beginning to feel like a machine, with no human emotions left.
It had seemed romantic, back on the Moon, to get into a ship and sail off to Mars,-the first human beings to visit another planet. He’d even dreamed about finding life there—maybe even intelligent life. Before he ever thought he had a chance to go on the expedition, he’d become involved with the puzzle of how men could communicate with other intelligent races, and had spent the best part of a summer vacation in studying all that had been written on it.
But that seemed flat now. His muscles ached from straining over the delicate workmanship. His back was weary with tension”, and his mind wanted to go around in a continual circle. Sometimes he felt older than any man on the ship—and then he realized that the others were feeling the same.
When he did fall asleep, it was only for an hour. Then some bit of a dream woke him up. Something about his father…
With sudden determination, he dressed quickly and went toward the control room. Technically, he had to get permission to use the radar communications set, but all rules had been dropped in the emergency. He snapped it on, coupling his built-in microphone to the set and began calling his father on Moon City.
Some of the tension he felt was in the operator’s voice. They must have been as worried as the men on the ship—or perhaps they felt worse, since they were powerless to help. He waited impatiently, until his father’s voice answered.
It was a calm, quiet voice. There was the strength and understanding in it he had always found. “Hello, Chuck. What’s the trouble, boy?”
Chuck felt like crying as his muscles relaxed slowly. He choked out the facts, stumbling over the words. Then he waited while the message sped to Earth, his father considered, and the answer came back—they were far enough away that even the speed of radar couldn’t cover the distance in less than minutes.
“Kid, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve run into the oldest trouble an engineer has,” his father told him. “Take a look to make sure all your power cables are hooked up. I remember I spent two weeks on a job once, and only got the answer when one of the cleaning women pointed out…”
But Chuck wasn’t listening. He was across the room, staring into the open panel. Lying curled up in one comer, under a maze of wiring, the unattached cable connection stared back at him accusingly!
He couldn’t remember signing off or thanking his father, though he must have done it. His next memory was of shaking Captain Vance awake, and yelling for Lew. By then, the whole ship was clustered around him, trying to make sense of his words.
Three hour’s later the meters indicated that the panel was working according to specifications.
Rothman made a check, and Steele and Vance rechecked. Everything seemed perfect.
“Looks fine,” Rothman told them. “You boys have done as well as anyone could—better than anyone except the engineer who figured this out in the first place. But until we make an actual landing, we can’t know if it’s perfect. If we’re lucky, well get down in one piece; when we see how it operates we’ll know enough to correct it if it needs it.”
He moved cautiously to the controls and fed a short burst of power into the jets. He nodded slowly, the frown still on his face. “If the gyroscopes were trustworthy…”
He let it hang there. Then he grinned. “Anyway, let’s have a celebration. How about it. Captain?”
Chuck went back to his routine duties, and the regular watches were continued again. Ahead, Mars continued to grow in size, though the spinning of the ship made it impossible to see any detail. The gyroscope wheel was turning over very slowly, cutting the spin down, until they would again be weightless, but Vance was putting no strain on it.
Chuck waited until the ship ceased spinning before he went back to the control room. Here the planet shone ahead, big and red in the near distance. There was air in the control room again, and he heard his breath whistle out sharply.
The markings on the surface stood out plainly. Whether they were “canals” or something else, there was no way of knowing. Still, his eyes proved that die Lunar observatory’s photographs had been right They weren’t as straight as the maps had shown them once, but there was nothing like them on either the Moon or Earth.
It could be intelligence, he told himself. Maybe there had been enough atmosphere for intelligence to develop and to start a civilization. Egypt had built pyramids against a gravity two and a half times as great—and China had erected the Great Wall that still stretched across thousands of miles.
What would they find: perhaps there would be no life of any intelligence, or perhaps ruins to show that intelligence had lost its battle with the vanishing air and water. Yet he could hope that somehow some of it had survived.
Steele had come up behind him and was looking out too. The man’s big chest lifted in a slow sigh; he shook his bead at Chuck. “It’s been too long since there was any real atmosphere. Except for a thin, weak dribble of it. Mars couldn’t hold her air. She was too small and light,” he muttered, as if reading Chuck’s mind. “But it’s hard to be scientific when you look at that. I keep thinking of strange people coming out to help us. Maybe I should be writing poetry instead of taking up atomic engineering. Well, we’ll know all about it tomorrow.”
“And if there are people?” Chuck asked.
Steele sighed again. “I don’t know. Maybe war. Maybe peace. When I was a kid, I heard tales from my grandmother that didn’t make me think much of people—-stories she’d heard from the days when my race were slaves. But. don’t let anybody tell you that men are rotten, boy; they’ve come a long way. I think it will be up to the Martians. If they’re savages, they’ll hate us, and fear us, maybe. You can’t make friends with people who are afraid of you.”
Then he grinned, shaking off his mood. “We’re talking nonsense. Chuck. We’ll be lucky if we find anything as advanced as insects down there. Let’s get back to work on the gardens.”
Chuck was dreaming of fairylike Martians coming out to welcome him with wreaths in one hand and swords in the other when, the next afternoon, the faint motion of the ship turning over to direct its jets at Mars awakened him.
He gobbled down a hasty breakfast from a ration can and plastic bag, and headed toward the control room. He hesitated outside, and Vance motioned him in. Only the captain, the pilot and Lew were there.
The screen above the controls showed the surface rushing up to them, growing as they watched. Rothman was busy with his calculator, and there was a trace of sweat on his forehead. Vance sat at the controls, as cool as ever, until Rothman finished and moved for the seat. Then the captain pulled two of the remaining three seats together and motioned Chuck into one.
The seats swung back to form horizontal shock cushions, while the controls slid out until Lew and Rothman could drop their hands onto them easily. Vance adjusted a throat microphone that was coupled into an overhead speaker. “One minute… thirty seconds… fifteen… ten… five… four… three… two… BLAST!”
‘The pressure of acceleration was easier to take in the carefully built seats. It hit at them, but their eyes remained glued to the screens. Chuck felt a groan slip from his lips.
The ship wasn’t steady. The point of ground at which Rothman was aiming wobbled, and the ship listed from side to side. They could almost feel the control slipping out of the pilot’s hands.
Rothman tapped the levers again, harder this time, fighting against the slipping of the ship. Then one of his hands reached against the savage pressure to a switch. “The instrument readings!” he gasped. “When we get down well figure out the trouble.”
Again he increased the acceleration against the speed, until the meter above registered five and a half gravities. Chuck’s eyeballs seemed to burst, and he could barely see the screen. The ship was slowing now.
“Free fall?” Vance’s hoarse voice asked from the
speaker.
Rothman made no answer, but his fingers suddenly cut off the rocket blast. There was a high, thin whistle - from outside to show they were in atmosphere.
Then they were falling free, trying to correct their motion with the tiny steering-vanes on the stubby wings.
CHAPTER 8
