Vance found them there just as the answering signal came through with its frantic excitement. They’d been given up as dead. Chuck sent quick assurances and a brief report before demanding connection to the Space Commission. Then he turned the instrument over to Vance, who began reeling off facts and figures. They were in luck—there was almost no static.
The others were doing odd jobs; now that some of the shock and fatigue were gone, they couldn’t be expected to escape the work completely when they couldn’t turn around without seeing something that desperately needed doing. But they were carefully avoiding physical effort as much as possible. Vance had apparently decided to accept the compromise.
The captain came down later, to join them in (he mess hall, which was slowly being turned into the chief room. A couple of the inflatable plastic chairs had been set up, and the table had been folded back into the wall. Nothing could make the stem, utilitarian walls of the ship look like home. No room which is designed so that any one of its six walls may be the deck can be given a homey touch. But it was better than the narrow alcoves where their hammocks were set up.
Vance shook his head. “They’re trying to figure out the margin I have with the fuel left. It would take us two days to get an approximation, but they’ll let us know tonight.”
He dropped onto a bench with the fatigue back on his face, though not as badly as the day before. Sokolsky made a gesture toward him and then checked it Vance would probably worry more in bed than out, his expression said.
But Chuck had gotten fed up with the depression. He’d been hit hard enough himself, and his mood was still one of loose ends and futile gestures. Still, sitting around and watching other men go back to their blues didn’t help. He turned toward the hammocks to lie and think by himself, or to sleep if he could.
Suddenly a high, keen wailing sound cut through the room, seeming to come from outside. Chuck felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle. He jumped to the hull, placing his ear against, it while the others rushed over to follow his example.
There was nothing for a few minutes. Then it came again—a thin, piping sound that rose to a quivering shriek and died away slowly.
Their faces were gray and taut as they faced each other. “It came from out there,” Chuck said, unnecessarily.
The others nodded. Sokolsky laughed nervously. “The wind—there must be a hollow stone. No living lungs could have power enough to make that carry through this atmosphere!”
“There’s no wind,” Vance told him quietly. “Up in the control room, I could see the sand out there lying completely still”
The doctor shrugged. “It must be blowing out there, even if it isn’t here. It’s just the wind.”
Nobody could dispute him, though Chuck wondered what force of wind would be needed.
Vance stood up and moved back to the control room. Chuck started toward the hammocks, and then swung after his captain. He arrived just in time to hear the speaker come to life. There was a long preamble about the difficulty of getting exact estimates, but the message finally got down to brass tacks.
“You have fuel enough to reach Earth it you take off in seventy days. Otherwise, you’ll have to use too much to reach us, and won’t be able to land.”
Vance cut the set off sharply and snapped off the lights. He sat staring out toward the desert as Chuck turned and moved softly back toward his hammock.
Seventy days to do work that couldn’t be done in a hundred! And if they couldn’t do it, they’d have to wait month after month until their supplies ran out before they had another chance.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright, cursing himself. With six mouths to feed, they might make the long wait, if they had to. But his extra burden on their partly ruined supplies would, probably weigh the scales against them. Vance’s first lecture came back, accusingly. He had no right on Mars. The others had been sent, but he’d stolen his place, and bad no rightful claim on the food and water he’d consume.
He got to sleep finally, but it wasn’t a restful sleep. His dreams were worse than his waking thoughts had been.
He saw six graves out in the red Martian desert. There should have been seven, but someone had built a gallows instead, and a straw image of himself was hung there with the accusing details of his murder of the others written on it. As he looked, the straw man came to life and ran after him shrieking in a high wail that his ears couldn’t stand.
CHAPTER 11
Eyes in the Night
It was exactly six o’clock when the sound of a gong woke Chuck. He turned over, growling at the noise, but the gong went on until sleep was impossible. Wearily, he dropped from the hammock to see the rest of the crew doing the same.
Vance’s voice was the crack of a drillmaster as it followed the ending of the gong’s clatter. “Everybody up and out. We’re going to work!”
Ginger was reaching for his clothes, mumbling and grumbling, staring through eyes still foggy with sleep for his missing pants. ” ‘Sa dirty trick. Nobody told me Mars would be like this.”
“It’ll be worse. Ginger,” Vance stated. “From now on, you’ll be up half an hour earlier to prepare breakfast for the others. I took care of it this time.”
They stumbled into the mess hall, to a heavy breakfast of powdered-egg omelet, bacon, and carefully toasted canned bread. At least Vance didn’t mean to starve them to death, as Steele commented.
The captain grinned tightly. “That will come later, if we don’t finish in time. Now I expect you to work until you drop dead and then get up and try again. You’ll need the food. We’ve got less than seventy days to get this ship headed back to Moon City—my figures were wrong.”
He stared at them, his mouth determined.
“It can’t be done,” Sokolsky told him. “Men aren’t robots—you can’t work them twenty-four hours a day.”
“Eighteen,” Vance stated. “And I wouldn’t expect robots to work the way you’re going to. We’ll let everything go that we can—if it can be fixed after we’re space-borne, we’ll skip it. We’ve got to get the Eros level and straighten her out. Doc, Lew and Ginger will form the digging crew. I’ve got a diagram here of where I want the digging to be done. Use what metal you must, but take it easy. The rest of us will start cutting where I’ve marked the places with chalk. Dick, you can give me a hand for half an hour to make sure I’m right in my figuring; you’re a better structural engineer than I am.”
He marched them out on the half-hour, assigned them their stations, and came back to pick up one of the welding torches himself. The big acetylene-compressed oxygen rigs were the heaviest took they carried, and there were four of them. The Space Commission had insisted that four was the minimum number of men needed to repair a major meteor rip in space before they lost more than half their air, and the precaution was useful now.
At noon, when the gong sounded again, Ginger came out with their lunches. Vance set the example by eating his with one hand while he went on cutting through beams with the other. There was another pause for an afternoon snack, and then they worked on until ten in the evening.
“Get to bed,” Vance told them. He wiped his hand over his forehead and tried to grin encouragingly. “We’ve got more done than I expected today—but we’ll have to do even more tomorrow.”
After three days of that, they were finished with the cutting, and Vance sent the whole crew out to dig, except for Rothman and Steele, who were improvising jacks to lift the section that had sagged.
Chuck’s arms lost all feeling after a few hours. He kept telling himself that there was a limit to what the human animal could stand. Then his eyes would go to Vance, who was determined to drive himself hardest of all, and he would realize again that Vance had been right. Robots couldn’t do it, but men had to.