Warbirds of Mars: Stories of the Fight!

by Неизвестный

  The sun was low in a baked sky that seemed to have been robbed of its blue. It had a dry and dusty yellowness to it. The land was tired and flat, and only the distant mesas and the jagged jot of Shiprock itself offered any break to the monotonous horizon. Those, and the big damn rock on the road, which, as I watched, shifted and slumped down onto itself.

  The man’s coat, skin, and hair were caked with dust. It was impossible to tell where one finished and the next began. He didn’t seem to be moving, and I gave him the berth you give dying things in the middle of the road. I nearly got bit once by a dog I hit, on a road in Las Cruces, but admittedly I was trying to steal its collar, and all I got was bit.

  “Fella?” I asked. I wondered how long he’d been out here. There was every likelihood Marseillaise was the only vehicle that had traveled this stretch of road that day, and I wouldn’t have bet more than four had in the last week. It was coming on to sunset but the air must still have been in the mid-nineties. If he had an ass sitting on that road under that coat, it would have been red as a Tijuana hooker’s lipstick. I had just about figured he was dead when he moved. His head looked up and two ice-blue eyes opened a crack.

  “Wo haben sie mich?”

  Now I have no fondness for Germans. But aside from the understandable bitterness about the trigger-happy flugenasshole who turned me from a pretty fair dancer into a dead hoofer, I have to confess an admiration for the German fighting spirit—in ‘forty-five those bastards kept shooting back when smarter men would have waved white, and I understand that there are still a bunch of widerstanders living in the sewers under Berlin, trying to keep up the fight with Big Green. And this guy, who’d clearly been out in the New Mexico sun with no hat and shoes with soles so thin you could shave with them, was clearly some tough yuck.

  I racked my brain trying to remember the basic Deutsch they had us learned in the D-Day briefings, but it didn’t matter—Gerry’s blue peepers fluttered shut and he hit the road again. I hefted him over and propped him in Marseillaise’s shade while I changed her tire. By the time I’d finished, I was wearing almost as much dust as him. The sky had turned from dirty yellow to an inflamed but beautiful orange. I collected the tire iron and jack, opened the trunk, and noticed that Gerry’s eyes were open again, flicking between my face and the tire iron.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “No whacken ze kopf.” I threw the tire iron and jack into the back, and I shut the lid.

  “Amerikaner?” he asked.

  “It’s still America, pal.” I looked at the sky; the sun slipped below a line of mesas so clean a draughtsman might have drawn them. “For the moment. Sprechen ze English, Hans?”

  For a moment, he didn’t reply. His eyes lost focus and his torso lost balance. He teetered, putting one hand down to the dry, purpling ground. I caught him by the shoulder. The guy felt as light as if he was made of cigarette papers. I leaned him against Marseillaise’s dusty flanks, opened one of the four little hatches under the rubber that covered her floor, and found a thermos of coffee. I sloshed it around. Half full. I poured a cup; it was lukewarm, but I figured that my new pal wouldn’t object. He regarded it for a moment, then drank it down fast. I poured him another. He drank it, too. His lips were cracked, and I saw the rim of the metal cup spot with red. He held up the cup apologetically, and I tipped what little mud was left into it. He finished that, too. But when he held the cup out a third time, it fell from his fingers, and he hit the clay again. This time, I was too slow to catch him.

  “We better get you to a doctor, Hans.” I racked my mind, wondering if there was a doctor within a hundred miles. The sky was finally pretty, a glossy opal with stars starting to blink awake in the east.

  His eyes blinked open.

  “No doctor.” His whispered English was inflected but clear. His eyes opened wider and found mine. “Get me to the Project.” His eyes rolled back in his head, the whites turning a strange blue in the dusky light. Then his body went limp again.

  I propped the man against Marseillaise again and dusted him off as best I could. It turned out his hair was black, so he was younger than I’d guessed. Thirty, maybe. When I took off his coat to shake the dust free, he was a scarecrow. I lifted the coat, and searched through it for a wallet. Nothing. But on his forearm he had a tattoo of six digits and a small triangle. His coat was dark blue and heavily patched, and his name—according to a worn patch sewed inside the collar—was Abraham.

  What goddamned luck. I looked around at the emptiness. What were my choices? If I left him there, no one would be the wiser. He’d die, but at least I wouldn’t be stuck with a dead German in my car. And if I took him? What would happen to me if he died in transit? Maybe nothing, maybe a bunch of awkward questions, maybe a spell in a ten-by-six while I waited for some assistant coroner working on New Mexico time to say: yup, it weren’t murder, the lost fool died of exposure. That was only a problem if anyone saw me with him in the car; if not, I could just dump him beside the road. And if I took him to the nearest town and found him help, then what? The guy didn’t want a doctor. Get me to the Project.

  The Project.

  It was one of the worst kept secrets in New Mexico that there were Europeans around White Rock. Some came and went; most went into Los Alamos and never came out. They were the gadget makers; the eggheads who had the job of building the next generation of weapons. After Berlin fell to the Big Heads, the news about what happened to enemy scientists that the Allies could find was deafening in its silence. Some people said they were spirited away to New Orleans; others said Sacramento; others said they were all shot because they couldn’t be trusted. A traveling key-cutter I shared a drink with in Grants pointed a calloused finger at me and said he reckoned “Los Alamos woulda been the first place that Big Green landed on American soil, even before Wash’ton.” A jokester in the same bar and listening to the same conversation said sure. He said the Martians had turned them scientists all into call girls with three mouths, and for two bits Einstein himself would give you the blow of your dreams while singing Lili Marlene and I’ll Get By in the same key. I didn’t believe that (not least because I knew Einstein hadn’t been one of the gadget guys), but I did believe that after Berlin fell again and Washington’s skies were abuzz with our birds and the Big Heads’, all the smarts from Los Alamos were bundled onto trucks and out past Pajarito Mountain into the wide brown yonder. Wherever they were, their job was to create a new weapon to destroy the invaders from Mars.

  I looked down at the unconscious German. The sun was down and the sky in the East was already dark purple; the thinning light and thickening shadows smoothed his features, but they couldn’t hide his tortured gauntness. I’d heard the Allies had rounded up all the surviving Kraut scientists who’d been working on their own National Socialist version of a Super Bomb and vanished them Stateside. A lot of them would have looked as grimly starved as Abraham, especially those who were too Jewish for their own good. Is that why Abraham had wandered into the desert here? I guess if he’d spent a winter or three in Mauthausen, then he might well have become understandably weary of life in clapboard huts and barbed wire. Might’ve jumped the fence. A day or so in the New Mexico sun must have cured his wanderlust. But why did he insist on no doctor? I’d heard how the stuff the eggheads worked with could turn your hair white and cause all sorts of weird things to happen to your body. I took a step back. Was Abraham radiating those invisible deadly beams now?

  I bundled Abraham into Marseillaise and watched his thin chest rise and fall. We had just got going when I saw a flash of greenish light to the east, and pushed in the chrome knob to switch off the car’s headlights. By moonlight I carefully slowed the car; with the spare on the front wheel, getting another flat could have spelt bad news for me and a death sentence for my traveling companion, given the lack of traffic. Marseillaise stopped, and I watched the green streak of light. It turned in a slow arc about ten miles away over a dark dash of mesas.

  Big Heads.

  Twin streaks of
emerald, like fluorescent vapor trails. They hung in the air like a slice of Northern Lights, before fading and vanishing. Damn, but they were fast. In the war, a bunch of us American pilots had watched tests of the British Gloster Meteor before it went operational, and we’d thought that jet was something else. The green streaks made the Meteors look as slow as clubfeet in a hundred yard dash.

  I watched them do a final arc before disappearing over the eastern horizon. My heart was doing a pretty fair foxtrot when I started Marseillaise again. They may not have been looking for us, but I was sure glad they didn’t find us.

  Nuts. It was all too hard. I pulled over and dragged the guy out. I got him over to the side of the road and laid him flat. I didn’t want the guy to die, but the idea that I might have to spend half a day answering questions from Sheriff Doyle, or some Bureau dick, or that some curious G-men might decide to give Marseillaise a thorough once-over was all too much.

  The stars were a salt sprinkle in the huge dark overhead as I bunched up his jacket and placed it under his head as a pillow. I took his greatcoat in both hands and gave it a shake to flick off what dust I could. The desert can be cold at night. I placed it over him and smoothed it down. And as I did, I felt the small, round lump near its low hem. There was no pocket there. Something was sewn into the lining.

  I opened my pocket-knife, cut around the lump, and tweezered the object out with my finger and thumb.

  It was a sphere, smaller than a golf ball, larger than a marble. It was heavy for its size, as if it might be made of lead. It was a strange color that reflected the sky with a burnish that suggested metal, yet it seemed to fracture the light into dazzling patterns in its surface, more like an opalized fossil. As I turned it in my fingers, the dark rainbow light shifted in the way that colors will shift in a soap bubble. Its surface was textured with strangely ordered whorls, like wood grain or human fingerprints. And it was warm; not warm from Abraham’s body or the past day’s heat: it had its own heat, as warm as human flesh.

  I had a momentary flutter of fear, remembering the weird elements I’d heard that these guys worked with. But while this might be metal, it was more than a lump of ore. I tentatively held it to my ear, and heard the faintest whirring. It was a machine of some sort. Maybe a gyroscope, maybe a detonator. Something important to the gadget guys. Something valuable. I was no fool. If a thing is worth hiding, it’s worth selling. All I needed was to find the right buyer.

  “Pal,” I said to the unconscious man. “You just bought your life back.”

  The town I headed for was Bellamy. Bellamy is not the cultural hub of the continental USA; it’s not even the cultural hub of New Mexico. Most of the folk in Farmington had likely never heard of it, and the few that had were no doubt glad they didn’t live there. Bellamy had very little to offer the traveler, but it did have a trading post run by a woman named Juanita Perez. Juanita also rented out two tiny but neat rooms in back of her store where I had stayed on a number of occasions, and her son Lope sold stolen gas and bought stolen tobacco. I had been planning to offload the last of my ersatz Lucky Strikes to Lope before heading down to visit my druggist. Bellamy also had a motor garage (where Lope sold his ill-gotten gas), and a small establishment that, with a little imagination and lot of squinting, might be called a bar. To my recollection, what Bellamy did not have was a doctor. But Abraham had said, no doctors, and besides, he seemed to be breathing regularly and he’d kept down those cups of jamoke. What he needed was a bed, and what I needed was time to figure out what to do with the little metal sphere—what I referred to in my own mind as ‘the gadget’—and how to turn it into some green. I’d hire a room at Juanita Perez’s and work out what to do next.

  Juanita Perez rented each of her tiny but neat bedrooms for two-fifty a night, including breakfast. I’d heard that for an extra ten dollars, Juanita Perez would escort you personally to your room and give you what was, in my imagination at least, Western New Mexico’s finest turn-down service. I’d never had ten spare bucks, so only my eyes were allowed to enjoy Juanita’s dusky skin and pleasant curves. She was in her forties but looked fifteen years younger, giving substance to that strange rule of thumb that the years on a Latina dartboard are never close to the bullseye. I once complimented an elderly woman in Cananea about the grandchild on her lap; turned out the kid was hers and the poor woman was only thirty-two. Anyway, I didn’t want a woman seeing my metal legs. One lousy attempt at intimacy some two years earlier had ended when the poor young thing had clapped eyes on my shiny braces and the nasty sores they’d raised on the scarred skin of my legs; the wide-eyed look of shocked disgust had cured my randiness faster than a Jack Kramer fastball.

  I parked round back, then walked through deep shadows to the store’s porch and front door. I knocked. A moment later, a light came on and the door opened an inch. Juanita Perez stood behind a chain, and her eyes flicked quickly over my face. She recognized me and said my name. I apologized for the late arrival. She watched me for a moment with those dark eyes, then unlatched the chain and opened the door wide, smoothing her nightdress over her thighs. I could smell her skin. Something inside me strained like a dog against a chain, and I gritted my teeth. I wanted a drink.

  “A room?” she asked. Her words came out slow and rich as melted chocolate. I nodded, and said just for tonight. She told me the price and I placed a dollar bill and six quarters on her long-fingered hand. What I wanted those fingers to do. She stepped into the dark and returned with a small brass key.

  “Room One,” she said. “You remember the way, or you need me to show you?”

  I would have liked to have followed those slow hips around the back to the rooms, but I didn’t want her to see the sleeping man I was going to smuggle inside. I told her I was fine. She said she’d bring breakfast at seven, handed me the key, and closed the door.

  I walked past the thick smell of outside toilets and the lighter scent of wild jasmine to the little cottage that housed the spare rooms Juanita rented. I unlocked the door, swung it open to darkness, and returned to my car. Abraham was light as a girl, and the irony was not lost on me that I was spending hard won cash to carry the wrong person into Juanita’s rented bedroom. My braces squeaked under the added weight, and squeaked loudly when I bent to lower him onto the single bed. I closed the door, checked that the blinds were down, then switched on the single bulb hanging from a cloth-covered cord.

  It was a small room, neatly swept, with a sagging iron single bed. There was a porcelain sink stained by rusty water, with a note above it telling guests to urinate in the toilet block outside. I looked at Abraham. He was still deeply unconscious. The Project. No doctor.

  I pulled off his shoes and socks, and made sure he was comfortable. I didn’t want him waking. I rinsed my unused handkerchief under the single faucet and wiped the patina of pale dust from his face and neck. He looked younger, clean. He would have been a handsome man, had he not been starved by war and horror. I rinsed the handkerchief again, and when I turned back, his eyes were open and looking at me.

  “Hurry,” he whispered.

  I wiped his face again. “We’ll go there in the morning.”

  “The Project?”

  I nodded. “How’d you get lost out there? Why’d you go AWOL?”

  He closed his eyes and was silent while I finished washing him. I thought he’d fallen back asleep when he said, “Stadtilm. Near Liepzig. We lived there… it seems many years ago.”

  His eyes opened, and the smallest of smiles played on his cracked lips.

  “Not far from Stadtilm is the Talsperra Hayda. A dam. A lake. It’s very beautiful.” He smiled. “My father would take us there. The water is so blue after the snows, and there are pine forests right down to the water. Cool, and they smell so clean… I wanted to smell the pines.”

  I turned to rinse the handkerchief again. “Well, this will all finish one day. Just play it straight and you’ll get back to your lake, and who knows…”

  When I looked back, he
was asleep, breathing deeply.

  I pulled the little metal marble from my pocket. It might have been my imagination, but it felt even warmer to the touch. I had to go out, but I didn’t want Abraham waking to discover his precious metal sphere missing, raising a ruckus, and killing off my chance of a reward. I slipped the gadget back into the cut lining of his coat, and folded the coat onto the chair.

  The guy was in the deepest of sleeps. I knew what I was going to do. Abraham might not have wanted a doctor, but I needed one. A quite particular doctor, and I thought I knew where I’d find him.

  I turned off the light, locked Abraham inside, and stepped into the night.

  The bar was called Los Clavos. Inside, it was dark as a bruise, and its air was the sour stink of a drunk’s armpit. But just as taste buds dull after the first sip of hard liquor, so eyes and nostrils also adjust to shadow and stench. I knew from experience that it was possible to spend many hours drinking at the rickety tables with their mismatching chairs, or at the tall, cigarette-burnt bar. There were two permanent fixtures in Los Clavos: a half-century old mirror, on which was painted a nude reposing woman, and an old man wearing an old apron. O’Connell was thick limbed and bald headed, and in all the years I’d come and gone, he had said perhaps ten words to me. His eyes were occluded by growing cataracts, and they showed neither recognition nor confusion when they landed on me. O’Connell simply nodded and poured me a finger of Early Times. Some folk reckoned he bought the bar after his Hopi wife left him; others thought it was her bar and he killed her for it. Either way, the place was as grim as the open mouth of a corpse.