Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  On Escobar asking her about herself, she replied: ‘My name is Anna Nitkin. I was born in Murmansk up in the Arctic Circle. My father is a high official in the department of Heavy Industry and as soon as I was old enough I was sent to the University of Leningrad. I took science, specialising in geology and radio-activity. I received a diploma in both, and after six months in the Ministry of Mines I was selected to be laboratory assistant to Doctor Kruger Harsbach.’

  As Escobar exclaimed at his name, she said: ‘You have heard of him, perhaps. He is one of the German scientists whom we brought to Russia after the War. He was already well known for his work on nuclear reactions and has since become one of our leading men in the atomic field.’

  ‘They, too, were brought here to make Atom bombs,’ Escobar said in a quick aside to Kem, as Anna went on:

  ‘I was transferred from the Ministry in Moscow to his experimental station beyond the Urals. It was a lonely place, hundreds of miles from anywhere, in the depths of the pine forests. Except for a little group of scientists, all the comrades there were Asiatics, chosen because they could not read or write, so could understand nothing of what we were doing. Naturally I found life there rather dull after Moscow, with the excitement of the Party rallies, the political discussion circles, and the Young Communists’ drives to increase production. But I was very proud to have been chosen for my work and became greatly interested in it. Sometimes Doctor Harsbach worked all through the night, and occasionally he permitted me to do a double shift so that I could help him. I had been stationed there just over ten weeks when we were captured. It happened at about three o’clock in the morning on a night that I had remained up working with Doctor Harsbach. Zadovitch had just come in—’

  ‘Who is Zadovitch?’ Escobar interrupted.

  ‘Nickolai Zadovitch is the third member of our party. He is the M.V.D. man who was responsible for maintaining political purity in the camp. He had just come in, and was kicking up a fuss. He said that I should not work such long hours and ought to be in bed. We were arguing with him that our work must come before all else, because on such work as ours depended the prevention of the enslavement of the free Soviet workers by the greedy American capitalists. Suddenly the windows were shattered and great hands came through them. Zadovitch drew his pistol, but he was knocked down before he could fire it. I tried to get through the door but I was pulled back by my hair. One pair of hands tore down the curtains, the other threw us upon them. Oddments of all kinds were then piled on us, the curtains were bunched up and we were carried off half dead in them to a Flying Saucer.’

  After having given Kem and Carmen the gist of her account so far, Escobar asked her, ‘When was this?’

  ‘In mid-October. We arrived here towards the end of December. Our voyage occupied sixty-eight days.’

  ‘It took considerably longer than ours, then; but that might be accounted for by the two planets having been nearer their opposition when we were carried off. We have been here only three days, whereas it must be nearly five weeks since you landed. You must have found out quite a lot about Mars in that time. We should be most interested to hear all you can tell us.’

  There is little to tell. As far as we know there are only three forms of life remaining on Mars: the insects, the giants, and the beans. We think that the insects must have liquidated every species of animal, reptile and plant in order to economise water. The conservation of water is their greatest concern. They must know that in a measurable time there will no longer be enough to form the polar caps in winter and that soon afterwards their last reserves will evaporate. They are very clever about some things, and have probably already calculated to within a few years the date at which a universal drought on Mars will render life extinct. They brought us here to teach them how to make Atom bombs, and we have no doubts about why they are anxious to learn our secrets. If they could make a big enough stock-pile themselves they could use it to bombard Earth and crush all resistance; so that they could safely invade it and establish themselves there permanently.’

  Escobar nodded. ‘We reached the same conclusion. To learn atomic secrets was also the reason why they kidnapped us. They have threatened to starve us if we refuse to work for them. No doubt they did the same with you. What attitude did your party adopt?’

  ‘They did; and Doctor Harsbach decided that we must play for time by pretending to humour them. He drew a number of blue-prints of extremely complicated mechanisms; but we are now becoming very worried. They have processes, as yet unknown to us, by which they can cast the parts shown in such designs far quicker than we could. For the past fortnight we have been taken each day to a plant they have some miles down the canal. There, we have been set to assemble the parts, and the work is nearly completed. What we are to do when it is finished, and we can no longer disguise the fact that we have constructed no more than an elaborate but quite useless shell, we cannot think.’

  ‘Before long, then, I shall find myself in the same awkward situation,’ Escobar told her. ‘But perhaps if Herr Doktor Harsbach and I get together we may be able to think of some way of fooling our captors for a bit longer. Whereabouts are your quarters; and how did you come to find us?’

  ‘The three of us were given a cell near the far entrance to the tunnel. It is about half a mile away. I sleep very badly; so I often go for a walk alone in the middle of the night. The giants all sleep like logs, and no one has ever attempted to stop me. One could escape with the greatest ease; but there is nowhere to escape to. The insects must realise that, or they would guard us more carefully. Usually I walk for a while outside and look at the stars. The high albedo of Earth makes it easy to pick out. From here it is the brightest star in the sky, and I get some comfort from looking at it. But tonight I thought I would walk right through the tunnel and back, just to see if I had missed any feature of it when I first explored it soon after our arrival. It is very silent in the tunnel at night, and when I came opposite your door I heard some sounds that I could not understand. They were quite unlike the harsh, throaty cackle that the giants make when they talk; so I undid the staple and peeped in to see what it was. You can imagine my feelings when I realised that there were other human beings here. The sounds I heard came from the man I woke; he was talking in his sleep.’

  When Escobar had again passed on to the others most of what Anna had said, they agreed that the sooner they met her companions, so that the two parties could hold a full-scale council of war, the better. On his suggesting that, she at once offered to fetch the Doctor and Zadovitch; and, promising to be back within half an hour, she left them.

  As soon as she had gone, Kem began to bewail the fact that, instead of being a nymph of some superior Martian race, she had turned out to be, like themselves, just another prisoner brought from Earth. The others felt the same; but all agreed that considerable comfort was to be derived from the fact that they would now have other human beings with whom to share their anxieties, and that six heads would be better than three in plotting how to circumvent their captors.

  Carmen was the least enthusiastic of the three about the possible benefits they might derive from this new development. ‘I think it is a bitter pill,’ she lamented, ‘that after finding that we have companions in misfortune they should turn out to be Russians. We shall find little in common with these atheists and enemies of freedom, and shall probably soon quarrel violently with them. How I wish that they had been Americans or British!’

  ‘The Doctor is a German,’ Kem reminded her. ‘And as he was taken into Russia as a prisoner, he probably hates the Soviets as much as we do; so if we find we can’t keep off politics we’ll be four to two, anyway.’

  ‘You are wrong there,’ said Escobar seriously, ‘and it raises a point that I wanted to warn you about, Kem, before they get here. I knew Kruger Harsbach when I was at Peenemünde. He is a clever devil but a bit unbalanced—in fact some people might consider him insane on one particular subject. By origin he is not German, but South African Dutch, henc
e his Christian name of Kruger. He is about my age, so was a small boy at the time of the Boer War. When the British did their mopping up out there in 1902 they shot his father for sniping at them, then burnt down his farm. Kruger has never forgiven them for that. He and his mother migrated to Germany and he was educated there. By 1915 he was old enough to enter the Kaiser’s war. On the Somme, I think it was, he was wounded when fighting the British, and badly disfigured. Owing to that he was still not a very pleasant sight to look at when I last saw him. Not unnaturally, that added fuel to his hatred of your nation, and as a young professor in the 1920s he spent much of his time urging his students to prepare themselves for a war of revenge.’

  Escobar broke off for a moment, then went on: ‘As you can imagine, he was one of those who welcomed the emergence of Hitler, and he became one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party. When they came to power that enabled him to get the pick of scientific appointments; and I must say he made the best of them. From early on he had been a great friend of Ribbentrop, and I have no doubt at all that he did a great deal to influence Ribbentrop in the belief that the Germans would come out on top if they had another war with England. While I was with him at Peenemünde his wife and only daughter were killed in one of the R.A.F. raids on Berlin. By that time he knew, as all top Nazis did, that Germany had lost the war; but he swore that he would spend every hour left till his dying day in working to revenge himself on the British.’

  Again Escobar paused, then added: ‘That young woman said that the Herr Doktor was sent to Russia as a prisoner. Don’t you believe it. If I know anything about Harsbach he went there of his own free will. Like plenty of other people he could see that sooner or later the Soviets would have a showdown with the Western Democracies; so you can be certain that he has willingly given the Russians everything he has got. Probably the only reason he regrets having been brought to Mars is because he will never stand a chance now of seeing London in ruins. He is the most fanatical Britain-hater I have ever met; so as you are British, Kem, for goodness’ sake keep off international politics and be careful of him.’

  20

  The Man with the Gun

  ‘One can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him,’ Kem said thoughtfully. ‘To have lost his father, his property, his wife, his only daughter, and to have been disfigured into the bargain, is enough to make any man bitter. All the same it is unreasonable to blame the British as a race for his misfortunes.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Escobar, without any trace of aggressiveness. ‘I know you British regard yourselves as the benefactors of mankind, who have brought justice, hygiene and education to many of the more backward races; but other peoples have some cause to see you in a very different light. It can be argued that you robbed the Boers of their country because you wanted the gold that it contained; that you deliberately formed a coalition with France and Russia to smash the Kaiser’s Germany because you saw in her a dangerous rival to your world-wide commercial interests; and that by robbing the Germans of all their colonies, and every natural outlet for the expansion of their huge population, you brought the Hitler war upon yourselves. Anyhow, Harsbach probably looks at it that way and attributes the ill-fate that has dogged him to British unscrupulousness and greed.’

  Kem smiled. ‘I could make a very good case to show that our wars have been forced upon us through Germany having become the bully of Europe and the crazy determination of her rulers to achieve their ambitions at any cost. But that is not the point. As we are situated at the moment it is of the utmost importance that we should not allow these old race hatreds to divide us. Since anything British has the effect on this chap of showing a red rag to a bull, perhaps our best plan would be to keep it dark that I am an Englishman.’

  ‘I think that an excellent idea,’ Carmen agreed. ‘You have been talking nothing but Spanish now for the best part of three months; so no German or Russian could possibly guess that you are not an Argentinian, if we say you are, but you’ll have to think of a suitable name when we introduce ourselves.’

  ‘Yes, and it should be something as near as possible to my real one, in case either of you slip up and call me by that in front of them some time. Can you thing of any Spanish name that sounds like Kem?’

  ‘Sem is short for Sempa,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘That will do splendidly. What about Lincoln?’

  That proved a more difficult proposition, and after several suggestions they had to settle on Lináres as the nearest they could think of.

  Some ten minutes later Anna rejoined them with her companions. Escobar greeted Harsbach as an old acquaintance, and they laughed together a little grimly about how utterly fantastic they would have thought it had they been told when they had last been together that they would next meet on Mars. Then general introductions took place.

  The Herr Doktor was a tall, gaunt man in his late fifties. It was a part of his jaw that had been shot away in the First World War, and the taut skin of his left cheek pulled down the corner of one eye. But he was not as badly disfigured as Kem and Carmen had expected; or perhaps did not appear so because his face was redeemed by a good nose and forehead and remarkably fine eyes. He had his hair cut enbrosse, like a Prussian; his voice was pitched rather high, but all his utterances were quick and decisive.

  Nickolai Zadovitch looked about forty. He was broad and powerful with a shock of yellowish hair, a beard of the same colour, and the flat high-cheekboned face of the typical Russian peasant. He was still wearing his uniform with the light blue facings and the black jackboots of the Political Police and, Kem was surprised to see, carrying a big pistol at his belt. He spoke nothing but Russian and favoured his new acquaintances with a suspicious look from his small, crafty eyes as he jerked his head abruptly in acknowledgment of Harsbach’s introductions.

  Harsbach could speak some Spanish, but Anna did not know a word of it; so as both of them and Escobar could speak German fluently, and Carmen and Kem understood a little, it was decided to carry on their conversation in that language.

  The two scientists did nearly all the talking. Half an hour sped swiftly by as they swapped accounts of their kidnapping, their arrival on Mars, and what they had since learned about the planet. They were in full agreement on why they had been brought there, and in their determination to disclose no secrets which might assist the bee-beetles in getting control of Earth. They then went on to discuss the achievements of the insects and the economy they had imposed upon their planet.

  ‘While they are far ahead of us in certain ways,’ Harsbach said, ‘they have no culture of any kind. That, I believe, is because they lack individuality. If one believed in souls at all, one would term them group-souled. There is much to be said for that term employed by the occultists, as it well describes the state of a number of physical bodies all animated by a common will. We see it in the migrations of our own animals, birds and insects at certain seasons, and with many of the last it is also demonstrated in their building communal nests.’

  Escobar stroked the black beard he had grown, and nodded. ‘I agree. And these bee-beetles have developed in a way which one would expect of insects. Their sole genius lies in constructional ability. We have embryonic examples of that in the hexagonal cells of our own bees and the beautiful symmetry of hanging wasps’ nests.’

  ‘Like many of our insects, too,’ the German informed him, ‘they themselves process all the materials for their requirements. The development of ours appears to have been arrested after they learned that by selecting certain foods they could secrete substances suitable to their immediate needs. These have progressed a stage further: by including chemicals in their diet, they can produce not one but a variety of substances; some transparent, others opaque; some with the elasticity of rubber, others which will harden nearly to the degree of steel.’

  ‘I take it you have found that out during your visits to their plant?’ Escobar enquired.

  ‘Yes. I have now been watching them at work for a fortnight. The thin
g that astonishes me is the simplicity of their operations. They use no furnaces; their own bodies are the crucibles in which they blend the ingredients for all their manufactures. The various types of excretions are stored in airtight vats, then run off into moulds as required. To construct large or complex objects several, sometimes many, parts are fashioned simultaneously in a number of moulds, then assembled before they are quite set. Thus the necessity for rivets is eliminated and, after polishing, the object presents a perfectly smooth and seamless surface.’

  ‘I suppose they lift the larger parts into position, and move the heavier things they make when they are completed with the aid of magnets?’

  ‘Yes. The control of magnetic force appears to be their one great discovery. I imagine that, initially, they must have stumbled upon some magnetic law of which we are still in ignorance, and have since learned to apply it in a variety of ways.’

  ‘The basic principle of how to eliminate the force of gravity without effort, once known, would open up almost limitless possibilities. Do you know if they use magnetism for disruptive purposes, as well as for light and propulsion?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. They do not appear to have any knowledge of explosives, or to possess weapons of any kind.’

  ‘How, then, do they keep a whip-hand over the giants?’

  ‘Routine overseeing appears to be all that is necessary. With their superior intelligence it is reasonable to suppose that by the lure of easy food they succeeded in training the giants to passive obedience countless generations ago. The functions fulfilled by them become almost automatic, so it is reasonable to regard them as little more than cattle.’

  ‘We thought of elephants as a better comparison,’ Escobar smiled. ‘In some cases, too, they function independently from the herd; witness those who kidnapped us and those who have since acted as our escorts. Their capability to carry out such orders infers that they possess a degree of intelligence considerably higher than that of most animals.’