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—
“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 have 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.
