him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When
I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection
of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for
roughing up my clothes.
"Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy.
We're buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness
of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don't really belong to a
planet smaller than Earth. But they're here and we accept them. We pit
our technical brilliance--or lack of it--against the rugged grandeur of
the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our
stride. But to bring a kid here--"
"Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn't want to put his son
in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the
Colony."
"That doesn't excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men."
"How many of them could step into Drever's shoes and grow to his
stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You're
forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary
screening. It's rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only
insist that he be good; they want him to be the best."
"That's true enough, I suppose. And now that he's here he probably
couldn't be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for
a man. And _to_ a man, if you like."
"I'm simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of
Freddy's age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust.
He couldn't ride a bike on Mars--if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has
no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like
this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?"
Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr.
Drever's son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire.
They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was
stamped on the faces of at least two of them.
Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. "Nonsense!"
he said.
A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow
of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian
geologist, and a good one.
"Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn't we get started?"
"We should and we will," Corriston said. "But a good many men collapsed
from the cold this morning. If we don't arrive at that ship in force,
we may live to regret it. Where's Freddy? Have you seen him?"
The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: "Over there," he said.
"His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of."
Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat
perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container
shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.
Dr. Drever's son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and
Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.
Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder
with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as
particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and
other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He
had felt like a dwarf child.
"Why did you do it, Freddy?" Corriston asked. "Your father is very
upset and worried."
Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.
"I had to come," he said. "I had to."
"But why?"
"I don't know."
"I see."
Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: "I
think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed
to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a
boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you'd
be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You'd be
dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as
big as dinner plates."
Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was
wonder and admiration in his stare. "How did you know?" he gasped.
"I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy--once," Corriston said.
"Gee, thanks," Freddy said.
"Thanks for what?"
"Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston."
Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that
everyone within earshot could hear him.
"We're starting again in ten minutes," he said. "Better have another
cup of coffee all around."
20
The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche,
a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost
intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards
head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would
rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up
again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled
for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than
moving ones across the entire line of advance.
The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after
minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of
it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity
flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions
of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the
Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for
dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have
supported the tiniest of elves.
For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then,
abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the
colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them
descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little
ahead of the swaying vehicles.
Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly
youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the
scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston's side.
"We can't be far from the ship now," he said. "I wish there was some
way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor
and one man to accompany him...."
"Freddy will be all right," Corriston said. "You don't know what it
means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company
of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he's
done it."
The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that
most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too
bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding
silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected
pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves
an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.
"I'm not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground,"
the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to
have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and
the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be
very near now.
"Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is," Drever
said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly,
perhaps to relieve his inner tension.
"They're a very primitive form of life, really," the geologist said.
"They look like large gray snakes, but they're actually more like
worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they've'
attached themselves it's almost impossible to dislodge them. You've
seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I'm sure. They come in all
shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look
quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about
three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet
or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard--the galaka--as
you know."
"All right," Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation
returning. "Now I suppose you're going to tell us exactly how they kill
their prey."
"I don't have to tell you how they kill men," Macklin said. "You know
as much about that as I do. You've been on Mars before. You've seen at
least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a
man when he's asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He
doesn't just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that
quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty
horrible. They're more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as
deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the
victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then...."
"All right, now I've heard an expert confirm it. I'd be grateful if
you'll just shut up."
"Lieutenant, I told you--"
"Never mind, Doctor. I'm asking him to shut up."
In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing
almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And
then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the
great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the
sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the
tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions
across the desert.
But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only
one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than
they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred
face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in
his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it
a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted
on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.
And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much
nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting
up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the
unmistakable stamp of reality.
Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared,
watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and
drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to.
The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the
shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were
in each other's way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement
was possible.
Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort.
Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and
shouting to the colonists behind him.
"Get to that man as quickly as possible!" he ordered. "There's no time
to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your
hands. Don't let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get
them off if you can. If you can't, bring him here. Carry him slung
between you."
Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert,
walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had
forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be
difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had
thought of it themselves.
He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror
at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence--a man
attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an
instant before.
But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in
any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of
time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary
precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost
as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.
Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by
just one lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"
It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets
into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a
suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve
poison and it spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it,
no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few
recoveries."
Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two
colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear
the lamprene--or lamprenes--from his flesh. They were bending over him,
and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or
not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture,
unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning
or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The
man was Stone.
It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric
torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it
scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.
Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and
shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He
forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a
threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at
all.
"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not
likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."
"I--I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler ... double-crossed Henley.
I guess ... he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken
her. I'm telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."
"All right," Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. "I believe
you. Take it easy now. They've got the lamprene off."
He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again,
telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in
leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking
along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and
relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked
him down.
There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley's
vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But
Corriston wasn't thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of
minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying
desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How
long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few
minutes, or hours before?
He'd have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he'd put off
asking it, dreading the thought of what Stone's answer might be. But
now he had no choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could
not be immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away
across the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and
that tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would
have to be a joint undertaking.
It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston's
rage, his bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent
enough to destroy anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in
relentless pursuit of Saddler and if it took days to track him down....
It was Freddy's voice that brought him back to reality, startling
and sobering him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors,
shouting at the top of his lungs.
21
Corriston couldn't quite catch what the lad was shouting at first.
Something about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught
the name of Helen Ramsey and his mouth went dry and for an instant he
couldn't seem to breathe. Freddy was shouting that he had found Helen
Ramsey.
Dr. Drever started and leapt quickly to his feet, his eyes darting with
an understandable solicitude toward the small figure coming toward them
across the sand. He moved quickly to place himself directly in front
of Stone, as if fearing it would be bad for Freddy to see a man so
close to death. Then the full significance of Freddy's words seemed to
dawn on him, and his solicitude for his son was replaced by a larger
concern, a wider sympathy.
"You talk to him, Corriston," he said. "You've been living through a
short stretch of hell. If he's really found her--"
Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied
himself and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the
nearest tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.
Freddy's eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and
immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense
something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.
Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words
seemed to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own,
and were somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man
with a heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places
and a thousand brilliant suns.
Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand.
Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a
moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn't possibly be making
any of it up.
"There wasn't a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston.
The sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure.
I mean there wasn't any prints that could have been made by a woman
leaving the ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places,
because about ten minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started
looking too. But that was all.
"I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to
very high dunes, even in a storm. There's a--a windbreaking buffer zone
where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about
that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off
I could be back again before anyone missed me."
Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. "You can see the dunes
from here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones
over there ... that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess
nobody would have been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far
away from the ship. But if I hadn't done it I wouldn't have found her.
That's for sure."
Corriston said: "You're so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I'm
afraid you're trying to spare me. It's hard to hurt someone you like,
but I've got to have the truth."
His hand tightened on Freddy's shoulder. "Do you understand, Freddy? I
must know. Don't lie to spare me. Is she all right?"
Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. "I think she is. She's
lying down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again
toward another dune. It's like one, big, hollow dune. I didn't see her
move. I guess she must have fainted. He's there, too, lying face down
in the sand halfway up the dune, like he was hurt...."
"All right," Corriston said. "Now you'd better stay here with your
father."
"Can't I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I
was afraid he'd catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know
I'd found her. He'd be warned and try to get away--"
"It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing," Corriston said.
"You couldn't have used better judgment."
"Then it's all right if I go back with you?"
Corriston shook his head. "No, Freddy. I'd rather you didn't. Don't you
understand? You've done _more_ than your share. Now it's my turn."
Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of
sunlight on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he
said, "All right, Lieutenant Corriston. If it's an order."
"It's an order, Freddy."
Corriston gave Freddy's shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest
pause, he said: "There's no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking
resourcefulness you've just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you'll
be heading an expedition and it won't be the kind that gets bogged down
after the first thousand miles. You can take my word for that."
He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed
the ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered
how a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as
this. It was just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston's
face as he moved still further away from the ship into a loneliness of
desert and sky.
* * * * *
She was lying in a wind-scoured hollow beneath a seventy-foot dune, her
head resting on one sharply-bent elbow, a look of utter exhaustion on
her face. Her eyes were closed, and even from where he stood Corriston
could see that she was breathing heavily. He could see the slight rise
and fall of her bosom, the trembling vibration of her oxygen mask. She
was completely alone.
He stood for an instant absolutely motionless on the summit of the
dune, staring down at her, noticing in alarm the hollow contour of her
cheeks on both sides of the oxygen mask, and the slight tinge of gray
that had crept into her countenance. Then he started downward. Almost
instantly the sand rose like an unsteady sea on all sides of him, and a
warning signal sounded in his brain.
He could connect it with no cause. Beneath him stretched only the
wind-scoured inner surface of the dune, dazzling his eyes with its
brightness, mirroring the sunlight like a burning glass. For a moment
the brightness deceived him, and he did not realize that there were
shadowed hollows directly beneath him, dark fissures in the tumbled
sand wide enough to conceal a crouching man. He did not even see the
shadow creeping toward him over the sand. Only the dazzle for an
instant and the gleam of sunlight on Helen Ramsey's tousled hair.
Then, suddenly, he was aware of the danger, fully awake and aware. But
realization came too late. Abruptly, without warning, a knife blade
flashed in the sunlight and he felt an agonizing stab of pain just
below his left kneecap.
A dark shape rose before him, and then dissolved into the shadows
again, darting downward and sideways as it disappeared. Corriston threw
himself backwards and froze into immobility, thrusting his elbows deep
into the sand behind him, using that moment of surprise forced upon him
by his assailant to lower his eyes and seek him out.
He saw Saddler's face clearly for an instant, saw the gleaming knife
and the hand holding it, and the wavering outline of the man's
crouching body three-fourths in shadow. He heard Saddler mutter: "I'm
done for, Corriston. But I'll get you first."
It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Corriston's hand went to
his hip, but with a nightmare feeling of retardation and his fingers
seemed to move without any assistance from the motor centers of his
brain. Then even more slowly he was facing the hollow with the gun in
his clasp, and the weapon was exploding into the shadows, filling the
hollows and windy places with reverberating echoes of sound.
There was complete silence after that. No groans, no outcry--nothing
but silence. It went on for so long that Corriston could not shake off
a numbing sense of unreality. Surely only a dream could have had so
violently unreal a beginning, so terrible an outcome. Then he looked
down, and saw the blood on his leg where the knife had grazed it, and
knew that it could not have been a dream.
He was still facing the hollow, with two bullets left in his gun. But
he knew that he would not have to fire again. Saddler was lying on his
back on the sand, his eyes wide open, his jaw hanging slack. There was
a spreading red stain on his chest and a rim of blood around his lips.
The wind which was blowing across the crest of the dune seemed suddenly
to turn malevolent, striking out at the dead man with a sudden,
downsweeping gust, ruffling his hair and making him seem to be still
enveloped in violence.
Corriston felt his throat muscles contract. He forced himself to bend
over and search for a heart beat he knew he wouldn't find, remembering
the other times when the outcome had been less fatal, when only a man's
face had changed.