I looked down. I was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord,
swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught.
And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is for
a trapped fly.
It wasn't Martians that had done it. There weren't any Martians, hadn't
been for a million years. It was some Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward Val, and saw that she was similarly trussed in
the sticky stuff. The tangle-cord was still fresh, giving off a faint,
repugnant odor like that of drying fish. It had been spun on us only a
short time ago, I realized.
"Ron--"
"Don't try to move, baby. This stuff can break your neck if you twist it
wrong." She continued for a moment to struggle futilely, and I had to
snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement," said a brittle, harsh voice from above me. I
looked up and saw a helmeted figure above us. He wasn't wearing the
customary skin-tight pliable oxysuits we had. He wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet, all but the face area opaque. The
oxygen cannisters weren't attached to his back as expected, though. They
were strapped to the back of the wheelchair in which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I could see hard little eyes, a yellowed,
parchment-like face, a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize him, and this
struck me odd. I thought I knew everyone on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was that he had no legs. The spacesuit ended neatly
at the thighs.
He was holding in his left hand the tanglegun with which he had
entrapped us, and a very efficient-looking blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb your sleep," he said coldly. "So I've been
waiting here for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might have been sitting there for hours,
complacently waiting to see how we'd wake up. That was when I realized
he must be totally insane. I could feel my stomach-muscles tighten, my
throat constrict painfully.
Then anger ripped through me, washing away the terror. "What's going
on?" I demanded, staring at the half of a man who confronted us from the
wheelchair. "Who are you?"
"You'll find out soon enough," he said. "Suppose now you come with me."
He reached for the tanglegun, flipped the little switch on its side to
MELT, and shot a stream of watery fluid over our legs, keeping the
blaster trained on us all the while. Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he said. "Slowly, without trying to make trouble."
Val and I helped each other to our feet as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly bound against the sides of our oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said, waving the tanglegun to indicate the
direction. "I'll be right behind you." He holstered the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an outboard atomic rigging behind him, strapped
to the back of the wheelchair. He fingered a knob on the arm of the
chair and the two exhaust ducts behind the wheel-housings flamed for a
moment, and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started walking. You don't argue with a blaster, even if
the man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
* * * * *
"What's going on, Ron?" Val asked in a low voice as we walked. Behind us
the wheelchair hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val. I've never seen this guy before, and I thought
I knew everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor called, and we stopped talking. We trudged
along together, with him following behind; I could hear the
_crunch-crunch_ of the wheelchair as its wheels chewed into the sand. I
wondered where we were going, and why. I wondered why we had ever left
Earth.
The answer to that came to me quick enough: we had to. Earth needed
radioactives, and the only way to get them was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late 20th Century had used up much of the
supply, but the amount used to blow up half the great cities of the
world hardly compared with the amount we needed to put them back
together again.
In three centuries the shattered world had been completely rebuilt. The
wreckage of New York and Shanghai and London and all the other ruined
cities had been hidden by a shining new world of gleaming towers and
flying roadways. We had profited by our grandparents' mistakes. They had
used their atomics to make bombs. We used ours for fuel.
It was an atomic world. Everything: power drills, printing presses,
typewriters, can openers, ocean liners, powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is inexhaustible, the supply of nuclei isn't.
After three centuries of heavy consumption, the supply failed. The
mighty machine that was Earth's industry had started to slow down.
And that started the chain of events that led Val and me to end up as a
madman's prisoners, on Mars. With every source of uranium mined dry on
Earth, we had tried other possibilities. All sorts of schemes came
forth. Project Sea-Dredge was trying to get uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd get some results, we hoped. But there
wasn't forty or fifty years' worth of raw stuff to tide us over until
then. In a decade or so, our power would be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog world we'd revert back to. Millions of
starving, freezing humans tooth-and-clawing in it in the useless shell
of a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much uranium on Mars, and it's not easy to find or
any cinch to mine. But what little is there, helps. It's a stopgap
effort, just to keep things moving until Project Sea-Dredge starts
functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers out on the face of Mars, combing for
its uranium deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
* * * * *
After we walked on a while, a Dome became visible up ahead. It slid up
over the crest of a hill, set back between two hummocks on the desert.
Just out of the way enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I thought it was our Dome, the settlement where
all of UranCo's Geig Corps were located, but another look told me that
this was actually quite near us and fairly small. A one-man Dome, of all
things!
"Welcome to my home," he said. "The name is Gregory Ledman." He herded
us off to one side of the airlock, uttered a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside when the door slid up. When we were inside
he reached up, clumsily holding the blaster, and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter, dried-up mask. He was a man who hated.
The place was spartanly furnished. No chairs, no tape-player, no
decoration of any sort. Hard bulkhead walls, rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic chef, a bed, and a writing-desk, and no other
furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun and sprayed our legs again. We toppled
heavily to the floor. I looked up angrily.
* * * * *
"I imagine you want to know the whole story," he said. "The others did,
too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously. Her pretty face was a dead white behind
her oxymask. "What others?"
"I never bothered to find out their names," Ledman said casually. "They
were other Geigs I caught unawares, like you, out on the desert. That's
the only sport I have left--Geig-hunting. Look out there."
He gestured through the translucent skin of the Dome, and I felt sick.
There was a little heap of bones lying there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the sands. They were the dried, parched skeletons
of Earthmen. Bits of cloth and plastic, once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered. There had been a pattern there all the time. We
didn't much talk about it; we chalked it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern of disappearances on the desert. I could think
of six, eight names now. None of them had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to make close friends out here. But we'd
vowed it wouldn't happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting Geigs?" I asked. "_Why?_ What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if I'd just praised his house-keeping. "Because
I hate you," he said blandly. "I intend to wipe every last one of you
out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never seen a man like this before; I thought all
his kind had died at the time of the atomic wars.