She faced me, solemnly. "Yes, it does. You'll be careful, won't you?
And you'll let me know if--if--"
"I promise. Before I let Baxter know, even!"
We stood like that a moment, scarcely a foot apart, and I fought an
impulse to take her into my arms. Then, with no warning, she flung her
arms about my neck, and I had my first taste of those red velvet lips.
Then she was gone from the lounge. I glanced at the wall chronometer,
and began to move toward my cabin in a hurry. Less than five minutes
till set-down. I entered at a dead run.
I'd barely lashed myself to the rack when the landing thrust began.
However, I'd taken two antipressure tablets, as per the instructions
posted in the room, and I was comfortably unconscious even before the
pressure began to grow.
* * * * *
When I awoke, there were two men in red and bronze uniforms standing
over my rack. They didn't seem very pleased to find me there. One of
them had my bag open, and was holding my collapser in his hand, and the
look he was giving me wasn't the cheeriest I'd ever seen.
"What are you guys doing here?" I demanded. In speaking, I tried to
gesture. That's when I became aware of the cold steel manacles on my
wrists. "What the hell?"
The one with the weapon hefted it thoughtfully in his palm. "Don't you
know it's a death-penalty offense to have possession of a collapser,
chum?" he said.
The other one, not waiting for my answer, began undoing the straps
across my body, and assisting me to my feet.
"Say, look, what do you guys mean by coming here and--"
"We were alerted," said the first man. "By an Amnesty-bearer."
I simply stared at him for an unbelieving instant. Then I said,
"You're crazy! There's only one Amnesty in existence, and--"
With horrible clarity, I recalled Snow's impassioned farewell in the
lounge, and the way her hands had darted about; my neck.
I brought my manacled hands up to my blouse and felt frantically for
the red and bronze disc. The Amnesty was gone.
"Come along, now," said the one who'd helped me up.
"Where are we going?" I demanded.
"You're to be held incommunicado," he said, "until the Amnesty-bearer
returns. Come along, now. We haven't got all day!"
"Day?" I said, and looked toward the viewport. Sure enough the glaring
Martian sunlight was pouring into the cabin. "But we were landing on
the night side," I said, confused.
"You did," said the one with the collapser. "Only it was arranged that
you'd stay asleep for a while, till we could get here."
"Arranged how?" I choked furiously. Then I remembered the capsules
I'd taken. I looked toward the instruction posted on the inside of
the cabin door. Now that I was in no great hurry, I could see where
someone had, with ordinary pen and ink, gone over the numeral 1, and
made it into a passable 2. Someone, I thought bitterly, with shimmering
cornsilk hair and red velvet lips!
"Now, just a minute, you guys, I can explain." I said.
"Stow it," said the one with the gun. "Come on, get moving."
"When Chief Baxter hears about this--" I growled.
He laughed. "You know Baxter has no authority to over-ride an
Amnesty-bearer's orders!" Once again, he motioned with the collapser in
the direction of the door.
"Well then, boys," I said, in as threatening a tone as I could muster,
"let your fat heads chew on this for a while: the girl who has that
Amnesty stole it from me! You just get hold of Baxter and verify it.
Because if you don't, there are going to be two slightly-used Security
Agent's uniforms for sale!"
They looked at each other, frowning. Then the one with the gun scowled.
The other guy paled. "Say, Charlie, what if there is something to his
story? What do you think we ought to do?"
Charlie blinked and thought hard. Then a smile crossed his face.
"Nothing," he said. "We were given orders by an Amnesty-bearer, and all
we have to do is carry them out to be in the clear."
"Oh, yeah?" I grunted. "Five'll get you ten Baxter thinks differently!"
The one who wasn't Charlie hesitated, and his grip, hitherto vise-tight
on my upper arm, went suddenly slack. "Disobeying an Amnesty-bearer is
unprecedented," he said carefully.
"So is the theft of the Amnesty!" I shouted in exasperation.
The other one looked at Charlie. "Maybe we ought to call Baxter, just
in case."
"In my book," Charlie muttered, "that's not holding a guy
incommunicado!"
"The hell it's not," I snorted. "I won't communicate with him. You two
guys do it. Do it any way you can square it with your sense of duty.
Either tell Baxter you have a man in custody by the name of Jery Delvin
or that the Amnesty is in the possession of a blue-eyed blonde girl,
and see what he says!"
* * * * *
Two hours later, I was facing the image of a purple-faced Chief Baxter
on an interplanetary videoscreen. "Sorry to be so long, Delvin," he
said apologetically. "But I'd left orders not to be disturbed. Anyway,
I've given the men instructions to return the collapser to you, and an
authorization permit for it, in case you meet any more agents."
"Which heaven forbid!" I growled. "No red tape with an Amnesty. Ha!"
"Uh. Yes. So you can continue with your search, Delvin. Have you found
anything interesting?"
"Full report when I get back, Baxter," I said. "Right now, I have a
date with a beautiful blonde."
"A date?" he choked out. "But--"
"Signing off," I said, and cut the circuit. I belted the collapser into
place around my waist, and started off for the city proper. Somewhere
in Marsport there was a lovely blonde girl named Snow White, who could
do anything, anything at all, and get away with it. Anything but one
thing.
She couldn't get within a foot of me again! Not if I had anything to
say about it.
8
Marsport, the largest--if you excluded the prospecting encampments
within a hundred-mile radius of the place--city on the Planet,
had grown fast, from the time of its founding in 2014. Originally
simply a mining site for the Tri-Planet Refining Corporation, it
had spread backward from the area of the original mines in a rough
circle, beginning with the monotonous quonset huts of the miners, and
modulating in its move toward the perimeter to smart iron-and-adobe
structures. Some of these, thanks to the less-than-half Earth's normal
gravity, as high as fifteen stories.
The planet, barely half the diameter of Earth and a tenth of Earth's
mass, was a minerologist's paradise. The rusty red sands of the Martian
desert were almost pure ferrous oxide, a source of both iron for the
profitable refineries and oxygen for the inhabitants of Marsport.
Going Los Angeles one ridge better, Marsport was completely
circumscribed by high crimson hills, and this natural bowl formation,
plus oxygen's heavier-than-air-density, allowed the city to be filled
with breathable atmosphere, much as tobacco smoke can lie surging
gently within an ashtray if the air in a room is still. This made
planetary wind-storms a hazard.
Outside the hills, of course, the air was thin, cold and barely
able to support life, being comparable to the biting cold air atop
Mount Everest. Human lungs could not breathe it for long without
freezing. Naturally, there was a high casualty rate amongst the
prospectors, despite their pressurized metal huts and oxygen masks.
But uranium, as it had been since the advent of the atomic age, was
enormously well-paying to the one miner in twenty to find any in
Mars' body breaking hinterlands with its roasting dry heat of day and
blood-freezing cold by night.
And then there was parabolite.
This mineral, found in abundance beneath the Martian sands, was,
theoretically, worth ten times its weight in gold to the people who
might mine it. I say theoretically, because no one had as yet found
a way of getting any ore. Paradoxically, the feature which made
parabolite so vitally desired was the same feature which prevented
anyone from mining it: it was totally indestructible.
The name had been given it by the scientists who studied the three
solitary fragments of it found small enough for shipping back to Earth.
There was just no way of chipping a piece loose for analysis. The name
was due to the oddly shaped molecules which made up this mineral. All
of them seemed to be joined atomically into perfect parabolas, no
matter which way you came at them. Which meant, in effect, that when
anything was brought to bear against the substance, pressure which
struck one end of the parabolically curved molecules was retransmitted
by the other end, back to the thing putting pressure on it. Result: it
"hit back" with a violence equal to that applied to it, and sustained
no damage whatsoever to itself. Chemicals were tried when pickaxes had
failed, but the substance was inert. It gave no sign of reacting either
to hydrofluoric acid, which could eat its way through glass, or to aqua
regia, which could eat through anything else.
They even tried using the collapsers on it. These deadly weapons, which
worked by the simple process of killing the attraction between the
protons and electrons, could, in the briefest time, reduce anything
to less than dust. The electrons spun away in a blinding blue-white
flash, and the stripped-down protons, being less than atomic in size,
fell silently down into the heart of the planet, leaving a virtual
nothingness where the object had been.
But on parabolite, even these mighty weapons were useless. Oh, they had
found that training a battery of them on a chunk of parabolite, for
a period of days, with an enormous drain of power keeping the weapons
firing continuously, did get results. The overall mass of the chunk
was reduced by one-millionth of a gram. Which was less than useless,
because not only was that amount completely impractical to obtain,
but it was not even obtained, thanks to the collapsers' destructive
potency. It was merely destroyed.
And so, vast acres of this fortune-making mineral lay all about the
planet, as common as sandstone was on Earth. And no one had any idea of
how to get any of it, not even the natives.
Yes, there were natives, of a sort, on Mars. Strange beings, albeit
friendly, made up, except for a fraction of a percent, of sugar.
They were crystalline, these beings, covered over with prisms of bright
red sugar that gave them, with their scuttling gait and long pointed
tails, the appearance of man-sized lizards. A lot of their metabolism
was a mystery to us, but we did know that they, like plants on Earth,
lived by a sort of modified photosynthesis.
At first thought, this seems strange, since we are used to green as the
primary necessity in a photosynthetic metabolism. But it made sense
when you remember that foliage looks green because the green rays of
the sun are reflected, and the red rays absorbed. Since a crystal
passes only the rays which correspond to its color-structure, they
did quite well, photosynthetically. Air and water were their chief
foods, of course. The water they inhaled through rubbery-looking hollow
tongues which extended a good two feet from their wide, dragon like
mouths. The distance was a necessity, due to their exteriors, which, as
I've said, were made of red crystalline sugar. They could take water on
the inside, but it was fatal on the outside.
The first men on Mars had felt pretty silly standing guard over their
encampments with water pistols. But the sugarfeet, as they came to be
called, proved friendly enough in a nonobsequious way. They seemed, on
investigation, to be the Martian equivalent of cats.
By that I mean that they must have been the self-sufficient pets of the
Ancient Martians. They tended to be standoffish and annoyingly smug,
but not menacing in any way. After all, why should they be menacing?
We had nothing they wanted. Our food was useless to them, as were our
clothes, gold or anything else in the way of possessions. They liked
our water, of course, but long evolution in the Martian deserts had
kept their physical need for this commodity down to a minimum. The
average sugarfoot drank about a pint of water per week, which was no
menace to us, even when we'd first landed and water was in short supply.
But of the Ancients, they could tell us nothing, any more than an
alien landing on a depopulated Earth could find out about men from an
alley cat. We knew there had been intelligent life, though. There were
remnants of buildings still to be seen half-buried in the rust-red
sands, and bewildering little artifacts for which no conceivable use
had as yet been convincingly postulated. There was one thing, though,
that bothered us about these buildings and artifacts.
They were made out of parabolite.
How had the Martians carved, or molded, or otherwise affected the shape
of this indestructible mineral? We had no idea.
Marsport had a population of about one hundred thousand families,
averaging five people to a family, so it was a good-sized city for Snow
to hide herself in.
On the other hand, I wasn't absolutely sure just why I was looking for
her. After all, I didn't really need the Amnesty. A collapser carries a
lot of weight on its own. And an Amnesty's power was only in proportion
to the esteem in which an approached individual held the authority of
the World Government.
The more I thought of it, the more I wondered why I was so determined
to find Miss Snow White. She'd only be a hindrance to me, really, what
with short-circuiting my spotting technique. And a man on a mission of
such grave importance wouldn't simply seek out a girl because she had
cornsilk hair and red velvet lips, would he? Well, would he?
As I thought all of this, I was striding swiftly along Von Braun
Street, the main thoroughfare, ignoring the stares of passers-by as
they spotted the golden collapser belted about my waist. Passing a
small bar, I happened to glance in through the window. And there was
her photograph on the stereo over the bar. The men along its polished
metal length were staring at her with interest.
Curious and puzzled, I turned back and went inside the bar to hear what
was being said about her.
"Shoot to kill! Repeat: Shoot to kill!" said the announcer's voice from
the speaker. "She is not to be obeyed under any circumstances. The
Amnesty is a forgery. Repeat: A forgery."
I found myself leaning weakly against a wall by the door as the sense
of the message came home to me. Baxter had lost no time making up for
my stupidity in losing the Amnesty. He didn't dare admit it had been
stolen, because Amnesty-bearers, like myself, were considered by the
populace to be intelligent, and very clever. It wouldn't do to weaken
public opinion of IS.
But to kill! From Baxter's viewpoint, it made sense. If she were simply
shot down, then she couldn't mention the fact that it had been stolen,
either.
As a patriot, I should have been happy to see my government operating
with such efficient dispatch. For some reason, I was not happy at all.
I thought of those soft warm lips pressing gently upward upon my own,
albeit in the act of deception, and felt suddenly sick inside.
"Something for you, buddy?"
I looked up. The bartender, his voice mirroring the polite caution with
which people spoke to collapser toters, was down at my end of the bar,
by the doorway, his face strained into a nervously hearty anxiety to
please.
Irritably, I leaned forward to rasp a negation into his face at close
range, and then I decided to create no more ruckus than I had to.
"Okay," I grunted.
"Yes, sir," he said, spinning about and commencing to do dexterous
things with the flashy array of bottles behind the bar and a tall
frosty mixer.
"Down the hatch," he smiled, setting the glass of shining chartreuse
liquid before me.
I nodded, and took a sip. It was good, whatever it was. It was a
little nose-tingling, like a stinger, and yet there was something, a
not unpleasant bitterish aftertaste. The glass fell from my suddenly
numb fingers and shattered loudly on the bar. I tried to get up, and
couldn't.
The floor of the bar was warping, tugging at me. I was unconscious
halfway down.
9
My first awareness was the whine of the converters, audible everywhere
in Marsport, if not by ear, then by the soles of one's feet. Their
thundering dynamos plunged potent destructive rays against the Martian
sands, leaving in their wake invisible fountains of nascent oxygen and
shimmering puddles of orange-white molten iron. They went on day and
night without ceasing, partly to keep the mining companies on Earth
from losing their franchises with Tri-Planet, but primarily to keep the
Marsport populace from tumbling down in the streets with cyanosed lips
and glazing eyes, as the breathable atmosphere sloughed away over the
hilltops.
So I knew that I was in Marsport, at least. But not much else. My
hands, when I tried to move them, proved to be bound, and tightly, at
that. My fingers felt swollen and numb when I tried to flex them. There
was something, a hood, a sack, a cloth, over my head, fastened about my
throat, impairing my breathing slightly and my vision altogether.
I found, though, that I could move my legs, but it was little help when
I wouldn't know where they were carrying me if I chanced using them.
For all I knew, I was lying on my back atop a precipice. Moving about
could be disastrous.
So I lay still and spent my time wondering why that bartender should
have slipped me a mickey.
It was senseless, in a way. I mean, even granting that there was some
sort of inimical agency here attempting to forestall investigation
of the missing Space Scouts, how did they know that I was the proper
Amnesty-bearer? Or that there was an Amnesty-bearer around? And,
knowing this, how would they know that I'd turn into that particular
bar?
The thoughts were too confusing, so I gave them up, and just lay there
in darkness, worrying. And not, strangely enough, about my fate, but
about Snow's. Security Agents were keen-sighted and perfect shots. And
a collapser beam wasn't choosy about what it annihilated.
I'd come to while lying on my back, but had chanced turning over on my
face to get my body weight off my hands. A little life seemed to be
oozing back into my thickened fingers. I tried the cords on my wrists
again, but they were still taut and firm. Then one of my fingers found
the loose end of the cord, and felt its surface. It was one of those
nylon ropes with a steel wire center. I gave up trying to undo it.
How long had I been lying wherever I was, anyhow? I had no means of
knowing. It might have been an hour, a day, or merely minutes. How far
behind Snow's trail had I fallen thanks to this damnable delay? And did
she know she was being hunted?
I shifted over onto my right hip to feel if my collapser holster were
still in place. Something pressed back against me, but it had too much
give to it. The holster was there, all right, but it was empty.
Obviously, I couldn't do anything else until I could see. I tried
catching at the hooding material with my teeth, but it was stretched
tautly across my features, and evaded them with maddening efficiency.
On reflection, I saw that this was the reason I hadn't smothered.
Looser cloth would have leaped easily to block mouth and nostrils
against my unconscious breathing. I wondered if the tautness was an
over-sight, or purposely done to ensure my staying alive.
That took me about three seconds to figure out. If I was still alive,
then they wanted me for something further. If they hadn't, then the
cord binding the hood to my neck would have been used as a simple,
efficient garrote.
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 only 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 sugarfoot 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 blue-white 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. Marsport, 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 durex 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 turnoff.
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?"
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 sugarfoot 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 l--"
"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.