Lester Del Rey by Marooned on Mars

Author:Marooned on Mars
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-04T12:20:47+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Marooned on Mars

Chuck’s eyes turned from one to another, looking for some explanation. Their bruised faces were blank, and their scratched and dirt-covered hands remained motionless. As one, they sat waiting for Vance to go on, to laugh at his own joke.

But he didn’t laugh. He waited with them, until he was sure that he’d have to speak first Then his hand reached out slowly for the porcelain shard. “Maybe this is important,” he said slowly. “I don’t know. Maybe Sokolsky’s three-sexed plants are more important than we are. And maybe we’re dead, and this is a hell of our own imagining. I don’t pretend to know the answers. I’m not pretending to know anything.

“But while you’ve been learning something, I’ve been hearing it all. That’s why military law is necessary.”

He tossed the automatic out onto the middle of the table. “I don’t feel like a leader. If someone else is better, select him; or select me, if you must. But whoever leads from now on will have to keep that as a symbol that his word is final. We can’t waste time on argument or divided authority. We can’t have men staying ten minutes for any reason when they’re ordered to return in five. There’s the gun—I want everyone who’s willing to accept the responsibility to put his hand on it, and we’ll take a vote on who it will be.”

He waited again, but no hands moved. Finally he reached out and put his own hand on the automatic again; there was no other offer. Vance sighed, and pulled it back to him.

“Very well. Tomorrow well go and look at the ruins. We need one day without any duties, even if it makes us feel guilty to shirk what we consider our dudes. And from there on, nobody can leave the ship without my permission. You’ll remove the radios from your suits when indoors, and you’ll call me before doing anything on your own, unless ifs work you’ve been assigned.

“You see—it’s worse than we thought. You know about the broken girder, the ripped seam, the damaged goods. Some of you even realize we have the nearly impossible job of getting the ship—more than ten tons of it here—back on its fins. Most of you haven’t asked how we’ll straighten out the bent frame before we weld it, but it’s obvious we’ll have to do it by digging sand out from below some parts and jacking up others; probably cutting and rewelding.

“I’ve been figuring out the time. Four of us will have to do at least one hundred days’ work here; part of the work can’t be done, except by those four, so the three remaining will have work for perhaps half the time. Rothman, Steele, Chuck and I know how to handle welders— and that means we have full-time jobs. We’re figuring on one hundred days’ work at twenty hours a day—-and we have to be done in less than ninety days.

“Otherwise, we’re marooned here—and we can’t live until another chance comes for us to go back to Earth.

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