Then he remembered what had happened, and heard the Marties still
howling outside in a most unpleasant way.
"Let's get the hell out of here!" he bellowed.
We went out with Bill on the throttles and me down in the drive room
with the portable emergency power-pack and a handful of wires to get
the Wilsons firing. Mike was out cold on the control room floor. We
went out with a swish and a swoop on an uncontrolled skew curve, and
only the low .38 gravity and 3.1 mile per second escape velocity of
Mars kept us alive.
As soon as we straightened out of the escape spiral Bill and I hustled
Mike into the cushions. It wasn't necessary to gas him, for although he
had recovered consciousness he did not resist at all. Instead he fell
into a long normal sleep, twice around the clock as though completely
exhausted.
That trip still haunts my nightmares. Everything powered off the
secondaries--which meant nearly everything but the main drivers--was
dead. Mike had really fixed that.
Then one of the Wilsons burned a liner, and with grave misgivings
we had to turn Mike loose. We didn't like the notion of spacing
a trajectory on power settings plotted by a crazy man, but the
calculations for unbalanced drive needed his astrogating skill. With
the mechanical astroplotter out of action it was too much for Bill and
me.
He didn't get violent, so after that we gave him the run of the ship,
though of course we never left him on watch alone. He seemed harmless
enough, and spent most of his time at a typewriter he had rebuilt to
operate in variable gravity. He wrote a few poems to and about Polly.
The usual mush.
Then he wrote a story. Maybe I've mentioned before that he collected
rejection slips. Bill and I laughed when we read it, because it was
much too farfetched for publication. All about a mysterious artificial
brain--he didn't specify whether animal, vegetable or mineral--invented
to serve as a combination integrating calculator and reference library,
working on a form of telepathy. But the creatures for whom it was built
kept using it more and more to solve their problems instead of working
them out for themselves. After a few generations the creatures became
nothing but eyes and hands for the brain, letting it do all their
thinking and make all their decisions.
And because the Thing was aware of every sensation of a whole planetful
of creatures it grew very tired of processing irrelevant information
and began to propagate the idea that any thought or action not
absolutely essential for survival was wrong and should be suppressed,
and that emotions--which interfered with transmission of factual
data--were unthinkably degenerate, to be shunned at all costs. After a
few more generations the creatures did not even realize they were being
controlled by the Thing, had even forgotten its existence and believed
its thoughts and decisions were their own.
That was the story.
Then he got to fooling with the burned-out ruins of the Hustic and made
a sheaf of graphs, all in five and six colors. They were too complex
for Bill or me.
A few days out from Earth, a worried Bill got me up in the middle of my
off-shift and motioned to the forward view-plate. There, coming toward
us from the inviting blue-green ball of Earth, were thirty closely
grouped orange specks. Spaceship driver flares.
Mike took a look too, then held both hands to his forehead with index
fingers protruding and wiggled them at us. When I got the idea I wasn't
happy about it. The wiggling fingers meant antennae. Martians.
Bill and I gnawed our fingernails. The poor _Banshee_ could neither run
nor fight. But the Martian ships went right on by without even trying
to contact us on the Luminophone. Mike just grinned through it all.
* * * * *
We landed rough, on account of the burned-out driver, but when things
stopped bouncing we were all in condition to limp away.
Mike saw the car pull up outside and had the hatch open before we could
stop him.
Polly met him with open arms and a kiss that would have been censored
on any telaudio show. She wasn't the pale, subdued, inertia-ridden girl
of a few months before. Not at all.
The Professor was dancing up and down with excitement behind her,
trying to shake one of Mike's hands.
"You did it, darling!" Polly released her lips long enough to say.
"They're gone, every one of them! And so is the Complex."
"Huh?" Bill and I stared.
Then Bill grabbed his brother.
"You mean Mike isn't--?" he began.
"Of course not," the Professor snapped. "He never was." Then he turned
to Mike.
"What capacitance were you using when you picked up the Thing's
radiations?" he demanded. "What power factor? What wave form? Sine wave
or flat top or sawtooth? Did you have the transportation grid shielded
or were you getting a reinduction feedback?"
"Father!" Polly said sternly. "Later!"
Mike reached in his pocket and handed his fancy graphs to the
Professor, who seemed to understand them at a glance.
"Oh," he said. "There's just enough similarity of wave form here so the
telepathic inertia influences directed at the Cultural Emissaries would
heterodyne in their receiving organs and be re-emitted exactly on a
generalized human brain-wave pattern.
"And that makeshift capacitance bar you rigged just happened to
sensitize the set to the Thing's own wave form."
We listened, but right then Mike was more interested in Polly. About
that he displayed good sense.
* * * * *
Bill's _Banshee III_ and my _Thor_ are between-trips at the same time,
so it was only natural that we got together last night. And when we
met Miu Tlenow, the Venusian cat-man, it was also natural that we head
immediately for the Ursa Major Tavern.
"Mewargh!" Tlenow purred, extending and retracting his clawlike
fingernails with pleasure as the second drink took hold. "Really it is
good to get away from that madhouse."
"What madhouse?" Bill asked.
"Mars."
We sat up straighter. Somehow in the five years that had passed without
authentic news from the Red Planet we had taken it for granted that
things there had settled down once more to a slow, lethargic normality.
We hadn't realized the full impact of Mike, as amplified by the Hustic.
"Those Martians!" Tlenow mewled, his whiskers twitching in agitated
disgust. "They are crazy. All crazy. They mate, but they use no sense
in how they mate. Like Earthmen. Such complications! They have many
different governments with a hundred different political parties, and
they talk and talk, vote and vote. They argue.
"Things like Earthmen's gloves they make. Of course they will not fit
Martian hands and they carry them only to hit in each other's faces.
Then they fight duels.
"They make liquor and drink it, and how crazy-drunk they get. Then,
Great Space, they even try to sing!
"They make jokes and play pranks, too, something they never did before."
Tlenow was slit-eyed with amazement at such illogical Martian behavior.
"They do this one day, do that the next. Always they grow more like
Venusians or Earthmen, only with not so much sense. What they will do
on any tomorrow one can never tell."
He finished his drink and leaned forward.
"They make writing--too much writing--everything in writing--and all of
it funny kind. What you Earthmen call--I think--poetry. Yes, that is
it. Poetry. And each day gets worser. They never make like that before.
By the Seven Black Comets, how they get that way?"
That was when Bill and I knew we had to break our silence.
* * * * *
So the Marties have not yet learned to think for themselves. Five
years, after all, is a very short time. Perhaps some day. In the
meantime they're nothing but reflections of the more uninhibited and
generally screwy aspects of Terence Michael Burke's personality. And
I'm afraid they'll share his disturbing ideas of humor.
Do we want anything to do with them? Frankly, I don't know. That's up
to you, Citizens of Earth, when you vote on the new treaty.
But don't say I didn't warn you.