Or possibly snow piled high on a sleeping landscape, with a thaw just starting, and the prints of small furry creatures on the white blanket of snow, for the first colonists had taken animals with them.
It would take another thirty years for newer, swifter rockets to be built and the supply problem to be brought under control and the colony to outgrow its birth pangs and its tumultuous adolescence and become a white and towering city, as huge as New Chicago.
And there were some who could not wait, for whom waiting was destructive to body and mind, a kind of living death too terrible to be sanely endured.
The fingers of the woman sitting opposite me were becoming restive, tightening a little on my hand. It seemed incredible to me that I could have gone off on that kind of thinking-back tangent when I was so close to paradise.
For paradise was there, seated directly across the table from me, in that crazy twilight hour, if I’d had the courage to seize it boldly—and if I hadn’t been still in love with Joan.
I could still make a stab at finding out for sure, I told myself, if I brushed aside all obstacles, if I refused to let my mind dwell on how I’d feel if something happened to Joan and I lost her forever. How could she have been so stubborn and foolish, when she was sophisticated enough to know that no man is insulated against temptation when he is lonely and despairing and paradise can be his for the taking, if he can kill just one part of himself and let the rest survive.
“What is it?” she asked. “You haven’t said a word for five minutes. I’m a good listener, you know. I always have been—perhaps too good a listener.”
It was the moment of truth, when I had to decide. Mars—and a woman too. Mars—and the big, important job, and the clatter and bright wonder of tremendous machines, with swiftly moving parts, whirring, blurring, dust and the stars of morning, and a woman like that in my arms.
I had to decide.
“What is it?” she asked. “Can’t you tell me?”
“Someday I’ll tell you,” I said. “But not now. I’ve a feeling we’ll meet again. Where and how and when I don’t know, because by this time tomorrow I’ll be on my way to Mars.”
A pained look came into her eyes and she quickly released my hand.
“But we’ve just started to get acquainted,” she protested. “You know nothing about me—or hardly anything. I thought—”
“It might be best not to know,” I said, and I think she must have realized then just how it was, must have read the truth in my eyes, for a faint flush suffused her face and she said quickly: “All right. If that’s the way it must be.”
I nodded and beckoned to the waiter, hoping she wouldn’t suspect how vulnerable I still was, how dangerously easy it would have been for me to alter my decision.
Ten minutes later I was alone again, with Lake Michigan glimmering at my back, and only the stars for company. And I still didn’t know her name.
3
It happened so suddenly it would have taken me completely by surprise, if the alarm bell hadn’t started ringing again in some shadowy corner of my mind. It wasn’t clamorous this time, but it was loud enough to make me straighten in alarm, with every nerve alert.
I was standing by a high wall of foliage, close to the lakeside and had just started to light a cigarette. All at once, directly overhead, there was a rustling sound that was hard to mistake, for I’d heard it many times before, and it had a peculiar quality which set it apart from all other sounds.
Something was moving through the shadows above me, rustling dry leaves, slithering down toward me with a dull, mechanical buzzing.
The buzzing stopped abruptly and there was a flash of brightness, a long-drawn whining sound. I braced myself, letting my arms swing loosely at my side.
With startling swiftness something long, glistening and snakelike descended upon me and wrapped itself around my right leg just above the knee. Before I could shake it loose it contracted into a tight knot and the whining turned into a shrill scream, prolonged, ghastly. It was quite unlike the scream of an animal. There was something metallic, rasping about it, as if more than animal ferocity was giving voice to its pent-up rage in a shrill mechanical monotone.
The constriction increased and an agonizing stab of pain lanced up my thigh. I raised my right arm and brought the edge of my hand down with an abrupt, chopping motion. I chopped downward three times, not at random, but with a calculated, deadly precision, for I knew that a misdirected blow could have cost me my life.
I was in danger only for an instant, and not a very long instant at that. The damage I’d done to it caused it to release its grip on my leg, shudder convulsively and drop to the ground.
Damaged where it was most vulnerable, it writhed along the ground with groping, disjointed movements of its entire body. Tiny fragments of shattered crystal glistened in its wake, and two long wires dangled from its cone-shaped head.
Its segmented body-case glowed with a blood-red sheen as it writhed across a flat gray stone on the edge of the lakeshore embankment, and reared up for an instant like an enormous, sightlessly groping worm. Then, abruptly, all the animation went out of it, and it flattened out and lay still. Both of the optical disks which had enabled it to move swiftly through the darkness had been smashed. I was no longer in any danger and it was very pleasant just to know that.
Very pleasant indeed.
An attempt had been made on my life. There could be no blinking the fact. That little mechanical horror, with its complex interior mechanisms, had been set upon me from a distance with all of its electronic circuits clicking by remote control.
From just how great a distance I had no way of knowing. But I didn’t think he’d be staying around, near enough for me to get my hands on him. Killers who made use of such gadgets usually kept their distance, and were very cautious.
But at least I knew now that I had a dangerous enemy, someone who wanted me dead. And there was nothing pleasant about that.
The human mind is a very strange instrument and it’s hard to predict just how profoundly you’ll be upset by an occurrence that’s difficult to dismiss with a shrug.
You can either turn morbid and brood about it, or rise superior to it and pigeon-hole it, at least for the moment. By a kind of miracle I was able to pigeon-hole it, to keep it from standing in the way of what I’d made up my mind to do before I’d heard the rustling in the foliage directly overhead.
I walked back and forth for a moment, resting most of my weight on my right leg, to make sure I could keep using it without limping and when I was satisfied a long walk wouldn’t be in the least painful I left the embankment with a feeling of relief and took the first turn on my left. I was pretty sure it would take me no more than twenty minutes to get back to the spaceport.
I knew that what I’d made up my mind to do wasn’t going to be easy. I had to find out exactly how important a job the Colonization Board had mapped out for me on Mars. She’d called me “Mr. Important Man” because—you don’t get a clearance stamped the way mine was unless there’s a big undertaking in store for you which has to be handled in just the right way. The walk gave me a chance to think about it. My leg didn’t trouble me at all and I was very grateful for that.… I stood for a moment just outside the spaceport’s railed-off, electronically-protected launching platforms, staring up at the three-hundred-foot passenger rockets gleaming with a dull metallic luster in the moonlight, their nose-cones pointing skyward.
The New Chicago Spaceport has and always will attract sightseers, because there’s no other rocket launching site on Earth that can compare with it. It’s not only the largest and the most elaborately equipped. It was built to last. Fifty years from now, in 2070, say, it was a safe bet the big Mars rockets would be taking off at four-hour intervals night and day. Now they took off only twice a month and there were fifty million people in the United States alone who would have given up comfort,
leisure, a well-paying job and every joy they’d ever experienced or could hope to experience on Earth to be on one of those big sky ships.
As far back as I can remember I’d hated to force a showdown with people who trusted me and believed in me. And that went double for the Martian Colonization Board, whose members were doing everything possible to keep me informed. Secrecy sometimes has to be imposed, and if you try to crack an information clamp-down prematurely you deserve to be slapped down.
But now I had no choice. I had to find out if my trip could be postponed, if I could wait one more week—a month, even—to get Joan to see things my way. And that meant I had to find out just how big a job they had lined up for me.
I had no trouble getting in to see him. There was a guard at the main entrance of the Administration Building, and when I identified myself and the massive, double-doors swung inward I had to go through it a second time, and six more times in all before I reached his private office on the twentieth floor. But you couldn’t call it trouble, because all I had to do was take out my wallet and display the pale blue card that was only an incitement to violence in certain quarters.
In that massive, almost half-mile-long building, on every floor, there were guards who knew me and guards who had never set eyes on me before. But what that card stood for was treated with respect.
I’d known that building to hum with activity, to come to life with a roar. But now only one floor blazed with light and the rest of the building was as silent as a mausoleum.
It happens sometimes and when it does everyone is grateful—including the man I’d come to visit.
His private office was at the end of a long corridor in Section C 10 Y, and I knew I’d find him there, because a small circle of cold light had been glowing above the office listing board on the main floor. There was a name plate above the numbered listings—BROWN. His name wasn’t Brown, of course. Or Smith, or Jones. The “Brown” was just a safety precaution—the sign and seal of immense power being modest in a genuine way and for expediency’s sake as well.
No man without the kind of card I carried had ever gotten as far as that office listing board and I doubt if the most ingenious assassin would have cared to try. But it was just as well to be on the completely safe side.
A saluting guard stepped back and what was perhaps the narrowest, least impressive door in the entire building opened and closed and I found myself in his presence.
Unless you’re a Gobi desert dweller or live in the precise middle of the Sahara you’ve seen the blue-eyed, mild-mannered little man who was Jonathan Trilling on a hundred lighted screens. In all respects but one he is the kind of man most people would go right past on the street without a second glance.
The thing that made him really not like that at all was something you couldn’t pin down and analyze. If you tried, you’d get nowhere. But it was there, all right, an emanation you couldn’t mistake that stamped him for what he was, radiating out from him.
Equate immense simplicity with immense power and you might come up with a part of the answer. But not all of it.
The office was stripped of all non-essentials; a hermit’s cell couldn’t have been barer. And it seemed to please him when my eyes swept over the almost bare desk, with just an inkwell and a single sheet of paper on it, before coming to rest on his face.
I’m pretty sure he interpreted it as an indication that I was trying to catch him up on something he took pride in, and he admired me for it, and greeted me with a chuckle.
“Well, Ralph!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight. I thought you’d be home wearing Joan’s patience ragged with the kind of last-minute preparations women never seem to understand. They like to think they never forget anything. But they do. They’re worse that way than we are, but just try getting them to admit it.”
There was only one chair in the office and he was occupying it. I hardly expected him to get up and wave me toward it, but that’s precisely what he did.
“Sit down, Ralph,” he said. “I sit too much. We all do here, I guess. Can’t be helped, but it doesn’t give a man of fifty-five much chance to get the exercise he ought to have, if he’s going to keep his weight down.”
“No—don’t get up for me, sir!” I said, then realized I was being unnecessarily formal.
The chair was empty and he expected me to take it. And I could see that he didn’t like the “sir.” He never had.
“Sit down, sit down. What is it, Ralph? Something worrying you? You’ll have plenty of time for that when you get to Mars. Why start now?”
I decided to come right out with it. I favored bluntness as much as he did, and there was nothing to be gained by talking around what I’d have to ask him before I left.
“There’s something I’d like to know,” I said. “Is the major part of my assignment still under wraps, or could you tell me more about it—even if you’d prefer not to?”
He looked at me steadily for a moment, his lips tightening a little. “Well—I certainly haven’t kept it a complete secret, Ralph. You’ll get full instructions in code later on. There’s naturally a reason for that. I shouldn’t have to go into it, because we’ve discussed it at great length right here in this office.”
“I realize that,” I said. “But could you see your way clear to telling me much more than you have, if I can convince you that it would help me solve a problem I can’t solve otherwise.”
His eyebrows went up a little at that. “What kind of problem, Ralph?”
“It’s as old as the hills,” I said. “The really ancient kind with fossils embedded in them. It goes right back to the Old Stone Age, and maybe a lot earlier. Joan doesn’t want to go to Mars. She’s very stubborn, very determined about it. If I can’t make her change her mind I’ll have to go alone. And I guess I don’t have to tell you what that would do to me. If I just had a little more time, another week or two—”
“So that’s it,” he said. “You want me to tell you that your assignment can be put off, that you’re not really needed on Mars. We’re just sending you there because we like to do whimsical things occasionally, to break the God-awful monotony of thinking about the problems the project is confronted with in a serious way.”
I was startled, because I’d never known him to indulge in deliberate irony before. He had all the intellectual equipment for it, but his mind just didn’t work that way.
Then I suddenly realized he was going to tell me everything I wanted to know and had just used that approach to make me a little angry and keep me alert and analytical, so that I wouldn’t underestimate the seriousness of what he was about to say.
“All right, Ralph,” he said. “I’ll risk angering a third of the Board. I’m going to tell you exactly why the Mars Colony is in trouble, and just how tremendous your task will be. You’ll be in the middle, Ralph, in the biggest clash of interests a new and growing society has ever known.
“A clash of interests can destroy any society, if they’re violent enough and have powerful enough backing and the population is divided in its loyalties and lacks firm and courageous leadership.
“That’s especially true if the society is on a pioneering level, with serious scarcities developing everywhere and with every man, to some extent at least, in fierce competition with his neighbors, all apart from the massive power monopolies that are in even fiercer competition among themselves.
“Don’t you see, Ralph, don’t you realize what that kind of cross-purpose distribution of power in a new and pioneering society can mean? When you have a three or four-way conflict, when everyone is bidding for what you’ve got and can’t afford to sell, or what you haven’t got but would like to sell, or what you can’t sell for what you’d like to get?”
He smiled suddenly, for the barest instant, and then the seriously concerned look which the smile had replaced came back into his eyes. “I didn’t intend that to sound fa
cetious. It probably did, because it has a slightly humorous side to it, like most major tragedies. I’m just giving you the broad outlines now, the general situation. Frustration, bitterness, thousands of colonists who can be swayed one way or the other by corrupt pressures, self-interest, greedy power monopolies.”
“But there’s a more specific situation you have in mind, is that it?” I asked. “Everything you’ve just said is common knowledge.”
Trilling nodded. “Yes—but the general situation has to be underscored. It is the crucial factor in everything that is taking place on Mars. In a more stable, and highly developed society the raw power conflict of the two major power monopolies would not take so destructive a form.”
“Two?” I said. “I was under the impression—”
He waved my objection aside. “Oh, there are a dozen power combines. But only the two giants—Wendel Atomics and Endicott Fuel—have fought each other to a standstill and threaten the peace, and stability of the entire colony. I’m putting it too mildly. There’s an explosive potential in that conflict that could destroy the colony overnight.”
He tightened his lips and took a turn up and down the office, then came back to where I was sitting and gripped me by the shoulder. “Ralph, listen. This is vital. I’ll try to sum it up as briefly as possible. You know what it cost to set up atomic generators, turbines, transmission lines, and keep utilities no city can do without in operation right here in New Chicago, in just one small section of the city? How much more do you think it costs to do the same thing on Mars? The transportation of materials alone—Have you any idea how much the total expenditures come to?”
“I guess so,” I said. “I don’t like to think about it.”
“Who does? But we had to think about it. We had to give Wendel Atomics a thirty-year monopoly. No other power combine had sufficient monetary resources to undertake it. And we had to give Endicott Fuel the same kind of monopoly. They transport both atomic and liquid fuels at a cost that would turn your hair white.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 19
