Here are the Project Gutenberg links to all the public domain books we've posted this year. We'll update this list as we go.
March: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
April: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
May: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
June: The Metamorphosis and The Trial by Franz Kafka
July: hiatus
August: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
September: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
October: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
November: Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
December: TBD
I am looking for a book series, and have been looking for it for years. I read it when I was young, my brain is saying during my asimov obsession, it's about these teen boys who are like the future version of boy scouts? and they go and have adventures on other planets. Like they go to Venus, and this is the part I remember, they were amazed by venusian chemistry being without fire. It was all chemical and pressure. There were four of them as I recall? But as far as I can tell, asimov never wrote 'the adventures of the space boy scouts'. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, or could point me in a direction?
I just finished The Three Musketeers, and this might be the best book I've ever read in my life, mostly because every single character is batshit insane and drunk for 90% of their Big Plot Decisions.
Lights up on d'Artagnan: he's new in town and he's already making enemies. He meets his three best friends by scheduling back to back duels with them, under the assumption that he won't have to fight the last two if he dies in the first one. He is twenty years old and has never even heard of a frontal cortex. This is made evident by every word he says.
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are supposedly in their 20s-30s, but barely any better. The moment they have any money at all, they siphon it directly into their alcohol budget. They make enemies everywhere they go and get into almost as many duels as d'Artagnan. Also worth mentioning: they see this crazed 20-year-old and choose to devote their lives to him simply because he has good vibes.
We've got the cardinal, who seems only tangentially related to any kind of clergyhood. We've got the king, whose main personality trait is that he HATES his wife. We've got the queen, whose main personality trait is cheating on her husband. We've got the Duke of Buckingham, who is (unfortunately) English. We've got the Love of d'Artagnan's Life, aka somebody else's wife but he sucks so he can get cuckolded. And finally, we've got the prototype female manipulator, a character written with such intense feminism AND misogyny that I scarcely know what to say about her except "go off, queen" as well as the occasional "I don't support all women, some of you are stupid."
Do yourself a favor and commit 5-12 weeks to reading this book, if for no other reason than the part where d'Artagnan tells a guy "I'll spring you from jail, don't worry, it's all part of the plan!" and then immediately forgets him in prison and flirts with his wife.
Out of curiosity, what was your favorite book this year? I read a bunch of stuff, but I don't know if I could pick a favorite. I know we've been slacking here, management blew the whole budget on a trip to Atlantic City, but I hope everyone has been reading on their own :)
A new drawing- visualising the books always stacked up on my bedside table.
From top to bottom mine currently are:
The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff
Every Elizabeth Strout book
Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
A crime thing I know I won’t like with a cliched ominous house on the cover
Bleak House by Dickens, I’m going to guess the second half
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
An Elric omnibus by Michael Moorcock, absolute nonsense and I love it
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, waiting on my third Libby queue after tackling 30% on each of the other borrows
And finally on the right- gigantic The Lyrics by Paul McCartney, doesn’t fit anywhere and I don’t currently have a coffee table for it to be in its natural habitat
You can buy a print in a couple different colours via my Etsy shop
22
Corriston left the tractor a hundred and seventy yards from the gate, well hidden behind a hundred foot dune. The other tractors had come to a halt a much greater distance from the Citadel, and were spread out across the desert in a slightly uneven, double line.
He walked slowly forward across the rust-red sand, with a feeling in his bones that he was going to be lucky. Yet he knew that he'd have to be convincing, or he wouldn't stand a chance. If there was more than one guard at the gate he might never get inside. With luck he might be able to convince two guards—even three—but never four or five, for you couldn't forge words into persuasive enough weapons to disarm the suspicion of that many observant men. Not the kind of men who would be guarding Ramsey, at any rate.
The massiveness of the fortified gate shook his confidence a little as he drew near to it. It was at least fifty feet in height, a solid oblong of inches-thick steel with a desert-mirroring surface. He could see his own reflection as he advanced, but it did nothing to reassure him.
He knew what he'd have to do, of course. Walk right up to the gate and trust to luck that he could find some way of announcing his presence without getting himself killed. How did you gain entrance to an impregnable fortress? Surely there had to be some way by which a man could gain admittance without being instantly shot down as a hostile intruder.
He was surprised by the simplicity of the answer. There was no need for him to press a bell or a buzzer, to manipulate a mechanism of any sort. There was not even any need for him to proclaim his arrival by shouting.
The gate swung inward without a sound, and in the shadows cast by its moving bulk two figures silently materialized. They were guards, heavily armed, one tall with shaggy brows and piercing dark eyes, the other a wiry little man with reddish hair, his expression peculiarly bland and non-committal.
It was the little man who said: "All right, come inside. We've been expecting you."
It was impossible, but true. There was nothing threatening in the way the words were uttered, just calm acceptance, just the matter-of-fact indifference of a man who has a duty to perform and doesn't care what happens afterwards.
But it would have perhaps been better if Corriston had not moved so quickly forward, for almost instantly the second guard barred his passage and laid a firm hand on his arm.
"Hold on. Just a minute," the tall guard said. "You're Peter Stone, aren't you?"
With a quick pretense of anger Corriston jerked his arm free and looked the guard up and down. "Naturally I'm Stone. Who in hell did you think I was."
"Sorry," the guard said, shrugging. "Don't take it out on me. I just had to be sure."
"Well, you're sure now. I guess you know why I'm here."
The guard nodded. "Ramsey just phoned down about you. Your friend is with him now. See that big gray building, the one on the left with the shuttered windows? There's a guard stationed at the door, but he won't stop you. He has his orders. Climb two flights of stairs and go down the long corridor on the third floor. Ramsey and your friend are in the last room on the left."
Corriston drew a deep breath, wondering if the guard had noticed the tightening of his facial muscles. He turned away from the gate slowly, staring out over the interior of the fortress, letting his emotions of the moment take complete possession of him.
He had entered as if by magic a world apart, a small, shutin world of massive magnificence, of undreamed of material power and wealth. There were five buildings within the encircling wall of the fortress, each monumental in architectural sweep. Each was a citadel alone and apart, monuments to man's creative genius erected by one man with a determination to make himself unique.
It was a folly almost beyond belief, a terrifying distortion of human creativeness that could lead only to ultimate disaster and defeat.
But greedy and cruel and ruthless as Ramsey undoubtedly was, there still burned in him a little of the spark that had created Athens in white marble. Had it not been so, he could not have even commissioned men of creative genius to transport to Mars the materials for such a project and have taken pleasure in its completion.
"Your friend got here two hours ago," the tall guard said. "They've been talking ever since. He came down to the gate once and said we should let you in, you and another man. Saddler, I think his name was. I see he's not with you."
"No, Saddler is not with me," Corriston said.
"What happened to him?"
"The big gray building with the shuttered windows, you said. If the guard tries to stop me, what do I say."
"I told you he had his orders."
Corriston looked up at the massive gate swinging shut behind him. For good or ill, he was completely trapped, completely at the mercy of the armed guards inside the citadel.
They hadn't taken his gun away from him, but, nevertheless, he was trapped. What chance would one armed man have against seventy-five or a hundred guards? They were keeping out of sight, all but the two at the gate. But at any moment they could converge upon him and shoot him down. They could choose their own moment, precisely as a research medical man could choose his own moment to experiment upon a laboratory animal, knowing that the creature was safe in its cage and couldn't possibly get away.
Corriston's lips tightened and from a shadowed corner of his mind came a determination to brush all that aside, to ignore it completely. The guards at the gate might very well be telling the truth. It stood to reason that Ramsey would have remained secretive about his daughter. Kidnappers do not like to have their ransom demands discussed too openly. If Ramsey had been a complete fool he would have gone down to the gate and taken the guards completely into his confidence, but Corriston could not believe that Ramsey was that much of a fool.
In all probability Henley had threatened Ramsey and provoked him almost beyond endurance. There had arisen the questions of how the ransom was to be paid, the girl set free.
Damn it, Corriston thought, the thing for me to do now is to go straight toward that building and straight up the stairs to the third floor and straight down the corridor until I'm confronting Ramsey face to face. I'm Peter Stone. I'm one of the two men who helped Henley kidnap the girl and I've come to help Henley convince Ramsey. I've come to help him really put the screws on Ramsey. I can improvise from that point on.
He moved away from the guards without looking back. Within the citadel there was silence, stillness, the five massive buildings cutting a rampart of pure, fragile design across the sky. There was a strange kind of perfection about the interior of the citadel. It was akin, somehow, to the perfection of solitude and even the sky seemed hushed, expectant, remote from reality, as if awaiting the unfolding of some impossible event, some terrifying drama of violence and retribution that could take place nowhere else.
But Corriston's reason told him that to believe any such thing would have been the height of folly. The sky inside the citadel was just as real, just as cloud-flecked and palely blue as the sky outside, and the notion that architecture or scenery of any kind could influence events was absolute nonsense. Things would happen exactly as he willed them to happen, provided nothing stood in the way of immediate drastic action and the kind of luck which had saved him at the gate continued to smile upon him.
The big gray building with the shuttered windows continued to occupy most of his attention, and he walked very resolutely toward it, his eyes on the glimmer of pale light which marked its wide doorway. He was still fifty feet away when he saw the guard, standing very quietly just inside the door with his hand on his gun holster.
Corriston's lips tightened, but he did not moderate his stride. He had a reply ready if the guard challenged him. He preferred to believe that he would not be challenged, but he had no intention of taking anything for granted.
He continued on until he reached the doorway and then he stopped abruptly. He waited for the guard to say something, but the man did not speak at all. He simply stared quietly at Corriston for an instant, and then stepped quickly back into the shadows. Corriston went on past him, and advanced along the wide corridor that stretched before him.
The wide central staircase that circled up did not seem appropriate to a building that was not a residence and Corriston found himself wondering if Ramsey had turned the other four buildings into similarly unusual expressions of his own strong-willed orientation to reality.
The buildings had undoubtedly been designed as administrative units of an industrial empire—a beginning empire in a new world. An empire predatory, avaricious, merciless. Yet Ramsey had seemingly allowed his desire for a home to gain dominance here, had allowed the emotions common to all men to influence his taste in interior architecture in at least one of the buildings.
Chalk up that much to Ramsey's credit. In that respect at least, he was superior to Henley. In that respect at least a man of good will could take sides, all apart from the personal issues involved. Henley was a predatory vulture on all counts, his talons constantly spread, constantly crimson-tipped. Ramsey was a vulture too, but in the depths of his mind he knew it. Part of the agony was shared by him, and in one desperate, despairing part of his personality he had tried to be creative.
Corriston ascended the staircase swiftly, casting one brief glance at some murals and then ignoring them. The second floor landing stretched away into shadows, bisected by a wide corridor dimly lighted by overhead lamps. The second floor had an administrative building aspect and so did the third floor, which seemed in all respects its exact duplicate.
Corriston's excitement grew as he mounted the stairway. He felt like a man poised on the brink of a precipice with no assurance that he would not be hurled to his death; a man aware that tragedy would not strike him like a thunderbolt at any moment; and yet also like a man who thought and felt differently from the trapped and the desperately despairing.
He felt very confident, very sure of himself, and it seemed to him that there was no danger that he could not surmount, and deep within him there was something that exulted in the thought and kept him moving steadily upward.
The third floor was like the second, its long central corridor dwindling away into shadows. Down it he moved cautiously, remembering what the guard at the gate had said. The third floor, the last door on your left.
Ramsey was in conference. But it wasn't a conference of industrial associates planning a division of spoils. Ramsey was talking to a killer under duress.
Corriston was half way down the corridor when he heard the shot. It rang out in the stillness with a terrible clarity, sending echoes reverberating throughout the building, stopping Corriston in his tracks.
For an instant the silence remained absolute, as if the shot had somehow silenced all life within the building. Even Corriston's breathing was affected by it, so that for an instant he remained like a man horror-blasted into immobility, frozen, a statue with waxen features and widely dilated eyes.
Then, abruptly, he ceased to be a statue. He broke into a run, heading for the door from which the shot had come.
He came to the door and saw that it did not slide open on a panel. It was massive, with a knob jutting out from it, and when he grasped the knob it swung inward instantly and soundlessly and he found himself in a large, blank-walled room brightly illumed by three circular overhead lamps.
Ramsey was sitting stiff and straight before a desk that was cluttered with reference files, manuscripts in folders, pens, pencils and other writing materials. His face was drained of all color, and his eyes were wide and staring. He was looking directly at Corriston, and yet he did not seem to see Corriston.
He did not appear to be staring at anything in particular, that small, shrunken, unimpressive-looking little man with graying temples and a look of blank incomprehension in his eyes that chilled Corriston to the core of his being.
Shaking, wishing that the eyes would close or brighten with relief, or do anything but remain so stonily indifferent, Corriston moved closer to the desk.
He saw at once that Ramsey was close to death. He had been shot in the chest. There was a dull red stain on his chest, and even as Corriston stared it widened, a butterfly pattern of red, like a Rorschach seen through the eyes of a homicidally inclined psychotic.
Suddenly Ramsey moved. He caught hold of the desk edge, and swayed a little, but his eyes remained filmed, blankly staring.
Corriston was bending above him when a familiar voice said: "He's done for. Nothing you can do for him. We had an argument and he lost his head. He just couldn't see it my way. So I made a mistake and shot him. It was a mistake, all right. I lost my head. Now I've got nothing to lose by killing you."
Corriston raised his eyes slowly. He had one chance in a hundred perhaps. He knew it; he sensed it. Henley had somehow managed to stay out of sight for an instant. The room was very large. There were shadows in it, and Henley had apparently flattened himself against the wall behind the desk, in deep shadow.
But now he was standing very straight and still behind the desk, ignoring the shuddering form of the man he had shot, little dark deathheads dancing in his eyes.
Henley's nearness did not bother Corriston. Death at ten feet could be no more final than death at a hundred yards.
Only one thing bothered him. Events could move fast when you were close to a killer.
He didn't intend to let them move fast. Not for him, at any rate. He let his eyes rest for an instant on the gun in Henley's hand, his thoughts racing. He knew that he'd be as good as dead if he made a single concession.
Don't let him know that the gun worries you. Pretend that the odds are even, even though he's got the drop on you.
Corriston said: "How do you know he's fatally wounded? The wound's three inches below his heart. You're taking a hell of a lot for granted. You just said you made a mistake in shooting him. If he's rushed to a hospital that mistake may not be your last. You'll have a chance to go to work on him again."
Henley shook his head, his lips tightening. "Don't be a fool. He'll be dead in five minutes."
"I'm not being a fool," Corriston said. "What will you stand to gain by shooting me and letting him die? You've got his daughter, but a dead man won't be able to ransom her."
For a moment, nothing happened. Henley had made no attempt to draw his gun, and he did not draw it now. He stood very quietly staring at Corriston, breathing heavily, a strange, withdrawn look in his eyes.
Perhaps he was thinking over what Corriston had said. Corriston wondered about that for an instant, and then dismissed it from his mind. You did not take anything for granted when you were standing that close to a killer.
It was probably too late to save Ramsey. But for the first time he was standing very near to Henley with a weapon beneath his hand. If he drew his gun instantly and shot Henley through the heart Ramsey might have a chance. Otherwise….
Somehow he couldn't do it; not without giving the other some slight warning, not without whipping his hand to his gun with a vigor that was clear and unmistakable. In matters of crime a fair man is at a disadvantage. He can only deal with a murderer in one way.
He drew a split second ahead of Henley. He shot Henley three times, the gun blazing in his hands, and it did not seem important to him that Henley had also drawn his gun. A tight knot reached into his stomach as Henley's gun blazed, but he kept right on firing.
Henley died missing him, not scoring at all. That was the incredible thing. Henley, an expert shot, a genius at massacre, had missed him clearly with five shots and now he was down on the floor, clutching at his stomach, dragging himself along, while beneath his fingers a dull red stain grew.
His eyes turned glassy suddenly. He tried twice to raise himself but he fell back each time. He did not speak at all. Blood from his punctured lungs flooded up into his mouth, and with a terrible, convulsive trembling of his entire body he rolled over on his side and lay still.
Corriston's hands began to sweat beneath the hard, cold gun. He wanted to drop the weapon, to hurl it from him, but he couldn't somehow. He had killed Saddler in immediate self-defense. This had been a little different—a new experience, a frightening experience and he had been forced to grit his teeth even in firing, and now that it was all over he was tormented inwardly in a way that left him badly shaken.
Henley was gone now. Dead and still and forever removed from a world he had contaminated. Henley had been warped and twisted largely by circumstances outside himself; nevertheless a deadly reptile has to be crushed when it is about to strike.
Corriston looked up from the limp form sprawled out on the floor, and for a moment the tight lines of his face relaxed a little. Henley was no longer a menace; the breath of life that had sustained him had expired so completely that he had become now a kind of hollow mockery of something monstrous and distorted that could never harm anyone again.
It was Ramsey who had to be considered now, Ramsey who was in peril.
The light in the room seemed somehow a little dimmer than it had been. He turned slowly back to Ramsey, and for a moment could not quite believe what he saw.
Ramsey's face was changing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper than they had been, and his mouth had gone completely slack, and his eyes were uprolled in a quite ghastly way, so that only the whites showed.
Slowly as Corriston stared Ramsey's features began to come apart. The familiar, hideous pattern began to repeat itself on Ramsey's blanched features. The mouth widened until it turned into a shapeless, colorless gash in a face that was hardly recognizable. The nose widened and spread out, the chin receded, and the cheeks became a flattened expanse of wrinkled flesh that stubbornly refused to stop spreading.
Ramsey's face became a pumpkin face, with slits for eyes and a hideous caricature of a mouth that seemed almost to pout as it expanded.
Suddenly Ramsey was no longer sitting upright before the desk. His body swayed and began to slump, tilting at first only a little sideways and then sliding completely from the chair to the floor.
Ramsey did not descend to the floor with violence. It was a slow, barely perceptible gliding motion of his entire body that carried him from an upright position to a prone one in less than thirty seconds. His body seemed to collapse inward upon itself, as if he had suddenly become too skeleton-thin for his clothes, as if so much vitality had been drained from him by the shot which had put an end to his life that he had given up all hope of maintaining his dignity in death.
But perhaps the man on the floor had no dignity to maintain. He wasn't Ramsey. He was a hired substitute, an impostor, and quite obviously no man would undertake to play such a role without calculating all of the risks in advance. Perhaps he expected to die without dignity. Perhaps that was one of the risks which went with the bargain—the assumption that Ramsey might very well be killed in a violent fashion, and that anyone who stepped into Ramsey's shoes and masqueraded as Ramsey might expect a similar fate.
Corriston felt a nerve begin to twitch violently in his cheek. Why had Ramsey kept Henley occupied in so strange a manner, talking to a nonentity, a stand-in, a double who could never bargain and come to terms unless Ramsey ordered him to do so? Had Ramsey been incapable of dealing with Henley directly, and had taken this means of complying with the ransom demands?
It seemed incredible on the face of it. Ramsey was quite obviously the kind of man who could live through any kind of private hell if he had to.
He'd have stood up to Henley no matter how great his inner torment. He'd have met the ransom demands or rejected them—and it was almost inconceivable that he would have rejected them—without for an instant losing his outward composure. And even inwardly he would have kept a tight rein on his emotions. He was not the kind of man who would hire someone else to protect him from anything that vitally concerned him, even with the masks so conveniently at hand.
Why then had he employed a double to bargain with Henley and keep him occupied for so long a time? It didn't matter if Ramsey had made use of doubles in the past. Probably he had, in order to protect himself in dealings with the colonists when the advantages of deception would favor him. But he would never have done so under these present circumstances—when a criminal who would stop at nothing was holding his daughter under threat of death.
He would never have done so unless he had some very special reason that dominated his thinking to the exclusion of all else.
Suddenly Corriston had the answer. It came to him in a lightning-swift flash of intuition, which carried with it complete credibility. It was more than a guess. Somehow he was sure; he knew. A full minute before he heard the dull rumble of the tractors as they came through the gate, and went to the window and stared down, he knew.
He had the answer and yet what he saw eclipsed what he knew. It was a little like watching a rocket take off, hearing the roar and seeing the flames through all of its burning time, and seeing at the same time the men on the proving ground moving swiftly about, and the space-helmeted men at the controls of the rocket itself, each grimly intent on one particular task.
Ramsey was returning into the Citadel with armed guards on both sides of him, and his daughter was walking with her head erect at his side. Five colony tractors had followed him into the Citadel and two more were just coming through the gate, moving ponderously on their caterpillar treads because each tractor weighed two tons even in the light gravity of Mars.
Corriston did an almost unbelievable thing then. Standing quietly by the window he raised his right hand and saluted Ramsey in silent tribute to the man's courage at the most threatening moment of his life.
What Ramsey had done in no way lessened his guilt. But Corriston would have just as readily repeated the salute in public, without caring what anyone might think. What Ramsey had done was as clear to him now as a series of moves on a chessboard laid out in advance, but hidden from the man who was to be outwitted and outplayed.
Ramsey had made use of a double to keep Henley occupied—no doubt with repeated, skillful evasions, a constant insistence that more proof be forthcoming, more details supplied. Perhaps a half-dozen conferences had taken place in all, extending over many hours. And while Henley was being encouraged to believe that Ramsey was being softened up and would accept all of his demands in the end, Ramsey had gone out into the desert alone, armed, furious, and determined to rescue his daughter if it cost him his life.
Or perhaps he hadn't gone alone. Perhaps he had taken a dozen armed guards with him. Somehow it didn't seem important, couldn't take away Ramsey's moment of victory. It was a moment of victory for Ramsey even though he hadn't played a major role for long, even though he had found his daughter already rescued and safe on his return. And Corriston had been the one to move out into the center of the board and deliver the coup de grace. He had kept a restless killer immobilized while the play was under way, and that was victory enough for any man.
Corriston suddenly realized that neither Ramsey nor the Colonists had any way of knowing that Henley was dead. They had probably joined forces outside the Citadel for the sole purpose of rescuing him from the deadliest kind of danger. And he wasn't helping them at all. In another minute they'd be trying to get to him with tear gas.
It didn't make any kind of sense, but when Corriston went down the wide central staircase he wasn't thinking about the colonists at all. He was wondering only how Helen Ramsey would look standing alone on a strange dark headland at midnight. Then the vision dissolved and another one took its place. She wasn't on a headland any more.
She was standing at the door of a small, white cottage and there were a couple of kids beside her: a boy of about Freddy's age, or maybe a little younger, and a little girl with golden curls, her hair like a crown.
He realized suddenly that it could never be a small, white cottage. There were no small white cottages on the Station, and never could be. But the Station would be all right for a married man with kids. The kids could come and visit him, and his wife could be with him about one-fourth of the time, both on the Station and on Earth.
What more could a happily married man ask, if the Station was so much a part of him that it was never wholly absent from his thoughts? He'd have to ask her, of course—at least a dozen times to make sure—that she really wanted that kind of man for a husband. But he knew what her answer would be even before the vision dissolved, and he was soon out in the central square between the five buildings, holding her tightly in his arms.
From the way she kissed him he knew that she must have endured an eternity of torment just from uncertainty, just from not knowing whether he was dead or alive. For an instant he could think of nothing else but the wonder of it, the absolute reassurance which she had brought to him with her closeness, her gratefulness, the intensity of her concern.
Across the square they could see the tractors, looking in the dazzling light like massive blocks of metal standing almost end to end. There was a great deal of movement and shouting between the buildings, and Corriston knew that in another half-minute they would no longer be alone together, that the closeness couldn't last.
A change was coming over her face, and he was suddenly afraid for her, afraid that when she was told the full truth about her father just the pain of knowing might make her withdraw from him, even though it could never really come between them or separate them for long.
So there it was. He could see it in her eyes, the fear, the shadow, and because he had no way of knowing just how much she already knew he decided that only complete honesty could keep the shadow from lengthening.
His hands moved slowly up over her face, and he drew her chin up and said, very gently: "There's something I'd like to say now, about your father. Without his help Henley would have finished what he started out to do. There are different ways of paying off a debt, and your father—"
She raised her hand as if to put a stop to his words. "Darling, I know he's in serious trouble. Don't try to spare me; there's no need to. There will be a trial and we both know what the outcome will be. He'll never walk out of the courtroom a free man. But he's not afraid … and neither am I. These last few, terrible hours have changed him. He's not ashamed now to admit that he loves me. All the hardness, the coldness, is gone."
Something in her voice stilled the questions he wanted to ask. She seemed to sense what was in his mind, for she said quickly. "I don't think father has any enemies now on Mars. He's going to give the colonists back their land. Not because he has to, but because he wants to. They came to his assistance when they could have used the way he cheated and robbed them as an excuse for not helping him at all. There are few men who wouldn't feel grateful, who wouldn't be shaken by remorse. But I think it goes deeper than that. Even now I'm not completely sure, but I think he knows it's the only way he can free himself from the prison he's been building around himself since I was a little girl."
She was silent for an instant, while the pain in her eyes seemed to deepen. Then she said, "I can't leave him now, darling. Not right away. It would be too cruel a blow."
Ahead now Corriston could see three of the colonists coming toward him. They were less than forty feet away. "I think I know how it is," he said. "When you've been through too much, you just go dead inside. You can feel sympathy for someone very close, like your father. But that's about all…."
"Darling, that's not what I mean. We'll be apart, but just for a little while. It will be so short a time we won't even miss it later on … two or three weeks, at most. And this time you won't have to wonder about me at all."
Corriston noticed then for the first time that her hair had been blown in all directions by the wind. He remembered how, on their first meeting, it had been disarranged in much the same way. She'd been wearing a beret then, and just the casual tilt of her hat had done the fluffing. But wind or no wind, he'd always like the way her hair looked, the gold in it, and the way it set off the great beauty of her face.
"I'd be more than unreasonable if I tried to pick flaws in a promise like that," he said.
"You can never go home again," someone had once said. You can never go home because people change and places change with them, and familiar scenes take on an aspect of strangeness as the old, well-loved landmarks fade.
But in space, the landmarks are as wide and deep as the gulfs between the stars, and it is not too difficult for a man to return to a steel-ribbed Gibraltar in space and experience again the emotions he felt when he first sighted it, and hear again the long thunder-roll of the ships berthing and taking off.
The ship which was bringing Corriston back had begun to loom up behind the telemetric aerials with her bow slanting forward. She had almost berthed, and, standing with his face half in shadow, Commander Clement watched the landing lights flashing on and off and wondered just what he would say to the young lieutenant he'd never met—the very famous lieutenant who would be emerging from the boarding port and descending the ramp any minute now.
He told himself that it ought to be something very simple and direct, accompanied by a friendly handclasp and a nod. "Welcome back, Lieutenant. Welcome back. I guess you know how I feel about the scoundrels who kept us from meeting the first time."
Yes, just a few words and a friendly handclasp would be best. No salutes either given or returned. No stiff-necked salutes, and damn the regulations for once. It was truly a very great occasion.
21
Corriston couldn't quite catch what the lad was shouting at first. Something about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught the name of Helen Ramsey and his mouth went dry and for an instant he couldn't seem to breathe. Freddy was shouting that he had found Helen Ramsey.
Dr. Drever started and leapt quickly to his feet, his eyes darting with an understandable solicitude toward the small figure coming toward them across the sand. He moved quickly to place himself directly in front of Stone, as if fearing it would be bad for Freddy to see a man so close to death. Then the full significance of Freddy's words seemed to dawn on him, and his solicitude for his son was replaced by a larger concern, a wider sympathy.
"You talk to him, Corriston," he said. "You've been living through a short stretch of hell. If he's really found her—"
Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied himself and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the nearest tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.
Freddy's eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.
Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words seemed to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own, and were somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man with a heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places and a thousand brilliant suns.
Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand. Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn't possibly be making any of it up.
"There wasn't a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston. The sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure. I mean there wasn't any prints that could have been made by a woman leaving the ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places, because about ten minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started looking too. But that was all.
"I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to very high dunes, even in a storm. There's a—a windbreaking buffer zone where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off I could be back again before anyone missed me."
Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. "You can see the dunes from here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones over there … that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess nobody would have been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far away from the ship. But if I hadn't done it I wouldn't have found her. That's for sure."
Corriston said: "You're so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I'm afraid you're trying to spare me. It's hard to hurt someone you like, but I've got to have the truth."
His hand tightened on Freddy's shoulder. "Do you understand, Freddy? I must know. Don't lie to spare me. Is she all right?"
Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. "I think she is. She's lying down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again toward another dune. It's like one, big, hollow dune. I didn't see her move. I guess she must have fainted. He's there, too, lying face down in the sand halfway up the dune, like he was hurt…."
"All right," Corriston said. "Now you'd better stay here with your father."
"Can't I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I was afraid he'd catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know I'd found her. He'd be warned and try to get away—"
"It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing," Corriston said. "You couldn't have used better judgment."
"Then it's all right if I go back with you?"
Corriston shook his head. "No, Freddy. I'd rather you didn't. Don't you understand? You've done more than your share. Now it's my turn."
Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of sunlight on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he said, "All right, Lieutenant Corriston. If it's an order."
"It's an order, Freddy."
Corriston gave Freddy's shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest pause, he said: "There's no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking resourcefulness you've just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you'll be heading an expedition and it won't be the kind that gets bogged down after the first thousand miles. You can take my word for that."
He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed the ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered how a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as this. It was just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston's face as he moved still further away from the ship into a loneliness of desert and sky.
She was lying in a wind-scoured hollow beneath a seventy-foot dune, her head resting on one sharply-bent elbow, a look of utter exhaustion on her face. Her eyes were closed, and even from where he stood Corriston could see that she was breathing heavily. He could see the slight rise and fall of her bosom, the trembling vibration of her oxygen mask. She was completely alone.
He stood for an instant absolutely motionless on the summit of the dune, staring down at her, noticing in alarm the hollow contour of her cheeks on both sides of the oxygen mask, and the slight tinge of gray that had crept into her countenance. Then he started downward. Almost instantly the sand rose like an unsteady sea on all sides of him, and a warning signal sounded in his brain.
He could connect it with no cause. Beneath him stretched only the wind-scoured inner surface of the dune, dazzling his eyes with its brightness, mirroring the sunlight like a burning glass. For a moment the brightness deceived him, and he did not realize that there were shadowed hollows directly beneath him, dark fissures in the tumbled sand wide enough to conceal a crouching man. He did not even see the shadow creeping toward him over the sand. Only the dazzle for an instant and the gleam of sunlight on Helen Ramsey's tousled hair.
Then, suddenly, he was aware of the danger, fully awake and aware. But realization came too late. Abruptly, without warning, a knife blade flashed in the sunlight and he felt an agonizing stab of pain just below his left kneecap.
A dark shape rose before him, and then dissolved into the shadows again, darting downward and sideways as it disappeared. Corriston threw himself backwards and froze into immobility, thrusting his elbows deep into the sand behind him, using that moment of surprise forced upon him by his assailant to lower his eyes and seek him out.
He saw Saddler's face clearly for an instant, saw the gleaming knife and the hand holding it, and the wavering outline of the man's crouching body three-fourths in shadow. He heard Saddler mutter: "I'm done for, Corriston. But I'll get you first."
It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Corriston's hand went to his hip, but with a nightmare feeling of retardation and his fingers seemed to move without any assistance from the motor centers of his brain. Then even more slowly he was facing the hollow with the gun in his clasp, and the weapon was exploding into the shadows, filling the hollows and windy places with reverberating echoes of sound.
There was complete silence after that. No groans, no outcry—nothing but silence. It went on for so long that Corriston could not shake off a numbing sense of unreality. Surely only a dream could have had so violently unreal a beginning, so terrible an outcome. Then he looked down, and saw the blood on his leg where the knife had grazed it, and knew that it could not have been a dream.
He was still facing the hollow, with two bullets left in his gun. But he knew that he would not have to fire again. Saddler was lying on his back on the sand, his eyes wide open, his jaw hanging slack. There was a spreading red stain on his chest and a rim of blood around his lips. The wind which was blowing across the crest of the dune seemed suddenly to turn malevolent, striking out at the dead man with a sudden, downsweeping gust, ruffling his hair and making him seem to be still enveloped in violence.
Corriston felt his throat muscles contract. He forced himself to bend over and search for a heart beat he knew he wouldn't find, remembering the other times when the outcome had been less fatal, when only a man's face had changed.
As his palm rested for an instant above the dead man's heart, the stirring of the sand immediately beneath him seemed to increase, to become a loud and continuous rustling sound that filled him with a vague sense of disquiet. He could not quite dismiss from his mind a feeling that he was still in danger, that in some strange, almost terrifying way Saddler was still a menace, and that the terrible reality of his death had not destroyed all of the hatred and savage violence which had forced Corriston to kill him in self-defense.
Suddenly Corriston realized that what he heard was not the wind stirring the sand at all, but something quite different. It was closer to him than the sloping rim of the dunes, and it was accompanied by movements directly under his hand, a sudden tightening of the dead man's skin, a contraction more pronounced than could have been produced by the abrupt onset of rigor mortis, however freakishly violent or premature.
The rustling continued for perhaps ten more seconds. Then, abruptly, it stopped and the heads of two lamprenes came into view, moving slowly across Saddler's unstirring flesh until their writhing mouth parts were less than two inches from Corriston's outspread hand.
The sight of them brought an instant of terror, an awareness of peril so acute that Corriston's breath caught in his throat. His hand whipped back and he leapt to his feet with a convulsive shudder.
It was suddenly very still on the dune again. Corriston stood for a moment with his body rigid, fearing to look downward, his mind filled with a growing sense of panic.
Had Helen Ramsey been attacked by lamprenes too? No, no, she was all right; she had to be. Everything confirmed it, her quietness, her steady breathing, the simple fact that her eyes had been closed and not opened wide in torment.
He descended the dune like a man ploughing in frantic haste through a snowdrift, sinking to his knees and floundering free again, lurching backward and sideways, sliding a third of the way.
She was all right when he got to her. He dropped down beside her and lifted her into his arms, and for an instant there was complete silence between them. She just looked at him, looked up into his face steadily and calmly, as if she could read his mind and had the good sense to realize there could be no more certain way of reassuring him. Then her arms tightened about him. "Darling," she whispered. "Darling, darling…."
Corriston started fumbling with his oxygen mask and suddenly he had it off. He held his breath and more slowly helped her free her lips so that he could kiss her. Their lips met and the kiss was longer and more intense than any they had ever before shared.
A half hour later the tractors were in rumbling motion again, their destination Ramsey's Citadel. And Corriston had a plan. He knew that it was riddled with risks and that he was perhaps quite mad to think that it might succeed. But the fact that Helen Ramsey was now completely safe and had dropped off into a brief, outwardly untroubled sleep at his side made him feel reckless to the point where a cautious, level-headed man like Drever could only stare at him and shake his head.
There was a swaying and a creaking all about them, the slow, steady rumble of caterpillar treads, and Drever had almost to shout to make himself heard. He stood directly opposite Corriston, supporting himself by a guard rail, and watching the desert through the weather-shield change color in the wake of the heavy vehicle's heaving, churning, torpedo-shaped rear-end.
"Stone's been unconscious now for an hour," Drever said, dividing his gaze between Corriston, and the loosely strapped-in, sleeping girl at his side, both swaying with the swaying tractor. "We can't count on getting any more information out of him. I can't wake him up. Drugs would be dangerous. I don't think he'll live, but we can't deliberately kill him to get him to talk."
"I know that," Corriston said.
"But he's the only one who knows why Henley is staying so long at the Citadel. He should have been back hours ago. He left before you escaped from the ship. For all we know, he may be dead. Ramsey may have lost his head and had him shot, although that seems unlikely. Ramsey would go to any length to save his daughter. But we've no way of knowing whether he believed Henley's story or not. Anything could have happened. Henley may have attacked Ramsey."
"I've a feeling that he's still at the Citadel," Corriston said. "I'll have to gamble on that—the one-in-five chance that for some reason the negotiations have been prolonged. He may be lying dead in the desert somewhere. He may have been attacked by lamprenes. As you say, anything could have happened. But when I make up my mind to do something I usually go through with it. It's just a matter of plain common sense. You don't toss aside a decision you've given a great deal of thought to just because the arguments against it are weighty, too."
"I see. So you're still determined to walk right up to the gate and tell them you're Stone."
"Why not? They've never laid eyes on Stone and they don't know me from Adam. I won't be wearing this uniform. I'll tell them that Henley's expecting me, that he left orders for me to join him if he failed to come back at a specified time. I'll watch the guard's face and change my story a little—if I have to—as I go along."
"It's a very long gamble. I hope you realize that."
"It's either that or no gamble at all. And we've got to gamble. We're holding at least two high cards and a joker. Henley has had the ground shot right out from under him. He's completely alone, and the only thing he has left to gamble with is his nearness to Ramsey, his ability to terrify Ramsey by making him believe that his daughter's life is still in danger. Ramsey has to be told that Helen has been freed, has to be warned in time, before he does anything foolish.
"Don't you see? With that threat hanging over him, Ramsey would never let us get within fifty yards of the Citadel, let alone walk through the gates. And if Henley finds out that we've got Helen, he'll know that he has nothing left to gamble with except that desperate bluff. And he may doubt his ability to win with a bluff. That would be the worst tragedy of all. He may turn on Ramsey in blind rage, and kill him. He gets a horrible, pathological pleasure out of killing. I've told you how he went berserk on the Station."
Drever nodded, and, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the look of stubborn opposition was gone from his eyes.
"I guess you're right, Lieutenant. You can't always tell how the cards will fall."
"You can never tell," Corriston said. "And there are some games where the important moves can only be made by just one player, and he usually has to be something of a reckless fool."
20
The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.
The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.
For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.
Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston's side.
"We can't be far from the ship now," he said. "I wish there was some way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man to accompany him…."
"Freddy will be all right," Corriston said. "You don't know what it means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he's done it."
The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.
"I'm not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground," the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very near now.
"Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is," Drever said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve his inner tension.
"They're a very primitive form of life, really," the geologist said. "They look like large gray snakes, but they're actually more like worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they've' attached themselves it's almost impossible to dislodge them. You've seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I'm sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard—the galaka—as you know."
"All right," Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation returning. "Now I suppose you're going to tell us exactly how they kill their prey."
"I don't have to tell you how they kill men," Macklin said. "You know as much about that as I do. You've been on Mars before. You've seen at least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a man when he's asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He doesn't just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty horrible. They're more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then…."
"All right, now I've heard an expert confirm it. I'd be grateful if you'll just shut up."
"Lieutenant, I told you—"
"Never mind, Doctor. I'm asking him to shut up."
In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions across the desert.
But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.
And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the unmistakable stamp of reality.
Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared, watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to. The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were in each other's way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement was possible.
Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort. Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and shouting to the colonists behind him.
"Get to that man as quickly as possible!" he ordered. "There's no time to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your hands. Don't let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get them off if you can. If you can't, bring him here. Carry him slung between you."
Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert, walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had thought of it themselves.
He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an instant before.
But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.
Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by just one lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"
It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve poison and it spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries."
Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man was Stone.
It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.
Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.
"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."
"I—I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler … double-crossed Henley. I guess … he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken her. I'm telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."
"All right," Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. "I believe you. Take it easy now. They've got the lamprene off."
He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again, telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked him down.
There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley's vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But Corriston wasn't thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few minutes, or hours before?
He'd have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he'd put off asking it, dreading the thought of what Stone's answer might be. But now he had no choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could not be immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away across the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and that tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would have to be a joint undertaking.
It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston's rage, his bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent enough to destroy anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in relentless pursuit of Saddler and if it took days to track him down….
It was Freddy's voice that brought him back to reality, startling and sobering him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors, shouting at the top of his lungs.
19
Corriston woke up to the hum of human voices, the soft whisper of the wind, the gentle stirring of sand. He awoke to coldness and brightness, to sunlight that dazzled him with its brightness.
Corriston remembered then. Not everything at once, but just the first thing. There were no guideposts. That was always the first thing to remember when you woke up from a brief, twenty-minute sleep on Mars.
In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. It would always be that way, it could never change.
Just lie very still and listen, listen to the voices of men who are risking their lives to help you. Listen and be grateful; listen and be proud.
All at once Corriston realized that an amazing discussion was going on. They were discussing an eleven-year-old boy who had done an absolutely crazy thing. He had followed his father into the desert by concealing himself in one of the tractors, behind a liquid-fuel cylinder, and was now a member of the 210 man rescue team.
"Mars is no place for a kid. Dr. Drever ought to be ashamed of himself. If a man has children—well, Mars is simply no place for children."
"That's right. A boy of eleven needs companions his own age to help him over the growingpain hurdles. He needs a backyard to play in. When I was a kid I had a bike of my own, a bull terrier pup, a collection of butterflies, a stamp collection and a simply amazing talent for roughing up my clothes.
"Mars is the worst of all possible worlds for a kid like Freddy. We're buoyed up by the bigness and the newness and the strangeness of everything. The mile-high granite cliffs don't really belong to a planet smaller than Earth. But they're here and we accept them. We pit our technical brilliance—or lack of it—against the rugged grandeur of the mountains and the plains and we can take even the sandstorms in our stride. But to bring a kid here—"
"Drever is a widower. He quite naturally didn't want to put his son in an orphanage. Besides, there are thirteen other young kids in the Colony."
"That doesn't excuse it. There are plenty of childless single men."
"How many of them could step into Drever's shoes and grow to his stature as the first really great medical specialist on Mars? You're forgetting the hell he had to go through just to pass the preliminary screening. It's rugged for a man of his attainments. They not only insist that he be good; they want him to be the best."
"That's true enough, I suppose. And now that he's here he probably couldn't be replaced. Experience of a very special sort does things for a man. And to a man, if you like."
"I'm simply stressing that Mars is simply not a place for a kid of Freddy's age. When he goes roaming he gets his lungs choked with dust. He couldn't ride a bike on Mars—if he had a bike. Worst of all, he has no kids of his own age to play with. And now he comes on a trip like this. Does he hope to rescue the Ramsey girl all by himself?"
Corriston got up then. The three men who had been discussing Dr. Drever's son stood by the smoldering embers of a burnt out campfire. They were kindly looking men but a certain narrow-mindedness was stamped on the faces of at least two of them.
Corriston shrugged off his weariness and walked up to them. "Nonsense!" he said.
A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian geologist, and a good one.
"Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn't we get started?"
"We should and we will," Corriston said. "But a good many men collapsed from the cold this morning. If we don't arrive at that ship in force, we may live to regret it. Where's Freddy? Have you seen him?"
The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: "Over there," he said. "His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of."
Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.
Dr. Drever's son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.
Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He had felt like a dwarf child.
"Why did you do it, Freddy?" Corriston asked. "Your father is very upset and worried."
Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.
"I had to come," he said. "I had to."
"But why?"
"I don't know."
"I see."
Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: "I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you'd be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You'd be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates."
Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. "How did you know?" he gasped.
"I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy—once," Corriston said.
"Gee, thanks," Freddy said.
"Thanks for what?"
"Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston."
Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.
"We're starting again in ten minutes," he said. "Better have another cup of coffee all around."
18
Corriston walked out into the central square and stood there. For a moment no one said a word. One of the doctors was there with him. He'd had a sandwich and coffee before leaving the hospital and his nerves felt steady and his voice was pitched low.
"I don't know a single one of these men, Dr. Tomlinson," he said. "I spent a week in the colony four years ago, but I just don't see anyone I recognize. I'm afraid you'll have to introduce me around."
It took a full hour to really get acquainted, to plan what had to be done, to check over the tractors, the ammunition supplies, the equipment of each and every man.
They had to cross eighty-seven miles of desert to a heavily guarded cave and then move on perhaps to Ramsey's fortress. They had to be prepared for any eventuality.
The morale was good. Corriston could sense the grim determination in every man, the faith in their mission, the anger. It cheered him.
He walked around between the tractors, listening to stray bits of talk, getting better acquainted with everyone as the minutes sped by.
He took out his watch and looked at it and decided that time was running short.
Give each and every man twenty minutes, he thought. Then we get rolling. Thirty caterpillar tractors and two hundred and ten men. And in the ship are two men holed up—possibly three now—with all the portable fighting equipment of a two thousand ton spaceship at their disposal. And if Henley has returned—
Suddenly Corriston found himself sweating in the silence, despite the cold, despite the hoar frost that was beginning to collect on the rim of his oxygen mask. There was a split second of shouting from one of the tractors and then it started up, with a coughing and spitting that drowned out the human voices.
All along the wide, rust-red street other tractors came to life. In the thin air of Mars, in the pale sky, a single blue cloud hung suspended.
It was wispy thin, incredibly thin, a hollow mockery of a cloud. But the scene below would have been less remarkable had the sky remained cloudless, for then Mars would have seemed completely unlike Earth and the human drama less compelling.
There was something tremendous in the forward march of the tractors, in the clatter and the rising dust, the shouts of the men at the controls and the women who ran swift-footed along the sand to urge them to greater fortitude. The women knew that endurance would be needed, for twenty-first century weapons of warfare could destroy a hundred tractors and spatter the desert with blood before retaliation could become complete and justice be fully satisfied.
So the women did not weep or lament. They ran parallel with the tractors, urging their men onward, stifling their own inner fears in the greatness of the moment.
Corriston waited for the last tractor to come abreast of him before he leapt aboard it. There was the smell of acrid grease in the air, a smell of burning. The mechanical parts set up a dull rumbling, and as Corriston swung himself aboard, a voice said: "I'm Stanley Gregor. If I had any sense I wouldn't take part in this. I came to Mars with the second expedition. I'm sixty-two years old but somehow today I feel young. There's no longer any doubt in my mind that Henley is a scoundrel. Why we trusted him I don't know. I'm here to do my part in rectifying an error."
"Sure," Corriston said, settling down at the side of a big, awkward-looking man with red hair. "Sure, I understand. Take it easy. We're all in this together."
"We've got eighty-seven miles of desert to cross. It's going to be tough. Have you seen the fortress Ramsey built to protect himself?"
"No," Corriston said.
"There are twenty-five square miles of fortified defenses—photoelectric eye installations. They spot you when you're a half-mile away. Try to storm those installations even with a dozen armed tractors, and you'll be pulverized into dust. Try to storm them on foot with the most formidable of energy weapons, and you'll be electrocuted. You'll hang suspended on barbed wire. Think that over, Lieutenant."
"I've thought it over," Corriston said. "We won't have to storm the fortress unless they've taken Ramsey's daughter there, or if Ramsey himself is in danger. And if he is in danger, he'll welcome our help. We're going to the ship first and there are only two men on the ship."
"But they've got plenty of ammunition, haven't they? They've got the ship's military installations. Anyway you slice it, it's a dangerous gamble."
"I never thought it was anything else," Corriston said.
