The Planet Strappers Part 29

"Hey, Mitch...! Selma...!"

Mitch Storey was there in a moment--dressed in dungarees and work shirt like he used to be, but taller, even leaner, and unsmiling.

Nelsen got up. "Thanks, Mitch," he said.

Their voices stayed low and intense.

"For nothing, Frank. I'm d.a.m.ned glad to see you, but you still shouldn't have come nosing. 'Cause--I told you why. Looking for you, Huth burned out more than five square miles. And if folks get too smart and too curious, it won't be any good for what's here..."

Nelsen felt angry and exasperated. But he had a haunting thought about a lanky colored kid in Jarviston, Minnesota. A guy with a dream--or perhaps a prescient glimpse of his own future.

"What's a pal supposed to do?" he growled. "For a h.e.l.luva long time you've answered n.o.body--though everyone in the Bunch must have tried beaming you."

"Sure, Frank... Blame, from me, would be way out of line. I heard you guys lots of times. But it was best to get lost--maybe help keep the thickets like they are for as long as possible... A while back, I began picking up your voice in my phones again. I figured you were heading for trouble when you kept coming with your girl to that same hill. So I was around, like I told you before... Sorry I had to hit you and give you the needle, but you were nuts--gone with Syrtis. Getting you back here, without Huth spotting the old heli I picked up once at a deserted settlers' camp was real tough going. I had to land, hide it and wait, four or five times. And you were both plenty sick. But there are a few medical gimmicks I learned from the thickets--better than those at the Station."

"You've done all right for yourself here, haven't you, Mitch?" Nelsen remarked with a dash of mockery. "All the modern conveniences--in the middle of the forbidden wilds of Syrtis Major."

"Sure, Frank--'cause maybe I'm selfish. Though it's just stuff the settlers left behind. Anyway, it wasn't so good at the start. I was careful, but I got the fever, too. Light. Then I fell--broke my leg--out there. I thought sure I was finished when they got hold of me. But I just lay there, playing on my mouth organ--an old hymn--inside my helmet. Maybe it was the music--they must have felt the radio impulses of my tooting before. Or else they knew, somehow, that I was on their side--that I figured they were too important just to disappear and that I meant to do anything I could, short of killing, to keep them all right... Nope, I wouldn't say that they were so friendly, but they might have thought I'd be useful--a guinea-pig to study and otherwise. For all I know, examining my body may have helped them improve their weapons...

Anyhow--you won't believe this--'cause it's sort of fantastic--but you know they work best with living tissue. They fixed that leg, bound it tight with tendrils, went through the steel cloth of my Archer with hollow thorns. The bone knit almost completely in four days. And the fever broke. Then they let me go. Selma was already out looking for me.

When I found her, she had the fever, too. But I guess we're immune now."

Storey's quiet voice died away.

"What are you going to do, Mitch? Just stay here for good?"

"What else--if I can? This is better than anything I remember. Peaceful, too. If they study me, I study them--not like a real scientist--but by just having them close around. I even got to know some of their buzzing talk. Maybe I'll have to be their amba.s.sador to human folks, sometime.

They _are_ from the planets of the stars, Frank. Sirius, I think. Tough little spores can be ejected from one atmosphere, and drift in s.p.a.ce for millions of years... They arrived after the first Martians were extinct.

Now that you're here, Frank, I wish you'd stay. But that's no good.

Somebody lost always makes people poke around."

Nelsen might have argued a few points. But for one thing, he felt too tired. "I'll buy it all, your way, Mitch," he said. "I hope Nance and I can get out of here in a couple more days. Maybe I shouldn't have run out on the Belt. Can't run--thoughts follow you. But now--dammit--I want to go home!"

"That's regular, Frank. 'Cause you've got Syrtis. Chronic, now--intermittent. But it'll fade. Same with your girl. Meanwhile, they won't let you go Earthside, but you'll be okay. I'll fly you out, close enough to the Station to get back, any morning before daylight, that you pick... Only, you won't tell, will you, Frank?"

"No--I promise--if you think secrecy makes any difference.

Otherwise--thanks for everything... By the way--do you ever listen in on outside news?"

"Enough. Still quiet... And a fella named Miguel Ramos--with nerve-controlled clamps for hands--got a new, special bubb and took off for Pluto."

"No! d.a.m.n fool... Almost as loony as you are, Mitch."

"Less... Wake up, Nance. Dinner... Chicken--raised right here..."

That same afternoon, Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss sat in the garden.

"If I blur, just hold me tight, Frankie," she said. "Everything is still too strange to quite get a grip on--yet... But I'm _not_ going home, Frank--not even when it is allowed. I set out--I'm sticking--I'm not turning tail. It's what people have got to do--in s.p.a.ce more than ever..."

Even when the seizure of fever came, and the sweat gathered on her lips, and her eyes went wild, she gritted her teeth and just clung to him. She had s.p.u.n.k--admirable, if perhaps destructive. "Love yuh," Frank kept saying. "Love yuh, Sweetie..."

Two days later, before the frigid dawn, they saw the last of Mitch Storey and his slender, beautiful wife with her challenging brown eyes.

"Be careful that you do right for Mitch and--these _folks_," she warned almost commandingly as the old heli landed in the desert a few miles from the Station. "What would you do--if outsiders came blundering into your world by the hundreds, making trails, killing you with fire? At first, _they_ didn't even fight back."

The question was ancient but valid. In spite of his experiences, Nelsen agreed with the logic and the justice. "We'll make up a story, Selma,"

he said solemnly.

Mitch looked anxious. "Human people will find a way, won't they, Frank?"

he asked. "To win, to come to Mars and live, I mean--to change everything. Sure--some will be sympathetic. But when there's practical pressure--need--danger--economics...?"

"I don't know, Mitch," Nelsen answered in the same tone as before. "Your thickets do have a pretty good defense."

But in his heart he suspected that fierce human persistence couldn't be stopped--_as long as there were humans left_. Mitch and his star folk couldn't withdraw from the mainstream of compet.i.tion--inherent in life--that was spreading again across the solar system. They could only stand their ground, take their fearful chances, be part of it.

One of the last things Mitch said, was, "Got any cigarettes, Frank?

Selma likes one, once in a while."

"Sure. Three packs here inside my Archer. Mighty small hospitality gift, Mitch..."

After the 'copter drifted away, it seemed that a curtain drew over Nelsen's mind, blurring the whole memory. It was as though _they_ had planned that. It was almost as though Mitch, and Selma, as he had just seen them, were just another mind-fantasy of the Heebie-Jeebie Planet, created by its present masters.

"Should we believe it?" Nance whispered.

"My cigarettes are gone," Frank told her.

At the Survey Station they got weary looks from Ed Huth. "I guess I picked a wrong man, Nelsen," he said.

"It looks as though you did, Ed," Frank replied. "I'm really sorry."

They got worse h.e.l.l from a little doctor from Italy, whose name was Padetti. They were asked a lot of questions. They fibbed some, but not entirely.

"We sort of blanked out, Doctor," Nance told him. "I suppose we spent most of our time in the desert, living in our Archers. There were the usual distorted hallucinations of Syrtis Fever. A new strain, I suspect... Four months gone? Oh, no...!"

She must have had a time evading his questions for the next month, while she worked, again, in the lab. Maybe he did divine half of the truth, at last. Maybe he even was sympathetic toward the thickets that he was trying to defeat.

Nelsen wasn't allowed to touch another helicopter. During that month, between brief but violent seizures of the fever, he was employed as a maintenance mechanic.

Then the news came. There had been an emergency call from Pallastown.

Rescue units were to be organized, and rocketed out in high-velocity U.N.S.F. and U.S.S.F bubbs. There had been sabotage, violence. The Town was three-quarters gone, above the surface. Planned attack or--almost worse--merely the senseless result of s.p.a.ce-poisoned men kicking off the lid in a spree of h.e.l.l-raising humor and fun?

Nelsen was bitter. But he also felt the primitive excitement--almost an eagerness. That was the savage paradox in life.

"You still have the dregs of Syrtis Fever," a recruiting physician told him. "But you know the Belt. That makes a big difference... All right--you're going..."

Nance Codiss didn't have that experience. Her lab background wasn't enough. So she was stuck, on Mars.

Nelsen had been pestering her to marry him. Now, in a corner of the crowded lounge, he tried again.

She shook her head. "You'd still have to leave me, Frank," she told him.

"Because that's the way strong people _have_ to be--when there's trouble to be met. Let's wait. Let's know a little better where we're at--please, darling. I'll be all right. Contact me when you can..."