The Planet Strappers Part 28

Frank Nelsen grinned slightly. "All right--let me tell it," he said.

"Because this is something I really paid attention to! Like you imply, their equipment is alive. So they work best with life--viruses, germs, vegetable-allergy substances. These are their inventing, developing and brewing bottles--for the numerous strains of Syrtis Fever virus. The living molecule chains split off from the inner tissue walls of the bottles, and grow and multiply in the free fluid. At least, that's how I read it."

"And that is where my lab job begins, Frank," she told him. "Helping develop anti-virus shots--testing them on bits of human tissue, growing in a culture bath. An even partially effective anti-virus isn't found easily. And when it is, another virus strain will soon appear, and the doctors have to start over... Oh, the need isn't as great, any more, as when the Great Rush away from Mars was on. There are only half a dozen really sick people in the hospital now. Late comers and snoopers who got careless or curious. You've got to remember that the virus blows off the thickets like invisible vapor. There's one guy from Idaho--Jimmy--James Scanlon. Come along. I'll show you, Frank..."

He lay behind plastic gla.s.s, in a small cubicle. A red rash, with the pattern of frostwork on a Minnesota windowpane in January, was across his lean, handsome face. Maybe he was twenty--Nance's age. His bloodshot eyes stared at terrors that no one else could see.

Nance called softly through the thin infection barrier. "Jimmy!"

He moaned a little. "Francy..."

"High fever, Frank," Nance whispered. "Typical Syrtis. He wants to be home--with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia--yearning terribly for old, familiar surroundings--is a major symptom. It's like a command from _them_--to get out of Mars. The red rash is something extra he picked up. An allergy... Oh, we think he'll survive. Half of them now do. He's big and strong. Right now, even the nurses don't go in there, except in costumes that are as infection-tight as armor. Later on, when the fever dwindles to chronic intermittence, it will no longer be contagious. Even so, the new laws on Earth won't let him return there for a year. I don't know whether such laws are fair or not. We've got a hundred here, who were sick, and are now stranded and waiting, working at small jobs. Others have gone to the Belt--which seems terrible for someone not quite well. I hope that Jimmy bears up all right--he's such a kid... Let's get out of here..."

Her expression was gently maternal. Or maybe it was something more?

Back in the lounge, she asked, "What will you do here, Frank?"

"Whatever it is, there is one thing I want to include," he answered. "I want to try to find out just what happened to Mitch Storey."

"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared, deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick settler in--on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After he got lost, his wife--a nurse from here whose name had been Selma Washington--went looking for him. She never was found either."

"Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement.

"Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols--watching for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late comers who might turn out to be screwb.a.l.l.s. You look as though you might be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty in half an hour..."

Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you."

For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli.

At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use.

He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars--from a safe alt.i.tude of two thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic cities--still faintly tainted with radioactivity--where the original inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation water of the otherwise mythical "ca.n.a.ls." The huge south polar cap of h.o.a.rfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the trails, once burned out with oxygen and gasoline-jelly to permit the pa.s.sage of vehicles, had again become completely overgrown--who could hope to stamp out that devilishly hardy vegetation, propagating by means of millions of windblown spores, with mere fire? The broken-down trains of tractors and trailers, now almost hidden. The stellene garden domes that had flattened. Here were the relics left by people who had sought to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear.

Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths.

Twice, working warily with machetes, and holding their flame weapons ready, they chopped armored mummies from enwrapping tendrils, while little eye cells glinted at them balefully, and other tendrils bent slowly toward them. They searched out the s.p.a.ce-fitness cards, which bore old dates, and addresses of next of kin.

In a few more days, Nelsen was flying the 'copter. Then he was out on his own, watching, searching. For a couple of weeks he hangared the heli at once, after each patrol, and Nance always was there to meet him as he did so.

Inevitably the evening came when he said, "We could fly out again, Nance. For an hour or two. It doesn't break any rules."

Those evening rides, high over Syrtis Major, toward the setting sun, became an every other day custom, harmless in itself. A carefully kept nuclear-battery motor didn't conk; the vehicle could almost fly without guidance. It was good to look down at the blue-green s.h.a.gginess, below... Familiarity bred, not contempt, but a decline of dread to the point where it became a pleasant thrill--an overtone to the process of falling in love. Otherwise, perhaps they led each other on, into incaution. Out in the lonely fastnesses of Mars they seemed to find the sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic Earth that the settlers had sought here.

"We always pa.s.s over that same hill," Nance said during one of their flights. "It must have been a beautiful little island in the ancient ocean, when there was that much water. Now it belongs to us, Frank."

"It's barren--we could land," Nelsen suggested quickly.

They visited the hill a dozen times safely, breaking no printed rule.

But maybe they shouldn't have come so often to that same place. In life there is always a risk--which is food for a fierce soul. Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss were fierce souls.

They'd stand by the heli and look out over Syrtis, their gloved fingers entwined. If they couldn't kiss, here, through their helmets, that was merely comic pathos--another thing to laugh and be happy over.

"Our wind-blown hill," Nance chuckled on that last evening. "Looking down over a culture, a history--maybe arguments, lawsuits, jokes, parties; gossip too, for all we know--disguised as a huge briar patch that makes funny noises."

"Shut up--I love you," Nelsen gruffed.

"Shut up yourself--it's you I love," she answered.

The little sun was half sunk behind the Horizon. The 'copter was only a hundred feet away, along the hillcrest. That was when it happened. Two dull, plopping sounds came almost together.

If a thinking animal can use the pressure of a confined gas to propel small missiles, is there any reason why other intelligences can't do the same? From two bottle-like pods the cl.u.s.ters of darts--or long, sharp thorns--were shot. Only a few of them struck their targets. Fewer, still, found puncturable areas and struck through silicone rubber and fine steelwire cloth into flesh. Penetration was not deep, but deep enough.

Nance screamed. Nelsen wasn't at all sure that he didn't scream himself as the first anguish dizzied and half blinded him.

From the start it was really too late. Nelsen was as hardy and determined as any. He tried to get Nance to the 'copter. Less than halfway, she crumpled. With a savage effort of will he managed to drag her a few yards, before his legs refused to obey him, or support him.

His blood carried a virus to his brain about as quickly as it would have carried a cobra's venom. _They_ probably could have made such protein-poisons, too; but they had never used them against men, no doubt because something that could spread and infect others was better.

For a while, as the black, starshot night closed in, Nelsen knew, or remembered, nothing at all--unless the mental distortions were too horrible. Then he seemed to be in a pit of stinking, viscous fluid, alive with stringy unknowns that were boring into him... Unreachable in another universe was a town called Jarviston. He yelled till his wind was gone.

He had a half-lucid moment in which he knew it was night, and understood that he had a raging fever. He was still clinging to Nance, who clung to him. So instinct still worked. He saw that they had blundered--its black bulk was visible against the stars. Phobos hadn't risen; Deimos, the farther moon, was too small to furnish appreciable light.

Something touched him from behind, and he recoiled, pushing Nance back.

He yanked the machete from his belt, and struck blindly... Oh, _no!_--you didn't get caught like this--not usually, he told himself.

Not in their actual grip! They were too slow--you could always dodge! It was only when you were near something not properly disinfected that you got Syrtis Fever, which was the worst that could happen--wasn't it...?

He heard an excited rhythm in the buzzing. Now he remembered his shoulder-lamp, fumbled to switch it on, failed, and stumbled a few steps with Nance toward the hill. Something caught his feet--then hers. Trying to get her free, he dropped his machete...

Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."

Yeah--forty minutes.

"It's--it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer almost apologetically. Dear Nance...

Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got both her and himself loose.

It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have sprung from _them_--someway. A huge, zombie form--the ugliest part of this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.

The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his shoulder...

There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either.

The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness, misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except to indicate the pa.s.sage of time. A month? A century...?

It seemed that he was always struggling impossibly to get himself and Nance somewhere--out of hot, noisesome holes of suffocation, across deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed incongruously with strange harmonica music that seemed to express all time and s.p.a.ce... He could never succeed though the need was desperate.

But sometimes there was a coolness answering his thirst, or rubbed into his burning skin, and he would seem to sleep... Often, voices told him things, but he always forgot...

It wasn't true that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn chair of tubular magnesium with a back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stellene. The stone walls showed the beady fossils of prehistoric Mars. More than probably, these chambers had been cut in the living rock, by the ancients.

Reclining in another lawn chair beside his was Nance, her eyes closed, her face thin and pale. He was frightened--until he remembered, somehow, that she was nearly as well as he was. Beyond her was a doorway, leading into what seemed a small, modern kitchen. There was a pa.s.sage to a small, neat garden, where Earthly vegetables and flowers grew. It was ceiled with stellene; its walls were solid rock. Looking up through the transparent roof above him, he saw how a thin mesh of fuzzy tendrils and whorls masked this strange Shangri-la.

Nelsen closed his eyes, and thought back. Now he remembered most of what he had been told. "Mitch!" he called quietly, so as not to awaken Nance.