MARS IS MY
DESTINATION
a science-fiction adventure by
FRANK BELKNAP LONG
PYRAMID BOOKS
NEW YORK
MARS IS MY DESTINATION
A Pyramid Book
First printing, June 1962
This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between
any character herein and any person, living or dead;
any such resemblance is purely coincidental.
Copyright 1962, by Pyramid Publications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Pyramid Books are published by Pyramid Publications, Inc.
444 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York, U.S.A.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
MARS
... Earth's first colony in Space. Men killed for the coveted ticket
that allowed them to go there. And, once there, the killing went on....
MARS
... Ralph Graham's goal since boyhood--and he was Mars-bound with
authority that put the whole planet in his pocket--if he could live
long enough to assert it!
MARS
... source of incalculable wealth for humanity--and deadly danger for
those who tried to get it!
MARS
... in Earth's night sky, a symbol of the god of war--in this tense
novel of the future, a vivid setting for stirring action!
1
I'd known for ten minutes that something terrible was going to happen.
It was in the cards, building to a zero-count climax.
The spaceport bar was filled with a fresh, washed-clean smell, as if
all the winds of space had been blowing through it. There was an autumn
tang in the air as well, because it was open at both ends, and out
beyond was New Chicago, with its parks and tall buildings, and the big
inland sea that was Lake Michigan.
It was all right ... if you just let your mind dwell on what was
outside. Men and women with their shoulders held straight and a
new lift to the way they felt and thought, because Earth wasn't a
closed-circuit any more. Kids in the parks pretending they were
spacemen, bundled up in insulated jackets, having the time of their
lives. A blue jay perched on a tree, the leaves turning red and yellow
around it. A nurse in a starched white uniform pushing a perambulator,
her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, a dreamy look in her eyes.
Nothing could spoil any part of that. It was there to stay and I
breathed in deeply a couple of times, refusing to remember that in
the turbulent, round-the-clock world of the spaceports, Death was an
inveterate barhopper.
Then I did remember, because I had to. You can't bury your head in the
sand to shut out ugliness for long, unless you're ostrich-minded and
are willing to let your integrity go down the drain.
I didn't know what time it was and I didn't much care. I only knew that
Death had come in late in the afternoon, and was hovering in stony
silence at the far end of the bar.
He was there, all right, even if he had the same refractive index as
the air around him and you could see right through him. The sixth-sense
kind of awareness that everyone experiences at times--call it a
premonition, if you wish--had started an alarm bell ringing in my mind.
It was still ringing when I raised my eyes, and knew for sure that all
the furies that ever were had picked that particular time and place to
hold open house.
I saw it begin to happen.
It began so suddenly it had the impact of a big, hard-knuckled fist
crashing down on the spaceport bar, startling everyone, jolting even
the solitary drinkers out of their private nightmares.
Actually the violence hadn't quite reached that stage. But it was a
safe bet that it would in another ten or twelve seconds. And when it
did there was no chain or big double lock on Earth that could keep it
from terminating in bloodshed.
The tipoff was the way it started, as if a fuse had been lit that would
blow the place apart. Just two voices for an instant, raised in anger,
one ringing out like a pistol shot. But I knew that something was
dangerously wrong the instant I caught sight of the two men who were
doing the arguing.
The one whose voice had made every glass on the long bar vibrate like a
tuning fork was a blond giant, six-foot-four at least and built massive
around the shoulders. His shirt was open at the throat and his chest
was sweat-sheened and he had the kind of outsized ruggedness that made
you feel it would have taken a heavy rock-crushing machine a full half
hour to flatten him out.
The other was of average height and only looked small by contrast.
He was more than holding his own, however, standing up to the Viking
character defiantly. His weather-beaten face was as tight as a
drum, and his hair was standing straight up, as though a charge of
high-voltage electricity had passed right through him.
He just happened to have unusually bristly hair, I guess. But it gave
him a very weird look indeed.
I don't know why someone picked that critical moment to shout a
warning, because everyone could see it was the kind of argument that
couldn't be stopped by anything short of strong-armed intervention.
Advice at that point could be just as dangerous as pouring kerosene on
the fuse, to make it burn faster.
But someone did yell out, at the top of his lungs. "Pipe down, you two!
What do you think this is, a debating society?"
It could have turned into that, all right, the deadliest kind of
debating society, with the stoned contingent taking sides for no sane
reason. It could have started off as a free-for-all and ended with five
or six of the heaviest drinkers lying prone, with bashed-in skulls.
The barkeep made a makeshift megaphone of his two hands and added
to the confusion by shouting: "Get back in line or I'll have you run
right out of here. I'll show you just how tough I can get. Every time
something like this happens I get blamed for it. I'm goddam sick of
being in the middle."
"That's telling them, John! Need any help?"
"No, stay where you are. I can handle it."
I didn't think he could, not even if he was split down the middle into
two men twice his size. I didn't think anyone could, because by this
time I'd had a chance to take a long, steady, camera-eye look at the
expression on the Viking character's face.
I'd seen that expression before and I knew what it meant. The Viking
character was having a virulent sour grapes reaction to something
Average Size had said. It had really taken hold, like a smallpox
vaccination that's much too strong, and his inner torment had become
just agonizing enough to send him into a towering rage.
Average Size had probably been boasting, telling everyone how lucky he
was to be on the passenger list of the next Mars-bound rocket. And in
a crowded spaceport bar, where Martian Colonization Board clearances
are at a terrific premium, you don't indulge in that kind of talk. Not
unless you have a suicide complex and are dead set on leaving the earth
without traveling out into space at all.
Now things were coming to a head so fast there was no time to cheat
Death of his cue. He was starting to come right out into the open,
scythe swinging, punctual to the dot. I was sure of it the instant I
saw the gun gleaming in the Viking character's hand and the smaller man
recoiling from him, his eyes fastened on the weapon in stark terror.
_Oh, you fool!_ I thought. _Why did you provoke him? You should have
expected this, you should have known. What good is a Mars clearance if
you end up with a bullet in your spine?_
For some strange reason the Viking character seemed in no hurry to
blast. He seemed to be savoring the look of terror in Average Size's
eyes, letting his fury diminish by just a little, as if by allowing a
tenth of it to escape through a steam-spigot safety valve he could make
more sure of his aim. It made me wonder if I couldn't still get to them
in time.
The instant I realized there was still a chance I knew I'd have to try.
I was in good physical trim and no man is an island when the sands are
running out. I didn't want to die, but neither did Average Size and
there are obligations you can't sidestep if you want to go on living
with yourself.
I moved out from where I was standing and headed straight for the
Viking character, keeping parallel with the long bar. I can't recall
ever having moved more rapidly, and I was well past the barkeep--he was
blinking and standing motionless, as white as a sheet now--when the
Viking character's voice rang out for the second time.
"You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you? Sure you do.
Why deny it? Who are you, who is anybody, to come in here and strut and
put on airs? I'm going to let you have it, right now!"
The blast came then, sudden, deafening. They were standing so close to
each other I thought for a minute the gun had misfired, for Average
Size didn't stiffen or sag or change his position in any way and his
face was hidden by smoke from the blast.
I should have known better, for it was a big gun with a heavy charge,
and when a man is half blown apart his body can become galvanized for
an instant, just as if he hasn't been hit at all. Sometimes he'll be
lifted up and hurled back twenty feet and sometimes he'll just stand
rigid, with the life going out of him in a rush, an instant before his
knees give way and there's a terrible, welling redness to make you
realize how mistaken you were about the shot going wild.
The smoke thinned out fast enough, eddying away from him in little
spirals. But one quick look at him sinking down, passing into eternity
with his head lolling, was all I had time for. Pandemonium was breaking
loose all around me, and my only thought was to make a mad dog killer
pay for what he had done before someone got between us.
Mad dog killers enrage me beyond all reason. Given enough provocation
almost any man can go berserk and commit murder. But the Viking
character had let a provocation that merited no more than a rebuke rip
his self-control to shreds.
The naked brutality of it sickened me. Something primitive and very
dangerous--or perhaps it was something super-civilized--made me out to
beat him into insensibility before he could kill again. I felt like a
man confronting a poisonous snake, who knows he must stamp on it or
blast off its head before it can sink its fangs in his flesh.
I was not alone in feeling that way. All around me there was an angry
muttering, a cursing and a shouting. If I needed support, sturdy
backing, I had it. But right at that moment I didn't need it. An
angry giant had come to life inside of me and we exchanged nods and
understood each other.
There was a crash behind me, but I ignored it. What was harder to
ignore was the barkeep straddling the bar and coming down flatfooted in
the wake of two reeling drunks who were lunging for the killer with a
crazy, wild look in their eyes. I didn't want them to get to him ahead
of me.
He hadn't moved at all and had a frightened look on his face, as if the
blast had jolted some sanity back into him and made him realize that
you can't gun a man down in a crowded bar without adjusting a noose to
your own throat and giving fifty men a chance to draw it tight.
The gun he'd killed with might still have saved him, if he'd swung
about and started shooting up the bar. But I didn't give him a chance
to recover.
I ploughed into him, wrenched the gun from him and sent him reeling
back against the bar with a solidly delivered blow to the jaw, luckily
aimed just right.
Then they were on him, five or six of them, and I couldn't see him for
a moment.
I held the gun tightly and looked at it. It was still warm and just the
feel of it sent a shiver up my spine. A gun that has just been wrenched
from the hand of a killer is unlike any other weapon. There's blood on
it, even if no laboratory test can bring it out.
I didn't know I'd lost anything until I looked down and saw my
wallet lying on the floor at my feet. The energy I'd put into the
blow had not only sent a stab of pain up my wrist to my elbow. It
had jarred something loose from my inner breast pocket that had a
danger-potential, right at that moment, that could have turned the tide
of rage that was sweeping the bar away from the killer and straight in
my direction. Some of it anyway, splitting it down the middle, causing
the drunks who were divided in their minds about what he had done to
change sides abruptly.
In my wallet was a perforated card, all stippled with tiny dots down
one side, and it said that I was on the passenger list of the next
Mars-bound rocket, and that the Martian Colonization Board clearance
was of a peculiar kind ... very special.
The wallet had fallen open and the card was in plain view for anyone
to read. It could be recognized by its color alone--a light shade of
blue--and if anyone who felt the way the killer had done about Average
Size had caught sight of it and made a grab for the wallet--
I was bending to pick it up when a voice whispered close to my ear.
"Don't let anyone see that card--if you want to stay in one piece.
You'd better get out of here before they start asking questions. They
won't wait for the Spaceport Police to get here. Too many of them
will be in trouble if they don't find out fast where everyone stands.
They'll know how to go about it."
I couldn't believe it for a minute, because I hadn't seen her come in.
I'd noticed two women at the bar, but not this one--it would have been
impossible for me to have failed to notice so slim a waist or hips so
enchantingly rounded, or the honey-blonde hair piled high, or the wide,
dark-lashed eyes that were staring at me out of a face that would have
made a good many men with their lives at stake forget the meaning of
danger.
Even if she'd been wedged in tightly between two male escorts at the
bar, I'd have noticed a part of all that. Just one glimpse of the
back of her head, with the indefinable, special quality that makes
beauty like that perceptible at a glance, so that you know what the
whole woman will look like when she turns, would have made so deep
an impression on me that not even the violence I'd participated in a
moment afterwards could have blotted it from my mind.
It left me speechless for an instant. I just snatched up the wallet,
put it safely back in my pocket and returned her stare in complete
silence.
"Better keep the gun," she advised. "Your fingerprints are all over it
now. You could clear yourself all right, considering who you are. But
it would be much simpler just to toss it into Lake Michigan, especially
if they decide to let him go and lie about who did the killing."
I could have wiped the gun clean and tossed it on the floor, but I knew
what was in her mind. You just don't leave a murder weapon lying around
in plain view when you've picked it up right after a killing. It can
lead to all kinds of complications.
I nodded and stood up. "Thanks for the advice," I said, finding my
voice at last. "There are enough eye-witnesses here to convict him
without this, if just a few of them have a conscience."
"Don't count on it," she said. "They're angry enough to kill him right
now, because they don't like to see anyone gunned down like that. But
when they've had time to think it over--"
She was right, of course. There were six or seven men struggling with
the killer now but there were others who weren't. A fight had started
near the middle of the bar and someone was shouting: "The ugly son
deserved what he got! Every man who gets a Mars clearance now has to
play along with the Colonization Board! He has to turn informer and
help them set a trap for anyone who gets in their way. Just depriving
us of our rights doesn't satisfy them. They're scheming to get the
whole Mars Colony for themselves."
It was the Big Lie--the charge that had done more damage to the Mars
Colony than the shortages of food and desperately needed construction
materials, and almost as much damage as the two major power conflicts
and the transportation difficulties that never seemed to get solved.
I wanted to go right up to him and grab hold of him and hit him as hard
as I'd hit the Viking character, because he was a killer too--a killer
of the dream.
But the blonde who seemed to know all the answers and what was wise
and sane and sensible was tugging at my arm and I couldn't ignore the
urgency in her voice.
"Time's running out on you, Mr. Important Man. If they find out just
who you are, you won't have a chance of getting out of here alive.
Every one of them will be clamoring for your blood. The pity of it, the
terrible pity, is that most of them hate violence as much as you do.
They hate what that wild beast just did. But the Big Lie has made them
hate the Colonization Board even more. Do we go?"
It came as a surprise that she was leaving with me, and that was
downright idiotic, in a way. With the place in an uproar, a killer
still trying to break loose and a fight under way it would have been
madness for her to stay, and the two other women had vanished without
stopping to talk to anyone. But in moments of stress you can overlook
the obvious and wonder about it afterward.
We had to move fast and we ran into trouble when two struggling drunks
got in our way. I shouldered one aside and rammed an elbow into the
stomach of the other and we reached the street without being stopped by
anyone who didn't want us to leave. The card was back in my pocket and
not a single one of them had X-ray eyes.
In another minute or two someone would have probably remembered that
I'd disarmed the Viking character and could have had a reason for the
fast violent way I'd gone about it. Then I'd have been in for the kind
of questioning the blonde had mentioned--a kangaroo court interrogation
before the Spaceport Police could get there. And if my answers had
failed to satisfy them they would have wasted no time in turning my
pockets inside out.
I'd been spared all that, thanks to that same blonde. And--I didn't
even know her name!
2
We'd been talking for twenty minutes and I still didn't know her
name. She wasn't being secretive or coy or holding out on me
because she didn't trust me as much as I trusted her. I just hadn't
gotten around to asking her, because we were both still talking
about what had happened at the bar and it was so closely tied in
with what was happening in New York and London and Paris and every
big city on Earth--and on Mars as well--that it dwarfed our puny
selves--extra-special as the blonde's puny self happened to be from the
male point of view.
I didn't know whether she was Helen or Barbara, Anne or Ruth or
Tanya. I just knew that she was beautiful and that we were sipping
Martinis and looking out through a wide picture window at New Chicago's
lakeshore parklands enveloped in a twilight glow.
The restaurant was called the Blue Mandarin and it conformed in all
respects to the picture that name conjures up--a diaphanous blue,
oriental-ornate eating establishment with nothing to offer its patrons
that was new, original, exciting, unique.
But there it was and there it would remain--until Lake Michigan
froze solid. For the moment its artificial decor wasn't important to
either of us. Only the Big Lie and what it was doing to the Martian
Colonization Project.
"My father was one of the first," she said. "Do you know what it means,
to stand in an empty, desolate waste, forty million miles from home,
and realize you're one of the chosen few--that a city will some day
grow from the seeds you've planted and nourished with your life blood?"
"I think I do," I said. "I hope I do."
"He died," she said, "when he was thirty years old, from a Martian
virus they hadn't discovered how to combat until two-thirds of the
first two thousand colonists succumbed to it."
"Why didn't he take you with him?" I asked. "There were no passenger
restrictions then. The Colonization Board had great difficulty in
finding enough volunteers."
"My mother refused to go," she said. "I'm afraid ... most women are
more conservative than men. Father died alone, and five years later
Mother married a man who didn't want to be one of the first ten
thousand--or the first sixty thousand. He had no problem. He wasn't
like the men we saw tonight."
"If every man and woman on Earth wanted to go to Mars," I said, "the
Colonization Board would have no problem. A demand on so colossal a
scale could not be met--in a century and a half. And laws would be
passed to prevent the scheming that's taking place everywhere, the
hatred and the violence. The Big Lie would not be believed."
"I know," she said. "It's when only twenty thousand can go and five
million want to go that you have a problem. A little hope filters
through, and the five million become envious and enraged."
I looked at her. I was feeling the glow now, the warmth creeping
through the cells of my brain, the recklessness that alcohol can
generate in a man with a worry that looms as big as the Big Lie, to
the part of himself that isn't dedicated to combating the Lie. The
ego-centered, demandingly human part, the woman-needing part, the old
Adam that's in all of us.
And suddenly I found myself thinking of Paris in the Spring, and the
sparkling Burgundies of France and vineyards in the dawn and what it
had meant to have a woman always at my side--or almost always--and in
my bed as well.
New York, flag-draped for Autumn, London in a swirling fog, the old
houses, the dreaming spires, anywhere on the round green Earth where
there was laughter and music and a woman to share it with....
All that had been mine for ten years. But now, like a fool, I wanted
Mars as well. Mars was in my blood and I could no longer rest content
with what I had.
Take it with me to Mars? And why not? It was no problem ... when you
didn't have my problem. A quite simple problem, really. The woman I'd
married wouldn't go with me to Mars.
She seemed to sense that I was having some kind of inward struggle,
and was feeling a decided glow at the same time, for she reached out
suddenly and took firm hold of my hand.
"Something's troubling you," she said. "Why don't you tell me about it
while you're feeling mellow. Considering the kind of world we're living
in, mellow is the best way to feel. It wears off quickly enough and
next day you pay for it. But while it lasts, I believe in making the
most of it. Don't you?"
Should I tell her, dared I? I might have to pay for it with a
vengeance, for she'd probably think me quite mad. And I still had some
old-fashioned ideas about loyalty and happened to be in love with my
wife.
It was crazy, it made no sense, but that's the way it was.
I looked at the woman sitting opposite me and wondered how a man could
be in love with one woman and find another so attractive that he'd been
on the verge of coming right out and asking her if she'd go with him to
Mars.
I looked at her blonde hair piled up high, and her pale beautiful face
and wondered how it would be if I hadn't been married to Joan at all.
I shut my eyes for a moment, thinking back, remembering the quarrel I'd
had with my wife that morning, the quarrel I'd tried my best to forget
over four straight whiskies at the spaceport bar late in the afternoon.
It was almost as if it was taking place again, right there at the
table, with another woman sitting opposite me who could not hear Joan's
angry voice at all.
"I mean every word I'm saying, Ralph Graham. You either tell them
you're staying right here in New Chicago or I'm divorcing you. I won't
go to Mars with you--tomorrow or next year or five years from now. Is
that plain?"
It was plain enough. To cushion the shock of it, and ease the pain
a little I stared into the fireplace, seeing for an instant in the
high-leaping flames a red desert landscape and a city that towered to
the brittle stars ... white, resplendent, swimming in a light that
never was on sea or land.
All right, the first Earth colony on Mars wasn't that kind of a city.
It was rugged and sprawling and rowdy. It was filled with tumult and
shouting, its prefabricated metal dwellings scoured and pitted by the
harsh desert winds. But I liked it better that way.
I wanted to walk its crooked streets, to rejoice with its builders and
creators, to be one of the first sixty thousand. With my mind and heart
and blood and guts I wanted to be there before the cautious, solemn,
over-serious people ruined it for the kind of man I was.
"I mean it, Ralph," Joan said. "If you go--you'll go alone. All of my
friends are here, all of my roots. I won't tear myself up by the roots
even for you. Much as I love you, I just won't."
It was five in the morning, and we'd been arguing half the night. In
two more hours daylight would come flooding into the apartment again,
and I'd probably have the worst talk-marathon hangover of my life.
I suddenly decided to go out into the cool dawn without saying another
word to her, slamming the door after me to make sure she'd realize just
how angry she'd made me.
I wouldn't even switch on the five A.M. news telecast or stop to take
in the cat on my way out. Women and cats had a great deal in common, I
told myself bitterly. They were arbitrary and stubborn and mysteriously
intent on having their own way and keeping you guessing as to their
real motives.
By heaven ... if I had to go alone to Mars I'd go.
So I'd really hung one on, had gone out and made a round of the
lakeside bars. All morning until noon and then I'd sobered up over
coffee and a sandwich and started out again early in the afternoon. It
just goes to show what a quarrel like that can do to a man's nerves and
peace of mind and all of his plans for the future, for I'm not even a
moderately heavy drinker.
* * * * *
Early morning bar traveling is barbarous, a lunatic-fringe pastime, and
it was the first time in my life I'd resorted to it. But resort to it
I did, and as the day wore on I gravitated from the lakeside taverns
toward the spaceport in slow stages, and twice in five hours reached
the stage where I couldn't have passed the straight-line test. If I
hadn't sobered up a little at noon I'd have reached the big, dangerous
bar as high as a man can get without falling flat on his face.
The Colonization Board hadn't even tried to stop what goes on there
around the clock, because there are explosive tensions and hard to
uncover areas of criminality in a city as big as New Chicago it's
wise to provide a safety valve for--when Mars fever is running so
high practically all of us are living in the shadow of a totally
unpredictable kind of violence.
If anyone had asked me toward the middle of the afternoon what was
drawing me, despite all of my better instincts, in the direction of
death and violence I'd have come right out and told him.
I had Mars fever too. I hated the Big Lie and all of its ramifications,
knew that every charge that was being hurled at the Colonization Board
was untrue. But I knew exactly how all of the tormented, desperate
men felt, the ones who fought the Big Lie and still had the fever and
needed to be cradled in strangeness and vastness--needed space and a
new frontier to keep from feeling strapped down, walled in, prisoners
in a completely new kind of torture chamber.
The restlessness was growing because Man had lived too long in a
closed-circuit that had almost destroyed him. The great barrier that
was no longer there had brought the world to the brink of a universal
holocaust, and just knowing that it had been shattered forever was
enabling men and women everywhere to lead healthier lives, set their
goals higher.
There was nothing wrong with that. Only--not one man or woman in
fifty thousand would see with their own eyes the rust-red plains of
Mars, and the play of light and shadow on a world covered over much of
its surface with wide zones of abundant vegetation. Not one in fifty
thousand would have a new world to rejoice in, after the long journey
through interplanetary space. A world laden with springtime scents, in
the wake of the crash and thunder of the polar ice caps dissolving.
Or possibly snow piled high on a sleeping landscape, with a thaw just
starting, and the prints of small furry creatures on the white blanket
of snow, for the first colonists had taken animals with them.
It would take another thirty years for newer, swifter rockets to be
built and the supply problem to be brought under control and the colony
to outgrow its birth pangs and its tumultuous adolescence and become a
white and towering city, as huge as New Chicago.
And there were some who could not wait, for whom waiting was
destructive to body and mind, a kind of living death too terrible to be
sanely endured.
The fingers of the woman sitting opposite me were becoming restive,
tightening a little on my hand. It seemed incredible to me that I could
have gone off on that kind of thinking-back tangent when I was so close
to paradise.
For paradise was there, seated directly across the table from me,
in that crazy twilight hour, if I'd had the courage to seize it
boldly--and if I hadn't been still in love with Joan.
I could still make a stab at finding out for sure, I told myself, if
I brushed aside all obstacles, if I refused to let my mind dwell on
how I'd feel if something happened to Joan and I lost her forever. How
could she have been so stubborn and foolish, when she was sophisticated
enough to know that no man is insulated against temptation when he is
lonely and despairing and paradise can be his for the taking, if he can
kill just one part of himself and let the rest survive.
"What is it?" she asked. "You haven't said a word for five minutes.
I'm a good listener, you know. I always have been--perhaps too good a
listener."
It was the moment of truth, when I had to decide. Mars--and a woman
too. Mars--and the big, important job, and the clatter and bright
wonder of tremendous machines, with swiftly moving parts, whirring,
blurring, dust and the stars of morning, and a woman like that in my
arms.
I had to decide.
"What is it?" she asked. "Can't you tell me?"
"Someday I'll tell you," I said. "But not now. I've a feeling we'll
meet again. Where and how and when I don't know, because by this time
tomorrow I'll be on my way to Mars."
A pained look came into her eyes and she quickly released my hand.
"But we've just started to get acquainted," she protested. "You know
nothing about me--or hardly anything. I thought--"
"It might be best not to know," I said, and I think she must have
realized then just how it was, must have read the truth in my eyes, for
a faint flush suffused her face and she said quickly: "All right. If
that's the way it must be."
I nodded and beckoned to the waiter, hoping she wouldn't suspect how
vulnerable I still was, how dangerously easy it would have been for me
to alter my decision.
Ten minutes later I was alone again, with Lake Michigan glimmering at
my back, and only the stars for company. And I still didn't know her
name.
3
It happened so suddenly it would have taken me completely by surprise,
if the alarm bell hadn't started ringing again in some shadowy corner
of my mind. It wasn't clamorous this time, but it was loud enough to
make me straighten in alarm, with every nerve alert.
I was standing by a high wall of foliage, close to the lakeside and
had just started to light a cigarette. All at once, directly overhead,
there was a rustling sound that was hard to mistake, for I'd heard it
many times before, and it had a peculiar quality which set it apart
from all other sounds.
Something was moving through the shadows above me, rustling dry leaves,
slithering down toward me with a dull, mechanical buzzing.
The buzzing stopped abruptly and there was a flash of brightness,
a long-drawn whining sound. I braced myself, letting my arms swing
loosely at my side.
With startling swiftness something long, glistening and snakelike
descended upon me and wrapped itself around my right leg just above the
knee. Before I could shake it loose it contracted into a tight knot and
the whining turned into a shrill scream, prolonged, ghastly. It was
quite unlike the scream of an animal. There was something metallic,
rasping about it, as if more than animal ferocity was giving voice to
its pent-up rage in a shrill mechanical monotone.
The constriction increased and an agonizing stab of pain lanced up
my thigh. I raised my right arm and brought the edge of my hand down
with an abrupt, chopping motion. I chopped downward three times, not
at random, but with a calculated, deadly precision, for I knew that a
misdirected blow could have cost me my life.
I was in danger only for an instant, and not a very long instant at
that. The damage I'd done to it caused it to release its grip on my
leg, shudder convulsively and drop to the ground.
Damaged where it was most vulnerable, it writhed along the ground with
groping, disjointed movements of its entire body. Tiny fragments of
shattered crystal glistened in its wake, and two long wires dangled
from its cone-shaped head.
Its segmented body-case glowed with a blood-red sheen as it writhed
across a flat gray stone on the edge of the lakeshore embankment, and
reared up for an instant like an enormous, sightlessly groping worm.
Then, abruptly, all the animation went out of it, and it flattened out
and lay still. Both of the optical disks which had enabled it to move
swiftly through the darkness had been smashed. I was no longer in any
danger and it was very pleasant just to know that.
Very pleasant indeed.
An attempt had been made on my life. There could be no blinking
the fact. That little mechanical horror, with its complex interior
mechanisms, had been set upon me from a distance with all of its
electronic circuits clicking by remote control.
From just how great a distance I had no way of knowing. But I didn't
think he'd be staying around, near enough for me to get my hands on
him. Killers who made use of such gadgets usually kept their distance,
and were very cautious.
But at least I knew now that I had a dangerous enemy, someone who
wanted me dead. And there was nothing pleasant about that.
The human mind is a very strange instrument and it's hard to predict
just how profoundly you'll be upset by an occurrence that's difficult
to dismiss with a shrug.
You can either turn morbid and brood about it, or rise superior to it
and pigeon-hole it, at least for the moment. By a kind of miracle I was
able to pigeon-hole it, to keep it from standing in the way of what
I'd made up my mind to do before I'd heard the rustling in the foliage
directly overhead.
I walked back and forth for a moment, resting most of my weight on my
right leg, to make sure I could keep using it without limping and when
I was satisfied a long walk wouldn't be in the least painful I left the
embankment with a feeling of relief and took the first turn on my left.
I was pretty sure it would take me no more than twenty minutes to get
back to the spaceport.
I knew that what I'd made up my mind to do wasn't going to be easy.
I had to find out exactly how important a job the Colonization Board
had mapped out for me on Mars. She'd called me "Mr. Important Man"
because--you don't get a clearance stamped the way mine was unless
there's a big undertaking in store for you which has to be handled
in just the right way. The walk gave me a chance to think about it.
My leg didn't trouble me at all and I was very grateful for that....
I stood for a moment just outside the spaceport's railed-off,
electronically-protected launching platforms, staring up at the
three-hundred-foot passenger rockets gleaming with a dull metallic
luster in the moonlight, their nose-cones pointing skyward.
The New Chicago Spaceport has and always will attract sightseers,
because there's no other rocket launching site on Earth that can
compare with it. It's not only the largest and the most elaborately
equipped. It was built to last. Fifty years from now, in 2070, say, it
was a safe bet the big Mars rockets would be taking off at four-hour
intervals night and day. Now they took off only twice a month and there
were fifty million people in the United States alone who would have
given up comfort, leisure, a well-paying job and every joy they'd ever
experienced or could hope to experience on Earth to be on one of those
big sky ships.
As far back as I can remember I'd hated to force a showdown with people
who trusted me and believed in me. And that went double for the Martian
Colonization Board, whose members were doing everything possible to
keep me informed. Secrecy sometimes has to be imposed, and if you
try to crack an information clamp-down prematurely you deserve to be
slapped down.
But now I had no choice. I had to find out if my trip could be
postponed, if I could wait one more week--a month, even--to get Joan to
see things my way. And that meant I had to find out just how big a job
they had lined up for me.
I had no trouble getting in to see him. There was a guard at the main
entrance of the Administration Building, and when I identified myself
and the massive, double-doors swung inward I had to go through it a
second time, and six more times in all before I reached his private
office on the twentieth floor. But you couldn't call it trouble,
because all I had to do was take out my wallet and display the pale
blue card that was only an incitement to violence in certain quarters.
In that massive, almost half-mile-long building, on every floor, there
were guards who knew me and guards who had never set eyes on me before.
But what that card stood for was treated with respect.
I'd known that building to hum with activity, to come to life with a
roar. But now only one floor blazed with light and the rest of the
building was as silent as a mausoleum.
It happens sometimes and when it does everyone is grateful--including
the man I'd come to visit.
His private office was at the end of a long corridor in Section C 10
Y, and I knew I'd find him there, because a small circle of cold light
had been glowing above the office listing board on the main floor.
There was a name plate above the numbered listings--BROWN. His name
wasn't Brown, of course. Or Smith, or Jones. The "Brown" was just a
safety precaution--the sign and seal of immense power being modest in a
genuine way and for expediency's sake as well.
No man without the kind of card I carried had ever gotten as far as
that office listing board and I doubt if the most ingenious assassin
would have cared to try. But it was just as well to be on the
completely safe side.
A saluting guard stepped back and what was perhaps the narrowest, least
impressive door in the entire building opened and closed and I found
myself in his presence.
Unless you're a Gobi desert dweller or live in the precise middle of
the Sahara you've seen the blue-eyed, mild-mannered little man who was
Jonathan Trilling on a hundred lighted screens. In all respects but one
he is the kind of man most people would go right past on the street
without a second glance.
The thing that made him really not like that at all was something you
couldn't pin down and analyze. If you tried, you'd get nowhere. But it
was there, all right, an emanation you couldn't mistake that stamped
him for what he was, radiating out from him.
Equate immense simplicity with immense power and you might come up with
a part of the answer. But not all of it.
The office was stripped of all non-essentials; a hermit's cell couldn't
have been barer. And it seemed to please him when my eyes swept over
the almost bare desk, with just an inkwell and a single sheet of paper
on it, before coming to rest on his face.
I'm pretty sure he interpreted it as an indication that I was trying to
catch him up on something he took pride in, and he admired me for it,
and greeted me with a chuckle.
"Well, Ralph!" he said. "I didn't expect to see you here tonight. I
thought you'd be home wearing Joan's patience ragged with the kind of
last-minute preparations women never seem to understand. They like to
think they never forget anything. But they do. They're worse that way
than we are, but just try getting them to admit it."
There was only one chair in the office and he was occupying it. I
hardly expected him to get up and wave me toward it, but that's
precisely what he did.
"Sit down, Ralph," he said. "I sit too much. We all do here, I guess.
Can't be helped, but it doesn't give a man of fifty-five much chance
to get the exercise he ought to have, if he's going to keep his weight
down."
"No--don't get up for me, sir!" I said, then realized I was being
unnecessarily formal.
The chair was empty and he expected me to take it. And I could see that
he didn't like the "sir." He never had.
"Sit down, sit down. What is it, Ralph? Something worrying you? You'll
have plenty of time for that when you get to Mars. Why start now?"
I decided to come right out with it. I favored bluntness as much as he
did, and there was nothing to be gained by talking around what I'd have
to ask him before I left.
"There's something I'd like to know," I said. "Is the major part of my
assignment still under wraps, or could you tell me more about it--even
if you'd prefer not to?"
He looked at me steadily for a moment, his lips tightening a little.
"Well--I certainly haven't kept it a complete secret, Ralph. You'll
get full instructions in code later on. There's naturally a reason for
that. I shouldn't have to go into it, because we've discussed it at
great length right here in this office."
"I realize that," I said. "But could you see your way clear to telling
me much more than you have, if I can convince you that it would help me
solve a problem I can't solve otherwise."
His eyebrows went up a little at that. "What kind of problem, Ralph?"
"It's as old as the hills," I said. "The really ancient kind with
fossils embedded in them. It goes right back to the Old Stone Age,
and maybe a lot earlier. Joan doesn't want to go to Mars. She's very
stubborn, very determined about it. If I can't make her change her mind
I'll have to go alone. And I guess I don't have to tell you what that
would do to me. If I just had a little more time, another week or two--"
"So that's it," he said. "You want me to tell you that your assignment
can be put off, that you're not really needed on Mars. We're just
sending you there because we like to do whimsical things occasionally,
to break the God-awful monotony of thinking about the problems the
project is confronted with in a serious way."
I was startled, because I'd never known him to indulge in deliberate
irony before. He had all the intellectual equipment for it, but his
mind just didn't work that way.
Then I suddenly realized he was going to tell me everything I wanted
to know and had just used that approach to make me a little angry and
keep me alert and analytical, so that I wouldn't underestimate the
seriousness of what he was about to say.
"All right, Ralph," he said. "I'll risk angering a third of the Board.
I'm going to tell you exactly why the Mars Colony is in trouble, and
just how tremendous your task will be. You'll be in the middle, Ralph,
in the biggest clash of interests a new and growing society has ever
known.
"A clash of interests can destroy any society, if they're violent
enough and have powerful enough backing and the population is divided
in its loyalties and lacks firm and courageous leadership.
"That's especially true if the society is on a pioneering level, with
serious scarcities developing everywhere and with every man, to some
extent at least, in fierce competition with his neighbors, all apart
from the massive power monopolies that are in even fiercer competition
among themselves.
"Don't you see, Ralph, don't you realize what that kind of
cross-purpose distribution of power in a new and pioneering society
can mean? When you have a three or four-way conflict, when everyone
is bidding for what you've got and can't afford to sell, or what you
haven't got but would like to sell, or what you can't sell for what
you'd like to get?"
He smiled suddenly, for the barest instant, and then the seriously
concerned look which the smile had replaced came back into his eyes.
"I didn't intend that to sound facetious. It probably did, because it
has a slightly humorous side to it, like most major tragedies. I'm just
giving you the broad outlines now, the general situation. Frustration,
bitterness, thousands of colonists who can be swayed one way or the
other by corrupt pressures, self-interest, greedy power monopolies."
"But there's a more specific situation you have in mind, is that it?" I
asked. "Everything you've just said is common knowledge."
Trilling nodded. "Yes--but the general situation has to be underscored.
It is the crucial factor in everything that is taking place on Mars. In
a more stable, and highly developed society the raw power conflict of
the two major power monopolies would not take so destructive a form."
"Two?" I said. "I was under the impression--"
He waved my objection aside. "Oh, there are a dozen power combines.
But only the two giants--Wendel Atomics and Endicott Fuel--have fought
each other to a standstill and threaten the peace, and stability of
the entire colony. I'm putting it too mildly. There's an explosive
potential in that conflict that could destroy the colony overnight."
He tightened his lips and took a turn up and down the office, then
came back to where I was sitting and gripped me by the shoulder.
"Ralph, listen. This is vital. I'll try to sum it up as briefly as
possible. You know what it cost to set up atomic generators, turbines,
transmission lines, and keep utilities no city can do without in
operation right here in New Chicago, in just one small section of the
city? How much more do you think it costs to do the same thing on Mars?
The transportation of materials alone--Have you any idea how much the
total expenditures come to?"
"I guess so," I said. "I don't like to think about it."
"Who does? But we had to think about it. We had to give Wendel Atomics
a thirty-year monopoly. No other power combine had sufficient monetary
resources to undertake it. And we had to give Endicott Fuel the same
kind of monopoly. They transport both atomic and liquid fuels at a cost
that would turn your hair white."
"And now you say they're locked in a power conflict. But why? I should
think Wendel Atomics would purchase all the fuel it needs directly from
Endicott. And Endicott would--"
I paused, troubled.
"What would Endicott do, Ralph? It has no use for atomic generators.
It isn't geared to install them, even if it could somehow absorb the
terrific expense of transporting them. And that, of course, would be
impossible. No combine is wealthy enough to undertake that kind of
two-pronged enterprise."
"But it wouldn't have to be a two-way exchange of commodities," I said.
"Not if Wendel continued to buy all of its fuel from Endicott. It
would, of course, have a tendency to dwarf Endicott, make it the lesser
of the two monopolies."
"It would do more than that, Ralph. It could bankrupt Endicott. You
see, Wendel Atomics suddenly decided it was paying Endicott too much
for the fuel it used, and cut the price it was paying in half. And
Endicott could barely meet expenses."
"Good Lord," I said.
"Naturally Wendel Atomics couldn't get along without fuel," Trilling
said. "And it couldn't transport fuel for its own exclusive use from
Earth. The two-pronged enterprise factor again. So Endicott struck back
by refusing to sell its fuel to Wendel."
"A complete stalemate, you mean?"
"Not quite, Ralph. If it were, one side or the other would have to give
in eventually. Endicott seized on the bright idea of selling atomic and
liquid fuel directly to the Colonists. A wildcat kind of madness. The
colonists buy the fuel on margin and wait for the price to skyrocket.
And every so often it does, because Wendel has to keep its generators
operating. It won't buy from Endicott, but it has no choice but to buy
from the colonists.
"Do you realize what such wild and dangerous wildcat speculation can
do to a new, rough-and-tumble, frontier kind of society, Ralph? The
colonists don't know whether they're rich or poor from one day to
the next. And with all their desperate needs, their frustrations,
their scrambling after scarce goods and services, their fierce
competitiveness, they are at each other's throats half of the time."
"I'm beginning to get the picture," I said.
"It's a very ugly picture, Ralph. Wendel Atomics buys its fuel
sporadically, cheats, steals, connives, beating the price down
artificially and then sending it skyrocketing again. It has its own
private police force. Translate--brutal roughnecks who know exactly how
to keep the colonists in line and frighten them into selling when the
fuel market sags and spending every cent they possess to buy more fuel
on speculation when the price soars.
"Endicott doesn't care what happens to the colonists. It's out to make
Wendel Atomics come to terms and has methods of its own to keep the
colonists inflamed and reckless. The whole situation has even taken
on a political cast. There are pro-Wendel colonists, who work hand in
glove with the Wendel police and colonists who would willingly lay down
their lives in defense of noble, altruistic Endicott. It's the right of
everyone to buy fuel on speculation, isn't it?"