Slogging through Venus' reeking muck and groping
horrors toward the forbidding dome of Solar
Science City--treasure-vault of the best brains
in the System--Guardsman Venard remembered the
frightened whispers: "An evil god rules there!"
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The tone of the slurred, emotionless voice was cold and deadly, as were
the tones of all Martians who had taken to their grotesque hearts the
mystic, dictatorial disease of Zharkonism. It droned an implacable
death song from the audio. It echoed horribly down the shadow-eaten
labyrinth of that sprawling death-mart which was officially labeled
Terro Concentration Camp Seven.
... _Another exalted warrior of the Occupational Armies of Zharkon,
the Undying--Zharkon, the ever-just and divine director of the
Solar System--Zharkon, the voice of the Gods--has been brutally
slain by terran underground subversives. In retaliation, five
hundred Terran inferiors will go to the experimental wards by
decree of our divine Martian Zharkon--Zharkon, our illustrious
solar father_ ...
The audio droned on. But none of the tier on tier of doomed men
imprisoned in the rehabilitated ruins of Washington's subterranean
levels listened any more. They were ragged, skeletal shapes crouched
like frightened animals in the filthy shadows. Feverishly bright eyes
stared with a fanatic's hunger for death, the release from hopeless,
mind-shattering pain and indignity. Those who would not wilfully sign
away their futures to colonial slavery under the Martian dictatorship
were killed in devious and ghastly ways. The death toll was high.
In each of the little prison cubicles two figures waited, helpless
behind cold metal. It would seem impossible to find even one face which
did not wear the terrible scar of resignation which marks the souls of
the hopeless. Yet in one of these prison cubicles there were two such.
Two Terran Guardsmen.
The great Terran Guards, what few remained of the once colorful and
renowned Solar Patrol, semantically-trained, objective yet warmly
human, knew there was no resignation. That was death if carried to its
obvious conclusion. While one lived, one moved, acted, and was acted
upon. While one lived there was conflict, and there was always hope.
Although perhaps only the few remnants of the Guards and the small
Underground which flourished dangerously somewhere in the ruins of
the Earth retained this pre-Solar War attitude. Perhaps this stubborn
minority totaled one percent. Perhaps. No one knew.
The tall, gaunt figure gripped the prison bars in two big hands. Karl
Venard, Ex-Lieutenant, strained hawk-like features outward, his thin
lips twisted. He turned suddenly to snarl, "This is it, Louie. We're
the only two Guardsmen left in this sad hole. We'll be among this
draft. Start praying."
Louie Larson, the little man who still, somehow, managed to be
overweight in spite of being half-starved, shivered.
"The least you can do is die like a man," snarled Venard. "You're a
disgrace to the Guards."
The fat little man grabbed Venard's ragged sleeves.
"Remember what the grapevine said last night, Karl? It said that the
Underground on Mars had managed to blow up the Zharkon's throne room
and him in it. It said the Zharkon had been injured, maybe killed, that
his double-brain was on the blink. Maybe that's right, Karl. Maybe it
might really have happened! Gad, Karl. If they've done that, I don't
care about dying. Knowin' that, death would be a pleasure, almost. Tell
me you think it's so, Karl. I'll not be scared any more, if you'll say
you believe it's true."
"How the devil should I know," murmured Venard. "I doubt it. Maybe
there is an Underground operating on Mars as efficiently as the one
here on Earth, but I doubt it. The Marties fell for that Zharkonism
mania like a degravitated dwarf star. And even if they do have a
working Underground organization there how could they ever get into the
Zharkon's throne room? That's carrying wishful thinking a little too
far, Kewpie Doll. Forget it."
"Listen," sputtered the little man desperately, "how about them
Martians who went to the Academy with us? They'd never fall for
Zharkonism. They was semantically-trained, too. They're too smart for
all this myth and legend stuff. I'll bet every solar credit I might
have had that Jhongan could have gotten into that throne room."
Venard's harsh features softened for an instant. Jhongan, the Martian,
had studied in the Academy during the golden days of the Solar
Democratic Federation. Yes, Martians like Jhongan would never have
become Zharkonites. But there were too few of them. His hardened mouth
curled cynically.
"Start praying, Kewpie Doll. If semantics can turn out an anachronism
like you it can even manufacture incipient Zharkonites. Why, you can't
even speak good old Terro-English."
Louis Larson looked as though he were going to cry. "We gotta do
something, Karl. It only takes a few minutes after one of them
announcements for them heathen Marties to start playin' human grab bag.
We gotta do something!"
"What do you want to do, Kewpie Doll, live forever?" grinned Venard.
"Besides, there is a way out for us. We don't have to go to the
experimental wards. Have you forgotten this little memento from my long
lost love?"
* * * * *
With infinite caution, Venard disclosed the memory-crystal, taking it
with a kind of dignified stealth from beneath the rags that had once
been a shirt. Dreamily he studied the small, delicate translucence of
the sphere. He had managed to retain that from the pawing Marties'
greedy scanners. Looking back into Venard's eyes from the shifting
beauty of the sphere, the three-dimensional, almost frighteningly
life-like figure of Vale who had once loved Venard, preened and sighed
provocatively. The figure moved, danced in lithe grace through shifting
clouds. A strange, heart-aching vision of reality and dream.
Louie Larson's beady black eyes bulged, sweat popped out of his pallid
skin and trickled down through the bristles of his dirt-caked beard.
"You--you're gonna use _that_?"
"Suicide, that's better than the experimental ward, isn't it? Kewpie
Doll, sometimes you leave the experimental wards alive, but no one
would ever guess you had once been human. They work on the genes, son.
And they're devilishly clever." He gripped the memory-crystal. "This
is a quick and easy way. There's enough of that amazing explosive
developed by the Venusian Sea People in this crystal to blow everything
for fifty yards around us to hell. Oh, I'll use it, Kewpie Doll."
"Sure, I'd prefer it to the wards," moaned Larson softly, "but
this--this suicide, it's so final."
"There's something pretty nice about finality, Kewpie Doll. If you can
really find it."
They waited. Larson picked at his beard, lips twitching. Venard looked
dreamily into the cloudy depths of the memory-crystal. Next to them
in a stinking cell, a man began to cry, a series of burbling choking
cries of fear and hopeless hate. From somewhere far down the corridor,
a woman was singing an ancient hymn.
Venard was extremely fortunate to have retained the memory-crystal.
A few prisoners had been able to do likewise. Because of the unique
physiogenic quality of the little spheres, ordinary scanners failed to
detect their presence. They were small and could be concealed under
one's clothing, and passed from one prisoner to another to escape
discovery. Others had used their suicidal capacity for a final escape
from unspeakable pain and horror.
Because of the difficulty in finding them, the memory-spheres
constituted a constant threat to the Martian guards. Many a Martie
had developed violent neurosis from knowing that the prisoners they
guarded might be hiding a memory-crystal, and might also at any moment,
merely by pressing a small release within the spheres, set off the
mutually antagonistic elements and blow up guards, prisoners and things
surrounding them to bloody ruin.
The incredibly beautiful and life-like face floating inside the crystal
laughed mockingly up at Venard through opaque, silvery mists. No horror
there. The little, diaphanous, three-dimensional figure dancing through
the shifting vapors of the memory-sphere floated in a never-ending
dream of things as they might have been. Vale, lovely and enchanting
Vale, the way she had looked and danced when she had loved him in those
carefree happy days before the Solar War. Nostalgia, bitterly sweet,
of lost and unrecoverable nights, dream-lost beauty of Luna nights the
blood-drenched holocaust. Vale, before she had went away to Venus and
to that hungry maw that ate up _the_ best minds of the Solar System,
Solar Science City.
Venard swore softly to himself. How silly he was to feed on memory,
like a parasite gnawing on itself and growing hungrier with each futile
bite.
The little man's eyes stared through the bars into the dreary shadows
of the cell block. "Gods, Karl!" he moaned suddenly. "Karl! I hear 'em
comin' down the line! Dirty heathens."
Ex-lieutenant K. Venard looked down curiously at the bald head. No one
would guess the existence there of steel nerves, iron will, somehow
strangely integrated with a golden heart.
"I hear 'em," Larson whispered hoarsely.
"Swissshhh--swissshhh--swisshhhh. I hear their slimy feet squeegyin'
along. I hear their body juices sloshin' around inside their cold
bellies like walkin' quarts of _stihn_. Karl--if I only had a quart of
_stihn_!" Abruptly he sank down in a sad, dejected heap.
"Yeah," growled the ex-lieutenant. "Keep crying, Kewpie Doll. If
something happens to our memory-crystal here, we'll be drinking
vat-acid tonight."
"Oh, don't talk that way, Karl!" moaned Larson. "Things is bad enough.
Things is simply terrible. Either we blow ourselves to tendons or
get pried and peered into by these furriners. We're gonna have those
probosci dinnin' into our innards. We're gonna--"
"Shut up!" yelled Venard. Maybe the little man really was cracking up.
No man is infallible. Maybe he, Karl Venard, would crack up too. He
and Larson had been through a lot. But never anything like this. This
was definite, inescapable. Maybe a little rationalizing, and wishful
thinking, would be a good idea. Maybe he could even talk himself into
believing that grapevine story about the Zharkon.
"What do we care, Kewpie Doll," he said, grabbed Larson and lifted him
onto his feet. "I been thinkin' it over, and I think maybe that story
about the Zharkon getting his double-brain injured might have some
basis in fact. The way I figure it, that story is too fantastic to be
handed out with any expectation of having it believed if it weren't
true. Or at least we can assume it has some basis in reality."
Larson's round, staring face altered with sudden violence. His hands
clutched Venard's sleeves. His eyes brightened. "Say it again. Keep on
sayin' it."
Venard said it again. It was working. He really was beginning to
believe it himself. "Sure it's very, very possible that the old
semantically-trained Martians like Jhongan got into that throne room
someway and conked out the Zharkon's double-brain, and that's a lot
of conking. And do you know what that means? It means the whole
Zharkonistic set-up will be thrown off center, maybe disintegrate
entirely. Remember, the Marties have regressed in a social sense.
They're primitives now. They worship the old gods--Styx, Amphoor,
Aalghor. Their leader, the Zharkon, is the mouthpiece of the gods.
If he goes, the gods and the whole militaristic mythology could very
possibly crumble overnight."
It sounded magnificent. And it was possible, if one was sufficiently
desperate.
"But it ain't true, an' you know it, Karl," moaned Larson.
"Oh, the devil with you," yelled Venard. "You're a negativistic
melancholic, among other unmentionable things. As an example of the
semantically-trained mind, you speak oddly for the world of null-A."
"The awful disgrace of it, Karl. The whole Solar System taken over by
barbaric sponges with legs. Who'd ever thought they had it in 'em?"
Venard gripped the cell bars in his big hands and pressed his forehead
tightly against the cool hardness. "Yeah," he muttered. "Damnation,
Kewpie Doll! I wish we could've escaped to the Underground. If the
Martian Underground have really managed to injure Zharkon, that
means maybe the Martian Terro-Colonial Armies of Occupation might
disorganize, fall apart. And if we could only contact the Underground
here--"
Venard shook his head; sweat speckled the metal wall. Fools. There
was nothing to the rumor, because such a thing was impossible. There
was no escape. Only the memory-crystal, a quick, self-administered
destruction. Blackout.
Larson's voice was a faint, far-away whisper. "They're comin' for us.
Look at them furriners--"
* * * * *
Metal doors had been clanging open. Venard was suddenly aware of the
shuffling of feet and the lifeless stirring and phlegmatic voices of
those whose minds had surrendered. Venard leaned against the wall of
the cubicle. He wouldn't stand at attention now. Not again. He had
once to avoid being beaten. But they couldn't do anything more to a
man than kill him. And he would take care of that now, his own way.
A much quicker and less complicated way than was to be found in the
experimental wards.
The women were the first of the pathetic line of chained humans who
staggered into sight around a turn in the dark corridor. Their cells
were on the west half of Concentration Camp No. 7 and they were always
first in the hostage lines. Bony human wrecks in drab and ragged
sack-like garments. Grey faces behind dry strings of unhealthy, scaly
hair.
"The Marties, they ain't got any intelligence at all," whispered
Larson, "to make beautiful females look that way. They're fiends. I
remember when maybe them very ladies used to dance to a Ganymedian
orchestra in the Lunaville escapeasy. That first one, now, she might be
Glora Karstedt. Glora was the most beautiful woman in the System. Hey,
Glora! Remember me, Kewpie Doll Larson?"
The pathetic skin-and-bone shape didn't even smile. Dull eyes stared
straight ahead, pallid, blood-streaked face that was a blank mask of
frozen horror. Venard gripped the bars. His knuckles shone whitely, his
whole body a tense, helpless arc of mental torture. "If they could only
die as Earthmen," he said softly. "And not as slaves."
Two Marties paused, one pressed a button.
"It's us all right," said Venard tensely. The cell door ground open.
Boneless lengths of purple-veined arms, muscled like serpents, reached
in and dragged the little man out first. Others reached for Venard.
Animate sacks of liquid intelligence. Four sliding and contracting
feet like snails. Filamented arms of great strength guided by highly
emotional intelligence. Judged by human standards, these were horrors.
Yet intelligence can hide behind any kind of facade. A mind adjusted
to Solar concepts is influenced by intelligence and behavior alone,
not by exterior physical aspects. These Martians had been good Solar
citizens once, responsible and progressive. But they had been seduced
by delusions of grandeur. The old Martian Royalists who had been
overthrown a hundred years ago had returned. And returning, they had
conquered democratic progressive thought, returned Mars to the old gods
of carnage and dark evil, had plunged the Solar System into an orgy of
primitive blood-lust, barbarism and hate.
Venard swore, threw off a heavy, plopping arm. Somehow, the heavy
bulging body sacks had always resembled punching bags. He had longed to
test this visual impression with tactile experimentation. A squeeshing
smack belched out from beneath his fist. The shocked Martie stumbled
back against the line of apathetic prisoners. Articulation on the tips
of its appendages writhed after the butt of its sheathed H-gun.
[Illustration: _The shocked Martie stumbled back._]
But it didn't kill. Sadists in the experimental wards wanted every
organism for their grisly research.
"Oh, Karl, you shouldn't ought to have done that," groaned Larson as
he lifted the chain another Martie was trying to lower around his
thick neck. Larson wrapped it around the Martian's purple-veined head
instead, and with considerable force. Then a heavy arm slashed like a
huge whip, thudded across Larson's flat nose. Blood spattered as the
little man slumped, groaning, to his knees.
Venard was struggling in blind, hating helplessness with a number of
arms that had encircled him like cable coils. And after that, as the
line shuffled along, the chains were cold as space around his neck. And
the thudding of the leathery arms flailing his back burned deeper than
any Martie knew.
But against his side, in a little plastic pouch, the memory-crystal
nestled. It was a comfortable feeling, the memory-crystal gave him. A
comfortable chilling sensation, both warm and cold. Like an acrostic
sonnet to death.