Mars is my Destination

Mars is my Destination by Frank Belknap Long

Frank Belknap Long's "Mars is my Destination" opens with narrator Ralph Graham in a New Chicago spaceport bar, sensing impending violence before witnessing a blond giant shoot and kill a smaller man who had boasted of his Mars clearance. Graham disarms the killer, but a nearby crowd begins repeating the Big Lie that the Martian Colonization Board is scheming to seize the Mars Colony for itself. A beautiful stranger, honey-blonde and unnamed at first, warns Graham to hide his own pale-blue Board clearance card before the mob turns on him, and the two flee together. Over drinks at the Blue Mandarin restaurant, the woman, whose father was one of the first colonists and died there, discusses the injustice and danger fueling colonist unrest. Graham nearly asks her to accompany him to Mars but stops himself, remembering he is married to Joan, who has refused to emigrate with him. He recalls the bitter quarrel that sent him on an all-day drinking binge ending at the spaceport bar. He declines to pursue the woman further and leaves. Walking home, Graham is attacked near the lakeshore by a small mechanical killer device that wraps around his leg; he destroys it and realizes someone wants him dead. He proceeds to the Administration Building to see Jonathan Trilling, the quietly powerful head of the Colonization Board, hoping to learn enough about his Mars assignment to justify delaying his departure and winning Joan over. Trilling reveals the colony's central crisis: two rival power monopolies, Wendel Atomics and Endicott Fuel, have been granted exclusive thirty-year monopolies and are locked in a ruinous conflict over fuel pricing that has driven colonists into destructive speculative buying, fueling factionalism and violence. Trilling explains Graham's mission is to become a new stabilizing authority amid this chaos and presents him with a silver hawk insignia, symbol of the highest command post the Board can bestow, worn previously by only four men, all now dead. Trilling suggests, half-jokingly, that revealing the insignia to Joan might change her mind. Leaving the building, Graham second-guesses his decision not to request armed protection, then descends into the New Chicago Underground. During the crowded train ride, he strikes up conversation with a talkative middle-aged man who mentions Wendel Atomics. In a dark tunnel, the man is fatally stabbed beside him; Graham grabs the assailant's wrist and disarms a fleeing woman, but cannot identify or catch her, and the man dies from the blow apparently meant for Graham. Arriving home shaken, Graham finds Joan waiting with their luggage packed, having reversed her refusal to go to Mars. They set off together aboard the Mars-bound rocket. During the voyage, Graham befriends fellow passengers and reflects on the ship's cybernetic robot navigators. Strange screeching sounds lead him to the Chart Room, where he discovers Helen Barclay, the woman from the bar, stowed away and being violently manhandled by a crewman with murderous rage in his eyes. Graham beats the crewman back, and in the ensuing struggle the man crashes into one of the robot giants, damaging it; the malfunctioning robot crushes him to death. Graham comforts Helen and escorts her to Commander Littlefield. Littlefield's investigation reveals Helen ingeniously stowed away inside a cybernetic robot being shipped for repairs, sustaining herself with concentrated food, in order to reach Mars and help her brother, who is dying of radiation poisoning from working in a Wendel Atomics laboratory that refused him proper treatment. The dead crewman is found to be carrying a Wendel Atomics secret police identification card, deepening the mystery of why Wendel would target a stowaway. Before this can be resolved, a saboteur is spotted crawling along the ship's exterior toward the jet section; Littlefield orders the ship's defensive "needle" filaments activated, destroying the saboteur in a flash and raising the chilling question of whether the attack was aimed at Helen or at Graham himself. Upon landing on Mars, Graham and Joan descend the spiral landing ramp amid the colony's raw, bustling frontier atmosphere. During the descent, Graham is struck by a poisoned dart fired from above, collapses, and is rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Regaining consciousness intermittently, he glimpses the colony through the ambulance windows and overhears hospital staff, including his nurse and doctor, discussing his narrow survival and Joan's devotion. Interwoven with his recovery, the narrative shifts to colonist John Lynton and his family, showing how ordinary colonists are being coerced into stockpiling volatile Endicott Fuel cylinders at home to manipulate legal ownership claims in the Wendel-Endicott conflict. An intruder tampers with the Lynton family's fuel cylinders; fearing imminent nuclear detonation, Lynton loads the cylinders into a truck to rush them to the spaceport for safe dismantling, risking his own life to save the thousands of colonists who would die if the cylinders exploded near the settlement, and bids his family a possibly final farewell. Back at the hospital, Graham wakes to find a hostile Wendel Atomics agent at his bedside, who threatens him with interrogation via the brutal "Big-Image" brainwashing technique unless he cooperates. Despite his weakened state, Graham attacks the agent and beats him unconscious, then realizes he is still in danger, stripped of his identifying silver hawk insignia and uncertain whether allies know his location or condition.

By Frank Belknap Long · First published 1950 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Thriller · 21 chapters · 86,390 words

First lines

MARS. Earth's first colony in Space. Men killed for the coveted ticket / that allowed them to go there. And, once there, the killing went on.

MARS. Ralph Graham's goal since boyhood -- and he was Mars-bound with / authority that put the whole planet in his pocket -- if he could live / long enough to assert it!

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science fiction · Mars · space exploration · adventure · alien life · future · technology · interplanetary travel · humanity · colonization · extraterrestrial · survival

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