There's really no excuse for what I did then, except that I wasn't
thinking clearly and ten days of supersonics will bring out all the
petty meanness in anyone. And I thought that for once the Professor
had missed the boat and the Hustic was a floperoo. It didn't bring in
thoughts. Just stuff, and I wasn't going to have such a no-good gadget
draining the power-packs all the way to Mars and back. I forgot that
first Hustic wasn't like a radio or these new universal models the
space liners all carry. That experimental set had to be adjusted to the
individual brain wave pattern of the operator. But I didn't remember
that.
So I disconnected one of the power leads and removed three parts. A
curved metal bar, a small condenser, and the shield of one of the
intricate little tubes.
I went back to sleep thinking Mike would wake me to get the parts and
we could write notes back and forth to settle the matter, forgetting
entirely how stubborn he could be.
It was a dirty trick, but I'm glad now I did it. It helped save Earth.
* * * * *
Before I was fully awake I knew something was really wrong. Mike was
shaking me roughly and there was a wild gleam in his eyes. A glance
showed me he'd pulled off Bill's sleep mask too.
"---- ---- ----!" Mike yelled, but of course I couldn't hear him. In
those Wilson-drive spaceships it was utterly impossible to talk between
blast-off and landing.
Then he shoved a pad under my nose.
"MARTIANS TAKING OVER!!! EARTH IN DEADLY PERIL!!!" he had written.
Little slimy bugs with ice-cold, prickly feet marched up and down
my spine. Every man has his private, personal phobia, something
that throws him into an irrational panic, and mine has always been
lunatics. Ever since I can remember I've had a morbid fear of mental
disorders, which is why the Malignant Inertia Complex had had me so
thoroughly frightened. And now I knew the supersonics had driven Mike
space-batty.
I didn't for a moment believe what he had written. I'd been to Mars
before, seen Marties in their home environment, slow-moving and
lethargic, entirely without initiative, completely unwarlike.
"DISCOVERED PLOT VIA HUSTIC," Mike scribbled.
The bugs on my spine quit parading and started running. I grabbed the
pad.
"IMPOSSIBLE," I wrote. "HUSTIC NOT WORKING. NO GOOD. DISCONNECTED."
Mike dived across the cabin in the light gravity, hauled himself up
neatly on a handgrip and raised the cover of the selector unit. Then he
thumbed his nose at me.
Bill and I took a good look. That stubborn, crazy Irishman had made a
new bar to replace the one I'd hidden and cut down an empty food can as
a tube shield.
"GOT TO TURN BACK, WARN EARTH," Mike wrote. "THE CULTURAL--"
Bill and I looked at each other. Swinging a ship in mid-transit can be
done, but it's hardly safe or good practice. Mike was no puny infant,
and we knew we had to get him before he became really violent.
Mike read our faces and started to draw back, but he was too late. Bill
pinioned his arms in a bear hug and I slipped a sleep mask over his
face. He struggled and tried to hold his breath, but the gas got him at
last and he went limp.
Sadly we loaded him into the pneumatic cushions and placed the
air-release valve out of his reach. Few victims of space-battiness
ever recovered, and both of us were feeling pretty sick. Mike had been
space-hopping with us for three years, and despite his screwballisms we
liked the big lug. And we knew Polly was going to take it awfully hard.
* * * * *
The rest of that transit was twelve on and twelve off for Bill and me,
and every minute I was awake I was afraid I might follow Mike down
Lunacy Lane. Or that he might get loose. A couple of times we brought
him awake, but each time we were glad we'd turned extra air pressure
into his cushions. He struggled, and by watching his lips we knew he
was still raving.
The calculations for landing spiral made us sweat. We'd left the
astrogation to Mike so completely we'd gotten rusty. We missed him even
more making contact. I had to handle both throttles and calculator
while Bill took the cumbersome Luminophone mechanism. It took hours to
line up the color-modulated beam, and then in typical Martian fashion
more hours for them to answer with a landing clearance. But at last the
_Banshee_ scrunched into the red desert just outside T'lith, and as the
Wilsons died Bill and I wiggled our fingers in our ears to get them
back to normal.
Within a few minutes a dozen Martians were striding toward us from the
beehive-domes of their city. They came straight as though walking ruled
lines, not hurrying and not lagging, semi-human in outline and size.
A couple of hundred feet from the ship they deployed and began to
watch. Then we could see their bulging, faceted eyes, their puckered,
three-lipped mouths and the two rodlike antennae that waved slowly
back and forth on their greenish foreheads. We didn't know then why
they watched, or who--or what--told them to watch. But always there
were a dozen on hand whenever a spaceship landed, watching in a
passive, detached way with neither approval nor disapproval in their
manner. They watched, just as the Cultural Emissaries on Earth kept an
eye on everything that happened without asking a single question or
interfering in any way that we could see.
Bill opened the port and gobbled at the watchers in their own language,
telling them we wanted to pick up a cargo of rhudite ore and had Earth
gadgets to exchange. They didn't give any sign they heard us, but
we didn't expect them to. The answer, if it came at all, would come
minutes or even hours later. We didn't know why. Not then. We'd never
heard of the Thing.
Bill pulled his head in again, and while we waited we turned off Mike's
sleep gas once more. This time we really had a faint hope that with the
Wilsons off he'd be himself.
But his first words were, "Will you damned fools turn me loose? I'm not
crazy! We've got to do something, and quick. Hell, I don't want to be
like a damned Martie! They don't get any fun out of life."
He started to kick and squirm, so we gassed him out again. It seemed
the only merciful thing to do.
"Olsen," Bill said thoughtfully. "We can't leave him alone and one of
us has to rustle up a cargo."
"You're elected. You know the lingo better than I do."
"You don't mind?"
I snorted. I wasn't any first-tripper who had to go sight-seeing. The
bleak domes of T'lith were no different from those of M'nu or V'rad or
any of the other cities. And the Marties themselves weren't my idea of
jolly companions.
So Bill packed the saddlebags of the little sandcycle and went
sputtering off to question Marties about other Marties who might know
of still other Marties who might know what _rhudite_ was and perhaps
with enough patient prodding might divulge some method for making
a trade and getting the stuff to our ship. And each question would
take ten minutes, minimum, for an answer. The three hundred Cultural
Emissaries had been admitted to Earth on the theory that they might
pick up Earth ideas that would facilitate trading. At least that's the
story the peculiarly nebulous Martian government had given the Earth
authorities.
After Bill left I checked Mike's pulse. It was weakening slighty from
over-anaesthesia so, much as I dreaded having a lunatic awake in the
ship with me, I had to let him recover consciousness.
He glared at me and fought against the pneumatic cushions that held him
gently but tightly.
"You fool!" he raved. "You abysmal idiot! Don't you realize you're
dooming Earth to an eternity of Martianization?"
It gave me a squirmy feeling to hear him talk that way.
"There is no war," I said soothingly, trying to reason with him. "It's
all in your head. If the Martians were attacking Earth it's only
logical they'd jump on us here and now. But you'll snap out of it when
we get you back home."
"It isn't that kind of a war," he insisted irritably.
* * * * *
Finally he calmed down. But his eyes, crazy and wild, kept following me
around the room. That made me so nervous I went down and tinkered with
the engines.
"Hey, Swede!" Mike's voice reached me after a while. "I'm thirsty."
So I brought him a drink and fed him a sandwich bite by bite.
"I'm okay now," he said when he had finished. "I know I blew my top,
but I'm all over that. How's about turning me loose?"