It was only a tiny nuclear priming-cap, and the blast was feeble. Even so, the box burst apart. Splintered crates, sealed cans, great torn bundles and what not, went skittering far across the plain in every direction, or were hurled high toward the stars, to begin falling at last with the laziness of a descending feather.
Neely and his companions hadn't attempted to move out of the way of the explosion. They only rolled with its force, protected by their space suits. Endlich rolled, too, helplessly, clutching his pistol and rifle; still, by some superhuman effort, he managed to regain his feet before the far more practiced Neely, who was hampered, no doubt, by a few too many drinks, had even stopped rolling. But when Neely got up, he had drawn his blaster, a useful tool of his trade, but a hellish weapon, too, at short range.
Still, Endlich retained the drop on him.
Alf Neely chuckled. "Fourth of July! Hallowe'en, Dutch," he said sweetly. "What's the matter? Don't you think it's fun? Honest to gosh—you just ain't neighborly!"
Then he switched his tone. It became a soft snarl that didn't alter his insolent and confident smirk—and a challenge. He laughed derisively, almost softly. "I dare you to try to shoot straight, pal," he said. "Even you got more sense than that."
And John Endlich was spang against his terrible, blank wall again. Seven to one. Suppose he got three. There'd be four
left—and more in the camp. But the four would survive him. Space crazy lugs. Anyway half drunk. Ready to hoot at the stars, even, if they found no better diversion. Ready to push even any of their own bunch around who seemed weaker than they. For spite, maybe. Or just for the lid-blowing hell of it—as a reaction against the awful confinement of being out here.
"I was gonna smear you all over the place, Greenhorn," Neely rumbled. "But maybe this way is more fun, hunh? Maybe we'll be back tonight. But don't wait up for us. Our best regards to your family."
John Endlich's blazing and just rage was strangled by that same crawling dread as before, as he saw them arc upward and away, propelled by the miniature drive-jets attached to the belts of their space-suits. Their return to camp, hundreds of miles distant, could be accomplished in a couple of minutes.
Rose and the kids were crouched in the deflated tent. But returning there, John Endlich hardly saw them. He hardly heard their frightened questions.
To the trouble with Neely, he could see no end—just one destructive visitation following another. Maybe, already, mortal damage had been done. But Endlich couldn't lie down and quit, any more than a snake, tossed into a fire, could stop trying to crawl out of it, as long as life lasted. Whether doing so made sense or not, didn't matter. In Endlich was the savage energy of despair. He was fighting not just Neely and his crowd, but that other enemy—which was perhaps Neely's main trouble, too. Yeah—the stillness, the nostalgia, the harshness.
"No—don't want any breakfast," he replied sharply to Rose's last question. "Gotta work . . ."
He was like an ant-swarm, rebuilding a trampled nest—oblivious to the certainty of its being trampled again. First he scrambled and leaped around, collecting his scattered and damaged gear. He found that his main atomic battery—so necessary to all that he had to do—was damaged and unworkable.
And he had no hope that he could repair it. But this didn't stop his feverish activity.
Now he started unrolling great bolts of a transparent, wire-strengthened plastic. Patching with an adhesive where explosion-rents had to be repaired, he cut hundred-yard strips, and, with Rose's help, laid them edge to edge and fastened them together to make a continuous sheet. Next, all around its perimeter, he dug a shallow trench. The edges of the plastic were then attached to massive metal rails, which he buried in the trench.
"Sealed to the ground along all the sides, Honey," he growled to Rose. "Next we fit in the airlock cabinet, at one corner. Then we've got to see if we can get up enough air to inflate the whole business. That's the tough part—the way things are . . .
By then the sun was already high. And Endlich was panting raggedly—mostly from worry. After the massive airlock was in place, they attached their electrolysis apparatus to the small atomic battery, which had been used to run the well-driller. The well was in the area covered by the sheet of plastic, which was now propped up here and there with long pieces of board from the great box. Over their heads, the tough, clear material sagged like a tent-roof which has not yet been run up all the way on its poles.
Sluggishly the electrolysis apparatus broke down the water, discharging the hydrogen as waste through a pipe, out over the airless surface of Vesta—but freeing the oxygen under the plastic roof. Yet from the start it was obvious that, with insufficient electric power, the process was too slow.
"And we need to use heat-coils to thaw the ground, Johnny," Rose said. "And to keep the place warm. And to bring nitrogen gas up out of the soil. The few cylinders of the compressed stuff that we've got won't be enough to make a start. And the carbon dioxide . . ."
So John Endlich had to try to repair that main battery. He thought, after a while, that he might succeed—in time. But then
Rose opened the airlock, and the kids came in to bother him. With all the triumph of a favorite puppy dragging an over-ripe bone into the house, Bubs bore a crooked piece of a black substance, hard as wood and more gruesome than a dried and moldy monkey-pelt.
"A tentacle!" Evelyn shrilled. "We were up to those old buildings! We found the people! What's left of them! And lots of stuff. We saw one of their cars! And there was lots more. Dad— you gotta come and see! . . ."
Harassed as he was, John Endlich yielded—because he had a hunch, an idea of a possibility. So he went with his children. He passed through a garden, where a pool had been, and where the blackened remains of plants still projected from beds of dried soil set in odd stone-work. He passed into chambers far too low for comfortable human habitation. And what did he know of the uses of most of what he saw there? The niches in the stone walls? The slanting, ramplike object of blackened wood, beside which three weird corpses lay? The glazed plaque on the wall, which could have been a religious emblem, a calendar of some kind, a decoration, or something beyond human imagining? Yeah—leave such stuff for Cousin Emest, the school teacher—if he ever got here.
In the cylindrical stone shed nearby, John Endlich had a look at the car—low slung, three-wheeled, a tiller, no seats. Just a flat platform. All he could figure out about the motor was that steam seemed the link between atomic energy and mechanical motion.
Beyond the car was what might be a small tractor. And a lot of odd tools. But the thing which interested him most was the pattern of copper ribbons, insulated with a heavy glaze, similar to that which he had seen traversing walls and ceiling in the first building he had entered. Here, as before, they connected with queer apparatus which might be stoves and non-rotary motors, for all he knew. And also with the globes overhead.
The suggestiveness of all this was plain. And now, at the far end of that cylindrical shed, John Endlich found the square, black-enamelled case, where all of those copper ribbons came together.
It was sealed, and apparently self-contained. Nothing could have damaged it very much, in the frigid stillness of millions of years. Its secrets were hidden within it. But they could not be too unfamiliar. And its presence was logical. A small, compact power unit. Nervously, he turned a little wheel. A faint vibration was transmitted to his gloved hand. And the globe in the ceiling began to glow.
He shut the thing off again. But how long did it take him to run back to his sagging creation of clear plastic, while the kids howled gleefully around him, and return with the end of a long cable, and pliers? How long did it take him to disconnect all of the glazed copper ribbons, and substitute the wires of the cable-attaching them to queer terminal-posts? No—not long.
The power was not as great as that which his own large atomic battery would have supplied. But it proved sufficient. And the current was direct—as it was supposed to be. The electrolysis apparatu
s bubbled vigorously. Slowly the tentlike roof began to rise, under the beginnings of a tiny gas-pressure.
"That does it, Pops!" Bubs shrilled.
"Yeah—maybe so," John Endlich agreed almost optimistically. He felt really tender toward his kids, just then. They'd really helped him, for once.
Yes—almost he was hopeful. Until he glanced at the rapidly declining sun. An all-night vigil. No. Probably worse. Oh Lord-how long could he last like this? Even if he managed to keep Neely and Company at bay? Night after night ... All that he had accomplished seemed useless. He just had so much more that could be wrecked—pushed over with a harsh laugh, as if it really was something funny.
John Endlich's flesh crawled. And in his thinking, now, he went a little against his own detenninations. Probably because, in the present state of his disgust, he needed a drink—bad.
"Nuts!" he growled lugubriously. "If I'd only been a little more sociable . . . That was where the trouble started. I might have got broke, but I would've made friends. They think I'm snooty."
Rose's jaw hardened, as if she took his regrets as an accusation that she had led him along the straight and narrow path, which— by an exasperating shift in philosophical principle—now seemed the shortest route to destruction. But he felt very sorry for her, too; and he didn't believe that what he had just said was entirely the truth.
So he added: "I don't mean it, Honey. I'm just griping."
She softened. "You've got to eat, Johnny," she said. "You haven't eaten all day. And tonight you've got to sleep. I'll keep watch. Maybe it'll be all right. . ."
Well, anyway it was nice to know that his wife was like that. Yeah—gentle, and fairminded. After they had all eaten supper, he tried hard to keep awake. Fear helped him to do so more than ever. Their tent was now covered by the rising plastic roof—but beyond the clear substance, he could still watch for starlight to be stopped by prowling forms, out there at the jagged rim of Vesta. It was hell to feel your skin puckering, and yet to have exhaustion pushing your eyelids down inexorably . ..
Somewhere he lost the hold on himself. And he dreamed that Alf Neely and he were fighting with their fists. And he was being beaten to a pulp. But he was wishing desperately that he could win. Then they could have a drink, and maybe be friends. But he knew hopelessly that things weren't quite that simple, either.
He awoke to blink at blazing sunshine. Then his whole body became clammy with perspiration, as he thought of his lapse from responsibility; glancing over, he saw that Rose was sleeping as soundly as the kids. His wide eyes searched for the disaster that he knew he'd find . . .
But the wide roof was all the way up, now—intact. It made a great, squarish bubble, the skin of which was specially treated to stop the hard and dangerous part of the ultra-violet rays of the sun, and also the lethal portion of the cosmic rays. It even had an inter-skin layer of gum that could seal the punctures that grain-of-sand-sized meteors might make. But meteors, though plentiful in the asteroid belt, were curiously innocuous. They all moved in much the same direction as the large asteroids, and at much the same velocity—so their relative speed had to be low.
The walls of the small tent around Endlich sagged, where they had bulged tautly before—showing that there was now a firm and equal pressure beyond them. The electrolysis apparatus had been left active all night, and the heating units. This was the result.
John Endlich was at first almost unbelieving when he saw that nothing had been wrecked during the night. For a moment he was elated. He woke up his family by shouting: "Look! The bums stayed away! They didn't come! Look! We've got five acres of ground, covered by air that we can breathe!"
His sense of triumph, however, was soon dampened. Yes— he'd been left unmolested—for one night. But had that been done only to keep him at a fruitless and sleepless watch? Probably. Another delicate form of hazing. And it meant nothing for the night to come—or for those to follow. So he was in the same harrowing position as before, pursued only by a wild and defenseless drive to get things done. To find some slight illusion of security by working to build a sham of normal, Earthly life. To shut out the cold vacuum, and a little of the bluntness of the voidal stars. To make certain reassuring sounds possible around him.
"Got to patch up the pieces of the house, first, and bolt 'em together, Rose," he said feverishly. "Kids—maybe you could help by setting out some of the hydroponic troughs for planting. We gotta break plain ground, too, as soon as it's thawed enough. We gotta . . ." His words raced on with his flying thoughts.
It was a mad day of toil. The hours were pitifully short. They couldn't be stretched to cover more than a fraction of all the work that Endlich wanted to get done. But the low gravity reduced the problem of heavy lifting to almost zero, at least. And he did get the house assembled—so that Rose and the kids and he could sleep inside its sealed doors. Sealed, that is, if Neely or somebody didn't use a blaster or an explosive cap or bullet—in an orgy of perverted humor . . . He still had no answer for that.
Rose and the children toiled almost as hard as he did. Rose even managed to find a couple of dozen eggs, that—by being carefully packed to withstand a spaceship's takeoff—had withstood the effects of Neely's idea of fun. She set up an incubator, and put them inside, to be hatched.
But, of course, sunset came again—with the same pendent threat as before. Nerve-twisting. Terrible. Arid a vigil was all but impossible. John Endlich was out on his feet—far more than just dog-tired . . .
"That Neely," he groaned, almost too weary even to swallow his food, in spite of the luxury of a real, pullman-style supper table. "He doesn't lose sleep. He can pick his time to come here and raise hob I"
Rose's glance was strange—almost guilty. "Tonight I think he might have to stay home—too," she said. John Endlich blinked at her.
"All right," she answered, rather defensively. "So to speak, Johnny, I called the cops. Yesterday—with the small radio transmitter. When you and Bubs and Evelyn were up in those old buildings. I reported Neely and his companions."
"Reported them?"
"Sure. To Mr. Mahoney, the boss at the mining camp. I was glad to find out that there is a little law and order around here. Mr. Mahoney was nice. He said that he wouldn't be surprised if they were cooled in the can for a few days, and then confined to the camp area. Matter of fact, I radioed him again last night. It's been done."
John Endlich's vast sigh of relief was slightly tainted by the idea that to call on a policing power for protection was a little bit on the timid side.
"Oh," he grunted. "Thanks. I never thought of doing that."
"Johnny."
"Yeah?"
"I kind of got the notion, though—from between the lines of what Mr. Mahoney said—that there was heavy trouble brewing at the camp. About conditions, and home-leaves, and increased profit-sharing. Maybe there's danger of riots and whatnot, Johnny. Anyhow, Mr. Mahoney said that we should Tceep on exercising all reasonable caution.'"
"Hmm-m—Mr. Mahoney is very nice, ain't he?" Endlich growled.
"You stop that, Johnny," Rose ordered.
But her husband had already passed beyond thoughts of jealousy. He was thinking of the time when Neely would have worked out his sentence, and would be free to roam around again—no doubt with increased annoyance at the Endlich clan for causing his restraint. If a riot or something didn't spring him, beforehand. John Endlich itched to try to tear his head off. But, of course, the same consequences as before still applied . . .
As it turned out, the Endlichs had a reprieve of two months and fourteen days, almost to the hour and figured on a strictly Earth-time scale.
For what it was worth, they accomplished a great deal. In their great plastic greenhouse, supported like a colossal bubble by the humid, artificially-warmed air inside it, long troughs were filled with pebbles and hydroponic solution. And therein tomatoes were planted, and lettuce, radishes, com, onions, melons—just about everything in the vegetable line.
There rema
ined plenty of ground left over from the five acres, so John Endlich tinkered with that fifty-million-year-old tractor, figured out its atomic-power-to-steam principle, and used it to help harrow up the ancient soil of a smashed planet. He added commercial fertilizers and nitrates to it—the nitrates were, of course, distinct from the gaseous nitrogen that had been held, spongelike, by the subsoil, and had helped supply the greenhouse with atmosphere. Then he harrowed the ground again. The tractor worked fine, except that the feeble gravity made the lugs of its wheels slip a lot. He repeated his planting, in the old-fashioned manner.
Under ideal conditions, the inside of the great bubble was soon a mass of growing things. Rose had planted flowers—to be admired, and to help out the hive of bees, which were essential to some of the other plants, as well. Nor was the flora limited to the Earthly. Some seeds or spores had survived, here, from the mother world of the asteroids. They came out of their eons of
suspended animation, to become root and tough, spiky stalk, and to mix themselves sparsely with vegetation that had immigrated from Earth, now that livable conditions had been restored over this little piece of ground. But whether they were fruit or weed, it was difficult to say.
Sometimes John Endlich was misled. Sometimes, listening to familiar sounds, and smelling familiar odors, toward the latter part of his reprieve, he almost imagined that he'd accomplished his basic desires here on Vesta—when he had always failed on Earth.
There was the smell of warm soil, flowers, greenery. He heard irrigation water trickling. The sweetcorn rustled in the wind of fans he'd set up to circulate the air. Bees buzzed. Chickens, approaching adolescence, peeped contentedly as they dusted themselves and stretched luxuriously in the shadows of the cornfield.
For John Endlich it was all like the echo of a somnolent summer of his boyhood. There was peace in it: it was like a yearning fulfilled. An end of wanderlust for him, here on Vesta. In contrast to the airless desolation outside, the interior of this five-acre greenhouse was the one most desirable place to be. So, except for the vaguest of stirrings sometimes in his mind, there was not much incentive to seek fun elsewhere. If he ever had time.