So I hurried - Into the building, through the long dark halls, into the room where the big polycloid quasitron stood -
And I was too late.
I tripped over a human body, stumbled, fell, the gun spinning out of my hand. I scrambled to my hands and knees, touching the body - still warm, but not very warm. Dr. Horn! His castoff cocoon, abandoned!
And before me capered and screeched the figure that once had been Van Pelt, holding a weapon. ‘Too late!’ he cried. ‘Too late, Colonel Windermere!’ Van Pelt! But it was not Van Pelt that lived in that fat soft corpse today, I knew; for the Horn-in-Van Pelt held a gun of his own in one hand, and in the other a bar of metal. And with it he was bashing, bashing the polycloid quasitron! Bam, and showers of sparks flew from it; crash, and it began to glow, sag, melt.
And he had the gun. It was a very difficult situation.
But not hopeless! For we were not alone.
Next to my fallen gun lay another body. Not dead, this one; unconscious. It was Corporal McCabe, struck down with a blow to the head.
But he was quivering slightly. Consciousness was not far away.
‘Stop!’ I cried strongly, getting to my knees. The Horn Van Pelt turned to stare at me. ‘Stop, don’t wreck the machine! More depends on it than you can possibly realize, Dr. Horn. It isn’t only a matter of your life - trust me for that, Dr. Horn, I shall see that you have bodies, fine bodies, to hold your mind as long as you want it. But think of national defence! Think of the safety of our country! And think of your sacred duty to science!’ I cried, thinking of my general’s stars.
And Corporal McCabe twitched and stirred.
I stood up. Horn’s carrier, Van Pelt, dropped his iron bar in alarm, switched the gun to his right hand, stared at me. Good! Better at me than at McCabe. I said: ‘You must not destroy the machine, Dr. Horn! We need it.’
‘But it is destroyed already,’ the little fat figure said stupidly, gesturing. ‘And I am not -’
Splat.
McCabe’s bullet caught him at the base of the skull. The brain that had evicted Van Pelt to house a Horn now housed no one; the blubbery little figure was dead.
And I was raging!
‘You fool, you idiot, you unutterable ass!’ I screamed at McCabe. ‘You killed him! Why did you kill him? Wing him, yes j injure him, break his leg, shoot the gun out of his hand. Any of those things, and still we could make him rebuild the machine ! But now he’s dead, and the machine is gone!’
And so, sadly, were my general’s stars.
The Corporal was looking at me with a most peculiar expression.
I got hold of myself. A life’s dream was gone, but there was no help for it now. Maybe the engineers could tinker and discover and rebuild - but, glancing at the wreck of the polycloid quasitron, I knew that was a dream.
I took a deep breath.
‘All right, McCabe,’ I said crisply. ‘Report to your quarters. I’ll talk to you later on. Right now I must phone the Pentagon and try to account for your blundering in this matter!’
McCabe patted the gun fondly, put it on the floor and turned to go.
‘Just so, Lieutenant,’ said Corporal McCabe.
The Middle of Nowhere
Just ahead of us we saw a cluster of smoke trees suddenly quiver, though there wasn’t a whisper of a breeze, and begin to emit their clouds of dense yellow vapour from their branch-tips.
‘Let’s get a move on, Will,’ said Jack Demaree. His voice was thin and piercing, like the thin air all about us. ‘It’s going to get really hot here in the next twenty minutes.’
The steel and glass town of Niobe was in sight, a quarter mile ahead, ‘Sure,’ I said, and changed pace. We had been shambling along, as lazily as we could, in the effort-saving walk you learn in your first week on Mars. I stepped it up to the distance-devouring loose run that is only possible on a light-gravity planet like Mars.
It is tough to have to run in a thin atmosphere. Your lungs work too hard; you feel as though every step is going to be your last. Hillary and Tensing found no harder going on Everest than the friendliest spot on the surface of Mars - except, of course, that by day the temperature is high, and the light gravity lets you stand effort that would otherwise kill you. But we hadn’t much choice but to run. The smoke trees had passed their critical point, and the curious gelatinous sulphur compounds that served them for sap had passed into gas with the heat. When that happened, it meant that the sun was nearly overhead; and with only Mars’s thin blanket of air to shield you, you do not stay out in the open at high noon.
Not that we needed to see the smoke trees to know it was getting hot. A hundred and twenty in the shade it was, at least If there had been any shade.
Demaree passed me with a spurt just as we reached the outskirts of Niobe, and I followed him into the pressure chamber of the General Mercantile office. We use helium in our synthetic atmosphere instead of Earth’s nitrogen. So they gave us the pressure in one big ear-popping dose, without any danger of the bends we might have got from nitrogen. I swallowed and rubbed my ears; then we shed our sandcapes and respirators and walked into the anteroom.
Keever looked out of his private office, his lean horse face sagging with curiosity.
‘Demaree and Wilson reporting,’ I said. ‘No sign of natives. No hostile action. No anything, in fact, except it’s hot.’
Keever nodded and pulled his head back in. ‘Make out a slip,’ his voice floated out. ‘And you go out again in two hours. Better eat.’
Demaree finished shaking the loose sand out of his cape into a refuse shaft and made a face. ‘Two hours. Oh, lord.’ But he followed me to the Company cafeteria without argument.
The first thing we both did was make a dash for the drinking fountain. I won, and sopped up my fill while Demaree’s dry and covetous breath seared the back of my neck. Sand patrol can dehydrate a man to the point of shock in three hours; we had been out for four. You see why we were taking it easy?
We sat down in the little booth where we had put aside our card game with Bolt and Farragut a few hours before, and Marianna, without waiting for our order, brought coffee and sandwiches. Her eyes were hooded and unhappy; nerves, I thought, and tried to catch Demaree’s eye. But it didn’t work. He said in his customary slow and biting drawl, ‘Why, Mary, you’re getting stupider than ever. You took away our cards. I swear, girl, I don’t know why the Company keeps you -’
He trailed off, as she looked straight at him, and then away.
‘You won’t need them,’ she said after a moment. ‘Farragut’s patrol got it this morning,’
Farragut and Bolt, Cortland and VanCaster. Four good men, and it was the same old story. They were a four man patrol, ranging far beyond the defence perimeter of Niobe; they had got caught too far from town before it got really hot, and it was a choice between using their cached sand cars or getting stuck in the noonday sun. They had elected to try the sand car; and something bright and hot had come flashing over a sand dune and incinerated men and car alike.
The hell of it all was we never saw the Martians.
The earliest expeditions had reported that there wasn’t any life on Mars at all, barring the tiny ratlike forms that haunted the sparse forests of the North. Then air reconnaissance had reported what turned out to be the Martians - creatures about the size of a man, more or less, that stood up like a man, that built villages of shacks like men. But air reconnaissance was severely limited by the thinness of Mars’ air; helicopters and winged aircraft simply did not work, except at speeds so high that it was nearly impossible to make out details. It wasn’t until one of the orbiting mother spacecraft, after launching its space-to-ground shuttle rockets and standing by for the return, spent a dozen revolutions mapping Mars’ surface that the first really good look at Martians and their works was available. Really good? Well, let’s say as good as you could expect, considering the mother ship was five hundred miles up.