The Secret Martians

by Jack Sharkey

  If my hands could reach the neck cord, though, I might be able to untie it, and then try my hand cords with my teeth.

  Slowly, I managed to slide my knees forward until I was resting solely on kneecaps and chin. Then I twisted, stretched, and tugged with my arms until the binding cord slipped over my rump and slid to the backs of my knees. My chin, from all the weight on it, felt as though it had been kicked by a fullback, but I ignored the pain and flopped awkwardly over onto my side, then rolled carefully onto my back, with my ankles somewhere over my face.

  Now came the rough part. I found myself, in the next five minutes of torture, wishing I’d done more toe-touching exercises in my erstwhile sedentary life. The cord slipped down as far as the tendons behind my heels, but would budge no further, no matter how I strained. With my boots off, I might have made the last inch or so, but they were on, and had thick durex heels. It was going to be a struggle.

  When it happened, it happened all at once. I was wrenching at my bonds, gritting my teeth and pulling, despite the binding agony that flared in my wrists. And then I smacked myself in the face with my own hands as my feet jackknifed back to the ground. I lay there panting awhile, then started feeling about my neck for the end of the cord fastening the hood in place.

  My fingers, thicker than ever after my struggles, were almost without the power to feel as I fumbled them against the knot in the cord. In their bloated state, they were just slightly more manageable than sausages.

  I let them work by touch, and kept my mind away from what they were doing, lest I begin to scream in frustration at their bumbling efforts. Then something slipped and gave way. The bottom folds of the hooding cloth fell open from my throat. I fairly tore the thing from my head and looked around me.

  There wasn’t much light to see by, just a pallid gray glow in the air, but I could tell I was in a cellar of some sort. The walls had that dusty look to them, and there was a flight of stone stairs going up toward a door, under which seeped a dim sheet of light. I started looking around for some other way out. There was none visible, although I couldn’t see too much outside the area where that dim light struck and diffused before vanishing into darkness.

  I licked my lips, took in some deep draughts of air, then began dulling my incisors on the wrist cords. The knot, unfortunately, was on the ulnar side of the wrists, just behind the little fingers. The only way I could get at that was to bend my hands tightly up to my neck, as though I were about to choke myself, and work over the underside of my wrists. It was awkward as hell, but finally that cord, too, dropped away, and I was free.

  Well, relatively free. I didn’t know how my chances were of getting out of that cellar or whatever it was.

  While it was probably only setting myself up for a return to my bonds, I decided to do the obvious thing and head up that flight of stairs.

  But before I did so, I scouted around for some sort of weapon. On a pile of empty crates I located a pair of shears, the sort used to snip through the metal tape that binds bulky crates like those. It wasn’t much, and was clumsy to hold, but it was all I had, so I took it along with me.

  Creeping up the stairs, I found the door locked from the outside, but it was a handle-or-key operated lock, the kind that can be opened from the inside by simply turning the knob. Apparently my captors were less concerned about me getting out than they were about anyone else getting in. It figured, though. I was supposed to be unconscious, hooded, and bound.

  Shutting the door behind me, I found myself in a corridor, not itself lighted, but getting light from somewhere at the far end. As I moved cautiously down its length, I was thankful for the treeless Martian topography which had occasioned all edifices being built of metal and/or stone. There wasn’t a chance of my making the floor creak.

  I arrived at the end of the corridor, and paused behind the edge of an open door, through which the light came streaming.

  And there were voices, too. Voices, and odd clacking noises.

  Gingerly, I lowered myself all the way to the flooring and peeked around the very bottom of the door frame, below, I hoped, the eye level of anyone in that room.

  It was, I saw, the bar in which I’d been mickeyed. But long opaque blinds were latched in place over the windows and glass door, and the people in the place didn’t seem to be customers. Some of them were seated on the barstools, and some on the bar itself. Others occupied tables and chairs along the wall opposite the bar. All were facing the area between the bar and the tables, in which was set another table. There was a man seated at it. A man, and something else.

  It was this something else which was emitting the clacking noises I’d heard. I looked with fascinated horror at its long, flare-nostrilled face, and rheumy-looking wide-set eyes. It had no hair, nor could I discern anything like ears, until it turned its head and I saw the hole just behind the back edge of the cruelly-toothed jaw. The overhead light, as this creature turned its head, glinted red off squarish conical scales, and I realized with a little shock that I was seeing my first sugarfoot.

  Seen in the flesh, as it were, it looked considerably more menacing than the photos I’d seen of it back on Earth. At that cosmic distance, I could believe that it was docile, albeit standoffish, and was, while not a friend to man, at least an accepted neutral. But looking at those eyes and teeth, I decided the Public Information Bureau on Earth was full of beans. That damned thing looked dangerous!

  As I watched, it made some more clacking noises, and the man beside it, whom I recognized as the bartender, frowned and clacked something back. His sounds didn’t have the same snapping quality to them, but I couldn’t doubt they were conversing in some language. Which language just had to be the sugarfoot’s.

  And that was another thing the PIB on Earth hadn’t mentioned. Contact between man and sugarfoot was supposed to be impossible, except in the form of rudimentary gestures. They were supposed to be able to learn to follow certain Earth words, if you dinned them at them often enough. But that was all. Now, here was an Earthman talking to one! It’d make interesting news for Baxter when I got back.

  If I got back.

  The bartender, in the course of his speech, pointed at something on the table before him and shook his head. I raised up Slowly on my hands from my prone position, and got a glimpse of the object under discussion. It was my collapser, goldenly glinting in the incandescent light.

  Just from following the bartender’s gestures and facial expressions, I began to gather some of what was going on. I didn’t know why, but they seemed to be dickering over possession of the weapon. And unless I misjudged the man’s now-and-then pointing in the direction of where that stone cellar lay, I, too, was on the auction block.

  The way I figured it, this sugarfoot wanted me, and it wanted the collapser. The bartender seemed willing enough to surrender me, but was nixing a deal on the weapon.

  The drawn blinds and the men’s lowered voices indicated that it must be nightfall. I’d started out into Marsport at midday. The rotation of the planet is only fractionally different from Earth’s, so that meant that at least six hours had gone by since my capture. But a bar closing down at sunset, just when its business would begin picking up, would look pretty suspicious, so I could figure on probably another six hours, putting the time at somewhere past midnight.

  I wished I could leave with the collapser, but I had my doubts that I could cross the floor of that room to snatch it from the table without being grabbed by someone. I shook my head and withdrew back into the corridor to think. No point in risking my life to get that weapon back, when I could simply slip out some other way and alert IS. A team of agents could reduce the bar to a sparkling crater in seconds, along with the men, sugarfoot and collapser.

  It wouldn’t be quite as glorious as acting the hero by myself, but it’d be considerably safer. I got back to my feet and started inspecting the rest of the corridor, seeking a less populated exit than the one onto Von Braun street.

  Back the way I’d come, there was onl
y the door to that cellar. I doubled back toward the other door by the bar itself, ducked down low, and scuttled past it on my hands and knees. No outcry came from the room, just the vociferous clacking noises, and an occasional mutter from one of the surrounding men. I figured I’d made it okay. The corridor bent, just past that doorway, and ended in a window. It was open. I stuck my head out and looked around.

  Something was glowing just beneath me, something that reflected almost intolerable heat against my face when I looked down at it.

  A river of liquified iron, ten feet wide, ran along a bed carved into the rocky soil. It was a good five feet between the bottom of the window and the sullen smolder of that hellish stream, but my face and throat felt already parboiled. Before ducking back into the relatively cooler temperature inside the corridor, I shot a glance toward the source of this impassable moat, and understood why it was there.

  About two miles along this radiant river, I saw the towering metallic hulk of the converters, their shimmering molecule-blasting rays leaping from a multi-noded sender plate to a cup-shaped receiver. And, silhouetted against the black velvet night sky, above and between these deadly twins, was a monster escalator, carrying ton after ton of rich red Martian sand to a point in space directly above the flashing beam, and spilling it downward through the raw energy below.

  Where the sand—pure ferrous oxide—struck the beam, I could not look without daring blindness, so violent were those disruptive reactions. But just above it, a silvery cloud arose and dissipated itself; the freed oxygen, enriching the atmosphere in this gigantic crater that was Marsport. And below it, a cataract of burning metal sprayed downward into an enormous vat, the sides of which were spouting a continual flow of this dangerous liquid into troughs which spread out in a fanlike pattern that must have encompassed the entire city.

  It took me a few minutes of thought, but I figured it out, as I drew back through the window from the heat. It was not enough that the converters could supply the citizenry with breathable air. The planetary temperature at night was below the level at which a man could live, save with the most cumbersome, demanding precautions, such as are demanded by arctic exploration on Earth.

  And so, instead of merely letting the metal cool into ingots before it was shipped where it was needed, it was channeled through the city, passing behind all the buildings where alleys would normally be, and warming the environment so that going into the night air would not mean sure death by freezing. I could not see the far end of the trough, but I knew that beyond the city limits the troughs would converge, and iron would be cooled, shaped and shipped.

  It was ingenious, and something I’d never run across in my readings about Mars. But then, I was never much of a space exploration fan. However, ingenious or not, it was a crumby trick on me, really. I hadn’t a chance of passing through that rushing inferno outside.

  That left me one way out: through the front door.

  Hefting the wirecutter in my hand, and breathing a silent prayer, I moved back to that open doorway.

  Things, when I peeked out, seemed no more advanced. Man and sugarfoot were still clacking away at one another, neither side giving ground. However, the other men round about were showing signs of restlessness.

  “Whyn’t ya just blast him, Jim, and forget it?” suggested an oldster just over to my left.

  Jim, the bartender, faced the other men with a black scowl, furious at the interruption. “You keep your mouth shut, Barry! You know these things can understand a little English!”

  The older man, Barry, subsided with a sullen look at Jim, and I turned my gaze there to see what would happen next. I’d quite overlooked the fact that Jim’s looking toward Barry had sent his eyes in the general direction of the corridor, and that I was leaning my fool head around the doorway. Jim was looking right at me, his mouth wide open.

  “Hey!” he cried, leaping to his feet and pointing with such violence that his chair crashed to the floor. “He’s loose!”

  I took a step back, as the entire roomful of men jumped up and turned to face me. My mind leaped about, like a fish flung alive onto a skillet, trying to make some sensible decision. Should I chance flinging myself over that red hot river outside, or rush back to the deadend of the cellar? Neither course seemed very profitable, somehow.

  But my time was running out. After the first startled pause at seeing me there, the group came at me in a rapid scuttle, hands outstretched to take me.

  So none of them ever saw what I saw, facing into the room. The sight they missed was one which sent me diving to my left, to fall prone on the corridor floor, hugging the raw stone there and clamping my eyes shut.

  I heard that terrible throbbing buzz in that bar room, and then my skin prickled and stung as an eight-foot segment of the wall above me vanished into a cloud of white sparks.

  When I at last lifted myself carefully for a look, the sugar-foot was gone. Gone with the collapser I’d seen it snatch up from that table when Jim’s guard was down.

  And the men were gone, too. Gone with most of the wall, half the bar, and a large quantity of chairs and tables.

  A collapser is nothing to fool with.

  The sugarfoot must have flicked it on and sent the bluewhite beam in a sweeping curve that turned everything it touched into hot protons and electrical energy. He’d turned it off, however, as soon as the last man vanished from his ken.

  I realized with a sick feeling of shock that a second’s more energy would have dissolved the back wall, and I would have been buried beneath a flood of molten iron.

  10

  When I got outside, there was no sign of the sugarfoot along the street. In fact, there was no sign of anyone. Mars-port, despite the caloric values of the heating troughs is still pretty chilly at night. I gathered no one went out much, or that this was a slack night for the local merchants, because even the stores were closed, and the public stereovision auditorium was shut down, too.

  It was eerie, walking down that rocky street, with no sound but that of my curex heels smacking the ground. To left and right, dark shuttered windows moved by as I advanced. My nose still felt irritated by the good whiff of ozone it had inhaled when the sugarfoot cut loose with the collapser, and I was rubbing the tip of it with the back of my wrist when I saw a figure down the street, facing toward me.

  It seemed to be a man, but his figure was lost in the deep shadows thrown by the eye-searing glow of the distant converter. I kept moving toward him, but slowed my pace.

  There was something in his attitude that I didn’t like. He was waiting there for me, I realized with a small shock. And I sensed his intentions weren’t the best possible.

  While moving toward him, I started darting my eyes about me, to see if there were some way of getting off the street. But the buildings were all side-to-side with one another, and shut tight. I could, of course, hurl myself through the glass front of one. But assuming I didn’t brain myself on the blinds in the process, what then? All these places were backed by that infernal molten river. There’d be no escape. And then my eyes saw something that sent brazen alarm bells clanging through my nervous system. In the entrance of one store, the glass curved at a forty-five degree angle to my line of movement, and, reflected in its depths, I could see the broad avenue behind me.

  It was filled with creeping figures.

  I spun about with an involuntary cry, and looked at them, head on. It was a group of men, armed with rude weapons, mostly clubs, but a few glittering knives. And they were obviously after me.

  As soon as they knew I’d spotted them, they left all pretense of stealth, and came at me in a run, brandishing their weapons.

  I staggered back one frightened step, then turned and ran down the street like a madman. Not one of them, however, was making a sound. Only their heavy footfalls told me they were still in earnest pursuit as I stumbled up the street toward that solitary waiting figure in the shadows. It was like a nightmare; the relentless pursuers chasing one down an endless avenue with no t
urnoff.

  My ribs ached with panicky breathing, and my vision was swimming giddily as I came to where the solitary figure stood. “Here we go,” I said to myself. “Now he steps out and stops me. And I’m too winded to put up a fight.”

  As I came nearly abreast of the figure, it stepped out into the blue-white glow that glared from the converter. Brilliant light coruscated over glassy scales as it moved out into the avenue in a queer scuttling motion.

  The sugarfoot! I knew it was the same one. My collapser was still clutched in its three-fingered hand. Blindly, I shot my arms in front of me to wrest the thing from its grasp, but it simply tossed the gun into its other hand, and with the free hand caught me by the collar and held on.

  Then a humming blaze filled the avenue for a split second, and I got my second whiff of ozone that night. The sugarfoot released me, and I fell to the street panting. I managed to lift my head, and look back toward where my pursuers had been. They were gone.

  I raised myself on my hands, and looked up into the scaly face of my rescuer, wary and alert. But the sugarfoot had lowered the collapser, and wasn’t menacing me with it.

  “Why did you kill those men?” I asked, bewildered.

  It flickered out a horrible-looking tongue that resembled a segment of hollow rubber tubing, and made some clacking noises. I shook my head. The thing ceased making noises, and tried sign language instead. It pointed toward where the men had been, then pointed at me.

  “You mean,” I said slowly, “you annihilated those men simply because they were after me?”

  The thing didn’t change expression—I didn’t really see how it could, what with its rigid crystalline structure—but it gave a slow nod. It seemed to have difficulty doing it, as though it weren’t used to that particular form of expression.

  “But why?” I said, getting to my feet and staring at the creature. “Why go to these lengths to protect me? Is there something special about me?”