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Mars is My Destination

<h2>19</h2> "Ralph!" she cried, running to meet me as I walked into the big, steel-walled enclosure where Commander Littlefield and eight or ten or possibly twelve men in gray skyport-technician uniforms were working over a long metal cylinder that Death had started working on well ahead of them. He was the expert and they were just amateurs doing the best they could to beat the time limit he had set for them. With a grim chuckle, no doubt, because, as I said once before, Death is a weird-o. Joan's arms went around my shoulders and she crushed herself against me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she let go of me and moved quickly to one side, so that Commander Littlefield could talk to me without interference or a moment's delay. She seemed to know without waiting for me to say a word how important that was. One look at Littlefield's white face told me all I really wanted to know. But I decided that if he could fill in the details for me in half a minute I could risk setting another time-limit in my mind and clocking him second by second by second as he talked. "A nurse at the hospital got word to us you'd be doing your best to get back here, Ralph," he said. "The Wendel police have orders to blast you down on sight, but now that you're here I can protect you—or you can protect yourself. I've got your papers and insignia. Right now that's not so urgent as what's happening inside this Endicott fuel cylinder. It's been triggered to build up to critical mass by a Wendel agent. A Colonist brought it here and we've been trying to dismantle it. But we don't know just how to go about it and we don't dare experiment. We've taken a few small risks, naturally. We've had to. But we're getting nowhere, and what looks like a small risk could turn out to be a big one. We don't even know how much time we've got!" He spoke almost calmly, without raising his voice, but there was nothing calm about the way he looked. The time limit I'd set to clock him by had run out and now it was my turn. I was going to have to ask him to do something that might seem only a little less terrible to him than being blown apart by a nuclear explosion. But it would have to be done—and fast. I clocked myself as I talked, allowing myself about forty seconds. "Those cylinders build up to critical mass when they've been tampered with and triggered to explode in about forty-five minutes," I said. "Don't ask me how I know, because I haven't time to explain. I do know—you can take my word for it. I knew the cylinder was here, and I was hoping you'd find a way—" I caught myself up. "Never mind that now. Just listen. I don't know how long it took the Colonist to bring it here or how long you've been working over it. But it hasn't exploded yet. So there's still a chance we can get it out into space before it blows up!" He looked at me as if he thought I'd gone suddenly quite mad. I finished what I had to say fast, because I knew it would take eight or ten more minutes for him to recover from his first shock, and issue orders, and have the cylinder carried on board his big sky ship—his pride and glory—and for the sky ship to rise from its launching pad and be blown apart in space. He'd have to get all of the crewmen off as well and set the robot controls and if there were any passengers still on board—I refused to let myself think about that. "It may be too late," I went on. "We may all be as good as dead right now. But we've got to try. Do you understand? You've got to get that cylinder on the sky ship, set the controls and send it out into space. It must be done at once. Every second counts." He recovered from the shock faster than I'd dared to hope. The grin that hovered for the barest instant on his lips startled me until I realized it was a very special kind of grin—the kind of grin only a man who is about to part with something that means just about as much to him as his own life would be capable of ... if he had a non-eradicable streak of wry humor deep in his nature as well. "Ralph, I've always looked upon people who put property above human life as just about the lowest worms that crawl. But for a minute—God pity me—I almost felt that way. It's just that—it's fifty billion dollars worth of big, tremendous sky ship and that cylinder is so small—" "It won't seem small if it blows up and takes the spaceport with it," I said. "It won't seem small at all." "I know, Ralph. I said once I was old enough to be your father and I still think I am. But if you put me across your knee and gave me the drubbing a dumb six-year old would rate I'd have no right to complain. I should have thought of it myself." "We don't always think of things that stand out like sore thumbs when we're under tremendous stress," I said. "Don't blame yourself for being human, Commander." "I hope it won't take me much longer than that to finish the job, Ralph," he said. "I'll do my best. There are only three crewmen on board and all of the passengers have been cleared." He swung about without another word and went striding out of the enclosure. I would have followed him if Joan hadn't picked that moment to come back into my arms. It held me up for a minute or two. <hr class="tb" /> The incandescent burst of flame that makes a big sky ship's ascent into space seem for an instant almost cataclysmic, as if the sky itself had been ripped apart in some terrible and incomprehensible way, came exactly eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later. I timed it myself, not mentally this time but with a watch in my hand. I stood with Joan at my side a hundred feet from the launching pad, watching the cylinder disappear into the sky. It was the cylinder and not the big rocket itself that I seemed to see as I stared upward, as if the sky ship had turned to glass and the deadly thing it was carrying out into space was beginning to stir and vibrate in a quite ghastly way, with its contours enlarged to sky-spanning dimensions under the glass. To my inward vision it was bigger than the ship itself and it was hard to understand how even a huge sky ship could be carrying anything so enormous and death-freighted when a short while before it had been discharging passengers in the bright Martian sunlight who had given no thought to Death ... only what life had in store for them on a new world. My fingers were clenched around the watch and I wasn't even aware that Commander Littlefield had joined me until he tapped me on the arm. "We can see and hear it when it happens—all of it, just as if we were taking it out into space ourselves. Every tele-communicator on the sky ship is turned on and tuned to big screen wave length. If there was a crewman on board he could talk to us and we could talk to him." "Thank God there isn't a living man on board," I breathed. "Yes," he said, nodding. "Yes, we can be thankful for that. And for our lives as well. There are four big screens here, but we may as well watch the one in the port clearance building. It's the largest of the four—if size makes any difference when about all we'll see when the cylinder explodes is a blinding flare. We won't see the bulkheads collapsing, or a robot cyb crumbling, that's for sure. It will happen too fast." "What good will it do us to watch at all?" Joan asked. "I'd rather stay right here. We'll see the flash, won't we?" "You'll see it, all right," Littlefield said, grimly. "It will look like an exploding star for about ten seconds. My sky ship—an exploding star. I never thought it would ever come to that." He started to turn away, thinking, no doubt, that I'd fallen in with Joan's idea of passing up a view of it on the screen. But I hadn't at all and when he started walking toward the port clearance building I was right at his side. So was Joan, because she was that kind of a wife. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him—questions of the utmost urgency, such as how much progress he'd made in finding out who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral and just what news he'd received from the hospital, when Nurse Cherubin had informed him I was trying to get back to the spaceport, that went beyond that bare statement—I was sure she'd briefed him in detail—and ... well, a lot of questions. But this hardly seemed the right time to ask him, because his inner torment was too great. I could sympathize and understand, because I knew what a hell he was passing through. Nothing could prevent the destruction of his sky ship, but he had to see it with his own eyes, no matter how much agony it caused him. He didn't have to do any explaining to the Port Clearance men, because they'd either assumed he'd pick out their screen well in advance of our arrival or their own curiosity had proved overmastering. The screen was lighted and the sound tracks whirring when we walked into the projection room. It was just like walking into the sky ship's chart room and staring across it at the four robot giants who had followed both emergency instructions in space and the routine kind and were doing their best to perform a man's job now. A mechanical best, which meant, of course, that they had no way of knowing how close they were to annihilation. They would be blown apart without pain and had nothing to lose that a man would have valued. But they were not men, and who can be sure that mechanical brains and the thought processes which take place in them are not faintly tinged with emotional coloration? Probably not ... for it would have been something that laboratory tests have never succeeded in establishing. A cybernetic brain can become fatigued, yes—but it is not really a human fatigue. It is on the metal-fatigue level. But knowing all that, a chill would have gone through me if the robots had been able to talk to us. The image on the screen was three-dimensional, and in full color and the illusion that we were standing right in the sky ship's chart room was so startling that Joan whispered: "I wish we'd stayed outside. It's terrifying. Almost as if ... we could be blown up ourselves when the blast comes." "No danger of that," I said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "You'd better sit down." There were ten hollow-tubed metal chairs in the room, but all except one were occupied. I reached out and drew it toward her, but she shook her head. "No, I'll stand, Ralph. I may want to leave in a minute." One of the port clearance lads got up and offered Commander Littlefield his chair, assuming I'd take the one that Joan had refused. But we were both of one mind about standing. Only Littlefield sat down, as if the burden of torment which rested upon him had added ten years to his age. No sound at all came from the screen for a full minute. Then a scream broke the stillness. It was so totally unexpected, so horrifying, that two of the port clearance men leapt to their feet, sending their chairs spinning backwards. Commander Littlefield was on his feet too, but he hadn't leapt up. He'd arisen jerkily, his hands pressed to his temples, as if to shut out the sound or keep his head from bursting. We saw her then. She had come into the chart room and was staring directly at us, and just knowing she could see us as clearly as we could see her made her plight seem even more terrible. To me, at least, because it wasn't hard to imagine what was passing through her mind. I'm alone on the ship ... just as I feared. They've sent me out alone into space. If Commander Littlefield isn't on board ... if he's in that room watching me with all those other men ... what else can it mean? She'd be ten times as sure of it if she'd been inside the port clearance projection room and knew what it looked like, and I was almost certain she had, because there was an unmistakable look of recognition in her eyes, and the Port Clearance building was where they took passengers for questioning. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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