Marooned on Mars Read online

  He tamed to look up at the ship, and then down into the hole. The leg-fins weren’t too stable, but the ship was standing on her own feet again.

  “She’ll do—well reload her carefully,” Vance said. He should have been completely happy, but his face was unreadable. “And I’m wondering when we’ll lose the other welder.”

  “I’ve got a theory—I think the ruins are the hideout,” Chuck told him. “It’s the only place they could be. And since it isn’t on the surface, they must have some way of getting underground. Does that sound reasonable?” Vance brightened. “Maybe. What about it. Doc?” Sokolsky nodded. “They’re nocturnal—we only know of them prowling around at night. And that does sound like an underground form of life. Besides, I’ve heard that screech come from somewhere in the old city.”

  Steele hefted a piece of pipe in one hand, while Rothman picked up another.

  “How about it, Vance? We’ve got three hours left until night,” the engineer asked. “I don’t like going around killing off other people—even when they’re Martians. But when it comes to kill or die off, I like to live. Anyhow, maybe they won’t fight, if we go in with a good frontal attack.”

  “Somebody has to stay,” Vance suggested. “I know they haven’t attacked by day—but I don’t want them to, either. Two men. That way, in broad daylight, the rest of us can make a Search of the city. Chuck, how about you and Dick staying?”

  The two men exchanged glances, and Vance nodded. “All right, then it’s settled. We’ll get what weapons we can, but we’ll leave the automatic with you. And if anything turns up, let out a yell—there’ll be no talking on the common channel unless it’s an emergency.”

  Any form of action was better than nothing. The men ran off to select their clubs and were back almost at once. Then the five headed toward the city, leaving Dick and Chuck beside the ship. Dick was wearing his oxygen tanks, and Chuck had on the blower device; whatever method was used by the Martians should be hampered by having to deal with both styles of equipment at once.

  By day, the sandy waste offered no hiding place, but Dick and Chuck had lost faith in good ideas. By common consent, they dropped down beside the ladder leading up to the rocket, back to back, so that they could cover all approaches.

  If anything should be safe, the ship should. Chuck sighed, and leaned back so his helmet touched that of the big engineer.

  “If I see even a bit of sand blowing, I’ll sing out and you shoot,” he planned. “You can do the same.”

  Should have kept guard this way long ago,” Dick said. “The trouble with us is that we’ve been so pressed for time that we’ve wasted most of what we have.”

  They settled back against each other, leaving just enough room at one side for Chuck’s faintly humming blower. There would be no talking—from now on, any sound that went out over the radio would be for warning to those in the ruins. Chuck felt for the switch again to make sure that it was on; it was easy to forget and leave it off once it was cut for helmet speech.

  Nothing moved. The shadow of the ship crept forward as the sun neared the horizon. Once Chuck felt something stir in the sand, and jumped, but it was only Dick shifting position. There was a slight wind and it touched the piled up sand around the rocket ship, sending little rivulets downward.

  He shifted slightly, and Dick jumped. They glanced around and grinned at each other, then quickly jerked back to watch ahead for any activity. It was like sitting quietly with a rattlesnake asleep on one’s lap.

  Sound rattled in their earphones. “There’s one! There—he slipped behind that big house!”

  A babble of confusion followed. Chuck frowned and waited. Finally Dick’s voice came over the phones. “What gives, Miles?”

  “Don’t know—must be somebody’s imagination. Probably one of us saw the shadow of another. Nothing to it. And no sign of any entrance underground. How’s it there?”

  “Quiet!” Chuck answered, and heard Dick’s laugh.

  Then it was quiet again. They shifted from time to time as the sand slipped from under them, and the space suits proved less comfortable than they might have been. But they were used to that now, and paid no attention to it.

  Chuck yawned, and realized that sheer boredom was their biggest danger. He yawned again, and it seemed to make the sound of the little blower a trifle louder; but it was so quiet that his ears had to strain to hear it anyway. Maybe the yawn had cleared his ear passages—inner ear passages… . He’d be glad when Vance got back. No wonder the watch got sleepy. He’d be less disgusted with them now…

  Something in the back of his mind whispered to him. He felt that the suit was getting damp and that the air was impossible to breathe. Must be the blower but it was still running—or was it…

  He opened his mouth to shout into the radio. But it was too much effort. Too much…

  Vance’s voice was ringing in his ears. He muttered in disgust and some of the blackness went away. He’d been about to do something—but it was hard to remember. Then his head cleared slowly and words began to penetrate.

  “Dick! Chuck! Chuck!”

  “Yeah.” It was hard to get the first word out, but the effort cleared the last of the fog from his mind. “Vance! What happened?”

  “That’s what I want to know! Wait, we’re coming now. Good Lord!”

  Chuck swung around slowly, to see Dick sprawled out on the ground beside him. He bent over, shaking the big figure, and the engineer sat up groggily. Then some of the babble in the phones registered, and Chuck swung toward the ship.

  It lay on its side again, though this time the entrance was just above the surface. Its fall had left part of the hole, but had filled in under it, where the digging had been necessary. And probably there were new cracks now releasing the air.

  Chuck staggered toward it, only half-conscious of what he was doing. But now Vance and the others were coming up over the final rise of the sand and pouring down. They stopped at the side of the ship, staring at it without comprehension.

  Finally, Vance turned back, shaking his head. “All right, I guess it wasn’t too bad—unless we’ve cracked the hull some more. And it looks more as if someone lowered it that as if it fell. We can blast and dig out the pit tomorrow. I’d rather have that than lose the last welder.”

  “Vance!” Rothman’s voice jerked them around, and they turned toward him. He was standing over the two winches, pointing at them.

  It was a sorry mess. A tank of the rocket fuel had been poured over the winch. The corrosive acid had eaten the cables through, stripped off the cogs of the gears, and generally ruined them completely. They wouldn’t be safe to support their own weight now.

  The funny thing was that there was no blame on any of the men’s faces. They had learned not to blame the failure of any of them, apparently. Chuck stood there, holding back the bitter sobs that wanted to come, and he knew it would have turned on him in a body.

  Yeah, he was a man. He knew what it meant. Maybe he did. But he wasn’t one when the chips were down. He wanted to go into a corner somewhere and cry.

  Then he turned in stunned surprise as the sound of genuine crying hit his ears—a choking, horrible sound, worse than he could remember from childhood. Dick Steele stood over the winches, seeing the final failure of the machinery that had become a part of his life, and knowing that he had been somehow responsible for its destruction. There was nothing weak about that crying—it was a release of rage and futility, but there was no weakness.

  Chuck stood frozen for a second longer. Then he turned with unsteady steps toward the fallen rocket ship. They’d never raise it now, he told himself. He’d failed them—it had all been his idea. He’d nailed the lids on their coffins as surely as the inscription in that early dream of his had indicated.

  Vance’s voice was tired and numb. “Never mind. There’s scrap metal, and we’ve got good welders; if I have to, I can weld new cogs, and cut down pipe to make die new winches. It’ll take time, but we can do it. There’s still
one welding machine on the ship.”

  Chuck went on into the air lock and down the passage. He’d stored the welder away carefully. He’d done everything carefully. He’d been proving he was a man with the right to work with men.

  He opened the cabinet The welder was gone!

  His steps were steadier as he came back down the passage and entered the air lock again. They were frozen as he stepped but onto the surface. He turned his face toward the ruins of the city and began walking, one foot ahead of the other, the other after the one.

  Vance came after him, but he went on walking until the man held him back by physical force.

  “You don’t have a welder. Captain. They got the last one. They came out and let the ship down, burned up the winches, and walked off with the welder.”

  “I know it.” Vance turned him around and led him back into the group. “Everyone here knew it when you came out. We must be getting psychic about such things—or experienced. We’ll weld everything with the electric torch, and we’ll dig a deeper hole, deep enough for the Eros to slide into it. You’ll fix the controls so they balance out— the instrument readings will let you do that—and it won’t matter if we do take off at an angle. We’ll last until we can make it on our fuel, or we’ll take off for Earth and tell them to ship out fuel to us on the little rockets, or well crash right into Moon City!”

  He stopped for breath and turned to face the rest of them. “You don’t believe it—and I don’t believe it any more. But we are going to do it because we’re men, and there isn’t enough trickery on Mars to keep us from doing it!”

  Chuck looked from one to another. They didn’t believe it could be done. Nobody was fooling himself any more. But they were going to go right ahead and try it.

  “Let’s get in and see what damage was done to the ship,” Dick suggested, and his voice was quiet now.

  They trooped in, one by one, and began moving up and down, searching with the smoke candles. But there was no sign that there were any new holes. A few tiny leaks along the seams remained, but so slow that they hardly mattered. The Eros had been let down gently, with the winches. That was why the cables were still on, instead of having been snapped out of their holds by the force of the shock.

  “They took a look at her right-side-up and decided it didn’t look the way it should, so they put her back,” Ginger said. ,

  “Why?” Rothman asked. “It doesn’t make sense. If they wanted to kill us, they could have waited until night and let her down with a rush. Why this way?”

  Sokolsky shrugged. “It seems fairly obvious. They’re trying to make us stay, not to kill us. This is sort of a welcome mat. ‘Welcome, Earthmen.’ As far as they’re concerned, we can stay as long as we like—longer. They could have killed us all off by now. But they like us.”

  “Why?” Rothman repeated.

  “Because we have so many nice toys that they want. We bring them presents—but presents they don’t know how to use. They hang around in the sand—I think I mean that literally, buried in the sand where we won’t see them. They watch us use the toys. And then, when they find out what the pretty toys will do, they come and take them away. Why should they kill us when they can keep us here to show them the use of more things? Gentlemen, we’re being domesticated!”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Martians

  It could only be one of two things. Chuck decided. He was sitting in the mess hall with the rest of the crew. But no one was doing much talking. There was no need for early sleep, now; they would have plenty of time in which to repair the ship, if it could be repaired. They might be short on supplies after a while, but there’d be more than time enough.

  He turned everything over again, breaking all the elements down and recombining them, but the answer still came out to the two possibilities. It had to be one of them.

  He got up, nodding to the others, and moved out toward the air lock where his suit was. The helmet was hanging there, with the little radio inside it. He studied it for a

  second and then moved on to the tool storage section, now half-bare. All he needed was a small screwdriver, and a metal tube, and a new set of oxygen tanks.

  When he came back to the suit, he had all of them. The screwdriver helped him to pull the radio set out and toss it aside. The metal pipe slid down one of the little tubes that led to the helmet. And the oxygen tanks replaced the blower he had been using. He studied the outfit for a few minutes. Something was missing.

  In the tool supply room he located a fine wire and a small flashlight. Then he began working on the suit again. This time the little plastic tube came out completely, and the wire went down it on the inside. A dab of cement held it in place. He put the plastic tube down, soldered insulated wire to the metal one and led it out to the battery. Soldered connections soon led through the battery to the bulb which fitted snugly inside the helmet, and from the bulb to the wire attached to the plastic tube. Finally, he reinserted the metal into the plastic tube and squeezed it. The little bulb lighted and he nodded in satisfaction.

  He climbed into his suit, snapped the helmet down and picked up the electric torch. The air lock closed behind him.

  For a moment, he moved along the hull of the ship and the little torch sparkled in the darkness, spitting against the metal. Again he moved on, apparently paying no attention to anything except the tiny holes he seemed to feel in the hull.

  This time he wasn’t bored and he knew he wasn’t going to become sleepy. It might have been the radio. It didn’t seem possible, but there might be some way to heterodyne the signal—shift it to one of a different type that would blank out the brain, which was itself partly electronic in behavior. He couldn’t remember a clear case of anyone passing out with the radio off. Sokolsky had slept, but it had been a natural sleep, until he used the radio while waiting; they had gotten him then.

  But he didn’t think so. That was just an added precaution.

  An hour slipped by. He moved closer to the tip of the Ship, waiting. He knew it was shock that was holding him up. He knew by now that he was as excited as he had ever been. But while the shock lasted, his feelings were deadened, and he meant to take advantage of it. He was beginning to see that others also had feelings, and that they could be shocked. It didn’t matter, if you used whatever you had when it was needed.

  The light in his helmet blinked, and then went on steadily. Something was pressing against the tube which carried air up from the tanks to his helmet. So that was the trick. He didn’t dare to turn, but he was picturing something that could lie buried in the sand, to slip up and pinch the air hose gently; the men on watch would be bored, tired from overwork, and ready to pass out easily enough;

  when the air supply dropped down slowly, they’d hardly notice it; or if it was a blower suit, it wouldn’t be hard to slip something slowly over the opening of the blower.

  He let the little electric welding torch drop slowly, cutting it off. He shook his head as if feeling drowsy. Then he was down on his face in the sand, and there was a chirping, something like a cricket. Other rustlings reached through his helmet—the creatures were coming out of hiding, chirping to each other.

  But he didn’t dare look until the rustlings faded a little. Nor could he wait too long. He had the little metal tube to thank for being conscious, but it couldn’t help him any longer.

  He took a deep breath, raising the oxygen level in his suit a trifle, and jumped to his feet. The big light on his helmet shot out.

  The timing had been right. They were ahead of him, just nearing the top of the little dune. He doubled his Earth-muscled, Moon-trained legs under him and set out as hard as his legs would carry him. They were traveling like deer through a forest, but his locomotion was that of a kangaroo on an open plain.

  Part of his mind studied them. They were about half the size of a full-grown man, and even more human in their body shape than he had expected, though they were slimmer than any man could ever be. The arms and legs were shaped and jointed like
those of a man, and the neck rose from the shoulders in the same way, though it was longer. There were no signs of ears or of long hair on the head. Instead, the whole body was covered with a golden-brown fur that must have been two inches, long, judging from the way it fluttered in the thin air. Their lungs were large—but not abnormally so. He watched more carefully, and saw that it was the rate of their breathing that accounted for their ability to survive here. Their chests must be heaving a better than two hundred inflations a minute, as against thirty for a man.

  There could no longer be any doubts as to their destination. For the first time, they were caught in the act and they were fleeing for what they hoped was safety;’ straight toward the old ruins.

  He put on a touch more speed which brought him closer to them. Now one threw a wild look back over its shoulder. The face had no nose—apparently the mouth served for everything. The forehead curved back sharply, but not without a good height. And the eyes were as he remembered them—three times the diameter of human eyes, and perfectly round, set as wide apart as the head would allow.

  Now the houses were closer and they began spreading out. He kept his attention on the one with the torch. The weight would slow it, and it would certainly want to bring its treasure to the community hive, or however it lived. The creature was squeaking furiously now, as if it felt all rules of life would be violated if such a big, heavy creature could outrun it.

  He was within feet of it when it flashed down what had apparently been the main street. He was within inches when it suddenly darted sideways into the house he remembered as having the elaborate mosaic on the floor. He lost it for a second as he overshot the entrance. But it was furiously busy, pressing in some order on the branches of the tree-thing.

  The center of the mosaic suddenly lifted, and the creature darted downward.

  He leaped forward before the entrance could close and caught it, wrenching upward with all his force. It gave easily; there was no snapping of hinges, as he had thought He stood holding it, wishing that he’d known enough to leave the radio in his helmet. With that, he could have had the others from the ship here; and a few men should be able to handle hundreds of these delicate creatures, at least when protected by space suits.