Usually, when a man ventured beyond the bounds of familiar existence, there was conflict. Either a struggle to win, or, immediately recognizable success, with no struggle or hint of conflict at all.
But not this. Not this success that seemed—what was the word? Hostile? That was ridiculous. These people were friendly. But somehow—there was an empty ring—
Hell! They had saved his life. Rebuilt his ship. Given him the tube that contained transcriptions, in his own language, of every scientific secret his people could ever hope to learn for themselves in the next thousand years! And, they had even buried Ferris . . .
Use the brains of a mature man, Johnny Love! You’ve pulled it off without even trying! The most stupendous thing any man in any age has ever pulled off . . . without even trying! For God’s sake don’t question—don’t question things you don’t understand! Take the credit and let the soul-searching go!
He looked behind him again. They were still there. A special, smiling farewell escort, watching a single, solitary figure cross a short expanse of sand to a towering, glistening thing of power.
He raised a booted foot to the bottom fin-step, hauled himself up by the stern mounting rungs, hammered the outer lock stud with his gloved fist and the hatch swung open. Like a trap.
He could feel the skin at the back of his neck tighten but he forced himself to ignore it. The lock cycled up to thirteen psi and the inner port swung automatically inward, and then he was inside, clambering up the narrow ladder past the titanium alloy fuel tanks and the spidery catwalks between them to the tiny control room in the forehull.
He would not be waiting for Harrison and Janes. He would get the hell out of here and then radio them and let them make all the decisions from there. Earth for him. Home. He ached for it.
He strapped himself in the hammock, punched the warming studs for each engine, and there was a dull, muffled throb below him as each jumped into subdued life. The banks of dials that curved in front of him glowed softly, and he started an almost automatic blast-off check. It took twelve precious minutes.
Then he was ready. Scanners on, heat up . . . ready.
The Martian sky was like frozen ink above him and his hands were wet inside his gloves and there was a choking dryness in his throat. Now . . .
And he could not move. There was a sudden, awful nausea and his head spun, and before his eyes there spread a bleeding Earth; the sun dimmed, and fertile plains were cast in sudden shadow . . . The air chilled, the shadow spread, and there were skeletons reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky!
And Earth was no longer what Men had built!
Then the horror in his head was gone, and he felt an awful pressure on each side of it. His hands . . . he had been pressing with insane strength at both sides of his skull as if to crush it with his bare hands . . . His face was wet, and he was breathing, choking, in strangling gulps.
A scanner alarm clanged.
He forced his eyes to focus on the center screen.
“Earthman! Emergency! There has been a flaw discovered in the repair of your ship! Do not blast off! Do not . . .”
The other image caught him as his arm was in mid-flight toward the control bank. Sweet and warm . . . the fertile plains mounting their golden fruits to a mellowed sun, and beyond the distant gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities . . .
But his arm kept going, its muscles loose, and it fell. Heavily. Squarely on the stud-complex toward which its fist had been aimed a split-second before.
The engines roared, and the ship lurched upward from the red sand.
The command flicked into the Captain’s brain like a lash of ice.
“Slaazar! Converge, sheaf!”
“Converging, sir . . .” It would be no use, of course. If the high brass had been content to rely on the beams rather than on their own subtlety in the first place, the Earthman would never have fallen prey to the Nomads, even for a second. But they had wanted to be as forthright as possible—force, they said, would only arouse suspicion. Psibeam units only as a last resort . . . The lowliest Patrol Lancer could have told them the folly of that!
Hastily, Slaazar issued orders to his battery crews tracking the ascending Spaceship, their units already nearing overload potential. But the desert-scum would see some real psi-power now! They’d see it wasted completely if they saw it at all . . . Because they’d outmaneuvered the brass again!
“Convergence impossible, sir.”
As he had expected.
“Colonel Truul, this is Captain Slaazar. Target has passed critical planetary curvature. Convergence impossible. Standing by, sir.”
For several moments after that, the thin atmosphere of Mars was warmed a little . . .
ACCELERATION blackout had not been total; leaving Mars was even easier than leaving the surface of Earth for the orbits of the Stations. But there was a period of no-thought, no-time, no-being. And then full consciousness seeped back slowly. But not as it was supposed to.
Johnny Love knew he had come to because he could see the banked instruments glowing palely before him; because he could realize from reading them that his ship was doing its job to perfection. Almost ready to complete the blast-off ogee, and—
Angrily he belted the scanner switches off and the dull red sphere faded from the viewplates.
And he could feel the sweat start again all over his body. No, the returning consciousness was all wrong . . . All wrong, and the image wouldn’t go away . . .
Red desert he had seen before, yet had not seen. There were dark ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places that might once have held placid lakes. And on all the vast surface there was no hint of the Patrol tracks, no sign of—anything.
But he had to descend to the place.
He did not know how to locate it, but the image told him that it did not matter. The image said merely that he must begin cutting his power.
There was no strength in his arms and hands, yet they moved in front of him as though things detached from his body; skillfully, surely, playing deftly across the colored studs.
Scanners on. Scanners on, kid . . .
He watched the screens again, unconscious of what his fingers did on the panels. The dull red sphere loomed large once more. The picture was off-center; without knowing what he did he rectified course with the bow jets; it was centered again. But it was a different place. Still the desert, but with ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places . . .
It was coming up fast, now; faster, until the horizon was only a gentle arc against a thin span of blackness, and the rest was cold red.
Hardly knowing what he did, his fingers suddenly raced over the control console, even before the scanner-alarms began their ear-splitting clanging!
The ship lurched into a direction-change that threatened to wrench the hull apart, and the picture in the scanner reeled crazily. He knew his own brain was not dictating the commands of control to his fingertips, nor was it evaluating for itself the madly fluctuating values indicated on the panels. A human brain could not have done it, he knew that . . .
He had cut power. At least there was no power. He was falling at a crazy angle and the desert was rushing up now, hurtling up to smash him. They’d hit him, then, yet he’d felt nothing . . .
It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosphere of Mars—it was a long fall. Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch.
The ocean of sand rushed up.
And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud.
It was as though he’d been hit from behind with all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the titanic force of full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless.
&nb
sp; He was running. In a nightmare of a dead planet that was not dead, he ran, away from something.
That was how his consciousness returned. While he ran. He stopped, stumbling, turned to look behind him.
And the ship was there. Landed perfectly, stubby bullet-nose pointing to the sky. And above it—
Run!
The command hit his brain with almost physical force. A will that was not his own took hold of his whole being, and he was running again, plowing his way through the sucking sand with strength summoned from a well of energy within his body that had never been there before.
Through the thin glassite walls of his helmet he could hear the thuk, thuk, thuk of his boots as they pounded somewhere below him, and there was another pounding, a deadly rhythmic bursting pressure in his chest. And a whine in his ears . . .
The wind-strewn sand stretched flat and infinitely before him. Then leaped at him headlong and there was no horizon; there was only the sudden awful wrench of concussion, a tremor of pure sound which would, in denser atmosphere, have destroyed him with the inertia of his own body.
He could not move. Only cling to the shifting desert floor that rocked sickeningly beneath his outstretched body . . . cling to it for dear life.
There was no thought, no understanding. Only a sensation which he could not comprehend, and the sure knowledge that none of this was real. Not real, but the end of survival nonetheless.
PAIN, and seeing two bright objects transiting the darkness at which he looked; seeing something then between.
His brain began identifying. The darkness; sky. The bright objects; Diemos, Phobos . . . And the something between—
It was a transparency of some sort; curved, or he would not have been able to detect it at all. A vaulted ceiling through which he could see . . .
His full consciousness came flooding back, then. He tried the muscles in his neck, they hurt, but they worked, and he could move his head from side to side. There was the same transparency, as though he were covered by some huge, invisible bowl.
And there were men. Big, muscular creatures, yet thin, tall . . . Not like the others at all . . .
He sat bolt upright, and they did not move. It was not the same as before. No small room. No voice that he could not see. They had not even removed his suit or his helmet, and he was lying on a hard, cold substance.
Then he saw what they were doing. There were two of them apart from the others, working to bring a compact-looking machine into position near him. A gleaming, short cylinder, swung on gymbals between slender forks, mounted on a thin wheeled standard. They were aiming it at him.
“No! No—” He tried to get to his knees, but it was as though there were no muscles in his body.
“Man of—Earth! We are friendly. Is that understood?”
The thought-words formed in his brain as the strange images had before, and then he knew. Should have guessed it, part of his mind was telling him in a fantastically detached way, the dreams . . . the compulsions over which he had had no control in the ship . . . This—thing. It probably—
“You are quite astute, Earthman. But it is not our technology which created this device. To save you and the civilization which you represent—and ultimately, our own—it was necessary for us to steal it. It cost six lives.”
“Steal . . .”
“From your former captors. It is their invention, as are so many things with which they destroy. With this instrument, they have succeeded in taking one of Nature’s more subtle phenomenon—psychokinesis—and amplifying its energies nearly a million-fold. Those stepped-up energies can then be projected in a tight or fanned beam at will.
“They can make a man ‘dream,’ as you did—or they can destroy him outright, depending on which of the ‘psi’ factors, ESP or PK, is given dominance during projection. But we are not skilled in its operation—they detected our use of it on you while you slept, and from that moment on you were so well screened that even at the risk of burning this unit out, we were not able to project powerfully enough to do more than merely touch your brain—”
THERE WAS a strange calm in his mind, now. He understood the words and accepted them as matter-of-factly as they were given. Even now they were manipulating him like some intangible puppet, yet he was convinced it was not a malevolent manipulation. Convinced. The conviction—manipulation, too . . .
“Only partly, Earthman. We said we are friendly, and we are. We have calmed you and erased your fear. From this point on, we will use this instrument only for communication.”
And then he felt the fear in him again, gnawing, and his body was again damp and cold. But he had control, now. Control enough to speak.
They stood before him, immobile, watching.
Somewhere, Johnny Love found his voice.
“Look, I’ve been through this ‘friendly’ act before . . .” He hesitated, and they did not try to interrupt him. “Well don’t just stand there!” The fear was suddenly turning to the bitter anger of frustration, they had him whipped, and he was tired. “Tell me why! You stick that thing into my head when I’m blasting for home. You force me to drop back. You blow up my ship. Real friendly! Real sports!” For a moment he had run out of words, and again they made no effort to answer him. “All right! I don’t understand you—I don’t know what you want. But nobody is trying to hurt you, nobody’s after your little desert paradise. We had an idea, that’s all. We thought we could make it work. People have been talking ‘go to Mars’ on my planet for longer than most of ‘em can remember. So we finally gave it a whirl! Sorry!”
He looked at them hard, then, and thought that there was something almost like a smile on the face of one. Smile, then, damn you . . .
“We want nothing, Earthman, but to prevent from happening on your planet the thing that happened on this. If they succeed in destroying you as they have us, then this System will always be under their heel, and we shall never be rid of them. Understand, their numbers were too few ever to conquer a planet with a civilization as large and as highly organized as that of Earth, by physical means.
“Knowing that, we—they call us gypsies, nomads, desert-scum today—we were not too alarmed when they landed here two centuries ago. We were glad to take from them, without paying a price. We were awed by their gifts. Their papers and their books, which would show us how to rebuild our waning civilization—advance us a thousand years in less than fifty; restore to us our lost arts . . . And compared to you, we were so very few.
“In return, they said that all they wanted was permission to set up a research site. They told us they were a scientific expedition from far out-System. Aldeberan, they said. Part of a vast exploratory program which they had been conducting for centuries.
“We believed them—why not? One day, we thought, we too will be in Space. And with that day would begin one of the greatest projects of exploration that our race had ever known. So we agreed, and gladly.”
“Hold it, hold it! ‘They’—who the hell are ‘they’? You can spare the suspense . . .”
And then there was no more words. The pictures formed in his mind as before, only stronger, now, and there were no details left out.
The weapons of war had been built, not by the out-System men, but by their hosts. The plans had not proven too difficult to follow . . .
The new knowledge was not hoarded, was not held under jealous guard by those who had given it, but by those to whom it had been given. One man from another; one group of men from another. States and nations from each other.
Until there was no trust left on all the planet.
There were the wars, then.
And when they were over, the new masters had established their first beachhead in the new System.
“But, it was only a beachhead, and had been only intended as such—” The pictures broke off; the unspoken words resumed. “Your planet was the ultimate target, but at first, your civilization was not adequately advanced to fall prey to their technique. Their weapon is knowledge, but t
he potentialities of that knowledge must be understood by a people before it can be effectively used to destroy them.
“The rest must be self-evident. After we destroyed ourselves, they sank their infectious, hollow roots into our planet. And from then, investigated your Earth from time to time . . . and waited . . .
“Waited, because they knew you would be coming. And they knew what kind of men you would be. Strong men, with the light of the stars in your eyes. Yet confused, weak men, with the darkness of suspicion and jealousy still in your souls. Such are humans, after all . . .
“That is why we stopped you, Johnny Love. Once your blast-off ogee had carried you beyond the curvature of their horizon and brought you over us, our psibeam was effective and theirs were not. We are sorry about your ship. Once they realize that you were under our influence, and were returning rather than taking their precious data to your people, they zeroed-in with those damnable guided juggernauts—”
“It wasn’t you, then. You mean they—”
“There is little that they cannot do. Destruction is their forte. They could not keep us from preventing your taking their ‘gift’ to your people, but they could keep that ‘gift’ from falling into our hands—and they did. They do not always win. But they never lose.”
“But I—” Johnny’s thoughts raced. The ship, gone. And Harrison and Janes, Lamson, and Fowler. They would be landing in a few days. They—
“Yes,” the thoughts of the true Martians before him answered. “And they will be given a ‘gift’ for Terra as you were. If your friends return successfully to your planet with that ‘gift’—then—”
The thought was not completed. But it did not have to be.
A beachhead was one thing. These scattered, struggling people who had once been masters of Mars might one day unseat it, for they were not yet beaten people, and their will to survive was yet strong. But beyond that—
Earth taken, the System taken.
There it was.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 50