Stowaway to Mars (24 page)

'Pity we can't signal them direct,' Dale said. He looked out of the other window. 'If she'd only landed a few feet farther to the left we could have seen her windows and there wouldn't be any need for this three cornered ' He broke off suddenly as a string of machines came scuttling at top speed round the flank of an intervening sand hill. 'Hullo, what the devil's happening now?'

The others crowded up to him. They watched the machines swerve on to a course headed for the bushes. A moment later they were followed by a dozen or so more, also travelling fast. Away to the left Froud noticed a series of reflected flashes crossing the crest of another dune.

'More active ironware on the way,' he announced. 'What the dickens is up now? Whatever it is, these nearer chaps don't seem to care for it. Watch their dust.'

The unwieldy cavalcade lumbered past, making the best speed its ill assorted parts would allow. Froud dashed across to the other window.

'The ones round Karaminoff are sheering off, too,' he reported. 'Streaking for the '

'Good God!' said Dugan's voice. 'Look at that!'

He pointed wildly at an object which had suddenly made an appearance on the top of the dune between themselves and the other ship. A strange, tank like device supported by innumerable short legs which ended in wide round plates. It stopped abruptly on the crest. The sunlight reflecting from its curved casework and the glittering of its lenses made it hard to look at. A sudden discharge of bright blue flashes snapped from its bows, and immediately consternation smote the fleeing machines. There were no missiles, no visible causes for the turmoil into which they were thrown, yet the disorganization was complete. They lost their course and began to run this way and that with a wild, senseless flourishing of tentacles and jointed levers. Their ill matched legs bore them on erratic lines so that they fouled one another and crashed ponderously together. A number tripped and fell, breaking or twisting the legs of others. There was a fresh salvo of flashes from the large machine, and the confusion grew. Had such a thing been possible, the crew of the Gloria Mundi would have said that they were watching machines go mad. They became a berserk mass of milling, flailing metal, surging this way and that, hopelessly tangled and interlocked, crashing and buffeting back and forth in an insane melee. The tank like contrivance trundled down the hill, still emitting its blue flashes and driving the machines to even greater frenzies of self destruction. A dozen or more coffin shaped objects ran in its wake. Except for the lack of one pair of legs they were identical with that in Joan's pictures.

'Well, thank Heaven for some machines which look as if they had been built by men who were at least fairly sane,' said Dugan.

'Allegory,' said Froud. 'Order putting paid to Chaos.'

'But why should there be chaotic machines at all?' asked the doctor.

'Why,' Froud countered, 'should Chaos ever have existed?'

The big machine ceased its fusillade. The recent besiegers appeared to have reduced themselves to a few heaps of scrap metal. Froud admired the efficiency of the operation. He said admiringly:

'You know, that's one of the bigger ideas. Just send your opponents potty, and watch them wipe one another out. We must take the notion back with us. Now, what do you suppose happens next?'

AT first Joan did not know why she awoke. The room was silent and dark. Vaygan had not woken. She lay still and quiet, pressed against his side, with her head on his shoulder, listening to his breathing; her left arm lay across his chest, rising and falling gently with its rhythm. Then, gradually she became aware of another sound a faint, familiar humming somewhere close by which told her that a machine was in the room. She held her breath to listen, and then relaxed. What did it matter? Let the machines run about like the silly toys they were. They no longer had any importance.

There was a cold touch on her shoulder, and a harsh, metallic voice spoke out of the darkness. She sat up swiftly. Vaygan woke too as his arm fell from about her. He put his hand over hers.

'What is it?' he asked.

'A machine,' she said, almost in a whisper. 'It touched me.'

With his other hand he found the switch, and the ceiling diffused a gradually increasing light. The machine was standing close beside the bed with its cold, blank lenses turned full on them.

'What is it?' Vaygan repeated, but this time he asked the question of the machine.

As before, Joan was unable to follow the harsh rapidity of its mechanical speech, but she watched the expressions on Vaygan's face as he listened, and her heart sank. After a few questions which involved lengthy answers he turned to her. She knew from the look in his eyes what he was going to say before she heard the words.

'The medical report was unfavourable you carry dangerous bacteria. It says that you will have to go.'

'No, Vaygan. It's wrong. I'm healthy and clean.'

He took both her hands in his.

'My dear, it is true. The tests can't lie. I was afraid of it. The Earthly bacteria you carry might start a disease here which would wipe all my people out and you, they say, are not immune from many of the bacteria we carry. It would be both suicide and murder for your people and mine to mix.'

'But you and I, Vaygan. We?'

He agreed softly. 'I know, my dear I know.'

'Oh, let me stay. Let me stay here with you...'

'It is not possible. They say you must go.'

'They? The Machines?'

'Not just the Machines. My people say it.'

Joan dropped back and hid her face in the pillow. Vaygan slid one arm round her bare shoulders. With his other hand he stroked her hair.

'Joan. Joan. Listen. You could not stay here. Even mixing with us you could not live our life for you it would be only a slow death. You would be lonely as no one has ever been lonely before. Your heart would break, my dear and mine, too, I think. I could not stand seeing you crushed by hopelessness. The very old and the very young have nothing to share. For a few moments you and I have met. For a time at least I have known through you how I might have lived; almost I have known how it feels to belong to a race in its youth. Now it is finished, but I shall never forget, for you have given me something which is beautiful beyond all I ever dreamed.'

Joan raised her face and looked at him through tears.

'No, Vaygan. No. They can't make me go now. A few days a week. Can't they let us have just a week?'

The voice of the machine broke in harshly.

'It says that there is not much time,' Vaygan told her. 'The rocket must start just after dawn, or it will have to wait another day.'

'Make it wait, Vaygan. Keep me here and make it wait one more day.'

'I couldn't if I would.' He looked at the machine. 'It's their world now, and they don't want you. That is the message you are to take back to Earth with you. Earth is to leave Mars alone. Some years ago they sent a ship to Earth to prospect, and when it came back, that was their j decision: They mean it, Joan.'

But she seemed not to hear him. She put up her hand and gripped his shoulder.

'Vaygan, you shall come back with us. Why shouldn't you come back? There'll be room in the Gloria Mundi. I can persuade Dale to take you, you can get him some more fuel if necessary. Yes, you must. Oh, say you'll come, Vaygan, my dear.'

He looked sadly into her face.

'I can't, Joan.'

'But you must. Oh, you shall.'

'But, my darling, don't you see? I must not mix with your race any more than you with mine.'

He slipped from the bed. He stood beside it for a moment, looking down at her. Then he pulled the coverlet aside and picked her up. She clung to him.

'Oh, Vaygan. Vaygan.'

'Hoy!' said Dugan. 'You're the prize scholar. What's this chap trying to tell us?'

Froud joined him at the window and together they watched the antics of the machine below. It was scratching characters very busily on a carefully smoothed piece of ground.

'Quite a little sand artist, isn't he?' Froud said. 'As far as I can see, it's an instruction that we must leave one something after dawn.'

'What do you mean "one something"?'

'I suppose it's a measure of time of some kind.'

'Very helpful. Hi, Dale l'

'What is it?' Dale looked up irritably from his calculations.

'Sailing orders, but we can't read 'em.'

'Well, if you can't, you can't. My reckoning came out at one hour and twenty minutes after dawn, which means that we've now got' he glanced at the clock'thirty two minutes to go.'

Froud drifted over to another window. Across the intervening dunes he could see the Tovaritch glistening in the early light. Like the Gloria Mundi she had been raised to the perpendicular with her blunt nose pointing to the sky. He frowned, wondering how the machines had accomplished the erection in so short a time, wondering too if the occupants of the Tovaritch had also suffered the indignity of being flung in a heap as the ship suddenly tilted beneath them.

'There's one thing I can't forgive,' he muttered to no one in particular,' 'and that's their keeping us bottled in here while they tipped it up. I'd have given a lot to see how they did it, and to get some pictures of it.'

'It was too dark for pictures, anyhow,' the doctor told him consolingly, 'but I do wish they'd given us some warning. Nearly cracked my skull on the floor as we went up. Would have done if one wasn't so light here.'

Froud took no notice of him. He was going on. 'I've covered a few dud assignments in my time, but of all the flops, this is the floppiest. We come here, we get chased about by crazy machines and we get told to go home again by slightly less crazy machines. We don't know what makes them work, who made them, how they made them, where they made them, when they made them, nor why they made them. In fact, we don't know a blasted thing, and the whole outing has been too damn' silly for words. We've lost Joan, poor kid, and Burns was laid out for nothing. If this is interplanetary exploration, give me archaeology.'

'On the other hand,' the doctor put in, 'we know that life still exists here by the canals. I've got some specimens, you've got some photographs. Dale has proved that it is possible to make a flight between '

'Hullo' Froud interrupted. 'Here's something in a hurry, just look at it.' He watched a bright speck tearing towards them and covering the successive lines of dunes at a prodigious pace.

'It looks different from the rest. I believe it's carrying something. Where are those glasses? It is. It's holding a man in those tentacle things. It's coming here. Stand by the airlock, Dugan.'

Dugan obediently pulled over the lever for the outer door.

'How's he going to reach it?' he began, but a shout from Froud cut him short.

'It isn't. It's Joan. Joan!' He dropped the glasses and waved frantically. An arm lifted in reply as the machine passed round the rocket and out of his sight.

All four of them crowded round the inner door of the airlock watching for the glow of the indicator. .

'How are they going to get her up to it?' Dugan asked anxiously.

'Don't you worry. A little thing like that's not going to -- -There!' Froud finished as the warning light switched on. Dugan pulled over his lever and turned the valve wheel. A few seconds later the door opened and Joan stepped out.

She did not seem to notice their welcome. She unscrewed her glass like helmet and slipped off her overall suit without heeding the questions fired at her. When she looked up they saw that she was crying.

'Please, not now. I'll tell you later,' she said.

They watched in astonished silence as she ran to the trap door and disappeared into the room below. At last Froud scratched his head ruefully. He bent down and picked up the silvery suit she had dropped.

'Now where on earth on Mars, I mean -- do you suppose that she got hold of this?'

Joan lay on the couch in the little cabin. She was speaking softly in a voice which did not reach to the other room. He had promised that he would switch on the screen. She knew that in that room, far away in Hanno, her face was looking at him from the wall and her voice whispering in his ears. She had so much to tell hire so many might-have-beens . . .

It seemed no more than a minute or two before Dale's voice called:

'Couches everyone!' and, 'Don't forget your straps, Joan.'

'All right,' she told him weakly as her hands reached for them.

Only a few minutes left. She whispered more urgently in the empty room. Seconds now. She could hear Dale counting the past away, slowly and deliberately . . .

'Five-four-three-two-one-'

'Oh, Vaygan. Vaygan . . .'

THE story of the Gloria Mundi's return is well known. Since even the schoolbooks will tell you how she landed in North Africa on the seventh of April, 1982, with only a litre or two of spare fuel in her tanks, it is unnecessary for me to give a detailed account. And if you want figures to explain why the return journey took seventy days whereas the outward journey took seventy four, or if you want to know how many minutes and seconds more than forty hours she spent on Mars, I cannot do better than refer you again to The Bridging of Space which Dale has crammed with vast (and, to me, indigestible) quantities of mathematical and technical information.

The experiences of her crew and particularly those of Joan started arguments which are not dead yet, for while one school of thought regards them as evidence that man on Mars has really mastered the machine and used it for his own ends, the other adduces them as proving the direct opposite. And there, for lack of corroborative detail, the matter see saws to the contempt of a third body of opinion which does not believe a word of their stories and declares that the whole flight was a hoax.

In the early excitement of their return it was enough for the people of Earth that man had at last flung his first flimsy feeler into space. Dale and his crew were feted; even the learned societies rivalled one another in honouring them, and never perhaps has so great a publicity value been attached to so few names.