Marooned on Mars Read online

  A joke was a joke. Chuck thought, and started to turn back to the ship. Then his lights swept over the horizon, and his eyes jerked back.

  It did look like a city—not a highly advanced one, but like some of the pictures of European ruins he had seen, built of stones that had since crumbled until only bits remained.

  Unconsciously, he started forward with Lew at his side. The ruins were probably only natural stones eroded by the winds, but he couldn’t stay away.

  They were up to it in a few minutes.

  It was a city of stone, laid out with streets, and with square, low stone walls outlining what had been houses. Even doors were plain enough—now empty openings. Just inside the doorway of one, a stone bench could be seen—and near it, set into the wall, a seven-pointed star of another color.

  Chuck could almost imagine humans sitting on the bench and gazing at the star. But it would have had to be very long ago. Here, with no rainfall, it would surely take at least a million years to weather the stones down to the wrecks these bad become.

  “Five minutes are up,” Vance called.

  “Captain, there is a city!” Chuck stooped suddenly to pick up a broken piece of what looked like porcelain, glazed, and with a tiny design running in a perfect arc of a circle around its edge. “There are ruins here.”

  “I don’t care if you’ve found native Martians smoking peace pipes. The five minutes are up. If you don’t start back, I’m sending Dick out to get you.”

  Chuck started to throw the shard of porcelain down, but Lew halted him. “Take it easy, Chuck. He’s got to get us back, and anything we find is second to that. Let’s collect our biologist.”

  They had no trouble. Sokolsky was already heading back to the ship, smiling to himself. He nodded, holding out three of the tiny cabbage-like plants.

  “I’ve found the answer,” he told them. “At least, as much as I can for tonight. There are three sexes among the plants. One produces something like pollen, another a different kind of pollen, and the third seems to be equipped to incubate the seed. I don’t care if we cant return—Just get the radar working so I can call Earth.”

  Then he sighed, and his face settled into practical lines again. “I hope we don’t find infections here that attack the men, though. I’ll have to keep a careful check on all the cuts we got from the crash.”

  “There was a city there,” Chuck told him, trying to puzzle out the new man the doctor had become. “Real houses, though they’re as old as the hills.”

  Sokolsky nodded. “I thought so. But I had my luck with the plants, so I left the city for you. There’s enough here for all of us. And—you know, boys, it’s been two years since I lost my head over anything. I’m glad I did.”

  Steele was reaching for his helmet as they came through the air lock and his face was shocked and worried. He made no comment, but jerked a thumb and preceded them along the passage toward the mess hall.

  Inside, the others were already assembled with Vance at the head of the table. He looked up, and his hand went down to his lap, to come up with a big .45 automatic.

  Chuck laid the shard on the table, pretending not to see the gun. “There were ruins, sir—really. This came from them.”

  There was a sudden stir among the others as they bent forward, but Vance’s free hand picked the shard up and set it aside.

  “Very well,” he said, in a voice that seemed ready to break into brittle pieces. “There were ruins. We’ll overlook your disobedience this time. But from now on, there can be no exception to the rules and orders. I’m proclaiming absolute, military rule—enforceable by the death penalty, if needs be.”

  He sat back, his hand caressing the gun, while, stunned silence fell over the others.

  CHAPTER 10

  Marooned on Mars

  Chuck’s eyes turned from one to another, looking for some explanation. Their bruised faces were blank, and their scratched and dirt-covered hands remained motionless. As one, they sat waiting for Vance to go on, to laugh at his own joke.

  But he didn’t laugh. He waited with them, until he was sure that he’d have to speak first Then his hand reached out slowly for the porcelain shard. “Maybe this is important,” he said slowly. “I don’t know. Maybe Sokolsky’s three-sexed plants are more important than we are. And maybe we’re dead, and this is a hell of our own imagining. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I’m not pretending to know anything.

  “But while you’ve been learning something, I’ve been hearing it all. That’s why military law is necessary.”

  He tossed the automatic out onto the middle of the table. “I don’t feel like a leader. If someone else is better, select him; or select me, if you must. But whoever leads from now on will have to keep that as a symbol that his word is final. We can’t waste time on argument or divided authority. We can’t have men staying ten minutes for any reason when they’re ordered to return in five. There’s the gun—I want everyone who’s willing to accept the responsibility to put his hand on it, and we’ll take a vote on who it will be.”

  He waited again, but no hands moved. Finally he reached out and put his own hand on the automatic again; there was no other offer. Vance sighed, and pulled it back to him.

  “Very well. Tomorrow well go and look at the ruins. We need one day without any duties, even if it makes us feel guilty to shirk what we consider our dudes. And from there on, nobody can leave the ship without my permission. You’ll remove the radios from your suits when indoors, and you’ll call me before doing anything on your own, unless ifs work you’ve been assigned.

  “You see—it’s worse than we thought. You know about the broken girder, the ripped seam, the damaged goods. Some of you even realize we have the nearly impossible job of getting the ship—more than ten tons of it here—back on its fins. Most of you haven’t asked how we’ll straighten out the bent frame before we weld it, but it’s obvious we’ll have to do it by digging sand out from below some parts and jacking up others; probably cutting and rewelding.

  “I’ve been figuring out the time. Four of us will have to do at least one hundred days’ work here; part of the work can’t be done, except by those four, so the three remaining will have work for perhaps half the time. Rothman, Steele, Chuck and I know how to handle welders— and that means we have full-time jobs. We’re figuring on one hundred days’ work at twenty hours a day—-and we have to be done in less than ninety days.

  “Otherwise, we’re marooned here—and we can’t live until another chance comes for us to go back to Earth. That’s all.”

  He waited for an argument. Chuck looked at the others, and nodded slowly. Silently they agreed, one by one.

  Vance smiled suddenly, a weak, dead smile. He broke open the automatic and tossed the empty cartridge clip onto the table. “Good. If you’ll accept the idea, you obviously won’t need the threat that I used to drive home the seriousness of this. Go to bed, and well look at the ruins tomorrow.”

  He stood up slowly, took three steps forward, and collapsed onto the floor. Sokolsky was at his side at once.

  “Strain, fatigue, and loss of blood,” the doctor told them. “He didn’t tell you he cut an artery in his arm in the landing. Hell be all right with a little rest.”

  Chuck followed Steele out toward the little bunk room. He was slowly figuring out the fact that Vance had deliberately made one-man rule seem as unpleasant as he could so that they would object to it at once, if they wanted to, and that the captain now felt sure of their obedience. But he hadn’t figured some other things out.

  “What are our chances, Dick?” he asked. “Honestly.”

  Dick dropped slowly onto his hammock, and closed his eyes. His voice was almost as tired as that of Vance. “About one in a million. Chuck. Probably less. We’re marooned. We might as well face it. But we don’t have to take it without fighting back. Go to sleep.”

  Chuck barely beard the last words, because he was already following them. A whole Martian city, restored to life, wouldn’t ha
ve changed his actions.

  Breakfast was a hodgepodge affair—Ginger was following the orders not to do any work that day without knowing whether he was doing right or wrong, but determined to try. Everyone woke up when they could sleep no longer and stumbled out into the mess hall, where Ginger’s sign said: “Help Yourself.” Chuck was fairly early. He found-a can of protein-vitamin-mineral concentrate and sprinkled it onto some starchy substance in a bowl, figuring it would be a balanced meal. Surprisingly, the combination tasted good, and several others followed his example, though some simply made a quick salad out of vegetables from the gardens.

  Vance came tottering in, weak, but obviously back to his normal self. He grinned weakly at them. “Sorry I went West Point drama school on you, boys. Must have been out of my mind. But I still mean it. What’s fit to eat in here?”

  He followed Chuck’s suggestion, washing the food down with a cup of cold instant coffee. “How about the city you found? Who’s going along?”

  Everybody was going, it seemed. Vance motioned Chuck to lead. They came out of the ship into a late Martian morning. Around them, the sand was still as barren as before, and the little cup into which the ship had settled cut them off from the rest of the planet. The sky above was a deep purple, with two thin wisps of cloud in it.

  “We can breathe the air,” Steele commented. “That is, we can if well compress it enough and moisten it Right now, it’s so dry it’d suck the liquid out of your bodies in a few hours. The ozone layer they talked about seems to be farther up—and that’s lucky. We’ve got oxygen, nitrogen, and pretty much the same stuff as Earth here-only not enough of it”

  He turned around, showing the back of his suit. He’d been the last to leave, so no one had noticed it. But there were no tanks. Instead, a set of batteries and a pump was attached. “One for each suit back in the ship. I’ll couple them on later.”

  It was a help. The batteries were lighter and would last longer than the air tanks, and it would save their own oxygen.

  They came up to the top of the dune. Chuck caught his breath at the sight below. The plants were an spread out to the sun now, covering almost every square inch. There were no visible flowers, though Sokolsky insisted something similar was at the end of each leaf. But there was a peculiar beauty to the waxy sheen of the green leaves.

  Sokolsky went about, turning up the leaves, which promptly rolled into tight balls. He came back shaking his head. “Nothing like bugs. I was hoping I’d find some.”

  “Couldn’t this stuff be eaten?” Vance asked.

  Sokolsky shook his head. “It’s unlikely. I didn’t have much time but the tests I made indicate poisons in it that we aren’t used to. Anyhow, the leaves are dryer than facial tissues even if they do look succulent”

  Rothman pointed toward the north. “I saw a canal up that way about thirty miles. But there was a lot of desert between here and there. Where’s this city, Chuck?”

  Seen in the clear light of day, even by the weak and distant sun that could only raise the temperature to about seventy degrees at midday, the city looked less imposing than at night From a few hundred feet, it seemed nothing but a mass of stone.

  Chuck led the way into it There were perhaps three hundred buildings, all obviously once single-story, and most of them of only one room. The buildings had been made of dressed stone, fitted without cement, but many of them still stood. One, with a sloping stone roof, was almost intact

  The floors were of the greatest interest Many were inlaid in little colored squares, like a mosaic. Some had geometrical designs, and one showed odd animals, something like a cat-headed buffalo. But toward the center of the city, where the house with the roof stood, they stumbled on the prize treasure of them all.

  Something that might -have been a tree was worked into the center. They cleaned some of the dirt and rubble away to examine it more closely, and Sokolsky let out a shout

  “Humanoid!”

  It was true enough. Standing around the tree were about a dozen creatures, each vaguely manlike. They carried themselves upright, with a rounded head, two arms, and two legs. Sokolsky pointed out that the elbow and knee joints were similar to those of men—a remarkable case of parallel evolution. “Probably didn’t look this much like us—all we’re seeing is silhouettes in rather bad art—but they are still more like us than you’d think. Look—is that a spear?”

  They studied it while Ginger took endless pictures, but couldn’t make up their minds. Lew drew out a knife from his tool pouch and started to dig out some of the mosaic.

  Vance stopped him. “Let it alone. If people have to vandalize this planet so that future generations who know more won’t have any real evidence, we’re not going to be the ones to start it. We can take back pictures, if we get back—but we won’t destroy the evidence.”

  There were no idols, or evidence of religion, unless the tree thing was worshiped. It might have been, though Lew thought that it was probably another geometrical design, showing some relationship among peoples or tribes.

  Nor was there any evidence of what had happened to the Martians; they might have vanished, or they might simply have moved on to other locations. Steele didn’t believe the last He pointed to the wear on the stones. “It must have been at least ten million years ago when this was built. That’s hard stone, and there’s only the thin wind and sand to wear it away. They must have died off. Maybe that basin over there held some of the last of their water, and when it went from the atmosphere, they couldn’t adapt. ‘Gone with the snows of yesteryear’ would be more truth than poetry in their case.”

  Night was falling when they turned back. They knew now as much as they had known before, and no more, except that the original people might have looked vaguely human. But Vance had proved right. The day of rest had been more important than even the pressure of the work.

  Ginger broke down enough to tell them where a few precious canned steaks were hidden, and they made a sort of community picnic out of it, broiling them over the little hot plates. The tomatoes and lettuce from the gardens hadn’t been seriously hurt, and the salad was officially tossed by Vance.

  Rothman alone seemed to have gained no lift from the day. He moved off, still worrying, toward the control room. Apparently the only trace of a sense of humor in his make-up came out only under extreme danger. Chuck followed. His own family had been on his mind more than he’d cared to let the others see, and the radar set might be repaired more easily than much of the rest of the equipment. After all, it wasn’t really work; electronics had always been a hobby.

  He found Rothman fussing over the communications set The man jerked up quickly, his dark face flushing faintly. Chuck looked at what he had been doing, and lifted his eyebrows.

  “No test instruments?” he asked.

  Rothman shrugged. “I worked my way through college— eight years of it—designing these things for a little electronics firm. You get a sixth sense about the inside of them, even if you can’t make them sit up and purr. You’ve lost one of those tubes—someday they’ll make them out of nothing but crystals—I’d say; what do you think?”

  Chuck wondered how many other talents the man held in check, but he simply nodded. “Maybe. Either that, or (here’s real trouble. I’ve been thinking about it. If the spare isn’t ruined, well soon know.”

  He located it, and could see no evidence of damage to the case in which it was so carefully packed. At better than $4,000 Earth price for the little thing, it should have been packed well. If it had been solid diamond, it couldn’t have been so precious. Yet in his own rig, he was using something that could be picked up on Earth for a couple of dollars; the chief difference lay in the fact that his tube stood some four inches tall, while this took up less than half a cubic inch. Weight-saving cost money.

  He plugged it in with the little tool needed to handle it, and cut on power. The indicator light flashed on, and a hum began to come from the small speaker.

  “Eros calling,” he repeated half a d
ozen times, and switched to receive. It would be several minutes before the message could reach Earth and return, even at the 186,000 miles per second light and radio waves traveled. “Any message to send?”

  Rothman nodded. “Just that I’m fine—my wife…”

  He saw the surprise in Chuck’s eyes, and nodded again. “I got married three days before take-off; I didn’t lie to the Commission when I said I was single. She insisted on it I suppose it doesn’t matter now who knows.” 91

  Vance found them there just as the answering signal came through with its frantic excitement. They’d been given up as dead. Chuck sent quick assurances and a brief report before demanding connection to the Space Commission. Then he turned the instrument over to Vance, who began reeling off facts and figures. They were in luck—there was almost no static.

  The others were doing odd jobs; now that some of the shock and fatigue were gone, they couldn’t be expected to escape the work completely when they couldn’t turn around without seeing something that desperately needed doing. But they were carefully avoiding physical effort as much as possible. Vance had apparently decided to accept the compromise.

  The captain came down later, to join them in (he mess hall, which was slowly being turned into the chief room. A couple of the inflatable plastic chairs had been set up, and the table had been folded back into the wall. Nothing could make the stem, utilitarian walls of the ship look like home. No room which is designed so that any one of its six walls may be the deck can be given a homey touch. But it was better than the narrow alcoves where their hammocks were set up.

  Vance shook his head. “They’re trying to figure out the margin I have with the fuel left. It would take us two days to get an approximation, but they’ll let us know tonight.”

  He dropped onto a bench with the fatigue back on his face, though not as badly as the day before. Sokolsky made a gesture toward him and then checked it Vance would probably worry more in bed than out, his expression said.