When Gail Loring chose Bill Drake to be her husband--in name only--for
the duration of the flight to Mars, she didn't know that she had just
signed his death warrant.
Jealous Dr. Spartan, leader of the expedition, swore to get revenge and
force Gail to share his maniacal plan for power.
Bound together in space, five men and a woman strained against the
powerful tug of twisted emotions and secret ambitions.
But all plans were forgotten when they landed on the Red Planet and
encountered the Martians--half animal, half vegetable--with acid for
blood and radar for sight.
When the Martians launched an assault against the spaceship, linking
their electrical energy in an awesome display of power, Spartan
realized that this was the perfect moment for personal revenge--and
touched off his own diabolical plan of destruction against his fellow
crewmen....
* * * * *
_Chapter 1_
I got no sleep that Thursday night. I tossed and dozed and tossed
again. Operation Jehad and Willy Zinder were on my mind. Operation
Jehad was the designation given to the proposed first manned flight to
Mars, and Willy was our last chance to fill the six-man crew.
If Willy didn't make it, Doc Spartan would be fit to be tied in a
hangman's knot. More than anything else, he had insisted on a six-man
crew and, if he couldn't get six qualified astronauts, including
himself, on the Jehad ship, he was as likely as not to postpone the
voyage for 26 months, when Mars would be in the right spot again and by
which time more men could be trained.
While I rolled and tossed in my bed sheets, Willy Zinder was playing
carousel in his Jupiter capsule three hundred miles above old Momma
Earth. And I hated to speculate about what had happened to him. When
I'd watched him get into the cherry-picker Thursday morning, he'd been
a poor, frightened kid. He'd probably been suffering ever since. And
now, after this dreadful night, re-entry was staring him in the face.
Feeling scared was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because we all
got butterflies on our first solo orbit. But when I took my ASD tests,
I'd managed to keep my teeth from chattering. Willy hadn't and somehow
I got the feeling that he was suffering as much as all the rest of
us combined. He looked so ready to collapse that I wondered what was
holding him up.
Finally I gave up trying to sleep. It was daylight anyhow and I
dressed, hurried to a restaurant and had scrambled eggs and coffee.
Then I went over to the reservation to see how things were going. Dr.
Spartan probably had spent the night there, but the rest of us had
knocked off when the midnight operations shift came on duty. If they'd
all spent a night like I had, the other members of the Jehad crew
would be on hand almost as soon as me.
Besides Spartan, the others were Axel Ludkin, the big Swede from
Minnesota; Dr. Warner Joel, who probably would hide his feelings by
slapping people on the back and trying to joke about inconsequential
things; and Morrie Grover, who was a pink-cheeked kid. We, plus Dr.
Lewis Spartan, had already qualified for the first manned trip to Mars.
But plans had been made for six and Willy Zinder was our last
candidate. To say we were scraping the bottom of the barrel would be
selling Willy short. He was Number 12 out of 100 fine physical and
mental specimens who had been selected for astronaut training three
years before. Eighty-eight others had been washed out, one way or
another, before twelve were fingered for Operation Jehad--so named
because Jehad means holy war to Moslems. We were going to Mars, which
was named after the Roman war god, so that accounted for the war part
of the name, but I don't know what was holy about it except that going
to Mars would materialize an ancient dream of man to travel through
space to another world.
Willy was as healthy as a mountain and even if he looked scared I could
tell he had guts. By the time the lift-off date of the operation got a
few months away, Willy had climbed to position Number Six. Two higher
numbers had flunked the ASD--Aeronautical Systems Division--tests, Dr.
Spartan had said two others wouldn't do--the space boys in Washington
took Doc's word as gospel--one had been banged up in a car wreck and
was still in the hospital, and the sixth man had undergone an emergency
appendectomy which left him too weak to lift off for Mars at the
scheduled time.
There wasn't time now to train more men for the job, which meant that
Willy _had_ to pass and Doc Spartan was enough of a perfectionist to
insist that Willy get as thorough a testing as the others of the crew.
Sure, there were other astronauts. There were ten or twelve working on
other projects, but the plasma space engine isn't an ordinary spaceship
that anybody can take on a 150,000,000-mile round trip without rigorous
training.
I reached the gate that separated spacemen from mere Earthlings and
flashed my badge on the security guard.
"William Drake," he said, grinning. "Sure hope you have luck today, Mr.
Drake."
"Thanks," I said. "How's Zinder doing?"
"Very well, the last I heard. The boys coming off the last Operations
shift said he'd handled everything pretty well."
I went through the gate. Almost anybody can get through this one, but
there are other security officers, at other gates further on down,
to keep the place from being overrun by tourists, newspaper guys and
people looking for rest rooms. How far you got depended on the color of
your badge. Mine was blue, for the wild blue yonder, and I could walk
right into Dr. Spartan's office with it, provided I had business there.
And I wouldn't dare call on Dr. Spartan unless I did have it. He could
eat a man out better than acid.
Finally I reached the bunker. I glanced into the room filled with the
Operations staff which was keeping track of Willy--communicating with
him, tabulating his heartbeats, respiration and maybe his thoughts--and
checking the behavior of his capsule. I wasn't interested in them. I
went to the end of the hall, flashed my badge again, and entered the
room reserved for the panel that was going to pass or flunk Willy
Zinder.
Doc Spartan was the man in charge. He was the leader of our little
group, but that was no break for Willy Zinder. Doc Spartan was an old
space hand. He'd been to the moon and he had conducted the trial flight
of the plasma engine. First, last and middle, he was a perfectionist.
I hated him, so did everyone else, but there was one thing that we all
could say: if Doc stamped you okay, you were as good as he expected to
find. And there was another thing that could be said: Doc Spartan made
a top sergeant of the Marine Corps look like Peter Pan.
He was there, along with three other men who looked as if they'd been
without sleep for a week. Maybe they'd taken a few naps during the
twenty-four hours, but it didn't show. They were red-eyed, their hair
was uncombed and they each showed a day's growth of beard. Although
the room was air-conditioned, they looked sweaty and hot. Mugs full
of black coffee were on their desks and there were bread crusts and
half-eaten sandwiches on trays nearby.
Axel Ludson stood back against the rear wall. Like me, he had nothing
to do but watch and he had probably hurried over after eating
breakfast, just as I had, in order to be on hand when Willy made his
re-entry.
Axel was a big, raw-boned Swede, which is a description you could
give of a large portion of the male population of his home town in
Minnesota. He had light brown hair, blue eyes and a long straight nose.
His jaw looked big and solid enough to crush concrete. He winked at me
and I walked over to him.
"Willy is doing fine," he said, which was an accolade. Axel made his
words count. "Doc has thrown everything at him but a flock of asteroids
and Willy hasn't missed a pitch."
"Good!" I said. "Where is Willy now?"
Axel nodded toward a screen on the left wall. On it was projected a
portion of a globe showing Northern Siberia. A little spot of light
showed up in the middle of it.
"In thirty minutes he'll begin his last orbit."
"How did he do on the emergencies?" I asked.