Endlich's imagination seemed forced to follow a groove, trying to
picture that last terrible moment, fifty-million years ago. Had the
blast been caused by natural atomic forces at the heart of the planet,
as one theory claimed? Or had a great bomb, as large as an oversized
meteor, come self-propelled from space, to bury itself deep in that
ancient world? A world as big as Mars, its possible enemy--whose weird
inhabitants had been wiped out, in a less spectacular way, perhaps in
the same conflict?
Endlich's mind grabbed at that brief instant of explosion. The awful
jolt, which must have ended all consciousness, and all capacity for eyes
to see what followed. Perhaps there was a short and terrible passing of
flame. But in swift seconds, great chunks of the planet's crust must
have been hurled outward. In a moment the flame must have died,
dissipated with the suddenly vanishing atmosphere, into the cold vacuum
of the void. Almost instantly, the sky, which had been deep blue before,
must have turned to its present black, with the voidal stars blazing.
There had been no air left to sustain combustion, so buildings and trees
had not continued to burn, if there had been time at all to ignite them.
And, with the same swiftness, all remaining artifacts and surface
features of this chip of a world's crust that was Vesta, had been
plunged into the dual preservatives of the interplanetary
regions--deep-freeze and all but absolute dryness. Yes--the motion of
the few scattered molecules in space was very fast--indicating a high
temperature. But without substance to be hot, there can be no heat. And
so few molecules were there in the void, that while the concept of a
"hot" space remained true, it became tangled at once with the fact that
a _practically_ complete vacuum can have _practically_ no temperature.
Which meant--again in practice--all but absolute zero.
John Endlich knew. He'd heard the lectures at the Homesteaders' School.
Here was a ghost-land, hundreds of square miles in extent--a region that
had been shifted in a few seconds, from the full prime of life and
motion, to moveless and timeless silence. It was like the mummy of a
man. In its presence there was a chill, a revulsion, and yet a
fascination.
* * * * *
The kids continued to jabber--more excitedly now than before. "Pop!
Mom!" Bubs urged. "Let's go look inside them buildings! Maybe the
_things_ are still there! The people, I mean. All black and dried up,
like the one in the showcase at school; four tentacles they had instead
of arms and legs, the teacher said!"
"Sure! Let's go!" Evelyn joined in. "I'm not scared to!"
Yeah, kids' tastes could be pretty gruesome. When you thought most that
you had to shelter them from horror, they were less bothered by it than
you were. John Endlich's lips made a sour line.
"Stay here, the pair of you!" Rose ordered.
"Aw--Mom--" Evelyn began to protest.
"You heard me the first time," their mother answered.
John Endlich moved to the great box, which had come with them from
Earth. The nervous tension that tore at him--unpleasant and chilling,
driving him toward straining effort--was more than the result of the
shameful and embarrassing memory of his very recent trouble with Alf
Neely and Companions, and the certainty of more trouble to come from
that source. For there was another and even worse enemy. Endlich knew
what it was--
The awful silence.
He still looked shamefaced and furious; but now he felt a gentler
sharing of circumstances. "We'll let the snooping go till later, kids,"
he growled. "Right now we gotta do what we gotta do--"
The youngsters seemed to join up with his mood. As he tore the pinchbar,
which had been conveniently attached to the side of the box, free of its
staples, and proceeded to break out supplies, their whimsical musings
fell close to what he was thinking.
"Vesta," Evelyn said. "They told us at school--remember? Vesta was the
old Roman goddess of hearth and home. Funny--hunh--Dad?"
Bubs' fancy was vivid, too. "Look, Pop!" he said again, pointing to a
ribbon of what might be concrete, cracked and crumpled as by a terrific
quake, curving away toward the hills, and the broken mountains beyond.
"That was a road! Can't you almost hear some kinda cars and trucks goin'
by?"
John Endlich's wife, helping him open the great box, also had things to
say, in spite of the worry showing in her face. She touched the
dessicated soil with a gauntleted hand. "Johnny," she remarked
wonderingly. "You can see the splash-marks of the last rain that ever
fell here--"
"Yeah," Endlich growled without any further comment. Inside himself, he
was fighting the battle of lost things. The blue sky. The shifting
beauty of clouds in sunshine. The warm whisper of wind in trees. The
rattle of traffic. The babble of water. The buzz of insects. The smell
of flowers. The sight of grass waving.... In short, all the evidences of
life.
"A lot of things that was here once, we'll bring back, won't we, Pop?"
Bubs questioned with astonishing maturity.
"Hope so," John Endlich answered, keeping his doubts hidden behind
gruffness. Maybe it was a grim joke that here and now every force in
himself was concentrated on substantial objectives--to the exclusion of
his defects. The drive in him was to end the maddening silence, and to
rub out the mood of harsh barrenness, and his own aching homesickness,
by struggling to bring back a little beauty of scenery, and a little of
living motion. It was a civilized urge, a home-building urge, maybe a
narrow urge. But how could anybody stand being here very long, unless
such things were done? If they ever could be. Maybe, willfully, he had
led himself into a grimmer trap than it had even seemed to be--or than
he had ever wanted....
* * * * *
Inside his space suit, he had begun to sweat furiously. And it was more
because of the tension of his nerves than because of the vigor with
which he plied his pinchbar, doing the first task which had to be done.
Steel ribbons were snapped, nails were yanked silently from the great
box, boards were jerked loose.
In another minute John Endlich and his wife were setting up an airtight
tent, which, when the time came, could be inflated from compressed-air
bottles. They worked somewhat awkwardly, for their instruction period
had been brief, and they were green; but the job was speedily finished.
The first requirement--shelter--was assured.
Digging again into the vast and varied contents of the box, John Endlich
found some things he had not expected--a fine rifle, a pistol and
ammunition. At which moment an ironic imp seemed to sit on his shoulder,
and laugh derisively. Umhm-m--the Asteroids Homesteaders Office had
filled these boxes according to a precise survey of the needs of a
peaceful settler on Vesta.
It was like Bubs, with the inquisitiveness of a seven-year-old, to ask:
"What did they think we needed guns for, when they knew there was no
rabbits to shoot at?"
"I guess they kind of suspected there'd be guys like Alf Neely, son,"
John Endlich answered dryly. "Even if they didn't tell us about it."
The next task prescribed by the Homesteaders' School was to secure a
supply of air and water in quantity. Again, following the instructions
they had received, the Endlichs uncrated and set up an atom-driven
drill. In an hour it had bored to a depth of five-hundred feet. Hauling
up the drill, Endlich lowered an electric heating unit on a cable from
an atomic power-cell, and then capped the casing pipe.
Yes, strangely enough there was still sufficient water beneath the
surface of Vesta. Its parent planet, like the Earth, had had water in
its crust, that could be tapped by means of wells. And so suddenly had
Vesta been chilled in the cold of space at the time of the parent body's
explosion, that this water had not had a chance to dissipate itself as
vapor into the void, but had been frozen solid. The drying soil above it
had formed a tough shell, which had protected the ice beneath from
disappearance through sublimation...
Drill down to it, melt it with heat, and it was water again, ready to be
pumped and put to use.
And water, by electrolysis, was also an easy source of oxygen to
breathe.... The soil, once thawed over a few acres, would also yield
considerable nitrogen and carbon dioxide--the makings of many cubic
meters of atmosphere. The A.H.O. survey expeditions, here on Vesta and
on other similar asteroids which were crustal chips of the original
planet, had done their work well, pathfinding a means of survival here.
When John Endlich pumped the first turbid liquid, which immediately
froze again in the surface cold, he might, under other, better
circumstances, have felt like cheering. His well was a success. But his
tense mind was racing far ahead to all the endless tasks that were yet
to be done, to make any sense at all out of his claim. Besides, the
short day--eighteen hours long instead of twenty-four, and already far
advanced at the time of his tumultuous landing--was drawing to a close.
"It'll be dark here mighty quick, Johnny," Rose said. She was looking
scared, again.
* * * * *
John Endlich considered setting up floodlights, and working on through
the hours of darkness. But such lights would be a dangerous beacon for
prowlers; and when you were inside their area of illumination, it was
difficult to see into the gloom beyond.
Still, one did not know if the mask of darkness did not afford a greater
invitation to those with evil intent. For a long moment, Endlich was in
an agony of indecision. Then he said:
"We'll knock off from work now--get in the tent, eat supper, maybe
sleep..."
But he was remembering Neely's promise to return tonight.
In another minute the small but dazzling sun had disappeared behind the
broken mountains, as Vesta, unspherical and malformed, tumbled rather
than rotated on its center of gravity. And several hours later, amid
heavy cooking odors inside the now inflated plastic bubble that was the
tent, Endlich was sprawled on his stomach, unable, through well-founded
worry, even to remove his space suit or to allow his family to do so,
though there was breathable air around them. They lay with their helmet
face-windows open. Rose and Evelyn breathed evenly in peaceful sleep.
Bubs, trying to be very much a man, battled slumber and yawns, and kept
his dad company with scraps of conversation. "Let 'em come, Pop," he
said cheerfully. "Hope they do. We'll shoot 'em all. Won't we, pop? You
got the rifle and the pistol ready, Pop...."
Yes, John Endlich had his guns ready beside him, all right--for what it
was worth. He wished wryly that things could be as simple as his
hero-worshipping son seemed to think. Thank the Lord that Bubs was so
trusting, for his own peace of mind--the prankish and savage nature of
certain kinds of men, with liquor in their bellies, being what it was.
For John Endlich, having been, on occasion, mildly kindred to such men,
was well able to understand that nature. And understanding, now, chilled
his blood.
Peering from the small plastic windows of the tent, he kept watching for
hulking black shapes to silhouette themselves against the stars. And he
listened on his helmet phones, for scraps of telltale conversation,
exchanged by short-range radio by men in space armor. Once, he thought
he heard a grunt, or a malicious chuckle. But it may have been just
vagrant static.
Otherwise, from all around, the stillness of the vacuum was absolute. It
was unnerving. On this airless piece of a planet, an enemy could sneak
up on you, almost without stealth.
Against that maddening silence, however, Bubs presently had a helpful
and unprompted suggestion: "Hey, Pop!" he whispered hoarsely. "Put the
side of your helmet against the tent-floor, and listen!"
John Endlich obeyed his kid. In a second cold sweat began to break out
on his body, as intermittent thudding noises reached his ear. In the
absence of an atmosphere, sounds could still be transmitted through the
solid substance of the asteroid.
It took Endlich a moment to realize that the noises came, not from
nearby, but from far away, on the other side of Vesta. The thudding was
vibrated straight through many miles of solid rock.
"It's nothing, Bubs," he growled. "Nothing but the blasting in the
mines."
Bubs said "Oh," as if disappointed. Not long thereafter he was asleep,
leaving his harrassed sire to endure the vigil alone. Endlich dared not
doze off, to rest a little, even for a moment. He could only wait. If an
evil visitation came--as he had been all but sure it must--that would be
bad, indeed. If it didn't come--well--that still meant a sleepless
night, and the postponement of the inevitable. He couldn't win.
Thus the hours slipped away, until the luminous dial of the clock in the
tent--it had been synchronized to Vestal time--told him that dawn was
near. That was when, through the ground, he heard the faint scraping. A
rustle. It might have been made by heavy space-boots. It came, and then
it stopped. It came again, and stopped once more. As if skulking forms
paused to find their way.
Out where the ancient and ghostly buildings were, he saw a star wink out
briefly, as if a shape blocked the path of its light. Then it burned
peacefully again. John Endlich's hackles rose. His fists tightened on
both his rifle and pistol.
He fixed his gaze on the great box, looming blackly, the box that
contained the means of survival for his family and himself, as if he
foresaw the future, a moment away. For suddenly, huge as it was, the box
rocked, and began to move off, as if it had sprouted legs and come
alive.
* * * * *
John Endlich scrambled to action. He slammed and sealed the face-windows
of the helmets of the members of his family, to protect them from
suffocation. He did the same for himself, and then unzipped the
tent-flap. He darted out with the outrushing air.
This was a moment with murder poised in every tattered fragment of it.
John Endlich knew. Murder was engrained in his own taut-drawn nerves,
that raged to destroy the trespassers whose pranks had passed the level
of practical humor, and become, by the tampering with vital necessities,
an attack on life itself. But there was a more immediate menace in these
space-twisted roughnecks.... Strike back at them, even in self-defense,
and have it proven!
He had not the faintest doubt who they were--even though he could not
see their faces in the blackness. Maybe he should lay low--let them have
their way.... But how could he--even apart from his raging temper, and
his honor as a man--when they were making off with his family's and his
own means of survival?
He had to throw Rose and the kids into the balance--risking them to the
danger that he knew lay beyond his own possible ignoble demise. He did
just that when he raised his pistol, struggling against the awful
impulse of the rage in him--lifted it high enough so that the explosive
bullets that spewed from it would be sure to pass over the heads of the
dark silhouettes that were moving about.
"Damn you, Neely!" Endlich yelled into his helmet mike, his finger
tightening on the trigger. "Drop that stuff!"
At that moment the sun's rim appeared at the landscape's jagged edge,
and on this side of airless Vesta complete night was transformed to
complete day, as abruptly as if a switch had been turned.
Alf Neely and John Endlich blinked at each other. Maybe Neely was
embarrassed a little by his sudden exposure; but if he was, it didn't
show. Probably the bully in him was scared; but this he covered in a
common manner--with a studiedly easy swagger, and a bravado that was not
good sense, but bordered on childish recklessness. Yet he had a trump
card--by the aggressive glint in his eyes, and his unpleasant grin,
Endlich knew that Neely knew that he was afraid for his wife, and
wouldn't start anything unless driven and goaded sheerly wild. Even now,
they were seven to his one.
"Why, good morning, Neighbor Pun'kin-head!" Neely crooned, his voice a
burlesque of sweetness. "Glad to oblige!"
He hurled the great box down. As he did so, something glinted in his
gloved paw. He flicked it expertly into the open side of the wooden case
which contained so many things that were vital to the Endlichs--
It was only a tiny nuclear priming-cap, and the blast was feeble. Even
so, the box burst apart. Splintered crates, sealed cans, great torn
bundles and what not, went skittering far across the plain in every
direction, or were hurled high toward the stars, to begin falling at
last with the laziness of a descending feather.
* * * * *
Neely and his companions hadn't attempted to move out of the way of the
explosion. They only rolled with its force, protected by their space
suits. Endlich rolled, too, helplessly, clutching his pistol and rifle:
still, by some superhuman effort, he managed to regain his feet before
the far more practiced Neely, who was hampered, no doubt, by a few too
many drinks, had even stopped rolling. But when Neely got up, he had
drawn his blaster, a useful tool of his trade, but a hellish weapon,
too, at short range.
Still, Endlich retained the drop on him.
Alf Neely chuckled. "Fourth of July! Hallowe'en, Dutch," he said
sweetly. "What's the matter? Don't you think it's fun? Honest to
gosh--you just ain't neighborly!"
Then he switched his tone. It became a soft snarl that didn't alter his
insolent and confident smirk--and a challenge. He laughed derisively,
almost softly. "I dare you to try to shoot straight, pal," he said.
"Even you got more sense than that."
And John Endlich was spang against his terrible, blank wall again. Seven
to one. Suppose he got three. There'd be four left--and more in the
camp. But the four would survive him. Space crazy lugs. Anyway half
drunk. Ready to hoot at the stars, even, if they found no better
diversion. Ready to push even any of their own bunch around who seemed
weaker than they. For spite, maybe. Or just for the lid-blowing hell of
it--as a reaction against the awful confinement of being out here.
"I was gonna smear you all over the place, Greenhorn," Neely rumbled.
"But maybe this way is more fun, hunh? Maybe we'll be back tonight. But
don't wait up for us. Our best regards to your sweet--family."
John Endlich's blazing and just rage was strangled by that same crawling
dread as before, as he saw them arc upward and away, propelled by the
miniature drive-jets attached to the belts of their space-suits. Their
return to camp, hundreds of miles distant, could be accomplished in a
couple of minutes.
Rose and the kids were crouched in the deflated tent. But returning
there, John Endlich hardly saw them. He hardly heard their frightened
questions.
To the trouble with Neely, he could see no end--just one destructive
visitation following another. Maybe, already, mortal damage had been
done. But Endlich couldn't lie down and quit, any more than a snake,
tossed into a fire, could stop trying to crawl out of it, as long as
life lasted. Whether doing so made sense or not, didn't matter. In
Endlich was the savage energy of despair. He was fighting not just Neely
and his crowd, but that other enemy--which was perhaps Neely's main
trouble, too. Yeah--the stillness, the nostalgia, the harshness.
"No--don't want any breakfast," he replied sharply to Rose' last
question. "Gotta work...."
* * * * *
He was like an ant-swarm, rebuilding a trampled nest--oblivious to the
certainty of its being trampled again. First he scrambled and leaped
around, collecting his scattered and damaged gear. He found that his
main atomic battery--so necessary to all that he had to do--was damaged
and unworkable. And he had no hope that he could repair it. But this
didn't stop his feverish activity.
Now he started unrolling great bolts of a transparent, wire-strengthened
plastic. Patching with an adhesive where explosion-rents had to be
repaired, he cut hundred-yard strips, and, with Rose's help, laid them
edge to edge and fastened them together to make a continuous sheet.
Next, all around its perimeter, he dug a shallow trench. The edges of
the plastic were then attached to massive metal rails, which he buried
in the trench.
"Sealed to the ground along all the sides, Honey," he growled to Rose.
"Next we fit in the airlock cabinet, at one corner. Then we've got to
see if we can get up enough air to inflate the whole business. That's
the tough part--the way things are...."
By then the sun was already high. And Endlich was panting
raggedly--mostly from worry. After the massive airlock was in place,
they attached their electrolysis apparatus to the small atomic battery,
which had been used to run the well-driller. The well was in the area
covered by the sheet of plastic, which was now propped up here and there
with long pieces of board from the great box. Over their heads, the
tough, clear material sagged like a tent-roof which has not yet been run
up all the way on its poles.
Sluggishly the electrolysis apparatus broke down the water, discharging
the hydrogen as waste through a pipe, out over the airless surface of
Vesta--but freeing the oxygen under the plastic roof. Yet from the start
it was obvious that, with insufficient electric power, the process was
too slow.
"And we need to use heat-coils to thaw the ground, Johnny," Rose said.
"And to keep the place warm. And to bring nitrogen gas up out of the
soil. The few cylinders of the compressed stuff that we've got won't be
enough to make a start. And the carbon dioxide...."
So John Endlich had to try to repair that main battery. He thought,
after a while, that he might succeed--in time. But then Rose opened the
airlock, and the kids came in to bother him. With all the triumph of a
favorite puppy dragging an over-ripe bone into the house, Bubs bore a
crooked piece of a black substance, hard as wood and more gruesome than
a dried and moldy monkey-pelt.
"A tentacle!" Evelyn shrilled. "We were up to those old buildings! We
found the people! What's left of them! And lots of stuff. We saw one of
their cars! And there was lots more. Dad--you gotta come and see!..."
Harassed as he was, John Endlich yielded--because he had a hunch, an
idea of a possibility. So he went with his children. He passed through a
garden, where a pool had been, and where the blackened remains of plants
still projected from beds of dried soil set in odd stone-work. He passed
into chambers far too low for comfortable human habitation. And what did
he know of the uses of most of what he saw there? The niches in the
stone walls? The slanting, ramplike object of blackened wood, beside
which three weird corpses lay? The glazed plaque on the wall, which
could have been a religious emblem, a calendar of some kind, a
decoration, or something beyond human imagining? Yeah--leave such stuff
for Cousin Ernest, the school teacher--if he ever got here.
In the cylindrical stone shed nearby, John Endlich had a look at the
car--low slung, three-wheeled, a tiller, no seats. Just a flat platform.
All he could figure out about the motor was that steam seemed the link
between atomic energy and mechanical motion.
Beyond the car was what might be a small tractor. And a lot of odd
tools. But the thing which interested him most was the pattern of copper
ribbons, insulated with a heavy glaze, similar to that which he had seen
traversing walls and ceiling in the first building he had entered. Here,
as before, they connected with queer apparatus which might be stoves and
non-rotary motors, for all he knew. And also with the globes overhead.
The suggestiveness of all this was plain. And now, at the far end of
that cylindrical shed, John Endlich found the square, black-enamelled
case, where all of those copper ribbons came together.
* * * * *
It was sealed, and apparently self-contained. Nothing could have damaged
it very much, in the frigid stillness of millions of years. Its secrets
were hidden within it. But they could not be too unfamiliar. And its
presence was logical. A small, compact power unit. Nervously, he turned
a little wheel. A faint vibration was transmitted to his gloved hand.
And the globe in the ceiling began to glow.
He shut the thing off again. But how long did it take him to run back to
his sagging creation of clear plastic, while the kids howled gleefully
around him, and return with the end of a long cable, and pliers? How
long did it take him to disconnect all of the glazed copper ribbons, and
substitute the wires of the cable--attaching them to queer
terminal-posts? No--not long.
The power was not as great as that which his own large atomic battery
would have supplied. But it proved sufficient. And the current was
direct--as it was supposed to be. The electrolysis apparatus bubbled
vigorously. Slowly the tentlike roof began to rise, under the beginnings
of a tiny gas-pressure.
"That does it, Pops!" Bubs shrilled.
"Yeah--maybe so," John Endlich agreed almost optimistically. He felt
really tender toward his kids, just then. They'd really helped him, for
once.
Yes--almost he was hopeful. Until he glanced at the rapidly declining
sun. An all-night vigil. No. Probably worse. Oh Lord--how long could he
last like this? Even if he managed to keep Neely and Company at bay?
Night after night.... All that he had accomplished seemed useless. He
just had so much more that could be wrecked--pushed over with a harsh
laugh, as if it really was something funny.
John Endlich's flesh crawled. And in his thinking, now, he went a little
against his own determinations. Probably because, in the present state
of his disgust, he needed a drink--bad.
"Nuts!" he growled lugubriously. "If I'd only been a little more
sociable.... That was where the trouble started. I might have got broke,
but I would've made friends. They think I'm snooty."
Rose's jaw hardened, as if she took his regrets as an accusation that
she had led him along the straight and narrow path, which--by an
exasperating shift in philosophical principle--now seemed the shortest
route to destruction. But he felt very sorry for her, too; and he didn't
believe that what he had just said was entirely the truth.