“—AND ALL FOR ONE,” by Jerome Bixby

Originally published in Other Worlds Science Stories, May 1950.

The drift-winds of Mars brought winter suddenly to Alcronah-haut. The small red sun was made smaller and more red by scudding clouds; the surface of the Great Canal sank to a few crusting inches, and the pumps of the water merchants worked overtime to stock their tanks against the coming bleak months.

At the lower end of Boulevard B27, beyond the ugly work-village of Kam and squatting on a sandstone bluff overlooking the skeletal litter of the Alcron freight locks, was the Outer-Worlds Explorers’ Club, Chapter XIV, a flat, redrock building, guilty of the randomness of native architecture, and connected to an observatory a little distance away by an unkempt garden pathway of kanl and linla.

Inside, this night, a young Martian shivered and got up to put another log on the fire. It flamed high, and sent the chilly shadows scooting back into the corners of the room to sway angrily against the dark paneling and glassed-in book-and-curio cases that mounted to the high, timbered ceiling.

Facing his companion, Rof Unain hiked up his tunic to warm his lower midsection. “I suppose,” he said, “that Mars’ winter is a picnic compared to that of Tethys, Mr. Millikan?”

The fat, gray-haired man closed his book—one of many he had written—and stretched his outmoded grav-boots toward the fire. As the Club’s most distinguished member on Mars, and its oldest one besides, Miles Millikan possessed for his use the big chair directly before the fireplace. He shifted in it now and sighed, raised his eyebrows at the young man. “You would like to hear the story, perhaps—” his voice was dry, and a little amused “—while we wait for our steaks?”

“I would indeed!” Rof Unain nodded eagerly. “I’ve read about it, of course—when I was a kid—but I’d be honored to hear it first hand…”

Outside, the whining wind threw heavy schluffs of snow against the leaded windows, and played cold music on the singing sculptures in the garden. The fat man’s pale eyes stared into the fire, as if seeking in its leaping redness an image with which to begin his tale. The log fire was an anachronism—and the members of this club were, for the most part, anachronisms too. There was an atomic furnace in the cellar, but the old men preferred to stalk the halls and trophy rooms and shiver their dynamic memories of Pluto and Ganymede and the icy oceans of Neptune, then to retire to the clubroom and warm themselves before carbon flames as they had long ago on those rugged worlds.

Millikan said slowly: “It was two, maybe three hundred miles off-world that the Drive backlashed. God knows why—and maybe Caddo knows why too, wherever he is: he went with the Drive. Four of us—the four—were up in Control.

“Greenberg said, ‘The hell with old Ringsy—I’ll try to world us on Tethys…’”

* * * *

The spaceship came thundering down through the snow, her starboard tubes fused into a seething, white-hot tumor. She flicked a mountain top, sheeting off snow, seeming to ride a moment on a bridge of white fluff that dropped back and down into a sparkling haze.

Another mountain top miraculously avoided; another, miles further, notched deeply into its soft white shoulder.

Then, hissing and screaming like a cat, the ship struck glancingly on a long ice slope, bounced, took the air for another six miles and smashed down again. She began to roll—rather, to cartwheel—end over end, on and on, to vanish over the lip of a ravine. A thud, the trembling of an avalanche, then a muffled roar as the tanks blew infernally beneath settling tons of ice and snow. A green flare, and some foul smoke that dissipated quickly in the thin air, and the I. S. Angel had made angels of sixty-three men.

The other four—there had been sixty-seven in the crew—lay in the snow—in the snow, not on it—each unconscious at the bottom of the little tunnel his flying entrance had created. Each wore an alumalloy bulger, with gadget belt and hotsy that had been turned on before the crash. And each—since the Angel had cracked up at 10:31 p.m. shiptime, and after hours of tension and activity preparatory to the intended landing on Saturn—was carried off into an exhausted slumber at the end of his stunned insensibility.

Tethys’ grey night wind came shrieking across the icy plateau, darkening the racing snow that lifted and fled level before it. Snow-devils danced from pockets and crevices to be whipped and shredded and their flaky atoms sucked into the striding storm. White hours passed; and Millikan, Chief Correlator, was the first to awake. His voice came out hoarsely:

“McNutt? Greenberg? Lacy?—McNutt? Greenberg?—”

At last he remembered to pull his arm up out of the arm of the bulger and switch on his talky. He fumbled at the inner control-board. “McNutt? Lacy? Greenberg?—”

He heard breathing sounds—he held his breath and heard them still. “Hey Nutsy—Greenberg—who’s alive?”

He heard a groan, and a stifled Hot damn!

“Hello there! Lacy? Hello—”

“Millikan! Is that you, chief?”

“Yeah. Looks like we made it—”

The young but competent voice of Lacy, Astrogator, scraped out of his earphones. “Where’s Angel?”

“Don’t know—probably screwed herself up against a mountain. Where’re you?”

“I hate to say it,” came the drawling answer, “but I think it’s a grave.”

“Me too. We’re down in the snow—”

“Uh! How far down?”

“Let’s make like moles and see—” Millikan began to squirm around, kicking his legs and arms until he had enlarged a space that permitted him to turn over. Lying on his stomach, he pointed upward and flashed his wristlight. “Lacy—”

“Yeah, dammit—”

“I’m just a couple feet. I think we hit a hard surface, broke through and went in a little way. There’s a blizzard up there—it’s corking us in. Better try to climb—”

“And don’t make too much fuss doing it,” a new voice growled, “or you’ll cave in your tunnel. I just did.”

Millikan grinned in the darkness of his helmet. “Hi, Greenboig. That’s me, you and Lacy. Now if McNutt only made it we can play Asteroids.”

“Asteroids hell! I’ll boot you in yours—get me outa here!”

“Lacy, I think Greenberg wants some help—how much does he owe you last counting?”

“Eighty sol-credits, but let it slide. I can spare it, and him too.”

* * * *

While Greenberg gave them a boiling in three languages, all non-terrestrial, Millikan and Lacy went worm-like up their tunnels. Always the feeling that below was nothing but white quicksand—maybe hundreds of feet down. Swum! Fly up and out of the brittle cotton—struggle up, slide down—damn the stuff! Is this the way up?—or sideways?

Poke a hand up, fingers clawed, and Lacy, standing on the surface, grabs and yanks. Out of the snow with a crunch and a stagger—and into a blinding, white-clotted inferno. They bumped their face-plates together. “Lacy, I kiss you—”

“Miles baby, your eyes—that soft, curly—”

“Yeah,” said Greenberg sourly into their earphones. “I vote for polygamy. I’m virile too—come and get me!” They found him under the crust, several feet away from the entrance of his tunnel. “I can feel you stamping—” his voice was oddly tight,“—you’re right over me!”

Millikan and Lacy pounded through the hard, milky surface, and dug out the fluff beneath. Metal clicked on metal, and soon Greenberg, Pilot, sat in the snow, his thin face twisted behind his face-plate. “Surprise—” he hissed, “I’m surprised! I got a broken arm and didn’t even know it!”

Leaving him nursing and cursing, the other two went to search for McNutt. They found his tunnel several dozen feet away and squatted beside it. Lacy adjusted his proton-buster to light heat and aimed it at the opening: “I’ll melt him out—”

Millikan knocked the ray aside. “You’ll ice him in, you mean! Wait.” The wind screamed and flooded against them, forcing them to resist it at an angle, pushing great churning walls and spirals of snow across the plateau, whose horizon could not be seen, nor the sky above it, through the thick motion.

Millikan put his talky at full volume and spoke loudly: “McNutt! Hey Nutsy—wake up!”

“Mmm?” A yawn. “That you, chief?”

“Yeah, and Greenberg and Lacy. Give a wiggle.” Then, ate an aside to Lacy: “That’s why he’s such a lousy medico—he slept his way through college.”

Lacy grinned. “How’d he graduate?”

“The Dean was a female.”

This brought a vulgar noise from McNutt, who finally shoved head and shoulders out of the tunnel and was hoisted to his feet. His heavy, pink features were loose and astounded. “You mean we’re still alive?”

“This look like Heaven?” came a snarl from Greenberg.

“And since when do spacemen go there?” McNutt gazed about him wide-eyed. “Bejabbers, I think this’s the other place, all right!”

The three men rejoined Greenberg and huddled together, warm in their bulgers, only dimly visible to one another through the leaping snow. They rocked on their hips as the sucking wind piled white buttresses against their hunched forms, then stripped them down, whisked them away into the shrouded grayness.

“What happened? We got tossed right out of the damned ship, that’s what!” Millikan flashed excellent teeth in a grin. “Remember? I saw you guys go streaking—then I went. What luck! She started to pinwheel, Control split like a herring, and here we are!”

“Where’s that?” said McNutt dubiously.

“Yeah; which way do we walk?” Lacy added. “Anybody know?”

* * * *

They took out their compasses; they switched on their suit lights and thumbed out charts from the clips by the inner control-boards. High above, for a moment, the whiteness parted and, startlingly, the tiger’s eye of Saturn stared down at the four of them. Her rings seemed to writhe in the snow, then she faded and the color was gone.

Millikan studied the Tethys chart, adjusted his all-world compass after the specific vagaries listed there. Finally he said: “We’re right smack on 12F, 22 northern. There’s an I. P. Station on this clod—look at 2N across .6 southern. That ex is where we head for—”

Lacy whistled softly. “About forty Earth days, if you count ten miles a day!”

“And forty nights,” growled McNutt, “and not an Ark in sight—or even a Flexible Flyer—”

Tiny ground-swells of snow rippled toward them, lapping at their ankles, spraying up to tap on their helmets like rats’ claws.

“Check your bulgers,” said Millikan. “Anybody got any concentrates?” He searched his own cubbies, found no edibles; and “None here,” rasped into his earphones, and “Empty—we didn’t have any time—” and, succinctly from McNutt: “Nah, hell!”

Millikan wiped his face-plate inside and out, steam and snow. His lips were tight. “We’d better locate Angel.”

* * * *

They walked along the level sweep, tracing the Angel’s hopping course by the huge, dented-in patches of ice where her searing rump had mashed the surface for a split-second melt. They came to the ravine, and grouped at its edge to stare down. Finger-sized in the distance, pointing rudely at the boiling clouds of whiteness that raged across the abyss, was the dead Angel, standing slant-wise in a pool of steam and stained water, her exploded engine room flaring out in jagged petals. The debris of the snow-slide had melted from over her, had made a metal island of her.

Millikan hopped down goat-like from the ice-drowned crags of the rim, skipping across crevices, plowing through sleek, fresh snow slopes, shorn by the avalanche. Tethys’ light gravity socked his feet gently into the crusted bottom.

McNutt and Lacy followed more slowly, helping the agonized Greenberg over the rough spots. After a backward glance, Millikan waded out into the pool. He stopped halfway.

“Here’s Jack,” he said into his talky. A dead face looked up at him from the bottom of the pool, and for some reason he bent to lift up the body, but the body wasn’t there. Not even all of the head.

Chest-high in the already clotting water Millikan made his way to the port side and found the airlock sprang open. He pulled himself up and in, and stumbled along the dark, crazily twisted corridor toward the store room.

By the time he came out again Greenberg had fainted and McNutt had joined suits with him and was bending through the belly lock of his bulger to work over the unconscious man. Expertly he set and bound the broken arm and checked Greenberg’s oxygen, turning it a little higher. Then he closed the inner lips of the other suit, straightened back into his own and closed its inner lips, separated the bulgers and closed the outer lips of both.

Millikan came crunching up to them. “We don’t eat,” he said. “Everything’s ashes.”

Lacy cursed softly, and McNutt drew his thick brows together. “Forty days on water,” he growled. “Well, it’s been done. At least we have water—the whole damned world’s water!”

Millikan checked his filter dial. “Oxy, too. Plenty outside.”

“We—” Lacy swallowed “—won’t the Smithsonian start up a search for us?”

“Sure. But where on which moon do you think they’ll start, kid?”

They sat there for a while, but Greenberg, looking more than ever like a skull, didn’t regain consciousness. Finally Millikan said “Let’s get going. We’ll take turns dragging him…”

Every hour they changed positions, the leader going back to the rear of the single-file to pull Greenberg along and the rest moving up a place. Only the first man kept his eyes open, wary of the sheer, treacherous cutbanks and gaping crevices that appeared wide beneath his probing feet; the others followed blindly, the hand of each on the gadget belt of the man preceding.

The snowball that was Tethys raced around its ringed parent, and under its sleek white shell four bellies shrank, four faces gaunted. Like the undead they stumbled through the days—like the dead they slept at night. On the third day Greenberg was able to keep his feet, and they made better progress.

And on the eighth day they saw the “white monkeys.”

“Up there! Look—behind that bank!” Millikan, at the rear, pointed as he shouted, and the others turned in slow motion. Lacy raised his proton-buster and snapped a shot at the scurrying form. It faded into the blurred whiteness, and he ran, staggering a little, to the spot and found it empty. He came back slowly.

“Everybody carry your gun,” said Millikan, and got his out. “We’ll eat the next one.”

The racing snow gave another red-yellow glimpse of Saturn above them—their daily glimpse, caused by some freak of clashing gravities.

“Golly, I’d like to be up there in Pilka right now… I’ve got a little female there with everything!” McNutt raised his eyes for a second, looked down again as he tripped and nearly fell.

“Dames yet!” said Greenberg acidly. “And with tentacles. What would you do with her in your condition?”

McNutt grinned weakly. “You guys don’t really know me.”

“I bet. The System birth rate’ll sure take a dive if you drop out here, Nutsy. Mass suicides, too—all the dames jumping out of windows huh?” White turned to gray as night came soaking through the eternal snow, and Lacy’s eyes began to hurt. He moved to the rear, giving the lead to McNutt.

“There’s another one!” Millikan brought up his gun and fired three fast shots. “Hell! You can’t hit ’em—you can hardly see ’em in—there!—”

A furry, round-eyed head poked around the edge of a snowdune, jerked back in time to avoid a silent, sweeping quartet of rays. McNutt hunched his huge shoulders in his bulger and licked his lips. “I ate monkey once,” he said, “in Sumatra. Wasn’t bad. Come on out, you little sutzes!—come and get it!” His red eyes searched the surrounding white death.

Lacy sat down abruptly. “How many more days, Miles?”

“The rate we’re going, about thirty.” The others sat down too, forming a circle, and chipped and scrubbed at their crisply iced faceplates. “How’s the arm?”

“Okay.” Greenberg was silent for a moment. Then, wearily: “Why in God’s name do they build the store room right next to the engine pit?”

Millikan grunted, voicing a shrug. “To save space which saves money—maybe to cut down on the population. It’s a Eugenicist plot. You crash, the Drive goes br-r-r-t! and you starve to death.”

“I thought McNutt was going to cut down the population.”

“Like hell,” rumbled McNutt. “I’m not dying out here—”

“None of us are,” Millikan broke in. “Come on now—up! We’ll rest later, Slow and easy. We’ll make it.”

* * * *

Next day they came, like bulgered skeletons, to the edge of the plateau, and saw below a land of tortured, ice-drenched ridges that sheered far down to merge shapelessly into a welter of vein-blue canyons. The snow was less heavy here, and the wind, broken and diverted, less powerful.

“We’d better knock off and sleep here. The climb down—” Millikan wheeled, sent his ray cutting out into the snow. “Damn you!—I almost got that one!”

He squinted through his face-plate, then spoke sharply: “Greenberg, winged or no you’re still our best shot. Come on—let’s get one of those damned things!”

The two men faded back onto the curtained plateau, and McNutt and Lacy sat in the lee of a snowdune, shifting forward now and then as it threatened to creep over them. They waited, eyes bright and red, for the glad shout in their earphones that would mean food had been gotten. And it came; it filled their helmets and brought them to their feet.

“Lacy—Nutsy! I got one! It walked right into the blast!”

Then they heard Greenberg’s voice: “Where? Where, Miles?”

“Over this way—hell, where are you?—oh, I see you. Where’s the monkey?—This way. Help me lug it! Man, what a break this—Greenberg watch out—that crevice—”

They heard a gasp, then a scream from Greenberg—“Mi-iles!—”

Then Millikan’s dull voice: “He fell. Greenberg fell into a hole. It all caved in on him—”

* * * *

Minutes later Millikan came back. Lacy and McNutt stood rigid as robots by the snowdune. Silently they cut up the big chunk of skinned white meat, broiled the pieces in their bulgers’ cookers. It had a sweet, sickish veal taste.

“I couldn’t get to him in time—” Millikan’s voice was an unsteady grating sound. “He hung on to the edge of the hole and looked at me. And I couldn’t get there in time. He looked at me…”

The monkey meat lasted them seven days, during which they followed their compasses and worked their way deep down into the ridge and ravine country. Then came four more foodless days, and their steps slowed and faltered.

They found a stone idol, cruel and ugly, and about it some tumbled ruins of what might once have been a sort of temple; and, crouched in this scant shelter, they stared up at the tormented snow that lashed horizontally, like a ceiling, across the ice-glassed canyon rim.

Lacy got up suddenly, and said: “Mary, I think it might snow.”

He took off his leather jacket, put it in the belly hatch of his bulger and, after closing the inner lips, opened the outer ones and took out the garment. He draped it gently over the idol. Then he turned briskly, strode to a fallen column, rapped on it.

“Some service, please. Ah there, I’d like a box of aspirin—” He paused to listen, pursed his lips. “Two credits? Tch. Well, I guess inflation can’t last forever.” He picked up some snow and dropped it on the column. “This will pay for it, won’t it? Very well then, ask the manager—although I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

He leaned on the column, whistled a few bars. His eyes traveled the length of the column, and he strained his ears to hear a distant conversation.

The wind shrieked over the top of the canyon.

He straightened and smiled; his eyes came slowly front again. “I was sure it would be. Thanks, no need to wrap it—” He returned to the idol, put a hand-full of snow in its mouth, waited for a while and then pressed his metalled hand to its forehead. “Ah, that’s better. Now you’ve got to rest and relax, dear—cold’s nothing to fool with.”

He went back to the column, rapped again. “Two tickets please, front balcony center.”

Then he sat beside the idol, his eyes fastened raptly on the frozen, featureless ice slope opposite him. The night came across the far plateau and into the canyons, and the deep snows with it; whipping, twisting masses of whiteness that were caught by the jagged walls and flung roaring to the canyon floor to break in foamy explosions and spread like water. From their concealment behind a crumbling altar Millikan and McNutt watched the two mounds become smaller and smaller; and at last, when day came, there was only a snowdune, sparkling and clean and very smooth.

“I suppose we’d better dig him out,” said Millikan. He and McNutt got to their feet and went to the spot where Lacy sat beneath the snow. His figure didn’t move as they kicked the snow away from about it, and McNutt tapped the silent helmet and it rang like a broken bell. Lacy exploded up and began to fight them.

“Where’s Mary?” he shouted, and sent McNutt tumbling back into a drift.

“She’s gone on ahead, Lacy!” Millikan held his arms. “She’s waiting for us at the I. P. Station—”

Lacy butted him in the chest and ran staggering down the canyon. He vanished, but his voice came strongly into their earphones: “Mary! Mary—you’ll catch pneumonia! Don’t you want my shirt, dear? Mary—”

McNutt sat in the snow, only his bulgered torso showing. “Let him go. He’ll find a rock and call it Mary and die happy.”

“Can’t do that. Wait here—I’ll get him.”

McNutt waited. In his earphones he heard Millikan calling, and Lacy’s unabated shouts and babblings. Minutes passed. Then he heard a grunt, and there were no more shouts and babblings. “What happened?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” came Millikan’s reply. “I think he fell and busted his talky. Lacy! Lacy!—ah, I can’t see anything but snow. Lacy! L-l—wait!—there he is! Lacy! Lacy?—holy hell, it’s a monkey! E-easy now—oh Lord—hah!—hahaha—I got him, Nutsy! I got the white stinker!—” And then, much later: “Nutsy—I think Lacy’s gone. I can’t go on looking for him any further or I’ll end up lost myself.”

Millikan came back, gasping for breath his face yellow and tight. They broiled part of the monkey meat and ate it, packing the rest, as they had before, into their cubbies.

* * * *

Thirty six days after the death of the Angel, her two survivors topped a low rise and saw a level, white-blown plain before them. Millikan clapped his hands. “Last lap!” he cried jubilantly. “Smooth going, now!”

McNutt stood silently, eyes and mouth troubled. Then: “Yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking, Miles. It’s funny that Greenberg didn’t yell after he fell in that hole. The gravity here isn’t enough to squash a man.”

“Probably knocked out.”

“He might still be alive then,” mused the big man. “Lacy, too. Maybe a searching party could locate them.”

Millikan’s smile had stiffened over his teeth. “Yeah,” he said evenly, “I guess one could.”

“And we could guide them, couldn’t we?”

“Count me in!”

McNutt said heavily: “Let’s get going, chief.” He stood aside. “After you.”

They walked a little way out onto the plain, silently.

Millikan shouted: “There’s a monkey!—”

McNutt whirled convulsively, his gun already out, peering into the thick-hung whiteness. “Where? Where?—I don’t see—damn you, Miles…”

“…it was horrible,” said old Millikan. “I saw McNutt from sheer weakness go spinning down into that bottomless crevice. God! His screams—” he cut a piece of fat from his steak, putting it carefully on his salad plate. He shook his head and went on: “And so close to the I. P. Station and safety, too. I got there by nightfall of the next day.”

Rof Unain sipped his brandy and pouted as he tasted it deep in his throat. The clubroom was shadowed again; the logs in the fireplace had burned down to tired coals. “It’s a remarkable story,” he said, “and a bitter one—a most sardonic one. Why were McNutt and Lacy and Greenberg spared by a miracle from death in the crash, only to die horribly on the way out?”

Millikan shrugged plump shoulders. “Who knows?—it’s very much like a dream now. Thirty years is a long time.”

They stared into the fireplace.

“I think,” said Unain, “that my first act as a member of this club will be to propose a toast to those who didn’t make it.”

“Agreed.”

They lifted their glasses and drank. After a short silence, the young Martian said: “Strange, though, that McNutt should fold like that. I mean, I’ve seen his photographs—big strapping man—when I was a kid, of course. It was pretty much of a story, that crack-up—I remember—”

“Yes.” Millikan stifled a belch. “More than you realize.”

“I imagine so. You have to live something like that to—they were never found, were they?”

“No. I led the searching party myself.”

“Shame—crying shame.” Unain choked a little as he swallowed too much brandy. “It still puzzles me, though—McNutt was a big man, wasn’t he? I should think he’d have outlasted you all—”

Millikan cut his steak deftly, ousting a strip of gristle. He pondered for a moment, his face reminiscent. “No,” he said, “you’re wrong there. He wasn’t really what you’d call muscular. Big he was, but soft—mostly fat.”