Mars' fever they called it. Could the wild
boy cheat the Red Planet's skeleton deserts
and the dogged trailers from Port Laribee?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Port Laribee with its score of Nisson huts, sealed against the lifelessatmosphere, the red dust and the cold, was a shabby piece of Earthdropped onto Mars.
There, Dave Kort was the first wilderness tramp to be remembered. Inwarm seasons he'd plod into Port Laribee, burdened by a pack that onlythe two-fifths-of-terrestrial gravity put within the range of humanmuscles. He was a great, craggy old man, incredibly grimed and browned,his frostbites bandaged with dry Martian leaves tied on with their ownfibre.
His snag-toothed grin was bemused and secret through the scratchedplastic of his air-hood. He'd trade carven stones, bits of ancientmetal, or oddities of plant and animal life for chewing tobacco,chocolate, heavily lined clothes, mending supplies, and new parts forhis battered portable air-compressor.
He'd refuse a bath with disdain. And at last his rusty, monosyllabicspeech would wax eloquent—comparatively.
"So long, fellas," he'd say. "See yuh around."
The equinoxial winds, heralding autumn, would moan thinly like theghosts of the Martians wiped out in war those ages back. Dust wouldblur the horizon of that huge, arid triangle of sea-bottom calledSyrtis Major—still the least sterile land on the Red Planet. At nightthe dry cold would dip to ninety below zero, Fahrenheit.
The specialists of Port Laribee, who watched the spinning wind-gauges,thermometers and barometers, and devoted monastic years to learningabout Mars, said that they'd never see Dave Kort again.
But for three successive summers after he had quit his job as helperamong them, he showed up, tattered, filthy, thinned to a scarecrow, butgrinning.
Young Joe Dayton, fresh from Earth and full of Mars-wonder, asked him astock question that third summer. The answer was laconic. "Oh—I knowthe country. I get along."
But at the fourth winter's end, Dave Kort did not return. No one eversaw him again, nor found among the ruins and the quiet pastel hues ofMars the dried thing that had been Kort. Somewhere drifting dust hadburied it. No one had quite understood him in life. If any affectionhad been aimed at him, it was for a story, not a man. The man died butthe story thrived.
Dave Kort had lived off this wilderness, alone and with sketchyartificial aids, for three Martian years—almost six by Earthreckoning. It was quite a feat. For one thing, the open air of Mars hasa pressure of only one-ninth of the terrestrial, and above ground itcontains but a trace of oxygen.
How Kort had turned the trick was not completely inconceivable.
In making starch from carbon-dioxide and moisture under the action ofsunlight, the green plantlife of Mars produces oxygen just as Earthlyvegetation does. But instead of freezing it lavishly to the air,many of those Martian growths, hoarding the essentials of life on adying world, compress their oxygen into cavities in stem and root andunderground capsule, to support later a slow tissue-combustion likethat of warm-blooded animals, thus protecting their vitals from coldand death.
Despoiling these stores of oxygen with a pointed metal pipette attachedto a greedily sucking compressor, was a known means of emergencysurvival on Mars. Thus you could laboriously replenish the oxygenflasks for your air-hood. Simple—yes. But tedious, grinding, endless.Dayton could imagine.
Food and shelter we