“No”, Corriston said.
“There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses — photoelectric eye installations. They spot you when you’re a half-mile away. Try to storm those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you’ll be pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of energy weapons, and you’ll be electrocuted. You’ll hang suspended on barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant”. “I’ve thought it over”, Corriston said. “We won’t have to storm the fortress unless they’ve taken Ramsey’s daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in danger. And if he is in danger, he’ll welcome our help. We’re going to the ship first and there are only two men on the ship”.
“But they’ve got plenty of ammunition, haven’t they? They’ve got the ship’s military installations. Anyway you slice it, it’s a dangerous gamble”.
“I never thought it was anything else”, Corriston said.
19
CORRISTON woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.
Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.
In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that way, it could never change.
Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.
All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on. They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a member of the 210 man rescue team.
“Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a man has children — well, Mars is simply no place for children”.
“That’s right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes”.
“Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We’re buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don’t really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they’re here and, we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance — or lack of it — against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here” —
“Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn’t want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony”.
“That doesn’t excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men”.
“How many of them could step into Drever’s shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You’re forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It’s rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best”.
“That’s true enough, I suppose. And now that he’s here he probably couldn’t be replaced. Experience of - a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like”.
“I’m simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy’s age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn’t ride a bike on Mars — if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?”.
Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever’s son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the faces of at least two of them.
Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. “Nonsense!” he said.
A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.
“Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn’t we get started?”.
“We should and we will”, Corriston said. — “But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don’t arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where’s Freddy? Have you seen him?”.
The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: “Over there”, he said. “His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of”.
Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.
Dr. Drever’s son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.
Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf child.
“Why did you do it, Freddy?” Corriston asked. “Your father is very upset and worried”.
Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.
“I had to come”, he said. “I had to”.
“But why?”.
“I don’t know”.
“I see”.
Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: “I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you’d be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You’d be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates”.
Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. “How did you know?” he gasped.
“I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy — once”, Corriston said.
“Gee, thanks”, Freddy said.
“Thanks for what?”.
“Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston”.
Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.
“We’re starting again in ten minutes”, he said. “Better have another cup of coffee all around”.
20
THE SAND had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.
The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.