The Best of Lester del Rey

He sighed softly, a faint sound in the tiny cabin, and his breath stirred the dust that lay everywhere. In four centuries, a man can learn not to think, but feelings and emotions survive. He was tired beyond any power of the rejuvenation treatments to remedy. His shoulders sagged slightly, confirming the age that the gray in his hair implied. But his eyes were older still as he swung about to open the inner lock of the ship.

Stendal was a middle-aged man, but some of the same age and fatigue lay on his face when he dropped his aspirator helmet and slumped limply into a seat. His plain uniform as Assistant Coordinator of Terra was covered with dirt and grime. He grinned faintly at Zeke and pulled a thermos of coffee out of its niche.

“So the Thirty-four is coming back?” Zeke asked quietly.

He had no need of the other’s nod, though. When they’d finally located him at the Rejuvenation Center and rushed him to the rocket field, he’d suspected. Only a matter of extreme urgency could interrupt a man’s return to youth. The messengers had been uninformative, but he had been sure, once they told him Stendal was waiting on Mars. They must have been keeping it restricted to the top administrators. Zeke’s eyes went back to the dirt on the man’s uniform.

“Top secret,” Stendal confirmed. “So hush-hush that I came to do the janitor work here. Now it’s all yours. The robots and I managed to get it into a reasonable facsimile of repaired condition. Oof! I could use a week’s sleep, but I’ve got to get back earthside at once…. Sorry to interrupt the rejuvenation, Zeke.”

Zeke shrugged. Once, when the rejuvenation was new and men stood in line for days to keep their appointment, it might have mattered. Now there’d be a cancellation he could replace. Over 15 percent of the population was refusing treatment—and some of the canceling men were those only reaching their first touch of age. Each year, less of the population seemed to find life worth renewing.

“How’d you find out she was coming?” he asked. “After all, she’s fifty years overdue.”

Stendal tossed the thermos into a disposal chute and reached for one of Zeke’s cigarettes. “Centaurus automatic signal must still be working. Nigel, at the Bureau, got a series of pips showing something coming this way faster than light. That’s the only ship we have out, so it must be her, or…”

He let it hang unfinished, but Zeke knew what he was thinking. It was either the Thirty-Four or another race coming with a ship that could exceed light speed. Sudden adrenalin shot through him, and he straightened. After all, the ship was long overdue. He wished the ship and the men no ill, but—

“No use getting up false hopes,” Stendal cut into his thoughts. “The captain was a pretty determined sort, as

I remember him. Maybe he had trouble. And I’ll have trouble if I don’t get back. I’ll leave you a robot, in case anything needs more repairs. Think you can still run this setup, Zeke?”

Zeke snorted. He’d spent tune enough at Marsport, first as head of communications, and finally as director of the whole Star Ship project, while they built the great ships and sent them out as fast as they could come’off the ways. Forty ships during half a century, each costing over four billion dollars. And the Thirty-Four was the last one out. All the rest had come back to report failure in this final quest for new frontiers.

They buckled on their aspirator helmets and went out through the locks. Stendal waved curtly and headed toward his own rocket, calling three of the waiting robots with him and sending the fourth toward the broken ruin of the administration building. Zeke watched Stendal’s rocket take off and disappear. Then he turned for a final look over the wrecked field.

Mars was already wiping out all traces of this second race that had come boiling out from Earth, bent for the stars. Marsport had been young and booming when Zeke had come there first, three and a half centuries ago. Two centuries later, when the star ships first began to come straggling back, and they shifted him to Earth to head General Traffic, the sand was just starting to creep over the outer buildings.

Those structures were gone now, vanished into the desert, with only this single building maintained after a fashion in faint hope the last ship would return. The frame shacks and hydroponic quonsets that had hidden the ancient Martian ruins were rotted long ago; there was only the hint of a foundation here and there to show they ever existed. In a century or so there would be no evidence that Mars had ever felt the marching feet of men, except for the scraps of the returned ships that might last a few millennia longer.

Zeke sighed again, and headed toward the building.

Then his eyes went to the horizon, where the piled stones and pitted pylon of beryl steel still stood, marking what had been the unknown and apparently unknowable race of Mars, dead perhaps ten million years before. Once that race must have spread its structures across the whole planet, but now there were only such traces as this, useless to even the archeologists. All the elaborate designs on them might have had significance once, but no man would ever decode them. There was no hint as to their nature, or where the race had vanished—or why.

He entered the lock of the building, with the robot dutifully at his heels, and surveyed it glumly. Only the one room, housing the great space-destroying ultrawave communicators, had been put in order. But most of the sand and dust was gone, and it was livable enough for a while. He checked to see that the communicator was working before walking over to the single window and staring out at the Martian ruins again.

Beside him, the robot stirred uneasily. “Orders?” it questioned.

Zeke turned back reluctantly from the window. “No orders, Ozin. We’re on Mars, where men have given up dominion. You’re as free as I am. Do what you like.” Ozin stirred again, worn metal protesting at its lack of usefulness, its queer, almost intelligent mind trying to resolve the problem presented by Zeke’s words. But even this final robot, the last model before men abandoned the idea of robots, could not handle that. “Orders?” it repeated.

Zeke gave up. “Take my ship up and house it behind the building, out of the way, then. After that, you can cut off until I call you.”

The robot wasted no words in acknowledgement, but turned slowly and headed out, its metal body clumping along as woodenly as Zeke’s mind was working. The lock hissed softly, and a trace of the stale, dessicated air of Mars came in. Then Ozin appeared around the arc of the wall, heading toward the rocket. Zeke watched it enter, saw the shiplock close, and shut his eyes at the deep blue flame of the exhaust from the unbaffled tubes.

Sand kicked up, spurting out and grating against the walls of the station wing, swishing against the pylon of the lost Martians. For a minute, dust hung in the air. But it settled back quickly now, to show an unchanged scene. Zeke heard the ship land again behind the building.

He reached automatically for a cigarette, wondering idly if the repaired building’s aspirators would take even that much added load in their labor of making a decent atmosphere out of Mars’ thin air. For a second, he fiddled with the ultrawave set. The signal was coming through from Earth, indicating that they were already quietly beaming it out to where the Thirty-Four could pick it up. It was the same dull, insipid news Zeke had heard for too many decades, though it might be interesting to men who had been gone from Earth for over two centuries. There was no other signal to indicate that they were within calling distance, however.

He went to the window again, to watch the slow sinking of the sun that was reddening a distant sandstorm, until it finally crept below the horizon. With an abruptness that was typical of the planet, darkness fell. The stars seemed to leap into the sky, with Earth standing out among them. He frowned at that, realizing that he was the only man who would be seeing it. All the others were home on the planet.

The skylight was filthy, but he found a battered bench that would stand his weight and began working the dust and grime from the glass. The stars were clearer through that. A few hundred years, hadn’t changed them noticeably, and he picked them out—hot points that barely flickered in the thin air of Mars. Jupiter was in view, and he knew where all the other useless planets should be, though he could not see them.

He grimaced faintly at that, remembering his life as a boy when men had dreamed that each new world might contain some rare treasure—or even intelligence to meet and compete with man. None had panned out, though. Mercury was too hot, Venus was a roiling dust-bowl under foul, poisonous layers of atmosphere, Mars worn beyond usefulness, and the other planets too cold and forbidding, except as possible stepping stones to the stars that lay farther out.

Chenery had found the trick to beat light speed when Zeke was still a callow thirty, and Marsport had sprung into life; the planet had made an ideal takeoff point for ships which Earth could not permit hi her own atmosphere because of the dangerous radiation of their exhausts.

There’d been Centaurus and Sirius, and the thousands of suns beyond, some with planets and some