One in 300 (19 page)

 

 

"Where's Sammy?" I demanded.

 

 

"At the stores." She pushed back her disheveled hair and straightened
herself abruptly as if to shake the fright out of herself. "He can't
always be around. Glad to see you, Bill."

 

 

"Has this sort of thing happened often?"

 

 

She shrugged. "All the time, more or less. Not that exactly, but something
like it."

 

 

"But why don't the rest of you gang up on Morgan?"

 

 

She shrugged again. "We have, occasionally. He always gets his own back.
So generally we don't."

 

 

I exploded. "For heaven's sake! Morgan's just a cheap would-be tough guy.
He can't build himself up into a menace unless you let him."

 

 

"Not," said Leslie patiently, "if you happen to be stronger than he is.
We're not."

 

 

"Two of you are.

 

 

"If there're two around. You don't know much about the ordinary, typical
child bully, do you, Bill? I do. He doesn't do anything when he isn't
going to get away with it. Little Jimmy comes home crying, and Johnny
gets a beating. Next day Johnny takes it out of little Jimmy. And this
time little Jimmy knows better than to come home crying and blame it
on Johnny. That's Morgan -- a naughty boy, cruel, selfish, and petty,
grown up physically but not mentally. He likes people to be afraid of
him. He has to show he's the boss. He -- "

 

 

I shook my head brusquely. "If that's all we'll soon knock it out of him."

 

 

"There speaks," said Leslie ironically, "the bigger and stronger boy."

 

 

"I don't say you can beat consideration for others into someone who
doesn't have any. But you can make him toe the line, and that's what
Morgan will have to do."

 

 

"All right," said Leslie with a wry grin. "You try it."

 

 

"I will," I said. "Better have a look and make sure he hasn't broken
his skull."

 

 

"I sincerely hope he has."

 

 

Morgan came to as we looked at him. His eyes burned at me. He didn't have
to say anything. His look spoke his hate.

 

 

"Watch your step, Morgan," I warned him. "From what I hear it's no good
appealing to your better nature. So I'll just say the next time I find you
stepping out of line I'll beat the hell out of you. Now get back to work."

 

 

"Work!" he exclaimed, his voice quivering with impotent resentment.
Blood was streaming from his nose and he nursed his ankle theatrically.
"How can I -- "

 

 

"That's for you to find out," I said dispassionately. "If you're not up
in five seconds I'll kick you in the ribs."

 

 

He was up and around the other side of the storage pile well inside the
five seconds, limping dramatically but moving quickly all the same.

 

 

"That may be the way to treat him," Leslie admitted. "If he's scared of you,
you may be able to handle him. But don't count on it. I've had twisted kids
-- the more you beat Johnny, the more he had to beat little Jimmy. If you
half killed Johnny, that was just too bad for little Jimmy."

 

 

"What's the answer?"

 

 

She shook her head. "There isn't an answer. At least, the only answer's in
psychotherapy, and pretty well hidden at that."

 

 

"This time there was another answer," I said, frowning. "Not bringing
Morgan along. I should have found it."

 

 

She'd been arguing with me, but at that she changed sides at once. "You
couldn't know everything, Bill," she said warmly. "It's not your fault
that Morgan -- "

 

 

"If bringing Morgan here was a mistake," I said, "it was my mistake.
We argued about this before, back on Earth, and we didn't agree then.
You thought all the biggest, the best, the greatest, the cleverest people
should come along. I thought -- "

 

 

"You were right, Bill. You were supposed to pick ten decent, ordinary
people, and Morgan looked like a decent, ordinary person."

 

 

I nodded, and we didn't say any more about the matter. But I went on
thinking about it, as I went back with her and found where everybody
was and what they were doing, and what I was supposed to do.

 

 

The disaster had been a great chance to build a really worth-while
community. Back on Earth we'd always had the excuse that we couldn't
destroy the criminals, the insane, the psychotics, and the weak-minded,
and so we could never have a perfect community. When the disaster came,
we lieutenants had had that chance. We could just quietly ignore the
criminals, the insane, the psychotics, and the weak-minded, and make
sure that if we didn't have saints we had at least eliminated the worst
of the sinners. And I hadn't taken that chance, apparently.

 

 

Leslie obviously thought Morgan was bad through and through. I hoped
she was wrong.

 

 

In a way, all Mars, the whole future of the human race, depended on the
lieutenants' choice. Decent, reasonable people would build a decent,
reasonable community -- and it would go on being what it was at the start.
The future isn't what happens to happen, remote, untouchable. The future
is what we have now, what we do, what we want, what we are.

 

 

The future was Leslie, Sammy, the Austrian doctor at the hospital,
Alec Ritchie, the gum-chewing girl from Brooklyn -- and Morgan.

 

 

I hoped it was a good future. I wasn't going to judge Morgan on hearsay --
even on what Leslie said. I would give him every chance.

 

 

However, from what I'd seen I could only hope that a future with Morgan
in it would be a good future. I couldn't count on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

Things for the most part went fairly smoothly. It's not worth detailing
all the jobs Work Party 94 did; there were too many of them, and we rarely
saw much of anyone. It was a pity the different work parties couldn't
be taken into the planning more and given some over-all impression of
the work they were helping to do. People work better when they have a
clear purpose and a set goal.

 

 

But there was no time for explanations yet. It was a case of "Do this
until I tell you to stop," "Carry all that stuff from here to there,"
"Dig here until someone comes and tells you what else to do," and after a
long, backbreaking day of toil in which nothing obvious was accomplished,
a hot, stuffy, restless night in one of the corridors at the research
station.

 

 

The nights were worse than the days. As far as temperature was concerned,
there was no happy medium. Outside, it was below freezing; inside, the
ventilating system planned to cope with seven thousand people labored
hopelessly in its efforts to supply fresh, clean, cool air for three
times that number.

 

 

We split up at night. Sammy and Harry Phillips were in one of the annexes
with no less than ninety-eight other single men. Bessie was in one children's
dormitory, Jim Stowe in another -- the best accommodation naturally went to
growing children. Leslie's status had changed since I left the hospital.
She and I, the Stowes, and three other couples shared a tiny room which had
once been a reading room -- but nobody had any time for reading any more.
Betty and Morgan were with five other couples in another tiny room somewhere.

 

 

I wondered sometimes how the research station staff, the people who had
been there before the disaster, felt about this invasion. In those early
days I seldom met any of them to find out, or if I did I didn't know it.
For now the state of all of us was the same -- a pair of hands and an
aching back -- whether we had come in the spaceships or lifeships or
had been there all the time.

 

 

The main difficulty about the building situation was that the prevailing
conditions didn't allow of temporary housing at all. The gales would blow
tents and huts away. Light, flimsy structures weighed so little that it
didn't take much of a wind to tear them away from the loose surface of Mars.
When a house was built, the first essential was a deep, strong foundation.
There was clay lower down, but the surface was shifting sand or fine dust.

 

 

By this time, the people who had been there longer than we had were
telling us, the weather was really beginning to settle down. Though it
rained every day, they pointed out that at least it was fairly clean rain.

 

 

A lot of the dust was out of the atmosphere now, though there were strange,
beautiful effects at sunset and sunrise. The gales were not quite so fierce
as they had been at first, and there were hardly any whirlwinds any more.
Mars, after all, had few mountains, which was a factor tending toward
stability; the ground and the air above it were heated pretty evenly.
There were occasional calm periods. Sometimes Mars was like California
in June. But only sometimes.

 

 

I soon saw the reason for the simple one-piece garment that nearly everyone
wore. I saw it on my first day in the open.

 

 

Leslie and I were checking stores. Suddenly it was raining. There was no
warning at all. I looked quickly around for shelter.

 

 

"You don't shelter on Mars," Leslie told me. "Not from rain. It's the wind
that drives us under cover."

 

 

It was undoubtedly true that by the time we reached shelter we'd be too
wet to care. I wondered why I was so wet so quickly. Then I saw why.
I looked inquiringly at Leslie.

 

 

She nodded. "The rain's almost horizontal," she said. "It often is."

 

 

With only two fifths of Earth's gravity and much the same wind velocity,
the rain didn't so much pour down as sweep along like the wind. Used to
Earth, you felt it was raining up at you. It made raincoats ridiculous.
It went down your collar, up your legs, and in a matter of seconds you were
as wet as if you'd plunged into a lake.

 

 

Leslie went on working unconcernedly. I was just about to make some comment
when the rain stopped almost as quickly as it had begun. It had lasted only
about three minutes.

 

 

It stands to reason that a wind following a rainstorm is a wet wind.
It's blowing over wet ground, drying it, picking up water of evaporation.

 

 

Well, on Mars that doesn't follow. Conditions on Mars are so different
from those of Earth that you have to forget all your weather lore and
start again before you can predict anything. On Mars the wind wheels so
often that if there's one thing you can be reasonably certain about,
it's that you'll have a dry wind following rain. That is, a dry wind
sweeping in from an angle.

 

 

About sixty seconds after the last drops of rain had fallen, Leslie's legs
were dry. A few minutes later her clothes were only slightly damp.

 

 

"That's why you wear that outfit?" I asked. "It's loose and it dries
quickly?"

 

 

"Oh no," she said. "You'll see the reason for that in a minute." She looked
at my shirt and slacks and smiled faintly.

 

 

"It could be a reason," I said. "My pants are still wet at the knees."

 

 

It was half an hour before a real wind came. I staggered when it hit me.
Leslie, who knew how to brace herself, wasn't visibly perturbed.

 

 

"We take cover now," she said calmly, "if we can. If not, we lie down."

 

 

We fought our way to the pile of stores where the others were huddled.
All the way my trouser legs billowed and flapped like blankets left out in
a storm. Twice the wind dragged my shirt out from under my waistband.
It did it in little sharp tugs, an inch at a time. Before I could get my
shirt to stay put I had to tighten my belt until it was cutting me in two.

 

 

"You see why we wear a one-piece suit?" said Leslie breathlessly, as we
joined the other members of 94 in the shelter of two head-high walls at
right angles.

 

 

It was obvious now. The only thing to wear in a swirling wind like that
was something simple, strong, and molded to the body, something that
didn't catch the wind and couldn't be torn open and off. My legs were
tired with the effort of moving them. My pants had acted like sails.

 

 

"Where's Betty?" said Leslie suddenly, sharply. "Look, Bill -- catch her!"

 

 

I was still pondering over the effects of a strong wind with only two fifths
Earth gravity to hold things down. I turned wildly, startled, not knowing
what I was looking for.

 

 

Leslie and I were strong and had plenty of power in our legs. Betty wasn't
and hadn't. She was a featherweight at best; in a wind like that she was
utterly helpless.

 

 

When I turned she was about twenty yards away. A second later she was
less than ten. Somehow she was keeping herself upright, looking as if
she was running but really being swept before the wind like a straw.

 

 

I leaped out and caught her -- and we nearly knocked ourselves senseless.
It was like when I hit Morgan. Gravity seems almost nothing, but inertia
is still the same as ever. If Betty had run into a wall at the speed she
had been going, she could have killed herself. I was quite hard enough
to knock the wind out of her.

 

 

"Thanks, Bill," she gasped. "Oh, I was scared!"

 

 

"How often have I told you," Morgan snapped, "to lie down and stay put
when a wind like that starts?"