Ross Rocklynne

Marooned! On the cold satellite of a dying sun,
light-years away from home.... For Rex there
was only one escape. But Carl called it murder!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The years passed relentlessly, ticked off—one, two three, four—by the big lone planet Worta as it moved with ponderous sureness around the dying red star. Sometimes, in the first year after they were marooned, the two runaway boys, Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling, crawled from the grottoes, chambers and labyrinthine tunnels which the Wortans had driven deep beneath the planet's crust, and with a chill lonesomeness looked out into the vastness of space where the stars brooded. One of those stars, thirty-five light-years away, was Sol, around which swung the planet Earth! They could not think of Earth without a brightness coming to their eyes.

Sometimes the younger boy, then seventeen, would whisper, "I wish we'd never left home, Carl."

And Carl would say, "But we left. So let's take our medicine like men."

Yes, their leaving home, leaving their parents, their friends, their whole world, could not be changed. Yet it seemed to them that their punishment was out of all proportion to their crime. Thinking back on it, Carl Wyant no longer remembered the petty grievance against his parents which made him decide to run away.

Mainly, of course, it had been because his father dropped his keys to the interstellar space-ship he had recently requisitioned from the Space Council. Both Carl and his buddy, Rex, the young fellow who lived next door and belonged to the same Scout Troop, had been caught up with the idea of visiting the stars, without parental supervision. To visit the stars! That was a thrilling thought.

At first they planned to be gone a month. But after landing on one of the Centaurian planets, four and a half light-years away, the tremendous excitement that gripped them burned away thoughts of their parents, who must certainly be suffering agonies because of their disappearance. Beyond Centauri were other stars—and others beyond them.

They never tired as the sub-etheric warp hurled them through the dark reaches of infinity at several times light-speed. For the first time, they were living.

By this time, the alarm had gone throughout the known universe. Two boys on the loose. Carl, an expert at Morse Code, deciphered the wild dit-dit-da's.

"Boy, are they looking for us!"

Rex's deep chest came out. "We'll be pretty famous when we get back, I guess." The thought pleased him. "Those smart alecs that always picked on me at school will change their tune."

"Ah, Rex, nobody ever picked on you." Carl was slimmer than Rex, though a year older. He added, "All you had to do was join in the fun and you'd have got along swell."

A dangerous flush crept up from Rex's thick, powerful neck. "I say they picked on me."

Carl said hastily, "Okay, okay." He dropped the subject. Sometimes Rex could be pretty touchy. But he was handy to have around and most of the time was a good guy. Both fellows had studied celestial navigation and mechanics, but Rex had it all over Carl when it came to handling the small ship, so Carl let him take the controls most of the time.

Suddenly the ship had gone haywire. Neither Carl nor Rex was technician enough to understand that the etheric warp engines had been overdriven. The engines, down to the last accumulator cell, exploded with a mighty, tearing roar that blew gaping holes in bulkheads, deck-plates, and overheads. Carl was knocked out, but Rex held on.

He crash-landed the ship—on Worta, the lone planet of the unlisted, dying red star. The ship landed in a snow-bank, and the heat of the landing turned tons of snow into steaming, boiling water. By the time they had inventoried the situation, there was a smooth lake of ice around them and the ship was frozen in up to the edge of the airlocks.

Rex said shakily, "We'll have to use the auxiliary engines."

Which was a bit optimistic. The auxiliaries weren't etheric warpers. They were rocket engines. The fuel a ship like this carried would take it a few billion miles, but what was that in the vastness of interstellar space, with the nearest solar system two light-years away?

Carl's long slim fingers bit mercilessly into the palms of his hands. His voice was a thin cry of protest, drifting out over the sterile vistas of Worta, the ice planet.

"Rex, we're done for. We can't get back. We're marooned."

They were marooned, but not done for. The Wortans found them one day and took them to their city a thousand feet under the planet. These Wortans, the few of them that remained, were quiet, kindly people. Ages ago, they had fought their last retreat from the bitter surface cold. They had dug beneath the crust. They were savages now, their former mighty civilization forgotten, and were unlearned, save in agriculture and the skillful breeding of such fur-and-meat-producing animals as the col, the friga, the hask-nor. And, since they were human in form, themselves, they accepted these strangers that came among them.

They never came to the surface of Worta, but that unexplainable sense of theirs which enabled them to perceive disharmony, much as one flinches at a sour discord, brought them up to investigate.

Carl was grateful to them for their simple wisdom, their understanding. From the first, however, Rex was a "sour chord" among them. An inner conceit, perhaps growing out of a race consciousness, painted him with an unmasked hostility.

But it was all of a year after their arrival before M'hort, chief of the Wortans, revealed his feelings to Carl. He drew Carl into his meegan—his rock-dwelling—one day. M'hort was tall as Carl, but his eyes were faceted and insect-like, great horny reptilian lumps stood out on his bony-joints, and his smoothly-scaled skin reflected the eternal fluorescence of this underground land like a polished mirror.

Carl's smile was rueful when M'hort explained about Rex. "Rex never was one to get along with people. He told me you people don't like him."

"How sad!" said M'hort.

"He's never stopped dreaming that we might get back to Earth."

"If only," said M'hort, "he would join us at our festivals as you do! If only he would laugh when we gather for meals! But, ah, he will do none of these things. Many times he sits in his meegan and broods. You say he insists there is a way to return to your planet?"

Carl was embarrassed for his friend. "When we first landed," he explained, "Rex thought that somehow we could use the auxiliaries."

"Ah, yes," said M'hort, trying hard to understand these things which were strange to him. "The auxiliaries."

"You see, we can manufacture unlimited quantities of rocket fuel with the fuel-generator that most ships carry. It's a catalytic process, the raw material being any fairly dense rock.

"The auxiliaries were a sort of obsession with Rex. I couldn't control him. In the few days before you found us, he manufactured seven or eight tons of merbohydrate. He filled the ship full. I let him have his way. We lifted the ship and left Worta. Rex was certain we could find another planet and get back to Earth by a stepping-stone method."

"Ah, but there are no other planets near enough," said M'hort, recalling this fact which Carl had previously taught him.

"Within light-years. As I say, I let Rex have his way until half the fuel was used up. Then I had to fight him."

Carl looked ashamedly at his fists. "I knocked him out as we came back to Worta. But somehow he never gave up the idea that we could use the auxiliaries somehow."

"How very sad! And you say there is little chance of the Earth people coming for you?"

"Very little. Worta and its sun aren't even entered in the Star Catalogue. It's an unlisted system, although the Stellar Survey Institution has been working like crazy the past hundred years to survey the whole works."

M'hort touched the boy's hand sympathetically. "Someday they will come for you! But, in the meantime, it would be wonderful if your friend saw the futility of his ways."

During the first year of their stay on Worta, Rex stayed close to Carl, confiding in him, making those trips to the surface of the snowed-under world. Then he took to wandering the great winding corridors and chambers and dead underground cities of Worta alone. Carl would have liked to explore with him, for there was an unending fascination in this dying civilization. Once upon a time the Wortans had been great. The quaint webbed architecture of the spired and domed buildings, the delicate traceries, on the walls and the sculptured figures standing in the squares—these were a timeless wonder. But Rex didn't want Carl along, for Rex had closed up clam-like, his broad, square face held a sullen fanaticism, and Carl knew he had his mind set on escape.

Carl went to Rex's meegan and sat on his spider-silk chair and whiled away the time by reading a scroll from the Wortan library until Rex should return. Both Carl and Rex had learned the complex language, the reading, the writing, the speaking of it, though Carl was much the more proficient.

Rex came in silently, a big man-size fellow with pale, beardless cheeks, dressed Indian-like in the thin, cured leather of the col. His moccasins padded and Carl looked up from the scroll with a start.

Rex said shortly, "Hello, Carl." He threw himself on the pile of sleeping-furs in the corner, locked his hands behind his head and stared straight up at the fluorescent ceiling with hard, unblinking eyes.

Carl uncomfortably put the scroll away. "Rex, I want to have a talk with you."

"Shoot," said Rex.

"You're not making it very easy for yourself, Rex."

"Oh! You're going to start moralizing again!"

"I wouldn't call it moralizing. I'm getting fed up with the way you act, if you want it straight. The Wortans are swell people and I get along with them fine. But it's just as if I was marooned alone. What I mean is, I don't have anybody to talk to."

Rex's lips curled in a half-smile. "Maybe you haven't treated me half-decent, either, if you want to know it."

"I haven't!"

"Nope. You want to stick here the rest of your life in these crummy, cold, underground rat-holes. No soap. I'm going to get back to Earth somehow."

"The auxiliaries," Carl said sarcastically.

Rex came to his knees with a violent motion, eyes burning. "Don't talk to me like that, Carl! I've got a way to get out of here."

"Yeah?" Carl refused to be intimidated. "How's the master-mind going to work it?"

Rex paused and then said slowly, "I'm going to create a distress signal."

"Distress sig—" Carl stiffened incredulously. "Rex, you're nuts!"

Rex smiled a slow, secret, satisfied smile. "I don't think so. 'Member when we were scouts? 'Member that time we got lost in the Big Neck Valley? We burned green wood and got a smoky fire started and used a blanket to send up a smoky SOS signal. We knew the rest of the troop was somewhere near and would see the signal. They came and got us.

"Well, this is the same thing. We're lost. This solar system never has been discovered, but we both know we're still in the known universe. All around us, maybe no more than fifty or sixty light-days off, are traffic lanes. Passenger ships, freighters. Then there's the SSI. It has ships everywhere. I figure if we send out a distress signal they're bound to see it over the sub-etheric, fifth-order ray detector. They'll see that signal as soon as I get started."

Carl was quiet. He was worried. This was a turn of affairs he hadn't expected. He remembered how fixed Rex's mind was on the subject of escape. Too fixed. Almost fanaticism. He hoped with all his heart Rex wasn't sick. Yet that the kid should kneel there, with that brightness in his eyes, and suggest sending up a distress signal which was to be sent across billions of miles of space—

"All right, Rex," he said gently. "I'm listening. You're to send up a distress signal and attract the attention of a Stellar Survey ship."

A derisive smile grew on Rex's lips. "You're listening," he scoffed. "Liar. You think I'm bats. But I'll show you."

He lay down again and turned his face to the wall and shortly Carl heard his deep breathing. Carl left.

That was in the second year. But another year passed. Carl found himself growing up. He had the shoulders of a man, and he could look back with a whimsical ruefulness on the immaturity which had led him and Rex to run away from home like callow ten-year-olds.

Carl longed for Earth, no less than Rex. Unlike Rex, he subdued the longing, but whenever his lonesome thoughts threatened to engulf him he diverted himself by climbing the thousand feet to the planet's surface. It was on such a voyage that he found the space-ship gone.

Carl and Rex had agreed to leave the ship on an eminence, so that if anybody did come they would see the ship and investigate. But the ship was undeniably gone, and Carl knew Rex had taken it.

He stood on the icy mesa where they had parked it, and Carl looked out on the drear vastness of Worta with sick eyes. He refused to believe Rex had gone away and left him. He stayed there for hours, waiting, then reluctantly went back into the bowels of Worta.

Rex showed up for the evening meal, though, taking his place at the great long yee—the festival table—where the forty-odd Wortans who remained had their meals. After the meal, Carl cornered him.

Rex twisted away from Carl's detaining hand. "I've got a right to take a ride if I want to, haven't I?"

Carl felt guilty at having even asked, the way Rex put it. Rex did have that right. Carl let it slide. But the frequent disappearance of the ship troubled him increasingly. Every time he stood hip-deep in snow on the upper world and saw the ship was gone, a chill worked through his heart. He would find himself looking into the lowering dark sky at the impersonal stars. Fastening his gaze on the dying red star around which Worta revolved. It was not a large sun. In another million years it would burn out. Then Worta would truly be dead.

He was convinced there was more to Rex's use of the ship than the loneliness of a nineteen-year-old wanting to take a ride. Rex had a purpose. Yet he let it slide until the end of the fourth year. Then his interference was not his doing. He was wandering far underground when a runner came panting up.

"M'hort must see you in his meegan," the runner panted.

Carl went at once, heart constricted. Nothing ever happened in these underground caves. Whatever M'hort wanted to see him about was urgent.

M'hort met him at the entrance and gripped his arm. His eyes bored into Carl's. "I sense that something is wrong, friend Carl," he said. "It is a great terror in my breast. It is about Rex, of course. I see—I see a great flame. Now tell me what you know!"

Carl blurted out the story. "He's making plenty long trips someplace," he said huskily. "He's been caving in a big hillside of rock these past couple years. Making merbohydrate."

M'hort's fear showed in his eyes. "There is no place for him to visit?"

"Not a planetary body within countless billions of miles."

M'hort paced. "We should not have this trouble," he said fretfully. "I am most annoyed with Rex. Look at us of Worta. Do we not know we are doomed, that the unhealthful conditions beneath Worta are producing a sterility that will soon destroy us as if we had never been? Yet we are gay and take what there is of life. Why must Rex make us all unhappy? And I feel he is planning—something that can never be undone."

He hesitated. "Carl, this merbohydrate—it is dangerous?"

Carl laughed. "Just about the peppiest explosion known to the human race." He touched M'hort's arm. "I'll find out what he's planning."

Carl went straight to the surface and stood in the cave opening, his breath hanging in puffy clouds of white. Rex was at that moment letting down the ship's gangplank. He wheeled the fuel-generator out on its short tripod.

All day Carl watched as Rex set "pills" of merbohydrate into the rock face of the snow-shorn, worked-over hill and detonated them. Tons of chipped rock cascaded toward the mouth of the generator. Rex panted as he worked with a square-point shovel. The twenty-pound merbohydrate ingots came rolling out at the rate of one a minute. Rex carried the ingots into the ship.

As the red star was about to settle for the night behind the sharply-silhouetted horizon, Rex wheeled the generator back into the ship. About that time, Carl panted up the hill to the mesa level. "Rex!" he called.

Rex stood scowling near the airlock. Plainly, Carl was not welcome.

Carl panted, "Going for a ride?"

Rex's shoulders—broader by far than Carl's—bunched up. He growled, "Yeah. I'm taking a ride."

"Swell. I'll go with you."

"Nope."

"Why not?"

Rex turned and, with a single motion, jumped to the edge of the airlock. He jeered, "I don't want any boy scouts along with me this trip. G'bye!"

Carl felt a rage he had never really shown Rex. He leaped. All it got him was a bad fall on the slippery ice underfoot. When he finally got to his feet, the airlock door was whining shut. A few seconds later, the ship leaped away, the rocket apertures throwing out their blatting swords of energy. The ship roared skyward.

Carl stood looking after it, a wet crawling on his skin. He was terribly frightened. The worst part of it was, he didn't know what was frightening him. He turned and started back down the ladders to the underground city.

Four years, he thought, as he climbed the ladders down. Four years we've been here. It seems forever since we ran away that night. And for two of those years, Rex has been busy with something. Manufacturing merbohydrate and taking trips out into space. Why?

Distress signal!

The two words hit him with smashing impact. He wrapped both hands around the ladder, to keep himself from falling down the shaft. He trembled and shook and dizzy spots grew in his eyes.

He raised his head and shouted, "The fool!"