Sleepers Of Mars

‘I’ll go back for them. It’ll only take a few seconds,’ I said.

The Captain grudgingly agreed. He disliked inefficiency, but could not afford to weaken his party by taking a member of it unarmed into possible dangers. I hurried back to the ship, stumbling along through the sand and shingle. As I pulled open the airlock door, I glanced back. The three, I could dimly see, had reached the edge of the forest and were standing under such shelter as they could find, watching me.

I jumped inside, and threw down my rifle and rucksack with a clatter. First I rushed for the engines and turned on the fuel taps; then I made forward to the navigation-room. Hurriedly, I set the controls as I had been shown, and pulled over the ignition switch. With my fingers above the first bunch of firing keys, I looked once more out of the windows.

The Captain was pounding across the beach followed at a little distance by the others. How he had guessed that there was anything wrong, I cannot say; perhaps his glasses had enabled him to see that I was in the control-room. Anyway, he meant business. He passed out of my line of sight, and a moment later I pressed the keys. The Nuntia trembled, lurched, and began to slither forward across the sand.

I saw the other two wave despairing arms. It was impossible to tell whether the Captain had managed to scramble aboard or not. I turned the rising ship, towards the sea. Again I looked back, just in time to see the others running towards a form which lay huddled on the sand. Close behind it, they stopped and looked up. They shook wild, impotent fists in the direction of my retreating Nuntia.

After a few hours, I began to grow seriously worried. There must be other land on this planet, but I had seen none as yet. I began to have a nasty feeling that it would all end by the Nuntia dropping into the sea, condemning me to eventual death by starvation should I survive the fall. She was not intended to be run single-handed. In order to economise weight, many operations which could easily have been made automatic had been left to manual control, on the assumption that there would always be one or more men on engine-room duty.

The fuel pressure-gauge was dangerously low, now, but the controls required constant attention, preventing me from getting aft to start the pressure-pumps. I toyed with the idea of fixing the controls while I made a dash to the engine-room and back, but since it was impossible to find a satisfactory method of holding them, the project had to be abandoned. The only thing I could do was to hold on, and hope that land would show up before it was too late.

In the nick of time, it did: a rock-bound, inhospitable-looking coast, but one which, for all its ruggedness, was fringed to the very edges of the harsh cliffs with a close-pressed growth of jungle. There was no shore such as we had used for a landing-ground at the island. The water swirled and frothed about the cliff-foot as the great breakers dashed themselves, with a kind of ponderous futility, against the mighty retaining wall. No landing there…. Above, the jungle stretched back to the horizon, an undulating unbroken plain of tree-tops. Somewhere there I would have to land, but where?

A few miles in from the coast, the Nuntia settled it for me. The engines stopped with a splutter. I did not attempt to land her. I jumped for one of the sprung acceleration hammocks, and trusted that it would stand the shock.

I came out of that rather well. When I examined the wrecked Nuntia, her wings torn off, her nose crumpled like tinfoil, her smooth body now gaping in many places from the force of the impact, I marvelled that anyone could sustain only a few bruises—acquired when the hammock mountings had weakened to breaking-point—as I did. There was one thing certain in a very problematical future: the Nuntia’s flying days were done. I had carried out Metallic Industries’ instructions to the full, and the telescopes of I.C. would nightly be searching the skies for a ship which would never return.

Despite my predicament—or perhaps because I had not fully appreciated it as yet—I was full of a savage joy. I had struck the first of my revengeful blows at the men who had caused my family such misery….The only shadow across my satisfaction was that they could not know that it was I, and not Fate, who was against them.

It would be tedious to tell in detail of my activities during the next weeks. There is nothing surprising about them: my efforts to make the wreck of the Nuntia habitable, my defences against the larger animals, my cautious hunting expeditions, my search for edible greenstuffs, were such as any other man would have made. They were makeshift and temporary. I did only enough to assure myself of moderate comfort until the Metallic Industries ship should arrive to take me off.

So, for six months—by the Nuntia’s chronometers—I idled and loafed, and though it may sometimes have crossed my mind that Venus was not altogether a desirable piece of real estate, yet it was in a detached, impersonal way that I regarded my surroundings. It would make a wonderful topic of conversation when I got home. That ‘when I got home’ coloured all my thoughts; it was the constant barrier which stood between me and the life about me. This planet might surround me, but it could not touch me as long as the barrier remained in place.