Complete Fiction Page 3

  Nick was frantic for the missing fragments of the puzzle, but he knew it would be useless to question her now. She began to shiver in the chill, so he removed his torn jacket and slipped it around her naked shoulders. After a while she sobbed herself to sleep, too exhausted and grief-stricken to care any more what happened to her.

  Nick dozed too, but the dregs of Gravinol still in his system denied him the release of complete forgetfulness. In disconnected, nightmarish flashes his mind reviewed the chain of events that had made him a hunted outlaw upon an alien planet.

  There was a bittersweetness to his thoughts of Earth, a nostalgic homesickness for the planet of great cities and green foliage and free-flowing water it had been before the War—and might some day be again.

  And then the War itself. The boyish, unthinking enthusiasm with which he had enlisted in the Special Corps. The new drug, Gravinol, touted by the laboratories of the great Harmon Enterprises as the discovery that would win the War. Twisting, writhing rocket fights high above the atmosphere, pilots of the Corps immersed in hypnotic, Gravinol-induced blind loyalty to the Cause, immune to fatigue and pain and fear.

  City after city crumbling to atomic dust. Rocket bases blasted out of existence and no more targets worth bombing. Complex weapons giving way to more primitive ones as industrial systems broke down. The Special Corps transferred from air to ground duty. Crumbling battle lines, disintegration of organized warfare into deadly confusion in which friend and foe were indistinguishable.

  PEACE. Peace without victory, without decision. Peace of destruction. Battles dying into scattered skirmishes that eventually died of their own inertia.

  Disillusion and disgust. But it was peace.

  Realization that Gravinol, hurriedly released upon the world without proper testing, was incompatible with any civilized system and at the same time incurably habit forming. Gravinol outlawed by the reviving New Governments. The few hundred survivors of the Special Corps, Nick among them, roaming the face of Earth in a desperate, frustrating search for the few grams still in existence, ready to commit any crime to ease their torment, clinging with fanatical, drug-inculcated loyalty to a Cause that had died with the War’s end, looking endlessly for a new Cause to which to fasten their drug-inflamed energies, shunned and avoided and feared and hated by those persons not in the grip of Gravinol.

  The whispered rumor that had led him to that office, miraculously untouched amid the ruins of Chicago. Listening to the young man with the cold eyes—he had never learned his name—as he told of the Jones Drive and the double Cause of protecting Earth and making Mars a fit new world for human colonization.

  “And this,” the man had said, casually rolling a tiny red pellet of Gravinol across the broad desk into Nick’s clutching fingers. “All you want.”

  Central Camp, the Martian Exploitation Company’s base on the red desert, and indoctrination under the thought machines. Plenty of Gravinol, to be had for the asking, and the companionship of other old members of the Corps. Flashing out in a wonderfully responsive fighter rocket to strafe and destroy a skulking Martie or two. Months without unhappiness, without a single emotional response not conditioned by the Gravinol and the thought machines.

  Then one night the glow of a spaceship landing far to the East, and Colonel Hammer’s orders.

  “That ship is not authorized by Headquarters. Bomb it! And you, Tinker, photograph the results. The Man wants proof.”

  Silvery hull against red sand. Small derrick drilling for the water Nick knew they would never find, for even the Exploiters had failed. A few tents. Men and women and half a dozen children waving excited greetings. Ship and tents obscured as the bombs detonated. And when the dust cleared—nothing.

  Liquidation of the potential independent colony had made no impression at the time, but now in this tunnel far beneath the surface Nick clenched his fists and bit his lip as he thought of the callous brutality of it.

  THEN, weeks afterward, that card game quarrel with Jake Alaimo. Patrol the next day, and rockets failing far out over the bleak and deadly desert. Fuel gauges showing full but tanks empty, radio dead, and Alaimo’s note on the mechanic’s service card.

  Starting the impossibly long walk back to base. Eyes tortured by the harsh sunlight. Thirst. Beginnings of the gnawing craving for Gravinol.

  Memories of the tortures he had endured brought Nick wide awake in the tunnel, all his muscles tightening momentarily as though to begin the twitching spasm typical of denied Gravinol addiction.

  He seemed to remember collapsing in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, and as he had fainted he had known he was dying. He had been so near dead that his eyes remained vacantly open, and in his unconsciousness he had seen—he thought—strange creatures that were tall and green and somehow thin in consistency. Like Marties. And there had been darkness and coolness after the blazing heat of the desert. Yes, and even wetness, wetness on arid Mars where all water was tanked in from Earth. He couldn’t remember, but something had happened.

  Days later a patrol had found him by chance, and back at Central Camp the medical staff had been skillful. But they were human and had therefore overlooked the obvious fact that he had gone three weeks without Gravinol. And for some reason he himself could not understand he had remained silent, battling the recurrent temptation as he recovered. Something—perhaps bodily dehydration, perhaps heat, perhaps the actinic rays of the sun that had turned his skin almost to leather—something out there on the desert had enabled him to evade the death that usually followed deprivation of Gravinol.

  One day when he was stronger and the recurring craving had all his nerves screaming, he had called Jake Alaimo out for a barehanded duel and snapped his neck with an edgewise chop of his palm. But when Colonel Hammer had congratulated him he had only felt annoyance. He was beginning to think for himself once more.

  II

  A SOUND IN THE TUNNEL broke into his reverie, bringing him instantly to the alert. Soft padding footsteps. He drew his gun and aimed at the sound.

  “Don’t!” Susan’s hand dragged his gun down. “It won’t hurt us.”

  “Huh?” Indoctrination had taught that everything that moved upon Mars was hostile, to be killed on sight. The impulse was still strong.

  “It’s a cajora. The Martians keep them as pets,” she insisted.

  Nick’s scalp crawled as the big animal glided through the darkness and its coarse fur made sandpaper sounds against Susan’s legs. He had seen the six-legged beasts on the surface, large as Earth tigers.

  “Mel nikko twa Kiev,” Susan said soothingly. “Mel nikko twa Kiev?”

  The creature purred.

  Nick kept his gun ready and swung toward the girl. She could feel him tense with suspicion. Indoctrination had impressed upon Nick’s mind the story that Jackson Jones and his daughter had turned traitor to Earth, siding in with the dangerous and degenerate Marties. “What’d you say?” he asked.

  “That’s Martian.” Her answer was matter-of-fact. “I asked him where Kiev is.”

  “Martian?” Nick was astonished. “Have they a real language? Then they’re really intelligent?” He had suspected but hadn’t known.

  “Of course,” she whispered. “Ssh! You’re disturbing the cajora.”

  “What’s Kiev? What do you want?”

  “He’s a Martian. My friend,” she answered, and talked to the cajora again as though it were a dog or cat.

  “I think he understands,” she said after a little. “Keep your hand on him and follow.”

  Nick was hesitant, but the only alternative was to remain in the pitch black, musty tunnel.

  For hours they shuffled blindly along, their hands meeting in the loose fur of the beast’s neck. The tunnel sloped downward, turning right and left so that within minutes Nick was hopelessly lost. Time and again his outstretched fingers, trailing along the wall, encountered the emptiness of side tunnels and branchings, but the cajora moved purposefully ahead. Several times Nick tried to talk, to ask the questions which were perplexing him, but each time the girl silenced him.

  “You’ll distract the cajora,” she warned.

  The animal stopped short as they rounded a turn and saw a glimmer of light ahead.

  “They don’t like light,” she explained. “We’ll have to go on alone.”

  The light came from a cross tunnel, from patches of some glowing substance in the hard, smooth walls. The tunnel was roughly circular in section, large enough for Nick to walk upright despite his height.

  He whistled in amazement.

  “Who built these?” he asked, for they had come several miles in darkness and now the lighted tunnel stretched away into the distance, a major engineering project.

  “The Martians.”

  “How?”

  “With their voras.”

  He wanted to ask her to explain, but she was examining some markings on the walls, combinations of triangles and curved lines that were obviously writing. She seemed to understand them, and Nick began to understand now how she and her father had evaded the Mec patrols so long. The leaders of the Martian Exploitation Company did not even suspect the existence of this extensive underground labyrynth.

  “We’re a long way from Kiev’s home,” the girl declared. “The faster we get there the better.”

  “Why? What’s the danger? The Mecs won’t follow us down here?”

  “Martians.”

  “Huh? I thought you were friends with them.”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “Only a few now. The rest have grown to hate us. Come on.”

  They had covered several more miles when they were stopped. Susan’s faint gasp sent Nick’s hand automatically to his holster and he looked up to see three Martians emerging from a side tunnel just ahead.

  He stared. They were the first living Martians he had seen at really close range, and the bodies of those hunted down by the patrols had always been as crumpled and collapsed as spiders caught in the flame of a blowtorch.

  THEY were slightly taller than humans, with great glowing eyes in their bulging heads and thin, many-fingered arms that reached almost to the knee joints of their stubby legs. Their noses were almost flat and their mouths too small, and their heads were topped by erect crests of skinlike material. Two of them were a dull greenish color, but the third, evidently the leader, had a marked bluish tinge to his face. All three wore shapeless brown clothing.

  The three made no threatening move at first, but training and the habit of self-preservation were still strong in Nick. He raised his gun.

  Before he could fire something uncoiled itself from the shoulders of the leading Martian and flapped down the tunnel like an ugly, distorted bat. It knocked him off balance as it struck his head and shoulders and clung there, heavy and warm and alive. Numbness raced through his body wherever it touched. His muscles refused to respond when he tried to squeeze the trigger and his struggles only brought part of the thing around his throat in a powerful, strangling grip.

  Susan called out something in the same language she had used to the cajora and took the pistol from his helpless fingers. But to his dismay she did not raise it.

  The Martian made a chirping, almost inaudible sound and the thing relaxed its throttling grasp. Feeling began to return to Nick’s arms. He could feel tiny pulsations running through the boneless, rubbery mass that still clung tightly to his shoulders.

  Susan had made no move to help him. Now she cringed back at the look on his face, a look that spelled murder. He reached for her, but instantly his arms fell limp and numb again as the Martian chirped.

  “You sold me out to these—these,” he gritted. “You slimy little doublecrosser!”

  One of the Martians interrupted, directing a sharp-, chirping question at Sue.

  She looked down at the jacket she wore, Nick’s uniform jacket, and shook her head negatively.

  The Martian made an angry gesture, and under Nick’s baleful stare she unfastened the garment and dropped it. Equipment in the pockets clanked against the stone floor. The girl blushed beneath the dirt that covered her face.

  The blue-complexioned Martian scooped up the discarded jacket with one long arm, and meekly Susan extended the pistol as he spoke again. The Martian held it against his waist, and immediately what Nick had assumed to be part of his clothing formed a pouch around it. The clothing was alive too, he realized.

  The three aliens watched them through bulging eyes and conferred in a series of chirps and clicks.

  “What are they saying?” Nick demanded, a bit confused by the turn events were taking. They weren’t treating the girl in too friendly a fashion.

  “That you’re an Exploiter, and because of that damned jacket that I joined the Exploiters too. If only we could have reached Kiev first!”

  She broke into the Martians’ discussion. “Mel nikko ne cho ke twa Kiev.”

  The Martians focused their attention on her, their voices taking on a note of uncertainty. She spoke to the bluish one at length, and at last he shook his head dubiously, making sweeping gestures to indicate movement.

  “We’d better go,” Susan said dully.

  “Just where do you stand with these things?” Nick asked anxiously as they walked. It was the most urgent question of the moment.

  “I don’t quite know any more.” Her voice betrayed her uncertainty. “They liked Dad and me at first, and when we came back from Earth the second time many of them even came out into the sunlight to meet us. But then the Exploiters came. It was only because they blasted the Trailblazer and opened fire on Dad and me too that the Martians didn’t kill us right then.”

  “Then they weren’t hostile at first? Weren’t they plotting a war on Earth?”

  “Of course not.” Her tone was scathing. “They were just friendly and sick and dispirited and dying. They couldn’t even live on Earth.”

  “Then why did your father organize the Mec?”

  Susan halted in mid-stride and her stinging two-handed slaps left angry marks across his face.

  “Say anything like that again and I’ll scratch your eyes out!” she spat.

  “But your father—”

  “He did not!” she snapped. “What he told Gerald Harmon was—”

  “Harmon?”

  One of the Martians clucked impatiently and motioned them to move along.

  Nick recognized the name. Gerald Harmon was the ruler of Earth’s greatest industrial combine, Harmon Enterprises. From his factories had come the War’s most deadly weapons, and Gravinol had been developed in his laboratories. A finger in every pie and a profit for every finger had always been the Harmon method.

  “Harmon told Dad he’d send out colonists as soon as things could be arranged in an orderly manner and another ship built, and he persuaded Dad to keep it secret that we had reached Mars on our first flight. Harmon had backed Dad’s work, so Dad trusted him in spite of everything people said. And people were right. When his first ship came . . . that cold-blooded murderer—”

  She sobbed, unable to continue.

  ANOTHER piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Nick’s brain. During the last months of the War when governments were merely hunted groups of men blasted out of one underground shelter after another, when armies went on killing because there was no one to tell them to stop, when work and comfort and productive effort and all the normalities of life had vanished in the dust of ruined cities, the great masses of people who wished only to live out their lives in peace had at last learned their lesson. At last it had been thoroughly beaten into their skulls that wars were the inevitable price of over-organization, of allowing a few individuals—whether politicians or industrialists or the priests of hatred-creeds made little difference—to assume unlimited power over the fates of others. The people had learned, and they were bitterly determined it should not happen again. It was because of this lesson that the unthinkingly obedient survivors of the Special Corps had been so cordially hated and feared. The age of the overlords, of the few exploiters and many exploited, was to be finished.

  On Earth.

  Harmon had seen the trend. And he had been shrewd enough to combine the possibilities of the secret Jones Drive and the Gravinol-addicted survivors of the Corps for the foundation of a new and more completely dominated empire as his domain on Earth crumbled.

  On Mars.

  And perhaps, some day when he had gathered sufficient power, once again on Earth.

  Often around the barracks of Central Camp the Mecs had speculated on the identity of The Man, the mysterious and unapproachable top link in the chain of command. Now Nick Tinker knew the whole story.

  “My God!” he said.

  Susan’s shoulders sagged. “We’re through, and the Martians are finished too. And sooner or later he’ll manage to wreck the New Governments also.”

  “Damn it, we’re still alive!” Nick exploded. “There’s still a chance.”

  She smiled weakly and brushed at her tears.

  Twice they passed side tunnels, and at a third opening turned in at a Martian’s gesture. A short passage opened into a series of three rooms.

  Nick looked around. The glow-plates in the ceiling were the same as those in the abandoned surface cities, but far brighter. The first room was furnished with a single broad couch and three peculiar objects he decided were chairs. There were no shelves or cupboards, but niches had been cut into the smooth stone walls at irregular intervals.

  The second room was completely bare, giving the impression that furnishings had been recently removed.

  The bluefaced Martian emitted a series of chirps, and at once the creature around Nick’s shoulders pulsated, uncoiled and fell to the floor with a dull thump. Nick jumped aside in distaste as it collected itself into a flattened ball and rolled toward the doorway. There it changed shape again, flowing into a slot in the door frame.