Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Demaree swore lividly all the way back to where the bodies of the three men lay. Dr. Solveig, bending over them, said sharply, “That is enough, Demaree! Think what we must do!”

  “But those filthy—”

  “Demaree!” Solveig stood up straight and beckoned to the only other survivor—who had raced to explore the dune to the left, with the same results. He was a man named Garcia; he and I had come out together, but I didn’t know him very well. “Have you seen anything?” Solveig demanded.

  Garcia said bitterly, “More of that fire, Doc! From that hill I could see two or three others shining, down along the way to Kelcy.”

  “I had thought so,” Solveig said somberly. “The Martians were of course aware of what we proposed. Kelcy is booby-trapped; we cannot expect to get there.”

  “So where does that leave us?” demanded Demaree. “We can’t stay here! We can’t even make it back to Niobe—we’ll get caught in the sandstorm. Maybe you’d like that, Doc—but I saw a man after the sandstorm got him a year ago!” And so had I; a patrolman like ourselves, who incautiously found himself out in the middle of nowhere at dusk, when the twilight sandstorm rages from East to West and no human can live for an hour, until the gale passes and the tiny, lethal sand grains subside to the surface of the planet-wide desert again. His own respirators had killed him; the tiny whirl-pumps were clogged solid with sand grains packed against the filters, and he had died of suffocation.

  Solveig said, “We go back. Believe me, it is the only way.”

  “Back where? It’s twenty-five miles to—”

  “To Niobe, yes. But we shall not go that far. I have two proposals. One, the sand cars; at least inside them you will not suffocate. Two—the Split Cliffs.”

  We all looked at him as though he had gone insane. But in the end he talked us around—all but Garcia, who clung obstinately to the cars.

  We got back to the Split Cliffs, leaving Garcia huddled inside the first car with something of the feelings of the worshippers leaving Andromeda chained to the rock. Not that we were much better off—but at least there were three of us.

  Solveig had pointed out, persuasively, that inside the growth of the Split Cliffs the sandstorm couldn’t touch us; that there were caves and tunnels where the three of us, huddled together, might keep each other alive till morning. He admitted that the probability that we would find Martians there before us was high—but we knew the Martians had spotted the cars. And at least inside the junglelike Split Cliffs, they would be at as grave a disadvantage as we; unless they could overpower us by numbers, we should be able to fight them off if they discovered us. And even if they did outnumber us, we might be able to kill a few—and on the sand dunes, as we had discovered, they would strike and be gone.

  Dr. Solveig, in the lead, hesitated and then slipped into the dense yellowish vegetation. Demaree looked at me, and we followed.

  There were no trails inside, nothing but a mad tangle of twisty, feather-leaved vines. I heard dry vine-pods rattling ahead as Solveig spearheaded our group, and in a moment we saw him again.

  The ground was covered with the fine red sand that overlies all of Mars, but it was only an inch or two deep. Beneath was raw rock, split and fissured with hairline cracks into which the water-seeking tendrils of the vegetation disappeared.

  Demaree said softly, “Dr. Solveig. Up ahead there, by the little yellow bush. Doesn’t that look like a path?”

  It wasn’t much, just a few branches bent back and a couple broken off; a certain amount of extra bare rock showing where feet might have scuffed the surface sand off.

  “Perhaps so,” said Solveig. “Let us look.”

  We bent under the long, sweeping branches of a smoke tree—too cool now to give off its misty yellow gases. We found ourselves looking down an almost straight lane, too straight to be natural.

  “It is a path,” said Dr. Solveig. “Ah, so. Let us investigate it.”

  I started to follow him, but Demaree’s hand was on my shoulder, his other hand pointing. I looked, off to one side, and saw nothing but the tangle of growth.

  Solveig turned inquiringly. Demaree frowned. “I thought I heard something.”

  “Oh,” said Solveig, and unlimbered his flame rifle. All three of us stood frozen for a moment, listening and watching; but if there had been anything, it was quiet and invisible now.

  Demaree said, “Let me go first, Doc. I’m a little younger than you.” And faster on the draw, he meant. Solveig nodded.

  “Of course.” He stepped aside, and Demaree moved silently along the trail, looking into the underbrush from side to side. Solveig waited a moment, then followed; and a few yards behind I brought up the rear. I could just see Demaree’s body flickering between the gnarled tree trunks and vines up ahead. He hesitated, then stepped over something, a vine or dead tree, that lay snaked across the path. He half-turned as if to gesture—

  Snap!

  The vine whipped up and twisted about his leg, clung and dragged him ten feet into the air, hanging head down, as a long straight tree beside the path snapped erect.

  A deadfall—the oldest snare in the book!

  “Jack!” I yelled, forgetting about being quiet—and half-forgetting, too, that I was on Mars. I leaped toward him, and blundered against the trees as my legs carried me farther than I thought. Solveig and I scrambled to him, rifles ready, staring around for a sight of whatever it was that had set the trap. But again—nothing.

  Demaree wasn’t hurt, just tangled and helpless. A flood of livid curses floated down from him as he got his wind back and began struggling against the vine loop around his legs. “Take it easy!” I called. “I’ll get you down!” And while Solveig stood guard I scrambled up the tree and cut him loose. I tried to hold the vine but I slipped, and he plunged sprawling to the ground—still unhurt, but angry.

  And the three of us stood there for a moment, waiting for the attack. And it didn’t come.

  For a moment the Martians had had us; while Demaree was in the tree and Solveig and I racing toward him, they could have cut us down. And they hadn’t. They had set the trap—and passed up its fruits.

  We looked at each other wonderingly.

  We found a cave just off the trail, narrow and high, but the best protection in sight against the dusk sandstorm and the night’s cold. The three of us huddled inside—and waited. Demaree suggested making a fire; but, although the wood on the ground was dry enough to burn even in Mars’ thin air, we decided against it. Maybe, later on, if we couldn’t stand the cold, we’d have no choice; but meanwhile there was no sense attracting attention.

  We asked Solveig, who seemed to be in command of our party, if he thought there was any objection to talking, and he shrugged. “How can one tell? Perhaps they hear, perhaps they do not. Air is thin and sounds do not carry far—to our ears. To Martian ears? I don’t know.”

  So we talked—not loud, and not much, because there wasn’t, after all, much to say. We were preoccupied with the contradictions and puzzlements the Martians presented. Fantastic weapons that struck from nowhere or shimmered into being between sand dunes—and a culture little beyond the neolithic. Even Earth’s best guided missiles could have been no more accurate and little more deadly, considering the nature of the target, than the one that obliterated car number two. And the golden glow that killed Keever was out of our experience altogether. And yet—villages of sticks! There had been no trace in any Martian dwelling of anything so complicated as a flame-rifle, much less these others…

  It grew very slightly darker, bit by bit; and then it was black. Even in our cave we could hear the screaming of the twilight wind. We were in a little slit in the raw rock, halfway down one of the crevasses that gave the Split Cliffs area its name. Craggy, tumbled, bare rocks a hundred feet below us, and the other wall of the crevasse barely jumping distance away. We had come to it along an irregular sloping ledge, and to reach us at all the wind had to pass through a series of natural baffles. And even so, we saw the scant
shrubbery at the cave mouth whipped and scoured by the dusk-wind.

  Demaree shivered and attempted to light a cigarette. On the fourth try he got it burning, but it went out almost at once—it is possible to smoke in Mars’ air, but not easy, because of the pressure. The tobacco burns poorly, and tastes worse. He grunted, “Damn the stuff. You think we’ll be all right here?”

  “From the wind?” asked Solveig. “Oh, certainly. You have seen how little sand was carried in here. It is the cold that follows that I am thinking of…”

  We could feel the cold settling in the air, even while the twilight wind was blowing. In half an hour the wind was gone, but the cold remained, deeper and more intense than anything I had ever felt before. Our sand capes were a help, almost thermally non-conducting in either direction; we carefully tucked under all the vents designed to let perspiration escape, we folded them around us meticulously, we kept close together—and still the cold was almost unbearable. And it would grow steadily worse for hours…

  “We’ll have to build a fire,” said Solveig reluctantly. “Come and gather wood.” The three of us went scouring up the ledge for what we could find. We had to go all the way back to the top of the crevasse to find enough to bother carrying; we brought it back, and while Demaree and I worked to set it afire Solveig went back for more. It wasn’t easy, trying to make that thin and brittle stuff burn. Demaree’s pocket lighter wore itself out without success. Then he swore and motioned me back, leveling his flame rifle at the sticks. That worked beautifully—every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them over yards, half of them going over the side of the ledge; and we charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we’d started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It helped—helped very much. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle as long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine leaves.

  “In case it goes out,” he explained. “If there’s any life in the embers at all, it’ll set one of these off, and we won’t have to blow up the whole bed of ashes to get it started again.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Now we’d better build up a woodpile—”

  We looked at each other, suddenly brought back to reality.

  Astonishing how the mind can put aside what it does not wish to consider; amazing how we could have forgotten what we didn’t want to know. Our woodpile reminded us both: Dr. Solveig had gone for more, nearly three quarters of an hour before.

  And it was only a five-minute climb to the top of the crevasse.

  The answer was obvious: The Martians. But, of course, we had to prove it for ourselves.

  And prove it we did: At the expense of our weapons, our safe cave and fire, and very nearly our lives. We went plunging up the ledge like twin whirligigs, bouncing in the light Martian gravity and nearly tumbling into the chasm at every step. I suppose that if we thought at all, we were thinking that the more commotion we made the more likely we were to scare the Martians off before they killed Dr. Solveig. We were yelling and kicking stones into the gorge with a bounce and clatter; and we were up at the top of the crevasse in a matter of seconds, up at the top—and smack into a trap. For they were waiting for us up there, our first face-to-face Martians.

  We could see them only as you might see ghosts in a sewer; the night was black, even the starlight half drowned by the branches overhead, but they seemed to gleam, phosphorescently, like decaying vegetation. And decay was a word that fitted the picture, for they looked like nothing so much as corpses. They had no hands or arms, but their faces were vaguely human—or so they seemed. What passed for ears were large and hung like a spaniel’s; but there were eyes, sunken but bright, and there was a mouth; and they were human in size, human in the way they came threateningly toward us, carrying what must have been weapons.

  Demaree’s flame rifle flooded the woods with fire. He must have incinerated some of them, but the light was too blinding; we couldn’t see. I fired close on the heels of Demaree’s shot, and again the wood was swept with flame; and the two of us charged blindly into the dark. There was light now, from the blazes we had started, but the fires were Mars-fires, fitful and weak, and casting shadows that moved and disguised movement. We beat about the brush uselessly for a moment, then retreated and regrouped at the lip of the crevasse. And that was our mistake. “What about Solveig?” Demaree demanded. “Did you see anything—”

  But he never got a chance to finish the sentence. On a higher cliff than ours there were scrabblings of motion, and boulders fell around us. We dodged back down the ledge, but we couldn’t hope to get clear that way. Demaree bellowed:

  “Come on, Will!” And he started up the ledge again; but the boulder shower doubled and redoubled. We had no choice. We trotted, gasping and frozen, back down to our cave, and ran in. And waited. It was not pleasant waiting; when the Martians showed up at the cave mouth, we were done. Because, you see, in our potshotting at the golden glow on the dunes and our starting a fire in the cave and salvoing the woods up above, we had been a little careless.

  Our flame rifles were empty.

  We kept warm and worried all of this night, and in the light from our dwindling fire, only a couple of branches at a time, we could see a figure across the crevasse from us.

  It was doing something complex with objects we could not recognize. Demaree, over my objections, insisted we investigate; and so we parted with a hoarded brand. We threw the tiny piece of burning wood out across the crevasse, it struck over the figure in a shower of sparks and a pale blue flame, and in the momentary light we saw that it was, indeed, a Martian. But we still couldn’t see what he was doing.

  The dawn wind came, but the Martian stayed at his post; and then, at once, it was daylight.

  We crept to the lip of the cave and looked out, not more than a dozen yards from the busy watching figure.

  The Martian looked up once, staring whitely across the ravine at us, as a busy cobbler might glance up from his last. And just as unemotionally, the Martian returned to what he was doing. He had a curious complex construction of sticks and bits of stone, or so it seemed from our distance. He was carefully weaving bits of shiny matter into it in a regular pattern.

  Demaree looked at me, licking his lips. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Will?” he asked.

  I nodded. It was a weapon of some sort; it couldn’t be anything else. Perhaps it was a projector for the lightnings that blasted the sand cars or the golden glow that had struck down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was it was at point-blank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead.

  Demaree said thinly, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The only question was, did we have enough time? We scrabbled together our flame rifles and packs from the back of the cave and, eyes fearfully on the busy Martian across the chasm, leaped for the cave mouth—just in time to see what seemed a procession coming down the other side. It was a scrambling, scratching tornado, and we couldn’t at first tell if it was a horde of Martians or a sand car with the treads flapping. But then we got a better look.

  And it was neither. It was Dr. Solveig.

  The Martian across the way saw him as soon as we, and it brought that strange complex of bits and pieces slowly around to bear on him. “Hey!” bellowed Demaree, and my yell was as loud as his. We had to warn Solveig of what he was running into—death and destruction.

  But Solveig knew more than we. He came careening down the ledge across t
he crevasse, paused only long enough to glance at us and at the Martian, and then came on again.

  “Rocks!” bellowed Demaree in my ear. “Throw them!” And the two of us searched feverishly in the debris for rocks to hurl at the Martian, to spoil his aim.

  We needn’t have bothered. We could find nothing more deadly than pebbles, but we didn’t need even them. The Martian made a careful, last-minute adjustment on his gadget, and poked it once, squeezed it twice and pressed what was obviously its trigger.

  And nothing happened. No spark, no flame, no shot. Solveig came casually down on the Martian, unharmed.

  Demaree was astonished, and so was I; but the two of us together were hardly as astonished as the Martian. He flew at his gadget like a tailgunner clearing a breech jam over hostile interceptors. But that was as far as he got with it, because Solveig had reached him and in a methodical, almost a patronizing way he kicked the Martian’s gadget to pieces and called over to us:

  “Don’t worry, boys. They won’t hurt us here. Let’s get back up on top.”

  It was a long walk back to Niobe, especially with the cumbersome gadgetry Solveig had found—a thing the size of a large machine gun, structurally like the bits and pieces the Martian had put together, but made of metal and crystal instead of bits of rubble.

  But we made it, all four of us—we had picked up Garcia at the stalled cars, swearing lividly in relief but otherwise all right. Solveig wouldn’t tell us much. He was right, of course. The important thing was to get back to Niobe as soon as we could with his gimmick. Because the gimmick was the Martian weapon that zeroed in on sand cars, and the sooner our mechanics got it taken apart, the sooner we would know how to defend ourselves against it. We were breathless on the long run home, but we were exultant. And we had reason to be, because there was no doubt in any of our minds that a week after we turned the weapon over to the researchers we would be able to run sand cars safely across the Martian plains. (Actually it wasn’t a week; it was less. The aiming mechanism was nothing so complex as radio, it was a self-aiming thermocouple, homing on high temperatures. We licked it by shielding the engines and trailing smoke-pots to draw fire.)