An hour slipped by, and another. Then the quiet, hesitating voice asked them all to meet in the saloon. Emergency.

  The saloon was rather sardonically named: there was barely room in it for all of them, jammed together in vibrating metal and smelling each other’s sweat. Alaric Wayne stood by the farther entrance, the great black dog behind him. His gauntly chiseled face was paler than before, under a tangle of mouse-brown hair, and his big light eyes did not look at any of them, but beyond. He spoke fast, impersonally:

  ‘Miss Grenfell has plotted out for me the pattern of transaudible vibrations which indicate something is going wrong with our blast. It’s changing rapidly, the pattern, but the data were enough, taken in conjunction with other observations, to give me an idea of the trouble. It’s something no one could have foreseen, for no one had ever been this close to the sun.’

  No, thought Collie, nobody ever had. It was hot and close in the ship. His shirt stuck wetly to his back.

  ‘Astronomers have long suspected that the solar energy output has sharp peaks at certain levels,’ continued Wayne, as dryly as if he were lecturing to a class on Earth. ‘Now it turns out that it does. There is a strong emission of charged particles which can get about this far out before falling back into the solar atmosphere. They, and, the secondary emissions from our hull which they cause, don’t amount to enough to harm us, but they do affect the electrostatic fields which direct the ion blast. Not much, but enough so that a certain small percentage of the positive ions ejected strike their tube walls, and on the shadow side of the ship some of these, losing all kinetic energy, acquire electrons from the solar radiation and cling there. In short, we’re getting an ice crust in the port tubes, and its vapors are disturbing the blast. Unless it’s remedied, our tubes will shortly be eaten through.’

  Silence.

  ‘I – I—’ Wayne looked away. ‘I’m s-s-sorry.’

  ‘Is hokay, ceptain,’ said Ivanovitch. ‘Like you say, who could know?’

  ‘The question,’ said Arakelian, ‘is what to do about it.’

  ‘Whatever we do will have to be done fast,’ said Feinberg harshly. ‘We need to blast almost the whole time in this sector, if we aren’t going to get so close to the sun that we won’t have reaction mass enough to pull free again.’

  ‘Rotate the ship?’ asked Gammony. ‘Heat every side even an’ boil that there ice out.’

  ‘We can’t do that while we’re blasting,’ said Arakelian, ‘and if we fall free and rotate, it’ll take too long. Those tubes are pretty heavily insulated.’

  ‘I’ve thought it out,’ said Wayne. ‘We’ll have to stop the jets, clean the crusted tubes, and mount electric coils on the outside to deflect the solar ions. It is a simple job; the only question is whether we can do it soon enough, before the ship falls hopelessly close. At an estimate, we can fall free for about twenty-four hours.’

  Silence again. Then Gammony stretched himself and grinned. ‘Okay, boys,’ he said, ‘What all is we standin’ ‘roun’ heah for?’

  Collie, Arakelian, and O’Neill were the tube-cleaning party, while the others worked to make the deflector coils. The hillman struggled into his spacesuit, cursing its awkwardness as he shivered with the need for haste. On Mars, they’d be using a simpler dress, but out here full armor was required. When the helmet clanged down, he had a moment of panicky claustrophobia. It died away, but his heart beat swiftly and the smell of rubber and oil flat in his nostrils.

  Feinberg’s delicate hands ran over oxygen tanks, pumps, cooling units, joints and clamps. ‘Hurry up,’ muttered Arakelian. His voice sounded tinny in the helmet radio. ‘The devil with that checking.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Feinberg into the microphone he was wearing. ‘We’ve taken too goddam many chances already.’

  They went out into the airlock and waited while it was pumped clear. Collie watched the air-diffused light of the overhead bulb wane, until he and his companions were only sliding highlights against darkness under its glare. ‘Okay,’ said O’Neill. ‘All clear.’

  As they emerged on the outer hull, the acceleration was cut off. Collie gulped, his stomach turned a somersault and he bit his teeth together to hold it down. Suddenly he was falling, falling endlessly into a sky that was black and hideous around him, and he clawed at slick metal and sobbed.

  ‘Easy there,’ Arakelian laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Take it easy, Collie. It’s harmless.’

  Collie swallowed. His heart was loud in his ears. Above him, below him, around him glittered a hugeness of stars. They were on the shadow side, but he could see red and white flames seething beyond the curve of the ship, and they hurt his eyes. He swayed, gripping himself to the falling ship with magnetic soles, his toes curling uselessly. It was hard to see, the light was tricky, he could only pick out the metallic edges of the spacesuits and the whitely flaring outline of the hull.

  ‘Okay,’ said Arakelian. There was steadiness in his tones; he had been on a practice flight to the moon. ‘Let’s take it slow. Keep the hull between you and the sun; if you have to look around its edge, slide your blinkers forward. Otherwise you’ll be blind for a week, maybe forever. Don’t lift one foot till the other one is planted firm on the hull, because if you should go jumping away from the ship there’s nothing in God’s universe that’ll ever bring you back. We’ve got plenty of time to do this job – hours. Follow me, now.’

  They shuffled toward the stern, holding hands. Collie swayed and teetered, but he could only tell that by the swinging of the stars in his faceplate. Every little movement brought dizziness, when there was no gravity to hold down the fluid in the semicircular canals. but he was ill all the time and couldn’t use that vertigo as a gauge. He hoped he wouldn’t be sick in his suit. It was hard to tell if you had one foot on the hull or not. Once O’Neill made a miss-step and floated gently toward the horrible stars, but Arakelian pulled him back.

  When they came to the great clustered tubes, they stooped and duck-walked, creeping toward the throats. Arakelian planted a magnetic stanchion and they roped themselves to it. Then they felt easier, and swung around to peer down the mouths of the tubes. Collie couldn’t see much detail in there, a shadowy hint of coils where the wan puddle of his flashlight touched.

  Arakelian murmured to himself. ‘Yeah. I spot some ice in there. Just a thin layer, but I guess it’s what’s making the trouble.’ He unlimbered a stiff wire ending in a brush. ‘Heh! Makes me feel like a goddam plumber. All right, let’s swab ‘em out.’

  Collie hung in darkness, thrusting and wiping. Every time he pushed his brush forward, he went back, jerking to a halt at the end of his line. Arakelian, toward the sun-side, was too brilliant to look at. Collie gasped in the stuffiness of his suit. Lord! How long did this take?

  Enormously later, Arakelian hauled himself around to inspect the tubes. Most of the ice was out; ship-rotation could boil the rest free quickly enough. His voice was a sigh of strengthless exhaustion: ‘Okay, I guess that’s it.’

  Slowly, they pulled themselves in and unlashed their ropes and began the creeping walk back. They didn’t hold hands this time, perhaps they were too tired to think of it, and somehow it had never occurred to anyone that they should be tied together. Collie’s skull felt hollow.

  He was not aware of his misstep till he saw O’Neill’s armored form sliding past him. Then he screamed. He threshed his arms, and the stars spun a little and spun back again, then they did a huge cartwheel and he felt the radiance of the sun on him.

  ‘Help!’

  The awful thing was the slowness. Collie drifted from the ship, drifted a yard a minute maybe, turning and spinning, now the ship was there and now he faced the stars and now he threw an arm across his faceplate against the sun. His screaming echoed in the helmet, he thrust out his arms and cried, and the stars burned at him from a huge and waiting silence.

  ‘My ankle,’ shouted O’Neill. ‘Grab it!’

  He jumped frog-wise, away from the ship, and Arakelian clung to his shins and prayed that the magnets were strong enough. The Irishman passed by Collie, a foot out of reach, and jolted to a stop. Collie thought he could glimpse the tortured face as he went drifting by.

  ‘Swing me around, Alec!’ O’Neill held himself stiffly outstretched. ‘For God’s sake!’

  An inch a second, perhaps, limned in sun-fire against a million frosty stars, and Collie turning and tumbling from the ship. O’Neill’s clumsy gauntlets slapped at the hillman’s thigh, and both of them bounced apart, and Arakelian yelled and swung O’Neill around again.

  This time Collie felt the gloves slam on his boot, and he waited rigidly for O’Neill’s lanky form to straighten out. When the small shock of halting came, if it was great enough to tear that insecure grasp loose, he, Collie, would fall into the sun.

  And Lois, whom O’Neill loved, had been holding Collie’s hands, and Collie was the most dispensable man aboard, and it would be the easiest thing in the universe to let go and say he had torn loose after all. Collie jammed his teeth together and waited.

  The recoil of stopping jarred him, ever so faintly, and then the hands were rising, ankle, thigh, calf, arms about his waist, and his feet clashed on metal and he swayed and sobbed against the ship.

  ‘Jesus – Christ!’ muttered Arakelian. ‘Don’t ever do that!’

  Collie’s throat felt like dry sand, and the shaking was on him now, but he managed to whisper that he was sorry.

  ‘Oh, hell, it could happen to anybody,’ said O’Neill.

  When they were back in the ship, taking off their suits, Collie’s eyes met the Irishman’s, and they looked at each other for a long time.

  ‘I got a lot to thank you for,’ said Collie at last.

  ‘Isn’t anything,’ said O’Neill. ‘Nothing at all.’

  IX

  Mars filled half the sky. When you looked out the ports on that side, the planet’s ruddy-amber glow spilled in and tinted faces a strange hue. Collie’s eyes followed the trace of stony hills and iron deserts, polar bogs and thin harsh equatorial scrub, the huge outline of a dust storm scudding redly over a thousand square miles of barrenness, and it seemed impossible that this could be another world. That it would be as hard and real under his feet as the hills of Earth, and Earth herself no more than a star.

  The spaceship swung in a hurrying orbit some thousand miles above the turning surface, and instruments strained forward to know what it was that waited there. High-powered telescopes, spectroscopes, thermocouples, a scribble of notes for which Schiaparelli or Lowell would have traded their lives. There was no gravity on the ship, you hung endlessly falling in a silence that after the rocket-bellowing approach maneuvers was ghostly. Voices dropped unawares to a whisper, and the small blowing of ventilators seemed unnaturally loud against that stillness.

  Collie heard Feinberg speaking: ‘Seems to be about what the astonomers have thought for a long time. Perhaps a little more oxygen than was detected from Earth or the space stations, but certainly not enough to breathe. Temperatures ranging from chilly to goddam cold. Pretty flat, a few low ranges of hills. Fairly well-developed plant life, probably involving some elaborate symbiosis, but nothing like a terrestrial forest or meadow. A few tiny lakes, especially around the poles, but otherwise it’s bone-dry. No sign of intelligent life, or animals of any kind, though I imagine there are some small ones. All in all, we seem to have picked a pretty grim place.’

  ‘It beats the moon,’ said Arakelian. ‘Not by a great length, I admit.’

  ‘It can be colonized,’ said Wayne. ‘I’m s-s-s-certain of that.’

  Feinberg went back to his work, the preparation of a map. It was a big job, with all the detail they had and the necessity of tying everything in with the coordinate system established by Earth’s astronomers. And doing such a task in free fall was not especially simple. Papers and instruments kept floating out of reach.

  Collie turned from the room, he was no use here, and pulled himself by handholds down toward the saloon. Ivanovitch, Gammony, and Lois Grenfell were playing poker there. ‘Hi,’ said the Negro. ‘Come on an’ sit in.’ They had taken along no cash – hardly of use out here! – but played for I.O.U.s which, in the weeks of journeying had run into considerable amounts. ‘Come lose yo’ shirt, boy.’

  ‘Huh,’ grinned Ivanovitch. ‘Lois is de one who ought to lose her shirt.’

  The girl flushed, bit her lip, and said nothing. Collie felt a brief anger. Damn it, Misha had no business making such japes. She was a fine girl. She’d been together with Collie a lot since they left the sun behind, and O’Neill had withdrawn into a silent unhappiness.

  Collie shoved the words back into his throat. This was no time to quarrel, however sick of the same faces you might get. It didn’t seem right, either, that they should sit thumbing greasy cards while the human race, in their persons, was reaching out for the stars.

  Only what in hell should you do? Heroic speeches and blowing trumpets would have been still more out of place. Man just wasn’t that kind of animal.

  Wasn’t – hadn’t been— There was no telling what man might become, in the long night of change which lay before him. Collie repressed that train of thought, it had tormented him enough, and hooked a leg about a stanchion. Taking the magnetized pencil off the table and a sheet of paper from a spindle, he scrawled a ‘$500’ and his name and slapped the I.O.U. onto a light adhesive surface fastened to the wall. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Deal me in.’

  They came down out of night and stars, riding a jet of fire and waking dim echoes in rusty valleys. Gammony, O’Neill, and Arakelian piloted them, less a team than a single trained unit, stretching its senses to make up for the lacking instruments. And when they sat down, it was in a storm of sand blown up by their rockets, so that the landscape blurred for them and they wondered, briefly, if the ship would be fused here forever.

  Then the tripod found bedrock, the blast died, an engine hummed to lengthen one leg enough to put the ship even, and there was silence. They had arrived.

  No one said a word. It was too big for talking. Lois’ hand stole into Collie’s, and their fingers held closely together. The rest climbed from their acceleration harness and stood unmoving, unspeaking, while the silence grew around them.

  Wayne spoke from the bridge. His tone was flat, not quite steady. ‘Come on. Let’s go outside.’

  Slowly, saying little, they climbed into their airsuits. These were stiff, insulated coveralls with sliding joints and transparent helmets, holding oxygen-enriched air at ten pounds pressure, but there was much thought behind them. The color was scarlet, luminous at night, to help if a man should get lost. Heating coils ran through the fabric, and a small, highly efficient rotary pump sucked in the Martian air, compressing and warming it enough so that a man might breathe; though there were supplementary tanks of oxygen on their backs for ordinary use.

  On the shoulders was mounted a receiver for the power-beam which transmitted ship’s energy to the suit, as well as the sender of a feedback radio signal which kept the separate beams pointing at the men as they moved about. With the equipment and their own mass, they weighed a little more under Mars gravity than they had done naked at home, but they could at least travel freely within a wide circle about the ship.

  They held back, letting Alaric Wayne go first, but he didn’t notice the gesture. He climbed down the ladder from the air-lock, his dog – almost comic in its own suit – scrambling awkwardly after. Looking down, Collie saw those two as small and lonely figures, dark against the tawny, rust-streaked desolation around them.

  When his own boots touched Martian ground, he stood for a long while, withdrawn into his own thoughts. Behind him, the ship was a tall steely pillar, looking up against a night-blue sky which became a thin chill greenish on the horizon. Underfoot was hard-packed sand, yielding little to his footsteps, rolling in great dunes as far as he could see. There was scant wind here to pile it up, but what there was had had millions of years to work. The ground was a dull blend of colors, yellow and ocher and dun; here and there a mineral-streaked rock lifted above the desert, its shadow black and knife-edged.

  The horizon curved sharply off, and in the tenuous air seemed even nearer than it was, as if the planet had closed walls in on them. The sun was slipping westward, a small pale disc spilling wan light over the empty world. Collie could just make out the zodiacal lens which had been so clear in space, and a few of the brighter stars glittered overhead by day. He couldn’t see Earth, and somehow that made his loneliness all the greater.

  It was very quiet here. The purr of his compressor, the sound of his own lungs and pulse, seemed to override whatever Mars might be whispering to welcome him. Straining, he thought he could hear the tiniest voice of wind, streaming over more leagues of death than he knew. Lois, he thought, was the only one to whom Mars could really speak. Their eyes met behind glassy masks, and they smiled at each other with a certain forlornness.

  ‘Over there.’ O’Neill’s words came flatly in his earphones. ‘A clump of trees—’

  ‘Mars’ equivalent of a tropical jungle,’ grunted Arakelian. ‘Well, let’s go have a look, shall we?’

  They went plodding over the sand, strung out so that one man would be close to the ship. It seemed a meaningless precaution. This was not a place of wild beasts and hostile savages: Mars’ threat was something older and stronger and more patient. Mars would suck the air from broken helmet and ripping lungs, would freeze a man’s blood in his living veins, would gaunt him with hunger and shrivel him with thirst and take a thousand years to bury his mummified corpse under the slowly marching sands. And this is the world we have to conquer!

  The wood was not large, a few acres of low, twisted gray trees with umbrella-sized leaves of dull green, intermingled with several kinds of dry moss-like vegetation, rust-colored lichenous patches, and pale hard fungoid growths. None of the shapes looked much like anything on Earth – it was a surrealistic nightmare till you got used to it.

  Still – life! Here in rust and rock, under a rainless heaven and a niggard sun, millions of miles from Earth the lovely, there was something that lived. Collie touched the rough gray surface of a tree with a kind of reverence. Life was a frail thing, a short pale flicker in the wheeling immensity of an inorganic universe, but it could fight for its place; torn and crippled on one world, it could reach out to another and find that its own spirit had gone before. Somehow that ugly little tree became a thing of hope, and very beautiful.