by Jack Sharkey
I swayed woozily, and hung onto the sugarfoot’s shoulder for support. “Blazing a false trail, huh?”
It didn’t answer, but reached out for me, and swung me up into its powerful arms, as a man carries a child. It clacked something which I took to be a term of reassurance, and then, holding me tightly so I wouldn’t get jounced to death, it took off in a leaping bound in a direction at right angles to that taken by the hay-bale creature. It jolted me a little, but the cold and lack of enough oxygen had taken its toll of my stamina. I passed out before the third bound.
And when I awoke, there was warmth and air, and a comfortable bed beneath me. And I was looking into the face of Snow White.
12
I forgot I was supposed to be mad at her. Instead of chewing her out for her sneak-thievery, I grasped her soft little hands, and murmured, “Are you okay?”
“Miraculously,” she said. “I hadn’t got twenty yards into town before my face and name were being blazoned on every stereo in Marsport. Things were a bit rough for a while.”
I propped myself up on my elbows, the better to see that lovely face, framed in a halo of silky pale yellow hair, and said, “What happened? How’d you escape? What’s with these mobs and sugarfeet, and—And where are we, for pete’s sake?”
“Whoa, boy!” she laughed, pressing me back onto the bed, her hands lingering on my chest for a delicious moment before she sat back again. “You’ve been very sick, whether you know it or not. Here, take a look.”
She picked up her handbag from the floor, took out a small mirror, and held it in front of my face. I took one look, then shut my eyes. My face was the cheery color of porcelain, with purplish eyelids and gray lips.
“What hit me?” I sighed, opening my eyes again.
“Oxygen-starvation, exposure, and near pneumonia. I thought you were dead when Clatclit carried you in here. You’ve been sleeping for nearly thirty-six hours.”
“Clatclit?” I said. “Is that the ambient hunk of dextrose who blasted me out of stir?”
“Let’s not be colorful,” said Snow, deprecatingly. “You owe your life to him, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “That was the ad man in me coming through. But look, my mind’s a whirlpool of confusion. Could you please tell me what’s been going on here, anyhow?”
“Lie back and rest,” said Snow, “and I will.”
I burrowed deeper into the warm coverlet, sighed, and kept my eyes on her lovely face. In the midst of her discourse, I even sneaked a hand out and laid it gently over her own. It was smartly slapped, without rancor, and I withdrew it from active duty for a while.
“Well, first thing, I’d like to apologize for that dirty trick I pulled back on the Valkyrie” Snow said. My heart turned over, and I felt an idiot grin of forgiveness spreading across my ghastly features. I found it quite impossible to stay angry with the girl. As I’ve said, something happens to my brain when around women.
“Accepted,” I croaked.
“I knew that you’d have no trouble getting away from those Security men I sent,” she said smilingly.
“Then why did you send them?” I asked.
"To keep them from asking me any questions,” she said, with a small shrug. “For all I knew, they were expecting a man with the Amnesty. However, knowing that just having it carried a lot of weight, I gave them the order to pick you up as soon as they approached me at the customs booth.”
“And if they hadn’t believed me?” I complained.
"Well,” she said carefully, “I suppose I’d have sent them a note, or something, telling them to release you.”
“Thanks for the kind thought,” I muttered.
Snow ignored my minor irritation, and went blithely on.
“My next move was to go to the Port Authority, and find out just where the Phobos II was berthed before takeoff. I thought that Ted might have left me a clue of some sort.”
“You sound as if he were expecting you to traipse up here after him,” I said, dubiously.
“He wouldn’t count on my coming, if that’s what you mean. But Ted’s a good kid. I’ve practically had to raise him myself. He knew I’d worry if I didn’t hear from him. He couldn’t know, of course, that IS would send forged letters to the relatives of the missing boys. 'So I assumed that, if he had the chance, he’d leave a clue of some kind for me, in case I did come.”
“An assurance of sorts, you mean?”
“Something like that. Like 'I’m okay, Snow, so don’t worry,’ or some such message. So that’s what I looked for at the rocket berth.”
“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “I used to be a boy, once, myself, and while I didn’t have any sisters of my own, I knew a lot of buddies who did. The last thing in the world they’d expect would be for their sister to follow them into danger! Hell, they’d feel like sissies if they had to count on a sister for aid."
“I—” Snow hesitated. “I’m not what you’d call the typical sister, Jery.”
"Oh?”
She blushed prettily. “When you have to raise a brother, you have to learn a lot of things, if you’re going to bring him up fairly normally. I had to teach him to play ball, to box, to ski, to—Well, I was more like a father to him than anything. So Ted, knowing my more belligerent side, would just about figure I’d come storming up here to find him.”
“I don’t know,” I pondered aloud. “If you and Ted have this friendly relationship, why the hell would he put you to all this trouble? It seems like a lousy thing on his part to go wandering off without a word.”
“It would be,” Snow agreed, “unless there was a mighty important reason for his going. And it wasn’t without a word.”
“Then you did find a message?” I exclaimed.
She nodded. “After a few minutes’ inspection of the berth, I found it scratched onto one of the supporting beams.”
“Funny IS didn’t spot it,” I remarked.
“It’s in our special code, silly!” Snow said. “To anyone else, it’d look like hen scratches.” .
“Just what is this code of yours?” I asked, curious.
Snow looked at me a moment, frowning.
“I’ll carry the secret to my grave.” I said generously.
She laughed, then, and said, “All right, Jery. Just a second.”
From her handbag, she took out a small address book and a pencil, found a blank sheet at the back, and drew the following diagrams:
“See?” she said. “It’s very simple, really. You just remember the position of each letter in its portion of the diagram, and draw the corresponding shape instead of the letter; a square for E, square-plus-dot for N, an L-shape for G, same with a dot for P, an inverted V-shape for U—”
“I get it,” I said. “Gad, it looks positively runic when you write that way.”
Snow put the address book back into her bag. “So that’s what I found scratched onto that supporting beam. The message said, simply: Snow i am all bight find Clatclit THE SUGARFOOT AND HE WILL EXPLAIN.”
I stared at her. “Not a very easy task he set, was it?”
“Nothing easier, as it turned out,” she said airily. “Of course,” she admitted, when I gave her a cold stare, “I didn’t know it was easy, at the time. I was actually pretty much bewildered. I mean, I thought, like everybody else, that sugarfeet were like cats or dogs.”
“So how’d you accomplish locating him?” I said.
She grinned. “I went into Marsport, went up to the first one I saw—they’re as common as pigeons around the town—and said, feeling like a- damned fool, ‘Clatclit?’ Instead of the blank-eyed stare of uncomprehending nonintelligence which I expected for my efforts, the thing looked to left and right, I guess to insure that no Earthmen were watching, then beckoned to me and started waddling off. Still feeling like an idiot, I followed it. It led me back toward the airstrip. For a while, I had the stupid impression that it was going to point me out the spot from which the boys had vanished, and that I’d be right back whe
re I started.”
“So what happened?” I demanded impatiently.
“Back of the berth where the Phobos II had been, there was a slope, the beginning of the hills that surround Marsport. I followed the sugarfoot partway up the slope to a sort of cave mouth, and it gestured that I should go inside.”
“Okay, okay,” I prodded. “You went inside, and—”
Snow shook her head. “No, I didn’t. If you were on a strange planet, would you go into a cave after a red-scaled creature that looked like a pint-sized dragon?” She added, matter-of-factly, “Besides, there was a sign in front of the cave mouth, telling Earth people that it was forbidden to enter any of the many Martian caves that lay on the hillsides. It seems they’re old volcanic tunnels, and wind like labyrinths into the planet. Some of the earlier colonists vanished there, you know.”
“Ye gods!” I growled. “What did you do, then? Leave the sugarfoot standing at the cave mouth like an untipped bellboy?”
“More or less,” she admitted. "It seemed to want to take me with it, but I begged off as politely as possible, and went back into town. Only, when I got there, the first thing I saw was my own picture on the stereo screen outside the public auditorium.”
“With shoot-to-kill commands ringing into the street,”! nodded. “I suppose you swooned away on the pavement?”
Snow gave me a black look. “Mister Delvin, I do not swoon!”
I shrugged. “Just as well. Marsport has no pavement, anyhow.”
“Ho ho,” she said. “Do you want to hear the rest of this, or not?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do then, but to get out of town, fast. I hadn’t been spotted, yet. I guess my picture had only just gotten onto the screen. So I hurried back to where that cave mouth was, and the sugarfoot was still there, waiting for me.”
“He does sound like an untipped bellboy at that,” I remarked.
Snow ignored this, and continued. “Well, I went into the cave with him. After all, getting eaten by a dragon has no worse end result than getting hit with a collapser-bolt.”
“The process is a bit more painful, though,” I said.
“I took that chance,” Snow said. “I had to. So I followed it for what seemed miles of slippery tubular tunnels—knowing, and it scared me stiff, that I’d never find my way out without a map—and it led me here, where I met Clatclit.”
“And where, by the way,” I said, “are we?”
“Darned if I know,” said Snow. “We’re at present in a room off one of those tunnels I mentioned. The sugarfeet have been wonderful, helping you. Especially in bringing water for you; they’re deathly scared of the stuff.”
“I would be, too, in their case,” I said. “It’d be like toting around a carboy of sulphuric acid.”
“Well, anyhow, you’re alive,” she said, “and that’s something. But as for Ted—” her voice faltered.
I looked up, startled. “He’s not dead?”
“D—? Oh, no. At least I hope not!” she said. “I only meant that, while I’ve located Clatclit, I can’t figure out either his gestures or his—pardon the expression—words.”
“He understands English, even if his vocal apparatus can’t form it,” I said. “Why don’t you just ask him yes-and-no questions? He nods easily enough.”
“I did that,” she sighed. “I asked if Ted were alive, and he nodded. Then I asked to be brought to him, and he spread his hands. I said, ‘Does that mean you don’t know where Ted is?” He seemed stymied; he nodded, then shook his head immediately. You figure that one out!”
I tried hard. Nothing happened inside my head. It was filled with the picture of Snow, her lips slightly parted, her violet eyes anxious, her hair like a misty golden corolla.
“I can’t. Not with you around. Remember?” I said, helplessly.
She stood up from my bedside. “Then close your eyes, or something, Jery! I’ll stand here, quiet as a mouse.”
“Well,” I said, doubtfully, “I’ll try.”
I shut my eyes and tried to convince myself that Snow wasn’t anywhere about. I couldn’t do it.
“No use,” I sighed, opening my eyes again. "I can feel you here.”
“I guess the only thing to do is send Clatclit in to see you, and stay outside myself,” she said.
“Good idea,” I said. “Send him around with a lunch, though, will you? I’ve gone all hollow inside.”
Snow smiled, and left through a rocky archway.
I lay there looking about me. With Snow in the room, I hadn’t paid attention to my less stimulating environment. Now I found myself gazing over dark crimson walls, smooth and glossy looking. The room was just a bubble in the rock, about ten feet in diameter, with an artificially leveled floor.
Light came from a narrow ridge that ran around the walls near the top, a sort of ledge covered with fuzzy stuff that glowed pallidly white.
I threw back the coverlet and eased myself to my feet, and was grateful to find my trousers folded neatly upon a small hump of rock that probably served a sugarfoot as a stool. I slipped them on hurriedly, then investigated the stuff on that ledge.
It seemed to be a kind of crumbly dry fungus, not unlike the stuff found in dead logs on Earth, the phosphorescent foxfire. But it was a lot brighter, and also gave off a detectable amount of heat, too, which explained why I wasn’t still turning blue.
I left off looking at the heaps of fungi, and went to the archway for a look. Beyond the room, the cave dissolved into a riot of diverging tunnels. I decided to stay put, rather than risk getting myself entombed in some pahoehoeal cavity, and succumbing to the fate Baxter had planned for me.
And besides, those tunnels were black as oil, further off from the chamber I was in. My feet might find me a quick shortcut to the center of the planet, in that treacherous gloom.
Sugarfeet, I decided, could either see in the dark, or else they carried a handful of that white-glowing fungus with them when they went for a stroll.
I went back to the cot, and sat down to wait for Clatclit’s appearance, passing the time by struggling back into my durex boots. I felt a bit more competent, once trousered and shod, than I had felt while lying beneath that coverlet in my shorts. A man without his pants is only half a man, somehow.
From the corridor, there came a series of sharp, regular clicks, and then Clatclit waddled in. When not going full speed, in that gravity-defying bound of theirs, the sugarfeet moved rather clumsily, like an old sailor rocking down the street on legs trained to fight a rolling deck. I think it was the tail’s weight that accounted for that lumbering gait. It was fully as long as the legs, and nearly as thick, except where it dwindled at the end to a solitary prismatic red spike. I rather judged that that four-inch crystalline dagger came in handy during a fight.
Clatclit made a gesture with both hands, and clacked something at me. His attitude and inflection were unmistakeable.
I gave him the Earth equivalent of the gesture, raising my right hand in a sort of lazy wave. “Hello, yourself,” I said. “Snow seems to be having trouble communicating with you.”
Clatclit nodded, and seated himself on that stool.
“What’s this about her brother Ted?” I went on. “She asked if you knew where he was, and got a yes-no answer.”
The nod again.
“Do you know where he’s at?” I persisted.
Clatclit made the same yes-no motion with his nubbly head that Snow had described. I thought it over.
“You know, in a way, where he is, but not specifically?”
Violent nods, three of them.
“Ah, so that’s it!” I said. “Let’s see. Can you take us to him?”
The yes-no business again.
“You can take us to a point, but no further, maybe?”
The violent triple nod.
“Is there danger?”
Three nods.
“To you?”
Headshake.
“To me and Snow, then?”
Headshake.
“Ah! To Ted.”
Nods.
"How about his companions? Are they in danger too?” Yes.
“From whom?” I said, forgetting our limitations.
Disgusted stare.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Uh…from Baxter?”
A rocking of the head from side to side. This was a new one. I wrinkled up my forehead, puzzling it out.
“Baxter’s a danger in general, you mean, but that’s not the danger you meant, right?"
Nods again.
“Okay, then, let’s see who’s left…Danger from Earthmen, like those mobs who came after me?”
Negative.
“Surely not danger from me or Snow?”
Negative.
“From—from you Martians?” I choked, bewildered.
The head rocked from side to side.
“Danger…Danger from sugarfeet?”
A very violent negative.
“But from Martians?” I queried, blinking.
A slow, positive nod.
“But there are no Martians but you sugarfeet. Unless—” An icy cold hand grabbed my adrenal glands and squeezed, hard. “The Ancients!” I gasped, in horror.
A triple yes.
“Then they’re not extinct!”
A disgusted stare.
I realized he couldn’t answer till I rephrased that one, or I’d be stuck with wondering if he meant yes, they are, or yes, they aren’t. “Are they extinct?” I said.
Headshake.
“And they’ve got the boys!”
Nod.
“And they’re inimical to man, in some way!”
Violent negative.