The ancient leviathan heaved mightily in the vast
buried cavern, pumping water upward as it had been
told. Only hunted Nick Tinker knew that more than
just water was coming to the dust-dry surface!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The hot, high whine scorched past his face and the slug splatted into
the eroded grey wall beside him. He should have died then, but his
instinctive recoil at feeling something sticky and moist beneath his
feet saved him.
Nick Tinker let himself crumple and fall, a trick which during the War
days back on Earth had fooled more than one sniper. His left hand slid
under his padded jacket toward his gun, but the movement looked as
though he were clutching his chest. His right arm landed outstretched,
and he let that hand clutch convulsively at the air. Then he lay very
still beneath the unwinking Martian stars while the thin, chilling
night wind whispered through the deserted, sand-drifted streets.
The Gravinol was gradually leaving his brain, leaving him feeling
fully alive for the first time since he had entered the Special Corps
back on Earth at the age of seventeen. He wasn't sure he liked being
so completely alive, for it was all he could do to keep his body from
cringing under the expectation of another, better-aimed bullet. The
stoic fatalism was gone.
He lay motionless, but his trained senses were busily sorting the
eerie impressions of this undead Martian city, picking out a sensation
of--someone watching. The feeling localized itself on an oval opening
in the hulking black building across the wide street. His gun hand
moved imperceptibly and his jacket tore and smoldered as he fired. The
recoil slide of the heavy automatic thumped a bruise against his ribs,
and even as the explosive bullet flared against the window's edge he
was on his feet, zigzagging across the street in a stooping rush to
flatten himself against the wall.
He watched the greenish light of a glow-plate seeping from the window,
hoping for a glimpse of the sniper's silhouette. The window had been
dark before, but his bullet had evidently damaged the screen-creature
that covered the window. He knew the screen-creatures well, the living,
amorphous and deadly remnants of a Martian civilization that still
guarded almost every opening in this abandoned city, rendering it so
hazardous for unwary Earthmen.
His groping hands found the narrow entrance to the building and he
ducked in. Someone had been there before him, and recently, for the
door-creature inside the alcove hung in tattered shreds. One of its
torn, limp folds touched his hand as he passed, and with a sudden
resurgence of alien life it contracted around his wrist. It tried to
unleash its deadly shock, but it was weak and Nick felt only a faint
tingle.
He jerked free and went up the inside ramp at a fast but quiet run, his
finger ready on the trigger as he neared the top.
Then Nick stopped dead as he saw his target. The girl looked hardly
more than a child. Her tattered blouse was pulled aside and she was
mopping blindly at a bleeding gash low on one shoulder. The back of her
other hand scrubbed at her closed eyes. Her face, framed in uncombed
coppery hair, was peppered with grey freckles of rock dust thrown by
Nick's explosive bullet.
His boots gritting in the dust, warned her, for she whirled, opening
red-rimmed, watering eyes and snatching up a heavy rifle.
It would have been an easy shot, but Nick did not fire.
* * * * *
Her rifle spat once into its silencer as he dived across the room and
they went to the floor together. For a minute he was fully occupied in
avoiding her teeth and fingernails and shrewdly placed kicks as she
fought with the desperation of terror, but at last he got a grip on her
hair and clipped her once on the point of the chin.
He spat out a mouthful of acrid dust and tore the remains of her blouse
into strips. There was haste and no gentleness in the way he tied her
hands and feet. The exertion left him panting in the thin Martian air,
so he took a breath of oxygen from his pocket sniffer bottle. Then,
wanting to talk to the girl at once, he held the nosepiece to her face.
He knew when she recovered consciousness, for her head twisted suddenly
and her teeth sank into his hand. He slapped her face hard, and she lay
staring up at him with hatred and terror.
"You're Susan Jones," he declared.
"Murderer!" she spat, her face twisted with loathing.
He followed her glance to his uniform and laughed mirthlessly. "I'm
outlawed," he snorted. "The Mec is after me just as hot as they're
after you. I disobeyed orders."
She looked at him unbelievingly, suspecting some sort of trap. She
knew from experience the ruthless resourcefulness of the Martian
Exploitation Company.
"You couldn't disobey," she said incredulously. "You couldn't."
"Like hell," he snapped. "I've had no Gravinol for six weeks. Now,
where's your father?"
His temper flared as her lips set in a stubborn line. He had no time to
lose.
"I'll make you talk, damn you!"
The rush of treads and whine of brakes from the street interrupted
him, sending him to the window with gun ready. The screen-creature,
still alive with the almost unkillable vitality of those alien things,
had dragged itself together to cover the opening again. Nick was
careful not to touch it. He peered out, knowing that to the men
climbing from the armored half-track the window would appear dark. The
screen-creatures passed light in one direction only. As quietly as
possible he closed the sliding panel at the top of the ramp and pushed
in the locking plug.
"Remember, get the old man alive. Stun him if necessary, but alive.
That's orders from The Man himself." Nick recognized Colonel Hammer's
voice. The search must be tightening if the commandant himself took
charge of a patrol. They were after Professor Jones and his daughter,
but Nick knew that he too would be shot on sight. This time he was with
the hunted instead of the hunters.
The girl's face went white as he drew his sheath knife. Then she stared
uncomprehendingly as the blade slit her bonds instead of her throat.
"Over the roofs," he whispered. "Which way out?"
She pointed, still uncertain of his intentions.
A big man in a uniform like Nick's own lay sprawled on the floor of
the adjoining room, a black circle between his eyes. Nick spared him
just one glance. And then he understood the sticky-moist splotch he had
encountered in the street. The man with the straggly beard had caused
it, bleeding his life away through the gaping rent in his chest.
The girl ignored Nick's ready pistol and ran to the low couch on which
the old man reclined. "Dad!" she called softly, shaking his shoulder.
"Dad!"
Nick pulled her away and shook his head. Jackson Jones, the first man
to reach Mars, was dead.
"Shoot that panel down!" someone yelled from the ramp. "He's in there!"
"Wanna get took by the back-blast?" another voice complained. "Stand
back."
"Which way?" Nick asked quietly.
The girl darted to a window and Nick caught his breath as she reached
toward the guarding screen-creature. Then he stared for, instead of
killing her with its strange powers, the rubbery, no-color, living
stuff flowed back into grooves in the edge of the stone. Susan gave one
last backward glance at her father's body and scrambled through.
Nick followed nervously and sprawled beside her on a narrow roof ledge.
She touched the screen-creature again and it closed with a silent,
oily motion.
"It felt my thoughts," she whispered.
He dragged her to her feet and they ran through the dim starlight,
climbing across the uneven roofs, leaping the chasms between buildings
in the darkness. Excited yells as the patrol broke through the panel
and found the two bodies speeded them onward. The girl held her own,
keeping the fast pace Nick set, although a few times he had to help her
swing her slender body from a lower roof to a higher one.
"Down!" he barked suddenly. A jet of orange light flung itself upward
and outward behind them as someone turned a flame gun on the window
through which they had escaped.
"There she is!"
An automatic roared a long burst. From a roof in the opposite direction
from where they crouched behind a projecting cornice a _cajora_
screamed as it tumbled, astonishingly like a woman in agony.
"You got her, Fred!" someone yelled triumphantly. "Nice shooting!"
Susan shivered, not entirely from the cold.
"What now?" she asked.
"Hide."
* * * * *
The pause had given Nick time to get his bearings. Searchlights from
a dozen cars were lancing through the city, and he knew they had to
get under cover before flares flooded the roofs with brilliance. He
found the hole in which he had hidden during the day, a spot of deeper
blackness beneath an overhanging ledge, and motioned Susan inside.
Instead of following immediately he belly-crawled to the edge of the
flat roof. Two armored cars were approaching, still hidden from each
other by the curving street, but he could see them both.
Anger at his pursuers burned fiercely inside him, anger and the
deep-seated prejudice against purely defensive action that was a legacy
from the Special Corps days on Earth.
Smiling grimly, he unslung the rifle he had taken from the girl and
sent a single bullet ricocheting harmlessly off the turret of each car.
Then he followed Susan. Even through the massive stone walls of
the building they could hear the whistling roar of two proton
cannon--firing at each other. Colonel Hammer would be displeased with
the survivors, Nick reflected with grim amusement.
They paused just inside the black hole to let their labored breathing
return to normal. It seemed to go right through the building, between
inner and outer shells.
"We'd better climb down and hope it goes deep enough," he said at last.
The Martian Exploitation Company had a little gadget, outgrowth of the
last War on Earth, which could detect the presence of living creatures
through a hundred feet of solid rock.
"This passage will join the tunnels," the girl said with quiet
confidence. "We can dodge their detectors."
"What tunnels? You been here?" he asked sharply, trying to see her face
in the blackness.
"No, but a _vora_ made this."
Nick didn't understand, but there was no time for hesitation. They
climbed down, into an underworld of blackness and silence. He went
first, searching out niches in the almost vertical shaft with his
toes, lowering his body, reaching overhead to guide Susan's feet. Once
one of them dislodged a sliver of rock that bounced and clicked into
the depths for what seemed like minutes. His mind was seething with
questions but the treacherous shaft required his full attention.
Only the light gravity of Mars made the climb possible, and even then
his muscles were stiff and aching when at last his feet touched a solid
floor and they sprawled in what the echoes of their heavy breathing
told them was a roughly horizontal tunnel. He estimated they had come
at least a mile straight downward, perhaps more.
For a long time they lay without moving in the powder-fine sand that
had penetrated even here.
"We've got to steal a ship," he voiced the thought uppermost in his
mind. Already he had accepted this girl as a partner in his venture,
for she too was a fugitive from the tyranny of the Martian Exploitation
Company.
Her body jerked suddenly at his words, and then he had to fumble for
her in the darkness and shake her with brutal insistence until her
hysterical laughter stopped.
"Just steal a ship!" she gasped finally, her voice still unsteady. "Dad
and I tried for a year, ever since the Exploiters came and wrecked our
_Trailblazer_. And now they've killed him!" She began to sob, but this
time in sadness rather than hysteria.
Nick was frantic for the missing fragments of the puzzle, but he knew
it would be useless to question her now. She began to shiver in the
chill, so he removed his torn jacket and slipped it around her naked
shoulders. After a while she sobbed herself to sleep, too exhausted and
grief-stricken to care any more what happened to her.
Nick dozed too, but the dregs of Gravinol still in his system denied
him the release of complete forgetfulness. In disconnected, nightmarish
flashes his mind reviewed the chain of events that had made him a
hunted outlaw upon an alien planet.
There was a bittersweetness to his thoughts of Earth, a nostalgic
homesickness for the planet of great cities and green foliage and
free-flowing water it had been before the War--and might some day be
again.
And then the War itself. The boyish, unthinking enthusiasm with which
he had enlisted in the Special Corps. The new drug, Gravinol, touted
by the laboratories of the great Harmon Enterprises as the discovery
that would win the War. Twisting, writhing rocket fights high above the
atmosphere, pilots of the Corps immersed in hypnotic, Gravinol-induced
blind loyalty to the Cause, immune to fatigue and pain and fear.
City after city crumbling to atomic dust. Rocket bases blasted out of
existence and no more targets worth bombing. Complex weapons giving way
to more primitive ones as industrial systems broke down. The Special
Corps transferred from air to ground duty. Crumbling battle lines,
disintegration of organized warfare into deadly confusion in which
friend and foe were indistinguishable.
* * * * *
Peace. Peace without victory, without decision. Peace of destruction.
Battles dying into scattered skirmishes that eventually died of their
own inertia. Disillusion and disgust. But it was peace.
Realization that Gravinol, hurriedly released upon the world without
proper testing, was incompatible with any civilized system and at the
same time incurably habit forming. Gravinol outlawed by the reviving
New Governments. The few hundred survivors of the Special Corps, Nick
among them, roaming the face of Earth in a desperate, frustrating
search for the few grams still in existence, ready to commit any crime
to ease their torment, clinging with fanatical, drug-inculcated loyalty
to a Cause that had died with the War's end, looking endlessly for a
new Cause to which to fasten their drug-inflamed energies, shunned
and avoided and feared and hated by those persons not in the grip of
Gravinol.
The whispered rumor that had led him to that office, miraculously
untouched amid the ruins of Chicago. Listening to the young man with
the cold eyes--he had never learned his name--as he told of the Jones
Drive and the double Cause of protecting Earth and making Mars a fit
new world for human colonization.
"And this," the man had said, casually rolling a tiny red pellet of
Gravinol across the broad desk into Nick's clutching fingers. "All you
want."
Central Camp, the Martian Exploitation Company's base on the red
desert, and indoctrination under the thought machines. Plenty of
Gravinol, to be had for the asking, and the companionship of other old
members of the Corps. Flashing out in a wonderfully responsive fighter
rocket to strafe and destroy a skulking Martie or two. Months without
unhappiness, without a single emotional response not conditioned by the
Gravinol and the thought machines.
Then one night the glow of a spaceship landing far to the East, and
Colonel Hammer's orders.
"That ship is not authorized by Headquarters. Bomb it! And you, Tinker,
photograph the results. The Man wants proof."
Silvery hull against red sand. Small derrick drilling for the water
Nick knew they would never find, for even the Exploiters had failed.
A few tents. Men and women and half a dozen children waving excited
greetings. Ship and tents obscured as the bombs detonated. And when
the dust cleared--nothing.
Liquidation of the potential independent colony had made no impression
at the time, but now in this tunnel far beneath the surface Nick
clenched his fists and bit his lip as he thought of the callous
brutality of it.
* * * * *
Then, weeks afterward, that card game quarrel with Jake Alaimo. Patrol
the next day, and rockets failing far out over the bleak and deadly
desert. Fuel gauges showing full but tanks empty, radio dead, and
Alaimo's note on the mechanic's service card.
Starting the impossibly long walk back to base. Eyes tortured by the
harsh sunlight. Thirst. Beginnings of the gnawing craving for Gravinol.
Memories of the tortures he had endured brought Nick wide awake in the
tunnel, all his muscles tightening momentarily as though to begin the
twitching spasm typical of denied Gravinol addiction.
He seemed to remember collapsing in the shadow of a rocky outcropping,
and as he had fainted he had known he was dying. He had been so near
dead that his eyes remained vacantly open, and in his unconsciousness
he had seen--he thought--strange creatures that were tall and green
and somehow _thin_ in consistency. Like Marties. And there had been
darkness and coolness after the blazing heat of the desert. Yes, and
even wetness, wetness on arid Mars where all water was tanked in from
Earth. He couldn't remember, but something had happened.
Days later a patrol had found him by chance, and back at Central
Camp the medical staff had been skillful. But they were human and
had therefore overlooked the obvious fact that he had gone three
weeks without Gravinol. And for some reason he himself could not
understand he had remained silent, battling the recurrent temptation
as he recovered. Something--perhaps bodily dehydration, perhaps heat,
perhaps the actinic rays of the sun that had turned his skin almost to
leather--something out there on the desert had enabled him to evade the
death that usually followed deprivation of Gravinol.
One day when he was stronger and the recurring craving had all his
nerves screaming, he had called Jake Alaimo out for a barehanded duel
and snapped his neck with an edgewise chop of his palm. But when
Colonel Hammer had congratulated him he had only felt annoyance. He was
beginning to think for himself once more.