The Best of (30 page)

Duncan left the screen, and went to the cabin. He found Lellie fighting off a large case which, under the influence of deceleration, seemed determined to pin her against the wall. He shoved the case aside, and pulled her out.

"We're there," he told her. "Put on your spacesuit."

Her round eyes ceased to pay attention to the case, and turned towards him. There was no telling from them how she felt, what she thought. She said, simply :

"Thpacethuit. Yith—okay."

Standing in the airlock of the dome, the outgoing Superintendent paid more attention to Lellie than to the pressuredial. He knew from experience exactly how long equalizing took, and opened his faceplate without even a glance at the pointer.

"Wish I'd had the sense to bring one," be observed. "Could have been mighty useful on the chores, too."

He opened the inner door, and led through.

"Here it is—and welcome to it," he said.

The main livingroom was oddly shaped by reason of the dome's architecture, but it was spacious. It was also exceedingly, sordidly untidy.

"Meant to clean it up—never got around to it, some way," he added. He looked at Lellie. There was no visible sign of what she thought of the place. "Never can tell with Marts," he said uneasily. "They kind of nonregister.'

Duncan agreed: "I've figured this one looked astonished at being born, and never got over it."

The other man went on looking at Lellie. His eyes strayed from her to a gallery of pinnedup terrestrial beauties, and back again.

"Sort of funny shape Marts are," he said, musingly.

"This one's reckoned a good enough looker where she comes from," Duncan told him, a trifle shortly.

"Sure. No offence, Bud. I guess they'll all seem a funny shape to me after this spell." He changed the subject. "I'd better show you the ropes around here."

Duncan signed to Lellie to open her faceplate so that she could hear him, and then told her to get out of her suit.

The dome was the usual type: doublefloored, doublewalled, with an insulated and evacuated space between the two; constructed as a unit, and held down by metal bars let into the rock. In the livingquarters there were three more sizeable rooms, able to cope with increased personnel if trade should expand.

"The rest," the outgoing man explained, "is the regular station stores, mostly food, air cylinders, spares of one kind and another, and water—you'll need to watch her on water; most women seem to think it grows naturally in pipes."

Duncan shook his head.

"Not Marts. Living in deserts gives 'em a natural respect for water."

The other picked up a clip of storesheets.

"We'll check and sign these later. It's a nice soft job here. Only freight now is rare metalliferous earth. Callisto's not been opened up a lot yet. Handling's easy. They tell you when a crate's on the way: you switch on the radio beacon to bring it in. On dispatch you can't go wrong if you follow the tables." He looked around the room. "All home comforts. You read? Plenty of books." He waved a hand at the packed rows which covered half the inner partition wall. Duncan said he'd never been much of a reader. "Well, it helps," said the other. "Find pretty well anything that's known in that lot. Records there. Fond of music?"

Duncan said he liked a good tune.

"H'm. Better try the other stuff. Tunes get to squirrelling inside your head. Play chess?" He pointed to a board, with men pegged into it.

Duncan shook his head.

"Pity. There's a fellow over on Callisto plays a pretty hot game. He'll be disappointed not to finish this one. Still, if I was fixed up the way you are, maybe I'd not have been interested in chess." His eyes strayed to Lellie again. "What do you reckon she's going to do here, over and above cooking and amusing you?" he asked.

It was not a question that had occurred to Duncan, but he shrugged.

"Oh, she'll be okay, I guess. There's a natural dumbness about Marts—they'll sit for hours on end, doing damn all. It's a gift they got."

"Well, it should come in handy here," said the other.

The regular ship'scall work went on. Cases were unloaded, the metalliferous earths hosed from the bins into the holds. A small ferryrocket came up from Callisto carrying a couple of timeexpired prospectors, and left again with their two replacements. The ship's engineers checked over the station's machinery, made renewals, topped up the

If water tanks, charged the spent air cylinders, tested, tinkt ered and tested again before giving their final okay.

Duncan stood outside on the metal apron where not long ago his predecessor had performed his fantastic dance of welcome, to watch the ship take off. She rose straight up, with her jets pushing her gently. The curve of her hull became an elongated crescent shining against the black sky. The maul driving jets started to gush white flame edged with pink. Quickly she picked up speed. Before long she had dwindled to a speck which sank behind the ragged skyline.

Quite suddenly Duncan felt as if he, too, had dwindled. He had become a speck upon a barren mass of rock which was itself a speck in the immensity. The indifferent sky about him had no scale. It was an utterly black void wherein his mothersun and a myriad more suns flared perpetually, without reason or purpose.

The rocks of the satellite itself, rising up in their harsh crests and ridges, were without scale, too. He could not tell which were near or far away; he could not, in the jumble of hardlit planes and inky shadows, even make out their true form. There was nothing like them to be seen on Earth, or on Mars. Their unweathered edges were sharp as blades: they had been just as sharp as that for millions upon millions of years, and would be for as long as the satellite should last.

The unchanging millions of years seemed to stretch out before and behind him. It was not only himself, it was all life that was a speck, a briefly transitory accident, utterly unimportant to the universe. It was a queer little mote dancing for its chance moment in the light of the eternal suns. Reality was just globes of fire and balls of stone rolling on, senselessly rolling along through emptiness, through time unimaginable, for ever, and ever, and ever...

Within his heated suit, Duncan shivered a little. Never before had he been so alone; never so much aware of the vast, callous, futile loneliness of space. Looking out into the blackness, with light that had left a star a million years ago shining into his eyes, he wondered.

"Why?" he asked himself. "What the heck's it all about, anyway?"

The sound of his own unanswerable question broke up the mood. He shook his head to clear, it of speculative nonsense. He turned his back on the universe, reducing it again to its proper status as a background for life in general and human life in particular, and stepped into the airlock.

The job was, as his predecessor had told him, soft. Duncan made his radio contacts with Callisto at prearranged times. Usually it was little more than a formal check on one another's continued existence, with perhaps an exchange of comment on the radio news. Only occasionally did they announce a dispatch and tell him when to switch on his beacon. Then, in due course, the cylindercrate would make its appearance, and float slowly down. It was quite a simple matter to couple it up to a bin to transfer the load.

The satellite's day was too short for convenience, and its night, lit by Callisto, and sometimes by Jupiter as well, almost as bright; so they disregarded it, and lived by the calendarclock which kept Earth time on the Greenwich Meridian setting. At first much of the time had been occupied in disposing of the freight that the ship had left. Some of it into the main dome—necessities for themselves, and other items that would store better where there was warmth and air. Some into the small, airless, unheated dome. The greater part to be stowed and padded carefully into cylinders and launched off to the Callisto base. But once that work had been cleared, the job was certainly soft, too soft...

Duncan drew up a programme. At regular intervals he would inspect this and that, he would waft himself up to the crag and check on the sunmotor there, et cetera. But keeping to an unnecessary programme requires resolution. Sunmotors, for instance, are very necessarily built to run for long spells without attention. The only action one could take if it should stop would be to call on Callisto for a ferryrocket to come and take them off until a ship should call to repair it. A breakdown there, the Company had explained very clearly, was the only thing that would justify him in leaving his station, with the stores of precious earth, unmanned (and it was also conveyed that to contrive a breakdown for the sake of a change was unlikely to prove worth while). One way and another, the programme did not last long.

There were times when Duncan found himself wondering whether the bringing of Lellie had been such a good idea after all. On the purely practical side, he'd not have cooked as well as she did, and probably have pigged it quite as badly as his predecessor had, but if she had not been there, the necessity of looking after himself would have given him some occupation. And even from the angle of company —well, she was that, of a sort, but she was alien, queer; kind of like a halfrobot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun. There were, indeed, times—increasingly frequent times, when the very look of her irritated him intensely; so did the way she moved,and her gestures,and her silly pidgintalk when she talked,and her selfcontained silence when she didn't,and her withdrawness,and all her differentness, and the fact that he would have been £2,360 better off without her ... Nor did she make a serious attempt to remedy her shortcomings, even where she had the means. Her face, for instance. You'd think any girl would try to make her best of that—but did she, hell! There was that left eyebrow again: made her look like a sozzled clown, but a lot she cared...

"For heaven's sake," he told her once more, "put the cockeyed thing straight. Don't you know how to fix 'emyet ! And you've got your colour on wrong, too. Look at that picture—now look at yourself in the mirror: a great daub of red all in the wrong place. And your hair, too: getting all like seaweed again. You've got the things to wave it, then for crysake wave it again, and stop looking like a bloody mermaid. I know you can't help being a damn Mart, but you can at leasttry to look like a real woman."

Lellie looked at the coloured picture, and then compared her reflection with it, critically.

"Yith—okay," she said, with an equable detachment.

Duncan snorted.

"And that's another thing. Bloody babytalk! It's not 'yith', it's 'yes'. YES, yes. So say 'yes'."

"Yith" said Lellie, obligingly.

"Oh, for—Can't youhear the difference? Sss, not ththth. Yesss."

"Yith," she said.

"No. Put your tongue farther back like this—"

The lesson went on for some time. Finally he grew angry.

"Just making a monkey out of me, huh! You'd better be careful, my girl. Now, say 'yes'."

She hesitated, looking at his wrathful face.

"Go on, say it."

"Yyeth," she said, nervously.

His hand slapped across her face harder than he had intended. The jolt broke her magnetic contact with the floor, and sent her sailing across the room in a spin of arms and legs. She struck the opposite wall, and rebounded to float helplessly, out of reach of any hold. He strode after her, turned her right up, and set her on her feet. His left hand clutched her overall in a bunch, just below her throat, his right was raised.

"Again?" he told her.

Her eyes looked helplessly this way and that. He shook her. She tried. At the sixth attempt she manager: "Yeths."

He accepted that for the time being.

"Youcan do it, you see—when you try. What you need, my girl, is a bit of firm handling."

He let her go. She tottered across the room, holding her hands to her bruised face.

A number of times while the weeks drew out so slowly into months Duncan found himself wondering whether he was going to get through. He spun out what work there was as much as he could, but it left still too much time hanging heavy on his hands.

A middleaged man who has read nothing longer than an occasional magazine article does not take to books. He tired very quickly, as his predecessor had prophesied, of the popular records, and could make nothing of the others. He taught himself the moves in chess from a book, and instructed Lellie in them, intending after a little practice with her to challenge the man on Callisto. Lellie, however, managed to win with such consistency that he had to decide that he had not the right kind of mind for the game. Instead, he taught her a kind of double solitaire, but that didn't last long, either; the cards seemed always to run for Lellie.

Occasionally there was some news and entertainment to be had from the radio, but with Earth somewhere round the other side of the sun just then, Mars screened off half the time by Callisto, and the rotation of the satellite itself, reception was either impossible, or badly broken up.

So mostly he sat and fretted, hating the satellite, angry with himself and irritated by Leslie.

Just the phlegmatic way she went on with her tasks irritated him. It seemed an injustice that she could 'take it all better than he could simplybecause she was a dumb Mart. When his illtemper became vocal, the look of her as she listened exasperated him still more.

"For crysake," he told her one time, "can't you make that silly face of yoursmean something? Can't you laugh, or cry, or get mad, or something? It's enough to drive a guy nuts going on looking at a face that's fixed permanent like it was a doll just heard its first dirty story. I know you can't help being dumb, but for heaven's sake crack it up a bit, get some expression into it."

She went on looking at him without a shadow of a change.

"Go on, you heard me! Smile, damn you, smile!"

Her mouth twitched very slightly.

"Call that a smile! Now, there's a smile!" He pointed to a pinup with her head split pretty much in half by a smile like a piano keyboard. "Like that! Like this!" He grinned widely.

"No," she said. "My face can't wriggle like Earth faces."