Asteroid of Fear Page 2

his tormenters was strangled, bottled-up--brutallyrepressed, and left to impose the pangs of neurosis on his tormentedsoul. Narrowing domesticity had won a battle.

  Except, of course, that what he had already said to Alf Neely andFriends was sufficient to start the Juggernaut that they represented,rolling. As he picked himself and Rose up from the ground, he saw thatthe miners were grimly donning their space-suits, in preparation totheir coming out of the ship to lay him low.

  "Oh--tired, hunh, Pun'kin-head?" Alf Neely growled. "It don't matter,Dutch. We'll finish you off without you liftin' a finger!"

  In John Endlich the rage of intolerable insults still seethed. But therewas no question, now, of outcome between it and the brassy taste ofdanger on his tongue. He knew that even knuckling down, and changingfrom man to worm to take back his fighting words, couldn't do any good.He felt like a martyr, left with his family in a Roman arena, while thelions approached. His butchery was as good as over....

  Reprieve came presumably by way of the good-sense of the pilot of thespace ship. The hold-port was closed abruptly by a mechanism that couldbe operated only from the main control-board. The rocket jets of thecraft emitted a single weak burst of flame. Like a boulder grown agileand flighty, the ship leaped from the landscape, and arced outwardtoward the stars, to curve around the asteroid and disappear behind thescene's jagged brim. The craft had gone to make its next and finalstop--among the air-domes of the huge mining camp on the other side ofVesta--the side of torn rocks and rich radioactive ores.

  But before the ship had vanished from sight, John Endlich heard AlfNeely's grim promise in his helmet radiophones: "We'll be back tonight,Greenhorn. Lots of times we work night-shift--when it's daytime on thisside of Vesta. We'll be free. Stick around. I'll rub what's left of youin the dust of your claim!"

  Endlich was alone, then, with the fright in his wife's eyes, thesqualling of his children, and his own abysmal disgust and worry.

  For once he ceased to be a gentle parent. "Bubs! Evelyn!" he snapped."Shud-d-d--up-p-p!..."

  The startled silence which ensued was his first personal victory onVesta. But the silence, itself, was an insidious enemy. It made his earsring. It made even his audible pulsebeats seemed to ache. It bored intohis nerves like a drill. When, after a moment, Rose spoke quaveringly,he was almost grateful:

  "What do we do, Johnny? We've still got to do what we're supposed to do,don't we?"

  Whereupon John Endlich allowed himself the luxury and the slight reliefof a torrent of silent cussing inside his head. Damn the obviousquestions of women! Damn the miners. Damn the A.H.O.--the AsteroidsHomesteaders Office--and their corny slogans and posters, meant to hooksuckers like himself! Damn his own dumb hide! Damn the mighty urge toget drunk! Damn all the bitter circumstances that made doing soimpossible. Damn! Damn! Damn!

  Finished with this orgy, he said meekly: "I guess so, Hon."

  * * * * *

  All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at theweird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flasheda picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders'School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given severalweeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, hehad been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had ofcourse seen it from space.

  It was not round, like a major planet or most moons. Rather, it was likea bomb-fragment; or even more like a shard of a gigantic broken vase. Itwas several hundred miles long, and half as thick. One side of it--thisside--was curved; for it had been a segment of the surface of theshattered planet from which all of the asteroids had come. The otherside was jagged and broken, for it had been torn from the mesoderm ofthat tortured mother world.

  From the desolation of his own thoughts, in which the ogre-form of AlfNeely lurked with its pendent promise of catastrophe soon to come, andfrom his own view of other desolation all around him, John Endlich wassuddenly distracted by the comments of his kids. All at once, conformingto the changeable weather of children's natures regardless ofcircumstance, their mood had once more turned bright and adventurous.

  "Look, Pop," Bubs chirped, his round red face beaming now from hishelmet face-window, in spite of his undried tears. "This land all aroundhere was fields once! You can even see the rows of some kind of stubble!Like corn-stubble! And over there's a--a--almost like a fence! An' upthere is hills with trees on 'em--some of 'em not even knocked over. Buteverything is all dried-out and black and grey and dead! Gosh!"

  "We can see all that, Dopey!" Evelyn, who was older, snapped at Bubs."We know that something like people lived on a regular planet here,awful long ago. Why don't you look over the other way? There's thehouse--and maybe the barn and the sheds and the old garden!"

  Bubs turned around. His eyes got very big. "Oh! O-ooh-h-h!" he gasped inwonder. "Pop! Mom! Look! Don't you see?..."

  "Yeah, we see, Bubs," John Endlich answered.

  For a long moment he'd been staring at those blocklike structures.One--maybe the house--was of grey stone. It had odd, triangular windows,which may once have been glazed. Some of the others were of a blackenedmaterial--perhaps cellulose. Wood, that is. All of the buildings werepushed askew, and partly crumpled from top to bottom, like greatcardboard cartons that had been half crushed.

  Endlich's imagination seemed forced to follow a groove, trying topicture that last terrible moment, fifty-million years ago. Had theblast been caused by natural atomic forces at the heart of the planet,as one theory claimed? Or had a great bomb, as large as an oversizedmeteor, come self-propelled from space, to bury itself deep in thatancient world? A world as big as Mars, its possible enemy--whose weirdinhabitants had been wiped out, in a less spectacular way, perhaps inthe same conflict?

  Endlich's mind grabbed at that brief instant of explosion. The awfuljolt, which must have ended all consciousness, and all capacity for eyesto see what followed. Perhaps there was a short and terrible passing offlame. But in swift seconds, great chunks of the planet's crust musthave been hurled outward. In a moment the flame must have died,dissipated with the suddenly vanishing atmosphere, into the cold vacuumof the void. Almost instantly, the sky, which had been deep blue before,must have turned to its present black, with the voidal stars blazing.There had been no air left to sustain combustion, so buildings and treeshad not continued to burn, if there had been time at all to ignite them.And, with the same swiftness, all remaining artifacts and surfacefeatures of this chip of a world's crust that was Vesta, had beenplunged into the dual preservatives of the interplanetaryregions--deep-freeze and all but absolute dryness. Yes--the motion ofthe few scattered molecules in space was very fast--indicating a hightemperature. But without substance to be hot, there can be no heat. Andso few molecules were there in the void, that while the concept of a"hot" space remained true, it became tangled at once with the fact thata _practically_ complete vacuum can have _practically_ no temperature.Which meant--again in practice--all but absolute zero.

  John Endlich knew. He'd heard the lectures at the Homesteaders' School.Here was a ghost-land, hundreds of square miles in extent--a region thathad been shifted in a few seconds, from the full prime of life andmotion, to moveless and timeless silence. It was like the mummy of aman. In its presence there was a chill, a revulsion, and yet afascination.

  * * * * *

  The kids continued to jabber--more excitedly now than before. "Pop!Mom!" Bubs urged. "Let's go look inside them buildings! Maybe the_things_ are still there! The people, I mean. All black and dried up,like the one in the showcase at school; four tentacles they had insteadof arms and legs, the teacher said!"

  "Sure! Let's go!" Evelyn joined in. "I'm not scared to!"

  Yeah, kids' tastes could be pretty gruesome. When you thought most thatyou had to shelter them from horror, they were less bothered by it thanyou were. John Endlich's lips made a sour line.

  "Stay here, the pair of you!" Rose ordered.

  "
Aw--Mom--" Evelyn began to protest.

  "You heard me the first time," their mother answered.

  John Endlich moved to the great box, which had come with them fromEarth. The nervous tension that tore at him--unpleasant and chilling,driving him toward straining effort--was more than the result of theshameful and embarrassing memory of his very recent trouble with AlfNeely and Companions, and the certainty of more trouble to come fromthat source. For there was another and even worse enemy. Endlich knewwhat it was--

  The awful silence.

  He still looked shamefaced and furious; but now he felt a gentlersharing of circumstances. "We'll let the snooping go till later, kids,"he growled. "Right now we