Asteroid of Fear.

by Raymond Zinke Gallun.

[Sidenote: _All s.p.a.ce was electrified as that harsh challenge rang out ... but John Endlich hesitated. For he saw beyond his own murder--saw the horror and destruction his death would unleash--and knew he dared not fight back!_]

The s.p.a.ce ship landed briefly, and John Endlich lifted the huge Asteroids Homesteaders Office box, which contained everything from a prefabricated house to toothbrushes for his family, down from the hold-port without help or visible effort.

In the tiny gravity of the asteroid, Vesta, doing this was no trouble at all. But beyond this point the situation was--bitter.

His two kids, Bubs, seven, and Evelyn, nine--clad in s.p.a.ce-suits that were slightly oversize to allow for the growth of young bodies--were both bawling. He could hear them through his oxygen-helmet radiophones.

Around him, under the airless sky of s.p.a.ce, stretched desolation that he'd of course known about beforehand--but which now had a.s.sumed that special and terrible starkness of reality.

At his elbow, his wife, Rose, her heart-shaped face and grey eyes framed by the wide face-window of her armor, was trying desperately to choke back tears, and be brave.

"Remember--we've _got_ to make good here, Johnny," she was saying.

"Remember what the Homesteaders Office people told us--that with modern equipment and the right frame of mind, life can be nice out here. It's worked on other asteroids. What if we are the first farmers to come to Vesta?... Don't listen to those crazy miners! They're just kidding us!

Don't listen to them! And don't, for gosh sakes, get sore...."

Rose's words were now like dim echoes of his conscience, and of his recent grim determination to master his hot temper, his sensitiveness, his wanderl.u.s.t, and his penchant for poker and the social gla.s.s--qualities of an otherwise agreeable and industrious nature, that, on Earth, had always been his undoing. Recently, back in Illinois, he had even spent six months in jail for all but inflicting murder with his bare fists on a bullying neighbor whom he had caught whipping a horse.

Sure--but during those six months his farm, the fifth he'd tried to run in scattered parts of North America, had gone to weeds in spite of Rose's valiant efforts to take care of it alone....

Oh, yes--the lessons of all that past personal history should be strong in his mind. But now will power and Rose's frightened tones of wisdom both seemed to fade away in his brain, as jeering words from another source continued to drive jagged splinters into the weakest portion of his soul:

"Hi, you hydroponic pun'kin-head!... How yuh like your new claim?...

Nice, ain't it? How about some fresh turnips?... Good luck, yuh greenhorn.... Hiyuh, papa! Tied to baby's diaper suspenders!... Let the poor dope alone, guys.... Snooty.... Won't take our likker, hunh? Won't take our money.... Wifey's boy! Let's make him sociable....

Haw-Haw-haw.... Hydroponic pun'kin-head!..."

It was a medley of coa.r.s.e voices and laughter, matching the row of a dozen coa.r.s.e faces and grins that lined the view-ports of the ship.

These men were asteroid miners, s.p.a.ce-hardened and s.p.a.ce-twisted. They'd been back to Earth for a while, to raise h.e.l.l and freshen up, and spend the money in their then-bulging pockets. Coming out again from Earth, across the orbit of Mars to the asteroid belt, they had had the Endlichs as fellow pa.s.sengers.

John Endlich had battled valiantly with his feebler side, and with his social inclinations, all through that long, dreary voyage, to keep clear of the inevitable griefs that were sure to come to a chap like himself from involvement with such characters. In the main, it had been a rather tattered victory. But now, at the final moment of bleak anticlimax, they took their revenge in guffaws and ridicule, hurling the noise at him through the radiophones of the s.p.a.ce-suit helmets that they held in their laps--s.p.a.ce-suits being always kept handy beneath the traveler-seats of every interplanetary vessel.

"... Haw-haw-haw! Drop over to our camp sometime for a little drink, and a little game, eh, pantywaist? Tain't far. Sure--just drop in on us when the pressure of domesticity in this beootiful country gets you down....

When the turnips get you down! Haw-haw-haw! Bring the wife along....

She's kinda pretty. Ought to have a man-size fella.... Just ask for me--Alf Neely! Haw-haw-haw!"

Yeah, Alf Neely was the loudest and the ugliest of John Endlich's baiters. He had gigantic arms and shoulders, small squinty eyes, and a pendulous nose. "Haw-haw-haw!..."

And the others, yelling and hooting, made it a pack: "Man--don't he wish he was back in Podunk!... What!--no tomatas, Dutch?... What did they tell yuh back at the Homestead office in Chicago?--that we were in de-e-esperate need of fresh vegetables out here? Well, where are they, papa?... Haw-haw-haw!..."

Under the barrage John Endlich's last shreds of common-sense were all but blotted out by the red murk of fury. He was small and broad--a stolid-looking thirty-two years old. But now his round and usually placid face was as red as a fiery moon, and his underlip curled in a snarl. He might have taken the savage ribbing more calmly. But there was too much grim fact behind what these asteroid miners said. Besides, out here he had thought that he would have a better chance to lick the weaknesses in himself--because he'd _have_ to work to keep his family alive; because he'd been told that there'd be no one around to distract him from duty. Yah! The irony of that, now, was maddening.

For the moment John Endlich was speechless and strangled--but like an ignited firecracker. Uhunh--ready to explode. His hard body hunched, as if ready to spring. And the baiting waxed louder. It was like the yammering of crows, or the roar of a wild surf in his ears. Then came the last straw. The kids had kept on bawling--more and more violently.

But now they got down to verbal explanations of what they thought was the matter:

"Wa-aa-aa-a-ahh-h! Papa--we wanna-go-o-o--hom-m-mm-e!..."

The timing could not have been better--or worse. The shrieks and howls of mirth from the miners, a moment ago, were as nothing to what they were now.

"Ho-ho-ho! Tell it to Daddy, kids!... Ho-ho-ho! That was a mouthful....

Ho-ho-ho-ho! Wow!..."

There is a point at which an extremity of masculine embarra.s.sment can lead to but one thing--mayhem. Whether the latter is to be inflicted on the attacked or the attacker remains the only question mark.

"I'll get you, Alf Neely!" Endlich snarled. "Right now! And I'll get all the d.a.m.ned, h.e.l.l-bitten rest of you guys!"

Endlich was hardly lacking in vigor, himself. Like a squat but streamlined fighting rooster, rendered a hundred times more agile by the puny gravity, he would have reached the hold-port threshold in a single lithe skip--had not Rose, despairing, grabbed him around the middle to restrain him. Together they slid several yards across the dried-out surface of the asteroid.

"Don't, Johnny--please don't!" she wailed.

Her begging could not have stopped him. Nor could her physical interference--for more than an instant. Nor could his conscience, nor his recent determination to keep out of trouble. Not the certainty of being torn limb from limb, and not h.e.l.l, itself, could have held him back, anymore, then.

Yet he was brought to a halt. It certainly wasn't cowardice that accomplished this. No.

Suddenly there was no laughter among the miners. But in a body they arose from their traveler-seats aboard the ship. Suddenly there was no more humor in their faces beyond the view-ports. They were itching to be a.s.saulted. The glitter in Alf Neely's small eyes was about as rea.s.suring as the glitter in the eyes of a slightly prankish gorilla.

"We're waitin' for yuh, Mr. Civilization," he rumbled softly.

After that, all s.p.a.ce was still--electrified. The icy stars gleamed in the black sky. The shrunken sun looked on. And John Endlich saw beyond his own murder. To the thought of his kids--and his wife--left alone out here, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, and real law and order--with these lugs. These guys who had been starved emotionally, and warped inside by raw s.p.a.ce. Coldness crawled into John Endlich's guts, and seemed to twist steel hooks there, making him sick. The silence of a vacuum, and of unthinkable distances, and of ghostly remains which must be left on this fragment of a world that had blown up, maybe fifty million or more years ago, added its weight to John Endlich's feelings.

And for his family, he was scared. What h.e.l.l could not have accomplished, became fact. His almost suicidal impulse to inflict violence on his tormenters was strangled, bottled-up--brutally repressed, and left to impose the pangs of neurosis on his tormented soul. Narrowing domesticity had won a battle.

Except, of course, that what he had already said to Alf Neely and Friends was sufficient to start the Juggernaut that they represented, rolling. As he picked himself and Rose up from the ground, he saw that the miners were grimly donning their s.p.a.ce-suits, in preparation to their coming out of the ship to lay him low.

"Oh--tired, hunh, Pun'kin-head?" Alf Neely growled. "It don't matter, Dutch. We'll finish you off without you liftin' a finger!"

In John Endlich the rage of intolerable insults still seethed. But there was no question, now, of outcome between it and the bra.s.sy taste of danger on his tongue. He knew that even knuckling down, and changing from man to worm to take back his fighting words, couldn't do any good.

He felt like a martyr, left with his family in a Roman arena, while the lions approached. His butchery was as good as over....

Reprieve came presumably by way of the good-sense of the pilot of the s.p.a.ce ship. The hold-port was closed abruptly by a mechanism that could be operated only from the main control-board. The rocket jets of the craft emitted a single weak burst of flame. Like a boulder grown agile and flighty, the ship leaped from the landscape, and arced outward toward the stars, to curve around the asteroid and disappear behind the scene's jagged brim. The craft had gone to make its next and final stop--among the air-domes of the huge mining camp on the other side of Vesta--the side of torn rocks and rich radioactive ores.

But before the ship had vanished from sight, John Endlich heard Alf Neely's grim promise in his helmet radiophones: "We'll be back tonight, Greenhorn. Lots of times we work night-shift--when it's daytime on this side of Vesta. We'll be free. Stick around. I'll rub what's left of you in the dust of your claim!"

Endlich was alone, then, with the fright in his wife's eyes, the squalling of his children, and his own abysmal disgust and worry.

For once he ceased to be a gentle parent. "Bubs! Evelyn!" he snapped.

"Shud-d-d--up-p-p!..."

The startled silence which ensued was his first personal victory on Vesta. But the silence, itself, was an insidious enemy. It made his ears ring. It made even his audible pulsebeats seemed to ache. It bored into his nerves like a drill. When, after a moment, Rose spoke quaveringly, he was almost grateful:

"What do we do, Johnny? We've still got to do what we're supposed to do, don't we?"