Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

The old stirring is still there, the death-sex linkage, and it can hit you hard at times and you have to keep a tight grip on yourself to keep from succumbing to it. But you can do it if you try.

Of course I was being unfair to her. The sex-death linkage had no more relation to the glow I'd felt back in the lakeside tavern than it did now to her as an individual. I'd have felt the same stirring if I'd been guiding Joan out of the Chart Room with her head on my breast—more of a stirring because Joan was the one woman in the world for me.

What it really meant was that the woman with the hair piled up high on her head filled me with a two-way sense of guilt. The life-sex linkage was better than the death-sex linkage, and the one and only woman feeling better than the promiscuous amorousness which any beautiful woman can arouse in the male. And right at the moment she represented both of the more primitive aspects of sex.

But the dice had just fallen that way. It wasn't her fault and now she was close to hysteria and needed reassurance and all the comfort I could give her.

As soon as we were out in the passageway I asked her to tell me who she was. Her name. So much had happened between us that it seemed unbelievable that I still didn't know that much about her.

"I thought I told you right after we left the spaceport," she said. "I thought you knew. It's Helen ... Helen Barclay."

So ... the old wonder name, the magical name, the Topless Towers of Illium name. How often it seemed to go with her kind of woman. How could she have been Margaret or Janice or Barbara ... attractive as those names were. Lilith perhaps ... yes. Or Eva ... because I've often felt that Eve must have been a woman of glamor, red-headed and with a temper a little on the fiery side, because how else could she have come down to us as Earth's first legendary temptress? But otherwise ... Helen, the glamor name that led the list.

Why was I letting my mind go off at such an absurd tangent, when right ahead of me the stern-obligation stream I've mentioned was widening out, filling with rapids, becoming a river which could have swallowed up the sky ship, or wrecked it ... if I failed to take up a giant's stance right in the middle of it. Wade in and thrust the waters aside, Ralphie boy. It's your duty. Try to think of yourself as a giant.

What made it tough was ... I didn't feel at all like a giant. But what had just happened in the Chart Room couldn't be ignored. A lot of questions would have to be asked fast, and if the explanations sounded like lies, if Helen Barclay refused to cooperate, some very drastic action might have to be taken. I hoped she didn't have anything ugly to conceal. Just the thought was hateful to me, because I believed in her and trusted her. But the way I felt had nothing to do with an obligation I had no right to sidestep for as short a distance as the width of an electron-microscoped virus.

I was glad that I wouldn't have to do the questioning. Not straight off, anyway—not until I knew much more than I did, and all of the big, vital questions had been answered with candor and I could go right on feeling the way I did about her with a clear conscience. I hoped to God it would be with candor. If someone is dying and you can do nothing to save him and what he's done or hasn't done is of no importance to anyone but himself ... you don't ply him with questions. But what she'd done or hadn't done could send the sky ship down into the gulfs in flaming ruin, because all of the passengers are encased in a fragile kind of bubble and the slightest pinprick could puncture it.