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 Using Amazon SageMaker and Jupyter

Doug Hudgeon
Richard Nichol

MANNING
Each scenario chapter covers an operational area of a typical company. Chapters 3
and 4 (retention and support) deal with customers. Chapters 2 and 5 (purchase
approval and invoice audit) deal with suppliers. And chapters 6 and 7 deal with
facilities management (power consumption forecasting).

Support (ch04) Purchase approval (ch02)

Customers Suppliers

Retention (ch03) Invoice audit (ch05)

Your company

Facilities

Power consumption
forecasting (ch06 & ch07)
Machine Learning
for Business
USING AMAZON SAGEMAKER AND JUPYTER

DOUG HUDGEON
AND RICHARD NICHOL

MANNING
SHELTER ISLAND
For online information and ordering of this and other Manning books, please visit
www.manning.com. The publisher offers discounts on this book when ordered in quantity.
For more information, please contact
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Manning Publications Co.
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any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written
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Development editor: Toni Arritola

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PO Box 761 Copy editor: Frances Buran
Shelter Island, NY 11964 Proofreader: Katie Tennant
Technical proofreader: Karsten Strøbæk
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Cover designer: Marija Tudor

ISBN: 9781617295836
Printed in the United States of America
 brief contents
PART 1 MACHINE LEARNING FOR BUSINESS ................................1
1 ■ How machine learning applies to your business 3

PART 2 SIX SCENARIOS: MACHINE LEARNING FOR BUSINESS ......23

2 ■ Should you send a purchase order to a technical
approver? 25
3 ■ Should you call a customer because they are at
risk of churning? 49
4 ■ Should an incident be escalated to your
support team? 76
5 ■ Should you question an invoice sent by a supplier? 99
6 ■ Forecasting your company’s monthly power usage 128
7 ■ Improving your company’s monthly power
usage forecast 161

PART 3 MOVING MACHINE LEARNING INTO PRODUCTION .......185

8 ■ Serving predictions over the web 187
9 ■ Case studies 211

iii
 contents
preface xiii
acknowledgments xv
about this book xvii
about the authors xx
about the cover illustration xxi

PART 1 MACHINE LEARNING FOR BUSINESS ......................1

1 How machine learning applies to your business

1.1 Why are our business systems so terrible? 4
3

1.2 Why is automation important now? 8

What is productivity? 9 ■
How will machine learning
improve productivity? 9
1.3 How do machines make decisions? 10
People: Rules-based or not? 10 Can you trust a pattern-based
■

answer? 11 How can machine learning improve your

■

business systems? 12
1.4 Can a machine help Karen make decisions? 12
Target variables 13 ■
Features 13
1.5 How does a machine learn? 14

v
vi CONTENTS

1.6 Getting approval in your company to use machine

learning to make decisions 17
1.7 The tools 18
What are AWS and SageMaker, and how can they help you? 18
What is a Jupyter notebook? 19
1.8 Setting up SageMaker in preparation for tackling
the scenarios in chapters 2 through 7 19
1.9 The time to act is now 20

PART 2 SIX SCENARIOS: MACHINE LEARNING

FOR BUSINESS ....................................................23

2 Should you send a purchase order to a technical approver?

2.1 The decision 26
25

2.2 The data 27

2.3 Putting on your training wheels 28
2.4 Running the Jupyter notebook and making
predictions 29
Part 1: Loading and examining the data 32 Part 2: Getting
■

the data into the right shape 36 Part 3: Creating training,

■

validation, and test datasets 39 Part 4: Training the model 41

■

Part 5: Hosting the model 43 Part 6: Testing the model 44

■

2.5 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your

notebook instance 46
Deleting the endpoint 46 ■ Shutting down the notebook
instance 47

3 Should you call a customer because they are at risk

of churning? 49
3.1 What are you making decisions about? 50
3.2 The process flow 50
3.3 Preparing the dataset 52
Transformation 1: Normalizing the data 53 Transformation 2:
■

Calculating the change from week to week 54

3.4 XGBoost primer 54
How XGBoost works 54 How the machine learning model
■

determines whether the function is getting better or getting

worse AUC 57
 CONTENTS vii

3.5 Getting ready to build the model 58

Uploading a dataset to S3 59 ■
Setting up a notebook on
SageMaker 60
3.6 Building the model 61
Part 1: Loading and examining the data 62 Part 2: Getting■

the data into the right shape 65 Part 3: Creating training,

■

validation, and test datasets 65 Part 4: Training the

■

model 67 Part 5: Hosting the model 70 Part 6:

■ ■

Testing the model 70

3.7 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your notebook
instance 73
Deleting the endpoint 73 ■
Shutting down the notebook
instance 74
3.8 Checking to make sure the endpoint is deleted 74

4 Should an incident be escalated to your support team?

4.1 What are you making decisions about? 77
76

4.2 The process flow 77

4.3 Preparing the dataset 78
4.4 NLP (natural language processing) 79
Creating word vectors 80 ■
Deciding how many words to
include in each group 82
4.5 What is BlazingText and how does it work? 83
4.6 Getting ready to build the model 84
Uploading a dataset to S3 85 ■
Setting up a notebook
on SageMaker 86
4.7 Building the model 86
Part 1: Loading and examining the data 87 Part 2: Getting■

the data into the right shape 90 Part 3: Creating training

■

and validation datasets 93 Part 4: Training the model 93

■

Part 5: Hosting the model 95 Part 6: Testing the model 96

■

4.8 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your notebook

instance 97
Deleting the endpoint 97 ■
Shutting down the notebook
instance 97
4.9 Checking to make sure the endpoint is deleted 97
viii CONTENTS

5 Should you question an invoice sent by a supplier?

5.1 What are you making decisions about? 100
99

5.2 The process flow 101

5.3 Preparing the dataset 103
5.4 What are anomalies 104
5.5 Supervised vs. unsupervised machine learning 105
5.6 What is Random Cut Forest and how does it work? 106
Sample 1 106 ■
Sample 2 109
5.7 Getting ready to build the model 114
Uploading a dataset to S3 114 ■
Setting up a notebook
on SageMaker 115
5.8 Building the model 115
Part 1: Loading and examining the data 116 Part 2: Getting ■

the data into the right shape 120 Part 3: Creating training and
■

validation datasets 121 Part 4: Training the model 121

■

Part 5: Hosting the model 122 Part 6: Testing the

■

model 123
5.9 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your notebook
instance 126
Deleting the endpoint 126 ■ Shutting down the notebook
instance 126
5.10 Checking to make sure the endpoint is deleted 126

6 Forecasting your company’s monthly power usage

6.1 What are you making decisions about? 129
128

Introduction to time-series data 130 ■

Kiara’s time-series data:
Daily power consumption 132
6.2 Loading the Jupyter notebook for working with
time-series data 133
6.3 Preparing the dataset: Charting time-series data 134
Displaying columns of data with a loop 137 ■
Creating multiple
charts 138
6.4 What is a neural network? 139
6.5 Getting ready to build the model 140
Uploading a dataset to S3 141 ■
Setting up a notebook
on SageMaker 141
 CONTENTS ix

6.6 Building the model 141

Part 1: Loading and examining the data 142 Part 2: Getting ■

the data into the right shape 144 Part 3: Creating training
■

and testing datasets 147 Part 4: Training the model 150

■

Part 5: Hosting the model 152 Part 6: Making predictions

■

and plotting results 153

6.7 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your notebook
instance 158
Deleting the endpoint 158 ■
Shutting down the notebook
instance 158
6.8 Checking to make sure the endpoint is deleted 159

7 Improving your company’s monthly power usage forecast

7.1 DeepAR’s ability to pick up periodic events 161
161

7.2 DeepAR’s greatest strength: Incorporating related

time series 163
7.3 Incorporating additional datasets into Kiara’s power
consumption model 164
7.4 Getting ready to build the model 165
Downloading the notebook we prepared 165 Setting up the folder
■

on SageMaker 166 Uploading the notebook to SageMaker 166

■

Downloading the datasets from the S3 bucket 166 Setting up a ■

folder on S3 to hold your data 167 Uploading the datasets to

■

your AWS bucket 167

7.5 Building the model 168
Part 1: Setting up the notebook 168 Part 2: Importing the
■

datasets 169 Part 3: Getting the data into the right shape 170
■

Part 4: Creating training and test datasets 172 Part 5: ■

Configuring the model and setting up the server to build the

model 175 Part 6: Making predictions and plotting
■

results 179
7.6 Deleting the endpoint and shutting down your notebook
instance 182
Deleting the endpoint 182 ■
Shutting down the notebook
instance 183
7.7 Checking to make sure the endpoint is deleted 183
x CONTENTS

PART 3 MOVING MACHINE LEARNING INTO

PRODUCTION ..................................................185

8 Serving predictions over the web

8.1
187
Why is serving decisions and predictions over the web so
difficult? 188
8.2 Overview of steps for this chapter 189
8.3 The SageMaker endpoint 189
8.4 Setting up the SageMaker endpoint 190
Uploading the notebook 191 Uploading the data 193
■

Running the notebook and creating the endpoint 194

8.5 Setting up the serverless API endpoint 197
Setting up your AWS credentials on your AWS account 198
Setting up your AWS credentials on your local computer 199
Configuring your credentials 200
8.6 Creating the web endpoint 201
Installing Chalice 202 Creating a Hello World API 204
■

Adding the code that serves the SageMaker endpoint 205

Configuring permissions 207 Updating requirements.txt 207
■

Deploying Chalice 208

8.7 Serving decisions 208

9 Case studies
9.1
211
Case study 1: WorkPac 212
Designing the project 214 Stage 1: Preparing and testing the
■

model 215 Stage 2: Implementing proof of concept (POC) 216

■

Stage 3: Embedding the process into the company’s operations 216

Next steps 217 Lessons learned 217
■

9.2 Case study 2: Faethm 217

AI at the core 217 Using machine learning to improve processes
■

at Faethm 217 Stage 1: Getting the data 219 Stage 2:

■ ■

Identifying the features 220 Stage 3: Validating the

■

results 220 Stage 4: Implementing in production 220

■

9.3 Conclusion 220

Perspective 1: Building trust 221 Perspective 2: Geting the data
■

right 221 Perspective 3: Designing your operating model to make

■

the most of your machine learning capability 221 Perspective 4:

■

What does your company look like once you are using machine
learning everywhere? 221
 CONTENTS xi

appendix A Signing up for Amazon AWS 222

appendix B Setting up and using S3 to store files 229
appendix C Setting up and using AWS SageMaker to build a machine
learning system 238
appendix D Shutting it all down 243
appendix E Installing Python 247

index 249
 preface
This book shows you how to apply machine learning in your company to make your
business processes faster and more resilient to change. This book is for people begin-
ning their journey in machine learning or for those who are more experienced with
machine learning but want to see how it can be applied in practice.
Based on our experiences with automating business processes and implementing
machine learning applications, we wanted to write a book that would allow anyone to
start using machine learning in their company. The caveat to anyone isn’t that you
need to have a certain technical background, it’s that you’re willing to put in the time
when you run the code to understand what’s happening and why.
We look at a variety of different functions within various companies ranging across
accounts payable (supplier invoices), facilities management (power consumption
forecasting), customer support (support tickets), and sales (customer retention). The
intent is that this will give you some insight into the range and scale of potential appli-
cations of machine learning and encourage you to discover new business applications
on your own.
A secondary focus of this book is to demonstrate how you can use the Amazon
SageMaker cloud service to rapidly and cost effectively bring your business ideas to
life. Most of the ideas we present can be implemented using other services (such as
Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure); however, the differences are significant enough
that to cover multiple providers would be beyond the scope of this book.

xiii
xiv PREFACE

We hope you enjoy our book and that you’re able to dramatically improve the
productivity of your company by applying the techniques inside. Please hit us up in
liveBook if you have questions, comments, suggestions, or examples of how you’ve
tackled certain problems. See page xxi for access to the liveBook site. We’d love to
hear from you.
 acknowledgments
Writing this book was a lot of work but would have been a lot more without Richie
cranking out the notebook code and contributing to chapter ideas. My advice to any-
one looking to write a technical book is to find a coauthor and break up the work.
Richie and I have different coding styles, and I learned to appreciate his way of tack-
ling certain problems during my documentation of his code.
I’d like to acknowledge the team at Manning for their help and guidance through
the process, and Toni Arritola, in particular, for accommodating the different time zones
and having the flexibility to deal with two very busy people in putting this book together.
Thank you to everyone at Manning: Deirdre Hiam, our production editor, Frances
Buran, our copy editor, Katie Tennant, our proofreader, Arthur Zubarev, our technical
development editor, Ivan Martinović, our review editor, and Karsten Strøbæk, our tech-
nical proofreader. To all of our reviewers—Aleksandr Novomlinov, Arpit Khandelwal,
Burkhard Nestmann, Clemens Baader, Conor Redmond, Dana Arritola, Dary
Merckens, Dhivya Sivasubramanian, Dinesh Ghanta, Gerd Klevesaat, James Black,
James Nyika, Jeff Smith, Jobinesh Purushothaman Manakkattil, John Bassil, Jorge
Ezequiel Bo, Kevin Kraus, Laurens Meulman, Madhavan Ramani, Mark Poler,
Muhammad Sohaib Arif, Nikos Kanakaris, Paulo Nuin, Richard Tobias, Ryan Kramer,
Sergio Fernandez Gonzalez, Shawn Eion Smith, Syed Nouman Hasany, and Taylor
Delehanty—thank you, your suggestions helped make this a better book.
And, of course, I’d like to thank my spouse and family for their patience and
understanding.
—Doug Hudgeon

xv
xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m very grateful to Doug for asking me to join him as coauthor in writing this book,
but also for his creativity, positivity, friendship, and sense of humor. Although it was a
lot of work, it was also a pleasure.
I’d also like to offer my special thanks to my parents, family, and friends for putting
up with the long hours and lost weekends. Most of all, I’d like to thank my wife, Xenie,
who could not have been more supportive and understanding during the years I com-
pleted my studies as well as this book. No husband could hope for a better wife, and I
can’t believe how lucky I am to be spending my days beside her.
—Richard Nichol
 about this book
Companies are on the cusp of a massive leap in productivity. Today, thousands of peo-
ple are involved in process work, where they take information from one source and
put it into another place. For example, take procurement and accounts payable:
■ Procurement staff help a customer create a purchase order, and then send it to
a supplier.
■ The supplier’s order-processing staff then take the purchase order and enter it
into the order-processing system, where it’s fulfilled and shipped to the customer
that placed the order.
■ Staff on the customer’s loading dock receive the goods, and the finance staff
enters the invoice into the customer’s finance system.
Over the next decade, all of these processes will be completely automated in almost
every company, and machine learning will play a big part in automating the decision
points at each stage of the process. It will help businesses make the following decisions:
■ Does the person approving the order have the authority to do so?
■ Is it OK to substitute a product for an out-of-stock item?
■ If a supplier has substituted a product, will the receiver accept it?
■ Is the invoice OK to pay as is or should it be queried?
The real benefit of machine learning for business is that it allows you to build decision-
making applications that are resilient to change. Instead of programming dozens or
hundreds of rules into your systems, you feed in past examples of good and bad

xvii
xviii ABOUT THIS BOOK

decisions, and then let the machine make a determination based on how similar the
current scenario is to past examples.
The benefit of this is that the system doesn’t break when it comes across novel
input. The challenge is that it takes a different mindset and approach to deliver a
machine learning project than it does to deliver a normal IT project.
In a normal IT project, you can test each of the rules to ensure they work. In a
machine learning project, you can only test to see whether the algorithm has
responded appropriately to the test scenarios. And you don’t know how it will react to
novel input. Trusting in safeguards that catch it when it’s not reacting appropriately
requires you and your stakeholders to be comfortable with this uncertainty.

Who should read this book

This book is targeted at people who may be more comfortable using Excel than
using a programming language such as Python. Each chapter contains a fully work-
ing Jupyter notebook that creates the machine learning model, deploys it, and runs
it against a dataset prepared for the chapter. You don’t need to do any coding to see
the code in action.
Each chapter then takes you through the code step by step so that you understand
how it works. With minor modifications, you can apply the code directly to your own
data. By the end of the book, you should be able to tackle a wide range of machine
learning projects within your company.

How this book is organized: A roadmap

This book has three parts:
Part 1 starts with a description of why businesses need to become a lot more pro-
ductive to remain competitive, and it explains how effective decision-making plays a
role in this. You’ll then move on to why machine learning is a good way to make busi-
ness decisions, and how, using open source tools and tools from AWS, you can start
applying machine learning to making decisions in your business.
In part 2, you’ll then work through six scenarios (one scenario per chapter) that
show how machine learning can be used to make decisions in your business. The sce-
narios focus on how an ordinary company can use machine learning, rather than on
how Facebook or Google or Amazon use machine learning.
Finally, in part 3, you’ll learn how to set up and share your machine learning mod-
els on the web so your company can make decisions using machine learning. You’ll
then go through some case studies that show how companies manage the change that
comes along with using machine learning to make decisions.

About the code

In each chapter in part 2, we provide you a Jupyter notebook and one or more sample
datasets that you can upload to AWS SageMaker and run. In part 3, we provide the
code to set up a serverless API to serve your predictions to users across the web.
 ABOUT THIS BOOK xix

You run and write the code used in part 2 of the book on AWS SageMaker. You
don’t need to install anything locally. You can use any type of computer with internet
access for this code—even a Google Chromebook. To set up the serverless API in part
3 of the book, you need to install Python on a laptop running macOS, Windows, or
Linux operating systems.
This book contains many examples of source code both in numbered listings and
in line with normal text. In both cases, source code is formatted in a fixed-width
font like this to separate it from ordinary text.
In many cases, the original source code has been reformatted; we’ve added line
breaks and reworked indentation to accommodate the available page width in the
book. Code annotations (comments) accompany many of the listings, highlighting
important concepts. Additionally, comments in the source code have often been
removed from the listings when the code is described in the text.
The code for the examples in this book is available for download from the Man-
ning website at https://www.manning.com/books/machine-learning-for-business?query
=hudgeon and from GitHub at https://git.manning.com/agileauthor/hudgeon/tree/
master/manuscript.

liveBook discussion forum

The purchase of Machine Learning for Business includes free access to a private web
forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about the book,
ask technical questions, and receive help from the authors and from other users. To
access the forum, go to https://livebook.manning.com/book/machine-learning-for-
business/welcome/v-6/. You can also learn more about Manning’s forums and the
rules of conduct at https://livebook.manning.com/#!/discussion.
Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful
dialog between individual readers and between readers and authors can take place. It
is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the authors,
whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try
asking them some challenging questions lest their interest stray! The forum and the
archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long
as the book is in print.
 about the authors
Richard (Richie) and Doug worked together at a procurement software company.
Doug became CEO not long after Richie was hired as a data engineer to help the com-
pany categorize millions of products.
After leaving the company, Doug built Managed Functions (https://managedfunctions
.com), an integration/machine learning platform that uses Python and Jupyter note-
books to automate business processes. Richie went on to complete a Master of Data Sci-
ence at the University of Sydney, Australia, and is now working as Senior Data Scientist
for Faethm (http://www.faethm.ai).

xx
 about the cover illustration
The figure on the cover of Machine Learning for Business is captioned “Costumes civils
actuels de tous les peuples connus,” meaning “current civilian costumes of all known peo-
ples.” The illustration is taken from a collection of dress costumes from various coun-
tries by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757-1810), titled Costumes de Différents Pays,
published in France in 1797.
Each illustration is finely drawn and colored by hand. The rich variety of Grasset
de Saint-Sauveur’s collection reminds us vividly of how culturally apart the world’s
towns and regions were just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke dif-
ferent dialects and languages. In the streets or in the countryside, it was easy to iden-
tify where they lived and what their trade or station in life was just by their dress.
The way we dress has changed since then, and the diversity by region, so rich at the
time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different conti-
nents, let alone different towns, regions, or countries. Perhaps we have traded cultural
diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced
technological life.
At a time when it is hard to tell one computer book from another, Manning cele-
brates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers
based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by
Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s pictures.

xxi
 Part 1

Machine learning
for business

T he coming decade will see a massive surge in business productivity as com-

panies automate tasks that are important but time consuming for people to do.
Examples of such tasks include approving purchase orders, evaluating which
customers are at risk of churning, identifying support requests that should be
escalated immediately, auditing invoices from suppliers, and forecasting opera-
tional trends, such as power consumption.
Part one looks at why this trend is occurring and the role of machine learn-
ing in creating the surge. Companies that are not able to accelerate to catch this
surge will quickly find themselves outdistanced by their competitors.
 How machine learning
applies to your business

This chapter covers

 Why our business systems are so terrible
 What machine learning is
 Machine learning as a key to productivity
 Fitting machine learning with business
automation
 Setting up machine learning within your
company

Technologists have been predicting for decades that companies are on the cusp
of a surge in productivity, but so far, this has not happened. Most companies still
use people to perform repetitive tasks in accounts payable, billing, payroll, claims
management, customer support, facilities management, and more. For example,
all of the following small decisions create delays that make you (and your col-
leagues) less responsive than you want to be and less effective than your company
needs you to be:
 To submit a leave request, you have to click through a dozen steps, each
one requiring you to enter information that the system should already

3
4 CHAPTER 1 How machine learning applies to your business

know or to make a decision that the system should be able to figure out from
your objective.
 To determine why your budget took a hit this month, you have to scroll through
a hundred rows in a spreadsheet that you’ve manually extracted from your
finance system. Your systems should be able to determine which rows are anom-
alous and present them to you.
 When you submit a purchase order for a new chair, you know that Bob in pro-
curement has to manually make a bunch of small decisions to process the form,
such as whether your order needs to be sent to HR for ergonomics approval or
whether it can be sent straight to the financial approver.
We believe that you will soon have much better systems at work—machine learning
applications will automate all of the small decisions that currently hold up processes.
It is an important topic because, over the coming decade, companies that are able to
become more automated and more productive will overtake those that cannot. And
machine learning will be one of the key enablers of this transition.
This book shows you how to implement machine learning, decision-making sys-
tems in your company to speed up your business processes. “But how can I do that?”
you say. “I’m technically minded and I’m pretty comfortable using Excel, and I’ve
never done any programming.” Fortunately for you, we are at a point in time where
any technically minded person can learn how to help their company become dra-
matically more productive. This book takes you on that journey. On that journey,
you’ll learn
 How to identify where machine learning will create the greatest benefits within
your company in areas such as
– Back-office financials (accounts payable and billing)
– Customer support and retention
– Sales and marketing
– Payroll and human resources
 How to build machine learning applications that you can implement in your
company

1.1 Why are our business systems so terrible?

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till
that other is ready.”
Henry David Thoreau

Before we get into how machine learning can make your company more productive,
let’s look at why implementing systems in your company is more difficult than adopt-
ing systems in your personal life. Take your personal finances as an example. You
might use a money management app to track your spending. The app tells you how
much you spend and what you spend it on, and it makes recommendations on how you
 Why are our business systems so terrible? 5

could increase your savings. It even automatically rounds up purchases to the nearest
dollar and puts the spare change into your savings account. At work, expense manage-
ment is a very different experience. To see how your team is tracking against their bud-
get, you send a request to the finance team, and they get back to you the following week.
If you want to drill down into particular line items in your budget, you’re out of luck.
There are two reasons why our business systems are so terrible. First, although
changing our own behavior is not easy, changing the behavior of a group of people is
really hard. In your personal life, if you want to use a new money management app,
you just start using it. It’s a bit painful because you need to learn how the new app
works and get your profile configured, but still, it can be done without too much
effort. However, when your company wants to start using an expense management sys-
tem, everyone in the company needs to make the shift to the new way of doing things.
This is a much bigger challenge. Second, managing multiple business systems is really
hard. In your personal life, you might use a few dozen systems, such as a banking sys-
tem, email, calendar, maps, and others. Your company, however, uses hundreds or
even thousands of systems. Although managing the interactions between all these sys-
tems is hard for your IT department, they encourage you to use their end-to-end enter-
prise software system for as many tasks as possible.
The end-to-end enterprise software systems from software companies like SAP and
Oracle are designed to run your entire company. These end-to-end systems handle
your inventory, pay staff, manage the finance department, and handle most other
aspects of your business. The advantage of an end-to-end system is that everything is
integrated. When you buy something from your company’s IT catalog, the catalog
uses your employee record to identify you. This is the same employee record that HR
uses to store your leave request and send you paychecks. The problem with end-to-end
systems is that, because they do everything, there are better systems available for each
thing that they do. Those systems are called best-of-breed systems.
Best-of-breed systems do one task particularly well. For example, your company
might use an expense management system that rivals your personal money manage-
ment application for ease of use. The problem is that this expense management sys-
tem doesn’t fit neatly with the other systems your company uses. Some functions
duplicate existing functions in other systems (figure 1.1). For example, the expense
management system has a built-in approval process. This approval process dupli-
cates the approval process you use in other aspects of your work, such as approving
employee leave. When your company implements the best-of-breed expense manage-
ment system, it has to make a choice: does it use the expense management approval
workflow and train you to use two different approval processes? Or does it integrate
the expense management system with the end-to-end system so you can approve
expenses in the end-to-end system and then pass the approval back into the expense
management system?
To get a feel for the pros and cons of going with an end-to-end versus a best-of-
breed system, imagine you’re a driver in a car rally that starts on paved roads, then
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The survivors
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The survivors

Author: T. D. Hamm

Illustrator: Douglas

Release date: March 30, 2024 [eBook #73288]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1961

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SURVIVORS

***
 THE SURVIVORS

By T. D. HAMM

Illustrated by DOUGLAS

Step by gruelling step the four of them slogged

their way toward a perilous safety. It was a
magnificent display of the will for survival.
The only question was, whose survival?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories August 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There were only four of them now. Soames and Rutherford had
literally gone down with the ship in a roar of cascading rock and
sand. Out of fifty square miles of the Martian plateau they had been
unlucky enough to sit down on the egg-shell thin roof of a sector
honey-combed with caves. Scant moments after the exploring party
had disembarked, Soames' comments on their resemblance to a
Sunday School picnic were suddenly broken off by a cacophonous
medley of yells, the rolling thunder of sliding rock, and over all the
agonized metallic shrieking of tortured metal as the ship fell, crushed
and twisted. There came a final tremendous roar as the fuel tanks
blew. The ground heaved convulsively, and shuddered into silence.
Stunned and deafened, Bradford, Canham, Palmer and Rodriguez
pulled themselves to their feet, staring dazedly at the towering
column of dust hanging like a malevolent genie over the half-mile
wide chasm.
Palmer, white with shock, lunged forward, turning indignantly as
Bradford's arm jerked him back.
"Soames—and Rutherford—" he stuttered. "We've got to do
something!"
Bradford's lip twisted mirthlessly.
"What're you going to do—jump in after them? If there was anything
left of them the fuel tanks took care of it. They're gone—we're here.
And we'd better start figuring out what we're going to do about it."
The four of them looked at each other silently. They knew as well as
he, what they faced. Theirs had been the task of setting up a
temporary exploring base till the supply ship arrived in three months
—with luck.
Supplies for six months and all their equipment except their
emergency rations had gone down with the ship. No hope there—as
well explore the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon as to try to salvage
anything under that million tons of rock. Compressed food they had,
two weeks supply per man; their extra oxygen tanks; an extra battery
apiece for the suit heaters. Water would be their worst problem.
Bradford looked at the miles of barren, reddish wasteland and
shrugged fatalistically.
"If there's any water at all, it will be at the Polar cap. We might as
well get going—we've got a long hike."
Palmer grimaced wryly. "Forward, you Eagle Scouts. We can get our
merit badges easy."
"Yeah, we can get them from Santa Claus at the Pole—" Rodriguez
made a valiant attempt at his usual sardonic humor.
They piled a small cairn of the red rocks and Bradford planted the
green and white flag of the Federated Nations. Encased in its
protective covering he placed a note at its foot indicating their
destination.
"We ought to sign it 'Kilroy,'" Canham grunted as they trudged
forward. "Say, how far do we have to walk?"
"Around a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles."
Their concerted whistle of dismay echoing oddly in their ear-phones,
they set out in thoughtful silence across the red face of Mars, the
hovering dust blotting out their footprints as they went.

Three days and seventy five miles later, they huddled wearily against
the face of a small cliff shivering in the icy chill of the night wind.
They had found a desiccated bush or two in a protected nook during
the afternoon and carried it with them. Now, they fed the wiry twigs
into the fire with miserly care glad of its meager light against the
haunted dark.
Rodriguez held a branch to the firelight. "Looks like a sort of
poorhouse cousin to birch," he hazarded. "Wonder if they ever had
forests on this God-forgotten planet?"
Palmer grinned. "Well, at least there is still life of sorts. Rutherford
would have flipped his lid over those comical little fellows we saw
today."
A half dozen times they had seen furry little marsupials, downy as
chinchillas, their young poking out inquisitive snouts toward the
interlopers and as promptly getting them slapped down again.
A flicker of motion on the perimeter of firelight caught his eye.
"We've got a visitor," he whispered. "There's one of the little beggars
now."
He tossed a crumb from his plate toward the peering head. Flicking a
tongue like a lizard's, the visitor fielded it neatly in midair and
advanced, peering hopefully at the circle of grinning faces. Palmer
stretched out a stealthy hand and gripped it gently about the middle
as it sniffed at his food can.
"Look at him," he cried delightedly. "He doesn't even squirm. He likes
me!"
He tickled its ears, sliding his fingers down through the heavy, silky
pelt. "You could make a fortune with these...." he dropped it abruptly
with an anguished yelp and a string of blistering oaths, while his
friends clung to each other and howled mirthfully.
"Your little friend, he pulled a knife on you. No?" queried Rodriguez
sympathetically. The grin faded from his suddenly startled face.
"Amigo, que lo es? Hey, fellows—something's wrong!"
Palmer, his face shocked and dazed had dropped to his knees,
whimpering and retching painfully.
"My God, look—his hand!" whispered Bradford.
They had removed their bulky gloves before eating and Palmer's
exposed hand was black and swollen beyond recognition. Even as
they watched, the skin split, leaking watery fluid. His body contorted,
he rolled on the ground screaming with unbearable agony.
Bradford's hand dropped to his pistol and fell away again. He looked
at the others pleadingly.
"We can't let him suffer this way. But my God—I can't do it...."
Canham looked at him dully. "You won't have to—he's finished."
The rigidly contorted body relaxed inertly, the tortured eyes open and
glazed. Rodriguez crossed himself and burst into childish sobs.
Bradford put out a restraining hand toward Canham.
"Let him alone—I wish to God I could do the same thing. Give me a
hand with Palmer—we'll have to bury him the best way we can."
Shaken with more than the night chill, they removed the clumsy
oxygen and water containers and piled a protective cairn of rocks
above the silent figure. Behind them, Rodriguez sobbed bitter
Spanish curses and hurled rocks at telltale flickers of movement in
the dark.

Through the next day and the next, they trudged on doggedly,
speaking little as they put the reluctant miles behind them, taking
what shelter they could during the bitter nights. During the day under
the thin Martian sunlight, they turned off the suit-heaters, conserving
the batteries; hoarding their remaining food and water with miserly
care.
Bradford, assuming tacitly acknowledged leadership, pondered the
situation wearily. Even with Palmer's supplies, it was doubtful that the
three of them could last out the ten weeks or so remaining before the
arrival of the second ship. If they could only make it to the Pole—
there they were sure of water at least, in the vegetation belt
surrounding the shallow icecap. If it was ice and not frozen carbon
dioxide which some of the experts held out for. In their initial swing
around the planet they had seen the narrow green belt dotted with
shining pools. Plants meant oxygen, too; and it was possible that in a
temperature supporting some kind of growing life, it would be warm
enough so that they could remove their helmets for breathing, if only
in the brief daylight hours.
Bradford, lost in thought, started as Canham touched his arm,
motioning him to open his faceplate and turn off the head-phones.
"What's the matter with you?" he jerked impatiently.
Canham turned a thumb toward Rodriguez.
"Nothing's the matter with me. Him—I think he's going off his rocker."
Bradford looked at Rodriguez plodding unheedingly ahead. Since his
first outburst after Palmer's death, he had gone mechanically about
each day's routine, outwardly calm. He said little, but neither had the
others. The only indication of his inner torment was when one of the
deadly little marsupials peered at them as they went on their way.
With deadly fury, he would hurl a barrage of rocks through the air,
while the little animal eyed them in indifferent curiosity. Occasionally
he scored a hit, laughing grimly as the dying animal erected the ruff
of lethal spines through its silky fur.
Bradford snorted mirthlessly. "I doubt if either of us would pass a
sanity test at the moment," he grunted. "What's so special about
him?"
Canham's normally cheerful face retained its solemn worry.
"I know what you mean—but, watch him next time one of those
dust-devils comes by."
The day before they had descended the northern slope of the high
plateau onto the long, sandy plain that extended northward.
Everywhere there were the dancing, careening dust-devils, tall
columns of the brick-red sand; faintly menacing forms, pursuing
some unseen purpose of their own. From time to time, one would
swerve close, seeming to keep pace with them for a few steps before
whirling off in its erratic dance.
One approached them now. Rodriguez turned toward it making a
furtive gesture with thumb and forefinger and deliberately trickled a
stream from his water bottle upon the sand.
Bradford came forward on the run, shouting into the hastily adjusted
helmet mike. Angrily he jerked the bottle out of Rodriguez'
unresisting hand.
"What the hell do you think you're playing at?" Bradford panted.
Rodriguez eyed him sullenly.
"I know these things, as my people know them. Los Bailerines del
Diablo—the devil-dancers. One gives them what is most precious. Es
muy necessario." More and more he was losing his usually fluent,
faintly accented English and reverting to his native tongue.
Bradford eyed him sternly. "Rodriguez, you are a good Catholic. You
wear a holy medal. What's all this talk about sacrifices to the devil?"
Rodriguez' gaze slid away. "I don't think God knows about this place.
This is of El Diablo."
"So now you want to get in good with the Devil," Bradford grunted.
"Well, you can do it some other way than with the last of the water."
He jerked his head at Canham waiting wearily behind them.
"Come on, you two. We'll all feel better when we get out of this—
desert." He ended with a wry twist of the lips. He had nearly said
'god-forsaken.' Maybe Rodriguez had the right idea after all.

During the afternoon, some chance convection of air currents sharply

increased the dust whirls. The desert seemed full of their erratic,
spinning shapes. Rodriguez plodded along, ignoring Canham's
sporadic attempts at conversation. The chilly sunlight was waning
and Bradford's face lighted with relief at the sight of a small sand hill.
At least they could dig a hole to get their backs into and break the
whistling winds. He felt an irrational comfort at the thought of the
coming darkness—at least they wouldn't be able to see the dust-
devils. Maybe they could get some talk going and snap Rodriguez out
of his melancholy silence. Perhaps they had all been getting too
introverted since the series of disasters.
They made camp before dark, digging themselves well in; Bradford
and Canham forced themselves into a semblance of cheerfulness as
they worked. Rodriguez's face remained dark and unsmiling. Like one
of those damned stone images in the Yucatan jungle, Bradford
thought with a brief burst of irritation. You wouldn't think that the
little Mexican had been the ship's humorist, his face one perpetual
white-toothed smile.
As they huddled cold and uncomfortable in the gathering darkness,
Canham grinned apologetically and with the air of a conjuror
producing trained seals from a hat, gravely presented three crushed
and bent but undeniable cigarettes, distinctly contraband on the ship.
He eyed Bradford with mock contrition.
"I can't imagine how I got these in my kit. I guess when I was
packing everything just went black. Of course, if you'd care to be my
companion in crime...?"
Bradford frowned darkly. "I ought to have you in irons for this, Mr.
Canham! Now give me one of those things before I break your arm!"
With a muttered word of thanks, Rodriguez laid his carefully aside on
a handy rock and slid out of the shelter into the early dark. Canham
tossed a facetious remark after him and received the usual
unprintable reply.
The other two sat, inhaling luxuriously. Bradford sighed comfortably.
"I think he's snapping out of it. Good thing you noticed what was
happening. We'll all have to keep an eye on each other from now
on."
"It's enough to drive anybody nuts. Have you noticed anything funny
about—well, about the feel of the place?"
Bradford looked at him uneasily.
"What do you mean 'funny'!"
"It's just a feeling I get; you know how a brand-new house that's
never been lived in feels different than an old house that's been
deserted? They're both empty, but it's a different emptiness. It's the
same way with pieces of country—where we trained on that high
desert country in Arizona, it had a new, sort of unused feeling about
it."
Bradford felt an unacknowledged tingling along his nerve ends.
"Well, this is a lot like it—" he tossed out defensively. In spite of
himself he slid a sidelong glance at the surrounding dark.
Canham went on unnoticing.
"That's what I mean—it's a lot like it, but it's different too. Like it had
been lived in for God knows how long, but everybody moved out."
"But there's no ruins, or anything—"
"Maybe there wouldn't be any after a million years or so. And how do
we know what's under the sand? You can't even find your own
footprints fifteen minutes after you've made them."
Bradford laughed shortly. "Well, keep your spooky ideas to yourself.
We don't want Rodriguez going clear off his rocker."

They sat watching the fading landscape where the dust-devils still
swooped and swung. Finally, with a faint frown, Bradford glanced at
his chronometer.
"Roddy's been gone quite a while," he said uneasily. He stood
suddenly and lifted his voice sharply.
"Rodriguez! Hey, amigo—andale Ud.!" He glanced at Canham. "I
don't like this—we don't know what we're liable to run onto in this
damned country...."
They set out, trotting clumsily in their heavy suits, circling the mound
where Rodriguez footprints were already fading in the shifting sands.
Canham gave a sudden convulsive clutch at his companion's arm.
There was no need to speak—scattered over the sand were the
component parts of a space-suit; the heavy gloves, the helmet, the
shoes. And neatly wrapped in the padded coverall the oxygen tanks.
Ahead, nearly invisible, were the prints of naked feet.
Bradford groaned. "Good God, he's gone completely nuts. He'll be
frozen stiff in ten minutes!"
They saw the crumpled heap at the same moment and with a thrill of
undefinable terror they saw the stooping, whirling shadow, spinning
dizzily over the huddled shape.
Bradford wrenched his faceplate open, yelling frantically. Gasping, he
slammed the mask shut against something like a rain of fiery sparks
on his unprotected skin. It was all too evident that Rodriguez would
never hear again.
Gathering his strength to turn the inert figure, he nearly over-
balanced—there was no weight to it at all! Beside him, Canham cried
out hoarsely, "My God—he's like a mummy—!"
The whole figure looked strangely unhuman. Completely dehydrated,
the flesh molded tight over the protruding bones, Rodriguez lay
peacefully, both stick-like hands clasped over the holy medal on his
chest.
Sick and shaken, they bent to the task of scooping sand over the
shrunken body, glancing sidelong at the devil-dancers whirling
exultantly in the shadowy night.
Bradford with a defiant look at his companion, unhooked Rodriguez'
half-empty water bottle from his own belt and placed it upright at the
head of the mound.
"He knew what they wanted and I took it away from him. I guess we
can spare him this!"
Retrieving the oxygen tank and the heat batteries as they went, they
trudged wearily back to their meager shelter, sickeningly conscious of
the vacant space beside them.
Canham gave a sudden choked exclamation.
"He didn't even get to smoke his cigarette—"
Bradford caught his up-thrown arm. "He left it for us. When things
get tough we'll share it."
Canham gave an hysterical giggle. "When 'things get tough'—!
Goodnight, Hardrock!"

The two days following went by in a continuous waking nightmare—

putting one foot in front of the other foot, inching their way
monotonously toward the still invisible Pole. They had left the dust-
devils behind—due to some freakishness of the wind, so they figured.
Canham looks like Death on a pale horse, Bradford thought dully. And
I probably look worse. He rubbed absently at the dry, scaly pits on
his face where the unholy dust had stung him and reverted to his
private worry. Suppose the carefully theorized solar compass was
wrong? Suppose this double-damned planet possessed a field of its
own that would throw their calculations out and they were going in
circles? If they were heading North, the Pole couldn't be more than
another day or two distant even if his reckoning had been off.
Unconsciously he lengthened his stride for a few paces, and was
reminded by his quickened breathing that he was wasting his scant
oxygen supply. They already had tapped their original spare tanks,
thankful for the lessened weight as they jettisoned the empty. Even
with Palmer and Rodriguez' partly filled tanks they only had enough
for a couple of days full time use. Since they had left the region of
the whirlwinds, they had been able to experiment cautiously with
leaving their faceplates open a few minutes at a time, even though
the thin, oxygen-starved air caused their lungs to labor painfully.
Bradford was roused from his musings by an astonished exclamation
from his companion. Down on his knees, Canham was babbling
incoherently, "—green! It's green!"
Bradford knelt beside him in awestruck silence. A tiny growth scarcely
large enough to be dignified with the title of shrub, here in this arid
plain and undeniably—green! Canham touched it caressingly.
"Baby, I hope all your brothers and sisters and the rest of the kinfolk
are just over the hill!"
Clambering to their feet, they set off, lumbering awkwardly in their
heavy suits, breath coming in labored gasps to halt abruptly at the
edge of a steep downward slope. Before them lay another belt of arid
sand and beyond a ring of marshy, pool-dotted soil encircling a solid
belt of vivid green—and faintly visible on the horizon, the glimmer of
the shallow snowcap.
Canham gulped audibly. "If Cortez really wanted a thrill, he should
have discovered this overgrown duckpond. The Pacific—phooey!"
Bradford slapped him on the back. "I feel like I could flap my wings
and fly down! Last one in's a rotten egg...."
Laughing with almost hysterical relief, they ran, waddled and slid,
heedless of bumps and oxygen wastage. They picked themselves up
at the bottom, grinning sheepishly.
"If Space Authority could only see us now!" Canham chortled. "Let us
now with due dignity take possession of our kingdom."
Jubilantly they strode ahead, bowing to imaginary cheering crowds.
"We've got it made, Hardrock. We got it made!"
Bradford's grin wavered. "Well ... we've got it made this far anyway,
with two months and half to go. Let's hope there's duck on that
pond!"
Suddenly sobered they went on; before them the semi-arid belt
seemed to stretch interminably toward the barely visible green area.
The horizon seemed to retreat as they advanced.
"Another night in this damned desert," Bradford groaned. "At least
we may be able to get a fire going with this brush—and a real
swallow of water apiece. I hope that stuff we saw out there wasn't a
mirage," he added disconsolately.
"Not that—that was real honest-to-God water. Wish I'd brought my
duck gun. These damn supply sergeants never do send out the right
equipment."
Towards dusk they scooped out a shallow hole in the sand and roofed
it with green branches.
"With our luck this stuff will probably turn out to be poison ivy,"
Canham predicted gloomily. "Join me in my thatched hut, oh
beauteous one—and look out for sandburs."
They slept fitfully, shivering through the long night hours. Bradford
announced that this was undoubtedly the North Pole and they had
arrived at the beginning of the six months night. With the first of the
thin, cheerless rays of the distant sun, they clambered out of their
cramped sleeping place, some of yesterday's enthusiasm waning as
they stumbled about, relaxing stiffened muscles.
Vaguely uneasy and depressed they started out; the very nearness of
their goal somehow seemed to make their chances of reaching it
doubly unsure.
Afternoon brought them to the edge of the marshy area; they halted,
surveying it doubtfully. Any such region on Earth would have been
busy with life—frogs croaking on lily pads, water rats and fish making
small plopping sounds in the water, tall reeds swaying. Here there
was nothing that breathed of warm-blooded life. Only the shallow
pools lying stagnant, reflecting stubby water-grasses, dotted here
and there with small mounds growing a stunted bush or two.
Canham shivered suddenly. "This is more dead than a cypress
swamp. How I'd love to see a little old cottonmouth rearing his ugly
head out of that puddle."
Bradford shifted his shoulders uneasily.
"Well, here goes! Shall we circle around a bit to see if there's a dryer
path?"

An hour's walking brought no change; always before them lay the

silent marsh, inimical in its unending desolation. And beyond it,
tantalizingly green, lay the only growing things on Mars.
With some difficulty they managed to find a branch apiece long
enough for a probing pole and started out reluctantly, wincing as
their feet sank deep in the fetid ooze.
"These boots are damned heavy," Bradford remarked doubtfully.
"You take yours off if you want to," Canham returned emphatically.
"I'm damned if I'm going to step on some slimy, poisonous species of
fauna in my bare feet."
They forged ahead doggedly, tapping with their poles, making for a
stunted shrub lifting itself above the rest. Bradford, slightly in the
lead, whirled as Canham gave a stifled yelp and hauled himself up on
the mound, looking slightly green.
"Felt like a whale turned under my foot," he panted. "Let's get out of
this so I can be sick—"
Foot by foot, they heaved and plunged their way through the
relentless sucking mire.
"We must be nearly to the other side," Bradford wheezed. "We've got
to make it before dark. It's a cinch we can't camp here."
Canham looked across the few hundred yards remaining and shook
his head wearily.
"This thing is like a moat; I get the feeling that we're being kept out
by one defense after another. Those harmless looking, poisonous
little beasts that killed Palmer, the wind-devils that got Rodriguez and
now—this."
Bradford repressed a shiver.
"Come on!" he said roughly. "Don't start telling your ghost stories
here, for the love of heaven! Save them for your kids."
They plopped off the further side of the mound, their feet making
gobbling noises as they lifted them one after the other in the
tenacious, clinging mud. Bradford halted suddenly.
"There it is," he breathed. "You can see the shore from here...."
Caution forgotten, they plunged ahead, panting with effort. Canham
gave a sudden startled cry.
"Brad! I can't—lift—my foot...! I can't move it!"
Bradford, a few steps to the right, felt his heart leap sickeningly at
the stark terror in the voice.
"Take it easy! Get a grip on my pole—now!"
He heaved strongly, feet slipping, unable to get a purchase to make
his strength felt against the pull of the quicksand. The perspiration
trickled into his smarting eyes. Through Canham's faceplate, he could
see his face set in agonized strain as he attempted to free his feet in
their heavy boots, the water level rising from waist to armpits as he
struggled. Bradford redoubled his efforts, muscles cracking as he
tried to heave the other free bodily. Canham relaxed suddenly.
"It's no use," he panted heavily. "Don't come closer—it'll just get both
of us. Don't stay and watch it—it'll just make it harder. Wait a minute
—here, catch!"
With a last convulsive effort, he jerked loose the oxygen tank and
gave it a desperate throw. Bradford automatically caught it, nearly
going off-balance and righting himself with panic-stricken effort.
"Hold on! hold on—" he gritted. "I'll get some branches from that
shrub; you can throw yourself forward so I can get a grip on you."
Canham looked at him palely.
"No use. But, I'm not going under with my helmet on, still alive,
under—this!"
He shuddered queasily, and with one quick jerk freed his faceplate as
he went under. For a moment the water boiled furiously as the
remaining oxygen in his suit released. Then Bradford stood alone,
staring stupidly with shock, watching as the bubbles rose more and
more slowly and died away.
He had no recollection of floundering the remaining hundred yards to
the shore. Physically sick and shaking with horror, he ploughed
through the shallowing ooze and fell headlong on wet, but solid
earth.

The sun was sinking as he finally stirred, groaning, and pulled himself
further away from the haunted ooze. Incredibly, he slept at last,
waking to the first rays of the sun, dazed and unbelieving. Turning
instinctively for the reassurance of another face, remembrance hit
him like a blow. Bile came up into his mouth as he wrenched his
faceplate open and was grindingly, shudderingly sick.
The spasm over, he heaved himself to his feet, staring about stupidly.
Surely there was something he had to do? Every morning for so long
he had had to lift himself to his feet and force himself to go on till
dark—toward the Pole.
But—here was the green and a few miles away the hoarfrost glitter of
the snowcap. There was nowhere to go!
"We made it—" he said uncertainly, looking around. But there was no
one to share the triumph. Dully, he thought of them all—Palmer,
betrayed by a gentle, kittenlike thing—Rodriguez, a human sacrifice
to something utterly alien—Canham, dead on the edge of victory. He
looked at Canham's oxygen canister and laid his hand on it gently.
Then slowly, with dragging steps, he went on toward the shining
green that had cost them so much to achieve.
The ground and the air above it as he approached were strangely
warm. And the plants too, were warm and oddly different. No
biologist, he dimly sensed a difference from any growth that Earth
knew. The stems, the leaves were veined with pulsing red and at the
tip of each stem, a flower lifted, shaped like an open mouth. There
was a space between each plant, none crowded his neighbor. It was
very orderly and pleasant and so warm—so warm. He opened his
faceplate.
Drowsy and relaxed, no longer driven by unrelenting urgency, he
found himself nodding dreamily as he walked between the tall stems.
With a sigh of pleasure, he laid down among them, conscious on the
verge of sleep of an insistent demanding whisper—"More air! Give us
air!" Unhesitatingly, he opened the gauge of the oxygen tank, drifting
into a sea of darkness.
The red-veined plants about him pulsed with a quicker rhythm as the
thousand opened mouths drank in the air, rich with a richness they
had not known for a million years. And about the unconscious form of
the man, poured the carbon dioxide from the lips of a thousand
oxygen breathing creatures.
They had had a million years to learn the technique of survival as the
atmosphere of their planet drained off into space. Retreating,
adapting, eon by eon to their last stronghold: ringed round by their
guardians of the Earth, the Air and the Water.
Here were the Survivors.

THE END
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