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When we left, the old soft-hearted fraud was sending through an emergency message to Ganymede trying to get in touch with the kid’s uncle.
Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but that kid was a Godsend-a genuine stroke of Old Man Luck. He took our minds off Callisto. He gave us something else to think about. The tension, which at the end of four days had almost reached the breaking point, eased completely.
There was something refreshing in the kid’s natural gayety; in his bright ingenuousness. He would meander about the ship asking the silliest kind of questions. He insisted on expecting pirates at any moment. And, most of all, he persisted in regarding each and every one of us as “Dime Spacer” heroes.
That last flattered our egos, of course, and put us on our mettle. We vied with each other in chest-puffing and tale-telling, and old Mac Steeden, who in Stanley’s eyes was a demi-god, broke the all-time record for plain and fancy lying.
I remember, particularly, the talk-fest we had on the seventh day out. We were just past the midpoint of the trip and were set to begin a cautious deceleration. All of us (except Harrigan and Tuley, who were at the engines) were sitting in the control room. Whitefield, with half an eye on the Mathematico, led off, and, as usual, talked zoology.
“It’s a little slug-like thing,” he was saying, “found only on Europa. It’s called the Carolus Europis but we always referred to it as the Magnet Worm. It’s about six inches long and has a sort of a slate-grey color-most disgusting thing you could imagine.
“We spent six months studying that worm, though, and I never saw old Mornikoff so excited about anything before. You see, it killed by some sort of magnetic field. You put the Magnet Worm at one end of the room and a caterpillar, say, at the other. You wait about five minutes and the caterpillar just curls up and dies.
“And the fu
His story made quite an impression on us. Joe Brock’s deep bass voice sounded, “I’m damn glad those things are only four inches long, if what you say is right.”
Mac Steeden stretched and then pulled at his grey mustachios with exaggerated indifference, “You call that worm unusual. It isn’t a patch on some of the things I’ve seen in my day-.” He shook his head slowly and reminiscently, and we knew we were in for a long and gruesome tale. Someone groaned hollowly, but Stanley brightened up the minute he saw the old veteran was in a story-telling mood.
Steeden noticed the kid’s sparkling eyes, and addressed himself to the little fellow, “I was with Peewee Wilson when it happened-you’ve heard of Peewee Wilson, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Stanley’s eyes fairly exuded hero-worship. “I’ve read books about him. He was the greatest spacer there ever was.”
“You bet all the radium on Titan he was, kid. He wasn’t any taller than you, and didn’t scale much more than a hundred pounds, but he was worth five times his weight in Venusian Devils in any fight. And me and him were just like that. He never went anyplace but what I was with him. When the going was toughest it was always me that he turned to.”
He sighed lugubriously, “I was with him to the very end. It was only a broken leg that kept me from going with him on his last voyage-”
He choked off suddenly and a chilly silence swept over all of us. Whitefield’s face went gray, the Captain’s mouth twisted in a fu
No one spoke, but there was only one thought among the six of us. Peewee Wilson’s last trip had been to Callisto. He had been the second-and had never returned. We were the eighth.
Stanley stared from one to the other of us in astonishment, but we all avoided his eyes.
It was Captain Bartlett that recovered first.
“Say, Steeden, you’ve got an old spacesuit of Peewee Wilson’s, haven’t you?” His voice was calm and steady but I could see that it took a great deal of effort to keep it so.
Steeden brightened and looked up. He had been chewing at the tips of his mustachios (he always did when nervous) and now they hung downwards in a bedraggled fashion.
“Sure thing. Captain. He gave it to me with his own hand, he did. It was back in ‘23 when the new steel suits were just being put out. Peewee didn’t have any more use for his old vitri-rubber contraption, so he let me have it-and I’ve kept it ever since. It’s good luck for me.”
“Well, I was thinking that we might fix up that old suit for the boy here. No other suit’ll fit him, and he needs one bad.”
The veteran’s faded eyes hardened and he shook his head vigorously, “No sir. Captain. No one touches that old suit Peewee gave it to me himself. With his own hand! It’s-it’s sacred, that’s what it is.”
The rest of us chimed in immediately upon the Captain’s side but Steeden’s obstinacy grew and hardened. Again and again he would repeat tonelessly, “That old suit stays where it is.” And he would emphasize the statement with a blow of his gnarled fist.
We were about to give up, when Stanley, hitherto discreetly silent, took a hand.
“Please, Mr. Steeden,” there was just the suspicion of a quaver in his voice. “Please let me have it. I’ll take good care of it. I’ll bet if Peewee Wilson were alive today he’d say I could have it.” His blue eyes misted up and his lower lip trembled a bit. The kid was a perfect actor.
Steeden looked irresolute and took to biting his mustachio again, “Well-oh, hell, you’ve all got it in for me. The kid can have it but don’t expect me to fix it up! The rest of you can lose sleep-I wash my hands of it.”
And so Captain Bartlett killed two birds with one stone. He took our minds off Callisto at a time when the morale of the crew hung in the balance and he gave us something to think about for the remainder of the trip-for renovating that ancient relic of a suit was almost a week’s job.
We worked over that antique with a concentration out of all proportion to the importance of the job. In its pettiness, we forgot the steadily growing orb of Callisto. We soldered every | last crack and blister in that venerable suit. We patched the inside with close-meshed aluminum wire. We refurbished the tiny heating unit and installed new tungsten oxygen-containers.
Even the Captain was not above giving us a hand with the suit, and Steeden, after the first day, in spite of his tirade at the begi
We finished it the day before the scheduled landing, and Stanley, when he tried it on, glowed with pride, while Steeden stood by, gri
And as the days passed, the pale blue circle that was Callisto grew upon the visiplate until it took up most of the sky. The last day was an uneasy one. We went about our tasks abstractedly, and studiously avoided the sight of the hard, emotionless satellite ahead.
We dived-in a long, gradually contracting spiral. By this maneuvre, the Captain had hoped to gain some preliminary knowledge of the nature of the planet and its inhabitants, but the information gained was almost entirely negative. The large percentage of carbon dioxide present in the thin, cold atmosphere was congenial to plant life, so that vegetation was plentiful and diversified. However, the three per cent oxygen content seemed to preclude the possibility of any animal life, other than the simplest and most sluggish species. Nor was there any evidence at all of cities or artificial structures of any kind.
Five times we circled Callisto before sighting a large lake, shaped something like a horse’s head. It was towards that lake that we gently lowered ourselves, for the last message of the second expedition-Peewee Wilson’s expedition-spoke of landing near such a lake.
We were still half a mile in the air, when we located the gleaming metal ovoid that was the Phobos, and when we finally thumped softly on to the green stubble of vegetation, we were scarcely five hundred yards from the unfortunate craft.
“Strange,” muttered the Captain, after we had all congregated in the control room, waiting for further orders, “there seems to be no evidence of any violence at all.”
It was true! The Phobos lay quietly, seemingly unharmed. Its old-fashioned steel hull glistened brightly in the yellow light of a gibbous Jupiter, for the scant oxygen of the atmosphere could make no rusty inroads upon its resistant exterior.
The Captain came out of a brown study and turned to Charney at the radio.
“Ganymede has answered?”
“Yes, sir. They wish us luck.” He said it simply, but a cold shiver ran down my spine.
Not a muscle of the Captain’s face flickered. “Have you tried to communicate with the Phobos?”
“No answer, sir.”
“Three of us will investigate the Phobos. Some of the answers, at least, should be there.”
“Matchstickst” grunted Brock, stolidly.
The Captain nodded gravely.
He palmed eight matches, breaking three in half, and extended his arm towards us, without saying a word.
Charney stepped forward and drew first. It was broken and he stepped quietly towards the space-suit rack. Tuley followed and after him Harrigan and Whitefield. Then I, and I drew the second broken match. I gri
“The ship will be backing you fellows,” said the Captain quietly, as he shook our hands. “If anything dangerous turns up, run for it No heroics now, for we can’t afford to lose men.”
We inspected our pocket Lectronics and left. We didn’t know exactly what to expect and weren’t sure but that our first steps on Callistan soil might not be our last, but none of us hesitated an instant. In the “Dime Spacers,” courage is a very cheap commodity, but it is rather more expensive in real life. And it is with considerable pride that I recall the firm steps with which we three left the protection of the Ceres .
I looked back only once and caught a glimpse of Stanley’s face pressed white against the thick glass of the porthole. Even from a distance, his excitement was only too apparent. Poor kid! For the last two days he had been convinced we were on our way to clean up a pirate stronghold and was almost dying with impatience for the fighting to begin. Of course, none of us cared to disillusion him.