A GIFT FOR TERRA

BY FOX B. HOLDEN

Illustrated by Paul Orban

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction September 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

His head hurt like blazes, but he was alive, and to be alive meantfighting like hell to stay that way.

That was the first thing returning consciousness told him. The next wasthat his helmet should have been cracked wide open when the bum landinghad wrenched the acceleration hammocks out of their suspension socketsand heaved his suited body across the buckled conning deck. It should'vebeen, but it wasn't.

The third thing he knew was that Ferris' helmet had been smashed into amillion pieces, and that Ferris was dead.

Sand sifted in a cold, red river through the gaping rent in the side ofthe ship, trying to bury him before he could stand up and get hisbalance on the crazily tilted deck. He shook loose with more strengththan he needed, gave the rest of the muscles in his blocky body a try,and there wasn't any hurt worse than a bruise. Funny. Ferris was dead.

He had a feeling somewhere at the edge of his brain that there was goingto be more to it than just checking his oxygen and food-concentratesupply and walking away from the ship. A man didn't complete the firstEarth-Mars flight ever made, smash his ship to hell, and then just walkaway from it. His astrogeologer-navigator was dead, and the planet wasdead, so a man just didn't walk away.

There was plenty of room for him to scramble through the yawning rip inthe buckled hullplates—just a matter of crawling up the river of redsand and out; it was as easy as that.

Then Johnny Love was on his feet again, and the sand clutched at hisheavy boots as though to keep him from leaving Ferris and the ship, butit didn't, and he was walking away....

Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltereddaylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurthis eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plainwas too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind thatwhorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the onlyinterruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet wastoo still.

Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemedtoo great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. He lookedback, and the plume of still-rising smoke from the broken thing that hadbeen his ship was like a solid black pillar that had been hastily builtby some evil djinn.

How far had he walked; how long?

He turned his back on the glinting speck and made his legs move again,and there was the hollow sound of laughter in his helmet. Here he was,Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of thestrength in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forwardand no backward, no direction at all; breathing when there was nopurpose in breathing.

Why not shut off the valves now?

He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. Alone, bu