A Gift For Terra.

by Fox B. Holden.

[Sidenote: _The good Martian Samaritans rescued Johnny Love and offered him "the stars". Now, maybe, Johnny didn't look closely enough into the "gift horse's" mouth, but there were others who did ... and found therein the answer to life...._]

His head hurt like blazes, but he was alive, and to be alive meant fighting like h.e.l.l to stay that way.

That was the first thing returning consciousness told him. The next was that his helmet should have been cracked wide open when the b.u.m landing had wrenched the acceleration hammocks out of their suspension sockets and heaved his suited body across the buckled conning deck. It should've been, but it wasn't.

The third thing he knew was that Ferris' helmet had been smashed into a million pieces, and that Ferris was dead.

Sand sifted in a cold, red river through the gaping rent in the side of the ship, trying to bury him before he could stand up and get his balance on the crazily tilted deck. He shook loose with more strength than he needed, gave the rest of the muscles in his blocky body a try, and there wasn't any hurt worse than a bruise. Funny. Ferris was dead.

He had a feeling somewhere at the edge of his brain that there was going to be more to it than just checking his oxygen and food-concentrate supply and walking away from the ship. A man didn't complete the first Earth-Mars flight ever made, smash his ship to h.e.l.l, and then just walk away from it. His astrogeologer-navigator was dead, and the planet was dead, so a man just didn't walk away.

There was plenty of room for him to scramble through the yawning rip in the buckled hullplates--just a matter of crawling up the river of red sand and out; it was as easy as that.

Then Johnny Love was on his feet again, and the sand clutched at his heavy boots as though to keep him from leaving Ferris and the ship, but it didn't, and he was walking away....

Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain was too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was too still.

Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemed too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. He looked back, and the plume of still-rising smoke from the broken thing that had been his ship was like a solid black pillar that had been hastily built by some evil djinn.

How far had he walked; how long?

He turned his back on the glinting speck and made his legs move again, and there was the hollow sound of laughter in his helmet. Here he was, Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of the strength in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forward and no backward, no direction at all; breathing when there was no purpose in breathing.

Why not shut off the valves now?

He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. _Alone, but never without hope! And here there was no hope, for there was no life, and no man had ever lived where there was not life!_

But he had come to see, and he was seeing, and in the remaining hours left to him he would see what no man had seen in a half a million years.

Harrison and Janes or Lamson and Fowler would not be down for twenty days at the inside; that had been the time-table. Twenty days, twenty years ... he heard himself laugh again. Time-table!

He and Ferris first. Then Harrison and Janes. Then Lamson and Fowler, all at twenty-day intervals. If all landed safely, they would use Exploration Plan I, Condition Optimum. If only two crews made it down, Plan II; Condition Limited. And if only one made the 273-day journey from the orbit of Terra--that would be Plan III; Condition Untenable, Return. The twenty-day interval idea had come from some Earth-bound swivel-chair genius who had probably never even set foot in a Satellite operations room. Somebody had impressed on him when he was young that egg-carrying was a safer mission with a multiplicity of baskets; it was common sense that if anything happened to Mars-I touching down, at least it wouldn't happen to II and III at the same time.

Common sense, Johnny thought, and he laughed again. s.p.a.ce was not common, and it was not sensible. And n.o.body had ever taught it the rules men made.

He kept walking, seeing, thinking and breathing.

For a long time. He fell once or twice and picked himself up again to walk some more, and then he fell a final time, and did not get up. Red sand whispered over him, danced lightly, drifted....

The flat, wide-tracked vehicle swerved in a tight arc, throwing up low ruby-colored clouds on either side. Its engines throbbed a new note of power, and it scuttled in a straight line across the desert floor like a fleck of shiny metal drawn by an unseen magnet. Behind it rose a thinning monument of green-black smoke, and between its tracks was a wavering line of indentations in the sand already half-obliterated by the weight of their own shallow walls. But they became deeper as the vehicle raced ahead; and then at length they ended, and the vehicle halted.

There was a mound of sand that the winds, in their caprice, would not have made alone, for they sculptured in a freer symmetry. And the child-like figures seemed to realize that at once.

With quick precision they levelled the mound and found Johnny Love. They took him into their vehicle, and deftly matched and replenished the waning gas mixture in the cylindrical tanks on his back.

Then they drove away with him.

"Ferris?"

"Ferris was your astrogeologer-navigator. He died when you crashed."

"Harrison ... _Janes_?"

"Harrison and Janes are not due for nine more days. But you are in no danger."

There was darkness and warmth; his throat was dry and it burned. It was hard to talk, and Ferris was dead. Harrison and Janes were not due for nine more days. Somebody said so. Nine more days and then everything would be--

Panic shook him, sent blood throbbing to his head and brought consciousness back hard. His eyes opened and he was suddenly sitting bolt upright.

"But Lamson, you were twenty days behind--" And the racing thought froze solid in his fumbling brain. Then there was a torrent of thoughts and memory overran them, buried them, and red desert was rushing up to engulf him. He screamed and fell back with his hands clawing at his eyes.

"You are in no danger. You had thought our planet lifeless; it was an error. We live underground, John Love. That is why you did not see us, or surface indications of our existence. A group of us speak your language, because for eleven days we have been studying your brain and a.n.a.lyzing your thought-patterns."

Johnny was bolt upright again, and now his eyes were wide and his hands were knotted, and where there had been only light and shadow before there was full sight now. Swiftly he was off the low cot and on his feet looking for the speaker, arms ready to lash out and hit.

But he was alone in the small, sterile-looking chamber, and his muscles were so much excess baggage. He tried to recover his balance: he had forgotten about the slight gravity. He tried too hard, and his body crashed, confused, into a wall. A--d.a.m.n them, a _padded_ wall!

He regained his feet. Stood still, and raced his eyes about him. There it was--above the cot. A small round, shuttered opening--some sort of two-way communication system. He wondered if they could see him, too. If they could, that part of it worked only one way.

"All right, whoever you are, so you've a.n.a.lyzed me!" He had to direct his sudden anger at something, so he shouted at the shuttered aperture.

"Now what...."

There was silence for a tiny eternity, and he could feel them probing, evaluating him, as a human scientist would study a rare species in a cage. The feeling ignited a new anger in him, and made him want to curse the teachings that had conditioned his lifetime of thinking to the belief that Man _was_ more than an animal.

He'd been sold short....

"d.a.m.n you! G.o.d d.a.m.n you, what are you going to do to me?"

In a corner of his mind he was aware of a gentle hissing sound, but he did not listen. The fear and terror had to be broken. Make them tell, _make_ them tell....

His muscles grew heavy and his face was feverish with his effort, and his eyes stung. Something ... like roses. But there were no roses on dead planets--

"Earthman, can you still hear?"

"I can hear," Johnny said. It was suddenly easier to talk. Even easier to understand. They had done something....