The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 14

  Corriston waited for the last tractor to come abreast of him before he leapt aboard it. There was the smell of acrid grease in the air, a smell of burning. The mechanical parts set up a dull rumbling, and as Corriston swung himself aboard, a voice said: “I’m Stanley Gregor. If I had any sense I wouldn’t take part in this. I came to Mars with the second expedition. I’m sixty-two years old but somehow today I feel young. There’s no longer any doubt in my mind that Henley is a scoundrel. Why we trusted him I don’t know. I’m here to do my part in rectifying an error.”

  “Sure,” Corriston said, settling down at the side of a big, awkward-looking man with red hair. “Sure, I understand. Take it easy. We’re all in this together.”

  “We’ve got eighty-seven miles of desert to cross. It’s going to be tough. Have you seen the fortress Ramsey built to protect himself?”

  “No,” Corriston said.

  “There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses—photoelectric eye installations. They spot you when you’re a half-mile away. Try to storm those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you’ll be pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of energy weapons, and you’ll be electrocuted. You’ll hang suspended on barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant.”

  “I’ve thought it over,” Corriston said. “We won’t have to storm the fortress unless they’ve taken Ramsey’s daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in danger. And if he is in danger, he’ll welcome our help. We’re going to the ship first and there are only two men on the ship.”

  “But they’ve got plenty of ammunition, haven’t they? They’ve got the ship’s military installations. Anyway you slice it, it’s a dangerous gamble.”

  “I never thought it was anything else,” Corriston said.

  19

  Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.

  Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.

  In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that way, it could never change.

  Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.

  All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on. They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a member of the 210 man rescue team.

  “Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a man has children—well, Mars is simply no place for children.”

  “That’s right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes.

  “Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We’re buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don’t really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they’re here and we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance—or lack of it—against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here—”

  “Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn’t want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony.”

  “That doesn’t excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men.”

  “How many of them could step into Drever’s shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You’re forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It’s rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best.”

  “That’s true enough, I suppose. And now that he’s here he probably couldn’t be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like.”

  “I’m simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy’s age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn’t ride a bike on Mars—if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?”

  Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever’s son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the faces of at least two of them.

  Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. “Nonsense!” he said.

  A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.

  “Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn’t we get started?”

  “We should and we will,” Corriston said. “But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don’t arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where’s Freddy? Have you seen him?”

  The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: “Over there,” he said. “His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

  Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.

  Dr. Drever’s son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.

  Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf child.

  “Why did you do it, Freddy?” Corriston asked. “Your father is very upset and worried.”

  Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.

  “I had to come,” he said. “I had to.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.”

  Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: “I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you’d be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You’d be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates.”

  Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. “How did you know?” he gasped.

  “I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy—once,” Corriston said.

  “Gee, thanks,” Freddy said.

  “Thanks for what?”

  “Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston.”

  Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.

  “We’re starting again in ten minu
tes,” he said. “Better have another cup of coffee all around.”

  20

  The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.

  The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.

  For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.

  Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston’s side.

  “We can’t be far from the ship now,” he said. “I wish there was some way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man to accompany him.…”

  “Freddy will be all right,” Corriston said. “You don’t know what it means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he’s done it.”

  The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.

  “I’m not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground,” the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very near now.

  “Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is,” Drever said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve his inner tension.

  “They’re a very primitive form of life, really,” the geologist said. “They look like large gray snakes, but they’re actually more like worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they’ve’ attached themselves it’s almost impossible to dislodge them. You’ve seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I’m sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard—the galaka—as you know.”

  “All right,” Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation returning. “Now I suppose you’re going to tell us exactly how they kill their prey.”

  “I don’t have to tell you how they kill men,” Macklin said. “You know as much about that as I do. You’ve been on Mars before. You’ve seen at least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a man when he’s asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He doesn’t just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty horrible. They’re more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then.…”

  “All right, now I’ve heard an expert confirm it. I’d be grateful if you’ll just shut up.”

  “Lieutenant, I told you—”

  “Never mind, Doctor. I’m asking him to shut up.”

  In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions across the desert.

  But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.

  And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the unmistakable stamp of reality.

  Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared, watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.

  For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to. The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were in each other’s way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement was possible.

  Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort. Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and shouting to the colonists behind him.

  “Get to that man as quickly as possible!” he ordered. “There’s no time to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your hands. Don’t let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get them off if you can. If you can’t, bring him here. Carry him slung between you.”

  Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert, walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had thought of it themselves.

  He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an instant before.

  But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.

  Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. “If a man is attacked by just one lamprene, and it’s pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?”

  It was Drever who answered him. “Not much, I’m afraid. The poison gets into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can’t get it out with a suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It’s a nerve poison and it spreads very fast. And there’s no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries.”

  Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. The
n, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.

  The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man was Stone.

  It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone’s exposed flesh.

  Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone’s closeness to death a threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.

  “Where’s Helen Ramsey?” he demanded. “Where is she, Stone? We’re not likely to do anything more for you if you don’t tell us.”

  “I—I don’t know,” Stone muttered. “Saddler…double-crossed Henley. I guess…he wanted her for himself. I don’t know where he’s taken her. I’m telling you the truth. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “All right,” Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. “I believe you. Take it easy now. They’ve got the lamprene off.”

  He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again, telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked him down.

  There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley’s vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But Corriston wasn’t thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few minutes, or hours before?