Andre Norton (ed) (35 page)

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 oncel
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!
 
Goshl"

"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.
'Top!
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 bum, 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—deepfreeze 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 be-
fore. "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 un-crated 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: