No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (18 page)

Owen was on his hands and knees in the dust of the street, like a trapped animal, with one foot fast in the broken bottom step.

With a yell, Jeff launched himself in a flying tackle even as Owen’s foot came free.

Warned by the yell, Owen twisted to meet him, flung up an arm that broke the swing of Jeff’s gun. Thudding into the man, Jeff felt his arm go numb, felt the gun fly from suddenly limp fingers.

A fist caught him in the jaw, rocked him back against the porch. In front of him, Owen was scrambling to his feet, hands reaching for the guns that dangled from his hips.

Desperately, Jeff leaped, good arm swinging. The blow caught Owen in the side of the head and staggered him. Jeff followed, left fist punching as Owen clawed for steel.

One of Owen’s guns was out and coming up. Jeff swung again, stepping in fast, putting every ounce of power into the blow. It connected with a thud that snapped Owen’s head back between his shoulders, sent him rocking on his heels against the hitching rail. A gun blasted and Jeff felt a sharp snarl of pain slash across his leg.

Owen was against the rail, groggy, weaving. Jeff stepped forward and his leg screamed with agony. The gun came up again, shaky, uncertain.

Jeff’s fist lashed out, straight to the chin. Owen slumped like a sack, gun tumbling from his hand.

Hanging onto the railing, Jeff stooped and picked it up, straightened up again, still clutching the rail. He couldn’t move, he knew. He had to hang to that rail.

He lifted his head, stared dully at the Silver Dollar. The place was a hum of voices, but there was no shooting. Light still spilled from the windows.

His head spun and he fought to keep his grip. But the railing seemed to writhe and twist and his hand slipped off. He knew that he was plunging to the street, flat on his face.

He awoke choking and coughing, clawing at his throat. Through bleary eyes he saw a glass half full of whisky in a fist before his face.

He fought his way to a sitting posture and looked around. Men were standing in a circle, among them a man with a bearded face.

“How about it, Dan?” he asked, his voice raspy.

“It’s all right, kid,” said Dan. “Slemp coughed up his guts. We got enough evidence to hang them all.”

“But you,” asked Jeff. “How did you get away with it?”

Dan laughed. “Slemp was the only one that ever saw me close. I was too busy on the ranch to spend much time in town. And then the beard fooled them, would have fooled even Slemp. And no one pays much attention to a floating drunk. I figured what the setup was and I meant to get the evidence. But you almost upset my plans. When you came barging in this afternoon, I nearly came dealing myself a hand when Churchill jumped you …”

“Lucky thing for me,” said Churchill, “that you didn’t.”

“Only thing,” said Dan, “I wasn’t even sure, myself. That scar of yours.”

Jeff’s hand went to his cheek, “Got it the week after you left home,” he said. “Bronc bucked me off into a barbed wire fence.”

Message from Mars

Originally named “Martian Lilies,” this story, which was apparently written in late 1939 or early 1940, was rejected by
Amazing Stories
,
Astounding Science Fiction,
and another magazine not named in Cliff’s journals before being accepted by
Planet Stories
late in 1942. The magazine paid Cliff a hundred dollars, and the story appeared its fall 1943 issue. In a way, readers can view this story as a reversal of the plot of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds,
as well as an extension of the idea underlying the Superman comic books (I know Cliff read Wells, but there’s no evidence that he ever read the Superman comics). But the most important thing about “Message from Mars” is that it contains, appropriately, the seeds of the later Simak novel
All Flesh Is Grass.

—dww

I

“You’re crazy, man,” snapped Steven Alexander, “you can’t take off for Mars alone!”

Scott Nixon thumped the desk in sudden irritation.

“Why not?” he shouted. “One man can run a rocket. Jack Riley’s sick and there are no other pilots here. The rocket blasts in fifteen minutes and we can’t wait. This is the last chance. The only chance we’ll have for months.”

Jerry Palmer, sitting in front of the massive radio, reached for a bottle of Scotch and slopped a drink into the tumbler at his elbow.

“Hell, Doc,” he said, “let him go. It won’t make any difference. He won’t reach Mars. He’s just going out in space to die like all the rest of them.”

Alexander snapped savagely at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You drink too much.”

“Forget it, Doc,” said Scott. “He’s telling the truth. I won’t get to Mars, of course. You know what they’re saying down in the base camp, don’t you? About the bridge of bones. Walking to Mars over a bridge of bones.”

The old man stared at him. “You have lost faith? You don’t think you’ll go to Mars?”

Scott shook his head. “I haven’t lost my faith. Someone will get there … sometime. But it’s too soon yet. Look at that tablet, will you!”

He waved his hand at a bronze plate set into the wall.

“The roll of honor,” said Scott, bitterly. “Look at the names. You’ll have to buy another soon. There won’t be room enough.”

One Nixon already was on that scroll of bronze. Hugh Nixon, fifty-fourth from the top. And under that the name of Harry Decker, the man who had gone out with him.

The radio blurted suddenly at them, jabbering, squealing, howling in anguish.

Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.

“No. No. No come. Danger.”

Scott turned toward the window, stared up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.

What was the use of keeping hope alive? Hope that Hugh might have reached Mars, that someday the Martian code would bring some word of him.

Hugh had died … like all the rest of them. Like those whose names were graven in the bronze there on the wall. The maw of space had swallowed him. He had flown into the face of silence and the silence was unbroken.

The door of the office creaked open, letting in a gust of chilly air. Jimmy Baldwin shut the door behind him and looked at them vacantly.

“Nice night to go to Mars,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be up here, Jimmy,” said Alexander gently. “You should be down at the base, tending to your flowers.”

“There’re lots of flowers on Mars,” said Jimmy. “Maybe someday I’ll go to Mars and see.”

“Wait until somebody else goes first,” said Palmer bitterly.

Jimmy turned about, hesitantly, like a man who had a purpose but had forgotten what it was. He moved slowly toward the door and opened it.

“I got to go,” he said.

The door closed heavily but the chill did not vanish from the room. For it wasn’t the chill of the mountain’s peak, but another kind of chill … a chill that had walked in with Jimmy Baldwin and now refused to leave.

Palmer tipped the bottle, sloshed the whiskey in the glass.

“The greatest pilot that ever lived,” he said. “Now look at him!”

“He still holds the record,” Alexander reminded the radio operator. “Eight times to the Moon and still alive.”

The accident had happened as Jimmy’s ship was approaching Earth on that eighth return trip. A tiny meteor had struck the hull, drilling a sharp-cut hole. It had struck Andy Mason, Jimmy’s best friend, squarely between the eyes.

The cabin had been filled with the scream of escaping air, had turned cold with the deadly breath of space and frost crystals had danced in front of Jimmy’s eyes.

Somehow Jimmy had patched the hole in the hull, had reached Earth in a smashing rocket drive, knowing he had little air, that every minute was a borrowed eternity.

Most pilots would have killed themselves or blown up their ships in that reckless race for Earth, but Jimmy, ace of all the space-men of his day, had made it.

But he had walked from the ship with a blank face and babbling lips. He still lived at the rocket camp because it was home to him. He puttered among his flowers. He watched the rockets come and go without a flutter of expression. And everyone was kind to him, for in his face they read a fate that might be theirs.

“All of us are crazy,” said Scott. “Every one of us. Myself included. That’s why I’m blasting off alone.”

“I refuse to let you go,” said Alexander firmly.

Scott rested his knuckles on the desk. “You can’t stop me. I have my orders to make the trip. Whether I go alone or with an assistant pilot makes no difference. That rocket blasts on time, and I’m in it when it goes.”

“But it’s foolishness,” protested Alexander. “You’ll go space-mad. Think of the loneliness!”

“Think of the coordinates,” snapped Scott. “Delay the blast-off and you have to work out a set of new ones. Days of work and then it’ll be too late. Mars will be too far away.”

Alexander spread his hands. “All right then. I hope you make it.”

Scott turned away but Alexander called him back.

“You’re sure of the routine?”

Scott nodded. He knew the routine by heart. So many hours out to the Moon, landing on the Moon to take on extra fuel, taking off for Mars at an exact angle at a certain minute.

“I’ll come out and see you off,” said Alexander. He heaved himself up and slid into a heavy coat.

Palmer shouted after Scott. “So long, big boy. It was nice knowing you.”

Scott shrugged. Palmer was a little drunk and very bitter. He’d watched them go too long. His nerves were wearing out.

Stars shone like hard, bright jewels in the African sky. A sharp wind blew over the summit of Mt. Kenya, a wind that whined among the ice-bound rocks and bit deep into the flesh. Far below blazed the lights of the base camp, hundreds of feet down the slope from the main rocket camp here atop the mountain set squarely on the Earth’s equator.

The rasping voice of a radio newscaster came from the open door of the machine shop.

“New York,” shrieked the announcer. “Austin Gordon, famous African explorer, announced this afternoon he will leave soon for the Congo valley, where he will investigate reports of a strange metallic city deep in the interior. Natives, bringing reports of the discovery out of the jungle, claim the city is inhabited by strange metallic insects.”

Someone slammed the door and the voice was cut off.

Scott hunched into the wind to light a cigarette.

“The explorers are going crazy, too,” he said.

Probably, later on in the program the announcer would have mentioned Scott Nixon and Jack Riley would blast off in a few minutes in another attempt to reach Mars. But it would be well along in the program and it wouldn’t take much time. Ten years ago Mars had been big news. Today it rated small heads in the press, slight mention on the air.

But the newscaster would have been wrong about Jack Riley. Jack Riley lay in the base camp hospital with an attack of ptomaine. Only an hour before Jack had clasped Scott’s hand and grinned at him and wished him luck.

He needed luck. For in this business a man didn’t have even an inside chance.

Scott walked toward the tilted rocket. He could hear the crunch of Alexander’s feet as the man moved with him.

“It won’t be new to you,” Alexander was saying, “you’ve been to the Moon before.”

Yes, he had been to the Moon three times and he was still alive. But, then, he had been lucky. Your luck just simply didn’t hold forever. There was too much to gamble on in space. Fuel, for one thing. Men had experimented with fuel for ten years now and still the only thing they had was a combination of liquid oxygen and gasoline. They had tried liquid hydrogen but that had proved too cold, too difficult to confine, treacherous to handle, too bulky because of its low density. Liquid oxygen could be put under pressure, condensed into little space. It was safe to handle, safe until it combined with gasoline and then it was sheer death to anything that got within its reach.

Of course, there had been some improvements. Better handling of the fuel, for instance. Combustion chambers stood up better now because they were designed better. Feed lines didn’t freeze so readily now as when the first coffins took to space. Rocket motors were more efficient, but still cranky.

But there were other things. Meteors, for one, and you couldn’t do much about them. Not until someone designed a screen, and no one had. Radiations were another. Space was full of radiations and, despite the insulating jacket of ozone some of them seeped through.

Scott climbed through the rocket valve and turned to close it. He hesitated for a moment, drinking in the smell and sight of Earth. There wasn’t much that one could see. The anxious face of Alexander, the huddled shadows that were watching men, the twinkling base camp lights.

With a curse at his own weakness, Scott slammed the valve lock, twirled it home.

Fitting himself into the shock absorbent chair, he fastened the straps that held him. His right foot reached out and found the trip that would fire the rockets. Then he lifted his wrist in front of his eyes and watched the second hand of the watch.

Ten seconds. Eight. Now five. The hand was creeping up, ticking off the time. It rested on the zero mark and he slammed down his foot. Cruel weight smashed down upon him, driving his body back into the padded chair. His lungs were flattened, the air driven from them. His heart thumped. Nausea seized him, and black mists swam before his eyes. He seemed to be slipping into a midnight chasm and he cried out weakly. His body went limp, sagging in the chair. Twin streams of blood trickled from his nose and down his lip.

He was far out in space when he struggled back to consciousness. For a time he did not stir. Lying in the chair, it took long minutes to realize where he was. Gradually his brain cleared and his eyes focused and made impressions on his senses. Slowly he became aware of the lighted instrument board, of the rectangle of quartz that formed the vision panel. His ears registered the silence that steeped the ship, the weird, deathly silence of outer space.

Weakly he stirred and sat upright, his eyes automatically studying the panel. The fuel pressure was all right, atmospheric pressure was holding, speed was satisfactory.

He leaned back in the chair and waited, resting, storing his strength. Automatically his hand reached up and wiped the blood from his lips and chin.

II

He was in space. Headed for the Moon and from there for Mars. But even the realization of this failed to rouse him from the lethargy of battered body and tortured brain.

Taking off in a rocket was punishment. Severe, terrible punishment. Only men who were perfect physical specimens could attempt it. An imperfect heart would simply stop under the jarring impact of the blast-off.

Someday rockets would be perfected. Someday rockets would rise gently from the Earth, shaking off Earth’s gravity by gradual application of power rather than by tremendous thrusts that kicked steel and glass and men out into space.

But not yet, not for many years. Perhaps not for many generations. For many years men would risk their lives in blasting projectiles that ripped loose from the Earth by the sheer savagery of exploding oxygen and gasoline.

A moan came from the rear of the ship, a stifled pitiful moan that brought Scott upright in the chair, tearing with nervous hands at the buckles of his belt.

With belt loosened, body tensed, he waited for a second, hardly believing he had heard the sound. It came again, a piteous human cry.

Scott leaped to his feet, staggered under the lack of gravitation. The rocket was coasting on momentum now and, while its forward motion gave it a simulation of gravity, enough so a man could orient himself, there was in actuality no positive gravity center in the shell.

A bundle of heavy blankets lay in a corner formed by a lashed down pile of boxes … and the bundle was moving feebly. With a cry in his throat, Scott leaped forward and tore the blankets aside. Under them lay a battered man, crumpled , with a pool of blood soaking into a blanket that lay beneath him. Scott lifted the body. The head flopped over and he stared down into the vacant, blood-streaked face of Jimmy Baldwin.

Jimmy’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Scott squatted on his heels, wild thoughts hammering in his head. Jimmy’s eyes opened again and regarded the pilot. He raised a feeble hand in greeting. The lips moved, but Jimmy’s voice was faint.

“Hello, Scott.”

“What are you doing here?” Scott demanded fiercely.

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy weakly. “I don’t know. I meant to do something, but I forgot.”

Scott rose and took a bottle of water from a case. Wetting his handkerchief, he bathed the bloodied face. His hands ran over Jimmy’s body but found no broken bones. It was a wonder the man hadn’t been killed outright. Some more Baldwin luck!

“Where are we, Scott?” Jimmy asked.

“We’re in space,” said Scott. “We’re going out to Mars.” No use of telling him anything but the truth.