Menace Under Marswood

by Sterling E. Lanier

  Danna was walked about for a moment by Thau Lang, who seemed to be talking to her, though no one could hear what was said. In the full light of morning, even with the constantly growing fog, she seemed perfectly sound.

  The eight dead wolves were simply left lying. The rest of the pack had fled. Scavengers—plant, animal, and a couple of local oddities that were really neither—would deal with the bodies.

  For some two hours they marched without a break. Occasionally Muller would consult with Lang. Magnetic compasses were useless on Mars, which has low magnetism of any kind, so the military used a type that fixed on a radio beacon at Ares Base. But their present disguise precluded carrying such things. The stars and bush training had to be their substitute.

  As on much of the old planet, the ground thereabouts was fairly level, with few rises and most of those gentle. But the second birth of ancient Mars made Marswood anything but old and tired. When the warmth and light of the new day hit the plant growth, it seemed to burgeon and curl into fresh life as one watched, and as the travelers passed through each wisp of fog, new shapes reached out at them—not literally in most cases, but by virtue of their sudden emergence from the shrouding mists.

  Once, however, a green tendril struck at Lang, who happened to be in the lead. The Mars bloodsucker was one of the few native plants that competed with the imported stock on even terms. Most of the older planet's original life-forms were apt to do better at night, when the imports of Earth were dormant. And they tended to like the more barren areas and the poles, where even mutated Terran vegetation had too hard a time.

  The bloodsucker was an important exception. Its green color owed nothing to chlorophyll, but was nothing more than a chameleon pigment it used to lurk undetected in the mass of imported plant life. As to whether the bloodsucker was a plant itself, the zoologists were still battling with the botanists. It resembled a very large, dirty sofa cushion, with six twisting arms, one of which had just swung at Lang and missed. He leaped aside while ducking as Muller sprang back then whipped up his short bow and fired an arrow into the brush. There was a wheezing hiss, as if a very large snake were speaking. Muller laughed, a short bark, and Thau Lang clapped him on the back.

  "They don't die easily," Muller said to Slater, who was still staring off the trail to where the sound came from. "I gauged where the body would be and let go. The brutes store gas, mostly oxygen and carbon monoxide, under pressure. That's how they move the tentacles, gas pressure. I popped the balloon and it will take the thing a few days to mend the hole and build up pressure again. Meanwhile it's dangerous as a toy loofah."

  Slater could only marvel at his commander's skill. He himself had known everything about the bloodsucker that he just had been told, but knowing it and putting the knowledge to use in an emergency were very different things.

  They stopped twice a day for food, using the tough jerked meat and hard bitter bread made from a root found in the Ruck. Water was no problem; pools were common, some of them large enough to require a detour. They were apt to be shallow and have soft bottoms. Vast, low, sprawling willows, many with trunks a meter and a half across, grew around them, the descendants of a dwarf species from Earth's Arctic. At one small lake Breen speared a black frog the length of his arm that had foolishly goggled at them from the water's edge for a moment too many. In camp that night, Muller and the three Ruckers ate the legs raw. Breen got the eyes as well for snaring the creature. Slater, Nakamura, and Feng abstained.

  By the next day, Slater had decided that it would take quite a while to get to enjoy the Ruck or the mission. Danna spoke to him when addressed, but in terms of utter indifference. Nakamura was silent and morose, and the two older men and Feng spoke little and then mainly to one another. Only Breen seemed friendly. It came out finally that he had been favorably impressed by Slater's killing the Marswolf.

  "We all would die to protect a Wise Woman, Slater," he said earnestly. "One reason that I and Arta joined with you and not the two who are Gone Down is that these new men from the South seem to despise the Wise Women. This is madness and worse. They do not say so openly, of course, but one gathers hints from what they say when alone with us young men. Someone who has the chance to save a Wise Woman is lucky too, a good person to be with. My aunt was a Wise Woman but I do not have her power. I will never be a konsel and I am glad. They have to learn too much."

  Slater tried to store away everything he heard for future reference. He knew that Rucker clans were matriarchal, but the details were obscure and much of the information he had seen conflicting. No one spoke while on the march, but once the party had stopped and posted a guard, Breen was willing enough to speak. Slater learned that the offices of konsel and war chief were not synonymous, it being most rare for one person to combine them as did Thau Lang. As a result he was held in tremendous respect. A konsel was like a male equivalent of the Wise Women, but he was also a permanent delegate to the only supraclan government the True People recognized—a kind of informal parliament that seldom met in the body, but nevertheless managed to keep members informed and even to vote on matters of common interest. The body had no name, or at least not one Breen was willing to give.

  By the third day Slater found himself toughening. He began to sleep better at night, instead of tossing and turning in the bitter chill. He had been fit anyway, but fitness for garrison duty and fitness for the Ruck were different things. Now his muscles were hardening. Even the cold-adapted insects were not so bad, he found.

  The fleas and lice of Earth had managed to survive on Mars and in most places were far too abundant. During the day gnats and mosquitoes existed in dense swarms, particularly near water. Fortunately the night cold kept most of them immobilized, though once in a while one would find the heat of a sleeping body sufficient to awake it. Slater killed one crawling thing—a kind of crab louse, he suspected—at least an inch long after it had brought him out of a sound sleep with a savage bite. He saw spiders ten times as large, but they seemed as eager to stay out of the humans' way as were the latter to avoid them. No snappers were seen, and Grabbit was quiescent in its box.

  Breen, when queried, tended to minimize the spiders. He admitted they could bite and that many were poisonous, but most, he said, sought smaller prey, chiefly rabbits, rats, mice, and birds. He warned Slater that the giant scorpions were another matter, and that they were irritable and frightfully venomous, fortunately they were not common. Other things to avoid were the bloodsuckers and a nasty form of burrowing armored slug, a heat seeker and native of the planet, which haunted the plateaus and rocky cliffs in the higher elevations. Though small, the slug could tunnel into the body in seconds when hungry. Then there were the sand crawlers. Like most native Martian life, they had been rather small, no more than a half meter long or so to begin with. Terraforming had changed that; now they could be bigger than a bulgote. They looked like bulbous armored fish, perhaps of the flounder variety, and were all sorts of bright colors. Cruising about on small jointed legs buried under a fat body, sand crawlers mined pockets of soil for worthwhile minerals. But their mineral-detecting organs functioned equally well on living things, which are, after all, equally well stocked with interesting substances. Slater did not care for Breen's description of what a man looked like after a crawler was through feeding. They were apt to be haunters of the night.

  Between the stories of the Ruck and its inhabitants and being marched to the point of exhaustion every day, Slater managed to make do. He envied Nakamura the special lessons he got from Danna, but there was nothing he could do to put himself in the big man's place. Danna was teaching Nakamura how to act like a member of the strange clan from the South. She was patient and, Nakamura admitted privately, very good at what she was doing. "She must have perfect recall, damn it. If I miss even a shade of accent, in just one word, or pick my nose the wrong way, back we go and do it all over again. Reminds me of Year One at the Academy, only worse!" But he seemed less sullen, and Slater had the feeling that he no longer though
t of the Rucker girl as merely a variety of dangerous animal that ought to be exterminated.

  Ten days out from the fort, they were filing down a gentle slope through moderately thick cover, when Muller used the hand signal "down!"

  Slater had long since ceased trying to guess where they were or what exactly it was they were to do whenever they got to wherever they were headed. Enduring the hard conditions so unsure of the details of the mission was difficult, but at least he had the training that only long discipline gives.

  Flat on his stomach under a cactus, rifle forward, he peered up the slope in the same direction as the others. Next to him Breen cocked one eye at him and winked. A swarm of minute bugs crawled over both their faces after their sweat. Slater could sense nothing but the usual noises of the Ruck during midafternoon, but he knew he was no judge.

  Suddenly he saw that Danna was standing, rifle by her side, looking up the tangled gradient. As he watched, she cupped her hands and called, a gentle quavering sound, "ooh, aaahh, ooh," which ran up and down until it died away. From not far off an answer came, the exact same cry. At the crest of the rise, a man stood up, rifle held over his head in both arms.

  "Arta," Breen said from beside Slater's ear. "He moves quiet, that one. But not quiet enough for your chief or Danna. She and he worked out that call together. It's an animal, what you call a one that hunts by, well, singing. You know it?"

  As Arta Burg jogged down the slope and was welcomed by the others, Slater admitted to his new friend that he knew nothing about any animal that hunted by singing. Presumably it was yet one more example of Martian life that had not yet got into the books.

  Burg headed straight for Muller and passed him a small cylinder, which he took from a pouch at his waist. He carried the bow and rifle and a small backpack. To look at him, one would think he had been for a walk around the block in a Terran apartment city. Slater was supremely conscious of feeling dirty and looking it, although the males were all using the Rucker depilatory, which at least kept them from being shaggy as well. Not for the first time, he wondered sourly what Unilever-Gradco or the Supaharto Trust would give him for a tube of the stuff.

  "I should like everyone to come over here at once please," Muller said after conferring briefly with Thau Lang. When they were seated around him, minus the old konsel who took the guard position uphill, he began without any preamble.

  "Warman Burg brings us a message confirming certain suspicions I had. There are several points, and I will take them in order.

  "One, Lieutenant Mohini Dutt is a deeply planted traitor. She is of Indian descent, all right, but born on Mars and then taken back to Earth. Her parents were fanatical followers of JayBee Pelham. The mother is dead. The father, whose name is not Dutt at all but Medawar, is believed to be one of the men who arranged Pelham's escape. He is probably with him now. Very probably Lieutenant Dutt is on the way to meet them at some rendezvous. She may know more about living in the Ruck than she led us to believe. Also, it is obvious why she tried so hard to be one of this party. She wished to be able to warn Pelham of any countermeasures. And she knows much—not just about Pelham but our other business, the U-Men." His voice grew even gentler. "A pretty girl, but I rather wish she were dead. If any of you get the chance, see that she is dead." He grew brisk again.

  "JayBee has found a guide, I'm afraid. An old Marsrat named Deimos Smith. I've heard of him, though he usually operates on the other side of the planet. The True People like him, and he seems to move quite freely among them. He's said to be not a bad sort, but he has a kink—he's one of the last of the old White Supremacy crowd. Seems Pelham hooked him with some wild tale about the master race taking over Mars. Even Pelham is not that crazy, and anyway, he's an eighth Melanesian and three-quarters Hawaiian mix himself.

  "Back to us. We are going to a big meeting, one of several clans. We hope to arrive after the delegates from the new Clan of the Giants." He bowed to Nakamura, who saluted back, deadpan. "The new clan people have gone back to wherever they came from. We will appear with our own giant and, quite reasonably, follow them. Their headquarters has to be found very quickly. Any questions?"

  "On behalf of my corps, I wish to say—" Feng began. He looked as though he had just been hit by a rocket shell.

  "My dear fellow," Muller said quickly, "how could anyone blame you for Dutt? This has been planned for many years. The I-Corps security checks were made too late. Miss Medawar was a 'sleeper', an agent buried in place since she was young. So. Now, let's be off. There are two hours of good daylight left."

  Feng still looked miserable, but he was a very good man. It was obvious that what Muller said made sense. But Slater did not think he would care to be in Mohini Dutt-Medawar's shoes if Feng happened to lay hands on her. What a ghastly waste of fantastic bed material, Slater thought ruefully.

  He found himself near Arte Burg in that evening's campsite. Burg quietly thanked him for saving Danna. Breen had filled him in and he seemed deeply grateful. Slater decided to trade on the gratitude for purely selfish reasons. "I'm afraid she's annoyed at me for some reason," he said mendaciously. "Frankly, Burg, anything you can do to make us friends again would be a real favor to me."

  Burg said in surprised tones, "This is not like a nice girl, not like Danna. She could have come to your bed if we were in camp—real camp, not on a trip. Of course," he added in confidential tones, "the Wise Women are funny. They have their own rules about things. Maybe you got in the way of one of those. I will ask Milla what he thinks. Since Danna is the responsibility of us two, she can at least be polite." He went off, leaving Slater wondering what the last sentence meant. By Earth standards the Ruckers were very casual and, at the same time, very finicky about sex, following complex customs of their own devising. But he dared not risk giving offense by asking for too many particulars.

  Late that night, while he had the watch under the cold distant shine of Phobos, he heard a small noise, like a muffled cough, and whirled. Danna looked at him soberly from a yard away, her hood thrown back, the moonglimmer showing her short, curly hair.

  "Milla and Arte told me I was not a nice girl," she said in a sad little voice. "They were right, Slater. Even if you had not shot the wolf, I had no right to be nasty." Her eyes narrowed momentarily. "But I wanted to kill that big woman you had your hands on."

  She sat on a rock next to his knee and gently took one of his gloved hands in hers. She looked up at him fondly and he dropped down beside her, caught by the expression in her eyes. Then he remembered he was on duty and started to rise. She pulled him back down. "Milla will watch," she said demurely. "He is by the big stone on the other slope. I asked him." She took his face in her cold hide mittens and pulled it down to hers. The world vanished from his mind leaving only the sweet intoxication of the kiss, the warm perfume of her breath, and the delightful musk of her body, rising from her clothes through the opening at her neck. Eventually they came up for air and stared at one another with startled eyes. A feeling of mutual surrender had overpowered them and as normally strong, self-contained people, the sensation had made them nervous. Danna pulled off her right glove and smoothed her hair.

  "I have wanted to do that ever since I first saw you," she said quietly. "I knew it would be wonderful." The great ring on her hand gleamed in the faint moonlight and Slater took her hand to look at it, the blue stone in the middle stirring his memory. She slipped the ring off and handed it to him. He took a pencil flash from his pocket and, shielding it with his body, examined the ring.

  There, worn but plain to a student of military history, was the galley of the long-gone United States Naval Academy, flanked by half-effaced seahorses and surmounted by a trident. On the other side, the spread eagle hovered over the propeller. The class number was too battered to be made out.

  "Do you know what this is?"

  "Yes, I think so. It came from my mother and from her mother and from hers again, and hers too. It comes from Earth, and it means that among my ancestors was a warrior who
went upon the water, which we cannot do here."

  He returned the ring and patted her hand. What an end for the ring of an ancient American naval officer! Probably a pure white, if his memory of the racial customs of that period was accurate.

  "Danna, that ring is from a school for—well, soldiers like me, back on Earth, as you know. Whoever the man was, he is your link to Earth and to what Earth stands for." He smiled. "You're just an Earth girl a long way from home. We two are natural allies."

  She bent over him and kissed him gently and briefly. "Perhaps we are, Slater. Perhaps the wild woman of the woods is your natural ally." Her eyes surveyed him calmly. "Some day we will have more time together. Now we are at war." She added as she rose and slipped away, "And you have not yet told me what you were doing with your hands on that fat-rumped woman who has betrayed us all!" He heard a faint giggle as Danna disappeared into the dark.

  The next day the group moved more slowly because they were getting close to the big Rucker encampment one of the two younger warmen was to enter. The others would wait, polishing their roles as Rucker clansmen from the other side of the planet, ready to appear if the strange giants and their allies had left. They had moved off the Aetheopis highlands and were now approaching the edge of the Sinus Gomen valley. Not too far beyond it, to the south and west, lay the unknown deeps of the great Cimmerium rift that the Ruckers called the bad country.

  That night Breen and Burg slipped out of camp while Feng, Slater, and Colonel Muller tested each other's masquerade as members of the remote Bulgote Clan. Muller had to be perfect since he was the one who would talk while the other two pretended to a vow of silence. At the same time, Nakamura was getting a last review of his attitude and appearance from Danna. Over and over in the dark they rehearsed their mission, until even Muller and Danna, both stern judges, were satisfied.