Read Ebook: One touch of Terra by Bok Hannes

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Ebook has 159 lines and 8613 words, and 4 pages

Release date: November 19, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

one touch of terra

"Listen, Elmer!" Horseface Smith told his gwip. "What's that racket ahead--yellin', shootin', or both?"

Elmer obediently stopped and cocked his duck-head in the direction of Finchburg, then nodded sagely, if somewhat ambiguously. He was a pack animal of the sort commonly used by psithium-prospectors on Venus, now that interplanetary travel was commonplace, and he was almost as intelligent as a human.

Despite his size--he was nearly as large as a terrestrial horse--he must have had a dash of flying-squirrel blood, since when in a hurry gwips were apt to bound off the ground, flattening their plump bodies in a flying-squirrel glide which took them thirty to fifty feet per jump.

But at present Elmer wasn't able to do any bounding. His saddle-bags were sagging with samples of ore, and he had all he could do just to walk.

Horseface clunked his heels on Elmer's sides, urging him up the stony hillside. They gained the summit and craned down at Finchburg, only half a mile below. Like most of the mining-settlements scattered sparsely over the vast Venus deserts, it consisted of scarcely a dozen buildings, none of them new, but all in reasonably good repair. If it is true that a town speaks for its inhabitants, Finchburg plainly declared that while its people might be down on their luck, but they hadn't lost hope.

"Looks like Trixie is blowing her jets," Horseface speculated, and Elmer dipped his broad bill in agreement. "Wonder what's eating her? She ain't acted human for months!"

Elmer cocked an inquiring eye on his master as if asking whether Trixie's behavior could possibly be considered gwippish. He decided not, and clucked sympathetically. He knew all about Trixie's idiosyncrasies. But then, who--or what--didn't?

Trixie O'Neill was the only woman within a thousand miles of the Venus Flats, and furthermore, the only terrestrial woman. She wasn't young nor beautiful. She was in her middle fifties, gaunt, coarse, and had a wooden leg.

She'd come to Finchburg thirty years ago at the height of the psithium rush. She'd been young and pretty then, and desperately in love with her prospector-spouse Mike O'Neill. Mike had been a roistering giant, but he hadn't lasted long on Venus. The acid dust had eaten his lungs away, and in less than a year he'd been laid to rest down in an abandoned mine.

Almost immediately the veins of psithium had petered out. The mine-owners closed the shafts and took away their expensive equipment imported nut-by-bolt by rocket from Earth. Finchburg became a ghost-town. All the miners except for die-hards like Horseface had moved far away to the more promising strikes of Satterlee, Guzil Banks and Storington.

But Trixie remained at Finchburg. "My Mike's buried here, ain't he? Awright--where he stays, I stay!"

And she went on doggedly doing Mike's work until a cave-in crushed one of her legs, after which she set up a hostelry which was a one-woman service-bureau--she washed the miners' clothes, served their meals, kept their books, sold supplies to them and most of all kept up their morale. She provided the woman's touch, and the men adored her.

But the touch which they worshiped abjectly was of Terra itself--half of a blistered blast-tube filled with Terrestrial soil and growing genuine Terrestrial dandelions, rather scrubby and colorless ones, but from good old Terra just the same.

When you thought you'd choke on one more whiff of the bitter Venus-dust, when you remembered the green lushness of Terra and wished you were back there, knowing you could never find enough psithium to pay your passage--then you went to Trixie's place, looked at her dandelions and maybe touched your finger to the dirt in which they grew--and you went away feeling better somehow. You'd been home again for a little while.

And if anybody saw a tear in your eye, he looked the other way. Because maybe tomorrow he'd be doing the same.

No man, you didn't treat Trixie or her dandelions lightly. They were sacred.

"Hey," Horseface asked Elmer, "is that a rocket down there? A rocket--in Finchburg?"

Elmer peered forward and said, "Wak, wak!" in a meshed-gears voice, meaning yes.

"A rocket!" Horseface marvelled. "Maybe it's visitors from Terra! Or maybe it's news of a new strike! Gee-jup, Elmer! Time's a-jettin'!"

They started down the hillside's hairpin turns. The shouting grew more strident, and at times Horseface heard the raucous yowl of blaster-guns.

Celebration!

"Yippity!" Horseface bellowed, firing his own gun in the air.

But it turned out to be anything but a celebration. Horseface rushed Elmer into the community stable, unhooked the saddle-bags, dropped the stall-bar, and ran toward Trixie's place, "The Pride of Terra".

Every man in the camp was waiting at the door, and waiting vociferously. The comments mingled into an indistinguishable babble. A few miners were loitering around the rocket, a small two-seater, like mice cagily inspecting a new and baffling trap. Horseface recognized it by the device emblazoned on one of its doors--a yellow sunburst on a grey square, the insignia of United Mars.

The rocket belonged to Thurd Goreck, the Martian. Goreck hadn't been in town for years. He and his fellows had their diggings over at Saturday Wells, "Saturday" for short, in the west. What, Horseface wondered, possibly could have brought him here?

Since Horseface was a little below average height, he couldn't see over the heads of the crowd. He raced up the steps of an old ruin opposite Trixie's establishment. A shrieking beam from a blast-gun fired at random just missed him and scorched the wood overhead.

He heard Trixie's bark: "Stop it, boys, do you hear me? Somebody's likely to get hurt!"

She was standing in her doorway, a big sculpturesque woman with her feet planted solidly wide and her red fists on her broad hips. Her face was square and rough-hewn as a man's, the skin leathery from years of weathering. She'd thrown her blue lace scarf around her shoulders, the scarf that Mike O'Neill had given her on their first anniversary. Her crystal earrings dangled under her cottony hair--a bad sign. Trixie never put on her shawl and earrings unless thinking of leaving town.

Thurd Goreck lounged against the door-frame beside her. Like most Martians, he was tall and spindle-legged, large-chested, big-nosed and equipped with almost elephantine ears. He displayed quite a paternal solicitude whenever he looked at Trixie, but he sneered openly at the yelping crowd.

"Don't do it, Trix!" somebody roared above the din.

"You'll be sorry!" another warned.

Still another wanted to know, "Have you forgotten Mike?"

Then Horseface noticed that the other Martians from Goreck's settlement were ranged on either side of Trixie and Goreck, holding off the Finchburgers. It was they who were doing most of the firing--warning blasts over the crowd's heads.

"No," Trixie yelled, "I ain't forgotten Mike. He was a better man than the lot of you put together!"

Horseface whistled to Candy Derain, who turned and edged toward him. "What's up, Candy?"

"Man!" Candy reached at him. "You're just the one we need--Trixie's running away! You got to do something quick!"

"She's--huh?"

"Goreck's been lazing around town almost ever since you went out nugget hunting. He's taking Trixie to Saturday--going to set her up there in a new place. He was smart and waited till you weren't around, 'cause he knows you cut a lot of ice with Trix. You got to stop her--"

A roar from the crowd cut him short. It sounded as if all the men simultaneously had been jabbed with ice picks.

"Look!"

"No!"

"They're stealing our Terra!"

"Trixie, you can't do this to us--you can't!"

"Ain't you got no heart at all?"

Horseface goggled, and groaned. Trixie and Goreck had stepped aside, making room for those Martians who were coming out with the blast-tube and its dandelions.

"Howling Gizzlesteins!" Horseface moaned. Then determinedly, "One side, Candy!"

He launched into the mob, shouldering, prodding and elbowing room for himself until he was out in front. A Martian significantly poked a blaster in his ribs.

"Trixie!" Horseface bawled, "what do you think you're doing?"

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