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eBook Category: Science Fiction Nebula Award(R) Preliminary Ballot Nominee
eBook Description: Dramatic Saga of First Person Born on Mars! The first colony on the red planet is founded amid joy and hope, and the colonists are given every support. Then war sweeps the mother planet and the Mars colonists are abandoned by an Earth that needs every resource for its own survival. Though there are signs the colony could become self-sufficient in time, the colonists don't have that time. They face slow and certain death. However, Timothy Davis Barlow, nicknamed Skyclimber, the first person to be born, and grow up, on the red planet, believes he knows how to change Earth's mind. He plans a stellar stunt that dwarfs Lindberg's crossing of the Atlantic and soon has every living soul on the mother world glued to their video screens. But when Tim arrives on Earth to cheering crowds, he discovers his real job has just begun. There he faces social and political challenges that make survival on Mars seem simple. He also finds love, with a woman who shares his vision of the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But even Tim grows daunted when he realizes just how big Earth really is and how many people still swarm its surface. Can one person really change the hearts and minds of so many billions? Don't miss this 1981 Nebula Recomendee novel. It's a mix of hard science and human emotion that only a grandmaster like Raymond Z. Gallun could have penned.

eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books/PageTurner, Published: 2005
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2005

7 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.1 MB], eReader (PDB) [250 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [241 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [211 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [220 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [262 KB], hiebook (KML) [529 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [313 KB], iSilo (PDB) [198 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [246 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [298 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [304 KB]
Words: 65320
Reading time: 186-261 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Frank Gotch slowly got some awareness back. The memory of when he had been able, really, to think before, seemed as distant as some other life, with an eon of dazed misery between then and now. Mostly, he kept his aching eyes closed. But he knew that he was flat on his back, somewhere. For a while his wits remained a blurred, unsorted jumble of incidents, impressions, names. Marie. Everett. Bessie. Where did they all belong?

Sometimes he was far from sure that the ordeal was over. Often he still felt a fearsome urgency, toward terrible, puzzling, necessary effort. Such spasms would smother in his weakness and confusion. Then his mind might drop into his far-lost past. To Dakota wheatfields, awave in a summer breeze, to a distant horizon. Or to the feel and slap of a basketball as he dribbled it down the floor. In high school! What good in recalling such remote stuff? Or, from a little later on, to the sounds of city traffic, the wink of lighted signs, and being on an apartment-house rooftop at night, bare-eyed, or with a little telescope, tripod-mounted.

There, there was some clarity. Particularly for a ruddy spark, high in the southeastern sky. While he had ached and yearned in his lonesome, restless gut, that craved more than food and company to stand tall on top of distant mystery and danger. The blessing, or foolhardy curse, of a few fools like himself.

Then he had been at the University, absorbing much diversified but coordinated knowledge. After that, he had sweated and prayed his way to top honors in the special exams; he had passed his physical and the probings of his personality for defects equally well. He had gotten signed up for training, and through it, with joy and impatience, yet with fear that he wouldn't be among the leading four of the fifty finalists who had won out from hundreds of eager candidates. Well, he had won there, also: inclusion in the first live crew to be hurled toward Mars.

Uh-uh, trite old Mars, wearied by thousands of fantastic tales from more than a century ago, before there was any intrusion into outer space at all: Romantic guesses that had been killed by since-discovered facts. But still Mars by fact, and by default of any better goal--if one discounted the airless, but very near, terrestrial Moon, and the artificial satellite stations, and the habitable cylinder worlds, long in prospect, and already under prototype testing. Such fabrications were of another category--man-made.

There was a shortage of natural planets at all suitable for easy human habitation, not sun-blasted Mercury, pressure-and-heat-smothered Venus, or Jupiter and the other gas-giants, or their many satellites deep in cryogenic freeze, or the even colder and almost lightless Pluto. As for the stars, man's spiritual goal, they were so far away that reaching them at all might remain fantasy.

Mars was less harsh, but not very promising, either. It was at last rejected as a place to attempt a human settlement, after considerable argument. Still, to satisfy a common curiosity, it should be visited briefly by actual explorers. Public opinion about space programs, often uneven, but just then strong, favored this. But second thoughts about the great expense finally reduced the numbers of ships to be sent from three to one. Surely enough to satisfy pure science!

Gotch was remembering better now: There had been the long ride out, Everett Holsten and Bessie Blythe to stay with the ship in Mars orbit, Marie Manning and himself to descend to the surface.

Mated pairs, not necessarily married, but both couples were--though the women chose to keep their own family names--had been judged the best arrangement for harmony on long missions. Of course, all four of the crew had contraceptive implants under their skins.

Gotch recalled the landing: yes, he of the funny name and face, and that petite clutch of energy, courage, enthusiasm, and cuteness--Marie. Beauty and Beast? Plummeting together in the descent-vehicle, into personal contact with fact, beyond what all the complex, robotized probes could show!

To there, everything had gone with the smoothness of a computerized sequence, riding a wave of supportive enthusiasm on Earth. Down past the lofty, swirling fringes of the south-polar vapor hood, thousands of kilometers across, to a preselected touchdown spot at 54 degrees south latitude and 108 degrees west longitude, in Aoneus Sinus.

Gotch's recollections continued to follow each other in sequence:

Getting out of the Lander to look. Of course, everything televised for eight-minute distance-lag transmission to the billions of armchair adventurers on Earth. Hero and heroine, Gotch and Manning, standing there, in vacuum suits, with the dust-yellow sky, the laminated moraines of glacial sediments and, distantly, the edge of the south-polar surface cap, heavy with dry ice deposits in the background in the early, southern spring. Soon their President should be congratulating them.

They were historic first arrivals--like Columbus or Eriksson to America; like Peary and Amundsen to the two terrestrial poles. But much more for their own fascination in being on this other planet.

In his helmet phones, Gotch heard Marie talking to their audience:

"...We're here, folks. Hope you're getting the picture? Low, subantarctic sun, only about two-thirds its apparent diameter, as seen from back home. Atmospheric pressure very slight--just under eight millibars. Temperature, minus 80 degrees Celsius--l12 degrees Fahrenheit below zero--mild, this far south..."

Yes, peak point in their lives. Success! Wild thrill, spiked, of course, with scare! They were supposed to stay 1,480 hours--sixty Martian sols--about sixty-one and a half Earth days.

They had landed at this fairly high latitude to begin their explorations by checking subantarctic conditions. The first thing they did after they had unlimbered their surface vehicle--their Mars Wanderer--was to use its power drill, extracting a meter-long core from the layered ground. The bottom end of the core was almost transparent. Thus they proved again what landed robot probes had long ago proven--that the Martian polar regions, and a considerable fringe beyond them, had an only shallowly buried underlayer of fossil water-ice. Here was a little more to be added to their fulfillment, but the pinnacle of their triumph was only thirty minutes from an abrupt plunge to nadir.

There had been perhaps the ghost of a popping sound in the hyper-thin atmosphere. Anyhow they had turned their heads, then dashed back to the Lander to staunch an outflow with their gloved hands. As useless as trying to stop the rush of blood from a terrible chest wound. In a minute all the oxidizer for the Lander's fuel had spewed through a jagged rent in its flank. The volatile liquid, quick boiling in the low air pressure, made a prismatic shimmering under the cold, muted sunlight.

Now Gotch relived that terrible realization, that they--Marie and himself--had had no chance at all of returning to the ship in orbit. Death sentence. They were marooned as nobody had ever been marooned before. Far out of reach of any reasonable hope of rescue, on Mars, which could not even give them breath!

The stunning effect of shock helped cushion their wits from complete grasp of their situation, and possible screaming hysteria. Besides, they had their intrinsic coolness and their training for emergency. To anyone who gambles realistically with disaster, there must be a backdrop of emotional bracing for the worst. So they continued to think and function calmly.

Had their Lander suffered an accident, a failure of some part? Evidence insisted on a cruder cause for catastrophe. A small element of the home world's populace still hated space programs that much, and for more than their price in tax money. Maybe, to the retarded and frightened view of some, planets and stars should retain only their original, primitive purpose, that of pretty sparks to adorn the flat-Earth sky after sundown? Yet, in their ignorant, phobic savagery, such persons could call on science from nobler brains to accomplish their trite abominations. It was a constant, tiresome threat, in spite of careful security.

"We're stranded--sabotaged," Gotch remembered saying quietly, into his helmet mike, and to the watchers back home. "A character got through, probably at the last hour, when our ship was being serviced in Earth orbit..."

A skilled, conscientious technician, it had to be, but with an emotional quirk: a person bringing some dot-size electronic device, to time, and/or to trigger, by a certain condition, or lack of it, a minute, explosive charge in the oxidizer tanks. The outward curl of the rent edges in the Lander's metal side proved the kooky misdeed. By someone outwardly mild, able to pass security requirements, and also to blend into a crowd. One working alone, or hired by a group? The difference hardly mattered.

Yes--such a man had been hunted down, on Earth.

Remembering this much, with an incongruously muddled vividness almost hurled Gotch's present through thready consciousness back to then. In rage and fear, he opened his sticky eyes once more. His homely and wasted features twisted. Dimly he saw the small, arching, air-pressure-sustained interior and the few hospital-like furnishings.

Confused panic still drove him. He tried to raise himself on an elbow.

"Marie, Babe...?" His gravelly voice was only a painful, whispery croak.

The nurse's hands pushed him back.

"She's still right here in the next cot, Gotch. The same. At least, no worse. Relax. Rest. You shouldn't move much. You'll disturb the intravenous feeding."

His mental muddle quieted. His eyelids went shut again. He smelled--not the fantasized aroma of hot dogs from his youth in Dakota--but, faintly, the real, dusty-dry pungence of Mars. He was still here, then. His groping recovery of events continued.

There was something his mate and he had almost agreed on, after true grasp of their plight had seeped into their heads. Marie had voiced it cheerfully. "We're the mad kind, Frank. We wanted to come here. So maybe we can pack a whole lifetime of satisfying and different living into our two months! And whatever more time we can squeeze out of our limited supplies. It'll all be entirely new!"

So they had followed AP-Q--Alternate Plan Q--not so very much of a change from their originally intended, normal schedule. Drive their wheeled vehicle 2,500 kilometers northward, toward the equator, and slightly less cold conditions. Only, they wouldn't be testing the environment all along the way so much, and they wouldn't be coming the long distance back to their now useless Lander. Instead, they had to cannibalize it of everything helpful that could be loaded onto their Wanderer.

It hadn't been so bad for quite a while. In fact, some of it had been rather wonderful. AP-Q wasn't truly a survival method, but a means to create the illusion that it was, and to fill the time with still applicable Martian research activity, instead of brooding in horror.

The first horror was mostly on Earth, among that horde of TV watchers. Unless the motive was pure, deranged mischief, what the saboteur--and his possible backer's--must have envisioned was the morale wrecking spectacle of slow, inevitable death to wear down the audience and to "prove" to it, once and for all, that space projects were an unnatural, immensely costly, and cruel foolishness. This intention certainly had its psychological validity. How could two people, with, at best, a three-month supply of oxygen and food, possibly last through the twenty-five-month interval, past the most favorable orbital positioning of two worlds' window time for a launching from Earth until a rescue craft could reach Mars? Worst was the problem of unpreparedness. Very little at all was ready.

But at least the sabotage, and its dragging, anguished sequel, claimed world-wide attention of an intensity never equaled before in the history of matters made public. And again, the uneven nature of Man was proven to be of sounder mettle than some had supposed. Most people were not frightened into feeble retreat. And hadn't they always responded favorably to tense, agonizing drama? Miners, sealed off by a collapsed tunnel; child alive at the bottom of a deep, dark well. The more terrible the place, the stronger the will and the out cries for rescue. This was on another--a deadly--world! Crash program, please, for God's sake! Call the senators, the President! Hang the costs! We see and hear Gotch and Manning! They're our friends--our bolder selves!

Here, the intention of the sabotage--if rightly assessed as a lesson in awful futility--had begun to backfire.

Gotch reviewed his thoughts of how then must have been on Earth: Sure that it was impossible for the marooned to survive, people had still watched them try. To some, it must have had the sadistic appeal of an ancient Roman holiday. To others, it was the just outcome of folly. Still, others hid their eyes in weak capitulation to the unendurable. Let other worlds be! But many more had reacted positively. At minimum, there must be an effort to help.

Gotch brought back to himself the memories of those first Martian days, after Marie and he had selected a site for their attempt to remain alive near Arsia Silva Mons, the great volcano, only ten degrees south of the equator. Just as at their landing place nearer the south-polar regions, there was permafrost and water-ice here, less than a meter below ground level. In the peculiar Martian surface soil there were peroxides, perhaps generated by strong solar ultraviolet rays, unscreened by any dense atmosphere. These exotic peroxides should assist minorly as an oxygen source.

Following AP-Q was back-breaking toil. But who should complain about that? Spread two salvaged crowns of the Lander's descent parachutes made of thin, transparent plastic, such as was used to make high-altitude balloons on Earth, on the ground, one on top of the other, and over the Wanderer. Stake the edges with magnesium rods. Pile rocks and dust around the rim to provide a reasonably effective gas seal. Dig a shallow tunnel, plugged in two places with wadded material from the third parachute, to contrive a crude airlock. Start the pumps taken from the Lander, thus beginning to inflate the whole construction with the much-rarefied but plentiful carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere.

Gradually, the crude bubble--double-walled for insulation against the cold--had arisen, to be further strengthened by an external net of nylon cordage, fashioned from 'chute shroud lines. For safety from rupture, the internal pressure shouldn't exceed 350 millibars, about a third of terrestrial atmospheric norm at sea level. Then, dig into the ground of the dome floor, mine the shallowly buried fossil-ice. Turn on the heaters, energized by the Wanderer's small, shielded, nuclear-fusion power supply. Outside, rig movable magnesium-foil reflectors, to add more of the weak sunshine's warmth to the dome's interior.

"See how it's done?" Gotch remembered saying often.

And Marie had added her portion to the running commentary:

"...So we put algae spores into the pool of water here under the dome, where there is enough pressure to keep it a liquid, instead of evaporating at once. Now we plant seeds in the moist ground--lettuce, onions, tomatoes. Like the algae spores, the seeds were intended only for research purposes. But now this is for real. We have a total planting area thirty-five meters across. The vegetables and algae should give us some food. More importantly, oxygen to breathe, derived from the carbon dioxide, by the usual green-plant process of photosynthesis, under the action of sunlight. We'll see if it works, adding more to the little that seeps up from soil-peroxides."

Perhaps remarkably, it had worked, in a month's time. The algae were a fast-growing, vigorous kind, specially developed at a Moon station for extraterrestrial use. And the Martian soil, like the virgin lunar dust, seemed to have a particular fecundity, under reasonably favorable conditions. Even the vegetables hadn't done too badly, at first. The air under the dome became more than three-quarters oxygen, breathable at last.

For a considerable time, it hadn't been too difficult to get along, Gotch remembered. But the constant struggle to keep vital balances somewhere near right within the dome: scraping away the hoarfrost that furred its inner surfaces in the profound nocturnal cold; trying to squeeze more warmth out of the heaters when the internal temperature at floor level almost reached the freezing point of water; detecting and patching leaks in the fragile, makeshift structure, when winds, tenuous but of 200-kilometer per hour velocity, made it quiver perilously, at last joined forces with the starvation-rations, that were wearing Marie and him down. They had started out with food for a maximum of ninety days. How could they stretch it for so much longer? What they could raise helped, but it was far from enough.

"We mean to stay alive as long as we can," Marie had often asserted into the Earthward distance. "Who knows? Maybe we'll even win till you come! Thanks for trying!"

Everett Holsten and Bessie Blythe would have stayed in Mars orbit for more than the sixty sols, had this been of any real use. But conversation between the two couples soon began to seem like living friends trying to cheer the living dead. No help.

It was best that they leave for home sooner, parachuting down to Mars in a freight-canister the additional supplies that they could spare from their own marginal survival capability because of their shortened time in space.

So it had been. The canister had landed within four kilometers of the dome. Still, its retrieval was strenuous, because the Wanderer, now almost necessarily confined inside the rude, pressurized habitation as its power source for warmth, could no longer be gotten out for any field excursion. He, Gotch, and Marie had had to go forth on foot, and carry its forty-five kilograms, Mars weight--more shell and oxygen bottles than food--over rough ground, and in the 0.38-g gravity, to which their leg muscles were even yet not fully attuned.

The extra supplies would help. But again, far from enough.

Gotch recalled the falsely light banalities of the departure of their colleagues, spoken and responded to by radio:

"So long, you pair! Keep pitching! We'll be talking you up good all the way, and better still when we get there! Reports already sound good! There's super activity."

"Sure, you other screwballs! And don't drown in the ocean. Or some handy bar. Many thanks, though Everett and Bessie..."

That much had been finished, with regret, yet also relief.

But Gotch remembered parts of Marie's and his own talks to Earth, begun much earlier, almost from the start of their tribulation--soft-sell stuff, mostly. For instance, Marie speaking in her quiet way:

"See, folks. Five months here already--not just two. And we're still fairly all right. All the basics for sustaining life are available on Mars. Water, sunlight, carbon dioxide for reduction to oxygen, and for the synthesis of nutrients. And isn't it odd that the Martian day--sol--is only forty minutes longer than the terrestrial? In fact, any good wristwatch can be slowed down enough to synchronize with the otherwise imperceptible difference! It's a comfortable thing--as if Mars has always been waiting, mystically, for folks to come, not just to explore, but to stay.

"Of course, the rough conditions need manipulation. But--where was it I read?--of five persons who migrated from Europe to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two were dead from disease, malnutrition, and violence within three years. Yet the migration was successful. Considering the enormous advances in technology since then, couldn't the record here be better--or at least no worse?"

And he, Gotch, would add his bits, wondering a little if he argued a thesis in which he truly believed, or did so merely, perhaps, to increase their own almost nonexistent chances for survival.

"Solid resources are here, too. We've seen them. Copper, much of it in metallic form, in outcroppings green with carbonates on the outside, but bright metal within--not just as sulfides or oxides. And nickel-iron from big meteorites that fell. Not iron ore, needing smelting--but, again, metal almost ready for use! Some rocks give strong radioactive reactions, so uranium is also available. Look ahead half a century. To cities and fields covered by their plastic domes. Factories, universities, cultural centers. A population growing toward millions. Orbiting reflectors of magnesium foil to warm the climate with stronger sunshine...

"Look, it's not Mars that is threatening us, here! It's what a mixed-up man did! Plus human stinginess! If three ships had been sent, as originally planned, we wouldn't be in this fix!"

Gotch had tried to mellow his occasional rough outbursts:

"Of course, it'll take time, money and patience to really open up Mars to immigration. To make settlements here self-supporting and then productive. But it'll be giving people a whole, natural world! Isn't that better than just some nice, neat, manufactured, habitable cylinders, floating in space?"

Frank Gotch had never before thought of himself as a salesman. He lacked the desire and the vocal enthusiasm. Still, he had tried. This, even though, during that interval of deepening desperation, he often wished that Marie and he had never wanted to cross space. But as time moved on, taking them closer to personal extinction, it was clearer and clearer, from communications that came to them, that instead of wrecking extraterrestrial ventures entirely, the fact of helplessly watching a slow horror develop from sabotage was having an intense and opposite effect on Earth.

For here was the right combination of compelling forces for the common soul of Man: drama, rage at a disgusting wrong, sympathy, admiration for courage, challenge of every capability; an old vision thrust forward, the inspiration of perhaps doing the impossible--fulfilling not folly, but a huge and logical dream that shouldn't be denied!

Yes, there was a crash program in progress for rescue, but going beyond that, to an actual pilot settlement project! Five small, hastily prepared robot craft, carrying provisions, had first been launched at high speed in spite of poor orbital positioning and distance, in a desperate effort to resupply the marooned pair. But then five ships had followed at proper window time, and were on the way, carrying ten selected couples, each person highly competent in various fields but with a particular specialty.

At the launch time of the ships, there had been four months yet to go before their arrival. Much earlier, stringent rationing of food, plus other straining circumstances, had already thinned and weakened Marie very much, and Gotch remembered that the effect on himself had been even worse. Both of their minds were getting fuzzy; every necessary effort took more out of them. Inside their crude bubble habitation, he crept about as if often half in a trance, though his starved gut had stopped aching.

Yet they talked on, now and then, to those ships gradually spiraling out toward Mars:

"...Gotch here. Hi! Everett Holsten? So you're truly headed back! Marie is right beside me..."

Minutes later, across the shrunken but still huge distance, the answers would come.

"Yeah--me, Frank. Everett. We'll be with you! Hello, Marie!"

"Me, too, Marie! And was that old Frogface Gotch? This is Bessie. Hey, those little supply craft have landed--two of them quite close to where you are, according to telemetry..."

"We know," Marie had replied. "One, nine kilometers northeast. The other about seven, west. We tried to get to it. We went a kilometer, and then blacked out. Silly, huh? We're sort of feebler. We had to crawl back to the dome ... Just barely made it."

Sometimes he, Gotch, had wondered, inside his vague and rambling wits, how it really was for Bessie and Everett. Once in a while hearing Marie or himself talk--his own rough voice now like dry straw rustling. No television views, anymore. Trying to save power--and, effort--and maybe pride. It was harder and harder to do even the most necessary. A ghost at last, still trying to speak.

"I gotta ... M-marie ... We'll..."

His head had been full of dim murmurings. He could scarcely creep anymore. Marie was lying in a coma, one side of her face and body a crust of scabs. Some weird Martian allergy seemed to have sneaked up out of the ground while her resistance was all gone. Their own filth and stink was all around them ... terrible squalor ... but what the hell difference, now? The thin croak in his throat had found no force or thought to continue. Yet he remembered sprawling prone on his wasted belly with a filthy blanket over his mate and himself. All they had had to eat for seventy sols was algae strainings, often uncooked.

The microphone on a cord from the radio inside the Wanderer's cab had dropped from his unfeeling fingers. There had been frost on the curved ceiling above, but the deepening chill was also unfelt.

That had been the end--in a timeless blank.

Until somewhere--here--a few hours--or sols--ago? Had he tried to find that microphone again? Gone, though ... Then had come the muddled, urgency-resisting confusion.

But he had been finding out better ever since. Now it was all almost clear. Those ships hadn't come too late! He was alive! Unless he'd been fibbed to, so was his woman. Thankfulness, and thanks for everybody--for all of Earth--throbbed in his brain. Goddamnit! Wonderful!

He opened his eyes again, and with an effort, turned his head to look around; he had all the strength of a pinch of dust. He saw Marie, terribly wasted, but very clean now, and visibly breathing, on the couch beside his own. Likely, she was still in coma, or maybe she only slept?

Overhead was a curve of roof, not of their own place, but of some other--contrived too of parachute plastic, put to double use. For efficiency? Amid the austere but wondrous cleanliness, a tawny girl in hospital white sat on a camp chair nearby.

And beyond the transparent double walls was a carmine scene of outdoor activity. Figures in blue Mars suits were moving about gingerly in the desolate bleakness of early morning. Some were mounted on busy machines. Work must have proceeded with swift efficiency. Two more domes were already being inflated.

Marie and he hadn't been returned to Earth, as sometimes, in his blurred state, he had foolishly imagined. There hadn't been anywhere near enough time! But, just then, he wished that they had!

The tawny girl came toward him.

"Things are pretty good, Mr. Gotch," she said. "I'm Ella Duross, Dr. Pharr's companion and assistant. You may remember him from your training, before you came out here. He's a Marspro physician. Want some good broth? You're about ready for it."

Gotch gave a breathy, achy chuckle, but there was good humor in it. He struggled to speak. "Sure, Nurse Duross. Another thank you! But tell me--how bad did our refuge stink when we were found?"

Before Ella Duross could return with the broth, he had slipped into almost normal slumber.