Raymond Z. Gallun

“ Nelsen could almost hear the coarse laughter of the Jolly Lads, as they broke it up, robbed it, raped it—because they both sneered at its effeteness, and missed what it represented to them... Nelsen remembered very well how a man's attitudes could be warped while he struggled for mere survival in an Archer drifting in space.
Yet even as he worked with the others, to put up temporary domes and to gather the bloated dead, the hatred arose in him, and was strengthened by the fury and grief in the grim, strong faces around him. To exist where it was, Pallastown could not be as soft as it seemed. ”

“ Nelsen saw Rodan and Dutch unlatch the collars of their helmets, preparatory for removing them, as they usually did if they stayed here a while, to pack new artifacts or stow tools. Nelsen made as if to unlatch his collar, too. But if he did it, the gasket would be unsealed, and his helmet would no longer be airtight.
Now!—he told himself. Or would it be better to wait fourteen more Earth-days, till another lunar dawn? Hell no—that would be chickenish procrastination. Rodan and Dutch were a good ten feet away from him—he was out of their reach. ”

“ The Bunch was a sort of family. Members of families may love each other, but it doesn't have to happen. For a second it was as if Ramos had Tiflin spitted on some barb of his taunting smile—aimed at Tiflin's most vulnerable point.
Ramos clicked his tongue. What he was certainly going to remark was that people who couldn't pass the emotional stability tests, just couldn't get a space-fitness card. But Ramos wasn't unkind. He checked himself in time. "No sweat, Tif," he muttered.
"Hey, Gimp—are you going to sit in that Archie all night?" Joe Kuzak, the easy-going twin, boomed genially. ”

“ The two Kuzaks diving with a vigor, as if from a rocket airlock, hitting the dirt with a thud, scrambling up, opening and spreading the great bundle, attaching the air hose. Little Lester hopping in to help fit wire rigging, most of it still imaginary. A friendly dog coming over to sniff, with a look of mild wonder in his eyes.
"Laugh, you leather-heads!" Art Kuzak roared at the others. He grinned, wiping his muddy face. "We've got to learn, don't we? Only, it's like make-believe. Hell, I haven't played make-believe since I was four! ”

“ Several hours before the rest of the Bunch curved into a slow orbit a thousand miles above the Moon, Glen Tiflin set the ionic of his bubb for full acceleration, and arced away, outward, perhaps toward the Belt.
"So long, all you dumb slobs!" his voice hissed in their helmet-phones. "Now I get really lost! If you ever cross my path again, watch your heads..."
Art Kuzak's flare of anger died. "Good riddance," he breathed. "How long will he last, alone? Without a space-fitness card, the poor idiot probably imagines himself a big, dangerous renegade, already." ”

“ In this gravity, going to Lester's place was a floating glide rather than a walk. Along a covered causeway, into a huge dome, up a wall with handholds, onto a wispy balcony. Nelsen and Ramos brought liquor and roses.
Much of what followed was painful and familiar—in a fantastic setting. Two young people, recently married, struggling with problems that they hadn't been able to plan for very well. ”

“ No doubt, her mind was also on the Big Vacuum beyond the Earth.
But what is there about a dangerous dream? When it is far out of reach, it has a safe, romantic appeal. Bring its fulfillment a little closer, and its harsh aspects begin to show. You get a kick out of that, but you begin to wonder nervously if you have the guts, the stamina, the resistance to loneliness and complete strangeness.
Looking at a real Archie—with a friend inside it, even—did this to Frank Nelsen. ”

“ Gimp shouted. "Don't forget to spin 'em for centrifuge-gravity and stability!"
And so they did, each gripping the rigging at their bubb rims, and using the minute but accumulative thrust of the shoulder ionics of their Archers, to provide the push. The inflated rings turned like wheels with perfect bearings. In the all but frictionless void, they could go on turning for decades, without additional impetus.
"We've made it—we're Out Here—we're all right!" Ramos was shouting with a fierce exultation.
"Shut up, Ramos!" Frank Nelsen yelled back. "Don't ever say that, too soon. Look around you!" ”

“ Their next asteroids were mere chips a foot long—core fragments of the planet, heavy metals that had sunk deep. No crust material of any normally formed world could ever show such wealth. It gleamed with a pale yellow shine, and made Ramos' sunken eyes light up with an ancient fever, until he remembered, and until Nelsen said:
"Not for the gold, anymore, pal. Common, out here. So it's almost worthless, everywhere. Not much use as an industrial metal. But the osmium and uranium alloyed with it are something else. One hunk for each of our nets. Too bad there isn't more." ”

“ Nance said during one of their flights. "It must have been a beautiful little island in the ancient ocean, when there was that much water. Now it belongs to us, Frank."
"It's barren—we could land," Nelsen suggested quickly.
They visited the hill a dozen times safely, breaking no printed rule. But maybe they shouldn't have come so often to that same place. In life there is always a risk—which is food for a fierce soul. Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss were fierce souls.
They'd stand by the heli and look out over Syrtis, their gloved fingers entwined. ”

“ Paul got into it, first. Then Nelsen took his turn, sitting as if within an inclosed vault, hearing the gurgle of bubbles passing through the green, almost living fluid of the air-restorer capsule. Chlorophane, like the chlorophyl of green plants, could break up exhaled carbon dioxide, freeing the oxygen for re-breathing. But it was synthetic, far more efficient, and it could use much stronger sunlight as an energy source. Like chlorophyl, too, it produced edible starches and sugars that could be imbibed, mixed with water, through a tube inside the Archer's helmet. ”

“ Art roared angrily, as soon as Frank had entered his office.
"A fact we should accept, not discuss," Nelsen responded dryly. "You know the things we need."
"Um-hmm—Nelsen. To rescue and restore Pallastown—when it's pure nonsense, only inviting another assault! When we know that dispersal is the only answer. The way things are, everywhere, the whole damned human race needs to be dispersed—if some of it is to survive!" ”

“ Lester seemed not to hear these remarks. "All that gypsum, Frank," he said. "The water-and-oxygen mineral. But this is for real. There's no gimmick—no energy-source—to release it and save us..."
Frank Nelsen untied Rodan's and Dutch's feet, and, at pistol point, ordered them to move out ahead. From the charts he knew the bearing—straight toward the constellation Cassiopeia, at this hour, across an arm of Mare Nova, then along a pass that cut through the mountains. Eight hundred hopeless miles...! Well, how did he know, really? How much could a human body take? How fast could they go? ”

“ Gimp rasped, with his phone turned low so that only his companions could hear him. "But there are other names... Art's right. We'd better keep our eyes open and our mouths shut."
Asteroid miners who had had poor luck, or who had been forced to kill to win even the breath of life; colonists who had left Mars after terrible misfortunes, there; adventurers soured and maddened by months in a vacuum armor, smelling the stench of their own unwashed bodies; men flush with gains, and seeking merely to relieve the tensions of their restrained, artificial existences in a wild spree ”

“ Nelsen was always busy to the gills. Progress was so smooth for another couple of years, that the hunch of Big Trouble building up, became a gnawing certainty in his nerves.
Of course there were always the Jolly Lads to watch out for—the extreme individualists, space-twisted and wild. Robbing and murdering could seem easier than digging. Take your loot into Pallastown—who knew you hadn't grubbed it, yourself? Sell it. Get the stink blown off you—forget some terrible things that had happened to you. Have yourself a time. ”

“ Even though Joe and Two-and-Two said I had to go bring you back..."
His arms went tight around her, right there on the old porch. "Nance—love you," he whispered. "And we've got to be tough. Everybody's got to be tough—to match what we've come to. Even little kids. But it was always like that—on any kind of frontier, wasn't it? A few will get killed, but more will live—many more..."
Like that, Frank Nelsen shook the last of the cobwebs out of his brain—and got back to his greater destiny. ”

“ He had seen a pink mist dissolve in the sunshine as a man in armor out in the Belt was hit by an explosive missile, his blood spraying and boiling. Besides, he had read up on the thickets of Mars, watched motion pictures, heard Gimp Hines' stories of his brief visit here. So, at first, he could be almost casual about what he saw in the peek box. There were many ghastly ways for a man to die.
Even the thicket plant in the box seemed dead, though Nelsen knew that plant successors to the original Martians had the rugged power of revival. ”

“ Art Kuzak chuckled.
So another phase began for Nelsen. Offices bored him. Amassing money, per se, meant little to him, except as a success symbol that came out of the life he had known. He figured that a man ought to be a success, even a rough-and-tumble romantic like Ramos, or Joe Kuzak. ”

“ Everybody was looking down at the Moon, whose crater-pocked ugliness and beauty was sparsely dotted with the blue spots of stellene domes, many of them housing embryo enterprises that were trying to beat the blastoff cost of necessities brought from Earth, and to supply spacemen and colonists with their needs, cheaply.
The nine fragile rings were soon in orbit. One worker-recruiting rocket and several trader-rockets—much less powerful than those needed to achieve orbit around Earth—because lunar gravity was only one-sixth of the terrestrial—were floating in their midst. ”

“ There'll be just big shining, magnificent rings made up of countless little floating stellene houses all around the sun. A zillion people, maybe more. Gardens, flowers, everything beautiful. Everybody free to move anywhere. Uh-uh—I'm not making fun, Frankie. I'm joining in with all the relief and happiness of my heart. Only, it'll be kind of sad to see the old planets go—to be replaced by a wonderful super-suburbia. Or maybe we should say, superbia."
Nelsen burst out laughing, at last. "You sly slob...! Anyhow, that extreme is millenniums off—if it has a chance of happening, at all. ”

“ In the excitement of a hunt, as if for ancient treasure, for a long time, through many ten hour shifts, Frank Nelsen found a perhaps unfortunate Lethe of forgetfulness for his worries, and for the mind-poisoning effects of the silence and desolation in this remote part of the Moon.
They found things, thinly scattered in the ten acre area that Rodan meant tediously to sift. The screws and nuts, bright and new, were almost Earthly. But would anyone ever know what the little plastic rings were for? Or the sticks of cellulose, or the curved, wire device with fuzz at the ends? ”

“ Frank Nelsen said.
Mitch Storey was there ahead of him. Mitch's helmet was off; his dark face was all planes and hollows in the moonlight coming through the thin, transparent walls of the vehicle. "Should we call the U.S.S.F. patrol, Frank?" he asked anxiously. "Have them take him off? 'Cause he sure can't stand another devil-killer."
"We'd better," Frank answered quickly.
But now Tiflin, having deserted his blastoff drum, was coming through the airlock flaps, too. He stepped forward gingerly, along the spinning, ring-shaped tunnel. ”

“ He and Charlie had figured another destination of opportunity—Mercury, the planet nearest the sun, everlasting frozen night on one side, eternal, zinc-melting sunshine on the other. But there's the fringe zone between the two—the Twilight Zone. If you can live under stellene, you've got a better place there than Mars might have been. Colonists are going there, to quit the Earth, to get away from it all. Two-and-Two was about to leave for Mercury, when I last spoke to him. ”

“ Nelsen figured that all this was probably the truth. In the Belt, life was cheap. Death got to be a joke.
"There was an ox of a guy with big teeth!" he hissed furiously. "Thought I saw Tiflin, too—the S.O.B.! Cripes, do I always land in the soup?"
"The bossman with the teeth, I remember," Ramos grated. "Tiflin I don't know about. Could be... Hell, though—what now? I suppose we're going in about the same direction and at the same speed as before? Have to watch the sun and planets to make sure. ”

“ Mitch looked anxious. "Human people will find a way, won't they, Frank?" he asked. "To win, to come to Mars and live, I mean—to change everything. Sure—some will be sympathetic. But when there's practical pressure—need—danger—economics...?"
"I don't know, Mitch," Nelsen answered in the same tone as before. "Your thickets do have a pretty good defense." ”

“ Nelsen had felt such urges cropping up within himself. So this wasn't the end p. 149 of trouble—especially not out here in raw space, that was still far too big for man-made order.
So it wasn't just the two, opposed space navies patrolling, more quietly now, between Ceres and Pallas. That condition could pass. The way people always chose—or were born to—different sides was another matter. Or was it just the natural competition of life in whatever form? More disturbing, perhaps, was the mere fact of trying to live here, so close to natural forces that could kill in an instant. ”