Martians. He wanted to sleep late, fish and rest in the sun.
“Three tons of G-Agent,” Engstrand said softly.
The rocket would hit Mars. Countless other rockets would fly out of it, each directed, each exploding and casting out its deadly sprays and gases of the G-agent.
“Within an hour,” Morgenson said, “after the rocket hits, there won’t be a bug, a germ, a piece of lichen left alive. Unless somebody sends it there, there won’t be anything alive on Mars again for a long time.”
“I’d still like to know what kind of life it is,” Schauffer said.
Michelson looked at the floor. “Now we’ll never know."
“But we’ll stay alive to speculate about it, and some day maybe they’ll figure how to get a man across space. And then we’ll know what died up there.”
There was a chance, Michelson knew, but a very slim one, that something might go wrong. The rocket might crash on the Earth somewhere. But no one else probably even dared to think about it. None of them were as old nor as tired as Michelson. A lot of people would die. Just in case the Mar-, tians might have something in the way of gases as deadly as the G-agent, the population had been supplied with hypos of antidote, gas masks, and suiting. But still, so many people would die. However such a thing was very highly improbable.
They drank again.
Engstrand put his hand on Michelson’s bowed shoulders. “Again you’ve done a magnificent job, old friend.” His voice was low. “Three weeks ahead of schedule. That time advantage may have saved us all. God knows what the Martians are getting ready to send now!”
“One thing we can be thankful for,” Schauffer said. “No spies. No worry about security, no saboteurs. Of course the Martians are lucky too—or were—in that respect.” He looked thoughtfully into his glass. “The Martians did us a favor really. They created world unity. A psychologist couldn’t have predicted it. But think of that—since the war with Mars, no human being has ever tried to sabotage anything directed at defeating the Martians!”
“It’s natural enough. This time it’s humans against—well— God knows what! But nothing human.” Engstrand poured himself another drink. “No human being has had anything to identify with in the enemy’s camp. You’re right, Major. In a way, the Martians did us a favor. And now we’U do them one—one last favor. They’re too damn evil to live, and they’ll sure be glad, somewhere in their guts, to be finished off!”
Schauffer turned to Michelson, and grinned. “Where’s Mary?”
“She wasn’t feeling well,” Michelson said. "I left her out at Lake House.” He stood up. Quietly, he said. "Good-bye, gentleman. I’m going home, to Lake House. I’m tired.” “Aren’t you going to watch the rocket blast?”
Michelson shook his head. “I think not.”
They all shook hand with Michelson. “Write us, will you, Mike,” Engstrand said. “Let us hear from you often.”
“Of cqurse,” Michelson said. At the door he turned, an old man, stooped by years of devotion to more and more deadly chemicals. “If you need me, I’ll still be at Lake House.”
He went out of the observation room and stood for a moment looking at the elevator that waited with an open mouth. He had always been with G-2. Back when they had started over again in the ruins of World War III he had been in charge of various space-going projects aimed at a quick defeat of the Eurasians, and this always included the latest complex developments in bacteriological warfare, and the use of liquid and atmospheric gases. He had sent the first New Era test rocket into space, the first one to the moon, the first ones to Mars.
Instruments far in advance of the original telemetering and servomotor devices, had measured temperature, radiation, chemical makeup of atmosphere, minerals, various field effects, measured and catalogued all life, even to its cultural development, then sent back their measurements and evaluations on ultra-high-frequency to ground observers on Earth.
He had sent out the first rockets with monkeys, rats, guinea pigs and birds to test the effects of alien conditions on living organisms. No human being had ever survived. They stopped trying.
But the Martians had been carrying on a program much the same. They had been frightened. They had sent deadly rockets. The war had begun, fantastic push-button operation between worlds millions of miles apart. This Earth rocket loaded with three tons of G-agent was what the UN hoped would be the last retaliatory gesture in a number of years of interspatial bickering. For it was also evident now that no Martian could get across space to Earth.
Michelson sighed, stepped into the elevator and started home. Home to rest, fish, lie in the sun. Home to Mary who kept him occupied and entertained in his loneliness.
But Mary had not been ill. She had not stayed at Lake House either. She had been aboard Michelson’s helio, hiding in the luggage compartment. She had the key to Michelson’s office and she was there.
But her head ached now. She hadn’t slept for two days, thinking about what had to be done. Her head ached worse now as the wave directives came again and again, bringing new bursts of coercive pain with any deep emotional hint of possible resistance.
Now, in fact, there was doubt in Mary’s mind.that there was any desire to resist the directives, or if there ever had been. Now even those lingering wonderings about the possibility of doubt brought pain.
Better just ta act. And it was time.
The clock gave her exactly one hour, she knew, to destroy the central building sector, the heart of the giant UN Research Foundation, and also wreck the rocket due to blast foT Mars. She had heard Daddy Mike say what time the rocket would blast if he got the G-Agent loaded on schedule, and she knew he had done that.
There was little if any caution exercised at the Foundation. It had been well established by years of precedent that humans just didn’t sabotage ah effort directed at aliens. Especially Martians who, time and time again, had almost brought destruction to earth in innumerable unexpected ways. Added to that was the fact that no Martian could get across the void to take care of it directly, any more than an Earth-man could to ^lars for a similar purpose.
Mary had the advantage of this freedom. But the immediacy with which she could be identified by all the personnel about the Foundation might be a handicap as well as a possible advantage. She would have to exercise extreme caution herself.
The directives had stopped. She was on her own as long as she didn’t resist the preceding orders. From this point on it was strictly Mary’s responsibility.
She checked the electrodoor. No one was approaching Daddy Mike’s office. She wasn’t sure whether or not he would return to his office before going to Lake House. She wondered what he would do, how sad he would be, to find her gone.
From behind the rearmost, long unused files in the filing cabinet, she took the capsule of G-Agent. There was enough of the nerve gas in the ten ounce container to destroy everyone in the building, within half an hour after it was thrown into the ventilator shaft.
She went to the wall, pressed the button, and the opening was revealed by a sliding panel. Without hesitation, she tossed in the capsule of G-Agent. Dimly, she remembered how she had collected it, painfully over a period of months, drop by drop and stored it in the special non-corrosive alloy of the container. She had access to all of Daddy’s laboratory equipment.
The container would explode in half an hour. Thirty minutes to get outside the buildings and over to the pits and the lethal rocket.
She felt nothing but a kind of depersonalized tension of responsibility as she removed her hat and took the small deadly neutron beam gun from the tiny sling she had fixed inside. She put the hat back on and tied the ribbon under her chin. The hat had caused much amused reaction from those friends of Daddy Mike who had become accustomed t<3 her being constantly with the old man.
She ran into the bright shine of the tubular metal hall. She hoped with a flash of unexpected feeling that Daddy Mike would leave the building before the G-Agent was activated.
He loved her. Her heart throbbed painfully as she remembered how much Daddy loved her. How he had held her on his lap and stroked her hair and philosophized endlessly to her, not caring that she was not supposed to understand such complexity. But sharing this as he did all things with her in his aging loneliness.
She crouched there in the hall and thought of that, how she would love Daddy as Daddy loved her. Except that she was incapable of love. Dimly she remembered that once, long, very long ago, there had been a kind of spontaneous expression of physical desire, and sensuous pleasure, from the contact with others. But since then there had been the experiments, endless, too painful to recall. The bursting of blood and the repair, the brain slicing and the laying open of cells, and the sewing up. Years, a lifetime, a forevemess of pain, and the apparent making good as new again. But the scars were too deep too show, and too deep to mend.
Such pain for so long, the cold objective testing, had killed any capacity for love. Mary was convinced of that.
She held the gun to her left side and ran in silence down the glowing tube.
An overweight guard in his brown UN uniform eased around the curve in the tube and stood with his back to her. It was a good place for him to walk what was to him a useless beat. There was nothing to guard against but boredom. This was the building’s left wing and fairly isolated, and he could merely stand here and wait for the far end of his shift.
She slid along the wall. Her feet moved with a vague whispering silence, the silence of unconscious stealth. But then the guard turned to place his heel more comfortably on the inward-sloping bottom of the tube. And he saw her.
He grinned. “Mary!” he said. Everyone knew her. And everyone loved Mary. “What are you doing out here?”
He could never guess the truth, she thought. Even if someone told you, you would never believe it.
The good humor spontaneously beginning to bubble from the fat guard was changed into a kind of gasping cough of unbelieving fear. Desperate words filtered out through his teeth. A white line moved around his lips. His hands reached out and hung suspended.
“Marv—Oh God, Mary—the gun, that’s—that’s a real gun, Mary—”
The charge was light. It contacted the Guard’s face just above the chin. It dissolved instantly all of his face and most of his brain. It left only a smeared shell of bone behind, like a bowl tipped up.
She ran on down the slightly curving tube. They were never never so'kind to me. For he is free from the directives that pull and push and pry and pick at the brain. He is free from pain.
When this was done, she would be free. As free as the guard.
Once near the rocket, the long task would be ended. She would then theoretically be free from the complex thought which her body was incapable of handling without pain. Free from the pain of an imbalanced body and nervous system. And free of the coercion bands, the directive waves that could sometimes rip the cells apart.
She pressed the down button of the elevator. At that moment the high scream of the alarm sirens shrieked in her ears. She cowered a moment. It came from all around. It bathed her in painful sound. It became a pervading throb that seemed to come from the metal everywhere.
They had discovered the guard already. That was one of those unpredictable elements. Purely chance that anyone would have passed there just after the guard was killed. That could be the only reason for the alarml
She had to get outside the buildings. She had to get over there near enough to the rocket to blast the firing tubes! She wasn’t even off the tenth floor.
There was nothing to fear except failure. Death itself would be a welcome if not a preferred kind of freedom for her. But if she failed and lived, there would be torture. And the misty worlds of pain, not only in the labs but from the coercion directives. As far as she knew, perhaps the directive rocket buried somewhere high in the pines near the lake would contain even more duties for her, if this failed. Except that now she would be known and they would hunt her down and—but so far they did not know who had killed the guard.
No, if they caught her they wouldn’t kill her. That was sure enough. There would be the labs again. They would probe, cut her open, try to find out why. She had long been a living instrument for finding out why.
As the elevator dropped, the walls pulsed with the screams of the alarms.
She had one advantage she realized that she had been doubtful of earlier. She was Mary, and everyone knew and loved her. Though it was definite now that a saboteur was loose inside the Foundation, there was nothing so far to connect Mary with such a fact.
She concealed the gun in the sling inside her cap, and tied the ribbon firmly under her chin. When the elevator reached the first floor, the panel slid back. She was tensed to run out, but a group of Foundation guards were running for the opening. Their faces were twisted into various expressions of tense terror. They were all inside a gigantic gas capsule, they knew that, one of terrible potential lethality. Evidently it was suspected that the G-Agent might be used.
Mary ran out, turned, leaped for the narrowing gap between the guards and the arched opening that led into the court. Most of the guards scarcely noticed her at all, and if they did they evidently figured it was hardly anything to cause diversion from the awful emergency.
But one of them, a man named Jonothan who had often caressed her and expressed his love for her, smiled. It was a kind of conditioned reaction that broke the frozen fear of his mouth and cheeks. He leaned toward her, his hand outstretched.
"Mary—this is no place for you, baby. You’d better come back up with us.”
The invisible mouth of the intercom spoke. "The saboteur may be heading for the rocket which must blast on schedule. Already deadly gases may have been released inside the Foundation. Sections five and six will establish instant cordon around the rocket pits. Anyone not obeying security instructions will be shot instantly. Anyone entering or leaving the Foundation buildings or grounds without proper identification will be shot. All guards will immediately put on masks, and protective suiting, and will prepare antidote injections. Sections seven and eight will search the main wing. Sections nine and ten—"
“Come on, John!” someone yelled from the elevator. Kits were falling open. Masks were unfolding. Suit capsules were exploding under compressed air, and the special suits were breaking out in fluffs of green.
“Hey, for God’s sake, Johnny, come on!” The voices were ragged with fear.
A warning would also, Mary knew, be going out to all civilians made susceptible immediately by inversion, movements of predictable winds. But Mary knew that many would die, many many would die, when the rocket crashed. If she could succeed.
Only for that inevitable percentage who would die in great pain did she have any recognizable sympathy. She had a duty, else she herself would experience greater and greater pain.
“You’d better come along with us, Mary baby,” Jonothan said. He reached for her, while the others yelled at him. The intercom itself was toned with terror that was in the walls and in every man’s eyes and his voice and the stance of his body.
Mary giggled. She started a kind of disarming dance. But this time it did not excite the laughter and general response it usually did.
Her stomach turned sickeningly at she felt the release, the ribbon fluttering and the cap falling. The thud and the bright shining spin of the gun over the mosaicked floor. The sling had broken.
She danced toward it.
Jonothan yelled, but the voices of the others snapped off into a pulsing silence. Then an incredulous murmur trickled over the floor.
"Mary—what are you doing with that? Mary—stop—wait, Mary—”
Desperately, Jonothan dived to the floor. He clawed. He kicked with his frantic feet for traction on the floor. He screamed at her as he pawed to reach the gun. But she leaped over him and turned with the gun ready.
Jonothan was slowly standing up. His face was white. His lips moved. His throat trembled. But no words came out
.
Behind him, a voice shivered. “Give us the gun, Mary.”
Pleading, cajoling, shaking, other voices joined.
“Mary—give us the gun now!”
“Please, Mary, you can kill people—”
“You just give Uncle Patrick the gun now, honey, and—"
She was backing away toward the arched opening. Beyond that were the gardens, the fountains, the pretty landscape of the courts. Beyond that were the helio landings, and then the pits. It wasn’t so far.
Jonothan was trying to smile at her as he reached again for the gun. Behind him, the others stood immobile and without any more words. The intercom had words, but no one was listening now.
She fired a much heavier charge than that against the guard on the tenth floor. Between Jonothan’s outstretched arms which had held her with love, his torso and head disappeared. His arms fell and the legs toppled like parts of a mannequin. Beyond the vacancy that had been Jonothan, several others tried to draw their guns. All were abruptly reduced to jellied and smoking anonymity. Mary ran for the courts.
She heard herself giggling without recognizable meaning as she ran under the rainbowed fountains, leaped the flower hedges, and skimmed over the carefully designed green of lawn patches.
She still had that initial advantage. No one still could logically connect her with what was happening. So far there were no living witnesses. At least it was unlikely that there were.
She was a little behind her schedule and every second was now important. Where before there had been allowed some margin for error, now there was none.
She wanted to get a helio. She wanted to get as far up wind and as far into the air as possible when the G-Agent began drifting over the land. She wanted to live for the reasons she had thought about before, many times. She couldn’t say that her life was important to her now any more than it ever had been. It had never been her life, not in her memory. Always she had been the instrument of others. She could blast the rocket back to earth from inside a helio, and keep on from there to some degree of personal safety.
The Earth In Peril Page 12