Chapter 19

Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.

Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.

In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that way, it could never change.

Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.

All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on. They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a member of the 210 man rescue team.

“Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a man has children--well, Mars is simply no place for children.”

“That’s right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes.

“Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We’re buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don’t really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they’re here and we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance--or lack of it--against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here--”

“Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn’t want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony.”

“That doesn’t excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men.”

“How many of them could step into Drever’s shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You’re forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It’s rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best.”

“That’s true enough, I suppose. And now that he’s here he probably couldn’t be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like.”

“I’m simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy’s age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn’t ride a bike on Mars--if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?”