Read Ebook: Give Back a World by Gallun Raymond Z Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 195 lines and 12019 words, and 4 pages

"Damn Fane! Something screwy about him. I always knew...."

"Sure! What's he trying to pull? What does he know about Mercury that he never told? Running out on us, now, huh? Six months he spent here once. Bet he did kill Martell and Jacobs! What is he after now? And what has he found out about the war machines that must be here?..."

"Easy, guys. No wolf-pack talk...."

"Easy--hell! If he didn't know his way around he'd never be wandering off like that on foot! His running off means no good...."

Then someone raised a long-range blaster. But before it could be fired at the dodging and elusive Fane, Nostrand struck the weapon down. The runaway had already reached the darkward foothills.

"It's no use trying to stop him now," Nostrand said.

"Fane--do you hear me?" Rick called, his helmet radiophone giving his voice the needed range. "Tell me, what's the pitch?"

Rick heard Fane's derisive and harsh laugh. "I told you, didn't I, smart boy Mills?" he taunted. "Or are you all stupid?"

The laugh and the words revealed more of Fane's nature to Rick than he'd ever seen before. The ego, the vanity, flaunted now because of some hidden advantage. Doubtless it salved an inferiority. Rick would have liked to like Fane. But now that big lanky man, for all his show of competence, was like a poisonous child.

Rick felt an amused smirk coming out on his own face in spite of his sense of the presence of masked danger. "Somebody has got the idea that he's super, Fane," he chuckled. "I wonder how that old, tiresome thing happened to you. Maybe you had a bitter, frustrated youth. Kids beat you up, hunh? So now you're the bigshot who makes monkeys out of everybody. Well, go play your marbles...."

Final response was only another harsh laugh.

For secrecy, Rick now cut off his radio, and established a sound-channel for his voice by grasping Nostrand's shoulder.

"We've got to follow him, Chief. See what he's up to," he said.

Nostrand nodded, and beckoned Schmidt, who was supposed to lead the pre-planned party into the dark hemisphere, to come closer. Nostrand spoke softly, with his phone also shut off:

"Of course. Things will proceed about as we intended. With the primary purpose of scientific exploration. But we'll cut the parties to ten men each to risk less personnel. One party with specially shielded space suits and tractors will invade the sunward hemisphere, while you folks will go the other way."

Within an hour, under Schmidt's able command, Rick and his other companions were moving along the highway toward the shadowy eastern hills, with two tractors fitted with pressurized cabins. Rick and two other men, Lattimer and Finden, rode atop the lead vehicle as lookouts.

Rick thought of how flexible a Survey Service guy had to be. Here their intended work was to learn about Mercury--to dig, even, into its crust, searching out its mineral wealth and learning its history, even back far beyond the rivalry of the Martians and Xians. A steaming, fast-spinning little world, it must have been once. And of course its now dubious value to modern civilization and economics must be judged.

But now another duty was added--something of criminal detection! There was suspicion without proof. Doubt that might be groundless, almost. Or that might point to a deadly unknown.

What must be Fane's tracks in the dust, were visible in one place for about a mile, along the hard-surfaced road. But then they vanished among the rocks. And what sense was there to try to hunt him out of the hills? Schmidt gave no such order. And Rick realized fully, then, that it was not so important to find Fane himself, but to learn what fabulous mystery it was that had made him hurry into this wilderness alone. Something tremendous must be at stake.

Miles were covered swiftly at first, making the sliver of sun sink from view to the rear. But one pale wing of the solar corona--a reminder, here, of the final sunset so long ago--still projected above the horizon, providing ghostly illumination. There was little talk, but Rick Mills felt as if he was invading some immense and haunted cellar, covering half a planet.

For young Finden to photograph, there were domed structures, vast buildings that might have been factories, huge slag heaps from mines, even the still standing trunks of trees, that had been perhaps developed from Martian stock. Thicker and thicker layers of frost and frozen air were over everything. And scattered along the road were the scars and wreckage of violence. Here, wood had been blackened by fire. Here, dug in the ground, had been a fortified strong point and supply-dump, full of toppled cylinders. Here there were dried-out, blackened corpses. The Martians, their many tentacles stiffened to the consistency of old wood, looked like charred tree-stumps. The Xians, with but four boneless limbs, were like deflated sacks of old leather.

There were great tanklike machines, of both Martian and Xian origin, blasted, and grotesquely toppled into ditches. There were metal forms, vaguely human and similarly torn. Here was all the evidence of battle and of Martian retreat. Mile by mile they must have been driven back toward some fortress deep in the now dark hemisphere.

And what comments were there to make now, about all this archaic fury that had gone silent and moveless those eons past? In momentary contact with their space suits, Rick Mills heard Finden's "Jeez!" and Lattimer's monosyllabic and awed curses. Fane had said something about a push-button war put into deep freeze.

"That's about the size of it," Rick said once to his companions. "Everything is in deep-freeze--almost absolute zero, and a vacuum, besides. No method of preservation could be much better."

It was as if here on the dark hemisphere, time had stopped with the ending of the passing days that measured it. Nowhere else in the solar system could the remains of that old conflict be better kept. And nowhere else were they more profuse.

It was hard not to think, now, that it was unwise to have come here so rashly. Rick had the feeling of having plunged too far into enemy territory where his bunch could be ambushed. For those war machines were not all smashed, certainly. Time meant nothing to them here. And the mystery of their function was half known from others like them on other worlds. There was always the chance that some of them would respond to the stimulus of detected movement around them. They were known to have intricate electronic relay systems inside them, almost brains.

"Keep your necks swivelling and your eyes peeled," Schmidt told his watchers on the tractor top, in a brief helmet phone message from inside the cabin.

"Don't worry, we will, Chief!" Lattimer growled back.

Overhead blazed the same constellations of stars known on Earth. Venus was glorious among them. Earth was dimmer--farther off. And it was the brilliance of that space-like star curtain that limned the first ugly moving silhouette. One of the man-like monsters was on the road ahead, its arms raised. Its great jutting thumbs of metal might have been the sort of things that had punctured the helmets of Martell and Jacobs. Perhaps this colossus had awakened on its own, as has been suggested. On the other hand, it might have been commanded by remote control, operating through radio impulses, of which the static-like whispers, barely noticeable in Rick's phones, might be the evidence.

To signal, Rick pounded on the roof of the tractor's cabin. And the men below fired their main blaster at once. The dazing blue flash of neutrons tore the metal giant apart with a spattering of incandescence. But then something fired back. There were two concussions and a blinding glare. Rick felt himself hurtling.

Two more Earth-made blasters had been in action.

"We're still with you, Rick!" Finden risked saying by phone.

"Yeah, all I got out of it was some bruised ribs," Lattimer who was older, joined in, hiding a wince of pain.

While they were taping up a weak spot in Lattimer's armor, something spitting blue, like a rocket, arced overhead, and Rick was sure he heard a derisive chuckle in his phones. Fane.

"Damn him!" Lattimer snarled. "At the very least Fane would know how to use some of these machines after six months here. He'd know how to travel fast...."

Again, against the possibility of their conversation being overheard they were speaking directly by contact-transmitted sound.

"Keep down and tune in on camp," Rick said. "We can listen, anyway."

They heard strange noises. And then Nostrand's voice saying: "... We're under attack. A dozen war-robots. Parties afield please don't answer if there is danger of giving away your positions by radio-direction finder.... Ship already disabled...."

"Maybe. Not necessarily," Lattimer answered. "The question is, what do we do? Try to get back to camp on foot?"

Rick was younger and less experienced than the middle aged Lattimer but he felt the force of leadership coming over him. Most of it, perhaps, was fury, bringing the drive out in him--and bringing out an idea.

"We'd be of small use in camp," he said, "even if we could get there. Come on--crawl!..."

Rick had spied another Martian corpse, half-buried in a blanket of frozen air and frost a little way down the ditch. They reached it, and Rick ripped open the thin, rubberlike integument that had served its kind as space armor. Among its weird equipment Rick found a pouch held close to its hardened flesh. He drew out a parchment.

"Should have thought of this before," he growled. "In war they carried maps--Martians and Xians alike. Now let's see. What looks important on the dark hemisphere? Something that a guy like Fane would go for. If that's the way it is...."

His attention was drawn inevitably to a great golden circle on the parchment. All roads led to it.

"No matter how you stack it, that must be the place we want to reach," Rick said. "But it's four thousand miles away."

"I see there's a tunnel, too," Lattimer joined in. "That heavy red line. I know Martian maps. It's for a kind of jet-train. Am I cockeyed to think that some cars might still work?... If we could get to a tunnel entrance. But it's fifty miles at the nearest. Some walk!"

"We're stranded in a white hell, with a good chance of being knocked off before we die from more natural causes," Finden said. "So we've got to think boldly. How about finding something like what Fane seemed to be using? Then we could rocket to that golden circle place."

They crept further along the ditch to get away from the deadly little ovoids that must still lurk near. Then they arose and ran. There was a dazzling blast from behind them, and they ran faster, maybe a mile or more, stumbling through deep drifts of white.

They came to more Xian wreckage. Hurriedly they searched, as some vague bulk prowled, far off to their left. But at last they found and shaped what they wanted. They crouched on the sheet of metal, and fired continuous streams of protons rearward. Soon their arms, braced against the thrust of incandescent fire, ached furiously.

The weapons were hot in their hands. But under the rocket-like kick of the blasters they made speed even though their makeshift toboggan, unguided by runners, careened crazily. The hour it took to cover fifty miles seemed an age.

Rick thought of Anne Munson, his girl, at the Survey Service School on Mars. But such sweet ruminations had no place here. He pushed them aside angrily. He wondered if Mercury would ever be worth anything, anymore. Mines it had, yes, but with one hemisphere frozen like this, and the other a furnace, would it ever be worth the trouble to build the insulated camps that would be needed to work those mines? Even the completely airless asteroids were less forbidding. And out there, in those fragments of a world, the metal-rich core of a planet was exposed for easy exploitation.

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