by Don Wilcox
“One thing more,” said Bobby. “The guards tell me the mate is out.”
“Out?”
“A fellow named Menniker has seized the reins.”
“Menniker?”
“You know—that big stock broker. Don’t ask me how he got in. All I know is, the guards said his orders were law.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
I strode up the steps and across the observation deck toward the captain’s quarters in the fore of the ship. I passed the steel wall where the guards had practiced for the execution.
Passengers standing in small groups ceased their whispered conversation to turn and look at me. Someone said, “Senator, are you going to let them get away with this?” A paralysis had descended upon the ship. One could read it in the shocked and bewildered faces—faces that betrayed helplessness. How had this shift of authority come so swiftly?
Who was this big man Menniker that had taken over the instant the captain fell—only twelve hours before we were due to land on Mars
All I remembered of the man was that he had been the most incessant talker among the groups that had gathered around the Mars map in the observation deck.
He had practically owned that map from the first day out. It was a large, highly colored wall map that showed the seven separate mountainous valleys stemming from the narrow plains of the Marshington port. Any passengers or members of the crew who had paused to catch their Martian bearings from this seven-pointed design might have fallen into more or less confidential talk with Nathaniel Menniker.
I had talked with him once or twice, and he had sounded out my interest in buying Martian lands and other stocks. For a senator such investments were out of the question, naturally. I had forgotten him.
Now it became apparent that Nathaniel Menniker had been quietly plotting some sort of mischief from our first day out. The captain’s death found him ready to seize all the trumps.
I spent a few minutes in the reception room of the late captain’s quarters to pay my respects to the dead. Then elbowing out of the crowd I sauntered back to the captain’s private office.
Two uniformed guards stopped me, gleaming with evil triumph, and demanded to know what I wanted.
“You know who I am?” I snapped.
“On the earth you’re a senator,” said one of the guards, giving his companion a slight nudge, “but here you’re just another hitch-hiker on a private boat.”
I didn’t argue the point. I simply asked them to convey my compliments to the new captain, and turned to go. But the door opened and Menniker poked his head out.
“You might just as well come in and get lined up,” he barked. “Meet the new owner of this space hopper.”
I returned his ugly glare, hesitated, then walked in. He made an expansive gesture toward the elderly lady sitting at the captain’s desk—none other than Sarah Windblow Weeks.
CHAPTER X
New Execution for Old
“I need you, Senator Pollard,” Sarah Weeks said. She gave me a sharp gesture to sit down, which I chose to ignore. “This is your chance to get in on the right side.”
“What’s the other side like?” I asked sarcastically.
She gave me a mean squint. “That’s the trouble with you headstrong senators. You don’t see it’s to your advantage to work in the harness. Don’t you see there’s big money in Mars? If we’re smart we can clean up.”
“I understand you perfectly. You expect the land around the spaceport to skyrocket from dollars to millions of dollars.”
“It will,” said Sarah Weeks, smacking the table with her plump fist.
“It won’t,” I said.
Then we went round and round, and the new captain—if such Menniker could be called—leaped into the argument with enough statistics on land, minerals, prices, and population to make any senator dizzy.
But I clung stubbornly to one fact. “The land you’re speculating in won’t be worth a cent for a hundred years—if ever. In these times transportation lines don’t bother to cut mountains away. They simply jump over.”
“Most people that come to Mars never think of that,” Sarah Weeks said with a sly smile. “That’s why they’re ripe for picking.”
“In fact,” said Nat Menniker,” we’ve already sold thousands of acres of those mountains to the passengers on the Blue Palace.”
“The fools.”
“They’re happy about it.”
“Wait till they see what they’ve bought.”
“They’ve paid cash. They can go to work and remove their own mountains if they want their land leveled down.”
I couldn’t understand how he hoped to get away with such skulduggery. Oh, he had used a smooth line, all right, so smooth that the very mountain peaks charted on the maps had melted into rolling hills before the eyes of the suckers.
“You’re cutting your own throats,” I said. “What you’re selling not even an eagle would take for a gift.”
“Facts talk,” said Menniker. “And the fact is, such regions have already been populated somehow—heaven knows how—by the native Martians.”
“Cliff dwellers, no doubt.” I shrugged. There wasn’t any use for me to try to argue away a swindler’s bagful of dishonest dough! And Menniker knew he had me squirming. He patted me on the shoulder.
“Everything’s fine, senator,” he said with an evil wink. “The government is pouring millions into our development, we’re getting rich off the land, and the people are the suckers. The only trouble is, these damned space-freight crashes.”
I studied his expression, not knowing how to take him. Was he really griping about those crashes? He piled it on thick, then, seeing that I was plenty disturbed about them myself, and began to prod me for more government aid to get them under control.
“Now,” said Sarah Weeks,” you’re beginning to see your opportunity to be of service.”
“There’s something back of all those crashes,” I growled savagely. “I have a hunch, Nat Menniker, that you know more than you’ll tell.”
For the first time, Sarah Weeks shot a suspicious glance at hint. He snarled, and Sarah quickly changed the subject.
“There’s something I want you to do just now, Senator,” and she motioned me to follow her, “It’s about Betty. Come, I’ll tell you.”
On the observation deck we stopped at one of the circular ten-foot windows. The white light poured in from the moon-like sphere of Mars, now grown so large that it covered a third of the sky. A few more hours—
“I want my stepdaughter to come away from that dreadful Martian woman, Senator. I’ve telephoned her but she won’t come out.”
“So?”
“I want you to go in after her and Bobby. My bones are too brittle to take a chance.”
“So I should take the chance—when you know there’s a senator-killer on the premises!” I was dodging. “But I might exchange a favor. Suppose you inform your passengers all executions are off?”
“Two executions are on, but quick. That’s why I want Betty and Bobby in the clear . . . Don’t stare at me so, Senator.”
“Two—but quick?”
“For the first one, we’re going to shoot that deadly flesh-chopping animal. For the second, Vedo.”
“Vedo?” I caught my breath.
“She let her trained beast kill the captain and a guard, didn’t she? All right, she’s got it coming—where are you going, Senator?”
I called back over my shoulder as I streaked away. “Call me Paul Revere. I’m off to warn the natives.”
“If you dare warn Vedo—”
The old lady’s warning scream caused a door to swing open. There was Vedo, looking half afraid and half defiant. She came out, escorted by Bob and Betty, and walked straight over to Sarah Windblow Weeks.
CHAPTER XI
A Dictator Takes Over
“Well, well, speak of the devil and she walks right into your trap!” Sarah Weeks boomed out with nervous laughter calculated to attract a
crowd.
Most of the onlookers saw nothing to laugh about. Poor Vedo. Her blue-lidded eyes were swollen from weeping. How beautiful she was! In her broken words she spoke. What modest, apologetic words!
“I wish to say . . . sorry for trouble . . . sorry my man be shot . . . He love. . . he love earth men. He not understand. He try to protect me . . . get in way”
She went over these words, speaking in a low, musical chant with hardly any facial expression.
Again, “I sorry rikit take such bites . . . I forgot . . . Think only of Vorumuff. . . Then too late.”
It was a homely speech, but nothing could have been said to affect us more deeply. Sarah Weeks would have to be pretty brutal to go ahead with an execution in the fact of this. She gave a low, retreating snarl.
“Sorry, are you! You’ll not get off with that, you bird-brained—”
Vedo wasn’t hearing her. “Now I go back where you call Mars. Go back, alone. Tell people about Vorumuff. Tell them some earth men sorry too . . . Thank you for let me talk.” She had us in the palm of her hand with those words. She turned and started toward her room. Sarah Weeks moved swiftly to block her path. I thought, here was a scene I would never forget—two women of great power about to clash. One was the supercivilized American who might have a great destiny before her on a new planet—if her rashness were not her downfall. The other an illiterate Martian, a barbarian, yet a proud champion of Martian secrets that none of us understood. She too might have her day with destiny if Sarah Weeks allowed her to live.
Sarah Weeks might have weakened in her resolve if Menniker hadn’t entered at that moment. He stalked in, and I think he was holding a pistol in his coat pocket. At the sight of him, Sarah Weeks got tough with her Martian victim.
“Come back here, you damned birdbrained Martian. Come here!”
Of all things, Sarah was forcing her toward the steel backstop.
“There, you stand there. This ship is mine now, and I’m going to see that it’s safe for human beings.”
I bounced up to them like a cop jumping to his own rescue. “What about a trial for her? She’s entitled to that, at least.”
“Get back, Pollard,” Sarah bellowed at me. “You may be a senator at home, but you’re just another nobody on my ship.”
“You’ll give her a trial, or by God you’ll have this ship mobbing you,” I snarled. Anyone was crazy to think she could high pressure this deal through against the weight of public opinion. The crowd was already surging in, following my lead, demanding that Vedo be released. “Get her away from that wall,” they were saying. “Don’t you touch her!”
It flashed to me in that moment that Sarah Weeks and Menniker must have had a lot more reason for getting rid of Vedo than the rest of us knew anything about. They weren’t going to be subtle about it, either. They had thought that the rikit’s indiscreet head-snapping would give them the moral justification to stand this Martian woman up against the wall and shoot her down. They were wrong. The crowd wasn’t going to have it. I had a gun in my pocket and I would use it—
“Guards, take your stand!” came Sarah Weeks’ order.
It all happened in a twinkling. The rest of us were being forced back against the windows. Vedo was standing alone in front of the sheet of steel. The guards formed a line. They brought their guns up—
What a weird moment! The baleful glow of the planet Mars was on all of us, and we were white like chalk. The mountains must be rising up fast now, though no one looked out to see. But the changing light, after days of artificial light, somehow added to the hypnotic effect of this awful scene.
Vedo was speaking.
“I have great armies on the Seventh Point . . . Will someone tell them how I die?”
She was slipping a ring from her finger. It flashed green through the whitness of the light in the room. With a flip of her hand she flung it toward those of us who were crowding the wall.
“I’ve got it,” I called out, leaping.
The guards looked. The ring was spinning through the air, glittering, and everyone turned. From the corner of my eye I saw Vedo reach to her breast for a weapon. I missed the ring, or rather, I struck it to the floor, to play for time. A split second was worth more to Vedo than all the jewels in the ship. The scramble held everyone’s attention. Then Vedo was shooting.
Crack-crack-crack!
Two guards staggered forward. Sarah Windblow Weeks uttered a maniacal shriek, weaving around as if her throat had been cut. She turned her face toward us as she fell, and I saw that Vedo had grazed her forehead with the bullet. A sudden line of blood—
All at once the place was a blaze of pistol fire. Menniker was running up, aiming a pistol at Vedo. He’d have got her if I hadn’t aimed true.
Crack. That did it. Something less than a fatal shot, but effective. It ripped Manniker’s wrist. His gun hung in a limp hand under a gush of blood. His eyes rolled at me, and I could read the curse on his stony lips. He weaved and tried to keep from falling.
And that was when we all began to f all—rikitward!
I didn’t see the rikit. It was somewhere beyond the corridor wall. But I felt its deadly power. The pandemonium spared no one. It must have reached to the pilots in the control room. It took all of us. I saw Menniker toppling.
He turned a sort of cartwheel as he struggled desperately to cling to his gun and stop the spurts of blood from his wrist. He was shooting again, and had some notion that he would catch me with one of the random shots. His blaze ripped into the chandelier. I saw the reflections of falling glass spin over the floor like a whirling kaleidoscope. I crashed into a table.
But something else was happening that I didn’t understand. The ship seemed to be weaving. The rikit had caught the men at the controls, I thought. And that was the only explanation I could think of as the strange movement gathered fury.
“The ship’s running wild! . . . The ship’s running wild! . . . The ship’s running wild!”
Someone from the controls was shrieking like mad. I staggered to my feet. Down again. Up—I was spinning. No, the whole damned ship was spinning!
“It’s running wild! . . . running wild!”
We were falling, turning and twisting as we fell. Outside the windows the sharp mountains were coming up and up, like the teeth of a vast trap, closing in on us, swallowing us—
Down, down, down—
Cr-r-rash!
CHAPTER XII
Rikit Land
Such blackness. Such painful blackness. Everything had gone away, and I was dying. We were dying by the hundreds. I knew somehow. We were dying, dying, dying . . . If I could only have a sip of water . . .
Somewhere there would be a stream. Let me bury these dead, and then I must find a stream. I must have a sip of water before I die . . .
But I have already buried someone. Or did I bury myself? I must have died twenty times already. Everything is so black.
Ah, rain. A light rain, falling gently. Somewhere there must be a stream. The deep pains were pressing down on me, but the drizzle of rain was pleasant. I was not dead.
I was alive, only dazed. I was walking. Just walking. Walking lightly over Mars, ever so light on my feet, in spite of the heavy pains.
It was daylight. I wondered how long I had walked. I tied knots in my tattered clothes to keep them together. The explosion had left me in a ragged state. Burns and bruises and weakness. But no longer thirst. Somewhere I must have found a spring. My hands were caked with soil.
My feet kept moving, and as the light of morning filled the sky I saw that I was climbing among the sharp, jagged mountain peaks.
Yellow and brown mountain peaks were all around me, and misty purple clouds were sifting through the canyons. Looking around I tried to distinguish a cloud of smoke that would indicate the direction of the lost ship. I couldn’t see any signs of it. I’d have to climb higher to get my bearings.
I was climbing, spiraling around a peak, making a trial over the sparkling stones underf
oot.
As I tried to recall what had happened when the ship had crashed, my thoughts were very hazy. “Here lies Patches Black—” The words came to me over and over. “Here lies—” and there was a mound of these sparkling stones. Or was it a dream?
I sat down under an overhanging cliff and waited for the clouds to clear. I slept. When I awakened the mountains were gold and brass and copper under the lowering sun. I could see the trail of footsteps I had left in the loose stones, blotches of little blue shadows down the long grade. Perhaps I could follow my own trail back—back to wherever I’d come from. There must be others alive, back there some where.
Suddenly I started rolling over the stones. I was being drawn by a rikit! The stones rattled through my torn clothing like pockets full of marbles. I clung to my billfold, the only thing of value I carried. Struggling to break out of my old trail, I tumbled into a jutting rock as big as a truck, and found hand holds. There I clung, protected against the drawing power of the rikit. It pulled at me like a vacuum, but the rock stood as a wall between me and the unseen force.
I peeked over. A young American was riding up on the back of the tawny beast. He saw me and called out, “Hi, there!” He tapped his mount on the shoulder and it released its grip on me. I slid down the jutting rock and regained my feet.
My gravity shoes helped to steady me, but I tottered as I walked out to confront the young, bronze-faced boy. A clean-cut lad of twenty dressed in rough brown American made work clothes.
“Don’t be afraid. He won’t bite you.”
The rikit moved up toward me with what I thought was a hungry expression. I picked a sprig of berries from the base of the rock and offered them. The beast snapped at them and munched noisily while the young man looked me over.
“Where do you think you’re going, friend?” he asked.
“Just walking,” I said. “There was a crash somewhere down the canyon, and I was in it.”
“And you thought you’d run away from it?”
