I
“You’re crazy, man,” snapped Steven Alexander, “you can’t take off for Mars alone!”
Scott Nixon thumped the desk in sudden irritation.
“Why not?” he shouted. “One man can run a rocket. Jack Riley’s sick and there are no other pilots here. The rocket blasts in fifteen minutes and we can’t wait. This is the last chance. The only chance we’ll have for months.”
Jerry Palmer, sitting in front of the massive radio, reached for a bottle of Scotch and slopped a drink into the tumbler at his elbow.
“Hell, Doc,” he said, “let him go. It won’t make any difference. He won’t reach Mars. He’s just going out in space to die like all the rest of them.”
Alexander snapped savagely at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You drink too much.”
“Forget it, Doc,” said Scott. “He’s telling the truth. I won’t get to Mars, of course. You know what they’re saying down in the base camp, don’t you? About the bridge of bones. Walking to Mars over a bridge of bones.”
The old man stared at him. “You have lost faith? You don’t think you’ll go to Mars?”
Scott shook his head. “I haven’t lost my faith. Someone will get there … sometime. But it’s too soon yet. Look at that tablet, will you!”
He waved his hand at a bronze plate set into the wall.
“The roll of honor,” said Scott, bitterly. “Look at the names. You’ll have to buy another soon. There won’t be room enough.”
One Nixon already was on that scroll of bronze. Hugh Nixon, fifty-fourth from the top. And under that the name of Harry Decker, the man who had gone out with him.
The radio blurted suddenly at them, jabbering, squealing, howling in anguish.
Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.
“No. No. No come. Danger.”
Scott turned toward the window, started up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.
What was the use of keeping hope alive? Hope that Hugh might have reached Mars, that someday the Martian code would bring some word of him.
Hugh had died … like all the rest of them. Like those whose names were graven in the bronze there on the wall. The maw of space had swallowed him. He had flown into the face of silence and the silence was unbroken.
The door of the office creaked open, letting in a gust of chilly air. Jimmy Baldwin shut the door behind him and looked at them vacantly.
“Nice night to go to Mars,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be up here, Jimmy,” said Alexander gently. “You should be down at the base, tending to your flowers.”
“There’re lots of flowers on Mars,” said Jimmy. “Maybe someday I’ll go to Mars and see.”
“Wait until somebody else goes first,” said Palmer bitterly.
Jimmy turned about, hesitantly, like a man who had a purpose but had forgotten what it was. He moved slowly toward the door and opened it.
“I got to go,” he said.
The door closed heavily but the chill did not vanish from the room. For it wasn’t the chill of the mountain’s peak, but another kind of chill … a chill that had walked in with Jimmy Baldwin and now refused to leave.
Palmer tipped the bottle, sloshed the whiskey in the glass.
“The greatest pilot that ever lived,” he said. “Now look at him!”
“He still holds the record,” Alexander reminded the radio operator. “Eight times to the Moon and still alive.”
The accident had happened as Jimmy’s ship was approaching Earth on that eighth return trip. A tiny meteor had struck the hull, drilling a sharp-cut hole. It had struck Andy Mason, Jimmy’s best friend, squarely between the eyes.
The cabin had been filled with the scream of escaping air, had turned cold with the deadly breath of space and frost crystals had danced in front of Jimmy’s eyes.
Somehow Jimmy had patched the hole in the hull, had reached Earth in a smashing rocket drive, knowing he had little air, that every minute was a borrowed eternity.
Most pilots would have killed themselves or blown up their ships in that reckless race for Earth, but Jimmy, ace of all the spacemen of his day, had made it.
But he had walked from the ship with a blank face and babbling lips. He still lived at the rocket camp because it was home to him. He puttered among his flowers. He watched the rockets come and go without a flutter of expression. And everyone was kind to him, for in his face they read a fate that might be theirs.
“All of us are crazy,” said Scott. “Everyone of us. Myself included. That’s why I’m blasting off alone.”
“I refuse to let you go,” said Alexander firmly.
Scott rested his knuckles on the desk. “You can’t stop me. I have my orders to make the trip. Whether I go alone or with an assistant pilot makes no difference. That rocket blasts on time, and I’m in it when it goes.”
“But it’s foolishness,” protested Alexander. “You’ll go space-mad. Think of the loneliness!”
“Think of the coordinates,” snapped Scott. “Delay the blastoff and you have to work out a set of new ones. Days of work and then it’ll be too late. Mars will be too far away.”
Alexander spread his hands. “All right then. I hope you make it.”
Scott turned away but Alexander called him back.
“You’re sure of the routine?”
Scott nodded. He knew the routine by heart. So many hours out to the Moon, landing on the Moon to take on extra fuel, taking off for Mars at an exact angle at a certain minute.
“I’ll come out and see you off,” said Alexander. He heaved himself up and slid into a heavy coat.
Palmer shouted after Scott. “So long, big boy. It was nice knowing you.”
Scott shrugged. Palmer was a little drunk and very bitter. He’d watched them go too long. His nerves were wearing out.
Stars shone like hard, bright jewels in the African sky. A sharp wind blew over the summit of Mt. Kenya, a wind that whined among the icebound rocks and bit deep into the flesh. Far below blazed the lights of the base camp, hundreds of feet down the slope from the main rocket camp here atop the mountain set squarely on the Earth’s equator.
The rasping voice of a radio newscaster came from the open door of the machine shop.
“New York,” shrieked the announcer. “Austin Gordon, famous African explorer, announced this afternoon he will leave soon for the Congo valley, where he will investigate reports of a strange metallic city deep in the interior. Natives, bringing reports of the discovery out of the jungle, claim the city is inhabited by strange metallic insects.”
Someone slammed the door and the voice was cut off.
Scott hunched into the wind to light a cigarette.
“The explorers are going crazy, too,” he said.
Probably, later on in the program the announcer would have mentioned Scott Nixon and Jack Riley would blast off in a few minutes in another attempt to reach Mars. But it would be well along in the program and it wouldn’t take much time. Ten years ago Mars had been big news. Today it rated small heads in the press, slight mention on the air.
But the newscaster would have been wrong about Jack Riley. Jack Riley lay in the base camp hospital with an attack of ptomaine. Only an hour before Jack had clasped Scott’s hand and grinned at him and wished him luck.
He needed luck. For in this business a man didn’t have even an inside chance.
Scott walked toward the tilted rocket. He could hear the crunch of Alexander’s feet as the man moved with him.
“It won’t be new to you,” Alexander was saying, “you’ve been to the Moon before.”
Yes, he had been to the Moon three times and he was still alive. But, then, he had been lucky. Your luck just simply didn’t hold forever. There was too much to gamble on in space. Fuel, for one thing. Men had experimented with fuel for ten years now and still the only thing they had was a combination of liquid oxygen and gasoline. They had tried liquid hydrogen but that had proved too cold, too difficult to confine, treacherous to handle, too bulky because of its low density. Liquid oxygen could be put under pressure, condensed into little space. It was safe to handle, safe until it combined with gasoline and then it was sheer death to anything that got within its reach.
Of course, there had been some improvements. Better handling of the fuel, for instance. Combustion chambers stood up better now because they were designed better. Feed lines didn’t freeze so readily now as when the first coffins took to space. Rocket motors were more efficient, but still cranky.
But there were other things. Meteors, for one, and you couldn’t do much about them. Not until someone designed a screen, and no one had. Radiations were another. Space was full of radiations and, despite the insulating jacket of ozone some of them seeped through.
Scott climbed through the rocket valve and turned to close it. He hesitated for a moment, drinking in the smell and sight of Earth. There wasn’t much that one could see. The anxious face of Alexander, the huddled shadows that were watching men, the twinkling base camp lights.
With a curse at his own weakness, Scott slammed the valve lock, twirled it home.
Fitting himself into the shock absorbent chair, he fastened the straps that held him. His right foot reached out and found the trip that would fire the rockets. Then he lifted his wrist in front of his eyes and watched the second hand of the watch.
Ten seconds. Eight. Now five. The hand was creeping up, ticking off the time. It rested on the zero mark and he slammed down his foot. Cruel weight smashed down upon him, driving his body back into the padded chair. His lungs were flattened, the air driven from them. His heart thumped. Nausea seized him, and black mists swam before his eyes. He seemed to be slipping into a midnight chasm and he cried out weakly. His body went limp, sagging in the chair. Twin streams of blood trickled from his nose and down his lip.
He was far out in space when he struggled back to consciousness. For a time he did not stir. Lying in the chair, it took long minutes to realize where he was. Gradually his brain cleared and his eyes focused and made impressions on his senses. Slowly he became aware of the lighted instrument board, of the rectangle of quartz that formed the vision panel. His ears registered the silence that steeped the ship, the weird, deathly silence of outer space.
Weakly he stirred and sat upright, his eyes automatically studying the panel. The fuel pressure was all right, atmospheric pressure was holding, speed was satisfactory.
He leaned back in the chair and waited, resting, storing his strength. Automatically his hand reached up and wiped the blood from his lips and chin.