Lester del Rey: Marooned on Mars

The rebound of the mattress threw Chuck up against the straps, and his stomach did a series of flip-flops under the change. For a few seconds, his head spun dizzily as he lost his sense of balance. He’d been sick for hours on the first trip to the Moon, but his body had learned to adjust. Nagging waves of sickness passed. It was almost like floating in clear water, without the wet sensation.

Fora moment, he was tempted to undo the straps and go floating about, bounding from walls and ceiling with a mere push of his finger. Then he remembered that he was ho longer a child, and relaxed back beside Jeff, watching out through the observation ports.

There wasn’t much tosee. The rear radar screen overhead showed the Earth shrinking behind, while the Moon was still a tiny, sharp ball of white in the black sky. The stars were mere pinpoints of bright, cold fire; there were more than could be imagined on Earth. The sun lay to one side, but an automatic filter protected their eyes, and made it seem only an irregular circle of leaping flame. It was the same view Chuck was used to seeing from the airless Moon.

Jeff pointed to the side, and Chuck turned to look. A few miles away, one of the old doughnut-shaped orbital stations floated. It circled above the Earth in an orbit, like the Moon, but nearer, and might go on forever. Before the new fuels and improved shields bad made atomic-powered jets possible, men had used the stations as a step toward the moon; now they were abandoned, except for a few scientific uses.

“Progress,” Jeff said. “Used to take twenty trips from Earth to a station before we could get enough fuel for a ship to “leave it for the Moon. Now we do it directly. They built them to use for atom-bombing enemies on Earth in case of war; but when too many countries got orbital stations up, everybody got scared, and they turned the whole thing over to the UN. Started out for war and they led to real world peace!”

Chuck had studied it in school, though he found it hard to believe that the United Nations Council had ever been weaker than the countries it now ruled so easily.

Jeff took one final look as the station shot out of view. Then he relaxed beside the automatic timer that would waken him, closed his eyes, and was soon snoring quietly. Chuck tried to do the same, but the feeling of weightlessness bothered him, reminding him of the first trip, and the four years that had passed since then.

Chuck had always dreamed of leaving Earth, but he’d never seen a rocket take-off or spoken to a man who’d left -the planet until he was nearly fourteen. His father had been head engineer for a small company in the Midwest, and Chuck had been forced to content himself with what he could read about the Moon ships. Then, without warning, his father had announced that he was chosen to work on the big ship being built cm the Moon to reach Mars. Chuck had nearly gone wild at the idea of actually living on the Moon.

When the novelty had worn off, he’d pestered the construction men into letting him help during his free time away from school. It had seemed enough to be able to help in making it possible for others to go farther to other planets. His mind traced the days and months of watching the ship grow, and his eyes slowly closed.

They were almost to the Moon when Jeff wakened him. Chuck saw that the ship had already been turned, around with its tiny steering rockets, and now had its jet pointing toward the Lunar surface. In the rear radar screen, the big crater named Albategnius showed he was almost home. The crater’s eighty-mile diameter almost filled the screen, · and the two smaller craters inside it stood out clearly. Moon City lay in the smaller one that the first explorers had nicknamed Bud, and the Mars Expedition construction was going on in the other, known as Junior. Around the flat crater, the run walls that rose for thousands of feet were already shutting out the rest of the Moon, while the central peak seemed to stick straight up toward them. Even the observatory building beside it could be seen.

Jeff nodded sharply, and cut in the big rocket-jet-to slow their rushing speed. Landing was like take-off, except that it was trickier, since they had to reach zero speed exactly at the moment they touched the surface. Jeff frowned into the screen, and juggled the controls, while the agonizing pressure again caught at Chuck. When it ended, there was hardly a jar as they settled down on the three landing fins.

“Sweet landing,” Chuck said, and Jeff nodded. It had been an exceptionally smooth one.

They waited, while the ground below cooled from the heat of the rocket blast. Then there was a tapping sound from the surface of the ship. Jeff fingered a control that would open the outer air-lock door, waited, and sent a signal to close it again. The lock permitted men to enter the ship from the vacuum outside without too much loss of the ship’s air. A moment later, the inner door opened, and Chuck’s father pushed up the hatch to the control room.

He was wearing a suit that looked like a diver’s, with a transparent globular helmet over his head, which he now threw back. In his arms were suits for Jeff and Chuck. His tanned face broke into a wide grin, and his big, booming voice seemed to shake the little room.

“Chuck! Boy, you look like a million. Welcome home!”

“Hi, Dad!” Chuck’s throat caught as his father grabbed him in one arm, squeezing him briefly. Then he grinned back. “I passed! Dad, I can go to Mars!”

The smile slipped from William Svensen’s face, and his eyes darted suddenly toward Jeff Foldingchair. The pilot avoided the look and shrugged helplessly. “I told him the ship would take off two days early,” he said uncomfortably. “I figured he knew when his birthday was. Oh, heck, Svensen, I couldn’t really tell him!”

Chuck dropped back weakly toward the mattress. He’d been a dope not to know what it meant. Nobody could leave on the ship for Mars until he was eighteen and Chuck’s birthday was one day after the new take-off date.

Svensen shook his head slowly, and one hand fumbled out toward his son, holding the suit. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe we can do something about it Here, get into your suit. Your mother’s waiting at home, and we’d better get going. We’ll talk it over later. Nobody has said you can’t go yet.”

Chuck hid his head as he fumbled with the suit, trying to keep his father from seeing the sudden tears in his eyes. He knew the older man didn’t think he had a chance!

On the Moon’s surface, the sun was blazing down mercilessly, heating the rocks underfoot beyond^ the boiling temperature of water. Only the heavy suits and the helmets which cut off all but visible light made walking possible. Chuck and his father left Jeff behind and headed toward the edge of the smaller crater, where Moon City lay. Here where gravity was only one-sixth that of Earth, their normal walk was a series of twenty-foot leaps that earned them along at better than ten miles an hour.

In the absence of air, no speech was possible, and Chuck was glad of it. He wanted time to recover from the shock of finding all his hopes were ruined. He followed his father silently, letting his eyes study the inky shadows and glaring high lights of the Lunar landscape.

They skirted the small group of storage sheds and receiving buildings, from which trucks were heading out toward the rocket ship, and came to the little cogwheel tracks that led down into “Bud.” The electric-powered car was waiting at the stop when Chuck halted for a quick look down into the little crater. Being away for even a few weeks made it all seem new again.

There wasn’t really much to see. Moon City had been built like the cities of the old cliff-dwellers. The living quarters were hollowed out of the crater rim, well back from the surface. Outside, only a half-dozen air-lock entrances showed, leading into tunnels that served as streets and connected the few shops and the homes. Such construction protected them from the occasional falling, meteorites, and enabled them to live without space suits most, of the time; the air that was baked from chemicals in the rocks was sealed inside.