by Jerry
To the north and to the south fled the survivors, there to battle and mingle their blood with the dwindling savage descendants of earlier civilizations. Yet the memory of their vanished fertile homeland persisted in their legends and was woven into the intricate structure of their theism.
The dune-buried islands and dead cities became a lost paradise that was to be eventually restored to its pristine culture and fertility . . .
From “Ancient Cultures of Mars”
by Red ford Blys, published by
Red Planet Pubs., Inc. 2041 A.D.
JUD LEE ran stubby brown fingers through his snowy hair before he let the pressure helmet drop back in place. Despite the laboring pressure pumps the air in the leaky cabin of the prospecting helicopter was uncomfortably thin. For the last three days he had lived, eaten, and slept almost exclusively in his pressure suit.
“Lopez!” he called as he snapped on the ship-to-ship audiophone.
The receivers in his helmet rattled in response. Have to check for loose connections or use the spare helmet, he decided. He bumped the transparent face-plate with a hooded wrist and the voice cleared.
“. . . speaking.”
“Almost in the heart of Raba Depression,” he said, his eyes continuing their endless sweep of the desolate dunes and ridged hollows. “No sign of water or desert growth. Two ruined cities off to the north. One just ahead.”
“No luck here either.” Vincent Lopez’s voice was unsteady. “We have but a week remaining, my friend.”
“If we could only blast the Toads out of the northern canals, we’d have water in plenty. Ten cruisers from Earth would do the trick. But we do nothing. Let them force us off Mars or use all our profits buying water!”
“Si,” agreed Lopez bitterly, “but the Rhett Peace Pact says no. For no longer raiding Venus and Earth, we give the northland of Mars to the invaders.”
“South Mars Limited maybe had a finger in the pie. Their polar waterways are free of grafting Voldurians.” Lopez grunted assent. “Reminds me—seen anything of that SML passenger liner reported missing yesterday?”
“Nope. Uh, wait a minute. Something down here. Outcrop of rock maybe, or a building . . .”
“Dropping down to a hundred feet . . . Uh, oh! It’s the ship all right. Half buried in a dune and shattered. Must have exploded.”
“What’s your position, Jud?” Lee snapped back the readings, easing the heli down toward the base of the marching dune.
“Stepping out to look her over, Lopez. Stand by.”
“Heading for you. Visibility almost zero. Sandstorm kicking up.” Lopez snapped out something in disgusted Spanish.
“Not bad, here. Better climb above it. So long.”
Lee took his featherweight sand spade and left the heli’s cabin on the side opposite the stiff southern breeze. He swung to the left, around the swirling turtle-paced toe of the marching hillock of ruddy sand. Here it was more sheltered and in a dozen paces he had reached the twisted debris of the half-covered wreck.
He cleared away the sand swiftly. In two minutes he had wriggled through the burst-open cabin’s wall. He gulped at what he saw.
A minute later he was calling Lopez. “Five passengers and three crew members. All dead.”
“Emergency call made it six passengers, one female.”
“All men.” Lee frowned at the slowly advancing wall of sand particles. The breeze was growing in power. “She may have been thrown free. Cabin split open like a nut.”
“We’ll radio from the base.” Lopez’s voice was strained. “Getting really knotty here, Jud. Better take off before it gets you.”
The transmitter of the little Mexican partner of Jud Lee clicked off. The water prospectors and mineralogists of Northern Mars Incorporated always worked in pairs. And never at greater distances than forty miles from one another. So the desert storm would soon be upon Lee.
He took off, the sudden blast of thin air as he topped the dunes almost smashing him downward again. He climbed as fast as the sky prop’s blades permitted. And his hands froze on the controls.
A pinpoint of light blossomed in the growing dusk of swirling dust clouds and endured for brief seconds—an emergency flare. Less than a quarter mile to the north it was. He headed toward it and finally spotted a pressure-suited shape kneeling in the shelter of a minor dune.
Somehow he landed less than a dozen feet beyond the woman. She came crawling through the blast of the sky prop and he yanked her into the cabin. He sent the ship lurching skyward, and, once clear of the sand, locked its controls for 500 feet.
The helmet slid from the woman’s dusty head. He saw a tear-stained face and long reddish-brown hair. Her eyes were, big, blue and staring with the terror she had known. Lee took in the flabby cheeks and the pouting lips and did not like what he saw.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Give me some water.”
Lee held a water flask for her and pushed her hands away after the first swallows. “Uh, uh,” he said.
“Give me that water, Grandpa,” she snarled weakly at him. “My father’ll put you back at mining if you don’t.”
“Your father will?” Lee laughed. “And who’s he?”
“Commander Banton, you fool! Now give me that drink.”
Lee stuffed the flask into his pressure suit’s zippered belly pouch. He snapped on the transmitter, calling Lopez again. Between calls for his comrade he studied his unwelcome passenger.
“So you’re ‘Louse’ Banton,” he mused. “Worst spoiled brat on Mars. And from South Mars, too!”
“My name is Lois!” the girl fairly screamed, “and I am not a brat!”
“Shut up,” ordered Lee abruptly. “Yeah, this’s Lee. You okay, Lopez? Great . . .
“Got the girl. Jet-happy little dame left the wreck and started off on foot! Honest . . . Banton’s daughter . . .” Lois slapped at Lee’s tough pressure mask and he held her off with one hand, grinning sourly at her gasping rage.
“Meet you at base,” he concluded, “in an hour or so.”
Half an hour later he was not so sure he’d make the base. He was making no headway against the raging torrent of sand-laden atmosphere; in fact he guessed he was losing the battle, and the battered heli’s cabin was slowly wrenching apart at its welded seams.
Once he’d climbed to four thousand feet, to find the wind yet more turbulent there. Cross currents of air had tossed the little mapping ship about and forced him groundward. And the power of the hurricane had kept growing.
Both he and the Banton girl were strapped into their seats as the heli slammed about crazily. Abruptly the controls went lifeless in his hands. Something had given way. Helplessly, they were carried before the storm. The instruments were crazy, here in the Raba Depression they were far below the arbitrary sea level as it was, and now they could not be read correctly.
“May crash any minute, Lopez!” Lee shouted through his throat mike.
Uselessly, Lopez’s faint voice was requesting his position, but before Lee could answer, the crash came. A freakish. swirl in the sand-laden air slowed the ship momentarily, and it dropped like a rock. There was a brutal snapping impact, and then a blackness the storm could not equal.
After a time Lee was conscious of the cutting blast of air that probed through a great split in the top of the cabin. Only now the roof was in front of him. There was the taste of salty blood in his mouth. And he was no longer strapped in the control chair.
Clumsily he groped to the locker where the protective sand masks were stored and took out two of them. One he slipped over his pressure helmet and the other he took to the girl’s sprawled body.
“Keep your filthy paws off me,” she snarled savagely. His audiophones rattled. Her breath gurgled unevenly.
She clawed at his hands, but he persisted in his task of strapping on the mask, and an extra belt of water flasks and oxygen cylinders. She was only semi-conscious, and he was forced to carry her toward the gaping rent. Only then did complete understa
nding return to her.
“What—where are we going?” she demanded pettishly.
“Have to start off on foot, look for a deserted city or other shelter.”
Lois Banton laughed nastily. “Hah! You laughed at my ignorance in leaving the wrecked flyer. And now you do the same.”
Lee shrugged. “Sure. You crashed in comparatively decent weather. The wreckage remained exposed. But in five minutes, ten feet of sand may bury the heli. The dunes build swiftly in such a hurricane.”
The girl gazed fearfully at the rising level of sifting sand over what had been the control panels. She fairly flung herself at the opening. Lee caught her sand boots just in time and pulled her back. Calmly he snapped a ringed ten-foot line of tough nylon into her belt and into his own. Then he checked his sand spade, pouched solar torch, and pressure-proof zippered holster where his compact machine-gun lay.
“We could anchor ourselves to the ship by a hundred-foot line,” he told her calmly as he set the transmitter for thirty-second intervals of automatic signals, “but we’d soon be buried too. Only chance is drifting before the wind.”
Lois’s eyes were streaming tears. “But there’s no water out there,” she quavered, “and our oxygen will run out.”
“Then we’ll use the hand pumps on our suits.” Lee was angry, suddenly. “As for water there is little loss, perhaps a pint escapes in a day from these suits.”
He pushed her out the opening and followed swiftly, the blast of the storm hurrying them along. He caught a glimpse of the heli and a building ridge of red dust behind it.
They stumbled through a ruddy darkness that rustled and chewed at their tough pressure envelopes. They leaned back against the wind, their sand boots slogging mechanically along. The surge of the storm currents threatened to send them hurtling skyward, chiplike. Even the shifting ridges of the dunes offered little protection, and a moment’s halt buried them to the knees.
The curved solidity of a wall jarred Lee back into realization of his surroundings. Time had lost all meaning and weariness had dulled his senses. He was astonished to discover Lois yet on her feet, her body flattened against the obstruction.
“Domed city!” he croaked, his throat thick.
The girl’s teeth showed whitely through the begrimed faceplates of her sand mask and helmet. She was trying to speak but he heard nothing, the communication cables linking them had broken or his audiophone receiver had finally quit.
He inched along the slow curve of the vast dome toward the left, and perhaps a hundred feet further along found a ragged crevice in the semiopaque shell roofing the dead city’s dust-choked ruins. He squeezed through to a catwalk of spidery looking, but enduring, metal, and drew Lois in beside him.
Only five feet below them, the highest of the ancient towers and flat-roofed dwellings sprouted from the sand. Lee knew that their bases might be a hundred feet further down, perhaps more. Eventually the outer level of sand and the inner level would coincide. That this dome must have been less badly shattered by the raiding invaders of a thousand years before, he could well believe. Most of the dead towns were completely buried.
They moved to the right until the spurting spray of sand through the wide slit in the dome could no longer reach them. Lee discovered the phone cable was unlinked and reclipped the contacts.
“I’m going outside again,” he told the girl, taking out his solar torch, “to mark our entrance. Then we’ll hunt for shelter in the ruins.”
He lengthened the nylon cord with another ten foot length, before battling outward again, and then, above his head, he burned a sooty broad arrow into the dome’s crystalline surface. To the left of this he burned: LEE, in two-foot letters. And on the opposite side of the crevice he put another, longer, arrow.
This done he re-entered the huge dome and lay, exhausted, upon the hard metallic ribs of the catwalk. Lois was sprawled there too, mouth slack, sleeping. The effort to stand again was too great. He closed his eyes.
Lee was smothering, his lungs gasping for air. He struggled to an elbow and opened his eyes to a dust-swirling twilight. The storm had not eased while he slept.
The oxygen cylinder was exhausted. Stale air sickened him, and his temples were throbbing as he switched over to the spare tank. When that was gone they’d have to rely on the emergency hand pumps to fill them again with compressed air.
He breathed deeply and switched on the girl’s extra tank. She stirred and sat up too. He grinned wryly at her, contorted features.
“Hard bed,” he said. “Even sand is better.”
Lois squirmed uncomfortably, stretching her cramped legs and arms. She stood up, looking out over the mile-wide extent of the dome’s foggy disc. “Now what?” She yawned. “Any chance of rescue soon?”
Lee shook his head. “Not until the storm’s over. May be a day, may be a week. Our exit’s blown shut too, I see.”
The crevice by which they had entered was sealed again, and a rounded ramp of sand led down to the dome’s uneven floor. Lee led the way to this and slid and stumbled down it, the girl trailing.
“Might as well hole up in the ruins,” he advised. “Maybe we can seal out some of the dust so our hand pumps will not clog so fast.”
Lois did not reply. She had withdrawn an arm from her suit’s inflated right sleeve and was munching at an oval bar that looked like candy. Lee jerked at her other arm, making her drop the remaining fragment.
“That’s emergency ration,” he said sternly, “food for a week. You’re going to be sorry.”
“Yah!” spat out the girl, grimacing angrily at him.
Suddenly she doubled over, her face paling and yellowing to a hideous green hue. For several minutes she was violently sick, the cramped confines of her helmet and pressure suit but multiplying the discomforts of a cramping disgorging stomach.
After a time she was better, and she smothered a smile as she glared at him. He headed again toward the oval doorway of a rounded tower of seamless yellowed plastic, the same material of which the enormously thick skin of the dome was constructed.
Inside, a vast, high-ceilinged chamber opened. And here the light seemed to have brightened, perhaps because the dust cloud was thinned. Lee uncapped his solar torch, cutting its radiance to less than normal noontime illumination.
Vast murals, their colors bright and fresh and the glistening protective coating of diamond-hard transparency unmarred by the centuries, covered the inner walls. Lee blinked his eyes, startled, as he saw familiar animals and vegetation, not of Mars, but of Earth! And then he recalled the legends of the savage natives of the polar waterways, stories of great ships crossing to Earth and Venus.
One wall depicted scenes of Earth; jungles, seas, and cultivated countrysides with hilltop castles and thatched huts of stone. One figure was that of a mailclad warrior astride a masked and hooded horse. Here was that proof that Martians had visited Earth during the Middle Ages, this and the relief maps just below the murals.
The other wall represented scenes on Venus, recognizable to Lee, although he had never been there. Froglike natives, Butrads, he saw, and the ever-present aquatic growth of thidin vines. The paintings were as lifelike and colorful as three-dimensional photographs.
“This must have been old Raba Dagan’s headquarters, Lois,” he said, turning to the pale-faced girl.
They were now near the further end of the lofty hall, where twin oval ports stood invitingly open. The right hand door opened into a smaller room, its walls also decorated with pictures. Lois stepped inside and Lee followed.
Sudden emptiness opened in the pit of Lee’s stomach; it was like a long-continued drop into a mine-shaft. The oval opening into the outer chamber gave way to a blurring succession of rock strata and black galleries.
Lois so far forgot her dislike for Lee that she clung to his arm in terror. “We’re falling!” she screamed. “Stop us! Stop us!”
“Don’t worry,” he told her, “this is probably an automatic elevator of some sort.”
/> As though to confirm his words the “room” slowed and stopped opposite another oval doorway. They stepped out into a dreary cavern of a room that was lightless save for Lee’s solar torch. For another ten seconds or so the platform remained opposite and then it sank away smoothly into the depths.
Only a faintly luminous mistiness, smokily brown and falling steadily, was to be seen in the square shaft.
“Now what, vac brain?” demanded the girl. “We’re stuck here maybe a mile below the surface.”
“The other shaft should have a current of this same inert gas rising upward,” Lee suggested. “Let’s see.”
They took the four steps necessary to reach the other opening, looking down into a vacancy like that they had just quitted. Lois laughed jeeringly. Apparently her stomach was returning to normal, and she was again her usual disagreeable self.
“Disappointed, Grandpa ?” she asked.
Lois was possibly nineteen or twenty and Lee was twenty-five. It was his prematurely snow-white hair that earned this nickname, a freakish result of a glancing bullet in one of the unending affrays between miners of SML and his own company. He grinned. After all he’d called her Louse, first.
“Nup. Be another platform along soon.”
A minute passed. Lois sniffed triumphantly. And then a bulky something came sliding softly up from below and came to rest in the shaft. Its oblong entrance almost exactly matched that of the mysterious barren chamber.
“Going up, Miss Ban ton?” asked Lee. “No charge.”
Lois shook her head violently. “No I Let’s keep going down and see what’s there. We might find a treasure or mines.”
There was new respect in Lee’s voice as he agreed. It took a certain amount of courage, or bravado, to go downward into the unknown when a way to the surface was waiting. Despite her words her voice had quavered a trifle at the end.
A moment later they were aboard a platform in the other shaft and dropping steadily downward.