Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Kem! Don’t make me! Please! I won’t give in! I won’t give in! Stop! I swear by the Blessed Virgin that I won’t let you!’

  ‘Oh hell!’ he muttered, and rolling off her flung himself face downward on the sand, his head buried in his arms, almost weeping with rage and frustration.

  Their struggle had left them both panting for breath like two fishes out of water. Striving to draw the thin air down into their straining lungs they lay without moving for several minutes; then Carmen crawled over to Kem and put her arms about him.

  She was crying now, and her warm tears fell on the back of his neck as she sobbed: ‘Oh, Kem, forgive me! I know you think I’m being hard and selfish; but it isn’t that. It isn’t that I still think we haven’t paid for our sin, either. In our obtaining it lies our only possible hope of protection and, perhaps, a chance to find happiness again in the future. We must be patient, brave and chaste. He knows how pitifully weak I really am and how terribly I want to give way to you. If you press me too far I may not be able to resist temptation. I beg you not to tempt me further, Kem, and so help me to keep my resolution.’

  Her appeal roused all the best instincts in him. Turning over, he took her in his arms, wiped away her tears and kissed her gently on the cheek. Then he murmured:

  ‘All right. I’m sorry I was rough. It’s not going to be easy but I’ll do my best.’

  For a time they lay there quietly, all passion drained from them after their emotional outburst, until he said a little grimly, ‘You know, it is a very true old saying that God helps those who help themselves; and I’m damned if I’m going to give in without a struggle to leading this sort of life indefinitely.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘As far as we know there is no better part of Mars to which we might attempt to escape.’

  ‘No; from what Estévan says it is five-eighths desert and the canals run all over it. That makes it pretty certain that its civilisation—if one can call it that—is the same all over. Of course, there must be scores of other barracks full of giants and hives full of bee-beetles scattered about near its fertile areas; but I am afraid the odds are enormous against there being other types of creatures who would treat us more decently.’

  ‘Well, there are no possible means by which we might get away from it.’

  ‘You’re wrong there, my sweet. We came here in a Flying Saucer, so we might get back in one.’

  Carmen tucked a strand of dark hair under her head scarf she was wearing, and smiled. ‘It’s a lovely dream, Kem, but I’m afraid it can never be more than that.’

  ‘Why? We might manage to steal one.’

  ‘If we could, we wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to fly it.’

  ‘No; that’s the real snag,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘We might succeed in stowing away on board one, though.’

  ‘I’m afraid there are lots of snags to that, too. For one thing, we couldn’t be certain that it was going to Earth.’

  ‘The odds are that it would be. According to Estévan all the other planets are unhabitable.’

  ‘They may not be for the bee-beetles.’

  ‘Where they could survive there is a good chance that we could. Anyway, I’d willingly take that risk to get away from here.’

  ‘It might be making only a cross-country flight and land in another part of Mars.’

  ‘That would be disappointing; but we’d be no worse off.’

  Thinking it good for him to employ his mind on practical problems, she led him on with further objections. ‘But, Kem, say we did manage to stow away on a Saucer that was about to fly to Earth, awfully few of them land when they get there. I’m afraid we would only be tantalised by a few hours of looking down on our dear old planet, then find ourselves on the way back here.’

  He considered that for a moment. ‘Of course, even if they didn’t find us during the voyage, we’d have to come out towards its end. But having got so far we might persuade them to land us.’

  ‘One can’t do much persuading with beings to whom one cannot talk; and so far these creatures have proved anything but obliging.’

  There are two kinds of persuasion. Ours might have to be with a big stick.’

  She shook her head. ‘I doubt if they would give way to threats.’

  ‘We might succeed in overpowering them.’

  ‘There would be more of them than there would of us and the sting of an insect their size might cause death.’

  ‘Bees sting, but beetles don’t; so they may not have stings.’

  ‘All right; saying we did get the best of them, we should still be faced with the job of landing the Saucer ourselves.’

  ‘I know. That’s the devil of it. Unless we can learn how to fly a Saucer first it’s a hundred to one that we’d crash.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much chance of our learning anything about them as long as we are quartered here. We don’t know yet where they are made or kept.’

  Kem glanced upwards. A saucer which, from its apparent size and altitude, they judged to be the same as the first they had seen on the previous day, was now again nearly overhead. In the past two hours it had climbed at a steady pace from low on the western horizon, and seemed again to be pursuing a set course to the east. As Carmen followed his glance, he said:

  ‘From the slow speed and undeviating path of that chap, he appears to be a patrol ship; but during the next few days it is a fair bet that we shall see some more active ones coming and going about the place.’

  ‘Even if they were flying over us all the time, I don’t see how that would help you to find out where their base is.’

  ‘Perhaps not; but I mean to try. Estévan should be able to help us there. After he has been pretending to work for our captors for a while they may show him one of their factories. They will have to if they want him to supervise the making of that phoney rocket he is designing. Given a little time we’ll find out where they keep the Saucers. That should be comparatively easy. The really stiff fence we’ve got to get over is to think of some means by which we can induce them to show us how to fly one; or, failing that, if we have to go as stowaways, some sort of gun we can pull at the last minute which will compel them to land us on Earth.’

  As there seemed no more to be said on the subject for the time being, they talked for a while on other matters; then, the warmth of the early afternoon sun having made them drowsy, they fell asleep.

  They were woken by wind-driven sand stinging their faces, and roused up to find themselves caught in another dust-storm. Hastily, they pulled their scarves over their mouths and nostrils and huddled together until the worst of the storm was over. When the wind had ceased to howl they got to their feet and set off hand in hand through the yellow fog towards the tunnel entrance. They found it only after having twice missed their way, and were greatly relieved when they had got far enough along it to be clear of the stifling particles.

  It was not until they were back in their cell that they were in any state to talk again. Then, as Carmen let down her dark hair and began to brush the grit from it, she said:

  ‘What a curse these duststorms are! D’you think we shall have to suffer being half asphyxiated every day, or that they only occur like rain with us, or at certain seasons?’

  ‘Estévan could give you a sounder opinion on that than I can,’ Kem replied, ‘but I’m afraid we shall have to put up with them as part of our daily routine. I’m pretty certain they are caused by the extremes of temperature between night and day here. Both yesterday and today storms have blown up about an hour after dawn and an hour before sunset. That looks as if, as soon as the sun has had time to warm up the earth, the cold air that has accumulated during the night is driven out towards the dark hemisphere of the planet; then when the earth begins to cool in the late afternoon it comes rushing back again.’

  He had hardly finished speaking when Escobar was brought in by Gog, and, after expressing his relief at finding them safe and sound, he confirmed Kem’s theory.
<
br />   While they were being given their evening rations they exchanged accounts of their doings since they had separated. Escobar had little to tell, but he was depressed, angry and very tired indeed. The bee-beetles had kept him at his drawing-board for over eight hours without a break.

  ‘Why don’t you go on strike?’ Kem enquired.

  The scientist shrugged. ‘I tried that, but each time I sat down in the armchair one of them started to open and shut the box that contained the beans. The little swine were saying as plainly as if they had spoken, “Go on working or you get no supper!” So what the hell was I to do but get back on the job again?’

  ‘Oh, Estévan, what soulless brutes they are!’ exclaimed Carmen sympathetically.

  He sighed. ‘Tomorrow there will be no cinema show or arguments, so I suppose they will expect me to put in an eleven-hour day. I can’t stand that sort of thing for long at my age. I shall crack up.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Kem with sudden firmness. ‘Not till we’ve got them where we want them, anyway. You’ve got to keep going somehow. On that hangs our only chance of getting back to Earth.’

  ‘Back to Earth!’ repeated Escobar, staring at him wide-eyed. ‘How? There is nothing I can do which would give us the remotest chance of doing that.’

  ‘Oh, yes there is. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought this afternoon. At first it occurred to me that we might steal a Saucer, or stow away in one and get taken back to Earth like that. But neither idea is any good. There are too many snags to both of them. Since then I’ve had a much better idea. We were wrong this morning in deciding that you should only pretend to show them how to make an Atom bomb. You must make one. You must make half a dozen, while keeping some essential detail of their manufacture to yourself. Then we’ll let one off. We’ll blow a chunk twenty miles long out of one of their canals. And if that doesn’t teach them we’ll blow their hive sky-high. We’ll scare the pants of the little bastards. We’ll create such merry hell here that they’ll come crawling to us on their knees, begging us to get into a Saucer and let them take us home.’

  ‘Oh, Kem!’ Carmen exclaimed with shining eyes. ‘What a wonderful idea! How absolutely marvellous!’

  Escobar gave a short, cynical laugh. ‘Yes; it’s a good idea all right—but for one thing. As we shall never get back, there is no reason why I should not tell you now. The plant I ran in the Argentine had nothing to do with atomic energy. I have no more idea how to make a fission bomb than the man in the Moon.’

  18

  The Menace to Earth

  For a moment Kem stared at Escobar in dismay, then he burst out laughing and cried: ‘Well, I’ll be damned! After General Peron’s public announcement that his atomic scientist had deceived him we got the idea that he might be bluffing, and really had something pretty terrific up his sleeve all the time.’

  ‘We thought the Great Powers might think that,’ Escobar smiled, ‘and, having told the truth, saw no reason to discourage them. In view of the state of the World today it is up to every nation to take any measures it can to make others think twice before attacking it. I suppose you were sent out to discover if we really had found a way to mass-produce Atom bombs, or had just allowed you to lead yourselves up the garden path?’

  Kem nodded. ‘That’s it. And now I’ve got the answer. The thing that does astonish me, though, is your disclosure that you know nothing about atomic energy. I never doubted for a moment that you were making Atom bombs; the only question was whether you had a new process by which you could make them much more swiftly and cheaply than anyone else.’

  ‘In view of the precautions we took to guard the place it is hardly surprising that you jumped to the conclusion that it was an atomic plant; but if you had given the matter serious consideration it should have occurred to you that we might be making some other type of weapon.’

  ‘I was told that you had been connected with nuclear research when you were working for the Nazis.’

  ‘Then you were misinformed. I am an astro-physicist and my speciality is stratospheric rockets. That is why I was stationed at Peenemünde. If you had read those papers in the brief-case you would have tumbled to that long ago.’

  ‘I have read them. I spent several hours going through them in the Saucer while you were asleep. But in science I got no further than elementary chemistry, so I could not make head or tail of the gibberish that most of them contained.’

  Escobar twirled up a point of his military moustache and smiled sardonically. ‘It does not say much for the people you were working for to have sent someone totally ignorant of science on a job like that.’

  ‘If these cursed Martians hadn’t come on the scene, and I’d got away with that brief-case, somebody else would have deciphered its contents quickly enough.’

  ‘You mean if you hadn’t hung about to keep your assignation with Carmen.’

  ‘All this is getting us nowhere,’ Carmen intervened. ‘I think your plan for terrorising the bee-beetles into sending us home was a fine one, Kem; and as I’ve never considered it my business to enquire into Estévan’s work, I, too, thought he was producing Atom bombs. But since he wasn’t, and has no idea how to make them, what can we do now?’

  While she was speaking twilight began to fall and within a few minutes the cell was in semi-darkness; but they had already settled themselves on their hard couches for the night, so they went on talking in the starlight.

  After some thought, Kem said, ‘It seems to me the best course would be for Estévan to continue to bluff the bee-beetles into thinking that he is making an Atom bomb for them.’

  ‘I can’t go on doing that indefinitely,’ Escobar objected.

  ‘No; but it will give us a little time to find out a bit more about them. Besides, the atom is not the only thing that can be used as an explosive. We might still pull off my plan if you could make some good old block-busters filled with T.N.T. Could you do that?’

  ‘How can I say? Given the right ingredients and facilities I could; but the question is, can our new masters provide them? When I was first taken into the laboratory they have copied from my own, I naturally expected that everything in it would be usable. But look at that pencil I showed you. If all the other things turn out to be like it, I’d stand no more chance of making explosives there than I would here out of these bean-fibre mats.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten about that dud pencil,’ Kem smiled. ‘I was rather glad to see it, in a way. It showed that these clever little devils aren’t so omnipotent as we first thought them. They can copy the shape of anything from their stereoscopic photographs, but they’ve no means of finding out what things are made of, or if they have something else inside them.’

  It was getting really cold now, and Carmen poked her head up from under her blanket for a moment to say: ‘That would explain why the armchair in the laboratory has no springs. When I sat down in it the seat felt quite solid; I’m sure it was made all in one piece.’

  ‘It explains, too, their failure to learn how to make an Atom bomb by watching how it is done on Earth,’ Kem added, looking across at Estévan, ‘and since they decided to bring someone here to show them how to do it, I can’t help seeing the funny side of having picked on you.’

  ‘Because you were fooled yourself, eh?’ Escobar replied grumpily.

  ‘That’s it. And, after all, they were better placed than I was to know what you were really doing: they could see into your plant.’

  ‘No doubt they were misled by seeing my new giant rocket. That is a further proof that in spite of their own achievements they are still very ignorant of science as it has developed with us. It is a great relief to know that, but it is also to our personal disadvantage. I shall be able neither to hold their interest by producing harmless wonders, nor make any kind of bomb that we might use ourselves, if all those instruments they have provided prove to be nothing but theatrical props.’

  ‘I should be surprised now if you found them of much use. One could see at a glance that th
e substances they were made of were different from those we use; and they have failed even to imitate the colour of ordinary ink.’

  ‘The colours of all the things in the room were wrong; but there is an explanation for that. Many animals and insects cannot see colour at all; so I think we may assume that these creatures see everything in black and white.’

  ‘I was rather surprised to see that none of their films was in “glorious technicolor”,’ Carmen put in, ‘but that would account for it.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ said Kem, ‘whether those instruments are duds or not, Estévan, it is up to you to do three things. You must keep the flag flying so that they continue to feed us, find out all you can about the Saucers, and try to make some H.E. bombs for us to use. Even hand-grenades would be better than nothing.’

  ‘It is easy enough for you to lie there and talk; but how do you suggest that I should set about making such bricks if I find there is no straw?’

  ‘You must persuade them to take you to one of their factories. They must have such places in order to make the Saucers and the films and talking machines. In them it is certain there will be raw materials and chemicals that you will recognise. By pointing out the ones you need, you could get them to hand over to you as much of each as you require. There is another angle to it, too. If you play your cards right they may let you examine one of the Saucers, and if you can find out how it works we might later steal one and get away in it.’

  Escobar grunted. ‘And how do you propose that I should convey such requests to them?’

  ‘By making drawings. You could sketch little pictures of a crane lifting a rocket, of a blast furnace, of yourself with a hammer at an anvil, of yourself being led by the bee-beetles towards a Flying Saucer, and that sort of thing. After all, they are very far from being fools. When you have completed your designs for the rocket parts and they have had them made, they are bound to realise that you could still help enormously by showing them how the bits should be put together. And they could not possibly assemble a large rocket inside their hive. That’s when your big chance will come to pull a fast one on them. In the meantime you must do your utmost to encourage them in the belief that, having brought you here, they’ve picked a winner. Unfortunately there is very little that Carmen and I can do that will help much, but you may be sure we shall do every possible thing we can to support you.’