Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “Mathematics could explain it,” said Dawson through wooden lips. “But I think I’ve got the general picture already. It’s the fault of the teleport.”

  “How?”

  “When we use the teleport, we travel through a sort of interspace between Mars and Earth, in which the distance is insignificant—infinitesimal, so that for practical purposes we have the planets superimposed. In space, that is. But not in time. What we’ve never realized—they’re out of alignment in that fourth dimension, and when you travel from Earth to Mars via teleport, you’re going from the Earth of now to the Mars of God knows how many thousand years ago.”

  “And this—” began Dave and stopped.

  “This is the Mars of many thousand years to come, in terms of the teleport. We crossed spice in a rocket and arrived only two weeks after we started instead of thousands of years before.” He paused, looking down at the heap of bleached bones at their feet. “So this, for us, is Mars of the far future—when the race of man is gone.”

  The numbness had gone on holding Dave throughout Dawson’s explanation: but now something snapped and it vanished. He stared wildly at the technician, crying out: “Gone? Where do you get that? Maybe they’re still alive back on Earth.”

  Dawson shook his head savagely. “They’re gone, I tell you. If the race had lived, they’d have come back, because they always come back.” He looked as if he were about to cry as he gazed about at the wilderness of wreckage around him. “Perhaps they destroyed themselves, at last. And we—Callahan thought we were the first men on Mars, but we’re the last.”

  Dave thought of Callahan and how, even now, the old man would not have given up. He cried, “We’ve got to go back—warn them! If men know what’s coming, they can plan and avoid it.”

  Dawson refused to meet his look: his eyes continued to dwell on the ruins. He said softly, “I don’t think that we did get back.”

  Then Dave remembered that Callahan had been mad, and that because he had been mad he had led these calm, sane, brilliant young-men in the conquest of certain impossibilities of space and matter. And he realized that what they lacked now was another madman to lead them in the conquest of the impossibility of time. He laughed aloud.

  He faced them, and shouted: “We’re going back!”

  THE END.

  WHEN THE ROCKETS CAME

  The trouble with trying to set up a colonial way of life really matched to the new planet is that it’s a hard way of life. The majority won’t like it—and they’ll try to destroy it with all the brutal power of the home-planet’s culture behind them.

  Two hundred miles deep in the Boishayapustynya, there is no longer any sign that human and animal life exists on Mars. The winds rush morning and evening over the waste and whirl clouds of iron oxide dust over every trace of wheels or feet; and over this desert even the great wyverns rarely cross, and the men who dwell there are the Izgnanniki—

  The expeditionary column rolled forward at forty miles an hour through a vast emptiness of sand; the wind had died an hour before, and the grinding of broad wheels, the purr of engines and the subdued mutter of men’s voices—all seeming far away in the thin Martian air—were the only sounds, and the sway and dip of the thirty armored cars as they climbed and slid over in the dunes, and the swirl of red dust from under their wheels, were all the motion there was. The sun was sinking in that pallid Martian sunset that looks colder than an Earthly dawn.

  “We’re already in Izgnannik country,” said Colonel Sokol, squinting nervously through the narrow window slits of the third car. He cast a glance then at the soldier who sat across from him on the other lengthwise seat, they two alone in the rear compartment of the swaying vehicle; a long-legged, lean-faced young man in full Martian fighting gear, respirator mask and insulated suit, with an automatic rifle cradled lovingly on his knees. Vic Denning looked perfectly relaxed, almost asleep; his head nodded gently to the motion of the car. At his commander’s voice, however, he opened half-shut eyes.

  “Think they’ll be with us before long, sir?” he asked with a mildness which, in him, was deceptive.

  The officer shook his head, glancing needlessly at his wrist watch. “I don’t know. They may not even attack tonight; if so, our orders are to push on into the Pustynya until they do attack.” He paused, cleared his throat, and asked a little hesitantly, “How do you feel?”

  Denning grinned slowly, an expression which gave a boyish look to his narrow face. “Tired of riding in this bus,” he said casually. “I can’t wait for the Izgnanniki to get on our tails.”

  His lazy glance made the colonel still more nervous; he said with a conscious control over his voice, remembering too that Denning, after all, was going into far greater danger than any of the rest of them: “They probably will be soon enough.”

  “Fine,” said Denning, a look of faint amusement in his eyes as they rested on his superior. “I’m anxious for the shooting to start. What gets me is, I’ve been on Mars two years now and haven’t been in a decent fight.”

  Colonel Sokol eyed the younger man thoughtfully; as field commander, his had been the final O.K. which had selected Denning from the scanty list of volunteers for the most hazardous mission that the Colonial Staff had conceived in years. Now, at the eleventh hour before action, he saw no reason to regret the half-hunch that had made him pick the man. Of course, he knew Denning’s record in the Aresia garrison: A hard drinker and a tough talker, whose brawls had landed him in trouble more than once with the civilian and military police. But now the same man was riding with all the coolness in the world toward a rendezvous with probable death.

  “Shooting,” Denning remarked, breaking the silence again, “is what made me leave Earth so fast. I burned holes in a couple of fat bellies that the police were fond of, clown in Brasil. That was in the course of Simao Coelho Pereira’s—old Quail-you’s—little try at making a revolution in the old style—remember, December of 563? I got out to North America, but they’d have extradited me in no time if I hadn’t slipped aboard an emigrant rocket for Mars, and enlisted in the Colonial Army here before my record caught up with me.”

  The colonel was startled neither by Denning’s past nor by his casual recounting of it. He said slowly, “I think the successful performance of your present mission will deserve something rather special in the way of recognition by the North American government. They won’t be likely to remember anything more about your past difficulties.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” inquired Denning superciliously. “That’s the reason I volunteered. When I come back from this little party I’ll be a hero. A first-class hero. I can go back to Earth if I want to, and nobody will remember a thing. But I want to live on Mars, anyway; I like it.”

  “Not many people do,” commented Colonel Sokol. “Witness the inducements offered to settlers.”

  “And do you know why they don’t want to live here?” demanded Denning. He looked fully awake now; he shifted the automatic rifle to a position between his knees, both big, lean hands clasping the barrel. “Because they’re soft, that’s why. The whole Earth is soft; it’s too civilized. Do you know what? If the North American government would ship all you Earth-born so-called soldiers, that sit around and whimper to go home, back there, and raise an army from among the settlers that have been fighting this planet hand to hand for a hundred years, they’d have a real fighting army. But—they wouldn’t have Mars for another decade; they won’t have it forever, anyway. I’d like to be around when that shooting starts.”

  The car rolled and lurched steadily on; Colonel Sokol’s eyes dwelt broodingly on the window slits and the darkening landscape of dunes that swept past beyond them, and abruptly he leaned forward and pressed the buttons which closed them all simultaneously. Outside, somewhere, the Izgnanniki might already have spotted them and be circling cautiously in to attack as soon as night fell. He did not switch off the light inside the car; their orders were to be seen and attacked, so that Vic Denning could carry o
ut his assigned mission. Anyway, is was believed that the Izgnanniki had infrared seeing devices.

  Colonel Sokol felt, in the bottom of his stomach, the beginning of that sick empty feeling which never failed to come before battle. He had known it in the war with the Zapadnyiki and in the battle of the Morje; he had never gone into a fight without a suppressed but desperate fear of the enemy and his weapons. Denning here—a different type of man. A type that the colonel knew only in theory.

  “Earth is rotten,” said Denning, leaning back once more in his seat. “Earth has gone soft with machines. Mars isn’t so bad; Mars is new and hard and it lets only the hard stay here. I’d like to go back to Earth for a little while, sure; Earth women are nicer—they’re soft too, and women ought to be soft. But Mars is the planet for men.”

  The colonel eyed him narrowly. He realized that the man was talking mostly to blow off steam, in a way; and his apparent sleepiness a short time before had been only another means of release from the tension that Sokol felt as a sickness in his stomach. It must be dark outside by now.

  “Denning,” he said softly, “you are a representative of a type which I, personally, have never met before—a type of humanity almost extinct in this year of civilization 566. If there were more like you, we might have conquered Mars twice as fast as we have; but it’s been bred out of the race. The fighting blood—humanity has bred it out and killed it out with machines. The last group of men on Earth who were selected and bred to fight was the flying aristocracy of the airplane age, and most of that strain was wiped out when the atomic blast was invented, because the fightless people—the soft people, if you like—could still hate and press buttons. Perhaps you have some of that old blood in you.”

  “Maybe so,” acquiesced Denning, his eyes half-closed again. “I’ve suspected for a long time that some of my ancestors were bastards.”

  Colonel Sokol realized, introspectively, that talking was an outlet for him as well; it helped him forget the darkness coming down outside, and the Izgnanniki. He said soberly, “You feel, rightly no doubt, that Earth no longer has place for the fighting breed. But you’ve found your true place here, Denning, on the new frontier. There’s always room for the fighters in the advance guard of civilization.”

  “To hell with the advance guard of civilization,” said Denning, grinning his boy’s grin once more. “What I want is to get in the fight.”

  The colonel thought: A curiously unbalanced mind; and not the least curious thing about it is that he knows his imbalance, after a fashion, and has found a fairly workable formula for living with it. A man who enjoys living most when death is at his elbow is beyond the understanding of most of us, though. But perhaps he does indeed have his place. At any rate, some time tonight he will probably leave this car and try to be captured by the Izgnanniki, in the hope of being carried alive to the hidden villages which our patrol cruisers have never been able to find and blast, and which have held up the march of Earth culture into the Pustynya for almost fifty years. And if he accomplishes that and sends the signal, then his personal hope will be to survive the attack when the rockets come, and live to be a hero. But that last is wholly immaterial to society.

  Suddenly the ear slithered to a halt with locked brakes, and the night became thunderous with explosions.

  Colonel Sokol picked up the intercommunication radiophone at his elbow.

  Vic Denning’s eyes opened and he came to his feet in the tilted car. He tucked his automatic close under one arm, and saluted—a salute with some mockery in it—with the other hand. “So long, sir, and good luck making it back to Fort 16. Don’t bother wishing me any, because I make my own.”

  “You’ll need all of it,” said Sokol without looking up. He was already hunched tensely over the phone, listening and talking low and fast. His pale-blue eyes were slitted, and he flinched a little when the shells hit near.

  Denning lay flat on his back, his shoulders pressed hard into a hollow in the slope of the dune. Hell was open for business in the night around him, and he was filled with the clear, fierce joy that was always new to him.

  He longed to get up, though, and do some of that shooting himself. One outflung hand was clasped around the grip of his automatic rifle, but he couldn’t get up and use it. The success of his mission—He had to wait here until the Izgnanniki found him.

  There was a ground-shaking thud as another car blew up, adding its red glare to the lurid light that turned the desert into a place of eerie, leaping shadows. There was a brief moment of day, a thunderclap and a deafening drone, as some wheeling Earth car found a target within the range of a heavy flame gun. The quick clatter of automatics, the whoosh of rocket launchers and the sharp, thrilling bang of the bursting shells, went on without stopping; the engines had whined into motion again and the battle was moving away to the west.

  Sokol was out there somewhere in the dark, if he was still alive, Sokol whose nerves had stuck out all over him just before the attack started, trying to fight his column back to safety across two hundred miles of desert. Sokol was a poor civilian in Army clothes, like most of the rest; but you had to give the guy some credit, he would go into a corner when the Colonial Staff told him to and he would fight like anybody else to get out of it.

  The bullets had stopped snapping past just over where Denning lay; the engine noises and the concussions were growing more distant. He shifted position where he was, fitting his body better into the hollow his sliding feet had torn in the sand. Denning chuckled to himself, remembering how he had come down that slope. Well, the air had been full of things that screamed and whispered as they went by, and he wanted to live to be a hero, didn’t he?

  He went on lying there, closing his eyes; very likely, since the Izgnanniki were following the column’s retreat, he wouldn’t be picked up until morning, when they came back along the trail of the running battle in search of loot or survivors, in that case, maybe he’d just as well go to sleep; he would look more like a casualty asleep anyway. He tested his respirator to make sure no sand had clogged it, and ran his tongue over the radio signal device hidden cleverly behind his upper teeth. The receding gunfire and explosions lulled him.

  He was really almost asleep when the three cars came careening swiftly over the crest of the dune. They were almost upon him before they saw him; two of them slammed on the brakes and slid to a sandspraying stop, the other went on by and wheeled back to stop a few feet from him. It was a regular enveloping maneuver for one apparently dead Earthman.

  The cars were Izgnannik, all right; even if Deimos hadn’t been up to show their low-slung outline and their lesser size to Denning’s slitted glance, nobody could mistake the noise those internal-combustion exhausts made for the whine of an Earthly electric motor. Then there were guttural words in a Martian dialect which Denning understood well enough, because like all other Martian tongues it went back to the classical Russki of Earth.

  “Uzhe myertvy,” said one voice, sounding impatient.

  There was a metallic sound, a door thrown open, and footsteps crunched toward Denning. “Nablyudam by,” said another one, from a tall figure that loomed suddenly above him, indistinct in the faint moonlight. Then Denning’s rifle was kicked from his hand, leaving him with bruised fingers, and an instant later the same foot landed heavily in his ribs.

  Denning grunted and stirred; he forced himself to sit up slowly, groggily, mastering the passionate need to get up and start killing the man who had kicked him. The Martian stood over him with an air of triumph reflected in the very attitude of his tall figure.

  “Ba! Zhivoi,” he exclaimed; then, with a harsh voice of command, to Denning, “Vstav! Ty shemnik?”

  Denning thought it over briefly, then decided it wouldn’t hurt to show that he knew the language; it might even help. And there was certainly no harm in admitting that he was an Earthman—that was obvious anyway. He answered, “Da,” in a thick voice that he did not need to counterfeit, for his mouth radio made a tough proposition. “Da, ya sh
emnik . . . Vhitvam sahlushdalsha . . .” Then, as if he had suddenly realized where he was, “Chto jest?” he gasped as if panic-stricken.

  “My Izgnanniki,” answered the man standing over him.

  He says that, thought Denning, like he expected me to faint from fear. They’ve made their name something that a lot of Martians and even some Earth settlers tremble at, the Driven Out, the robbers and killers of the Great Desert—He sat still as if frozen by the name.

  “Vstav!” ordered the Martian again, and his toe nudged Denning once more.

  The Earthman climbed to his feet, stiffly, unsteadily; it was hard acting. He stood facing the other, his hands dangling; there was a weapon in the Izgnannik’s hand that looked like an Earth-made flame pistol. He saw that the other two had not left the cars that loomed nearby on the slope of the dune; and he yearned to tackle the man in front of him, try to grab the flame gun and kill the other two before they could shoot. From their attitude of careless superiority he thought he would have anyway a fifty-fifty chance—but he had to think about his mission.

  He could feel the Martian’s eyes contemptuous upon him: then the warrior turned away to his car and flung open the door to the rear compartment. Silently, he gestured with the gun for Denning to crawl into the black interior.

  Well, it was a relief to know that they planned to keep him alive for a while. Sliding into the back of the car under the menace of the pistol, he remembered the stories he had heard; some of the neighboring “reconciled” peoples said, indeed, that the wild Outcasts took prisoners, but there were other, not-so-nice stories about what happened to those prisoners rather promptly afterward.

  When Denning was cramped inside the rear compartment, among lashed-down boxes that were no doubt food, tools, and ammunition, the Izgnannik dosed the door until only a narrow space remained for ventilation—Denning had feared he wouldn’t leave any—and locked it there. Denning’s hands and feet were free, but it was all he could do to move even slightly in the stifling little space he had.