Frank Long - Space Station 1

“Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We’re buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don’t really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they’re here and, we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance — or lack of it — against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here” —

“Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn’t want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony”.

“That doesn’t excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men”.

“How many of them could step into Drever’s shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You’re forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It’s rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best”.

“That’s true enough, I suppose. And now that he’s here he probably couldn’t be replaced. Experience of - a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like”.

“I’m simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy’s age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn’t ride a bike on Mars — if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?”.

Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever’s son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the faces of at least two of them.

Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. “Nonsense!” he said.

A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.

“Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn’t we get started?”.

“We should and we will”, Corriston said. — “But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don’t arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where’s Freddy? Have you seen him?”.

The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: “Over there”, he said. “His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of”.

Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.

Dr. Drever’s son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.

Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf child.

“Why did you do it, Freddy?” Corriston asked. “Your father is very upset and worried”.

Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.

“I had to come”, he said. “I had to”.

“But why?”.

“I don’t know”.

“I see”.

Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: “I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you’d be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You’d be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates”.

Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. “How did you know?” he gasped.

“I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy — once”, Corriston said.

“Gee, thanks”, Freddy said.

“Thanks for what?”.

“Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston”.

Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.

“We’re starting again in ten minutes”, he said. “Better have another cup of coffee all around”.

THE SAND had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.

The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.

For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.

Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston’s side.

“We can’t be far from the ship now”, he said. “I wish there was some way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man to accompany him ”.

“Freddy will be all right”. Corriston said. “You don’t know what it means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he’s done it”.

The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.

“I’m not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground”, the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very near now.

“Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is”, Drever said, as if he too welcomed the Opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve his inner tension.

“They’re a very primitive form of life, really” the geologist said. “They look like large gray snakes, but they’re actually more like worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they’ve attached themselves it’s almost impossible to dislodge them. You’ve seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I’m sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard — the galaka — as you know”.