"There is noise, or why can't I think? You are doing something to keep me from thinking!... That canary! It has been singing! That's it! You must wring its neck so I can think!"
"No," said McCauley, "it hasn't been singing. It hasn't sung for a long time. It did, but it doesn't any more. Why?"
"Something is the matter!" insisted Bramwell desperately. "I'm stupid! I'm as stupid as you! And I must use my brains!"
"You've got everything we can give you," said McCauley without particular emphasis. "We can't seem to do our work right either."
"There is some new condition we do not know about," Bramwell said, in a sort of puny panic. "There is something in space which is working to destroy us! Here! Send this message back to Earth!" McCauley took the slip of paper on which words were written in an erratic, spidery hand. "ButIthink you are making noises!"
Bramwell pulled himself back into his soundproof half of the ship. The door closed behind him, but not quite in time to cut off the beginning of an agitated whimpering sound.
McCauley pushed the beam-on button. He should have checked the time, Earth time, to see if Canaveral were on the side of Earth from which it could pick up the beamed message from space. It wasn't, but he didn't think to check. He read, in a monotone, the message Bramwell had written out:
I feel the purpose impossible probable effect similar to X-rays with this is vital to further but I have no instruments.Bramwell.
I feel the purpose impossible probable effect similar to X-rays with this is vital to further but I have no instruments.
Bramwell.
He was vaguely puzzled but he read it faithfully. Then, without checking for reception, he turned off the transmitter. He went back to the painful task of trying to make the ship's log entry at which he'd been working for a long time. He assured himself that though the message did not mean anything to him, they'd understand it back on Earth.
But they didn't. It didn't get back to Earth. The Venus ship had been pointed very accurately so that the parabolic reflector for the tight beam to Earth was perfectly aligned. But Bramwell had protested the faint, faint hum of the gyros which kept the ship pointed correctly. McCauley had turned them off. He'd meant to re-align the ship for each period of communication, but his mind was confused and he forgot.
Earth had received no message from the Venus ship for six days past. There was consternation in the Space Service.
It wouldn't have lessened any had Bramwell's message been picked up. He'd meant to say that he felt that achievement of the Venus ship's purpose was impossible because of something which doomed the men in it. He thought it probable that some previously unnoticed effect of radiation, perhaps similar to X-rays, was destroying their capacity to think. This effect should be studied. It was vital to further space exploration. But he had no instruments that could detect it.
They were three weeks out from Earth. The Bramwell-Faraday screen was turned up to full strength, and still the radiation counter clicked and clicked. It now indicated a higher frequency of radiation-particle penetration than was experienced in any of the Van Allen bands around Earth. Bramwell was a pitiable figure. Enough of his mental capacity remained to inform him of his intellectual degeneration. Now and again he popped into the forward part of the ship, trying to catch McCauley or Randy at some activity that was stealing his brain power away. When he failed to do so, he reacted with rages that would have been alarming except that he had not the energy for anything more than words.
McCauley struggled against a massive indifference. One part of his mind stood aside and knew that the occupants of the ship were doomed, but he could not care. Mr. Perkins no longer moved about its cage. Its feathers fluffed, the bird might be dead on its perch. McCauley tried painstakingly to write up the ship's log, but what he wrote was confused, meaningless. Even his handwriting grew steadily more illegible.
Then, at three weeks and one day, the leak alarms rang stridently. They made a frightful clamor all over the ship. The few compartment doors closed tightly.
"Leak," muttered McCauley to himself. "Prob'ly meteorite. Got to get in suit and fix leak...."
Fighting an overwhelming lethargy, he floated toward the space suit rack, missed it by yards, doggedly made his way back to it, and numbly began to get into a suit. Randy worked at the same task. He stopped to rest.
"Randy," said McCauley protestingly. "Get in suit! Leak!"
He himself was incredibly feeble. Had there been weight in the ship, he could not have lifted his helmet to his head. He settled it over his shoulders, but his fingers failed to turn the thumbnuts tight. Even so, there was the familiar feel of air blowing across his face.
Strength came to him. Not instantly, but with the first breaths of air from the suit tank his head seemed to clear a little. After more breaths, his hands moved assuredly. He began to realize the change in himself and gulped down deep lungfuls of the dry, curiously flat-smelling stored air.
Randy hadn't finished getting into his suit; he seemed to have gone to sleep. But when McCauley approached him in the space suit, Randy's eyes turned toward him incuriously.
McCauley thrust him into the space suit and clamped down the helmet. Randy suddenly stared.
"Something's been wrong with the ship's air!" snapped McCauley, feeling more like himself every second. "It's no good! Breathe deep, Randy! Breathe deep!"
Randy obeyed. His eyes cleared.
"Bramwell!" snapped McCauley. "Get him in a suit! He hasn't sense enough to do it himself!"
He flung himself at the control board. The leak was....
But there was no leak. The leak alarm had rung, but every pressure indicator in every part of the ship showed the same figure. It was.... McCauley gazed incredulously at the dials. The ship's interior pressure was 12.8 pounds to the square inch as against a normal 14.7. The difference was enough to set off the leak alarm, but a thinning of the air like this was not enough to cause the stupidity, the lethargy, the confused and helpless thinking which McCauley—marveling—realized had appeared during the past three weeks.
He heard a howling noise between the clamors of the gongs. It was Bramwell.
"You're making a noise!" wailed Bramwell. "I can't have a noise! I must have quiet...."
McCauley spoke crisply into the transmitter, sending a tight-beam message back to Earth. It would be minutes before it was received, as against the less-than-two-second lag in a message sent from the moon to Earth.
"We were suffering from oxygen starvation," said McCauley briskly. "The plants in the air-system's hydroponic garden absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but not quite cent per cent. There was a steady small loss of oxygen in the ship, caused by the use of oxygen as well as carbon by the growing plants. This small loss should have been made up by the addition of oxygen to keep the volume of the ship's air constant. But it happened that the oxygen flutter valve became jammed...."
He heard an explosive sigh of relief behind him, but he carefully did not look up at Bramwell. Bramwell was very silent these days, and he practiced extreme self-control. He realized now that he'd let too many things bother him. But he was still bothered, and horribly so, by the memory of his inability to make up his mind to face the journey in space, or to arrange for somebody to substitute for him, so he'd had to be shanghaied. He was even more bothered by the memory of his behavior when he found himself in a ship off for a swing in to Venus and out again. McCauley and Randy ignored these past happenings, and Bramwell would never be able to bring himself to mention them. But he was very much ashamed.
The thing that disturbed him most, however—the thing that made him extremely conscientious and extremely self-controlled—was the consequences of not facing things and of trying to cover up his own shortcomings. When he got over his hysterics he wanted to get even with McCauley and Randy by defying them. But he hadn't dared defy them openly. He'd been peevish and ashamed and humiliated. To him the bronx cheer of the oxygen flutter valve had seemed a mockery. But he still felt superior to pieces of machinery. So when the flutter valve went "Tht-tht-tht-tht!" at him, he angrily turned it off. And the human race almost had to stay on Earth forever because of it. The three of them came very close to dying.
McCauley continued talking matter-of-factly into the transmitter.
"As a result of the jammed valve, there was a steady lowering of the oxygen content of the air, but the carbon dioxide content did not increase. The air was getting closer and closer to pure nitrogen all the time, but we didn't notice, because a person feels suffocated by an excess of carbon dioxide rather than by a lack of oxygen. We were all dying quite comfortably when the leak alarm went off because the air pressure was dropping as the oxygen left us. When the alarm went off, we found the trouble and brought the oxygen concentration up to what it should be. We think there should be no more trouble. In fact...."
He stood up and handed the microphone to Bramwell. Bramwell hesitated a moment. Then he spoke.
"I have to report that the problem of a stronger Bramwell-Faraday screen field seems to be solved. This particular accident suggested a theory. Quite coincidentally, the theory resembled one aspect of charged-particle theory. It led to an idea. The new screen has a very gratifying reflex action which uses the velocity of the flare particles themselves to increase the screen's resistance. The charged particles are tricked into defeating themselves. I will have a detailed account of the theory and the apparatus shortly."
Mr. Perkins, in its cage against the wall, burst into song. The canary began with a trill and went on to a warble; then Mr. Perkins essayed a glocken. He accomplished it triumphantly. Bramwell scowled at it from habit. But then he carefully smoothed out his forehead as he handed the microphone back to McCauley. He nodded at the tiny cage.
"Not bad," he admitted. "Not bad at all!"
The Venus ship got back to its rendezvous with Earth some four months and eighteen days after take-off. At that time, this was the longest space journey ever made by man. But it was not only the longest trip. As a result of it, the reflex Bramwell screen had been developed along a new principle: The higher the velocity of a charged particle, the firmer the screen's resistance to its passage. Since the screen could stop even the highest-energy cosmic particles, the effect of such particles upon living matter could be determined by comparing exposed organisms—human beings and all other living things on Earth—to other organisms shielded from cosmic radiation. The ship, too, had made some close-range infrared photographs of Venus and prepared a fairly complete map of the planetary features underneath the cloud bank. The length of Venus' day was established. The....
It was a highly successful expedition from all standpoints.
But Randy insisted that the most remarkable result was the change in Bramwell. There was no doubt that Bramwell had one of the best brains in the solar system. Even when they disliked him most, both McCauley and Randy had respected his brains. But after Bramwell found out that they'd never refer to the way he acted before and immediately after he was shanghaied, the fact that he was so ashamed of himself improved him as far as human society was concerned.
He improved so much, in fact, that by the time they got back to Earth, McCauley and Randy were not much more polite to him than they were to each other.
Which was high honor.
6
(As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros—very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit—was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So he was assigned to try it.)
(As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros—very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit—was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So he was assigned to try it.)
The Personnel Ship of the First Martian Expedition was within two million miles of Mars when McCauley missed his watch. Everything had gone along as predicted, up to that moment. The ship had taken off from Earth and headed outward for its rendezvous with the tiny asteroid Eros. It burned rocket fuel lavishly to get the necessary velocity for the journey. Then it floated interminably while Earth grew small and far away behind it, and the sun dwindled and its heat lessened. Then Eros appeared like the tiniest pinpoint of light, and the ship drew up to it and braked—it had very little fuel left for its braking—and touched, and then moored itself to the half acre of previously moored bales and cases and special drones that the asteroid had ferried out from Earth. The ship's crew went outside in space suits, each one separately tethered to the ship by a long cable. They began to check the condition of their waiting supplies. Everything had to be examined because it had lain—hung—rested for two years on Eros' surface in the network of cables and drill rods needed to hold it there. The condition of the stores was satisfactory. So Colonel Ed McCauley took a shower.
In its way, even that was an adventure. The ship, of course, had no gravitational field, and Eros was very small indeed. Of almost solid nickel-iron, it was five miles by two by three; and though it dwarfed the ship, its gravity pull was on the order of one five-millionth that of Earth. So taking a shower in a ship moored to Eros was something special. It meant holding fast to handholds in a furious fan-made gale that blew water against one and then blew it off and to a water collector where it could be filtered and sterilized and pumped around to the showerhead again. It was quite different from a bath on Earth, but McCauley was much refreshed. He toweled himself and put on his ship clothes again—and his watch was gone from the pocket he'd put it in.
It made no sense at all.
He was still looking for the watch in every corner of the compartment outside the shower tank, when Major Randy Hall came in, propelling himself in that extremely unlikely fashion which has to be used in zero gravity.
"Randy," said McCauley vexedly, "I've lost my watch."
"I lost mine a week ago," said Randy. He caught a handhold and pulled himself to a sitting position, resting on nothing whatever. "Hathaway lost his the week we started out. Fallon told me privately that somebody'd swiped his wallet only a day or so after we started out."
McCauley swung around to face him.
"That's nonsense!" he said angrily. "It's lunacy! Who'd want to steal in a space ship?"
"I thought it was lunacy, too," said Randy, "until a few minutes ago. Now I'm more credulous. From checking supplies outside, it appears that some very fancy small instruments are missing. A case was broken open. Since we tied up here."
McCauley stared at him. On the face of it, Randy's statement was flatly impossible. Personal character aside, it was unthinkable that a member of the Expedition should steal from another member or from its stores. Nobody could use a stolen article in a ship containing exactly five other men. Nobody could sell stolen goods to his fellow crewmen. And nobody could hope to take any loot back to Earth. If all went well, the men themselves might hope to get back to Earth at some problematic future time. But every ounce of Earth-bound cargo would be scientific material, mostly microfilm. Stolen goods couldn't be used or sold or taken back to Earth. Money itself wasn't worth stealing. Nothing was. Many millions of dollars' worth of equipment now outside the ship had lain unguarded and untouched for two years in empty space. Nobody had stolen any of it before. There was no sense in stealing it now.
But somebody was.
It was a serious matter because of its implications rather than the facts themselves. The First Martian Expedition needed everything its members could give it for the safety of them all. If somebody considered himself apart from the rest, if one member of the crew was willing to injure the others by stealing from them, the situation was very, very bad. In fact, having a thief among the six was like a serious accident occurring to the Expedition's equipment. It would be comparable to a vital defect in the miniature atom-pile which was to supply energy for them to live by when they reached Mars' surface.
In a sense, though, the Expedition itself was the result of an accident of a different sort. The first part of this coincidence was the fact that some two years earlier the asteroid Eros had passed close to Earth on its elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. Eros is one of those rock and metal fragments which are found most often in orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Some people maintain that they are fragments of a planet which exploded some hundreds of millions of years ago, and there is some evidence to back this view. For one thing, some circle the sun in extremely eccentric paths. Eros swings out at its farthest between Mars and Jupiter, but when nearest the sun it dives in between Earth and Venus. Sometimes—rarely—it comes close to Earth in its passage across Earth's orbit. This had happened two years ago.
The second part of the coincidence was the purely fortuitous fact that only two Earth-years later Eros would pass even closer to the planet Mars. The two accidents added up to an opportunity, when McCauley added rockets and other resources of the Space Service. And the Service seized it.
So two years ago Colonel Ed McCauley had landed a ship on the asteroid, then close to Earth. He'd led a work crew which drove drill holes into the asteroid's solid metal substance. They made anchorages to fasten supplies to, and McCauley'd anchored the supplies. Then he took his ship back to Earth. On the way he'd passed other ships going out to Eros. They also anchored supplies on it. In one hectic month, the Space Service unloaded on the tiny asteroid all the supplies and equipment—some two hundred-odd tons of it—that the First Martian Expedition would need not only on Mars, but in getting back from Mars, which was equally important. Then the Space Service waited.
Nearly two years later, but now some months ago, the ship that was now moored to Eros took off from Earth. Enormous amounts of fuel were required for the journey out to Mars. No ship could carry fuel for the trip and the landing, much less a return trip. But if a ship made a rendezvous with Eros when the asteroid was close to Mars, it could refuel from the stores waiting on Eros. It could guide drone rockets from Eros to landings on Mars, carrying more supplies. The drones would not even need to be ships. They could be mere outlines of ships, with motors and guidance systems, their cargo lashed to their framework. So the asteroid would serve as a cargo carrier for the supplies the Expedition required, and also as the landing craft needed to put them ashore on the red planet.
So far, everything had worked out. Very shortly the first of the drones would be sent off to land the first cargo near an oasis close to the summer pole of Mars. Others would follow till all had been sent out; then the ship, refueled, would leave Eros and overtake the equipment that had preceded it. Its crew would recover the landed rocket cargoes, set up a base, be well equipped and amply supplied for several months of Martian exploration, and then have adequate fuel for the voyage home. More than that, it would leave a base that was ready to function, and fuel for return flights, for a reasonable number of other ships in the future. In fact, the passage of Eros close to Earth and then to Mars had provided a freight service that meant the difference between men going to Mars and staying home.
But there was a thief among the six men making the first trip. There was McCauley and Randy Hall and Fallon and Brett and Soames. Hathaway was the meteorologist who would learn all that was to be known about Mars' atmosphere. Fallon was the atom-power mechanic. Brett and Soames had their specialties, but all had been trained in the remote control of drone rockets with their loads of precious material. All were needed.
"Hmmm," said McCauley, frowning. "You say Hathaway and Fallon lost things, the one a watch and the other a wallet. You and I ... I lost an electric watch. It runs on a battery the size of a pea. I never have to wind it." He looked up. "Are you sure Brett and Soames haven't lost anything?"
Randy looked curiously at McCauley.
"Come to think of it, Brett asked me if I'd seen his fancy gold pen. That was weeks ago. He uses an issue pen now. And I think—IthinkSoames was turning things upside down once, looking for some sort of gold luck-piece he carries. Yes. He did."
"I'll find the stuff," said McCauley, frowning, "but I'm bothered."
He looked out a port at the crew members on the surface of the asteroid. Randy followed his eyes. The four other members of the Expedition, in bulky space suits, worked busily in a landscape—or an Eros-scape—too fantastic to be real. All of them now accepted the view that Eros was an explosion-created fragment of something much larger, and that that something must have been remarkable. Nine-tenths of the surface of Eros was solid metal such as forms the core of all the heavier planets. Now, metal rods stuck here and there out of drill holes in the raw, glistening crystalline mass. Between the drill rods ran cables holding nets under which objects were tethered. There were drone rockets by the dozen, and bales and boxes and tanks seemingly by the hundred. They would drift away to nowhere but for the nets which held them fast. They'd been held thus during two years of unaccompanied, uneventful cartage from the orbit of Earth out to the orbit of Mars. Most of the stuff needed only to be sorted and loaded on the drones, which would take off under control by the drone-master keyboard on the ship. There was an enormous mass of supplies. There could be a loss of up to fifty per cent in transit without irreparable damage being done to the Expedition's purposes.
When Randy looked back from the laboring, space-suited figures outside, he was alone. McCauley had gone to the ship's small workshop, all of whose tools would be left in the base on Mars. Frowning, he connected a microphone and an audio amplifier and a headset and went back to explain to Randy. But Randy was no longer there. He'd gone outside to carry on as second-in-command. His business was largely finding things to worry about and telling McCauley, who made them turn out all right.
McCauley went purposefully through the ship with his microphone-amplifier unit, touching it here and there against the fabric of the vessel. The idea was perfectly simple. If there was a thief on board, he would certainly not keep his loot on his person or in his locker. He'd have a hiding place for it. The loot included McCauley's watch, which would not run down for months. And solid things conduct sound much better than air does. The ticking of a watch which can't be heard at five feet, in air, can be heard through fifty feet of wood or metal if the watch is in contact with the farther end.
So McCauley methodically listened for the ticking of a watch conducted through the metal of a spaceship. There was no one else on board. There was no operating machinery to make extraneous noises. Presently he heard the five-times-a-second click-click of his watch. He traced it to its loudest, unscrewed a floorplate, and found three watches, a very expensive gold pencil, and a luck-piece that was a gold coin some hundreds of years old. There were also three small and very expensive instruments that came from a smashed case on the asteroid.
McCauley put them in his pocket and went to the compartment that was his sanctum as commander of the ship. He pulled out the personnel report on one member of the crew. It was not believable.... Then he thought of something. He pushed the outside-communicator button.
"Fallon," he said, "report to the ship. A job for you."
He drummed on the desk before him as he waited for Fallon. This was a singularly unpleasant situation.
Fallon came in, still in his space suit. He opened the faceplate and grinned. He was an exuberant personality, this Fallon.
"Reporting in, Colonel."
Without a word, McCauley brought out the three watches, the instruments, the elaborate gold pencil, and the luck-piece. He picked out his own watch and the instruments and waved his hand toward the rest.
"Get these back where they belong," he ordered. "I'll take care of the instruments. Don't let anybody know they're being returned. Let it appear they've been found misplaced."
Fallon stared. Then he went white and licked his lips. But he said nothing.
"I found this stuff," said McCauley, "as soon as I looked for it. I knew you'd hidden it, because you said your wallet was gone and there was no wallet with the other missing stuff. You should have put it in with the rest of the loot, Fallon, if you wanted to be convincing."
Fallon stared.
"It's about as stupid a performance as I've ever heard of," said McCauley. "Why did you do it?"
Fallon swallowed. Then he braced himself and looked defiant. In a moment or two he managed a grin. It was a shaky grin, but he straightened up and then shrugged.
"Why should I tell you?" he said. "What can you do about it, anyway?"
"I can think of a few things," said McCauley.
"Name one!" said Fallon defiantly. "You can't kill me. You can't put me out of the ship, because that'd kill me. You can't lock me up, because you need everybody. You can't do anything! You might as well forget it! This trip was dull. I wanted some excitement. I thought there'd be a big fuss when things started to disappear. There wasn't. All right, I'll put the stuff back. But you might as well forget the whole business because you can't do a thing about it."
McCauley stiffened. Fallon was right. There wasn't anything he could do, in the ordinary sense of the word. He couldn't execute Fallon for theft. He couldn't imprison him. If he punished him in any way that aroused his resentment, Fallon could no longer be trusted, and any of the six men could destroy the other five simply by neglecting some essential duty assigned to him. In space, men have to trust each other and be worthy of trust in return. There is no room in unlimited emptiness for a man who arouses suspicion and antagonism among his shipmates solely for his own amusement. But Fallon had done just that. He was as dangerous as an atom bomb on the expedition to Mars. But whereas an atom bomb can be disarmed, nobody can disarm a man who chooses to play the fool.
Fallon picked up the objects McCauley had given him. He spoke with sudden truculence.
"Well?" he said. "What can you do? Just suppose I don't feel like giving these things back. I'm going to, but if I wouldn't do it, what'd you do?... You won't even tell the rest you caught me! You want the stuff put back without their knowing it was taken!"
"Yes-s-s," McCauley said very slowly. "That's right. I shan't tell the rest. I want things to go along smoothly, without squabbles or suspicions. But you want excitement, more than our job provides. You'll look for it in some other fashion now, won't you?"
Fallon said defiantly:
"I'll do what I feel like doing!"
"Yes," said McCauley, nodding. "You'll get your excitement regardless. You're as independent as a hog on ice, because you think that I can't do anything to stop you. Very well. I'll try to provide you with some excitement. You do what you please. I'll do what I please about it."
Fallon's eyes narrowed.
"You don't care what I do?" he demanded skeptically.
"I do care," McCauley told him. "You're the one who doesn't care. But I'll be able to make use of you somehow. All right; you can go, now."
Fallon hesitated, scowling. Then he went out. He was uneasy. He could have understood had McCauley threatened him, or flown into a rage, or possibly tried to appeal to a nonexistent loyalty to his companions or to the purposes of the Expedition. But McCauley had not reacted in any fashion that Fallon could understand.
Later in the day Randy consulted with McCauley.
"Funny thing happened," he said vexedly. "Fallon went around and gave Brett back his fancy gold pen. He said he'd taken it for a joke. He gave Soames back his luck-piece and Hathaway his watch. He explained that they were jokes, too. He gave me mine.... Did you get yours back?"
McCauley nodded. He explained what had happened. Randy blinked.
"But why didn't he just slip them back like you told him to?"
"He's worried," said McCauley. "I didn't threaten and I didn't reason with him. So he figures that I've something special in mind. So he wants to be on good terms with everybody but me. Now if I accused him of stealing, he could insist that he was joking and that he'd proved it."
"That's crazy!" said Randy.
McCauley did not contradict him. He shrugged. Presently Randy went out on the surface of Eros. A single incautious movement might send him floating off into emptiness except for the moorings to the drilled-in metal rods that anchored supplies and ship and crew alike. On the nickel-iron surface of the asteroid, to be sure, magnetic-soled shoes ought to hold a man down. But the emergency wasn't great enough to make depending on them necessary. Everyone kept himself anchored to a drill rod, and did not let go, anywhere, until another anchorage had been secured.
The five-mile-long and two-mile-thick mass that was Eros floated onward in its orbit. It rotated very slowly—its day was half an hour and its night was thirty minutes—and all the stars appeared in turn, including that nearest star which was the sun. The Milky Way spread incredibly across the sky. Earth was blue-green and a bare speck of a crescent—a crescent because it was to sunward, and a speck because it was well over forty millions of miles away. Mars, to the outward, was a perceptible disk the size of a quarter at forty feet. Already photographs taken on spaceships and sent back to Earth by scanning signal had disclosed features that even the giant telescopes on the moon had not detected. Randy claimed to have seen Phobos and Deimos with his naked eye, and perhaps he had. But most of the crew were too busy for more than an occasional glance out at Mars.
The supply items to be carried by each drone rocket had to be regrouped so that no one rocket would contain a disproportionate amount of any one kind of supplies. It was to be expected that some loads would be lost, so it was important to make sure that no one load, if it was not landed or recovered, would cause crippling shortages of this item or that.
There was, though, one bit of freight that would not be trusted to rocket transport. The fuel for the atom-pile would go on the ship, because if the ship did not land safely there'd be no Expedition, and if it landed safely, the atomic fuel would be essential. The thin air of Mars would have to be pumped up to the pressure required by the human body, and its oxygen would have to be concentrated. There would be need for heat during the bitter Martian nights. Power was necessary for human life on Mars. And only atomic power would be adequate.
The first drone rocket lifted off Eros when the asteroid was a million and a half miles from Mars. The rocket rushed ahead, dwindling until it could no longer be seen among the stars. It carried a tank of rocket fuel, a rocket motor, and a communications unit. That was all. The drone was not streamlined, not pretty. It was a skeleton with its drive at the tail, a shaft to tie the cargo to, and a television camera at its nose. The first loads shipped were relatively unimportant ones, so that initial disasters due to lack of experience would have the least serious consequences. When the asteroid was a quarter of a million miles farther on, more rockets were on the way. There were two near-disasters. The rockets were prepared for launching during the planetoid's half-hour "daylight," but they were launched when the launching site was away from the sun and toward Mars farther out. During daylight McCauley prepared one rocket for firing and returned to the ship. Later Hathaway went out to set off that "night's" salvo. The first rocket blew itself to bits when fired. Hathaway had a very narrow escape.
The men figured out, afterward, that in the utter cold of the planetoid's "night" the rocket motor had cooled to the brittle point of metal. When the rocket was fired, the frozen metal flew apart before it could warm up and thus restore normal strength throughout its thickness. McCauley berated himself to Randy, because he had not anticipated this fact. The rest of the salvo was held until "sunset" the next day, and was fired within five minutes of the coming of darkness, before the metal could cool to brittleness.
The other near-tragedy happened when a rocket took off and the flame splashed against a glistening metallic upcrop and licked fiercely at Soames' space-suited legs. He jumped convulsively, rose out of the flame before it could either cook his legs or melt down his space suit, and, gasping in horror, soared off and up to the length of his safety rope. The rocket went past him no more than a dozen feet away. Its exhaust could have burned him to a crisp, or at the least flashed his plastic faceplate. That was a very close call indeed.
Presently Fallon came looking for McCauley. The mechanic was coming off-shift and still wore his space suit. He opened the faceplate, grinning nervously.
"Look here, Colonel," he said ingratiatingly, "I've got something I want to say to you."
"Go ahead," said McCauley. He was still bitterly discontented with himself. Actually, Soames should not have been so near the rocket blast, but McCauley felt responsible because he hadn't ordered him specifically away.
"Soames had a pretty close call," said Fallon nervously.
"Yes," said McCauley curtly.
"Hathaway had another," said Fallon. "When that rocket blew, he could have been killed. He should've been."
"I know it," snapped McCauley.
"I ... I ..." Fallon hesitated. "Look, Colonel! We had a—disagreement. I acted like a fool. I want to apologize."
McCauley scowled. There were innumerable things to worry about, and Fallon was one of them. McCauley had taken the one line that might keep Fallon from making trouble. He'd scared him, and it seemed to have worked. But for Fallon to come to apologize was something else. It meant that his attitude had changed from almost mutinous defiance to panic.
"Forget it," said McCauley.
"I—didn't have you figured right," said Fallon shakily. "I thought you were ... just the usual kind of character. I ... I know better now. I'd—I'd like to ... well ... you're likely to need somebody to help you. Maybe you don't think so, but if you knew you could count on me...."
Fallon's voice practically clicked off, and McCauley realized that he was terrified. The man was afraid to say something, but he was more afraid not to.
"What would I need you for besides your duty?"
Fallon hesitated, licked his lips, and then said desperately:
"Soames and Hathaway—they almost got theirs. I've been thinking. If ... accidents happened to us ... to all but you...."
"Go on," said McCauley, frowning.
"We're ... sending most of the stuff to Mars," stammered Fallon. "B-but we're keeping the atom fuel on the ship. It's w-worth a lot. If something happened to most of us ... why ... two men could take the ship back to Earth and land it anywhere they wanted to. And if ... if a person had contacts, that atom fuel would be w-worth a lot. Millions."
McCauley was jolted.
"Suppose," he said grimly, "that you tell me the rest of your idea."
"Why ... why ..." Fallon tried hard to be ingratiating and confidential, but he couldn't make it. So he said harshly: "I'm going to tell you something. My name's Fallon, but I'm not the Fallon you think I am. I've got a brother. He was slated to come on this trip. I was in the pen. I broke out. They were close after me. I went to my brother for money and help. He's tried to help me before, tried to make me stay out of trouble. This time was the worst, but this time he wouldn't help me any more. It was too serious. So I ... slugged him and took his papers and his orders and reported for duty instead of him. I ... I guess he couldn't bring himself to turn me in, but he figured I'd be caught before take-off. But I bluffed it through!" Here a trace of pride came into his voice. "I bluffed it through, and I came on the trip in his place because there wouldn't be anybody hunting me out here."
McCauley did not display any feeling at all. That Fallon had committed a crime or crimes back on Earth—forty million miles away—meant nothing here. Not if he did his work. But....
"Well?" said McCauley.
"I'm telling you," said Fallon urgently. "You didn't tell the others that I'd lifted their stuff. You had to have a reason. Then Hathaway almost got it when that rocket blew. And Soames came close to frying in a rocket blast. There are too many queer things happening! You not telling the others on me, and then...."
McCauley sat perfectly still, staring at Fallon.
"It adds up," said Fallon defiantly. "There's millions in atom fuel here. If things happen to the others, you can get back to Earth and land anywhere, and if you've got contacts so you can sell the atom stuff...."
McCauley waited ominously. Fallon tried to go on, and could not. But his meaning was clear. In some twisted fashion he had worked out what he believed a logical explanation for McCauley's behavior to him. It implied that McCauley did not see the Mars expedition as a normal man would see it, but as an opportunity for the first space robbery in history and perhaps the most stupendous criminal coup since time began. It was true that the atomic fuel for the Mars reactor had a money value in the tens of millions. To McCauley, that fact would mean that it was something to be guarded and taken care of. But to Fallon, it was something to be stolen. And he thought McCauley saw it the same way.
"I suppose," said McCauley evenly, "that you've guessed that I plan to kill off the others and go back to Earth alone. Is that it?"
Fallon twitched nervously.
"It figures," he said desperately. "But you need another man to help! I told you who I am. I couldn't afford to double-cross you! I couldn't land this ship. But I could help a lot!"
"Yes," agreed McCauley with irony, "you could. So you want to throw in with me, eh?"
"Y-yes."
"All right," said McCauley. "You're in. You share in everything I do and everything I get out of it. It's a bargain."
"F-fine," said Fallon in a voice like a croak.
He'd try to believe it, but he wouldn't be able to be sure. He left. McCauley knew that he would quake and be terrified, and he would not believe in McCauley's intention to make him a partner in crime. But in his own view he couldn't do anything but try to bargain for his own life if—but he thought of it as when—McCauley murdered or abandoned the others in emptiness.
McCauley told Randy the whole business, of course. As second-in-command Randy needed to know everything.
"He's a swine," Randy said distastefully. "But it took nerve to try to bluff through our training period, with the voyage out here to follow it."
"He's in bad shape," said McCauley. "However he got started that way, he chose to be a crook at some time or another. He probably thought it was smart. It wasn't, but now he can't think the way a non-crook thinks."
Randy frowned, thinking.
"I believe," Randy said slowly, "that I'll explain to the others. He's with us and the way he thinks has to be allowed for. They won't let him know they're on to him.... I feel sorry for the poor devil. You will, too, when you think it over. They'll feel the same way."
McCauley nodded. Space is no place for the self-righteous or the intolerant. Charity is a requisite for the endurance of journey in emptiness, in closed tin cans with re-breathed air and enforced exasperating contact with other persons. The Mars Expedition members had been chosen for personality traits as well as technical competence. It was remarkable that Fallon had been able to imitate his brother's character well enough to avoid unmasking before take-off.
The work of the Expedition went on. In the half-hour day, the rockets for Mars were loaded and set up for firing. Immediately after darkness fell, they went streaking away from the small, misshapen asteroid. McCauley or Randy at the control board picked up their monitor signals one by one, verified their course and speed, and made such adjustments as would be needed to get them to the planet which men now ought to reach a good twenty years ahead of schedule. Near Mars, they'd be swung into orbit and landed one by one.
It became routine. But it was a hair-raising routine. There was a tissue-thin difference between the success and failure that meant life or death. What rest they took was in snatches. But things went along. Curiously enough, when Hathaway and Brett and Soames were told in confidence of Fallon's self-produced predicament, it amounted to easing the tension their continuous labor might have produced. They had something to think about besides the nerve-racking need for absolute accuracy and absolute care in all they did out of the ship. Crawling about under the cargo nets was harrowing. There were the stars. There was the feeling of absolute emptiness, into which their sensations assured them that they were falling unendingly.
But Fallon had no relief as the others did. He didn't have their purpose. They were risking their lives to accomplish something they wanted to do. That was why they were here. But Fallon was with them in flight from the law. He had only fear to sustain him.
Three-fourths of the rockets had been released. Nine-tenths. There were more than forty rockets aground on Mars and the ship was refueled, and already it would be possible to leave Eros and land on Mars and set up the base and do the work the Expedition was expected to do. They could do all this and then return to Earth. The rockets still in space and on Eros amounted to a margin beyond necessity, and every extra one that landed would increase the surplus of equipment and supplies.
And then Fallon got lost. He was never out of sight of the others, but he got lost. It was the rule, of course, for every man to have his own life line securely fastened to solidity. They were long life lines to permit movement about the cargo cache and the much-diminished heaps of stores. They were inconvenient, but they were starkly necessary. It was strictly forbidden for any man at any time not to be safely tethered. And....
A rocket was to be made ready for firing. Its cargo was brought to it, item by item. Fallon had worked with the others. He was treated with singular forbearance by his shipmates. There came a moment when somebody had to shift his space-rope anchorage. It happened to be Fallon who needed to do this. Soames took hold of Fallon's space rope in the middle and held it firmly while Fallon shifted the end to another anchorage. Fallon was nervous, worried. He finished the task quickly and went on toward the cargo items he was to move.
McCauley, prowling on his perpetual task of inspection, saw the knot Fallon had made. He said sharply:
"Fallon, stop moving and hold on to something solid."
Fallon swung about and stared apprehensively. He clung to an anchor rod sunk in the metal of the asteroid. McCauley made sure he was safe, untied the space-rope knot, and tied it more securely.
"It was a bad knot," said McCauley. "You're safe now."
McCauley went on. This was outside the cargo-netted space and near where the rockets went up. Fallon clung fast to the drill rod. The others went about their business. Stars blazed in the daylight sky. The sun flamed far, far away. Fallon stayed motionless, gripping the rod that was securely set into the metal of Eros.
Presently he stirred stealthily and tugged at the rope with the new knot in the end. It was firm. He tugged more strongly. It held. Then, with the gentlest and most fearful of tuggings, he drew himself to where McCauley had fastened his space rope. He examined McCauley's knot. Fallon was afraid of McCauley, because he had made a bargain he did not believe McCauley would keep. He believed that McCauley meant to be the sole survivor of the Mars Expedition, returning secretly to Earth with tens of millions in stolen atomic fuel.
And Fallon believed that McCauley had planned the near-tragedies of Hathaway and Soames. Therefore he believed that McCauley would be arranging more successful accidents for those two and the rest, and that because Fallon knew of McCauley's plans, he, Fallon, would be the first to be destroyed.
He could see nothing the matter with the knot, but he distrusted it with a despairing terror.
He untied it so he could retie it himself. And McCauley's voice roared in the headphones in his helmet:
"Fallon! What are you doing?"
Fallon started violently. He jumped. His space rope was not anchored, and Eros has no measurable gravity. Fallon went up and away from the asteroid, toward a thousand million light-years of emptiness. His space rope rose with him, not trailing behind but writhing and twisting weightlessly, more like a tendril of smoke than anything else. Horror filled him. He could not cry out.
"Get him!" roared McCauley.
Space-suited figures turned in the stark white sunlight, and inky black shadows followed their movements in strict synchrony. Fallon was twenty feet high.... Forty. A space-suited figure jerked at his space rope for assurance and then leaped up toward Fallon. It was a miss. The glittering metallic space suit swung in a wide arc and then down to ground again. A second man leaped. A third. They swept past the line of his flight. The space rope of one of the men touched Fallon's. Had it struck near the middle, it might have brought his rope down captive. But the end of Fallon's rope flicked free and he went on toward the stars.
Now there were babblings. Space-armored figures moved swiftly toward a single spot, pulling themselves by their ropes.... Fallon was sixty feet high.... Seventy.
Then a man came soaring straight upward. He missed Fallon, but he flailed a rope and it tangled in Fallon's. The bobbing, rope-held figure hauled in, and had Fallon's rope fast. He wrapped it swiftly about his arm. When the jerk came it was not severe.
Then a single figure on the asteroid pulled down and down and down, and Fallon was towed to solidity. He touched before he could utter a sound.
McCauley was the man who'd hauled him back. The others crouched or squatted down, holding fast to the metallic projections from the surface of Eros. They'd given up their ropes to make a rope long enough for his rescue. While one went after him and McCauley stood erect to draw him back, the others held fast by their fingertips to keep from sharing his predicament. They'd risked floating away as helplessly as he himself, in order that their life lines might be used to save him.
McCauley did not reprimand Fallon, but he pointedly thanked the others for the promptness with which they'd acted.
Later, Randy asked vexedly:
"What was the matter with Fallon? He knew he shouldn't have unfastened his rope!"
"His knot wasn't good, and I retied it," said McCauley dryly. "But he thinks I intend to kill everybody, probably him first. So when I meddled with his life rope he thought I was arranging his death. He meant to retie the knot to defeat my evil intention."
"He's a fool!" snapped Randy. "We'd better have it out with him, or there's no telling what he'll do next!"
"I'm afraid I have to," McCauley said distastefully. "He'll be humiliated when he finds out I was humoring him. But get him, anyhow."
There was a clanking sound somewhere in the ship. The inner air-lock door closed. There were noises that told of the sealing dogs being tightened. Then, immediately, the outside lock door opened. Randy went to find Fallon. He came back, disturbed.
"Fallon just went outside. He's supposed to be off-duty, too."
McCauley frowned. Then he flipped the outside-communicator switch. As a matter-of-fact precaution, there was two-way communication with emptiness whenever anybody was outside the ship. Anything that came in was immediately heard from speakers all over the ship, so that the control room did not have to be manned all the time work was proceeding on the planetoid's surface. If an emergency arose, everybody anywhere in the ship would know immediately.
"Fallon," said McCauley curtly into the outside transmitter, "you're wanted. Come back, please."
Silence. No answer. There was only darkness outside the ship now. Stars moved steadily up from the blackness that was one nearby horizon, and down to the blackness that was the other. The red disk of Mars—very near, now—was the brightest object in the heavens.
"Fallon!" snapped McCauley. "You're wanted! Return to the ship immediately!"
A clanking sound came from all the loud-speakers inside the ship. Then Fallon's voice.
"Wait a minute." He panted as if doing some heavy labor where there was no weight. "Ah-h-h! Right! What do you want?"
"I want you back in the ship," said McCauley sternly.
More clankings. They were the type of sound that might be heard inside an air-filled space suit and picked up by its helmet microphone.
"What are you doing?" demanded McCauley.
"I'm fixing ... uh!..." The last was a grunt. "I'm fixing a way to settle something.... I'm set now."
"Fallon!" barked McCauley. "Come to the ship immediately! That's an order!"
"I'm busy," said Fallon's voice, defiantly. "But I'll tell you something! I'm not going back to Earth with the rest of you. I was on the run when I passed myself off as somebody else and got on the ship. I was on the run from Death Row in the pen. They had me ready for the hot seat in two days more, and I got away. Why should I go back to Earth?"
He paused. And then he said, his tone indescribable:
"Everybody is hearing me. I fixed that! I doctored the aerial switch so when it's turned on it can't be turned off again! McCauley can't keep you from hearing me now, because he called me! And McCauley's going to squirm now! I joined up with him to wipe out every one of you, so we could go back to Earth with the atom fuel to sell to contacts he's got! He tried to kill Soames and he tried to kill Hathaway! He tried to kill me today, by getting me lost, but the rest of you jumped to help me and he had to join in so you wouldn't know what he'd tried!"
McCauley winced.
"Poor fool!" Randy said.
"Now listen," said Fallon's voice fiercely. "I've told you the truth. If I'd told you before you wouldn't've believed me. But you're going to believe me now, because I've scrapped my chance of living—it wasn't good anyhow—to tell you! You watch McCauley! Send word back to Earth of what I've told you. He'll not dare to do a thing when a dying man's accused him—and that's what I am!"
"Fallon!" barked McCauley again. "It's a mistake! You thought I planned that stuff, and I was just playing along with you! The others knew all about it! They knew everything you just told them! It's a lie! I'm not planning anything. I just played along with you...."
"Yes?" jeered Fallon. "Tell that to the aviators! The spacemen don't believe you!" Then he said: "So what? I'll be the first man on Mars! I'm Joe Fallon, 4272365, Walla Walla Penitentiary, and I'll go down in the history books. I'm taking off for Mars. Want to race?"
There was a sudden roaring. It was the sound of a rocket blast, conducted by metal to a space suit and picked up by the microphone inside.
"T-taking off," gasped Fallon, outside. "You get this story back to Earth and he won't dare do anything! He won't dare! But I didn't rat on him! Only on what he was going to do."
After that, there was only the roar of the rocket blast.
They poured out of the ship in space suits as fast as the air lock would let them. Perhaps some of them had a faint, faint hope that it was merely a joke. But it wasn't. There were boxes and bales floating heavily, soggily, in the emptiness about Eros. They had been thrust aside when Fallon took the rocket for himself. And he was gone.
McCauley made an irresolute movement back toward the ship, and Randy said quickly, via space phone:
"No use, Ed! We can't make more than six gees acceleration in the ship, and in a loadless rocket he'll make twelve! We can't catch him!"
And there'd be nothing they could do if they did catch him. McCauley ground his teeth, staring at the star-filled sky.
"I did something wrong," he said bitterly. "Something wrong! But what would have been the right thing?"
Hathaway said enviously:
"He'll be the first man on Mars, at that! But his air won't last all the way. He'll coast in and crash and never know it. But he'll be the first man on Mars!"
"Yes," said Randy wryly, "he'll have that.... Let's get these last rockets off and land at a respectful distance behind him."
And they did.
Of course, as everyone knows, the First Martian Expedition was a great success. Of the six men who left on it, five came back. They had maps and photographs and petrological samples, and a complete and surprisingly reasonable explanation of the canals and oases about which astronomers had argued for the best part of a century. They even brought back a sluggish, naked, squirming creature which initiated an entirely new line of biological research.
McCauley began a battle behind closed doors, and Randy helped him, and in time a curious error in the public records appeared. It is officially stated in all the books that one Joe Fallon was the first man to land on Mars, though the first records of the Expedition gave his name as Andrew—at least Fallon the crewman was not named Joe. There is a strange lethargy in official quarters. Nobody bothers to correct the records.
"Of course," said McCauley to Randy, "he stole our watches, but he was a pretty decent character at that, considering. He'd have no part in taking your lives."
"What was he sentenced for?" asked Randy suddenly.
"First-degree murder," said McCauley shortly. "I was curious too. I asked." Then he said, "They're talking about trying to make Jupiter, Randy. It seems to me that if we try, we can get to go on that job. What do you say?"
Randy grinned. He put out his hand and they shook on it.