One in 300 (18 page)

Before I went, when it was known I was going, Ritchie made me a proposition.

 

 

"Ever struck you, Bill, that this is the greatest chance ever for smart
businessmen?" he asked.

 

 

"What is?"

 

 

"The setup here. Rebuilding. Starting again. It's better than getting
in on the ground floor. It's a chance to move into the basement."

 

 

"Money doesn't exist any more," I said shortly, a little disgusted at the
idea of making capital out of mankind's greatest disaster.

 

 

Ritchie shrugged his heavy shoulders. "What's money? All that ever mattered
was what you could get for it. This is a chance to get it. Now, you're
still a lieutenant, Bill. You have power, and any little piece of power
you have is a chance to get more. If you and I work together, starting
not when it's too late, but right now -- "

 

 

"Not interested," I said flatly. I was going to say more, angrily,
but Ritchie's smooth, pleasant voice cut in.

 

 

"Listen, Bill, I understand your idealism. I like you for it. But don't
you see what's going to happen? If you're not ambitious, someone else
will be. You want to make Mars a safe place, a good place. Fine. And
while you're doing it someone will be building himself up so that when
you've made Mars a safe place, a good place, he'll be able to step in
and take it from you."

 

 

I stared at him.

 

 

"I'm not suggesting," said Ritchie earnestly, "that you
shouldn't
work for the good of everybody. Of course you will. But don't forget,
while you're doing it, that human beings aren't perfect. Don't forget that
you can't rely on everyone to be as honest and unselfish and idealistic
as you. Look after your interests -- no one else will. Come in with me,
help me, and you and I will -- "

 

 

"You're making quite a lot of sense," I said, "but the answer's still no.
Build your own empire, Ritchie."

 

 

"All right," said Ritchie evenly. "I will."

 

 

So before I was even out of the hospital I should have been pretty well
prepared for the many battles which I knew were coming. I knew about Mars,
though not at first hand. I knew about the people who were trying to make
it a world fit to live in. I knew about Morgan Smith. And I knew about
Alec Ritchie. I wouldn't have had to be much of a prophet to have a
general picture of what was going to happen.

 

 

I wasn't much of a prophet. Or I didn't think. What happened hardly ever
found me better prepared than anyone else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

When I came out of the hospital, alone, I stood still for a long time
at the door and just looked around me.

 

 

This was the future home of the human race -- now and for a long time
to come. Mercury, Venus, and Earth would be too hot for human beings
for millions of years. Science would have to advance about twice as
far as it had already come from zero before Jupiter or any of the other
outer planets could be forced to provide a comfortable environment for
mankind. There would be little settlements, undoubtedly, on asteroids
and satellites. But now and for untold generations Mars was the only
place for men and women to live.

 

 

That made grumbles about the world itself absolutely pointless. It was
now of purely academic interest that there had once been a world on which
water boiled at 100° C.

 

 

If the pre-space-travel calculations had been correct and Mars had had
an atmosphere too thin and with too little oxygen to support human life,
human life would simply have ceased to exist when the sun underwent its
change. As it was, we could only be thankful that Mars had just enough
air, water, and whatever else we needed to enable us to live fairly
comfortably on it until we were once more in a position to take command
of our environment.

 

 

That wouldn't be soon. We had left a highly mechanized culture back on Earth,
but it would be some time before we had climbed to the same point on Mars.
For a year or two at least things would be very primitive. Hydroelectric
power was out of the question, and the use of oil, gasoline, or coal
for generating electricity was just as impracticable. We simply had to
use the new source of power, the one we didn't know very much about --
atomic power.

 

 

That meant that there would be plenty of power when we had any at all.

 

 

Nuclear physics had come a long way since the time when the power of the
atom could only be used to make a big bang. But it hadn't come anywhere
near the beautiful simplicity of really efficient technology. Atom power
was still huge, clumsy, and uncertain.

 

 

None of the spaceships was atom-powered. It was a pity, in a way,
that such a wonder fuel as moluone had been discovered, back in the
fifties. Instead of having to plug away at atomic power to make space
travel possible, the interplanetary pioneers had turned their backs on it,
since they didn't need it, and now we had to start from scratch. Moluone
was a wonder fuel for space travel, all right, but it was no earthly
use for ground-based industry. If there had been just one experimental
atom-powered ship, it might have saved twenty thousand people ten years
of toil.

 

 

I sighed and moved away from the door of the research station. People were
going in and coming out, and I was in the way. Nobody paid any attention
to me, apart from a few people who glanced curiously at my uniform,
as if they had never seen such a thing before.

 

 

Nobody else was wearing anything like my uniform, certainly. Every other
person I saw, of either sex, wore a sort of smock, except a few men who
wore only shorts. The improvised garment which was so generally worn was
like shorts and a sleeveless shirt except that it was in one piece.
If existing shorts and shirts were used, they were sewn together at the
waist. So far I didn't know why. There was seldom any attempt, even in
the case of the women, to make the one-piece suits attractive. There were
none with halter tops or bare backs or low necklines. They were plain and
strong and simple. But of course the girls who were attractive looked
attractive anyway.

 

 

I made my way slowly to where Party 94 was working. I'd been told where
to go. No one around had so little to do that he had time to come and show
me the way. As I went I continued my first survey of the Martian scene.

 

 

There had been a colony of about seven thousand people on Mars before
the disaster. That didn't seem many now, but it had been a lot when Mars
was a dead world, a mere research station for astronomers, physicists,
metallurgists, geologists, archaeologists, botanists, and scores of
other ists.

 

 

With all the people that the regular spaceships and the lifeships had
been able to bring from the doomed Earth in the time available, there
still weren't many more than twenty thousand people on Mars, including
all the ists.

 

 

From the short-term point of view, it was just as well that there weren't
any more. The fact that there had been permanent accommodation for seven
thousand people for a start meant that there was some sort of temporary
accommodation for the whole twenty thousand.

 

 

The settlement had been called Winant, after the first man to land on Mars,
and it looked as if the town that was going to grow up around it would
be called Winant too. So many people had so many different ideas about
what to call the first Martian township that the easiest way out of the
impasse seemed to be to use the existing name.

 

 

The Winant scene was typical of all Mars. The sun was bright, surrounded
and diffused by a strong haze. Mars would always have a lot of dust in
the atmosphere. It was warm but not unbearably hot; the air generally
was so dry that people could be comfortable at much higher temperatures
than could have been borne on Earth. The smaller effort that the reduced
gravity called for was another thing that made the heat bearable.

 

 

The sky was deep, luminous blue -- deeper than it had ever been on Earth.
The ground was colorful, though flat and almost featureless -- red, yellow,
green, and brown. Most of the rocks near the surface had been worn long ago
into sand and dust. But here and there were little ridges of rock and stone,
eroded to mere remnants of the mountains they must once have been.

 

 

Mars hadn't had an earthquake for millions of years. The ground surface
was very much as it must have been in the time of the first Cro-Magnon
on Earth. There was nothing much to see on Mars itself -- there never was.
The only native form of life was plant life, lichen and a few varieties of
moss. There was plenty of that.

 

 

Anything of interest had to be supplied by the people from Earth. Around
Winant there was plenty. First there were the long, flat buildings of
the research station, built not for this new Mars but for the cold, dark,
sterile world Mars had been before the sun stepped up its output. There
were hardly any windows.

 

 

All around the station buildings were piles of equipment, stones, metal
from broken-up lifeships, stores of all kinds -- mostly fastened down
firmly so that the gales, of which there was no sign at present, couldn't
scatter them all over the landscape. Drawn up behind the station were
about a hundred lifeships, being used for temporary accommodation. Behind
them again were the larger spaceships, the ships that had been in
existence before the emergency was known.

 

 

Among the ships were corralled the cattle which had been brought from Earth.
It seemed crazy to bring cattle to Mars instead of human beings, but unless
such provision had been made we would have had to manage henceforth without
meat, milk, leather, and wool. As it was, we had none of these things at the
moment; we couldn't allow the cattle to breed until we had fodder for them.
They ate the sparse Martian lichen, but it wasn't enough. They needed
Earth-type grass, which was only now being introduced to Mars.

 

 

In front of the station, about a hundred yards from it, thousands of people
were engaged on what looked already like vast excavations. We had heard
blasting frequently in the hospital.

 

 

I stopped a tall girl who was on her way toward the huge hole in the rock.
"What's going on there?" I asked.

 

 

Miraculously, even here she was chewing something. It couldn't be gum;
there wasn't any.

 

 

"Just out of the hospital, Lieutenant?" she said in the well-remembered
accents of Brooklyn. "You want to know what we're doing? We're digging
out a cliff face. When we've got it, we're going to dig caves in it.
Now I got to run."

 

 

"Thanks," I said.

 

 

"You're welcome," said Brooklyn.

 

 

There was more sense in it than appeared at first. We could live on the
surface, but we wanted greater atmospheric pressure if we could get it.
We
could
get it, by digging for it. A mile or two down, conditions
would be appreciably nearer what we were used to. Besides, long ago our
ancestors had found that caves made very comfortable houses. Dig a hole
in a perpendicular face of rock, find some way of closing it behind you,
and you have a very fair house.

 

 

But I had spent long enough getting my bearings in this new world.
I picked my way among the piles of material in search of Work Party 94.
I was lightheaded, stiff, a little uncertain on my feet, and had a dull ache
in my temples. But in what proportion my lightheadedness was owing to the
light air pressure of Mars and to my convalescence I didn't know. My lungs
weren't troubled at all. There was slightly more oxygen in the Martian
mixture than there had been in the Terran variety of air. Some of it had
been released recently by the extra heat warming the many surface oxides.

 

 

When I found 94 I didn't have time for any greetings. Harry Phillips,
Caroline and Jim Stowe turned and saw me. They didn't show any sign of
welcome, only of relief.

 

 

Harry said: "Son, I think you'd better get around the back fast."

 

 

"What's the matter?"

 

 

"If I were you I wouldn't waste any time finding out."

 

 

I didn't. "Around the back" was behind a stone wall about ten feet high.
I was still unsteady, but on Mars I could run. I did run.

 

 

Morgan had his back to me. I could see Leslie's face over his shoulder,
but not, at first, what he was doing. She didn't see me either. She
was scared.

 

 

Then I saw Morgan was picking and pulling and jabbing at her injured arm,
holding her other wrist so that she couldn't get away. He wasn't so much
hurting her as trying to frighten her, and in that he was succeeding
very well.

 

 

I didn't rush in at once. I waited until I was quite sure what was
going on, and that Morgan wasn't merely defending himself against some
ill-considered attack by Leslie, and until I was good and mad. Then I
stepped forward, swung Morgan around, and planted my fist hard on his
nose. What happened was more of a surprise to me than to him.

 

 

I had grown used to the light gravity of Mars but hadn't had much
opportunity to learn all its effects. With the force of the blow
Morgan and I staggered away from each other. Morgan was the one who was
unlucky. His foot caught on a stone and he went over hard, the force
of his fall being caused more by his momentum than by gravity. I saw he
was out and turned to Leslie.