The Best of Planet Stories, No. 1 (13 page)

Mars fever they called it. Could the wild boy cheat the Red Planet's skeleton deserts and the dogged trailers from Port Laribee?

Port Laribee with its score of Nisson huts, sealed against the lifeless atmosphere, the red dust and the cold, was a shabby piece of Earth dropped onto Mars.

There, Dave Kort was the first wilderness tramp to be remembered. In warm seasons he'd plod into Port Laribee, burdened by a pack that only the two-fifths of terrestrial gravity put within the range of human muscles. He was a great, craggy old man, incredibly grimed and browned, his frostbites bandaged with dry Martian leaves tied on with their own fiber.

His snag-toothed grin was bemused and secret through the scratched plastic of his air-hood. He'd trade carven stones, bits of ancient metal, or oddities of plant and animal life for chewing tobacco, chocolate, heavily lined clothes, mending supplies, and new parts for his battered portable air-compressor.

He'd refuse a bath with disdain. And at last his rusty, monosyllabic speech would wax eloquent — comparatively.

"So long, fellas," he'd say. "See yuh around."

The equinoctial winds, heralding autumn, would moan thinly like the ghosts of the Martians wiped out In war those ages back. Dust would blur the horizon of that huge, arid triangle of sea-bottom called Syrtis Major — still the least sterile land on the Red Planet. At night the dry cold would dip to ninety below zero, Fahrenheit.

The specialists of Port Laribee, who watched the spinning wind gauges, thermometers and barometers, and devoted monastic years to learning about Mars, said that they'd never see Dave Kort again.

But for three successive summers after he had quit his job as helper among them, he showed up, tattered, filthy, thinned to a scarecrow, but grinning.

Young Joe Dayton, fresh from Earth and full of Mars-wonder, asked him a stock question that third summer. The answer was laconic. "Oh — I know the country. I get along."

But at the fourth winter's end, Dave Kort did not return. No one ever saw him again, nor found among the ruins and the quiet pastel hues of Mars the dried thing that had been Kort. Somewhere drifting dust had buried it. No one had quite understood him in life. If any affection had been aimed at him, it was for a story, not a man. The man died but the story thrived.

Dave Kort had lived off this wilderness, alone and with sketchy artificial aids, for three Martian years — almost six by Earth reckoning. It was quite a feat. For one thing, the open air of Mars has a pressure of only one-ninth of the terrestrial, and above ground it contains but a trace of oxygen.

How Kort had turned the trick was not completely inconceivable.

In making starch from carbon-dioxide and moisture under the action of sunlight, the green plant-life of Mars produces oxygen just as Earthly vegetation does. But instead of freeing it lavishly to the air, many of those Martian growths, hoarding the essentials of life on a dying world, compress their oxygen into cavities in stem and root and underground capsule, to support later a slow tissue-combustion like that of warm-blooded animals, thus protecting their vitals from cold and death.

Despoiling these stores of oxygen with a pointed metal pipette attached to a greedily sucking compressor was a known means of emergency survival on Mars. Thus you could laboriously replenish the oxygen flasks for your air-hood. Simple — yes. But tedious, grinding, endless. Dayton could imagine.

Food and shelter were also necessary. But under thickets there is a five-foot depth of fallen vegetation, dry, felty, slow to decay in this climate, accumulating autumn after autumn for Martian centuries. In this carpet are those oxygen-holding capsules and roots, often broken, freeing their contents for the spongy surrounding material to hold. There too grow much green algae — simpler plants of the same function. There are the fruit and seed-pods of the surface growths, sheltered from cold. And there, the remaining animal life has retreated.

Fuzzy, tawny things that twitter; fat, mammal-like excavators that never care to see the sky, and many-joined creatures that resemble Earthly ants only in their industry and communal skins. Above ground they build their small, transparent air-domes — bubblelike structures formed of hardened secretion from their jaws. There they shelter their special gardens and sun their young.

So, for a man able to borrow methods unlike his human heritage, there were ways to keep alive in the raw Martian wilds.

Once, Lorring, the physician, said to Joe Dayton, "Kort must have burrowed, too — like a bear. Is that human? Of course the tip of the Syrtis Major triangle here at Port Laribee is far north. But even if he could have gotten all the way to the tropics, the nights are still bitter. Even so, the big question is not how he lived like he did, but why?"

Yes, this was a point which Dayton had often wondered about, frowning with thick, dark brows, while his wide mouth smiled quizzically above a generous jaw. What had impelled Kort to a solitude far deeper than that of an old-time hermit or desert-rat? Had he been a great child lumbering by instinct through the misfit fogs of his mind to a place where he felt at peace?

Dayton favored another explanation as the main one.

"Why, Doc?" he said to Lorring, as they played cards in the rec-hall. "The answer is in all of us, here. Or we would never have come to Mars. Where was there ever such a place of history, enigma, weird beauty, fascination to men? You can't be neutral. Hating Mars, you'd never stay. Half loving it, like most of us, you would — for a while. Loving it, you'd want a much closer look than is possible at Port Laribee, from which we sally forth like rubbernecks. Too bad that Mars is too rough for men, in the long run. Too bad that the Martians are extinct. Once there were even machines to maintain a better climate."

Other specialists were within hearing. They laughed, but they knew what Dayton meant. They'd seen the dun deserts, the great graven monoliths, dust-scoured, the heaps of rust. Being here had the charm of a quest for ancient treasure, marked by the mood of death.

Parsons, the metallurgist, said: "Funny, but I remember Kort's posture — bent, just like the figures in the bas-reliefs. Though Martian skeletal structure was far different. That sounds as if part of Mars sneaked into Kort's body, doesn't it? Hell, there's no pseudo-science here! Plodding through dust, and at low gravity, you just naturally develop that posture as a habit. Now call me nuts."

"You're nuts, Parsons," Kettrich, the biologist, obliged.

Not many days later, Frank Terry and his son came to Port Laribee. Bringing a seven-year-old boy — a bright little guy named Will — to unlivable Mars, marked the elder Terry at once as a screwball.

Was the mother dead or divorced? Was Terry a remittance man, exiled by his family? He seemed to have enjoyed the good things. . . Such curiosity was bad taste. Forget it.

"We like the sound of the place," Frank Terry explained. "We thought we'd take some photographs, really get friendly with the place. . ."

His listeners foresaw the withering of Terry's familiar enthusiasm, and his departure within a week. Except maybe Dayton guessed differently. The intellectual Terry was not much like Dave Kort. Yet perhaps a kinship showed in a certain expression, as if their natures had the same basis.

During the next Martian year, Dayton and the observatory crew saw the sporting-goods-store sheen vanish utterly from these two. They carried less and less equipment with each succeeding sally into the wilderness. Dried lichen, stuffed inside their airtight garments, soon served them as additional insulation against cold.

From their lengthening jaunts they brought back the usual relics — golden ornaments, carvings, bits of apparatus that had not weathered away. And the usual photographs of blue-green thickets, war-melted cities, domes celled like honeycombs, suggesting a larval stage in the life-cycle of the ancients, and of country littered with shattered crystal — much Martian land had once been roofed with clear quartz, against the harshening climate,

Frank Terry became bearded and battered. Will ceased to be a talkative, sociable youngster. Still devoted to his father, he turned shy, sullen, and alert in a new way.

He had a pet like an eight-inch caterpillar, though it was not that at all. It was warm-blooded, golden-furred, intelligent. It had seven beady eyes. It crept over the boy's shoulders, and down inside his garments, chirping eerily. Except for his father, it was the only companion the boy wanted.

So Summer ended, and the dark blue sky was murked by angry haze. Vitrac, chief scientist, said, "You're not going out again, are you, Terry?"

The kid gave the real answer, "Let's go, Dad. I want to. Besides, Digger is homesick."

The next morning, when the equinoctial storm closed in, the Terrys had vanished.

Joe Dayton led the search party. He found nothing. Mars is small but still vast. Its total surface equals all the land on Earth. Since the first men had come, not one in a thousand of its square miles had been touched by human boots.

Wandering explorers found Frank Terry's mummy late that spring, in a deep part of Syrtis Major, with old ocean salt around it. When they brought it to Port Laribee it was not completely dried out. So Terry must have survived through the winter.

The boy must surely be dead, too. But stories drifted back to the Port — of holes found in the felted soil, and of a small, heavily-burdened figure that scampered away at the sight of a man.

The general opinion was that this was pure romancing, to intrigue the tourists who came out that year in their bright, excited crowds, charmed by the Red Planet yet sheltered from it, equipped from shops recommended by the most debonair of space wanderers — if such existed. Many were eager to stay, girls among them, bright-faced, sure, with the thrill in their eyes and voices. Ah, yes — but how long would they have lasted in this too rich and rough a strangeness?

Joe Dayton shrugged, sad that his opinion had to be so mean. There were soberer arrivals, too. Relatives of Port Laribee staff: members, mostly. Willowby's wife. Doc Lorring's small daughter, Tillie, sent out for a visit. Among the tourists there were a few additional kids.

There was also the lost Frank Terry's elder brother, Dolph Terry, big, but prim beneath an easy smile. Also there was a Terry girl, Doran by name. She did not seem much like either of her brothers — the mystical wanderer, Frank Terry, nor the slightly stuffed-shirted Dolph. She was much younger than either of them, sun-browned, a bit puzzled at being on another world, not terribly pretty, but quick with good-humored shrugs and friendly chuckles whenever she could put aside her worry about her nephew.

Dayton had some belief in the tales from the wilderness. For he'd known young Will Terry. Besides, beneath the ineptness of kids, he recognized an adaptability beyond that of adults. So his work was cut out for him.

"After all, William was Frank's son," Dolph told Dayton. "Frank was — what he was. But my sister and I are here to see that the boy is located. Perhaps he can still have a normal childhood."

"We'll do what we can," Dayton replied, smiling crookedly to dampen the man's naive and assertive air.

For the last half of the long summer the search went on; many visitors took brief part, ranging well beyond the short tractor lints which encompassed the tourist's usual view of Mars.

Dolph Terry was dogged, but clumsy and irritable. His sister's rugged cheerfulness and interest in her surroundings pleased Dayton.

Still, at the end — sheer luck as much as anything — it was Joe Dayton who captured Will Terry single-handed. It was almost autumn again. Joe flushed the scampering figure from a thicket. The boy's limp was to Dayton's advantage. He made a flying tackle, and the savage, grimy thing that was an eight-year-old human, was finally in his grasp.

His crooned wods, finding their way through the thin texture of wo air-hoods and the tenuous atmosphere between, did not soften the ferocity of those pale eyes. Sich eyes can be like a blank mask anyway — not unintelligent, but expressive of a different thought-plane.

"Easy, Will — easy, fella," Dayton said. "You couldn't last much longer out here. Your compressor must be nearly won out."

Reassurance failed. "Lemme go!" the boy snarled blurredly, his speech rusted by solitude. Helped by his father, he had learned the tricks of survival here. His dimmed past was so different from his present life that perhaps it seemed fearfully alien to him. As he bore the struggling boy to the tractor-vehicle, Dayton had the odd idea that a Martian, trapped by a man, might behave like this.

He recalled old yarns of boys raised by wolves or apes. Here was Tb same simple loss of human ways — not by soul-migration, but the plain molding of habit by a bizarre environment.

At the Port Laibee hospital, Will Terry was at first least disturbed when left alone. But his whimpers at night reminded Dayton of the mewling of a Martian storm.

Dolph Terry cursed the waiting for an Earth-liner and the lack of a psychiatrist on Mars. Doran had no luck either at making friends with Will. Meanwhile the tempests began.

But Doran had an idea. Visitors were still awaiting passage home, among them children.

"Kids are kids, Joe," she told Dayton. "They may be able to reach Will. I talked it over with Doc Lorring."

She was right. Gradually, then more quickly, the trapped-lynx glare faded from Will's eyes as he accepted the scared but fascinated companionship of the other youngsters in the hospital. He still had Digger. At last he let the others pet the fuzzy creature. The strangeness dimmed on both sides. Kid-brashness returned. Perhaps in the whimsy and fantasy of children, that could accept even the humanizing of beast and beetle, Will and his new friends found a common denominator for his life on Mars. He became a hero. Doran and Joe overheard some of his bragging.

"Sure I can work an air-compressor. Dad showed me. He used to say that Mars was home. I'm going back."

One morning Will was gone from the hospital. It came out that a hospital orderly had been diverted from watchfulness for a minute by other children. Two air-hoods, Mars-costumes, and compressors were gone. Also another boy named Danny Bryant.