Trail Blazer by Raymond Z. Gallun

My twin brother Frank and I were just back on the ranch from college. Dad was dead, leaving us free. Magazines were full of diagrams of spaceships and living quarters for other worlds. There was recruiting ballyhoo on the television. At night we could sometimes see the fire-trails of rockets, outward bound from nearby White Sands, New Mexico. It became like drums beating in our blood.

"They need lots of young engineers like us, Dave," Frank said to me. He was leaning against the corner of the house. It was evening. "On the moon now - then gosh knows where."

"Sure," I answered, feeling both excited and sad. "The only question is, what do we do with Joe?"

Just then Joe Whiteskunk was fixing a fence not a hundred yards off. With the deliberation of a rivulet washing away a mountain - as usual. Joe, who had come from Oklahoma with our Dad long ago. Joe, who might have made an oil-fortune if a slicker hadn't cheated him of his claim. Joe, who resembled gnarled mahogany. Sixty-five years old, he was, if a day. He didn't know exactly himself.

Frank is no guy to beat around the bush. "Got to tell him what we mean to do," he said.

So we did. I began it with, "Look, Joe . . ."

For awhile he didn't seem to have heard. He just kept on working at that fence. But at last he said, "I go too."

I won't say that I was exactly surprised. I figured I knew Joe. Maybe he thought the Moon was something like Texas or California.

"You've got to know something special, Joe," I said patiently. "Like Dave, here. He knows all about air-conditioning."

Joe's face remained as deadpan as if he were a wooden Indian rather than a real one. "I know plenty special," he answered after a moment. "Hunt - track - new place - good. Plenty game."

Something in the glint of his black eyes told me that he was way back in his youth.

Frank busted out laughing. So did I. But there was a faint lump in my throat, made up of all my memories of Joe Whiteskunk. Teaching me to ride and to shoot, not by long-winded explanations but by example - or perhaps more by letting me be part of him. It's kind of hard to explain.

So I didn't want to say good-by to Joe. I knew that my brother didn't, either. We wanted to postpone it as long as possible. Besides we were a little worried about what might happen to him, left alone.

Combine all this with a certain residual kid-prankishness. We weren't above hazing Joe - letting his abysmal innocence lead him on - in this case toward the inevitable moment when his own ignorance must put a harmless and disgruntling end to his sudden urge to go where we went.

My brother Frank winked at me - such a wink as one Katzenjammer kid might give to the other. "Sure, Joe," he said, sober as a judge, "you come along with us. You hunt and track while we dig holes in all those mountains."

Joe seemed not even to realize that he was being kidded.

So the next morning we drove into White Sands with him. There, in the offices of Unified Lunar Enterprizes, Frank and I knew beforehand just about what we'd have to write of ourselves in the application blanks they gave us. We had our specialties. My fine was minerals and mining.

We were sure of ourselves. We were in step with the exciting imperialistic rhythm that had seized the world. The outward thrusting, the adventure, the military significance, the dangerous industries that could be developed on the Moon, far away from the densely populated Earth.

Yep, to Frank and me they gave the glad eye. A big burly official grinned at us. "Pass your physicals, fellas," he said, "and we'll ship you out tonight."

About Joe? Well - you know. He got a look as if he was at least a little loopy - the hopeless sort of character that keeps popping up all the time, asking foolish questions. Like the guy ninety years old who tried to enlist in the Army.

"Come back in fifty years," he was told indulgently. "Maybe by then the Moon will be changed enough by science so that there are woods and game on it."

Joe looked a little puzzled. That was all. Of course this wasn't funny now for Frank and me. What could you do? Life consists of living and learning.

I'm sentimental. Halfway I wanted to stay behind with old Joe Whiteskunk. Frank is different. "Well, Dave," he said, "this is it. So let's do what the man says. We can phone Dad's lawyer to see that the ranch is looked after. Nothing much there anyway. We won't even have to take the car home."

"Sure - you fellas go," Joe told us. "I come too, pretty soon."

So, that night, strapped to chairs in a cabin that looked like the inside of a bus, Frank and I were sick as dogs in the absence of gravity as the sharp stars of space blossomed beyond the window-ports around us. Facing the prospect of living on the Moon - an idea somehow out of tune with the instincts in human entrails, even when you're an enlightened young man - we were scared half to death.

"Good thing Joe couldn't come," Frank grunted. "He wouldn't understand anything. He'd die - just as if he'd suddenly found himself in an unnamed hell."

Right then we weren't very inspiring symbols of the pioneering urges of the human race.

Had we known that at that very moment old Joe Whiteskunk was huddled in the darkest corner of the dark baggage compartment of our spaceship we would really have blown our tops. Because in such a place during a Lunar hop a man could freeze to death or suffocate easily. Even if he were a trained scientist, who knew how to protect himself.

We were in space for better than seventy hours. I was too ill to pay much attention to the landing. But it was accomplished in a manner that was almost exactly the reverse of the takeoff.

Balanced by whirling gyroscopes, we came down sternward toward Camp Copernicus, our flaming jets gradually reducing speed. During the last few feet before we touched the ashy ground we hung almost motionless, swinging in the seats that adjusted automatically to the proper up-down direction of any gravitational attraction.

Then we were on the moon. Taking orders - fumbling our way into space-armor - looking at harsh sunlight and black shadows and jagged mountains that have driven many a man nuts with homesickness. Filing in a column across the ash to a large pressurized shelter of magnesium alloy that had been brought prefabricated from Earth.

This proved to be the entrance to a labyrinth of tunnels, newly excavated underground. This was Camp Copernicus, built in the bottom of the great lunar crater of the same name.

All of us greenhorn arrivals looked pretty awful. I felt like a foolish romantic, led into a deathtrap by my own romanticism. God, how I wanted to go homel

While quarters and bunks were being assigned the cry of "Stowaway!" arose. Right away I had a premonition that put my heart in my mouth.

Then they carried Joe in, tucked into a suit of space-armor. The story of what he had done came out, mixed with curses, from the mouths of the baggage-handlers. Right then Joe was a very frost-bitten, very disoriented Indian, whose swollen face nonetheless showed a flash of truculence.

How he'd managed to survive in that space-chilled compartment, breathing only the air that was locked in with him, might,

I think, have baffled a Houdini. He must just have followed some animal instinct when he bundled himself in paper wrappings torn from bundles and packages.

By the same instinct he must have relaxed and breathed shal-lowly to consume less oxygen. Something about how he must have done it all reminded me somehow of a stowaway rat - surviving not so much by intelligence as by some wisdom engrained into its whole cussed carcass.

"Joel" I gasped. "Joe!" Into my voice was poured all my concern about him - when he must finally realize in some measure where he was, how inconceivably far he had blundered from anything he could call familiar. He would just wither then, I was sure. He was a simple ranch Indian, who had trouble writing his own name and could never understand other worlds.

Someone growled in my ears, "Oh, you know this fella, eh?" The tone was as official as the gold braid that went with it - we civilian experts were under military direction, too. The tone bore a heavy load of contemptuous disgust. It blamed me, a greenhorn, for Joe's super greenhorn presence. I was responsible.

"Yes, sir," I said. "Joe Whiteskunk worked for my Dad."

Well, that officer took my words as if they constituted an admission of mortal sin. "Oh - so?" he said with poisonous gentleness. "And what do you think we can do with him, here? Why didn't you bring a sick baby along? It would be less trouble.

"Why didn't you bring an enemy spy? Then we could just shoot him. Back he goes with the first return rocket and you'll pay his passage! Every last cent of it if I have to take it out of your hide!"

He said a lot more. He had me wanting to crawl into my space boots until a little glimmer of hope came. I looked at Frank, who hadn't said anything. Right then I didn't want any more of the Moon. Maybe Joe was our ticket back home - our way out of a signed contract.

"Sir," I told the officer. "With your permission I'll personally conduct this man back to Earth."

Yeah, but that was where Joe entered the conversation. He looked kind of sore but he sounded both obstinate and gentle.

"I no go back, Dave," he said. "I come - I stay. You and Frank stay too. No be scared. Sure! You big boys now. Strong - smart. I smart, too. The Big Man back in White Sands tell big fib. He say no job for tracker here. Just now, outside, I see plenty tracks."

It burned me up. Joe was patronizing me - treating me as if I were a frightened child who had to be soothed. Treating me the way he had once when a gila monster had scared me out of my wits.

And he was rattling on with that crazy illusion of his. "Yeah, I see plenty tracks - old tracks. No wind here. No man tracks. No coyote tracks. Devil tracks."

Joe didn't even look awed. But in his black eyes, beyond the opened view-window of his oxygen helmet, gleamed something from the lore of his forefathers. It seemed to satisfy a question in his mind better than all our scientific sophistication could do for us. What I mean is that it enabled him to adjust better than we did to complete strangeness.

Right then something happened to our officer friend's face-presently I was to find out that his name was Colonel Richard Kopplin. He looked sober, puzzled, less grouchy - as if something that had been bothering him for a long time found support in Joe Whiteskunk's words.

"Hum-mm - devil tracks," he muttered.

No, I won't say that Kopplin didn't have plenty of other worries to make him grumpy and officious. Maybe his own nerves were a bit twisted just by his being on the Moon. Then he had a lot of responsibility - handling scared and inexperienced dopes who could go batty easily and throw everything out of kilter. Getting more tunnels dug, more apparatus set up to draw the constituents of air and water out of rocks, riding herd on experts to get mineral tests made.

And it was his job too to see that the astronomical observatory was finished and the Army fortress. Moreover, he had to deal with civilian interests. Mining companies and their prospecting and planning - companies who wanted to set up huge atomic piles and spaceship factories on the Moon or conduct immense and dangerous experiments that safety interests forced off the Earth.

But the worst part of his job was the fact that we weren't the only nation interested in lunar colonization. That name-calling, fist-shaking and blame-passing antedated the first hop into space. Don't make either party the villain too much. It takes two to fight. But for Colonel Kopplin these facts still made the Moon an additionally unpleasant post.

Now he cursed under his breath, showing that he was a fairly human and intelligent guy. "Dammit," he muttered. "When I was a kid I used to wonder if we of Earth would be the first beings of the Solar System ever to take a jump into space. Even though there are no obvious indications of space-travel by extraterrestrial creatures in modern times, still there might have been such travel, once. Maybe millions of years ago . . ."

Kopplin's muttering died away for a moment. Then, after a pause which seemed designed to give his words emphasis, he said quietly, "I figured that a trip to the Moon would give the answer."

"Why?" I asked.

He looked at me as if I weren't so bright. "Because, sooner or later, through the ages, such spacetravelers - if they ever existed - would get to our Moon. The Moon's been dead for at least a billion years. There has been no wind and no weather for that much time here. The lightest touch of anything against the dust on its surface would leave a permanent mark - because there is no force to rub it out."

That much was good logic. I nodded. Still, I was skeptical - as to the concrete basis for this reasoning.

"You're leaving something out, sir," I said.

"Yes, I am. But I can show you. Maybe your man here can really help us. It's important enough. Lieutenant Briggs - take over."

So Colonel Kopplin, Joe Whiteskunk, Frank and I went out there under the bleak stars. We all watched Joe. Odd, but he was top man now - when we had all thought he was going to be more helpless and out of place here than an infant.

He looked up at the huge blurry blue-green Earth, which hung almost at zenith, near the blazing, corona-fringed sun. There was something like awe in his face for a moment. The low Lunar gravity seemed to bother him some too - his steps were kind of uncertain.

But quickly facts that he understood as well on the Moon as back home on the ranch drew his attention. Kopplin had pointed to the ground, which wasn't exactly ashen here but seemed to consist of lava rock that had been pulverized by some terrific force.

And there, in plain view, were faint scrabbling marks, a little like those of a truck tire or a great millipede. Joe's eyes moved quickly, and ours followed his gaze. At a little distance there were other marks of a different character. Small round indentations - they could have been made with the end of a pogostick. They could have been made by a thing with a long stride. For a little way they were spaced evenly, like steps.

"Nothing to get excited about, I know," Kopplin growled. "Nothing to draw anybody's certain attention. Still if - "

Joe's eyes were very intent and searching - still I wouldn't say that he was excited. "Devil tracks," he said. "Two kinds. We follow, eh? Out across the valley."

Joe would have gone at it right then. Maybe that too was part of what made my blood run cold. I had always figured there was something funny about Joe. The now is the only time that exists for him really. For what he does he doesn't need what we would call determination. He just flows on like a river or a sandstorm.

I'd hardly call him stupid. But his intelligence is different. Something about it is in tune with natural forces. And what do you call that? Intuition? Instinct? Extrasensory perception? How should I know! Maybe he has a guardian devil or a terrific stack of luck that keeps him on the right beam.

Look at those tracks my way - or your way. It comes out the same, I'll bet. Yeah - I was trying to figure what kinds of creatures or things or forces could have made those tracks - and how many million years before. Sure, you and I can make a sort of picture from what we know about science and other worlds. Living monsters, with ages of logical culture behind them - or shining robots.

But how about Joe Whiteskunk? He had no background with which to construct such a picture - or even to understand its meaning. He just seemed to follow his nose. What thoughts went on in his head were as deep an enigma as those two kinds of tracks themselves.

Frank said, "We've got to go back to shelter, Joe. Too much civilization. We gotta rest up."

Well, we did that for several hours. And Joe studied his spacesuit the way he used to study his rifle and I tried to help him to understand it.

Colonel Kopplin got together huge packs of equipment for us to carry. Again he delegated his camp authority to Lieutenant Briggs so that he could go along with us.

On our shoulders as we started out sat dread. And its companion, curiosity, magnified to the point of fascination. But above and beyond all that was the great spice of life - high romance. Who had been here on the Moon so long before us - and for what basic motive? And why weren't they here, now? Had they somehow failed, in their vast reaching out, to hold onto what they had attained? And might we not fail for the same reason?

Skip the details of our progress across the floor of that tremendous lunar crater. We followed the scrabbled tracks - the circular ones soon vanished completely. And sometimes there was no spoor at all. Perhaps a more recent upheaval of dust had blotted them out. But, following Joe, we were always able to pick up the trail again.

Against the feeble Lunar gravity we climbed that vast crater wall, locating there a string of handholds - that were not quite handholds, since they did not comfortably fit our human hands - chipped out of the glassy rock. We topped the brim of the barrier as the lagging Lunar Sun crept across the sky. We came down in a congealed inferno of tortured rock outside Copernicus.

Five miles out Joe Whiteskunk found trail's end. It was a confused circular patch of tracks in the dust - as new as yesterday in appearance. Trampled markings full of violence and drama - an inconceivably ancient arena for two. And at the center of it lay the vanquished.

The being's weapon was as new and gleaming as yesterday. A small bright tube, which Colonel Kopplin picked up for us to stare at. And a little of the aura of the physical principles by which it had functioned crept into our minds, leaving deeper enigmas to challenge us, to label our human science the feeble and primitive groping it is.

The trigger-button - the tiny but terrifically stout pressure-chamber, in which a minute droplet of substance that was like that of the Sun's heart could be produced to yield energy. Atomic fusion. Four atoms of hydrogen yielding one of helium. And the barrel, which must have been lined with pure force to stave such heat away from weak metal, to direct such a blast of death.

Yet the being who had owned such a weapon had lost the fight, perhaps to a greater science.

The eerie corpse lay there. It did not resemble a centipede. Rather, it looked like a blackened old tree-stump with a thousand roots still contorted with agony. The spatial dryness of the Moon had sucked the moisture from ancient tissues, leaving them not only desiccated and harder than oak - but even charred. Beyond that the preservation was perfect.

"Bad things happen here," Joe said through his helmet radiophones. Then he just stood stolidly by while the rest of us proceeded to reach the same conclusion in our involved path of reason.

"The thing with the round tracks left no further spoor from this point," Frank said. "So it must have flown - moved above the surface."

"Sure," I joined in. "And this fight must have been just a tiny part of something far bigger." My voice was hoarse with dread and questioning.

Kopplin had been on the Moon far longer than any of us. So of course he knew far more than we did. "Sure," he growled. "The Moon is big enough and hard to travel in. It's easy never even to notice such little details as corpses, tracks, artifacts. But could anyone ever miss the thousands of Lunar craters?

"Volcanoes, astronomers used to call them. Then the wounds made by vast meteors, crashing down from space. But one thing tests have shown - even their highest walls still show a trace of radioactivity, far above the level of natural uranium deposits. What can that suggest except that they are gigantic bombcraters?

"What if the Moon was a battleground for two kinds of beings, from two different worlds - say fifty million years ago? You know that the gradual lessening of radioactivity in rocks provides a clock for calculating the age of a stratum. And that's the amount of time you get by calculation."

Well - I carried the ball from that point. But Kopplin certainly could have done the same. So could Frank. Only old Joe Whiteskunk was left out of it.

"The Asteroid Belt," I said. "Long ago it was figured to be the wreckage of an exploded planet. Was that explosion a natural phenomenon or was it part of war - between two planets? And what would be that other planet? It would have to be a planet smaller than the Earth too - cooling faster, supporting life sooner, developing civilization sooner. Mars, most likely. Or maybe a moon of Jupiter."

My voice was a whisper. But there wasn't a thing new in what I said. I'd followed an old track of romancing handed down from stories that had groped at the unknown long ago. Here, however, the hints of truth were plain - that corpse at our feet, and that weapon. And the result was sharpened dread.

A thing which became the more terrifying, because it was personal - because history was on the same track again, set to repeat itself, for human beings this time. Everybody had read the signs before. But now, pointed out by a harsh and factual example, it was infinitely more vivid. It scared the sweat out of your skin.

We looked toward the east. And a rocket was tracing an inbound path of fire against the brittle star-curtain. One of their rockets - of that other nation, I mean - our enemy.

"What do you read in the flight of any such rocket?" Kopplin said. "Beauty, imperialism, the inevitable urge of all life to expand as far as it can go, with not even the stars the limit. It happened before - starting from Mars and from this Asteroid world. But then all the romance and glory turned to death and silence, by fury and its own scientific triumphs. Like some great flowering plant that never blossomed."

But then my brother Frank looked a little brighter. "Maybe that's good," he said. "For our pals, the enemy - and for us. An example, a lesson, the pointing out of an error in brutal terms. A warning not to do what other hopefuls did before us.

"Ever think that fear, instead of misplaced courage, could be the key to progress by way of caution and common sense? Lord, it's the one chance! For us - for them! Otherwise maybe all there'll be is another bigger and better Asteroid Belt, littered with everything from mountains to bobby pins!"

"Sure, Frank," I put in. "The path to future glory is a scary tightrope."

We started marching again. It was too late in that two weeks long Lunar day to start back to Camp Copernicus. So we went forward. Twice we put up an airtight heat-proof tent in which to eat and sleep. And when sunset came it didn't stop us. We had our lights for night-work - and the glory of the Earth-shine over that maddening desolation.

But we didn't go mad - we were too frightened. With the disappearance of the Sun, the temperature of the surrounding ground dropped from higher than the boiling point of water to something a shade above absolute zero. But what did that matter to us in our insulated spacesuits?

Joe Whiteskunk led us on and finally picked up another trail, which led to a half-buried shelter of metal and a whole bunch of other ancient murders. Stumplike corpses - all except one. That one had belonged to the kind of creature that made the circular tracks. Its skin was black horn, its form was somewhat less human than a two year old's smeary drawing of a man. The prints its fingers - or tentacle-tips - would have made were crosshatched instead of spiral.

"Which is which, I wonder?" Frank asked.

I answered as well as anybody could just then. "Mars still exists, at least. It must have won. It must have been stronger. These things with the round feet were stronger. But the Martians must have lost too. Anyway, they haven't been around for a long time either."

We were exploring that shelter. It was hardly what a man could inhabit comfortably. The Asteroidians didn't have much use for rooms as we understand them. They lived like bugs - in sort of chinks between plates of metal, not ten inches apart.

That's otherworld stuff - which shows about how close we'd be in physical needs to the people of most alien planets. And there were a thousand different small articles, the uses of which we could never name. Imagine yourself a Martian, mulling over a mess of combs, shaving brushes, bootpolish and the like - maybe you'll understand what I mean.

Of course we found treasure. No, I'm not talking about simple stuff like gold and jewels or refined uranium - rather a wealth of ideas. Maybe the best was the little rod the Martian had - it was wonderfully simplified and seemed to be both a weapon of terrible power as well as a means of flying.

But the Asteroidians had their inventions, too. Wonderful compact calculation machines. A thin filtering fabric that could purify and reoxygenate air. An automatic control device that would have worked well on our spaceships. And dozens of other things - many more than we could have probed and understood by brief and tentative scrutiny.

We pitched our tent again. And with our radio we hurled the news of all that we had found and found out, back to Copernicus, and out to that other encampment, of our potential enemies.

"You'll see for yourselves," Kopplin said into the mike, "if you haven't seen already. These others may have had cities here on the Moon - even on Earth. They might have reached the stars long ago. Instead they worked it wrong - and perished."

He said a lot more. Maybe when he was finished talking the tightrope path to a great future was a little tighter and steadier. But you can't end all the danger of the years and of chance and of opposed life or factions with mere fright and example.

We were back in Camp Copernicus, staggering tired, before the Lunar midnight. Frank and I slept. Joe must have too. But when we awoke, he was gone. Joe wasn't the kind of guy to ask permission from anybody to do anything. If anybody tried to block his way by force he'd just watch his chance and slip past the obstacles by stealth. I was scared for him but what good did that do?

I had my mineralogy job - the thing I'd signed up for - to look after. And Frank was tied up with his air conditioning. But Joe had his work cut out for him. It was all he could do here.

He was gone a full terrestrial week that first solo trip. I hardly believed it when the news came that he was back. For I was sure by then - with a lump in my throat - that he was gone for good - that his naivete where science was concerned had tripped him up in an environment where there were so many horrible ways of dying if you didn't know exactly what you were doing.

But evidently Joe had learned enough of space-suits and things by observation, during our first excursion of discovery, to keep alive if nothing went too wrong.

He almost grinned at Kopplin, Frank and myself as he unloaded his pack in Kopplin's quarters. And it came to me that he hadn't changed much - it was as though that pack of his was full of skins from a trapping season and he was back at the trading post.

He had bits of queer fabric, colored blue. He had a wonderful camera. He had pieces of plating, that might have come from a blown-up spaceship. And he had some jeweled ornaments worth a dozen fortunes as artwork.

"You did fine, Joe," Colonel Kopplin said.

"Sure," Joe answered and I knew that there was a certain vanity in him. "I go back right away."

A few hours later we saw him trudging off across the crater-bottom, a lonely but contented figure, forever devoted to the wilderness - on Earth or elsewhere.

This time his luck, his intuition or his guardian demon seemed to desert him. For he did not return. After a Lunar day - almost an Earth-month - we went to look for him. Far out from Copernicus his tracks ended at the edge of an expanse of flaky ash more treacherous than quicksand. Even our probing radar-beams couldn't locate his remains at its bottom.

So long, Joe Whiteskunk. You were a true trail-blazer. You came much farther than you could ever have realized.

A year passed. Camp Copernicus became a little city, with all the comforts of civilization - with beautiful gardens even-under shining domes. It was the seed of the glory of the future - if our luck held. Of trans-spatial empire. Mines began really to produce. Great factories began to work. But of course our human dreams and plans were already far ahead.

Girls came to the Moon to work in offices, as lab technicians. And that, of course, was the surest sign of the success of our colony. One girl - a tiny dark-haired dynamo with the love of strangeness and millions of miles in her eyes - smiled at me. But how I happened to smile back and how we became Joan and Dave to each other is really another story.

In our factories on the Moon men of Earth built their first true interplanetary craft. From knowledge learned by their own right - and from what they were able to glean from wreckage left by the Martians and Asteroidians.

Mars was that craft's goal - or, more specifically, the deepest part of Syrtis Major, that great dark marking near its equator. A sea-bottom - verdant, compared to the cold Martian deserts. Once densely populated - a seat of culture. We knew that much from the fragment of a map that we had found.

I was one of a hundred men who said goodby to all that we knew. Frank, my twin, and Colonel Kopplin were others. And there was one little gray jolly man named Dimitri Vasiliev - from that other nation. A noted physicist. Was it a compliment to the practicality of the Brotherhood of Man and a promise of the great future of humanity, after the failure of the Martians and the Asteroidians, that he was one of us and our friend?

"On to Mars - on to mystery," he laughed - and his eyes shone with the same hopes that were ours. Proving again that there are fewer villains than some would have us believe - and that, from close up, people are just people.

Oh, yes - it sounds good. And we felt the triumphant vanity of it. But maybe it is an over-simplification. That path to the future is a tightrope in more ways than one. Everything is a gamble. And the bigger goal - not just Mars - was far, far off. Not just cities in the star-systems. But dreams that we couldn't clearly see.

Immortality - cosmic greatness to which we knew that only the minds of our distant descendants could ever be equal. We were still too primitive. Still, we were on the right track and might win, where the Asteroidians and Martians had failed. We'd seen their ruined and deserted fortresses - triumphs of technology that had not been enough.

Maybe our greatest encouragement was the fabulous sum that was paid just for motion-picture rights of what we would see on Mars. Aside from food, comfort and love, nothing is easier to sell, even to the timidest stay-at-home, than high romance.

Our luck held. We left the Moon in a blaze of atomic fire. Several months were spent hurtling in a great arc that joined two planetary orbits. We laughed, we speculated, we worried, we cursed, we grew bored - but Mars swelled to a great murky opal, at once ugly and beautiful, and we landed in the deepest part of Syrtis Major just as we had intended. Ah, but we were a proud lot then, looking back at our conscious determination, courage and skill]

They say that pride goeth before a fall. And so, by a little oversight somewhere, it happened. Maybe in space, under the electro-magnetic emanations of the sun, or even by the friction of our ship's hull with the atmosphere of two worlds, we acquired an electric charge, which became the cause of a hot spark just as we touched the Martian soil. We'll never know just what was the cause.

Ever try to imagine a flash-fire inside a spaceship, where all your stores and your oxygen are sealed up? We could have all died very quickly. Eleven of us did. The rest of us got out of the ship in spacesuits, most of us burned in various degrees. But were we any better off?

To the individual death is the end of the universe. The triumph of now and the triumphs of the far future can't matter much. And all we were, here on the Red Planet, was a bunch of blundering fools, as good as dead, without the best part of our supplies.

No, Mars isn't dead like the Moon. The sky we stared at was not black but deep blue. Go to a fifty-thousand-foot altitude on Earth and you've got about the same air-pressure - but still a lot more oxygen than on Mars. Want to try to breathe that thin desiccated atmosphere, even though a comfortable noonday temperature of nearly seventy degrees might encourage you?

Nope - you're not built right - you'd be the devil's own fool. The Martians are gone - they aren't there anymore to keep that atmosphere healthy with their science.

Colonel Kopplin was yelling, "Get the stuff outl Got to salvage what we can!" And those of us who were able were trying to obey. The fire was out soon, smothered by the Martian air mostly. But almost all of our oxygen supply was gone. And our water tank had been ripped open by the explosion of a big oxygen flask, weakened by the heat. The last of the precious liquid dribbled away into the powdery soil.

At last we stood panting and helpless. Inside myself I was saying, "Good-by, Jan. Goodby, dreams."

The scene around us, I guess, was beautiful. Ruins were everywhere - fused down to lumpy masses of glassy stuff, millions of years ago, by atomic heat in that last war. And everything was overgrown with blue-green papery vegetation, that stirred idly in a thin breeze. The sea-bottom that was Syrtis Major spread for miles all around and far off in the sunlight to the east we could see the ochre line of the desert.

"To find water is our only chance," Kopplin was saying. "We've still got the equipment to electrolyze it - to free the oxygen in it to breathe. But where, short of the polar regions, will you find water on a planet whose remaining total supply wouldn't more than fill a couple of our Great Lakes?"

"We could find the lowest ground here," Frank growled. "Try to dig a well."

Vasiliev nodded. He was a plucky little man. Maybe we were all plucky or we wouldn't have been where we were. But what good was that against grinding homesickness - besides all the rest of our misfortunes?

But we began to get the necessary equipment together. We figured we had maybe five hours' airsupply left. A spacesuit can be equipped for a long jaunt afield. But running for your life from a fire you can't always be fully prepared. A seal is made imperfectly. An air-purifier lacks adjustment. And if you've got anything to share part of it goes to pals who aren't so fortunate as you.

Wishful thinking at a time of despair, they say, can produce strange delusions. So now I saw a ghost stepping out from behind some weird Martian shrubbery. Lord knows that was all I could think then - because I couldn't know the simple train of events that had made the impossible true.

Yeah, I saw Joe Whiteskunk. And he wasn't even wearing space-armor. But from a disc strapped to the top of his head a faintly luminous aura flowed down over his ragged shirt and dungarees. A Martian invention - I didn't even think about it then. But that was the way it was. An aura which took up all the functions of our clumsy spacesuits - protection from cold, air purification, maintenance of pressure.

He was surrounded by a tough bubble of energy.

"Hi, Dave," he said and his voice was hoarse and rustling and dry. "Yup - me. Joe." He was as thin and brown and withered as a dry root. And he staggered a little. But his eyes were clear. Funny how his voice reached me through my helmet phones though I saw no transmitter. But that's ancient Martian science.

"No water down in valley," Joe croaked. "Little spring close by too small. Too many men. Water always bitter. So what? Sometimes I smell water higher up toward desert. I never look though. Now do, eh? Glad to see you boys again. Hi, Frank."

He showed us the twenty-foot hole he'd dug. There were a couple of spoonfuls of brackish muck at its bottom. Wildly we dug further, only to find dry sand into which the trickle vanished.

"Just spoil spring," Joe grumbled. "Now we go look."

"Toward the desert?" Kopplin growled. "That's against both science and common sensel I'll take a digging party down to lower ground."

"Okay," I said. "Fair enough. Just on the chance that Joe is right I'll take another party and go with him."

We were too intent on water and survival even to ask how Joe happened to be here, even though it seemed more impossible than any miracle. But I got around to inquiry as our group - which included Vasiliev - started out.

"Gonna tell us about you, Joe?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "I found Mars space-ship on Moon. Nothing broke. I crawl inside. Press wrong button. Ship start for home. Big city here once in this valley. Home to machine that

think, inside ship. Ship over there - maybe five miles." Joe grinned.

Far off I saw the burnished hull gleaming in the sunshine. "How do you live, Joe?" I demanded.

"Had my supplies. Had space-tent," Joe answered. "Now eat hard fruit. And big slow bugs. Taste good when hungry. No game. Plenty gold ornaments though - and stuff for houses. Vases - very nice. Maybe now we start business, eh, Dave?"

"You're crazy, Joe," I growled.

Under Joe's guidance, we dug for water. Twice we got nothing. But the third time, fourteen feet down, we got a muddy swirl of brackish stuff that widened to a pool. It was all that we needed. Distillation could get the mineral out of it, if we weren't squeamish about what we drank.

By radio we learned that Kopplin's party was still looking. They hadn't found anything.

Little Vasiliev laughed gleefully. "I guess there are neglected branches of science," he said. "About hunches - that is what you call them, is it not? About pigeons finding their way home. About your friend 'smelling' water . . ."

Sure. Joe Whiteskunk is an Indian - probably not quite an ordinary one. Maybe this story is mostly about him. Maybe it's about those deeper sciences. Or about fate and destiny and luck. Or about pride and humbleness. Or how simple life reaches out, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. Or about high romance . . .

I know how Joe managed to live alone on Mars. But I don't know how his mind stood it - how he escaped going mad. Maybe, like a primitive thing, he just didn't realize where he was - and that saved him. Maybe his luck was just a matter of being part of nature.

Nature is a word that covers a lot of ground. An atom, an amoeba, a galaxy - and everything in between. But they all must be joined together someway, be in sympathy and understanding. And maybe Joe's flesh is part of that understanding. That's why he always seems to know.

After our misfortunes most of us were fed up with Mars. The romance thinned. We wanted to go home to rest and brag. We could fix up our ship now - or maybe even use the Martian one, refitting it to be a little more comfortable for human occupation.

On my fourth day on Mars I said, "Joe - how would you like to be back on the ranch for a while?"

Joe thought about it. Then he answered, "No go. Stay here. Nice place. Plenty room. You go, Dave." His black eyes were on the distance. "Got plenty business here," he added.

None of us left for over seven months. By then we had a little camp set up - not much different, though far smaller, than Camp Copernicus. Maybe it'll be our first Martian city before long.

I left with the ship - I had to. But Frank stayed, and Vasiliev and a few others. I took Joe's "trade stuff' along. Golden ornaments, plaques, vases, strange carvings, stuff worth an emperor's ransom - because civilized people love high romance and call it beautiful. Does Joe really understand? I wonder.

I've brought Joan, my wife, back to Mars with me. Life goes on. Joe doesn't show up here much anymore. He's browner and more withered than ever. But with the help of decent food he's a lot spryer than he used to be. And his eyes are young. Has he found something like the fountain of youth too? Or is it just that the thirty-eight-percent-of-Earth-norm gravity of Mars is easy on old muscles? Search me.

Yesterday I saw him trudge off again toward the desert. He seems to belong here as much as the tattered Martian plants. I couldn't have believed that possible, once. Joe's a real trailblazer. He doesn't understand galaxies. Stars are still just little specks in the sky to him.

But there must be a drive and an understanding in his blood and bone and nerves. Perhaps it's a vast primitive yearning. It's the kind of thing that will lead us out to the farthest galaxies, maybe a thousand years from now, if our luck holds. But it's not distance alone. It's grandeur, dimly seen. It's mind, comprehension, mystery. Maybe it's a matter of becoming demigods. Who knows? And don't ask me. Dream it up yourself.

Maybe we of Earth will be the ones to do it - though the Martians and the Asteroidians failed.