to him now, and made him awkward, as he turned and looked west. Perhaps
two miles off, past a barbed-wire fence and what must be an old tractor
trail of the hopeful days of colonization, he saw the blue-green edge of
Syrtis Major, the greatest of the thickets, with here and there a
jutting spur of it projecting toward him along a gully. Nelsen's hide
tingled. But his first glimpse was handicapped by distance. He saw only
an expanse of low shagginess that might have been scrub growths of any
kind.
Dug into the salt-bearing ground at intervals, he knew, were the fire
weapons ready to throw oxygen and synthetic napalm--jellied gasoline.
Never yet had they been discharged, along this defense line. But you
could never be sure just what might be necessary here.
A man of about thirty had approached. "I meet the new arrivals," he
said. "If you'll come along with me, Mr. Nelsen..."
He was dark, and medium large, and he had a genial way. He looked like a
hopper--an asteroid-miner--the tough, level-headed kind that adjusts to
space and keeps his balance.
"Name's Ed Huth," he continued, as they walked to the reception dome.
"Canadian. Good, international crowd here--however long you mean to
stay. Most interesting frontier in the solar system, too. Probably
you've heard most of the rules and advice. But here's a paper. Refresh
your memory by reading it over as soon as you can. There is one thing
which I am required to show everybody who comes here. Inside this peek
box. You are instructed to take a good look."
Huth's geniality had vanished.
The metal box was a yard high, and twice as long and wide. It stood,
like a memorial, before the reception dome entrance. A light shone
beyond the glass-covered slot, as Nelsen bent to peer.
He had seen horror before now. He had seen a pink mist dissolve in the
sunshine as a man in armor out in the Belt was hit by an explosive
missile, his blood spraying and boiling. Besides, he had read up on the
thickets of Mars, watched motion pictures, heard Gimp Hines' stories of
his brief visit here. So, at first, he could be almost casual about what
he saw in the peek box. There were many ghastly ways for a man to die.
Even the thicket plant in the box seemed dead, though Nelsen knew that
plant successors to the original Martians had the rugged power of
revival. This one showed the usual paper-dry whorls or leaves, and the
usual barrel-body, perhaps common to arid country growths, everywhere.
Scattered over the barrel, between the spines, were glinting
specks--vegetable, light-sensitive cells developed into actual visual
organs. The plant had the usual tympanic pods of its kind--a band of
muscle-like tissue stretched across a hollow interior--by which it could
make buzzing sounds. Nelsen knew that, like any Earthly green plant, it
produced oxygen, but that, instead of releasing it, it stored the gas in
spongy compartments within its horny shell, using it to support an
animal-like tissue combustion to keep its vitals from freezing during
the bitterly frigid nights.
Nelsen also knew that deeper within the thing was a network of whitish
pulp, expanded at intervals to form little knobs. Sectioned, under a
microscope, they would look like fibred masses of animal or human nerve
and brain cells, except that, chemically, they were starch and cellulose
rather than protein.
Worst to see was the rigid clutch of monster's tactile organs, which
grew from the barrel's crown. It was like a powerful man struggling to
uproot a rock, or a bear or an octopus crushing an enemy. It was
dark-hole drama, like something from another galaxy. Like some horribly
effective piece of sculpture, the tableau in the box preserved the last
gasp of an incautious youth in armor.
The tendrils of the thicket plant were furred with erect spines of a
shiny, russet color. They were so fine that they looked almost soft. But
Nelsen was aware that they were sharper than the hypodermic needles they
resembled--in another approach to science. Now, Nelsen felt the tingling
revulsion and hatred.
"Of course you know that you don't have to get caught like that poor
bloke did," Huth said dryly. "Just not to disinfect the outside of your
Archer well enough and then leave it near you, indoors, is sufficient.
I was here before there was any trouble. When it came, it was a
shambles..."
Huth eyed Nelsen for a moment, then continued on another tack.
"Biology... Given the whole universe to experiment in, I suppose you can
never know what it will come up with--or what is possible. These
devils--you get to hate them in your sleep. If their flesh--or their
methods--were something like ours, as was the case with the original
Martians or the people of the Asteroid Planet, it wouldn't seem so bad.
Still, they make you wonder: What would you do, if, in your own way, you
could think and observe, but were rooted to the ground; if you were
denied the animal ability of rapid motion, if you didn't have hands with
which to fashion tools or build apparatus, if fire was something you
could scarcely use?..."
Nelsen smiled. "I _am_ wondering," he said. "I promise to do a lot more
of it as soon as I get squared away. I could inflate my bubb, and sleep
in the yard in it, if I had to. Then, as usual, off the Earth, you'll
expect me to earn my breathing air and keep, after a couple of days,
whether I can pay instead or not. That's fine with me, of course.
There's another matter which I'd like to discuss, but that can be
later."
"No sleeping out," Huth laughed. "That's just where people get careless.
There are plenty of quarters available since the retreat of settlers
almost emptied this world of terrestrial intrusion--except for us here
and the die-hard desert rats, and the new, screwball adventurers... By
the way, if it ever becomes important, the deserts are safe--at least
from what you just saw--as you probably know..."
Nelsen passed through an airlock, where live steam and a special
silicone oil accomplished the all-important disinfection of his Archer,
his bubb, and the outside of his small, sealed baggage roll. Armor and
bubb he left racked with rows of others.
It wasn't till he got into the reception dome lounge that he saw Nance
Codiss. She didn't rush at him. Reserve had dropped over them both again
as if in reconsideration of a contact made important too suddenly. He
clasped her fingers, then just stood looking at her. Lately, they had
exchanged a few pictures.
"Your photographs don't lie, Nance," he said at last.
"Yours do, Frank," she answered with complete poise. "You look a lot
less grim and tired."
"Wait," he told her. "I'll be right back..."
He went with Ed Huth to ditch his roll in his sleeping cubicle, get
cleaned up and change his clothes.
She _was_ beautiful, she had grave moods, she was wearing his fabulous
bracelet--if only not to offend him. But when he returned, he met two of
the girls who had come out to Mars with her--a nurse and another lab
technician. They were the bubbly type, full of bravado and giggles for
their strange, new surroundings. For a moment he felt far too old at
twenty-four for Nance's twenty. He wondered regretfully if her being
here was no more than part of his excuse for getting away from the Belt
and from the sense of ultimate human disaster building up.
But much of his feeling of separation from her disappeared as they sat
alone in the lounge, talking--first about Jarviston, then about here.
Nance had available information about the thickets pretty well down pat.
"You can't keep those plants alive here at the Station, Frank," she said
quietly. "They make study difficult by dying. It's as if they knew that
they couldn't win here. So they retreat--to keep their secrets. But Dr.
Pacetti, our head of Medical Research, says that we can never know that
they won't find a way to attack us directly. That's what the waiting
napalm line is for. I don't think he is exaggerating."
"Why do you say that?" Nelsen asked.
He was encouraging her, of course. But he wasn't being patronizing.
Frost tingled in his nerves. He wanted to know her version.
"I'll show you the little museum we have," she replied, her eyes
widening slightly. "This is probably old hat to you--but it's weird--it
gives you the creeps..."
He followed her along a covered causeway to another dome. In a gallery
there, a series of dry specimens were set up, inside sealed boxes made
of clear plastic.
The first display was centered around a tapered brass tube--perhaps one
of the barrels of an antique pair of fieldglasses. Wrapping it was a
spiny brown tendril from which grew two sucker-like organs, shaped like
acorn tops. One was firmly attached to the metal. The other had been
pulled free, its original position on the barrel marked by a circular
area of corrosion. The face of the detached sucker was also shown--a
honeycomb structure of waxy vegetable tissue, detailed with thousands of
tiny ducts and hairlike feelers.
"Some settler dropped the piece of brass out on a trail in Syrtis
Major," Nance explained. "Later, it was found like this. Brass is
something that people have almost stopped using. So, it was new to
_them_. They wouldn't have been interested in magnesium, aluminum, or
stainless steel anymore. The suckers aren't a usual part of them either.
But the suckers grow--for a special purpose, Dr. Pacetti believes. A
test--perhaps an analysis. They exude an acid, to dissolve a little of
the metal. It's like a human chemist working. Only, perhaps,
better--more directly--with specialized feelers and sensing organs."
Nance's quiet voice had a slight, awed quaver at the end.
Frank Nelsen nodded. He had examined printed pictures and data before
this. But here the impact was far more real and immediate; the impact of
strange minds with an approach of their own was more emphatic.
"What else?" he urged.
They stood before another sealed case containing a horny, oval pod, cut
open. It had closed around a lump of greenish stone.
"Malachite," Nance breathed. "One kind of copper ore. _They_ reduced it,
extracted some of the pure metal. See all the little reddish specks
shining? It is pretty well established that the process is something
like electroplating. There's a dissolving acid--then a weak electric
current--from a kind of battery... Oh, nobody should laugh, Frank--Dr.
Pacetti keeps pointing out that there are electric eels on Earth, with
specialized muscle-tissue that acts as an electric cell... But this is
somewhat different. Don't ask me exactly how it functions--I only heard
our orientation lecture, while we toured this museum. But see those
small compartments in the thick shells of the pod--with the membranes
separating them? All of them contained fluids--some acid, others
alkaline. Mixed in with the cellulose of the membranes, you can see both
silvery and reddish specks--as if _they_ had to incorporate both a
conductor and a difference of metals to get a current. At least, that
was what was suggested in the lecture..."
Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss moved on from display case to display
case, each of which showed another kind of pod cut in half. The
interiors were all different and all complicated... Membranes with a
faint, metallic sheen--laminated or separated by narrow air spaces as in
a capacitor, for instance... Balls of massed fibre, glinting... Curious,
spiral formations of waxy tissue...
"They use electricity as a minor kind of defense," Nance went on, her
tone still low with suppressed excitement that was close to dread. "We
know that some of them can give you a shock--if you're fool enough to
get so close that you can touch them. And they do emit radio impulses on
certain wavelengths. Signals--communication...? As for the rest, perhaps
you'd better do your own guessing, Frank. But the difference between us
and them seems to be that we _make_ our apparatus. They _grow_ them,
_build_ them--with their own living tissue cells--in a way that must be
under their constant, precise control. I suppose they even work from a
carefully thought-out design--a kind of cryptic blueprint... Go along
with the idea--or not--as you choose. But our experts suspect that much
of what we have here represents research apparatus--physical, chemical,
electrical. That _they_ may get closer to understanding the ultimate
structure of matter than we can, because their equipment is part of
themselves, in which they can develop senses that we don't possess...
Well, I'll skip any more of that. Because the best--or the worst--is
still coming. Right here, Frank..."
The case showed several small, urn-like growths, sectioned like the
other specimens.
Frank Nelsen grinned slightly. "All right--let me tell it," he said.
"Because this is something I really paid attention to! Like you imply,
their equipment is alive. So they work best with life--viruses, germs,
vegetable-allergy substances. These are their inventing, developing and
brewing bottles--for the numerous strains of Syrtis Fever virus. The
living molecule chains split off from the inner tissue walls of the
bottles, and grow and multiply in the free fluid. At least, that's how I
read it."
"And that is where my lab job begins, Frank," she told him. "Helping
develop anti-virus shots--testing them on bits of human tissue, growing
in a culture bath. An even partially effective anti-virus isn't found
easily. And when it is, another virus strain will soon appear, and the
doctors have to start over... Oh, the need isn't as great, any more, as
when the Great Rush away from Mars was on. There are only half a dozen
really sick people in the hospital now. Late comers and snoopers who got
careless or curious. You've got to remember that the virus blows off the
thickets like invisible vapor. There's one guy from Idaho--Jimmy--James
Scanlon. Come along. I'll show you, Frank..."
He lay behind plastic glass, in a small cubicle. A red rash, with the
pattern of frostwork on a Minnesota windowpane in January, was across
his lean, handsome face. Maybe he was twenty--Nance's age. His bloodshot
eyes stared at terrors that no one else could see.
Nance called softly through the thin infection barrier. "Jimmy!"
He moaned a little. "Francy..."
"High fever, Frank," Nance whispered. "Typical Syrtis. He wants to be
home--with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia--yearning terribly
for old, familiar surroundings--is a major symptom. It's like a command
from _them_--to get out of Mars. The red rash is something extra he
picked up. An allergy... Oh, we think he'll survive. Half of them now
do. He's big and strong. Right now, even the nurses don't go in there,
except in costumes that are as infection-tight as armor. Later on, when
the fever dwindles to chronic intermittence, it will no longer be
contagious. Even so, the new laws on Earth won't let him return there
for a year. I don't know whether such laws are fair or not. We've got a
hundred here, who were sick, and are now stranded and waiting, working
at small jobs. Others have gone to the Belt--which seems terrible for
someone not quite well. I hope that Jimmy bears up all right--he's such
a kid... Let's get out of here..."
Her expression was gently maternal. Or maybe it was something more?
Back in the lounge, she asked, "What will you do here, Frank?"
"Whatever it is, there is one thing I want to include," he answered. "I
want to try to find out just what happened to Mitch Storey."
"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared,
deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick
settler in--on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After
he got lost, his wife--a nurse from here whose name had been Selma
Washington--went looking for him. She never was found either."
"Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement.
"Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols--watching
for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late
comers who might turn out to be screwballs. You look as though you might
be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty
in half an hour..."
Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like
men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their
approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads
seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful
record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you."
For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli.
At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his
helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use.
He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars--from a safe altitude of two
thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the
present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and
archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and
other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic
cities--still faintly tainted with radioactivity--where the original
inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing
even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation
water of the otherwise mythical "canals." The huge south polar cap of
hoarfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the
frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the
trails, once burned out with oxygen and gasoline-jelly to permit the
passage of vehicles, had again become completely overgrown--who could
hope to stamp out that devilishly hardy vegetation, propagating by means
of millions of windblown spores, with mere fire? The broken-down trains
of tractors and trailers, now almost hidden. The stellene garden domes
that had flattened. Here were the relics left by people who had sought
to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear.
Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren
hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when
Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths.
Twice, working warily with machetes, and holding their flame weapons
ready, they chopped armored mummies from enwrapping tendrils, while
little eye cells glinted at them balefully, and other tendrils bent
slowly toward them. They searched out the space-fitness cards, which
bore old dates, and addresses of next of kin.
In a few more days, Nelsen was flying the 'copter. Then he was out on
his own, watching, searching. For a couple of weeks he hangared the heli
at once, after each patrol, and Nance always was there to meet him as he
did so.
Inevitably the evening came when he said, "We could fly out again,
Nance. For an hour or two. It doesn't break any rules."
Those evening rides, high over Syrtis Major, toward the setting sun,
became an every other day custom, harmless in itself. A carefully kept
nuclear-battery motor didn't conk; the vehicle could almost fly without
guidance. It was good to look down at the blue-green shagginess,
below... Familiarity bred, not contempt, but a decline of dread to the
point where it became a pleasant thrill--an overtone to the process of
falling in love. Otherwise, perhaps they led each other on, into
incaution. Out in the lonely fastnesses of Mars they seemed to find the
sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic Earth that the
settlers had sought here.
"We always pass over that same hill," Nance said during one of their
flights. "It must have been a beautiful little island in the ancient
ocean, when there was that much water. Now it belongs to us, Frank."
"It's barren--we could land," Nelsen suggested quickly.
They visited the hill a dozen times safely, breaking no printed rule.
But maybe they shouldn't have come so often to that same place. In life
there is always a risk--which is food for a fierce soul. Frank Nelsen
and Nance Codiss were fierce souls.
They'd stand by the heli and look out over Syrtis, their gloved fingers
entwined. If they couldn't kiss, here, through their helmets, that was
merely comic pathos--another thing to laugh and be happy over.
"Our wind-blown hill," Nance chuckled on that last evening. "Looking
down over a culture, a history--maybe arguments, lawsuits, jokes,
parties; gossip too, for all we know--disguised as a huge briar patch
that makes funny noises."
"Shut up--I love you," Nelsen gruffed.
"Shut up yourself--it's you I love," she answered.
The little sun was half sunk behind the Horizon. The 'copter was only a
hundred feet away, along the hillcrest. That was when it happened. Two
dull, plopping sounds came almost together.
If a thinking animal can use the pressure of a confined gas to propel
small missiles, is there any reason why other intelligences can't do the
same? From two bottle-like pods the clusters of darts--or long, sharp
thorns--were shot. Only a few of them struck their targets. Fewer,
still, found puncturable areas and struck through silicone rubber and
fine steelwire cloth into flesh. Penetration was not deep, but deep
enough.
Nance screamed. Nelsen wasn't at all sure that he didn't scream himself
as the first anguish dizzied and half blinded him.
From the start it was really too late. Nelsen was as hardy and
determined as any. He tried to get Nance to the 'copter. Less than
halfway, she crumpled. With a savage effort of will he managed to drag
her a few yards, before his legs refused to obey him, or support him.
His blood carried a virus to his brain about as quickly as it would have
carried a cobra's venom. _They_ probably could have made such
protein-poisons, too; but they had never used them against men, no doubt
because something that could spread and infect others was better.
For a while, as the black, starshot night closed in, Nelsen knew, or
remembered, nothing at all--unless the mental distortions were too
horrible. Then he seemed to be in a pit of stinking, viscous fluid,
alive with stringy unknowns that were boring into him... Unreachable in
another universe was a town called Jarviston. He yelled till his wind
was gone.
He had a half-lucid moment in which he knew it was night, and understood
that he had a raging fever. He was still clinging to Nance, who clung to
him. So instinct still worked. He saw that they had blundered--its black
bulk was visible against the stars. Phobos hadn't risen; Deimos, the
farther moon, was too small to furnish appreciable light.
Something touched him from behind, and he recoiled, pushing Nance back.
He yanked the machete from his belt, and struck blindly... Oh,
_no!_--you didn't get caught like this--not usually, he told himself.
Not in their actual grip! They were too slow--you could always dodge! It
was only when you were near something not properly disinfected that you
got Syrtis Fever, which was the worst that could happen--wasn't it...?
He heard an excited rhythm in the buzzing. Now he remembered his
shoulder-lamp, fumbled to switch it on, failed, and stumbled a few steps
with Nance toward the hill. Something caught his feet--then hers. Trying
to get her free, he dropped his machete...
Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold
out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."
Yeah--forty minutes.
"It's--it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer
almost apologetically. Dear Nance...
Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got
both her and himself loose.
It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have
sprung from _them_--someway. A huge, zombie form--the ugliest part of
this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.
The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his
shoulder...
There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either.
The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness,
misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed
to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except
to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?