Two men had died before Syme Rector's guns
to give him the key to the ancient city of
Kal-Jmar--a city of untold wealth, and of
robots that made desires instant commands.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The tall man loitered a moment before a garish window display, his eyes
impassive in his space-burned face, as the Lillis patrolman passed.
Then he turned, burying his long chin in the folds of his sand cape,
and took up the pursuit of the dark figure ahead once more.
Above, the city's multicolored lights were reflected from the
translucent Dome--a distant, subtly distorted Lillis, through which the
stars shone dimly.
Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now he
had another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to pass
himself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city,
after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest would
not be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and he
had to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the Triplanet
Patrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country,
and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his only
safety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He had
to get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough.
They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw--the very fact of the
crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they
didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared
raider in the System. In that was his only advantage.
He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and
then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the
short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over
the top of the ramp, and then followed.
The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel.
Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and
started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite
young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather,
and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw.
"All right," the boy said quietly. "What is it?"
"I don't understand," Syme said.
"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?"
"Why, no," Syme told him bewilderedly. "I haven't been following you.
I--"
The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. "You could be lying," he said
finally. "But maybe I've made a mistake." Then--"Okay, citizen, you can
clear--but don't let me catch you on my tail again."
Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes
on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next
street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side
a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the
intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.
It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data,
even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands
on it, but the identity card itself--that oblong of dark diamondite,
glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity--that could not be
imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill.
Up ahead was the Founders' Tower, the tallest building in Lillis. The
boy strode into the entrance lobby, bought a ticket for the observation
platform, and took the elevator. As soon as his car was out of sight in
the transparent tube, Syme followed. He put a half-credit slug into the
machine, took the punctured slip of plastic that came out. The ticket
went into a scanning slot in the wall of the car, and the elevator
whisked him up.
* * * * *
The tower was high, more than a hundred meters above the highest level
of the city, and the curved dome that kept air in Lillis was close
overhead. Syme looked up, after his first appraising glance about the
platform, and saw the bright-blue pinpoint of Earth. The sight stirred
a touch of nostalgia in him, as it always did, but he put it aside.
The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance
away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,
deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the
silent figure.
It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by
some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still
air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,
instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its
silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a
minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.
Syme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into
his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms
and thrust it over the parapet.
It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist.
Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late,
he realized what had happened--one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's
harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was
falling, linked to the body of his victim!
Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,
felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His
body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the
corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a
little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.
Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into
play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.
Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the
sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms
felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook
slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.
The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost
lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the
spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.
He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He
tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on
the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold
on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.
He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge
at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken
only a few seconds. He croaked, "Get me up."
Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other
pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed
to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.
"Are you all right?"
* * * * *
Syme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His
rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy
hair, a sharp nose, and--oddly conflicting--pale, serious eyes and a
humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.
"I'm not hurt," Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his
dark, lean face. "Thanks for giving me a hand."
"You scared hell out of me," said the man. "I heard a thud. I
thought--you'd gone over." He looked at Syme questioningly.
"That was my bag," the outlaw said quickly. "It slipped out of my hand,
and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it."
The man sighed. "I need a drink. _You_ need a drink. Come on." He
picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the
elevator, then stopped. "Oh--your bag. Shouldn't we do something about
that?"
"Never mind," said Syme, taking his arm. "The shock must have busted it
wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now."
They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a
cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just
killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on
the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be
found until morning.
And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of _culcha_, he
took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There
it was--his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even
friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was
the _culcha_, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning
he'd find a freighter berth--in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there
were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and
it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.
He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall,
graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat.
"Lissen," said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped,
caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. "Lissen," he
said again, "I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer,
but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment,
but I hic!--pardon--seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to
tell you something, because I need your help!--help." He paused. "I
need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?"
"Sure," said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG
plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting
in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their
delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk
after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow
of _culcha_ inside him.
"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar," said Tate.
Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,
a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big
was coming--something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.
"Why?" he asked softly. "Why to Kal-Jmar?"
Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,
he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been
right; it was big.
* * * * *
Kal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining
city of the ancient Martian race--the race that, legends said, had
risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,
the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly
preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many
thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.
For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected
Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis
as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both
above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew
what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of
the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew
anything about them or about Kal-Jmar.
In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth
scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it
from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots
that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they
had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall.
Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a
bloody uprising of the present-day Martians--resulting in a rapid
dwindling of the number of Martians--the Mars Protectorate had stepped
in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any
Earthman to go near the place.
Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.
Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical
in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a
force that would break it down.
And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four
hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme
Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits
on his sleek, tigerish head.
Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.
For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not
occur to him that he had been indiscreet.
"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold," he said. "Better
strap on your gun."
"Why. Are they really dangerous?"
"They're unpredictable," Syme told him. "They're built differently, and
they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns
where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that
way."
"Yes, I've heard about that," Tate said. "Iron oxide--very interesting
metabolism." He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and
strapped it on absently.
Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous
hill country in the distance. "Not only that," he continued. "They
eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the
deserts--all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to
xopite. They seem intelligent enough--in their own way--but they never
come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.
When the first colonists came here, they had to learn _their_ crazy
language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different
things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,
but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same."
"So you think they might attack us?" Tate asked again, nervously.
"They _might_ do anything," Syme said curtly. "Don't worry about it."
The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'
deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a
wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on
sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again
on the other side.
* * * * *
Syme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared
across their path. "Gully," he announced. "Shall we cross it, or follow
it?"
Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. "Follow, I guess,"
he offered. "It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we
cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more."
Syme nodded and moved the sand car up to the edge of the gully. Then he
pressed a stud on the control board; a metal arm extruded from the tail
of the car and a heavy spike slowly unscrewed from it, driving deep
into the sand. A light on the board flashed, indicating that the spike
was in and would bear the car's weight, and Syme started the car over
the edge.
As the little car nosed down into the gully, the metal arm left behind
revealed itself to be attached to a length of thick, very strong wire
cable, with a control cord inside. They inched down the almost vertical
incline, unreeling the cable behind them, and starting minor landslides
as they descended.
Finally they touched bottom. Syme pressed another stud, and above, the
metal spike that had supported them screwed itself out of the ground
again and the cable reeled in.
Tate had been watching with interest. "Very ingenious," he said. "But
how do we get up again?"
"Most of these gullies peter out gradually," said Syme, "but if we want
or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that
shoots the anchor up on top."
"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my
natural life. Depressing view." He looked up at the narrow strip of
almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his
head.
Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their
harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and
the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper
blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,
"Look out!" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.
The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the
gully. Syme was saying, "What--?" when there was a thunderous crash
that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into
the ground immediately to their left.
When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread
of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition.
Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate
said, "I guess we walk from here on." Then he looked up again and
caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully
toward them.
"My God!" he said. "What are those?"