As their footsteps died away Escobar began to tell Kem and Carmen all that had emerged from his conversation with the Herr Doktor, and of the decision they had taken. When he had done, Kem asked:
‘What was the row about that they had towards the end? For a moment, from the way the M.V.D. man tapped his gun, I thought they were going to set about one another in earnest.’
Escobar shrugged. ‘He is a stupid oaf, and has not yet fully realised that the orders he was given by his chiefs cannot possibly apply here. I admitted to Harsbach that I know very little about atomic energy, and he very sensibly agreed to share his knowledge with me, so that we could make two equally effective bombs. On the policeman learning that Harsbach intended to give away a Soviet State Secret, he threatened to shoot him. But the Herr Doktor told him that, in the present circumstances, nothing could matter compared with getting out of the clutches of the bee-beetles before they compelled us to show them how to blow every city on Earth to hell; and to stop being a fool. At least, that is the interpretation I put upon their quarrel.’
‘Then you were wrong,’ said Carmen quietly. ‘I’ve often told you how, when I was a young girl, I was threatened with deafness, until I had that marvellous operation; and that during the time I found hearing difficult I was taught to lip-read. Of course, I could not understand what that Russian said, because I don’t know Russian. But to lip-read one has to watch a person’s expressions so intently that, quite apart from the movements of the mouth, one gets a sort of sixth sense about the thoughts they are expressing. I am certain that when that horrible man tapped his gun, what he was really saying was:
‘ “All right; if you consider that the help of this Argentinian scientist can give you is essential to your plan, go ahead. But if you give away Soviet secrets to these people, I shall make it my business to see that none of them reaches Earth alive.”’
21
The Explosive Pill
In the morning Gog and Magog appeared as usual; but they brought with them only five beans, which Gog gave to Escobar. It seemed certain that this discrimination was aimed at penalising Kem and Carmen for having abandoned work in the bean-fields the day before, and that assumption was promptly confirmed by the giant preventing the scientist from sharing the ration with his companions. Much concerned by this new piece of blackmail, the breakfastless couple anxiously waited to see what would happen next.
Their anxiety proved needless and the attempt at coercion ended in farce, as they were taken on the trolley with Estévan and dropped off at the bean-fields; upon which they proceeded to eat as many beans as they wished, then, eluding Magog, who had remained to keep watch on them, they ran away again.
Once more they were subjected to a few minutes’ severe fright as two of the bee-beetle overseers pursued and endeavoured to drive them back; and, again, it was quite a time before they recovered from acute respiratory pains owing to the strain put upon their lungs; but by eight o’clock they were fed, free and none the worse for their second act of defiance.
The long empty day hung heavily on their hands, as they had no way of spending it other than chatting and dozing among boulders above the barracks. It would have gone quickly enough had they still actively been lovers, but all reference to their personal feelings for one another being barred by an unspoken mutual consent, their conversation soon became stilted. After having talked for a while of the staggering surprise that the appearance of Anna had occasioned them on the previous night, and discussed the members of the Russian party, they found little else to say; so they were not altogether sorry when the approach of the afternoon sandstorm drove them back to their cell.
As they sat there they were both conscious of a slight tension, which was broken only temporarily by Escobar returning, tired and grumpy; but the giants produced fifteen beans for the party’s evening ration; so they took some comfort from this indication that the attempt to bully them into becoming plantation slaves was not to be maintained permanently.
Soon after sundown Harsbach came in to report that his first efforts with the bee-beetles had proved unsuccessful. So far he had failed to convey to them the idea of a prospecting expedition; and, although he had made rough drawings of the two parties—first separately descending from two Saucers, then together seated in one cell—they had either not understood what he was driving at or were opposed to the parties joining up, as he and his companions had been taken back to their cell and shut up in it as usual.
After some discussion it was decided to present their captors with a fait accompli by the Russians moving in with the Argentinians, and Harsbach went off to fetch Anna and Zadovitch. The one cell would easily have accommodated twenty human beings; so when the newcomers arrived with their mats and few belongings there was ample space for them. Both parties displayed the utmost courtesy towards the other; but as some members of each could express themselves in a general conversation only with difficulty, they soon gave up the attempt and settled down to sleep.
When morning came they were given a fresh example of the giants’ indifference to any matter upon which they had not received definite orders. Gog and Magog arrived with rations for three, gave them clumsily to Carmen, Escobar and Kem, then sat down to wait patiently while they were consumed. They glanced at the Russians, exchanged a few clucking noises but, after a moment, took no further notice of them.
Harsbach then gave an interesting demonstration of his power to transmit thought, which in this case verged on hypnotism. His party also had two giants to look after them, whom they had derisively christened Uncle Sam and John Bull. Concentrating on Gog, the Herr Doktor willed him to go and find these two monsters. After a moment Gog stood up and left the cell; ten minutes later he returned with the Russians’ keepers. They showed no anger at having been eluded, and had brought with them the party’s rations. With expressionless faces they handed over the water flask and beans, then sat down beside Gog and Magog to watch their charges breakfast.
Meanwhile both parties had had their first opportunity to see the other by daylight, and Kem had been covertly observing his new companions with the keenest interest.
Zadovitch he dismissed at once at his face value. The yellow-haired Russian was obviously a very simple type, easily moved to anger or laughter, with the hearty appetites of an animal and, judging from his small, light eyes, imbued with an animal’s cunning. He was typical of the lower ranks of the Soviet secret police, who were not expected to have any ideas of their own. Kem knew that such men were chosen for a dog-like fidelity to their masters, based on the fact that as long as they held their jobs they enjoyed an easy life with many privileges; whereas the loss of them meant a return to harsh physical labour as the only thing for which they were fitted other than routine spying.
The Herr Doktor presented an infinitely more complex personality. His disfigurement showed more plainly in daylight, but his eyes were such a dominant feature that it became almost unnoticeable to anyone at whom he looked direct. It could now be seen that they were grey, piercing, very large and widely spaced, and the latter characteristics lent support to what Escobar had said of his being a fanatic. Somehow he had managed to keep himself both clean-shaven and spick-and-span while on Mars, and this, together with his lean figure and decisive manner, gave him much more the appearance of a professional soldier than the bulky, hirsute Escobar; although the former had served in an army only in his youth, while the latter had become a colonel.
Kem soon decided that the German could display considerable charm when he wished and, as he was undoubtedly intelligent, would make a most pleasant companion provided his sore points were not touched upon. More, he was already convinced that Kruger Harsbach possessed resource and courage, so would prove a greater asset in any attempt to escape from Mars than any other member of the combined parties.
From such little chance as Kem had had to judge Anna, he estimated that, mentally, she stood about halfway between the two men with whom she had been kidnapped. Whatever the Communists m
ight pretend for propaganda purposes about there being equality of conditions for all in the Soviet Union, social classes very definitely existed there; so, as the daughter of a senior official, she must have enjoyed a far more spacious unbringing than Zadovitch. She was, too, a graduate of a university; yet she could not conceivably have had one-tenth of the Herr Doktor’s experience of men and affairs, and she did not look in the least like an intellectual.
She was sturdily built, but several inches shorter than Carmen and possessing nothing of the South American’s delicate beauty, grace or distinction. Her health and colouring were her best assets; for she looked as strong as a little mare and the silvery-blonde locks that framed her piquant face were set off by a pair of round, smiling china-blue eyes. She wore no trace of make-up and needed none, as her lips and cheeks were red from the warm blood pulsing under them and her skin was as free from blemish as a baby’s.
As she had been captured up near the Arctic Circle she was well clad to face the bitter nights on Mars. Over a plain white sweater she was wearing a short musquash coat that buttoned across the front and had something of the appearance of a battledress blouse. Below it she had on a pair of thick, grey serge slacks, the bottoms of which were tucked into the tops of ugly, but practical, unpolished, square-toed boots that were lined with sheepskin. Suitable as the costume was to a young science graduate stationed in a cold climate, Kem could not help visualising her well-rounded little person with nothing on but a cache sexe doing a high-kicking cabaret act at some night haunt in a Scandinavian city.
When they had finished eating and had paid a visit to the long dark gallery, they emerged from its archway into the big tunnel chamber to see that Uncle Sam and John Bull had manned a trolley and parked it behind that of Gog and Magog. The Russians were soon aboard it and Escobar aboard the other; but Gog prodded Kem and Carmen back to the cell and closed its door upon them. With mixed feelings they heard the two trolleys rumble away. Evidently no further attempt was to be made to enslave them, but, all the same, they felt rather as though they had been sent to Coventry, and the prospect of another long day with nowhere to go and nothing to do robbed them of any joy in their liberty.
They waited until the morning dust storm was over, then went for a long walk in the opposite direction to that in which lay the bean-fields; but the scene proved equally monotonous and they did not dare to stray far from the road from fear of getting lost in the desert. Once they saw a line of trolleys driven by giants and loaded with some earthy substance rolling along a road in the distance and, on breasting a slight rise which they had decided to make the limit of their expedition, they sighted a green belt a few miles further on, which showed that another canal lay there. In the pleasant warm hours of the middle day they slept a while, then walked slowly back to the barracks, to await there with concealed impatience the return of the others.
During the week that followed no event of importance occurred and their plans for escape made no apparent progress. Harsbach got no further in his attempts to explain to the bee-beetles that certain minerals must be found and mined before he could complete his bomb; so all he could do for the time being was to modify its mechanism, in order that it should become operative when charged, and to furnish Escobar with specifications for designing the finer parts of his missile in a similiar manner.
All of them looked forward to the evenings, as once they were well wrapped up in their bean-fibre mats they lay talking, often till midnight or later, on a great variety of subjects. With several hours’ practice each night Kem and Carmen soon got back all the German they had ever learned and were constantly adding new words to their vocabularies. Zadovitch alone remained unable to participate in the general conversation, and had to content himself with scraps of Russian thrown to him from time to time by Harsbach or Anna.
Now and then the wars of the century and international politics brought them on to dangerous ground. Sometimes Kem had to exercise the greatest restraint to prevent himself from smacking Harsbach’s face for the untrue and flagrantly unjust things he said about the British. At others the Argentinians were hard put to it to conceal their hatred of Communism in all its forms, and the Russian party to conceal their loathing of such dictatorships as those of Generals Franco and Peron. It soon became clear, too, that the mentalities of Carmen and Anna were such poles apart that, like oil and water, they would never mix; but recognising the gulf that lay between them, the two girls rarely addressed one another direct.
Such tensions were, however, only occasional. For much the greater part of the time they thoroughly enjoyed these idle hours in the starlight or moonlight, during which they debated many matters, told stories and sometimes held sing-songs, in which Zadovitch, who had a fine baritone voice, was able to join. Kem, with his happy, tolerant nature, which took no account of creeds, prejudices or class distinctions, provided people were good-humoured and behaved decently to him, contributed more than any of the others to making their evenings a success; but he was far from happy in the daytime.
Had Fate decreed that he and Carmen should spend eleven hours a day alone together, in normal circumstances, anywhere on Earth, they would have found hundreds of things to talk about. The morning papers and radio bulletins would have daily provided a score of topics; he would have had financial problems and she household cares; leaving love out of the question, they could have confided their ambitions to one another with some prospect of achieving them. Food, clothes, entertainments, hobbies, games, books, pets, and even the weather, would have come up in due course for discussion. But here on Mars, with no foreseeable future, and no possible variation of regime, raiment, diet or conditions, there was positively no subject to discuss that had not already been worn thread bare. Had their walks been through countryside or jungle they would at least have had trees, flowers, beasts and birds to comment on, but the sandy wastes that they trod in their expeditions offered no conversational stimulus of any kind. As a final factor that prolonged the monotony of their day, almost unendurably, it held no breaks that they could look forward to, during which they could occupy themselves in preparing and eating lunch or tea; neither could they even offer one another a cigarette or a sweet to suck.
Carmen took this eventless existence much more philosophically than Kem; for, although she always appeared eager to talk on any subjects that did crop up, and produced her share of them, she invariably carried her rosary and, when they had been sitting silent for any length of time, employed herself by saying a number of Ave Marias.
Kem still thought her the most perfect living thing he had ever seen; but he was chary of looking at her too frequently, as it recalled memories of her face aglow with passion, and stirred in him fierce cravings that he had promised to subdue. Yet the very fact that he succeeded in banishing such thoughts from his mind had its repercussions. He became so bored that he could have screamed.
By the end of the week he was tempted to return to the bean-fields and start working there of his own free will, rather than continue to idle away interminable hours in semi-silence, while making pointless expeditions across almost featureless wastes, every boulder in which he already knew. He would have done so, but for the fact that he did not like to leave Carmen alone, and to take her with him was to risk that she might again be assaulted by one of the young monsters working in the fields.
At length he came to the conclusion that his only chance of escape from boredom lay in devising some way of forwarding their plans for attempting to leave Mars, and on the eighth night after the Russian party had joined them he put up a scheme to the Herr Doktor.
It was that Harsbach should steal some nitric acid and mercury and make a small quantity of explosive with them. Kem was then to produce the explosive and pretend that he had found its ingredients in one of his expeditions across the desert. By demonstrating an explosion to the bee-beetles he hoped that they would associate it with Harsbach’s empty bomb-case, and thus be persuaded to agree to a prospecting expedition setting off to secur
e the minerals necessary to manufacture a larger quantity.
Escobar suggested that much trouble could be saved in demonstrating an explosion to the bee-beetles if Zadovitch simply fired off his pistol in front of them; but to that certain objections were raised.
Harsbach disclosed that he, too, had been carrying a pistol at the time of his capture, and added: ‘Since both Zadovitch and I were knocked out before we had a chance to use our weapons, when we came to in the Saucer we decided that we had better save them as a last card if our lives were threatened. Evidently the insects do not appreciate the use to which they can be put, or they would not have returned them to us after we were decontaminated; but as we have them still I feel most strongly that we should keep them up our sleeves against some great emergency.’
‘Besides,’ Kem pointed out, ‘the insects must have seen the bullets of your weapons when they examined your things a few hours after your arrival on Mars; therefore if they were shown one they would recognise it as something brought from Earth. The whole point of my plan is that the explosive should be some substance which we can make them believe that I found in one of their own deserts.’
That clinched the matter, and Kem’s plan having received general approval Harsbach promised to get to work on it next day. Two nights later the Herr Doktor handed him a little pill and said:
‘This is as near an approach to fulmanite of mercury as I could get; but I feel pretty confident that it will do the trick. Be very careful of it, as fulmanite is extremely sensitive, and in spite of the small quantity it could make a nasty mess if it went off prematurely.’
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