There were three big Martians in the bar, real, king-sized Martians eight feet tall. There was nothing unusual about there being Martians in the bar, which was, after all, on Mars. Near the Qloptl Canal, in fact, near the city of Sopq. The unusual thing was that there were also Earthmen in the bar, several of them, and that was unusual because—so soon after the conquest—the two races did not generally mingle.
Of the Earthmen there were four, businessmen probably, on a sightseeing trip. Their car had broken down a short way from the bar, and they were waiting while the local public telepath office was contacting a repair crew from Kxl City. There was one other Earthman there, obviously a tramp, a little man to whom no one was paying much attention, except the Earth tourists. From time to time they would turn and sniff at him indignantly, ooze disgust, and then turn back to chatter virtuously among themselves.
The tramp had spoken up brightly, in a friendly way, when the Earthmen first came in, but they cut him cold. Unlike most drunks, the tramp was easily offended. He retired to a booth near the wall, hung his legs moodily from the rather high stool and looked at the tourists with growing, furtive rage.
The Martians’ chief drink, a potent beverage known—with reverence—as zok, eventually began to affect the tourists. With typical Earthly zeal, they commenced to pass loud comments on Mars, Martians, and other things pertaining thereto, which were unkind at best. As the afternoon wore on the Earthmen grew steadily unkind, sure in the freedom that comes only to conquerors. The three big Martians quietly prepared to leave. Being telepaths, they had caught every thought that was uttered, and a great many more that were not. But as the Martians left their stools, the tramp quite suddenly rose from his own.
Moving across the path of the Martians, going straight up to the tourists, the tramp arrived teetering at the bar. To the tourists’ great surprise and indignation, he attempted to cadge a drink, was rebuffed, and—grinned gleefully. Turning to the Martians as they passed behind him, he reached out and clutched one by a long, vine-like arm.
“Hold up a minute, Buster,” said the tramp happily. “Got time to hear a story?”
The Martians paused with the habit of the conquered. The tramp chuckled.
“If the story’s good enough, will you promise a drink?”
The Martians nodded wistfully.
“This is a story,” the tramp said, gazing at the Earthmen with evident, happy malevolence, “no Earthman likes to hear told. Especially to non-Earthmen. We try to push across that old superman business, the race of mental giants.” The tramp paused to guffaw toothily. But the tourists’ faces were tinged with alarm. There was whispering and the sudden downing of drinks.
The three Martians, having observed the tourists’ faces and sensing the mirth which abounded in the tramp’s mind, thoughtfully drew up stools.
“Well,” said the tramp, “a long time ago, when I was a fairly young man, I got my first really important job. I was what we used to call a press agent”—he paused so that the Martians could examine his mind and find out what a press agent was. It was easier that way than having to tell them.
“It was a tremendous job,” the little man said dreamily, “if everything had worked out all right I might have been the biggest man in the business.” The Martians looked at him enquiringly; the tramp let them know what a “big man” was.
“But it all got messed up,” the tramp went on, waving a philosophical hand, “and so here I am in this—unfortunate position. I will tell you how it got messed up, and we will all have a good laugh.”
He beamed at the Earthmen vindictively, and began:
“The first Earth rocket to go to the Moon…”
The Earthmen blanched, all four.
“My God, man!” shouted one.
“Have you no pride?” bellowed another.
“Not to Martians!” squeaked a third, “don’t tell it to Martians!”
The tramp chuckled. “As I was saying…”
“The first manned rocket we sent to our Moon was paid for by the government and built by an American industry, but the brains behind it was old Doc Kleinwitz.” He projected a mental picture of the doctor. “He was quite a boy. He was an astrophysicist, a mathematician, one of the world’s top engineers as well—all in all pretty much of a genius. And the rocket was his baby. He’d been working on it for most of his life, and he was sure of it as only an expert can be. That was back on the days on Earth when very few people thought space travel was possible”—the Martians showed surprise.
“Oh,” said the tramp, “you boys didn’t know that, did you? Well, living in a jerkwater town like…ahem…I guess they’ve been filling you full of that sauce about Earthmen believing nothing impossible.” He chuckled. “That’s a laugh. Back in those days, to tell you the truth, it was the Earth’s custom to have most inventors either laughed out of work or committed to an insane asylum.”
The tourists were still at the bar. They were trying to figure out whether or not they should jump the tramp. Those Martians were big.
“Well, anyway,” the tramp continued, “the day the first rocket took off for the Moon, old Kleinwitz was in his glory. The fact that most people didn’t think it would get there meant nothing to him. He was a genius, I guess, and the gibes of us ordinary people didn’t bother him in the least.
“I remember him standing there looking up at the trail of the rocket, chewing on his usual ancient cigar. He pounded me on the back and said, ‘George, today is a day which will live forever in the annals of mankind! This day we have gone out to the stars!’
“I thought he was a little bit overboard on that one, as we were only going to the Moon, but a statement like that is good copy, so I phoned it right out to the papers.
“It was my job, you see, to publicize the trip, to make it look like a good thing to the American public. After all, that rocket had cost a billion dollars worth of the taxpayers’ money, and so we had to do a lot of convincing. Senators, scientists, newspapers, everybody. And it wasn’t an easy job.
“In the first place, there were always those people who would come up and ask: ‘What’s on the Moon that we should spend a billion bucks to get there?’”
The Martians regarded him quizzically. To their placid minds it was a good question.
“Well, I had the answer to that long since learned by heat. First, there was the strategic value of the Moon as a military base. Second, we would probably find uranium there. Third, we’d gain all kinds of scientific knowledge, such as photographs outside an atmosphere, experiments in a vacuum, and so on, and fourth, there would probably be diamonds all over the place—as some scientists said—due to meteors or something.
“That part about the diamonds, that and the military base reason made most of them happy. I was counting on the actual samples and pictures Captain Henderson would bring back to satisfy the rest.”
He projected a picture of Captain Henderson.
“So then, while the rocket was gone, I worked just as hard as before, and Kleinwitz went around chomping on his cigar and watching the sky. Dreaming, I guess. I got to dreaming myself, thinking of all the things that could go wrong, and I started to chew my fingernails. But Kleinwitz never worried a bit.
“‘Nothing big can go wrong,’ he said, the poor guy, ‘everything is accounted for. Of course, there could be one or two minor accidents—there always are’—and he would laugh—‘but nothing important.’
“Minor accidents,” the tramp paused and grinned somewhat fiendishly. “How right he was!”
At this point he reflected that if the Martians were so disposed, he could use that drink. The Martians obliged and he tossed it off quickly. This somehow seemed to break the spell for the tourists, who arose suddenly and left the bar with their heads held high, wobbling. The tramp watched them go sadly, wishing they’d stayed.
“Well,” he said presently, “the rocket finally came back. It came back before schedule, so we were surprised, but we were glad to see it back and didn’t think about the schedule.”
He projected a picture of the landing base swarming with people.
“Everybody was there,” he went on, “everybody who could get a pass in, that is, and they were all big men; scientists, generals, top politicians. Kleinwitz and I were right up front. When the rocket came down Kleinwitz was first to get to the airlock, he was first to greet the men when they came out. Captain Henderson and the rest of the crew stepped out, one by one, and it struck me right away that they were haggard and worn, didn’t look too happy. But then the flashbulbs started going off”—he projected a camera—“and the crowd let loose a tremendous cheer and I forgot about their faces trying to keep from being killed in the rush.
“Well, old Doc Kleinwitz said something very profound and historic, and then the crowd really did break loose. It was a very impressive sight, all those important people.”
He paused, reminiscing. The Martian barkeep thoughtfully placed a glass by his elbow. The tramp sipped, rallied, went on.
“We finally got Captain Henderson alone, back at the base in Kleinwitz’s room, and right then I was sure something was wrong. You should have seen Henderson’s face—oops, I forgot”—he closed his eyes. The Martians started at the picture he formed. The tramp was drunk.
“Right away I said: ‘Tell me quick. What went wrong? Did you get there?’
“And Henderson said, miserable-like: ‘Oh sure, we got there,’ as if that were nothing. I was relieved, but Kleinwitz snorted.
“‘Wrong? Wrong?’ he said. ‘Pah! What could go wrong?’”
The tramp stopped altogether. He was beginning to remember how the world had laughed, and for the first time his delight in the story grew less. He sighed. Then, because of the zok, his humor returned and he went on.
“Henderson spent a long time just looking at the doctor. I thought he looked pretty mad. But all he said was ‘grease.’ Just ‘grease,’ just like that. And then he looked like he was going to cry. But before I could say anything he looked away from Kleinwitz and said, surprisingly:
“‘Who greased the ship?’
“We both looked blank.
“‘You know,’ Henderson said wearily, ‘greased it, lubricated it, oiled the moving parts. Who?’
“Kleinwitz faltered. ‘I don’t know. Some mechanic…’
“‘Well,’ Henderson went on, ‘whatever damn fool did the job apparently didn’t know that our surface temperature in space and in the area where we landed was down around absolute zero. Everything freezes. Everything. And the idiot greased the airlock.’”
And the little tramp went into a roaring fit of uncontrolled laughter and fell right off the stool. By the time they had picked him up he could see that the Martians hadn’t understood, and—bubbling merrily—he proceeded to the end.
“I didn’t get it myself, not for a few minutes, and in the meantime Kleinwitz was making noises to himself. But finally I understood, and then I realized that there were no pictures, no samples, no diamonds, no anything, and that they might just as well never have gone.
“Because what happened was this: after we had spent years of labor and billions of dollars to build the ship, finally took it out across a quarter of a million miles and landed on the Moon, the crew never saw a thing. They were caught inside like sardines in a can. Because the airlock stuck—
“And they couldn’t get the door open.”
Previously Unpublished