WHATEVER GODS THERE BE
At 1420 hours of the eighth day on Mars, Major Robert L. (Doc) Greene was standing over a slide in a microscope in the tiny laboratory of Mars Ship Groundbreaker II. There was a hinged seat that could be pulled up and locked in position, to sit on; but Greene never used it. At the moment, he had been taking blood counts on the four of them that were left in the crew, when a high white and a low red blood cell count of one sample had caught his attention. He had proceeded to follow up the tentative diagnosis this suggested, as coldly as if the sample had been that of some complete stranger. But, suddenly, the scene in the field of the microscope had blurred. And for a moment he closed both eyes and rested his head lightly against the microscope. The metal eyepiece felt cool against his eyelid; and caused an after-image to blossom against the hooded retina—as of a volcanic redness welling outward against a blind-dark background. It was his own deep-held inner fury exploding against an intractable universe.
Caught up in this image arid his own savage emotion, Greene did not hear Captain Edward Kronzy, who just then clumped into the lab, still wearing his suit, except for the helmet.
“Something wrong, Bob?” asked Kronzy. The youngest of the original six-officer crew, he was about average height—as were all the astronauts—and his reddish, cheerful complexion contrasted with the shock of stiff black hair and scowling, thirty-eight-year-old visage of Greene.
“Nothing,” said Greene, harshly, straightening up and slipping the slide out of the microscope into a breast pocket. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” said Kronzy, with a pale grin that only made more marked the dark circles under his eyes. “But Hal wants you outside to help jack up.”
“All right,” said Greene. He put the other three slides back in their box and led the way out of the lab toward the airlock. In the pocket, the glass slide pressed sharp-edged and unyielding against the skin of his chest, beneath. It had given Greene no choice but to diagnose a cancer of the blood—leukemia.
Ten minutes later, Greene and Kronzy joined the two other survivors of Project Mars Landing outside on the Martian surface.
These other two—Lieutenant Colonel Harold (Hal) Barth, and Captain James Wallach—were some eighty-five feet above the entrance of the airlock, on the floor of the crater in which they had landed. Greene and Kronzy came toiling up the rubbled slope of the pit where the ship lay; and emerged onto the crater floor just as Barth and Wallach finished hauling the jack into position at the pit’s edge.
Around them, the crater floor on this eighth day resembled a junk yard. A winch had been set up about ten feet back from the pit five days before; and now oxygen tanks, plumbing fixtures, spare clothing, and a host of other items were spread out fanwise from the edge where the most easily ascendible slope of the pit met the crater floor—at the moment brilliantly outlined by the sun of the late Martian “afternoon”. A little off to one side of the junk were two welded metal crosses propped erect by rocks.
The crosses represented First Lieutenant Saul Moulton and Captain Luthern J. White, who were somewhere under the rock rubble beneath the ship in the pit.
“Over here, Bob,” Greene heard in the earphones of his helmet. He looked and saw Barth beckoning with a thick-gloved hand. “We’re going to try setting her up as if in a posthole.”
Greene led Kronzy over to the spot. When he got close, he could see through the faceplates of their helmets that the features of the other two men, particularly the thin, handsome features of Barth, were shining with sweat. The eighteen-foot jack lay with its base end projecting over a hole ground out of solid rock.
“What’s the plan?” said Greene.
Barth’s lips puffed with a weary exhalation of breath before he answered. The face of the Expedition’s captain was fine drawn with exhaustion, but, Greene noted with secret satisfaction, with no hint of defeat in it yet. Greene relaxed slightly, sweeping his own grim glance around the crater, over the hole, the discarded equipment and the three other men.
A man, he thought, could do worse than to have made it this far.
“One man to anchor. The rest to lift,” Barth was answering him.
“And I’m the anchor?” asked Greene.
“You’re the anchor,” answered Barth.
Greene went to the base end of the jack and picked up a length of metal pipe that was lying ready there. He shoved it into the hole and leaned his weight on it, against the base of the jack.
“Now!” he called, harshly.
The men at the other end heaved. It was not so much the jack’s weight, under Mars’ gravity, as the labor of working in the clumsy suits. The far end of the jack wavered, rose, slipped gratingly against Greene’s length of pipe—swayed to one side, lifted again as the other three men moved hand under hand along below it—and approached the vertical.
The base of the jack slipped suddenly partway into the hole, stuck, and threatened to collapse Greene’s arms. His fingers were slippery in the gloves, he smelled the stink of his own perspiration inside the suit, and his feet skidded a little in the surface dust and rock.
“Will it go?” cried Barth gaspingly in Greene’s earphones.
“Keep going!” snarled Greene, the universe dissolving into one of his white-hot rages—a passion in which only he and the jack existed; and it must yield. “Lift, damn you! Lift!”
The pipe vibrated and bent. The jack swayed—rose—and plunged suddenly into the socket hole, tearing the pipe from Greene’s grasp. Greene, left pushing against nothing, fell forward, then rolled over on his back. Above him, twelve protruding feet of the jack quivered soundlessly.
Greene got to his feet. He was wringing wet. Barth’s faceplate suddenly loomed before him.
“You all right?” Barth’s voice asked in his earphones.
“All right?” said Greene. He stared; and burst suddenly into loud raucous laughter, that scaled upward toward uncontrollability. He choked it off. Barth was still staring at him. “No, I broke my neck from the fall,” said Greene roughly. “What’d you think?”
Barth nodded and stepped back. He looked up at the jack.
“That’ll do,” he said. “We’ll get the winch cable from that to the ship’s nose and jack her vertical with no sweat.”
“Yeah,” said Kronzy. He was standing looking down into the pit. “No sweat.”
The other three turned and looked into the pit as well, down where the ship lay at a thirty-degree angle against one of the pit’s sides. It was a requiem moment for Moulton and White who lay buried there; and all the living men above felt it at the same time. Chance had made a choice among them—there was no more justice to it than that.
The ship had landed on what seemed a flat crater floor. Landed routinely, upright, and apparently solidly. Only, twenty hours later, as Moulton and White had been outside setting up the jack they had just assembled—the jack whose purpose was to correct the angle of the ship for takeoff—chance had taken its hand.
What caused it—Martian landslip, vibration over flawed rock, or the collapse of a bubble blown in the molten rock when the planet was young—would have to be for those who came after to figure out. All the four remaining men who were inside knew was that one moment all was well; and the next they were flung about like pellets in a rattle that a baby shakes. When they were able to get outside and check, they found the ship in a hundred foot deep pit, in which Moulton and White had vanished.
“Well,” said Barth, “I guess we might as well knock off now, and eat. Then, Jimmy—” his faceplate turned toward Wallach, “you and Ed can come up here and get that cable attached while I go over the lists you all gave me of your equipment we can still strip from the ship; and I’ll figure out if she’s light enough to lift on the undamaged tubes. And Bob—you can get back to whatever you were doing.”
“Yeah,” said Greene. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
After they had all eaten, Greene shut himself up once more in the tiny lab to try to come to a decision. From a military point of view, it was his duty to inform the commanding officer—Barth—of the diagnosis he had just made. But the peculiar relationship existing between himself and Barth—
There was a knock on the door.
“Come on in!” said Greene.
Barth opened the door and stuck his head in.
“You’re not busy.”
“Matter of opinion,” he said. “What is it?”
Barth came all the way in, shut the door behind him, and leaned against the sink.
“You’re looking pretty washed out, Bob,” he said.
“We all are. Never mind me,” said Greene. “What’s on your mind?”
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
Buy this Ebook to finish reading the above story.