by Jack Sharkey
Again the ponderous nod. Then the sugarfoot pointed at me, and pointed at its head. I simply shook my head. It did the action again, patiently.
“Because I’m smart?” I choked, not really thinking this was the case.
The lumpy red head moved from right to left and back to center again.
“Then what?” I demanded.
It looked about, suddenly, then pointed to the ground and shook its head again.
“Not here, you mean?”
The sugarfoot nodded, then raised a hand and beckoned.
“You want me to come with you; is that it? I said.
It nodded, with less patience, and moved off a few paces.
When I didn’t go with it, it turned to face me again, and gave its head a questioning tilt.
“Because,” I answered its unspoken question, “I don’t know if I can trust you, that’s why.”
It stared at me with its wide-set eyes for a second, then pointed to the empty space in the street, then to the collapser, and nodded.
“I—I should trust you because you didn’t use the collapser on me? Because if your motives were bad, you would already have destroyed me?”
The sugarfoot nodded violently.
“Unh-uh!” I said, backing off. "Not a chance. You tell me why, and maybe I’ll come along. But not before.” Even as I said it, I felt regret for my own irrationality. Were its intentions even the best, it could certainly not prove them to me, or even demonstrate its reasons with the language barrier between us.
It stood there, looking at me, apparently thinking hard. We seemed to be at an impasse. I didn’t want to go with it. On the other hand, I didn’t want it to go off and leave me with the most baffling mystery of my life unsolved. I had to know why it had spared me, and what it wanted.
But an alien, on a strange planet, with that dragonish form, and the shark-mouth full of teeth, not to mention a thick three-foot tail…I couldn’t bring myself to trust it.
At that moment, there was a shout down the street, and a flashing light. Someone was coming. Probably, I realized an instant later, the Security men from the rocket field. They had a gadget there that could not only spot, but track down, any use of atomic energy in the region. And there had been, within ten minutes of each other, two such uses of that all-annihilating collapser.
The sugarfoot took a step backward.
“Hold on,” I said. “These guys are okay. Maybe, after I get a tranquillizer, I’ll be more in the mood for coming with you. If you’ll just wait a moment.”
But the sugarfoot was having none of it. It gave me an angry glance, then, before I could dodge, it grabbed my arm. I went to pull away, then saw that it was trying to tell me something. The fingers not holding my arm were indicating my wrist. It took me a second to catch on.
“Wrist—wristwatch?” A swift nod. “Time of some sort?” Another. “You—You’ll come for me at a later time?” A very brief nod, then a surprisingly friendly clasp of those clawlike fingers on my shoulder.
Then, with a bound that took my breath away, the sugar-foot sprang upward from the street and landed on the rooftop of one of the nearby stores. It landed running, and as I watched, it reached the rear of the store and took a soaring leap out over the molten river between it and the next rooftop. Then it vanished into the blackness beyond the trough alley. I turned to await the arrival of the Security/men.
11
Charlie and the other Security Agent, whose name turned out to be Foster, sat stolidly listening as I recounted events since I’d last seen them.
“You say,” Charlie interrupted with a frown, “this here sugarfoot told you why he didn’t shoot you down?”
“Not quite,” I said. “He didn’t seem to have the time. But he said he’d see me—”
“Look, Delvin, that’s not what I mean. Everybody from Mars to Venus knows that the sugarfoots are dumb animals. So I’d like to know what you’re trying to hand us.”
There was something funny in his tone. As though he were saying, not “It can’t be true,” but, “It’s not supposed to be true, and that’s the way things stay!”
I paused, considering. I’d had a hard time for a while, when I was first picked up. But I’d been able to get myself brought, by the men who found me, to Charlie and Foster, after giving Charlie’s name and describing the two. They’d identified me, and gotten me off the hook for the damage to that bar. It was damage possible only by a collapser. And I, of course, had been picked up wearing a collapser holster.
But from the time I’d been left with them, there was a bothersome something about their attitude; an impatience, as though they had something to say to me, or even do to me, but had to hold off until I was through.
“He told me by sign language,” I said. “He made a gesture, and I interpreted it. Nothing baffling in that, is there?”
Foster gave me a half-lidded stare, as though suppressing anger. Then he said, “Tell me, Mister Delvin. Just what is the sign for ‘I must go now, but I’ll see you at a later time’?”
I took a deep breath and controlled myself. "Look, I was picked for this job because I have a gift for interpretation, or deduction, or whatever you want to call it.”
“If you’re such a hotshot figure-outer,” Charlie snapped, “how come you didn’t get suspicious when that bartender was forcing free drinks on you? Any sap would’ve expected a mickey with the guy acting like that!”
“The reason,” I said, stiffly, hating to admit my mental weakness, “is that at that particular moment, the picture of Miss Snow White was on the stereo. That’s why! I—I don’t function properly when there are women about.”
Charlie and Foster exchanged a look, and both shrugged; I felt a hot blush of embarrassment and anger burning upon my face. “And that’s the story!” I finished stubbornly.
Charlie heaved himself lazily to his feet. “What do you think, Foster?”
Foster, emulating the same lazy motion, looked thoughtful for a second, then nodded. “I think that’s all we’re going to get. Come on, let’s stash him away.”
“Stash me away?” I cried indignantly. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re going into a nice cell, buddy,” said Charlie, an ugly smile on his face. “And you’ll be let out when the time comes. So quit your bellyaching and come on. It’ll be easier if you don’t try to get rough.”
“You can’t arrest me,” I said. “I’m—or, I should be—the Amnesty-bearer!”
It was as if they hadn’t heard me.
“Come on, come on,” said Foster, crooking a finger at me.
“You guys can’t pull this kind of trick!” I said. “When Chief Baxter hears about this—”
Charlie and Foster threw back their heads and laughed.
“W-what’s so funny?” I asked, a dreadful inkling growing inside my mind.
The door opened and a third security man walked in. It was Chief Philip Baxter. He gave me a tolerant smile.
“They’re laughing, Delvin,” he said smoothly, “because I gave the order for your arrest.”
The cell was of cold Martian stone, and had no window. I sat, miserable, on the thin cot provided for me, and pondered all that had happened to me in the last few days. None of it made the slightest sense to me. Not my selection by the Brain, nor my arrest by Baxter’s men. It was crazy!
Baxter, when I’d demanded to know the reason for his duplicity, had merely said, “You’ve served your purpose.” And then Charlie and Foster had taken me away, their collapser muzzles forming unarguable persuaders against my spine.
I didn’t even give a moment’s consideration to thoughts of escape. I was in a Security prison, and a maximum-security Security prison at that. The door to my cell was a massive foot-thick stone which swung into place on ponderous hinges, and sealed by making a half-twist in the circular entrance. Air was provided through vents, vents which could be closed off if the prisoner showed signs of aggressive tendencies. A few hours without air made m
ost men pretty docile.
I wondered how long I’d sit there before they fed me. Or if they would feed me at all. Hell, no one knew I was on Mars. My last contact with my regular associates had been my goodby to Marge at the office. For all anyone knew, I’d been arrested for anarchy, or something. I knew, with a cold sinking feeling, that no one would even ask about me. Security had taken me, Security was good for the country, and Security never made mistakes. Topic closed. Jery Delvin written off as an uninteresting memory.
There seemed to be nothing to do but think, so I did a lot of it.
I noted with chagrin that they hadn’t removed my belt, or socks. I could, if I so desired, escape my fate by simply knotting them into a cord, and passing one end through the overhead air grillwork and the other about my neck. Maybe that was the reason why they hadn’t taken them. I had a distinct feeling, a served-my-purpose feeling, that whether I died by my own hand or of claustrophobia made little difference to Baxter and his boys.
I folded my hands behind my head and sank back onto the hard cot, puzzling over everything that had happened to me.
The Brain selects me as the key figure in the finding of the missing Space Scouts. Fine, so far. Just what my duties are, it doesn’t say, but I’m the man for the job, whatever it is. Okay.
So Baxter hands over the Amnesty. I get a preliminary lead from Anders, the pilot of the Scouts. I take off for Mars to find the kids, who seem to have left of their own volition. Swell. Only, a cute blonde by the unlikely name of Snow White filches the Amnesty, and nearly has me tossed in prison. Except that Baxter, still on my side, gets me loose. I take off looking for Snow, and get mickeyed in a Martian bar. Then—
Then things start getting confusing.
I get loose and come upon a sort of council of Earthmen, dickering with a sugarfoot, a supposedly dumb animal, for me and my collapser.
I get spotted, the men try to snatch me, and they all get vaporized by the sugarfoot, who runs off. I follow, and next thing, another mob is on my heels. Same bit with the sugarfoot. Zzzzzzurp! No more men! Only this time it doesn’t run off. It dallies a bit, and tries to get me to go somewhere with it. Why it has suddenly decided to take me along, I don’t know, because it had the opportunity much earlier, when it made its first massacre.
However, I decline the invitation, and, like a good boy, report all events to Security. Upshot: I am stashed in a solid rock cell, possibly never to emerge alive.
I lay there pondering these facts. One thing seemed clear: I didn’t know the angles. What was Snow’s angle? Or Baxter’s? Or the sugarfoot’s? Or the mob’s?
Hell, what was mine?
I snorted and sat up, rubbing my neck. I had a headache coming on, and it felt like the start of a migraine, an occupational hazard with ad men. I tried rotating my head on my neck, a good relaxer for those tensed neck muscles. And then I noticed that I was perspiring like mad, and that my throat felt hot inside.
With a sick apprehension, I sprang up and thrust my nose near the grill on the wall. Nothing. I tried poking a finger between the latticework. It was stopped by a metal plate.
The air-supply grill was sealed off. In that tiny cell, I had maybe two hours more of breathing time. After that—Well, I wouldn’t be feeling my oxygen-starvation headache any more.
I sat down on the cot once more and scowled at the floor. I was tired of puzzles, but even this didn’t make sense! Why take the time and trouble to smother me?
A collapser could wipe me off the slate in seconds. No annoying corpus delicti cluttering up the premises. Not even a bit of fingernail left, nothing to incriminate the murderers. So they smother me.
But why kill me, for heaven’s sake? It couldn’t be to keep me from telling what I knew! I didn’t know a damned thing. Except that Baxter, motive unknown, must have left Earth immediately after I spoke to him on that interplanetary hookup. Or was it interplanetary? Come to think of it, he could’ve been in the next room when I talked to him. Damn. It was baffling.
Why he hadn’t simply told me that it was no use, and sent me back to Earth, I couldn’t figure out. He could have made all sorts of reasonable excuses for my not continuing in my search for the missing boys, and I’d have swallowed any one of them. Instead, he locks me up, throws away the key, and turns off the air supply.
What did I know that I could communicate to people back on Earth? What knowledge did I have that was a menace of some sort to Security? Or, to be more near the truth, to Baxter?
The only interesting fact I’d stumbled on was—
But maybe that was it: the fact that the sugarfeet were something other than what Earth had claimed. That one I’d met was certainly no dumb animal. He had a language; I’d heard that bartender talking to him. That put him a few steps ahead of cats and dogs. Maybe a lot further.
But what difference did it make if the sugarfeet were or weren’t dumb animals? I didn’t care one way or the other. And I was pretty representative of an Earthman, wasn’t I? Who’d care, anyhow, if it turned out the sugarfeet were nearer human than had been supposed?
Well, I knew the who, if not the why.
Baxter obviously cared tremendously. Which deduction left me approximately nowhere.
The air seemed to be getting staler by the minute. I found I could breathe better lying flat on my back, not even using enough energy to remain in a sitting position.
My skin was clammy with sweat from head to foot, my windpipe felt like someone had just given it a brisk toweling with a hot doormat.
I thought desperately of pounding on that impervious stone door, in the chance that my .suffocation was an oversight on their part. But I knew in my heart it wasn’t.
I held myself on the cot, fighting that deadly tug of irrational emotion. If I was going to suffocate, I wanted to do it with as little pain as possible.
My lungs, though were telling me a different story. They had that “time to go up for air” feeling, the hideous pre-strangulation hot wave that floods through the ribs, begging, and then ordering, the swimmer to head to the surface before his lungs rip apart.
I fought the feeling, breathing faster to keep that dull nudging from becoming a full-scale command. But it was harder and harder not to fling myself at that bare store and try, in the last few minutes of life, to dig my way free with my fingertips.
And then, with my eyes burning in my own perspiration, and tongue half-protruding between gaping lips, I felt that stinging, prickling sensation along my limbs.
Then a blinding blaze of blue-white sparks showered me, and I jumped to my feet in fright.
The wall opposite the cell door was raggedly missing, its three-foot slabs of granite jutting wildly into the area where their companions had just been. And there was air; cold, chilling air, terribly thin to breathe. But it was air, and I leaped through that gap like a madman, flooding my hot lungs with the elusive draughts of black Martian night.
I staggered, dizzy at the sparseness of the atmosphere, and then a tight clamp closed upon my arm and kept me from falling. A three-fingered clamp.
I looked into the glittering face of the sugarfoot. It had the collapser in its free hand, and its eyes were locked on mine. It was waiting for me to say something.
“Brother,” I said, managing a grin, “I would love coming with you, no matter where!”
Surprisingly, it shook its dragon head, and made gestures toward my blouse, then an upward movement of its arms.
“You want me to take it off?” I said, in bewilderment. “But I’m half frozen already.”
The sugarfoot was adamant. Again it pointed to the blouse, and did that slip-it-over-your-head motion.
I gave up fighting it. The creature was obviously not inimical to me. Even if it were, I thought, I owed it something for pulling me out of that stone coffin.
Hoping pneumonia was less painful than outright suffocation, I obediently tugged it, loose from within my belt, and slid the thing over my head and off.
The sugarfoot took it fro
m me, turned it inside-out, and held it out close to my face for inspection, in the dim crisscross lighting of tiny Phobos and barely larger Deimos, as they scurried across the cold black sky.
I stared stupidly at the inside surface of the blouse, the black one which Baxter had insisted I wear, and then I caught the glint of reflected moonlight where there should have been plain shirt material. Tiny metallic filaments had been woven into the garment, too light and flexible for the wearer to feel them, but strong enough not to break with constant flexing.
I nodded, and handed the blouse back to the sugarfoot. “I see them. Wires,” I said. “But what does it mean?”
The sugarfoot pointed toward the Security prison, which at this point of the topography was on the outside of the hills which surrounded Marsport. Security had burrowed into those hills to make themselves an escape-proof dungeon. Even though I was out of it, I hadn’t yet, in the real sense of the word, escaped. It was easily twenty below zero, and the air was thin as the inside of a vacuum tube.
I was dizzy, and sick, and barely able to keep from falling, but I made myself ask, “What’s the blouse got to do with the prison?”
The sugarfoot pointed to the prison, the blouse, and made a circular gesture with his finger.
“The prison…” I said slowly. “It—It tracks the shirt around!”
A nod. Then the sugarfoot turned its head and, extending that hollow tongue, produced a shrill piercing whistle through the vibrating tip. I heard a scrunching sound on the rocky hillside where we stood, and then the damnedest little beast hove into view. It was about the size of a burro. But it had six legs, no visible head or neck, and was covered with spiky hairs that seemed more like lengths of straw than anything else I could think of. This ambulant bale of hay approached us, and halted before the sugarfoot. The sugarfoot whistled again, and from somewhere in the front—I assume it was the front—of this creature, a claw-tipped tentacle wormed out through the hay, and took the blouse from- the sugar-foot’s hand. A third and final whistle, and the thing, clutching the blouse, went off down the hillside with remarkable speed, heading toward the open desert that lay sullenly gray beneath the moonlight. It had that busy-busy-busy ant-motion to it, the front and rear legs on one side moving forward simultaneously with the middle leg on the opposite side, then a swift, jerky reverse and the other trio of legs moved forward, giving it a strangely graceful—awkward wriggling gait. But it was fast, damned fast. Within a minute, it was out of sight.