1124
The first shot of plutonium didn’t explode. Priming again.
1130
The drive’s dead. I can’t understand it. My instruments swear the fusion shield is drawing power, and when I push the right button the hot uranium gas sprays in there. What’s wrong?
Maybe a break in the primer line. How am I going to find out? The primer line’s way down there under the dust.
1245
I’ve sprayed enough uranium into the fusion tube to make a pinch bomb. By now the dust must be hotter than Washington.
How am I going to repair the primer line? Lift the ship in my strong, capable hands? Swim down through the dust and do it by touch? I haven’t anything that’ll do a welding job under ten feet of fine dust.
I think I’ve had it.
Maybe there’s a way to signal the goldskins. A big, black SOS spread on the dust…if I could find something black to spread around. Have to search the base again.
1900
Nothing in the town. Signaling devices in plenty, for suits and Marsbuggies and orbital ships, but only the laser was meant to reach into space. I can’t fix a seventy-year-old comm laser with spit and wire and good intentions.
I’m going off minute-to-minute. There’ll be no takeoff.
April 29, 2112
I’ve been stupid.
Those ten suicides. What did they do with their knives after they were through cutting? Where did they get them in the first place? Kitchen knives won’t cut bubble plastic. A laser might, but there can’t be more than a couple of portable lasers in the base. I haven’t found any.
And the airmaker’s batteries were stone dead.
Maybe the Martians kill to steal power. They wouldn’t have fire. Then they took my uranium for the same reason, slicing my primer line under the sand and running it into their own container.
But how would they get down there? Dive under the dust?
Oh.
I’m getting out of here.
I made it to the crater. God knows why they didn’t stop me. Don’t they care? They’ve got my primer fuel.
They’re under the dust. They live there, safe from meteors and violent temperature changes, and they build their cities there too. Maybe they’re heavier than the dust, so they can walk around on the bottom.
Why, there must be a whole ecology down there! Maybe one-celled plants on top, to get energy from the sun, to be driven down by currents in the dust and by dust storms, to feed intermediate stages of life. Why didn’t anybody look? Oh, I wish I could tell someone!
I haven’t time for this. The town O-tanks won’t fit my suit valves, and I can’t go back to the ship. Within the next twenty-four hours I’ve got to repair and inflate the bubble, or die of runout.
LATER:
Done. I’ve got my suit off, and I’m scratching like a madman. There were just three slits left to patch, none at all along the edge of the bubble where I found the lone mummy. I patched those three and the bubble swelled up like instant city.
When enough water flows in I’ll take a bath. But I’ll take it in the square, where I can see the whole rim.
I wonder how long it would take a Martian to get over the rim and down here to the bubble?
Wondering won’t help. I could still be seeing goblins.
April 30, 2112
The water feels wonderful. At least these early tourists took some luxuries with them.
I can see perfectly in all directions. Time has filmed the bubble a little, merely enough to be annoying. The sky is jet black, cut raggedly in half by the crater rim. I’ve turned on all the base lights. They light the interior of the crater, dimly, but well enough so I’d see anything creeping down on me. Unfortunately they also dim out the stars.
The goblins can’t get me while I’m awake.
But I’m getting sleepy.
Is that a ship? No, just a meteor. The sky’s lousy with meteors. I’ve got nothing to do but talk to myself until something happens.
LATER:
I strolled up to the rim to see if my ship was still there. The Martians might have dragged it into the dust. They hadn’t, and there’s no sign of tampering.
Am I seeing goblins? I could find out. All I’d have to do is peep into the base fusion plant. Either there’s a pile there, mostly lead by now…or the pile was stolen seventy years ago. Either way the residual radiation would punish my curiosity.
I’m watching the sun rise through the bubble wall. It has a strange beauty, unlike anything I’ve seen in space. I’ve seen Saturn from an infinity of angles when I pulled monopoles in the rings, but it can’t compare to this.
Now I know I’m crazy. It’s a hole! I’m at the bottom of the lousy hole!
The Sun writes a jagged white line along the crater rim. I can see the whole rim from here, no fear of that. No matter how fast they move, I can get into my suit before they get down to me.
It would be good to see my enemy.
Why did they come here, the fifteen men who lived and died here? I know why I’m here: for love of money. Them too? A hundred years ago the biggest diamonds men could make looked like coarse sand. They may have come after the diamond wells. But travel was fiendishly expensive then. Could they have made a profit?
Or did they think they could develop Mars the way they developed the asteroids? Ridiculous! But they didn’t have my hindsight. And holes can be useful…like the raw lead deposits along Mercury’s dawnside crescent. Pure lead, condensed from dayside vapor, free for the hauling. We’d be doing the same with Martian diamonds if it weren’t so cheap to make them.
Here’s the Sun. An anticlimax: I can’t look into it, though it’s dimmer than the rock miner’s Sun. No more postcard scenery till—
Wups.
I’d never reach my suit. One move and the bubble will be a sieve. Just now they’re as motionless as I am, staring at me without eyes. I wonder how they sense me? Their spears are poised and ready. Can they really puncture bubble fabric? But the Martians must know their own strength, and they’ve done this before.
All this time I’ve been waiting for them to swarm over the rim. They came out of the dust pool in the bottom of the crater. I should have realized the obsidian would be as badly cracked down there as elsewhere.
They do look like goblins.
For moments the silence was broken only by the twin humming of a nearby bumblebee and a distant tractor. Then Lit reached to turn off the log. He said, “We’d have saved him if he could have held out.”
“You knew he was there?”
“Yah. The Deimos scope watched him land. We sent in a routine request for permission to land on UN property. Unfortunately flatlanders can’t move as fast as a drugged snail, and we knew of no reason to hurry them up. A telescope would have tracked Muller if he’d tried to leave.”
“Was he nuts?”
“Oh, the Martians were real enough. But we didn’t know that until way too late. We saw the bubble inflate and stay that way for a while, and we saw it deflate all of a sudden. It looked like Muller’d had an accident. We broke the law and sent a ship down to get him if he was still alive. And that’s why I’m telling you all this, Garner. As First Speaker for the Belt Political Section, I hereby confess that two Belt ships have trespassed on United Nations property.”
“You had good reasons. Go on.”
“You’d have been proud of him, Garner. He didn’t run for his suit; he knew perfectly well it was too far away. Instead, he ran toward an O-tank full of water. The Martians must have slashed the moment he turned, but he reached the tank, stepped through one of the holes and turned the O-tank on the Martians. In the low pressure it was like using a fire hose. He got six before he fell.”
“They burned?”
“They did. But not completely. There are some remains. We took three bodies, along with their spears, and left the others in situ. You want the corpses?”
“Damn right.”
“Why?”
“What do
you mean, Lit?”
“Why do you want them? We took three mummies and three spears as souvenirs. To you they’re not souvenirs. It was a Belter who died down there.”
“I’m sorry, Lit, but those bodies are important. We can find out what a Martian’s made of before we go down. It could make all the difference.”
“Go down.” Lit made a rude noise. “Luke, why do you want to go down there? What could you possibly want from Mars? Revenge? A million tons of dust?”
“Abstract knowledge.”
“For what?”
“Lit, you amaze me. Why did Earth go to space in the first place, if not for abstract knowledge?”
Words crowded over each other to reach Lit’s mouth. They jammed in his throat, and he was speechless. He spread his hands, made frantic gestures, gulped twice, and said, “It’s obvious!”
“Tell me slow. I’m a little dense.”
“There’s everything in space. Monopoles. Metal. Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds of bracing girders. Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen. Controlled environments—”
“Was it all that obvious before we got here?”
“Of course it was!” Lit glared at his visitor. The glare took in Garner’s withered legs, his drooping, mottled, hairless skin, the decades that showed in his eyes—and Lit remembered his visitor’s age. “…Wasn’t it?”
INTENT TO DECEIVE
A waiter came to meet them as they landed. It crossed the restaurant like a chess pawn come to life, slid to a graceful stop on the carport balcony, hesitated long enough to be sure it had their attention, then moved inside at a slow walking pace.
The sound of its motion was a gentle whisper of breeze from under the lip of its ground-effect skirt. It guided them across the floor of the Red Planet, between and around occupied tables, empty tables, tables which displayed decorative meats and bowls of flowers, and other whispering robot waiters. At a table for two on the far side of the room, it deftly removed one chair to accommodate Lucas Garner’s travel chair. Somehow it had recognized Luke as a paraplegic. It held the other chair for Lloyd Masney to sit down.
The murals on the restaurant walls were dull red and bright silver: a Ray Bradbury Mars, with the silver spires of an ancient Martian city nestling among red sands. A straight canal dwindled into the distance at both sides of the big room. Its silver waters actually crossed the floor and were in turn crossed by bridges. Attenuated, fragile Martians moved through the streets of the mural. Sometimes they looked curiously out at the customers, the human intruders in their make-believe world.
“Strange place,” said Masney. He was a big, compact man with white hair and a bushy white moustache.
Luke didn’t answer. When Masney glanced up he was startled by his friend’s malevolent expression. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and turned to follow Luke’s eyes.
Luke was glaring his extreme distaste at a target which could only have been the robot waiter.
The waiter was a standard make. Below a blank spherical head was a body cylindrical for most of its length. The arms it had used to adjust Masney’s chair for him had already vanished into panels in its torso, to join other specialized arms and hands and interior shelves for carrying food. Like all the other waiters, it had been painted in an abstract pattern of dull red and bright silver to match the murals. The last foot of the robot’s cylindrical torso was a short, flaring skirt. Like Luke’s travel chair, the waiter moved on a ground-effect air cushion.
“What’s wrong?” Masney repeated.
“Nothing,” said Luke. He picked up the menu.
The robot waited for their orders. Motionless, with all its arms retracted, it had become a pop-art barber pole.
“Come on, Luke. Why were you looking at the waiter like that?”
“I don’t like robot waiters.”
“Mph? Why not?”
“You grew up with ’em. I didn’t. I’ve never got used to them.”
“What’s to get used to? They’re waiters. They bring food.”
“All right,” said Luke, studying the menu.
He was old. It was not spinal injury that had cost him the use of his legs these past ten years. Too many spinal nerves had worn out with age. A goatee had once adorned his chin, but now his chin was as bald as his brows and scalp. His face, satanic in its wrinkled age, attracted instant attention, so that his every vagrant thought seemed exaggerated in his expression. The loose skin of his arms and shoulders half hid the muscles of a wrestler: the only part of him that seemed young.
“Every time I think I know you,” said Masney, “you surprise me. You’re a hundred and seventy-four now, aren’t you?”
“You sent me a birthday card.”
“Oh, I can count. But I can’t grasp it. You’re almost twice my age. How long ago did they invent robot waiters?”
“Waiters weren’t invented. They evolved, like computers.”
“When?”
“You were just learning to spell when the first all-automated restaurant opened in New York.”
Masney smiled and shook his head gently. “All that time, and you never got used to them. Conservative, that’s you.”
Luke put the menu down. “If you must know, something happened to me once in connection with robot waiters. I had your job about then.”
“Oh?” Lloyd Masney was Superintendent of Police for Greater Los Angeles. He’d taken his desk from Luke after Luke had resigned to become an Arm of the UN, forty years back.
“I was just getting used to the job; I’d only held it a couple of years. When was it? I can’t remember; around 2025, I think. They were just introducing automated restaurants. They were just introducing a lot of things.”
“Weren’t they always?”
“Naturally, naturally. Quit interrupting. Around ten that morning I took a cigarette break. I had the habit of doing that every ten minutes. I was thinking about getting back to work when Dreamer Glass walked in. Old friend, Dreamer. I’d sent him up for a ten-year stretch for false advertising. He’d just got out and he was visiting some old friends.”
“With a firegun?”
Luke’s smile was a startling flash of new white teeth. “Oh, no. Dreamer was a nice guy. Little too much imagination, that’s all. We put him away for telling television audiences that his brand of dishwashing liquid was good for the hands. We tested it, and it wasn’t. I always thought he got too stiff a sentence, but—well, the Intent-to-Deceive laws were new then, and we had to bear down hard on the test cases so John Q would know we meant it.”
“Nowadays he’d get the organ banks.”
“We didn’t put criminals in the organ banks in those days. I wish we’d never started.
“So Dreamer went to jail on my evidence. Five years later I was Superintendent. Another two years and he was out on parole. I was no busier than usual the day he showed up, so I dug out the guests’ bottle, and we poured it in our coffee. And talked. Dreamer wanted me to fill him in on the last ten years. He’d been talking to other friends, so he knew something. But there were odd gaps that could have gotten him in trouble. He knew about the Jupiter probe, for instance, but he’d never heard of hard and soft plith.
“I wish I’d never mentioned robot restaurants.
“At first he thought I was talking about a bigger and better automat. Then when he got the idea, he was wild to see it.
“So I took him to lunch at the Herr Ober, which was a few blocks from the old Police Headquarters Building. Herr Ober was the first all-automated restaurant in Ellay. The only human beings involved were the maintenance crew, and they only showed up once a week. Everything else, from the kitchen to the hat-check girl, was machinery. I’d never eaten there—”
“Then how did you know so much about it?”
“We’d had to chase a man in there a month earlier. He’d picked up a kid for ransom, and he still had he
r for a hostage. At least, we thought he did. Another story. Before I could figure how to get at him, I’d had to study the Herr Ober top to bottom.” Luke snorted. “Look at that metal idiot. He’s still waiting for our order. You! Get us two Vurguuz martinis.” The pop-art barber pole rose an inch from the floor and slid off. “Where was I?
“Oh, yeah. The place wasn’t crowded, which was a break. We picked a table, and I showed Dreamer how to punch the summons button to call a waiter. We already called them waiters, but they didn’t look anything like the ones here. They were nothing but double-decker serving trays on wheels, with senses and motors and a typewriter all packed into one end.”
“Ran on wheels, too, I’ll bet.”
“Yah. Noisy. But in those days it was impressive. Dreamer was bug-eyed. When that animated tray came for our orders he just stared. I ordered for both of us.
“We downed our drinks and had another round. Dreamer told me about the Advertisers’ Club that somehow got formed in his cell block. The cigarette men could have controlled it to the eyes, there were so many of them, but they couldn’t agree on anything. What they really wanted to do was form a convict’s lobby in Washington.”
The waiter appeared with the martinis.
“Anyway, we had our drinks and ordered. Identical meals, because Dreamer still wasn’t capable of making a decision. He kept staring around, grinning.
“The waiter brought us shrimp cocktails. While we were eating, Dreamer tried to pump me on who might have the advertising concession on the robots. Not on the restaurant, but on all the automatic machinery. There he was, knowing nothing about computers, but all ready to go out and sell them. I tried to tell him he’d picked a good way to get back in Quentin, but he wouldn’t listen.
“We finished the shrimp, and the waiter brought us two more shrimp cocktails. Dreamer said, ‘What’s this?’
“‘I must have typed wrong,’ I told him. ‘I wanted two lunches, but the damn thing is bringing us two lunches each.’”
“Dreamer laughed. ‘I’ll eat them both,’ he said, and did. ‘Ten years is a long time between shrimp cocktails,’ he said.
“The waiter took our empty cups away and brought us two more shrimp cocktails.