The Earth In Peril

by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

That was the plan.

  As she ran she wondered with a kind of dull throbbing hope if after this task was fulfilled, she would be free of the Martian directives. She didn’t know. She could only hope.

  Long after the high degree of intelligence she now possessed came to her, (that too having been something imposed to increase her effectiveness as an instrument) she had prayed to be free of pain and imprisonment. Even where there was not the capacity to formulate any awareness of her merely being used, or of being a prisoner of others, she had felt the primitive cellular discontent that had now become open and passionate desire for freedom.

  Maybe after this was done, she would be free for the first time that she could really remember. What she could do with it, where she could go, where she could hide with it, whether she could even live to enjoy it, if in fact she could enjoy something she had never had, was really not of much consequence to her as she ran and thought about it. Even one brief flare of freedom would be its own exultant reward.

  Figures made a scrambling chaos of unreality out of the area which usually displayed such a paradoxical atmosphere of quiet peacefulness. Sirens shrieked. Helios hummed and hovered nervously, then darted off in angled desperation through the slanting rays of dusk. Evidently there were a fortunate few whose emergency obligations were taking them elsewhere. And a few others, undoubtedly, who were escaping in guilt-ridden cowardice from an intolerable suspense.

  She jumped, slid the cowl back, crawled into the plastoid bubble before the two-seated passenger helio. The controls were simple. She had watched Daddy Mike many times as he commuted to and from Lake House. Jokingly he had let her sit on his lap and play with the controls, not being able even to suspect what she was really learning, and what the end result would be.

  As the helio whirred to lifting life, Mary did not bother with altitude. That would come later. She sent the helio skimming low over the courts and the landing plots, over the monuments and fountains, toward the pits.

  Warnings would be going out across the decentralized populations of the nation. Terror would be creeping over the land as the G-Agent would creep over it soon, very soon now.

  One thing she was still sure of—no one knew, or could even suspect, the identity of the saboteur they were searching for.

  She heard the gasp, then a sort of whimpering moan, and that changed even as she turned .with tense sharpness, to hoarse and spasmodic laughter.

  She seemed geared to any emergency, so that nothing, such as this, could be a surprise. A surprise would mean temporary indecision. She could not afford that. She turned, keeping the controls level, and raised the gun.

  A man was on his knees, his hands gripping one another. His eyes and teeth protruded, and saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth. Evidently he was a civilian employee, a clerk with his anonymous brown suit and his shaven head. Someone who had no strong identification with the plant except that it was a job, it was security. So now that it had turned into a giant gas capsule, he had only wanted to get away from it. His eyes kept bulging as they stared at Mary. They didn’t believe in Mary. He was trying to laugh away what wasn’t logical. But he couldn’t laugh it away.

  “I was told to lay off the neuro-tabs,” he whispered. ‘The medic told me I’d start flipping—flip, flip—he said—if I took too many neuro-tabs. He was right. I’ve flipped. I’m gone." Then the laughter that was not laughter really broke out all over him like a rash, and it filled the interior of the helio. “I’ve run away from my job when the alarm sounded!” He started screaming. “I can’t go back anyway. No job—hell— I’m finished no matter what!”

  He bent forward and groped for the button that would open the rear helio door. Mary lowered the gun, hoping this man’s own madness would make it easier for her. Adjusting the blast so that it would kill him without releasing too much deadly kinetic energy within so small a space would be a delicate thing. It was highly dangerous.

  He turned while the wind sucked at him and flapped his brown suit around his bony legs. He blinked slowly at Mary and tears ran down his cheeks. “Even if you’re not real, you’re the last I’ll see, the last thing. So good-bye!"

  The air pulled him abruptly out into its deceptive nowhere. For an instant, she felt drawn to his lonely pathway of escape. She wanted to say after him, "Good-bye," but she couldn’t.

  As the helio swung to the left, the rocket lifted with strange slowness, heavy and steady, on its column of fire. Reality compressed to only the helio and a narrowly restricted line between the gun and the lifting rocket.

  A few other helios moved in the area, but none nearly this close to the rocket. Observers would know. Once the thing was done, she wondered if she could possibly escape. They would know that the destructive blast came from this helio.

  A section of the cowling slid back. The helio slowed, hung suspended. Mary aimed slightly upward. She felt the automatic sight adjuster clicking delicately, the slight tug as the mags tilted the barrel directly into the meticulous balance of the firing jets.

  As she fired, she sent the helio straight up at maximum speed and the cowling slid closed.

  This was the end of her assignment. The gun’s full charge had been exhausted. It was no longer of any use. She dropped it. She knew the hit had been direct. A glance showed the rocket already curving in a terrible kind of deceptive gentleness away to the right over New Washington. Soon its parabola would become a screaming plunge. Nothing could divert it. To try to destroy it in the air would mean nothing, for in any case, its deadly tons of G-Agent would be spread on the winds over the land.

  The Foundation and everything in it would, by now be thoroughly contaminated by the G-Agent she had released inside. It would take a long time to decontaminate, to rebuild. And a lot of people were going to die, would be dying now. The antidote would save many from death. It would preserve others short of death in a state she could not envy, for to her it would be far worse than dying.

  But Mary could hardly concern herself with the wrecking of the Foundation, or the people who would die. Her con-

  cem was intense—to escape, to hide. And to know for certain whether or not, now that her task was done, the agonizing coercive directions from the Martian rocket would continue.

  So far there was no hint of this. She only wanted to get away. There were no invisible fingers probing in there, none of the drawing to tautness that had so many times ended in torture. Maybe somehow, the directive rocket with its intricate mechanism was delicately equipped to know when her job was successfully done.

  She would soon know.

  The helio whined with strain. A shiver racked the metal. A scream burst from Mary’s lips. She concentrated on her hands, forced the controls, drove the helio at maximum speed, trying to head across the park reserve toward the river and the great National Forest area.

  But already they were in close pursuit. Figures were running in all directions far below.

  The stars were breaking out and it was night now except for the glare of the exploding rocket far to the left. Now below the forest area shifted into view and the winding shine of the river.

  Night was the best time for the spreading of the G-Agent. Inversion was right. The stuff swept along close to the ground which cooled more slowly than the air. That, too, had been planned. The timing was right. Everything had been worked out right.

  But now—what was to happen to her?

  She felt none of the probing demands from the direction rocket. She felt not even a hint of them. Perhaps they had gone away forever and she was free. Free! FREE!

  They wanted her alive, or her helio, with her as part of it, would have been disintegrated long before this. She could understand why. The worst that she could do she had done. There was no need in killing her to prevent more sabotage.

  They wanted her alive. They wanted to know who she was, what she was, what organization or organizations she represented, if any. They had no idea who she was. Or at least it seemed unlikely yet that they had found out. Pe
rhaps they even thought she was a Martian. Whatever they thought, they didn’t know. She realized how desperately they had to know.

  The helio dropped straight down toward the deceptive softness of the forest sea. The wind sighed around the helio as the green darkness loomed up, seeming to rush up from all sides, its softness changing suddenly into the harshness of jagged limbs and bulging trunks. She clung to the dead controls as though there were some kind of promise in them, some solidity. But everything dropped from under, her, a sickening dislocation, and she clung as though she had no support, as though the earth itself were falling away. .

  The tearing impact was like a thousand echos' of her terrors.

  And the forest and the wet shine of harsh wood that tore metal and ripped like flashes of hot light, the blanket of crushing leaves, and the cooling shadows rushed smothering in around her.

  Lights fingered through the leaves. She could hear footsteps, stealthy and invisible, flowing among the lights. The lights moved around, streaming in from all directions, like the shifting bars of a tightening cage.

  She wasn’t dead! When she moved slightly in the twisted shine of metal, a beam of light glanced from it in a blinding glare. She felt the pain from her tom leg. Her right side seemed crushed. She felt the hotness of blood burning her ribs.

  She heard voices murmuring through wet leaves, caught the slight movement of protective green suiting and the shining leer of gas masks. They were far upwind now from where the rocket had crashed to spew out its lethal loads.

  She didn’t know as she squirmed desperately through the jagged hole in the metal, whether or not one of the many subsidiary rockets had exploded up wind from this location.

  It was something to look forward to.

  She tried to suppress the whimpering moan as the tom leg scraped over the metal. Then she dropped to the damp leaves and crouched there and wondered which way to go. The light beams moved in, crisscrossed now like a tightening wire mesh. She crawled, digging her fingers into the leaves. The leaves whispered a call to her from above.

  The light swung. Its beam flooded full and blindingly in her face. A gun came into view over the edge of the beam and feet smashed toward her through the brush.

  Her only weapon was the oldest one of all. She sprang up. The beam flashed upward in a wavering circle as her hands closed on the man’s throat. Her weight carried him scrambling back. His heels caught. He fell. His hands stabbed around with the gun as his breath choked off and his muscles worked with panicky power. With her left hand she dug into his windpipe. She released the other hand and tore the mask away, ripping the tough fiber like rotten cloth.

  She flung the flashbearn away, dragged the guard into the brush. Light beams slashed around as she crouched among the leaves. The man no longer struggled. When she took her hand away from his throat, he still did not struggle.

  A beam flashed full over her, held. Someone yelled wildly: "The guy who fell out of the helio! He was right. Oh God—he wasn’t crazy!”

  "Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot, you idiot!”

  “I tell you he was right! It’s Mary! The man was right—”

  “Don’t shoot! That’s an order!”

  She leaped up, caught the limb. She went on up among the thick sweet concealment of a thousand leaves. She swung into the next tree, then the next, faster and faster she moved. The leaves skimmed past her face.

  Her breath came in ecstatic gasps as the light beams faded behind, and the damp dark freedom of the trees spread away in all directions.

  She knew which way to go. And she was going there a long time before she even realized the fact. She wondered vaguely for a moment then how it was that she knew where to go, for it was a long way, over the river, and through the hills and the forest.

  Guards in helios whirred everywhere in the night clouds. Cars whined through the narrow roads around her. A net formed through the forest. A net of men, guns, lights, cars, helios, and many kinds of detectors.

  For what seemed much longer than it was, her strength held.

  It enabled her to pierce the net again and again when they were sure she was trapped. She went over it, under it, through it, part of the thick night in the trees and the brush. The river was the worst, for she hated water.

  "But she could no longer climb through the comparatively safe corridors of the trees. She could no longer run. Air sucked between her teeth. One leg dragged behind her as she crawled slowly through the dark, along the lake, up the winding path. She could only crawl. Finally crawling became a hitching dragging effort that slowed with each attempt.

  Blood and dirt had formed a sticky mud over her legs and ribs and chest. Damp leaves stuck to her, and the bitter rocks of the path leading up to the cabin had cut her flesh. There were lights in the windows of Lake House. The windows and the door were open to the warm night. Beyond the cabin she could see Daddy Mike’s helio on the. landing..

  How quiet and peaceful it is, she thought, here by the lake in the forest in the night. The moon moved from behind the clouds and spread a warm golden mist over the ground. Frogs sang from the lake below. And from all around came the insistent humming and stirrings and singings of life, but all muted and peaceful and subdued to make the night peaceful and quiet.

  She dug her fingers into the rock of the path. Her body dragged on a little at a time. She whimpered again, but not very loud. Her body flattened in a weariness that was only a little above defeat. Her face pressed to the cool stone.

  "Daddy,” the inexpressible thought was a whisper in her mind. "Help me, Daddy. You love me—”

  She remembered the warmth inside, the old man with his warm laughter, taking her on his lap, caressing her, swinging her up on his shoulders and walking with her along the lake in the evening. She thought of the old man who loved her.

  The thought gave here enough strength to reach the open door. She lay there sighing in her chest, her face pressed against the wood.

  She raised her eyes to the interior of the cabin.

  She tried to move nearer, tried to lift her hand up into the shaft of light. She wanted to call out, say something. Only a low inaudible moan strained through her clenched teeth.

  She rolled half over. Inside then, she saw Daddy Mike. He was sitting near the big radio panel, his head bowed and resting on his hands. On the other side, through the open door, she could see the gleam of glass and metal from the big laboratory. A spasm went through her. She could hear the sounds of caged life in there.

  Lights blinked on the radio panel. Michelson slowly raised his head and twisted a dial. “Yes,” he said. She could hardly hear him. He seemed very tired, more tired than she had ever seen him. And much older too. Old and thin and tired.

  “Mike—”

  “Hello, Engstrand.”

  “I’ve got Guards on the way up there, Mike! Has that damn thing showed up yet?” .

  “No—not yet.”

  "I don’t know why I never figured it would try to get back there. But that’s where it’s heading, we’re sure of it now. Listen, Mike—if it does get up there before my men do, remember, don’t kill it! Do anything you can think of, but keep it there and don’t kill it! Apparently it’s wounded anyway!”

  “Yes, yes,” Michelson said. He brushed at his eyes.

  Mary lay there, half inside the open cabin door, imprisoned by her inability to speak. She stared into the laboratory, then at Michelson.

  “We’re set back at least five years, Mike! It’s a hellish thing! But who could have anticipated a thing like that?”

  “I guess nobody could.”

  “We’re getting things under control, but it’s hell down here! We don’t know yet how many people have died.”

  “How could it be,” Michelson said. “I’ve tried to figure out—”

  Engstrand’s voice was loud. It seemed to Mary that he was right there in the cabin with Michelson. “It’s obvious what happened, Mike! Those first experimental rockets we sent up there. The damn Martians got hold of
one of those chimps and worked on it. Sent it back and we didn’t suspect the difference. They made it intelligent enough to plan and execute this whole thing! They must have put one of their own brains into it or something. Only a damn Martian would think of a thing like that!”

  Michelson’s head raised quickly. From the side, -Mary could see his eyes suddenly widen. Then he wiped his hand across his lips.

  The hand trembled. "Of course,” he whispered then. “But who could ever have suspected it?”

  “That’s the only explanation,” Engstrand said. “We’ve got to have that chimp alive! We can leam plenty from it. We’ll cut in there and put that brain under observation . . .”

  “I’ll do what I can, if Mary shows up here,” Michelson said. "But those Guards should get here!”

  ‘‘They will, Mikel They will! They’re on their way.”

  Mary dug her fingers into the floor. She moved slightly, and one hand fell with a slight thud. Michelson looked down. He kept on staring. His bps moved without saying anything a few times, then he stammered. “Engstrand—she’s here!”

  “What? What?”

  “She’s here—here on the floor. She just—just crawled in through the door!”

  “Don’t kill her! Get a hypo or something—”

  Michelson slowly stood up. “There’s no danger,” he finally said, still looking down at her. “She’s wounded all right. She looks almost dead now."

  “Don’t let her die!” Engstrand’s voice filled the room. “You’ve got to keep her alive!”

  “All right, I’ll do what I can,” Michelson said. "You’d better come up now. Bring the medics. We may have to work on her fast.”

  “I will. I’m on my way!”

  She wanted to say no. She wanted to scream out no and tel] him it was all wrong. If the Martians had given her the ability to speak, she could have explained everything long before this, and they could have helped her, and none of this would have happened. She could explain how she was forced to kill and destroy.

  Michelson backed away from her, haltingly, then ran into the lab. He came back out and knelt down. He had a long hypodermic needle. The needle came down. It looked bigger and bigger.