Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  And Carmen was not his wife. She was not even his mistress. She had been so only for a few nights three and a half months ago. Since then she had consistently denied herself to him, and had remained implacable in the face of his obvious distress and most urgent pleading. Reason told him that he owed her neither loyalty nor consideration. Yet the fact remained that it was her he loved, not Anna; and the second he set eyes on her again his mind was thrown into a fresh turmoil, in which delight at seeing her once more was mingled with guilty shame at having betrayed her.

  A dozen swift questions and answers passed between the returned travellers and those who had stayed behind, then Harsbach asked:

  ‘Where is Nickolai Zadovitch?’

  Kem had naturally expected the question and replied calmly: ‘He’s dead. He fell down a deep crevasse one night when we were out in the desert.’

  Anna turned and gave him a quick smile. ‘You are too modest. Why not admit that he threatened to shoot you, and that in spite of his superior strength you got the best of him?’

  As they had never discussed what account they should give of the Russian’s death. Kem could not blame her for blurting out the truth. Obviously she had done so only because she held life cheap, and wished him to receive due credit for his bravery. He, on the other hand, felt that the circumstances in which he had quarrelled with and finally rid himself of Zadovitch might, in England, have been considered very near murder; so he had instinctively sought to conceal it. Since the cat was now out of the bag, he shrugged and said:

  ‘It’s true that we had a difference of opinion, and fought. But the fact that he missed his footing and fell down the crevasse, instead of myself, was a matter of pure chance. It just happened that his luck was out that night.’

  Carmen did not appear to be at all concerned at learning that he had been responsible for the death of the Russian. On the contrary, she smiled fondly at him and announced: ‘I’m simply dying to hear all about it; and how you found the lead, and everything. I can’t even wait till this evening; so the Herr Doktor will have to give me the afternoon off.’

  Harsbach bowed gallantly from the waist. ‘Of course, Senora. Your time is your own to do what you will with.’ Then, with a slightly malicious smile, he added, ‘Your husband and I will be quite content to receive an account of the expedition from Anna.’

  Ignoring the innuendo, Carmen took Kem’s arm and said: ‘For the past week our captors have been allowing us to drive the trolleys ourselves when we wish to, and they are quite easy to manage. Let’s take one and drive up to our old haunt among the boulders above the barracks.’

  It was years since Kem had blushed; but he now felt the hot blood flush his cheeks to scarlet as he cast a swift, embarrassed glance at Anna.

  She gave him a wicked little smile and, evidently fully convinced in her own mind that she had permanently hooked him, murmured meekly: ‘Don’t think of remaining here on my account. I have no desire to monopolise your attention in the daytime.’ Then, like the little gamin she was at heart, she grinned and stuck her tongue out at him.

  Her highly suggestive grimace was not lost on Harsbach. His harsh, abrupt laugh echoed round the yard, then he said to Kem, ‘Now we know why you killed Zadovitch and threw his body down a crevasse.’

  Kem swung upon him and retorted angrily: ‘You are wrong! I killed him to save my own life.’

  Carmen had already taken a few steps towards the nearest empty trolley; so her back was partially turned towards them. But she had heard every word they said and, out of the corner of her eye, had seen Anna stick her tongue out.

  Without turning round, she said to Kem in a curiously muted voice: ‘Please don’t start an argument, but come with me. I want to talk to you alone.’

  As he caught up with her he saw that her face had gone deathly white, and he felt as though he had broken some precious thing that could never be replaced.

  24

  Murder

  Carmen was first up on to the trolley. As soon as Kem had jumped up beside her she pushed over the lever and it ran forward. The scene that had just occurred made both of them tongue-tied from embarrassment. In an awkward silence they drove through the bean-fields—now empty of giants as the harvest in that area had been completed some days before—and on to the top of the great low mound under which lay the barracks. It was not until they had got down and settled themselves among the boulders that either of them spoke. Then Carmen simply said:

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ he retorted, with an edge on his voice; for during their silent ride the shame he felt had become sublimated into a growing anger and, having persuaded himself that she had no right to reproach him, he was now on the defensive.

  ‘You know well enough,’ she said. ‘You have been making love to that little Russian slut.’

  ‘Yes. She has become my mistress,’ he replied with brutal frankness. ‘What about it?’

  As Carmen turned to look at him he saw that her big eyes were incredibly sad, and she murmured: ‘Oh, Kem, how could you? She is a product of everything that is evil. I know it is not her fault that she has been brought up as an atheist and to be shamelessly immoral; but the fact remains that she and her kind are bent on destroying everything that is noble, honourable and decent in our world. What can you possibly have in common with such a woman?’

  ‘A young and healthy body.’

  ‘Surely something more than that is needed by people like us before we can give ourselves in love?’

  ‘This isn’t love. I have no feelings whatever towards Anna but good, clean, honest lust.’

  Carmen sighed. ‘To admit that you have simply been behaving like an animal makes matters no better. I should have thought a man like you would have been ashamed to confess that you are incapable of controlling your baser instincts.’

  ‘You may be a saint, but I am not,’ he burst out angrily. ‘You know as well as I do how we are situated. We’ve found lead, but we have not found any traces of uranium, and we may have to search half the planet before we make a strike. Even when we do, it will be a long time before Harsbach can get his bombs finished. Then we shall still be faced with the problem of persuading or tricking these damned insects into letting us take the bombs up in one of their Flying Saucers. Given that we succeed in that, our attempt to terrorise them into taking us back to Earth may quite well fail. Whichever way you look at it, we shall be stuck here for months yet; perhaps years; maybe for good. You cannot possibly expect me to live like a monk for the rest of my life while constantly in the company of two pretty women; one of whom, at least, feels the same way as I do. It’s utterly unreasonable. And, anyhow, I don’t see that you have any right to complain about what I choose to do.’

  For a moment Carmen was silent, then she replied: ‘No: that is quite true. When I refused to sleep with you myself I gave up even the ethical right to question your actions. But that does not alter the fact that I love you; and it’s only natural that your unfaithfulness should come as a shock to me, because I believed you loved me, too.’

  ‘I do love you,’ he said in a more gentle voice. ‘I’ve never ceased to do so. I swear that. The thought of having to hurt you like this has made me desperately unhappy for days past, and I only wish to God there was a way in which I could spare you further pain about my being physically unfaithful.’

  She laid a hand on his. ‘There is a way, Kem. Let’s forget that you ever went on your expedition, and start all over again.’

  He swung round, his face beaming and exclaimed joyfully, ‘You mean you’re ready to sacrifice your scruples and let me—’

  ‘No, no!’ she drew back quickly. ‘Not that! You know I can’t. I meant that if you really loved me you would be willing to give up Anna; so that we could at least be again all we were to one another before you went away.’

  The sudden unexpected way in which she had unintentionally aroused his hopes made his disappointment all the greater; yet he gave a full minute to considering what s
he had said before replying: ‘If we were certain of getting away from Mars in a few weeks, or even a few months, I’d willingly give up Anna to retain your respect; but for all we know we may be stuck here for good. That being the case, it just isn’t on; because I know myself too well to believe that I could keep it up indefinitely. Sooner or later the yen for her would get under my skin again, and you would feel even worse about it if you found out that I had started to deceive you with her behind your back. I know only too well how rotten it is going to be for you to see me being even civil to her now you are aware she is my mistress; but the remedy is in your own hands. You can’t have it both ways. Either you must put up with that or stop playing the virtuous wife to a husband who doesn’t give a damn for you. I don’t have to tell you which course I would rather you chose.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Kem. What I wouldn’t give you for love I certainly will not give to prevent your making me miserable over another woman. Holy Mary be thanked, I have a little more character than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I shouldn’t have put it that way. The very last thing I intended was to be brutal: it is only that I am looking at the future more realistically than you seem capable of doing. Naturally, loving you as I do, I shall do everything I possibly can to prevent Anna drawing attention to the fact that she is my mistress, in your presence. But, actually, after tonight, it’s unlikely that she will even have a chance to do so for some time to come. The sooner we can find uranium the better; so I expect she will set off on another prospecting trip tomorrow. As things are between you and me, naturally I shall go with her.’

  Carmen smiled a little wanly. ‘As far as I am concerned perhaps that’s just as well. Now, leaving Anna out of it as far as you can, tell me about your trip.’

  The air having been cleared between them, Kem became considerably more cheerful; and, glossing over Zadovitch’s death, raked up a few amusing incidents from his twelve-day journey to recount them with gusto. Only the approach of the evening sandstorm drove them down into the tunnel, and while they waited for the others to return he took the opportunity to find an empty cell, into which he carried some bean-fibre mats; so that should Anna insist on vaunting her own proprietary interest in him, he could take her in there to sleep, and so minimise Carmen’s distress at their relationship.

  Actually the evening passed off better than he had expected, as most of it was devoted to a sing-song. Then, next morning, with fresh supplies, their four giant warder-retainers and three inspecting bee-beetles, he and Anna set out on their second prospecting expedition.

  Before they had gone far Kem asked her what sort of minerals she would look for in seeking to detect the presence of uranium, and she replied:

  ‘Both pitch-blende and carnotite contain uranium. The first is a glossy bluish-black substance found in igneous rocks; the second a canary-yellow mineral which occurs in sandstone deposits. In our world pitch-blende is the more common; but both are relatively scarce, and here we are much more likely to come upon carnotite. In fact I have already seen traces of it in some of the sandstone cliffs while we were prospecting for lead; but never in sufficient quantity to make a payload. From the distribution of the traces I found I think we should go north-east for two days, without wasting time in examining any rocky areas we pass, then start our prospecting on the third morning.’

  That night, and for many nights to come, the camps they made had few features to distinguish them from one another, or from those in which they had lain while on their first expedition. During the days they traversed endless deserts, intersected by occasional roads and bean-planted canal zones, both of which became separated by ever greater distances as they advanced into the vaster wastes to the north.

  Had they been offered a wish, and chosen a honeymoon in which solitude should be the first consideration, their desire could not conceivably have been more completely gratified. The giants performed their duties in a manner so like automatons that, after a time, they seemed to become no more than detachable parts of the trolleys they operated. The inspecting bee-beetles came and went with the regularity of clockwork. Apart from these representatives of the two types of inhabitants of Mars, there was neither man nor beast, bird, reptile or insect, to disturb for one instant the even tenor of their days and nights.

  On setting out Kem had been far from happy, as his talk with Carmen had shaken him badly. She had not lost one iota of her attraction for him, and he was more than ever convinced that she was the finest person he had ever known. While he resented the fact that her resolution had driven him into hurting her, he could not help but admire it, and was half inclined to wish that he had the strength of character to emulate it. But his Latin temperament was utterly averse to asceticism in any form and he felt that he had been right in refusing to pretend otherwise. He felt, too, that it would be foolish to allow himself to drift into fits of contemplating how infinitely happier he would be had she been with him on the expedition instead of Anna; so he deliberately checked each thought of Carmen as soon as it came into his head, and by this means succeeded for the time being in getting her image out of his mind.

  Her sense of humour was strictly limited. It consisted only of the custard-pie variety and occasional excursions into the realms of schoolgirl smut. Any forms of shaggy-dog story, play upon words, or satire, were entirely outside her comprehension. In mathematics, physics and various other practical subjects she appeared to have a sound education, and she could talk intelligently on the ballet; but art and literature were to her almost closed books. Her geography and scripture were extremely sketchy. She believed that Jesus Christ had lived in Constantinople and been made use of by the early Popes as a sort of soap-box orator, to persuade the masses to resign themselves to slavery on the promise of a future life on which he knew quite well they would never enter. Such history as she knew concerned either the development of Marxism or was an incredible tangle of perversions of the truth. She had never heard of the civilisations of Egypt, Greece, or Rome, and believed that the past consisted of one long, black record of evil rulers driving their peoples into war, in order to enrich themselves, or holding them down by deliberately created famines and using a pampered soldiery to carry out mass shootings whenever outbreaks occurred. She was, too, fully convinced that the masses in every country outside the Soviet sphere still groaned under the feudal system, and that Churchill was the King of England.

  Kem soon found that any attempt to educate her to the truth was hopeless. He was careful to preserve the fiction that he was of Spanish descent and an Argentinian; but he said that he knew London and Paris, as well as Buenos Aires, and endeavoured to give her some idea of the life led in those cities by ordinary people. She simply would not believe that most factory girls owned several frocks, could change their jobs whenever they liked, and worked only a forty-four hour week compared with the sixty-hour week usual in Russia; or that the cinemas had seats enough to accommodate everyone who wanted to go to them, that people incapable of work received the same rations as the most highly-qualified technicians, and that the vast majority of families enjoyed the privacy of a home of their own, which rarely consisted of less than four rooms. These, and many similiar facts, were all stigmatised by her as capitalist lies invented to disrupt the solidarity of the Soviet workers; and, after a time, she began to show strong resentment that Kem should—as she thought—continue to treat her like a gullible child.

  Sometimes she carried the war into the enemy’s camp by dilating on how the 200 million inhabitants of Russia had eliminated the friction inseparable from the ties of blood relationship through converting themselves into one great big happy family, with the kindly, impartial State acting as parents to them all; by describing the wonders that the five-year plans would eventually produce; and by enthusing over the excitement everyone derived from rival factories competing to see which could get its workers to give up the greater number of leisure hours, in a drive to increase output as a gift for Comrade Stalin. />
  More for amusement than anything else, Kem usually retaliated by asking, with apparent seriousness, such questions as ‘Does the State employ officials to play bears with the children?’ and ‘Does Comrade Stalin ever ask to dinner the workers who have given up their leisure for him?’ But, after a time, the game grew wearisome, as it usually resulted in an argument that was terminated by Anna dragging in a lot of pompous, meaningless Marxist jargon, to which there was no sensible reply.

  By their third week out they were running short of subjects on which they could talk without violent disagreement, and the monotony of the expedition was beginning to prey upon their nerves. By daytime the opaline tints of the desert scene were undeniably lovely, and by night the myriad stars made the ever-cloudless sky a thing of fairyland; yet that vast, lifeless emptiness had something inhuman and terrifying about it. The very silence seemed like the held breath of some intangible horror that was waiting to spring out on the unwary; and still more sinister were the false nights created by the duststorms, that often occurred several times a day, rendering them utterly defenceless and even for a while cutting them off from one another.

  It was, therefore, a great relief to both of them when, on their twenty-fourth day out, Anna made her strike. Such samples of carnotite as she had found had proved disappointing, but this was a really promising deposit of pitch-blende, to which she had been led by coming upon traces of silica, calcium, iron and manganese in the same area. That she should have found pitch-blende pleased her particularly for, as she told Kem, both sulphur and salt-petre were among the chemicals used by the bee-beetles, and from them Harsbach could make sulphuric acid, with which uranium could be extracted from pitch-blende; whereas its extraction from carnotite would have proved considerably more difficult.