The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  • • • •

  Oh, I knew just the way Horn's mind would work. Steal a body; smash the machine; get away. Could we trace him? Impossible; there was no test in the world, no fingerprints, no eye-retina charts, no blood-type classifications that could distinguish John Smith from Horn inhabiting John Smith. It was the obvious thing to do; it had occurred to me at once.

  Van Pelt had gone blundering in, conquering his cowardice. His objective was to try to stop Horn, I supposed, but what was the effect of his mad rush into the laboratory? Why, to furnish Horn with a body! And if one was not enough, there would be others; for there were the men of my own detachment, standing guard, going about their duties; it would not be impossible for Horn to lure one inside. He would not wait. No, for the chance that his own body would wear out on him in a moment, any moment, was very great--old, worn, and now subject to the pounding of a new hope and excitement, it might collapse like the bombed-out hulk of a barracks, at the lightest touch.

  So I hurried--Into the building, through the long dark halls, into the room where the big polycloid quasitron stood--

  And I was too late.

  I tripped over a human body, stumbled, fell, the gun spinning out of my hand. I scrambled to my hands and knees, touching the body--still warm, but not very warm. Dr. Horn! His castoff cocoon, abandoned!

  And before me capered and screeched the figure that once had been Van Pelt, holding a weapon. 'Too late!' he cried. 'Too late, Colonel Windermere!' Van Pelt! But it was not Van Pelt that lived in that fat soft corpse today, I knew; for the Horn-in-Van Pelt held a gun of his own in one hand, and in the other a bar of metal. And with it he was bashing, bashing the polycloid quasitron! Bam, and showers of sparks flew from it; crash, and it began to glow, sag, melt.

  And he had the gun. It was a very difficult situation.

  But not hopeless! For we were not alone.

  Next to my fallen gun lay another body. Not dead, this one; unconscious. It was Corporal McCabe, struck down with a blow to the head.

  But he was quivering slightly. Consciousness was not far away.

  'Stop!' I cried strongly, getting to my knees. The Horn Van Pelt turned to stare at me. 'Stop, don't wreck the machine! More depends on it than you can possibly realize, Dr. Horn. It isn't only a matter of your life--trust me for that, Dr. Horn, I shall see that you have bodies, fine bodies, to hold your mind as long as you want it. But think of national defence! Think of the safety of our country! And think of your sacred duty to science!' I cried, thinking of my general's stars.

  And Corporal McCabe twitched and stirred.

  I stood up. Horn's carrier, Van Pelt, dropped his iron bar in alarm, switched the gun to his right hand, stared at me. Good! Better at me than at McCabe. I said: 'You must not destroy the machine, Dr. Horn! We need it.'

  'But it is destroyed already,' the little fat figure said stupidly, gesturing.

  'And I am not--'

  Splat.

  McCabe's bullet caught him at the base of the skull. The brain that had evicted Van Pelt to house a Horn now housed no one; the blubbery little figure was dead.

  And I was raging!

  'You fool, you idiot, you unutterable ass!' I screamed at McCabe. 'You killed him! Why did you kill him? Wing him, yes j injure him, break his leg, shoot the gun out of his hand. Any of those things, and still we could make him rebuild the machine ! But now he's dead, and the machine is gone!'

  And so, sadly, were my general's stars.

  The Corporal was looking at me with a most peculiar expression.

  I got hold of myself. A life's dream was gone, but there was no help for it now. Maybe the engineers could tinker and discover and rebuild--but, glancing at the wreck of the polycloid quasitron, I knew that was a dream.

  I took a deep breath.

  'All right, McCabe,' I said crisply. 'Report to your quarters. I'll talk to you later on. Right now I must phone the Pentagon and try to account for your blundering in this matter!'

  McCabe patted the gun fondly, put it on the floor and turned to go.

  'Just so, Lieutenant,' said Corporal McCabe.

  The Middle of Nowhere

  Just ahead of us we saw a cluster of smoke trees suddenly quiver, though there wasn't a whisper of a breeze, and begin to emit their clouds of dense yellow vapour from their branch-tips.

  'Let's get a move on, Will,' said Jack Demaree. His voice was thin and piercing, like the thin air all about us. 'It's going to get really hot here in the next twenty minutes.'

  The steel and glass town of Niobe was in sight, a quarter mile ahead,

  'Sure,' I said, and changed pace. We had been shambling along, as lazily as we could, in the effort-saving walk you learn in your first week on Mars. I stepped it up to the distance-devouring loose run that is only possible on a light-gravity planet like Mars.

  It is tough to have to run in a thin atmosphere. Your lungs work too hard; you feel as though every step is going to be your last. Hillary and Tensing found no harder going on Everest than the friendliest spot on the surface of Mars--except, of course, that by day the temperature is high, and the light gravity lets you stand effort that would otherwise kill you. But we hadn't much choice but to run. The smoke trees had passed their critical point, and the curious gelatinous sulphur compounds that served them for sap had passed into gas with the heat. When that happened, it meant that the sun was nearly overhead; and with only Mars's thin blanket of air to shield you, you do not stay out in the open at high noon.

  Not that we needed to see the smoke trees to know it was getting hot.

  A hundred and twenty in the shade it was, at least If there had been any shade.

  Demaree passed me with a spurt just as we reached the outskirts of Niobe, and I followed him into the pressure chamber of the General Mercantile office. We use helium in our synthetic atmosphere instead of Earth's nitrogen. So they gave us the pressure in one big ear-popping dose, without any danger of the bends we might have got from nitrogen. I swallowed and rubbed my ears; then we shed our sandcapes and respirators and walked into the anteroom.

  Keever looked out of his private office, his lean horse face sagging with curiosity.

  'Demaree and Wilson reporting,' I said. 'No sign of natives. No hostile action. No anything, in fact, except it's hot.'

  Keever nodded and pulled his head back in. 'Make out a slip,' his voice floated out. 'And you go out again in two hours. Better eat.'

  Demaree finished shaking the loose sand out of his cape into a refuse shaft and made a face. 'Two hours. Oh, lord.' But he followed me to the Company cafeteria without argument.

  The first thing we both did was make a dash for the drinking fountain. I won, and sopped up my fill while Demaree's dry and covetous breath seared the back of my neck. Sand patrol can dehydrate a man to the point of shock in three hours; we had been out for four. You see why we were taking it easy?

  We sat down in the little booth where we had put aside our card game with Bolt and Farragut a few hours before, and Marianna, without waiting for our order, brought coffee and sandwiches. Her eyes were hooded and unhappy; nerves, I thought, and tried to catch Demaree's eye. But it didn't work. He said in his customary slow and biting drawl, 'Why, Mary, you're getting stupider than ever. You took away our cards. I swear, girl, I don't know why the Company keeps you--'

  He trailed off, as she looked straight at him, and then away.

  'You won't need them,' she said after a moment. 'Farragut's patrol got it this morning,'

  • • • •

  Farragut and Bolt, Cortland and VanCaster. Four good men, and it was the same old story. They were a four man patrol, ranging far beyond the defence perimeter of Niobe; they had got caught too far from town before it got really hot, and it was a choice between using their cached sand cars or getting stuck in the noonday sun. They had elected to try the sand car; and something bright and hot had come flashing over a sand dune and incinerated men and car alike.

  The hell of it all was we never saw
the Martians.

  The earliest expeditions had reported that there wasn't any life on Mars at all, barring the tiny ratlike forms that haunted the sparse forests of the North. Then air reconnaissance had reported what turned out to be the Martians--creatures about the size of a man, more or less, that stood up like a man, that built villages of shacks like men. But air reconnaissance was severely limited by the thinness of Mars' air; helicopters and winged aircraft simply did not work, except at speeds so high that it was nearly impossible to make out details. It wasn't until one of the orbiting mother spacecraft, after launching its space-to-ground shuttle rockets and standing by for the return, spent a dozen revolutions mapping Mars' surface that the first really good look at Martians and their works was available. Really good? Well, let's say as good as you could expect, considering the mother ship was five hundred miles up.

  It was easy enough to send a surface party to investigate the Martian villages; but they were empty by the time Earthmen got there. Our sand cars could move faster than a Martian afoot, but it wasn't healthy to use a sand car. Somehow, what weapons the Martians found to use against us (and nothing resembling a weapon had ever been found in the deserted villages) seemed most effective against machines. It was flatly impossible that they should have electronic aimers to zero in on the radio-static from the machines; but if it had been possible, it would have been certain--for that was the effect

  I had plenty of time to think about all this as Demaree and I ate our glum and silent meal. There just wasn't anything much for us to say.

  Farragut and Bolt had been friends of ours.

  Demaree sighed and put down his coffee. Without looking at me he said, 'Maybe I ought to quit this job, Will.'

  I didn't answer, and he let it go. I didn't think he meant it but I knew how he felt.

  General Mercantile was a good enough outfit to work for, and its minerals franchise on Mars meant a terrific future for any young fellow who got in on the ground floor. That's what everybody said, back on earth, and that's what kept us all there: the brilliant future.

  That--and the adventure of developing a whole new world. Suppose those old Englishmen who went out for the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and the other Middle Ages monopolies must have had the same feeling.

  And the same dangers. Except that they dealt with an enemy they could see and understand; an enemy that, regardless of skin colour or tongue, was human. And we were fighting shadows.

  I tasted my coffee, and it was terrible. 'Hey, Mary--' I started, but I never finished.

  The alarm klaxon squawked horrifyingly in the cafeteria; we could hear it bellowing all over the GM building. We didn't wait to ask questions; we jumped up and raced for the door, Demaree colliding with me as we tried to beat each other through. He clutched at me and looked at me blankly, then elbowed me aside. Over his shoulder he said, 'Hey, Will--I don't really want to quit....'

  • • • •

  The news was: Kelcy.

  Kelcy was our nearest village, and the Martians had schlagged it.

  Demaree and I were the first in the Ready Room, and Keever snapped that much information at us while we were waiting the few seconds for the rest of the patrols to come racing in. They had been in other buildings and came leaping in still wearing their sand capes; they had had to race across the blindingly hot streets in the midday Martian glare. There were twelve of us altogether--the whole station complement, less the four who had been lost that morning. We were on the books as 'personnel assistants'; but what we really were was guards, the entire trouble-shooting force and peace-and-order officers for the town of Niobe.

  Keever repeated it for the others: 'They attacked Kelcy thirty minutes ago. It was a hit-and-run raid; they fired on all but one of the buildings, and every building was demolished. So far, they report twenty-six survivors.

  There might be a couple more--out in the open--that's all that are in the one building.' Out in the open--that meant no other survivors at all; it was just past high noon.

  Big, fair-haired Tom van der Gelt unsteadily shredded the plastic from a fresh pack of cigarettes and lit one. 'I had a brother in Kelcy,' he remarked to no one.

  'We don't have a list of survivors yet,' Keever said quickly. 'Maybe your brother's all right. But we'll find out before anybody else, because we're going to send a relief expedition.'

  We all sat up at that. Relief expedition? But Kelcy was forty miles away. We could never hope to walk it, or even run it, between the end of the hot-period and dark; and it made no sense for us to be out in the open at the dusk sandstorm. But Keever was saying:

  'This is the first time they've attacked a town. I don't have to tell you how serious it is. Niobe may be next. So--we're going to go there, and get the survivors back here; and see if we can find out anything from them. And because we won't have much time, we're going to travel by sand car.'

  There was a thoroughgoing silence in that room for a moment after that, while the echoes of the words 'sand car' bounced around. Only the echoes made it sound like 'suicide'.

  Keever coughed. 'It's a calculated risk,' he went on doggedly. 'I've gone over every skirmish report since the first landings, and never--well, almost never--have the Martians done more than hit and run. Now, it's true that once they hit a settlement the usual custom is to lay low for a while; and it's true that this is the first time they've come out against a town, and maybe they're changing their tactics. I won't try to tell you that this is safe. It isn't.

  But there's at least a chance that we'll get through--more of a chance, say, than the twenty-six survivors in Kelcy have if we don't try it.' He hesitated for a second. Then, slowly: 'I won't order any man to do it. But I'll call for volunteers. Anybody who wants to give it a try, front and centre.'

  Nobody made a mad rush to get up there--it still sounded like suicide to all of us.

  But nobody stayed behind. In under a minute, we were all standing huddled around Keever, listening to orders.

  We had to wait another forty minutes--it took time for the maintenance crew to get the sand cars out of their hideaway, where they'd been silently standing, not even rusting in the dry Martian air, since the first Earthman drew the connection between sand cars and Martian attack. Besides, it was still hot; and even in the sand cars it would help for the sun to be a few degrees past the meridian.

  There were fourteen of us in three cars--the patrols, Keever and Dr.

  Solveig. Solveig's the only doctor in Niobe, but Keever requisitioned him--

  we didn't know what we might find in Kelcy. Keever's car led the party; Demaree, Solveig and I were in the last, the smallest of the lot and the slowest.

  Still, we clipped off fifteen miles of the forty-mile trip in eight minutes by the clock. The cats were flapping until I was sure they would fly off the drive wheels, but somehow they held on as we roared over the rolling sand.

  It sounded as though the car was coming to pieces at every bump--a worrisome sound but not, I think, the sound that any of us was really worrying about. That sound was the rushing, roaring thunder of a Martian missile leaping at us over a dune; and none of us expected to hear it more than once....

  The way to Kelcy skirts what we call the 'Split Cliffs', which all of us regarded as a prime suspect for a Martian hangout. There had been expeditions into the Split Cliffs because of that suspicion; but most of them came back empty-handed, having found nothing but an incredible tangle.

  However, the ones that didn't come back empty-handed didn't come back at all; it was, as I say, a prime suspect. And so we watched it warily until it was almost out of sight behind us.

  Martians or no, the Split Cliffs is a treacherous place, with nothing worth an Earthman's time inside. Before Mars's internal fires died completely,' there were centuries of fierce earthquakes. The sections we called the Split Cliffs must have been right over a major fault. The place is cataclysmic; it looks as though some artist from the Crazy Years, Dali or Archipenko, had designed it, in a rage. S
harp upcroppings of naked, metallic rock; deep gashes with perfectly straight hundred-foot sides. And because there happens to be a certain amount of poisonously foul water deep underground there, the place is as heavily vegetated as anything on Mars. Some of the twisted trees reach as high as thirty feet above the ground--by Martian standards, huge!

  Even Demaree, at the wheel of the sand car, kept glancing over his shoulder at the Split Cliffs until we were well past them. 'I can't help it,' he said half-apologetically to me, catching my eyes on him. 'Those lousy trees could hide anything.'

  'Sure,' I said shortly. 'Watch what you're doing.' I wasn't in a mood for conversation--not only because of the circumstances, but because my nose was getting sore. Even in the car we wore respirators, on Keever's orders--I think he had an idea that a Martian attack might blow out our pressure before we could put them on. And three hours that morning, plus five hours each of the several days before, had left my nose pretty tender where the respirator plugs fit in.

  Dr. Solveig said worriedly, 'I agree with William, please. You have come very close to the other cars many times. If we should hit-'

  'We won't hit,' said Demaree. But he did concentrate on his driving; he maintained his forty metres behind the second car, following their lead as they sought the path of least ups-and-downs through the sand dunes towards Kelcy. It began to look, I thought as I watched the reddish sand streaming by, as though Keever's 'calculated risk' was paying off. Certainly we had come nearly twenty miles without trouble, and past the worst spot on the trip, the Split Cliffs. If our luck held for ten minutes more--

  It didn't.

  'God almighty!' yelled Demaree, jolting me out of my thoughts. I looked where he was looking, just in time to see flame coursing flat along the ground. It snaked in a quivering course right at the middle sand car of our three; and when the snaking light and the jolting car intersected--

  Catastrophe. Even in the thin air, the sound was like an atomic bomb.