Galactic Dreams

He started toward the rear of the room and Charlie, with his airline bag in one hand, vaulted the back of the booth and crashed against the rear door.

“Come back here, you son of a bitch!”

The table rocked when Charlie’s flying heel caught it and the cigar box slid off to the floor. Heavy boots thundered and the door squealed open and Charlie pushed out through it. Sam bent over to retrieve the box.

“I’ll kill yuh, so help me!”

The circuit hadn’t been damaged; Sam sighed in relief and stood, the tinny music between his fingers.

He may have heard the first shot but he could not have heard the second because the.38 slug caught him in the back of the head and killed him instantly. He crumpled to the floor.

Patrolman Marger ran in from the patrol car outside, his gun ready, and saw Brinkley come back into the room through the door in the rear.

“He got away, damn it, got clear away.”

“What happened here?”

Marger asked, slipping his gun back into the holster and looking down at the slight, crumpled body at his feet.

“I dunno. He must have jumped up in the way when I let fly at the other one what was running away. Must be another one of them commonists anyway, he was sittin’ at the same table.”

“There’s gonna be trouble about this ….”

“Why trouble?”

Brinkley asked indignantly. “It’s just anutha of dead nigger ….

“One of his boots was on the cigar box and it crumpled and fractured when he turned away.

SIMULATED TRAINER

Mars was a dusty, frigid hell. Bone dry and blood red. They trudged single file through the ankle deep sand; in a monotonous duet cursed the nameless engineer who had designed the faulty reconditioners in their pressure suits. The bug hadn’t shown during testing of the new suits. It appeared only after they had been using them steadily for a few weeks. The water-absorbers became overloaded and broke down. The Martian atmosphere stood at a frigid sixty degrees centigrade. Inside the suits, they tried to blink the unevaporated sweat from their eyes and slowly cooked in the high humidity.

Morley shook his head viciously to dislodge an itching droplet from his nose. At the same moment, something rust colored and furry darted across his path. It was the first Martian life they had seen. Instead of scientific curiosity, he felt only anger. A sudden kick sent the animal flying high into the air.

The suddenness of the movement threw him off balance. He fell sideways slowly, dragging his rubberized suit along an upright rock fragment of sharp obsidian.

Tony Bannerman heard the other man’s hoarse shout in his earphones and whirled. Morley was down, thrashing on the sand with both hands pressed against the ragged tear in the suit leg. Moisture-laden air was pouring out in a steaming jet that turned instantly to scintillating ice crystals. Tony jumped over to him, trying to seal the tear with his own ineffectual gloves. Their faceplates close, he could see the look of terror on Morley’s face-as well as the blue tinge of cyanosis.

“Help me-help me!”

The words were shouted so loud they rasped the tiny helmet earphones. But there was no help. They had taken no emergency patches with them. All the patches were in the ship at least a quarter of a mile away. Before he could get there and back, Morley would be dead.

Tony straightened up slowly and sighed. Just the two of them in the ship, there was no one else on Mars who could help. Morley saw the look in Tony’s eyes and stopped struggling.

“No hope at all, Tony-I’m dead.”

“Just as soon as all the oxygen is gone; thirty seconds at the most. There’s nothing I can do.”

Morley grated the shortest, vilest word he knew and pressed the red EMERGENCY button set into his glove above the wrist. The ground opened up next to him in the same instant, sand sifting down around the edges of the gap. Tony stepped back as two men in white pressure suits came up out of the hole. They had red crosses on the fronts of their helmets and carried a stretcher. They rolled Morley onto it and were gone back into the opening in an instant.

Tony stood looking sourly at the hole for about a minute waiting until Morley’s suit was pushed back through the opening. Then the sand-covered trapdoor closed and the desert was unbroken once more.

The dummy in the suit weighed as much as Morley and its plastic features even resembled him a bit. Some wag had painted black X’s on the eyes. Very funny, Tony thought, as he struggled to get the clumsy thing onto his back. On the way back the now-quiet Martian animal was lying in his path. He kicked it aside and it rained a fine shower of springs and gears.

The too-small sun was touching the peaks of the saw-tooth red mountains when he reached the ship. Too late for burial today, it would have to wait until morning. Leaving the thing in the airlock, he stamped into the cabin and peeled off his dripping pressure suit.