The Man Who Loved Mars Page 5

  “Lucky too that the Martian gravity is so light,” I said. “It will make it easier to ascend the rock face.”

  He beamed at the girl. “It was Ilsa’s notion that we might need it, although I suspect she was thinking of utilizing the gear to descend into a treasure vault or cavern, rather than using it to climb a cliff.”

  We went on for a bit, found the mouth of the Rill, and nosed in very cautiously. The floor was a jumble of broken stone blocks the size of three-story houses, and there was no place visible within sight where it would be safe to set the skimmer down, so Bolgov brought her around in a fairly tight circle and headed out again into the open dustlands of Hesperia, circled, and took her taxiing down. He taxied on hissing runners to the mouth and brought her to a dead stop.

  We wrestled the skimmer into the mouth of the Rill and found a safe nook to store her away under a bit of camouflage netting, where she would be unlikely to be discovered by chance. Carrying the little craft across the powdery sands would have been one hell of a job back on Earth; here, of course, the gravity was only about four-tenths as strong, and it was not as tough as it might seem.

  This done, we loaded our backpacks on the lightweight, collapsible aluminum sledge, and trudged into the Rill on foot, Bolgov taking the first turn dragging the sledge.

  The ground was very uneven and knee deep in places with heaped rubble, fine in texture, like crushed gravel. This was the result of erosion from the rock face. Not erosion due to wind and water, of course, but the aeon-slow action of day and night, of frigid night and comparatively warmer day. The endless centuries of slight expansion and contraction, working away on the rock, cracked off pebbles over the ages. This was hard stuff to walk through, and it made the going difficult.

  The sledge itself was difficult to drag, although it was certainly light enough. Bolgov cursed sulfurously, trying to jam the ungainly thing through the narrow interstices between the colossal boulders. The job would have been much easier if the sledge had been equipped with wheels, but this was a dustlands sledge, with ski runners. Still, it was a lot easier than lugging all the gear on our backs.

  * * * *

  It was pretty rugged going. Respirators are useful, well-designed gadgets, but they cannot cope with outdoor labor very well. We needed frequent rest stops, and we all took a turn at dragging the sledge, even the old man.

  The deeper we got into the Rill, the more the darkness closed around us. The cliffwalls were about seven miles apart at the mouth, but they soon came together, narrowing to shut away most of the sky. We began to pass some of the fumaroles I had mentioned earlier. The first one was just a pocketlike depression in the ground with a black, irregular hole at the bottom of it, and a steamy vapor ascending in a vague wisp. It did not look very dangerous, I must admit. Bolgov eyed it and made a sour grunt. He fixed me with a surly eye.

  “This kind of stuff is going to knock down a skimmer?” he demanded. “Kack on that. My grandmother’s samovar kicked up a hell of a lot more fuss than that pothole and gave off more steam too!”

  “From the greenish hue of the escaping gases, that looks like methane, not steam,” the Doctor said genially. “Still, I must admit Konstantin is right. It does not look very dangerous.” He glanced at me dubiously. I shrugged.

  It was about time for another rest stop, so I suggested we halt right here. A few minutes later the fumarole exploded in a ground-shaking spray of solid green-yellow vapor that shot a half-mile in the air in an almost-solid steam, like the jet from a fire hose. As I had suspected, the gas geyser was a periodic.

  “See?” I grinned. Bolgov paled, under the coating of fine dust that masked his swarthy face, and Ilsa bit her lip. A jet that strong would rip the wing off an atmospheric liner or punch a hole through the fuselage of a helicopter. Any flimsy little skimmer that got hit with the full force of that geyser would come down over half an acre in pieces the size of your toenail clippings.

  We went forward in silence.

  I had made my point.

  * * * *

  After a day of trudging around, between, and sometimes across boulders as big as houses, we were weary in every muscle. We slept soundly that night and woke to find the thermal tents covered with hoarfrost from the moisture our circulator valves had leaked during the night. We were stiff and sore and very much in want of a bath and a shave, but those were Colony luxuries; here we must go dirty and unshaven, nursing our water supplies. When those ran low we would have to use the recycling system, but perhaps we could reach our destination before we had to drink purified waste fluids.

  I had done it many times, back in the wild years, but it was nothing to look forward to.

  We trudged on, and the Rill flattened out a bit, making the going a bit easier.

  By early afternoon we reached Death River. I dropped the loops of the sledge from my arms, and we stood together on the brink looking down at the thing.

  Next to me Ilsa shivered suddenly.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I suppose it has to be one of the natural wonders of Mars,” I said grimly. “But it’s a damned unpleasant one. Still, it’s a mystery. No one’s ever found another. Not that anyone is anxious to.”

  The People call it Farad-i-Janhg, River of Death.

  It’s a deep, narrow, rocky gorge that falls to a narrow bottom. The name river suggests running water, but running water is about the rarest thing on all of the planet. This river is a river of gases. Gases that are deadly poison to breathe. A weird, flowing stream of heavier-than-air vapors that drift sluggishly along the bottom of the steep-sided gorge. An eerie sight, surely. And a deadly hazard, impossible to wade through, even with respirators.

  The presence of the famous Death River is why this particular Rill out of tens of thousands happens to have a name on the map. Hareton discovered it at the end of his Hesperian expedition of ’52.

  He went down on a line to take a sample.

  Then he tried to cross it, using a respirator and a thermal suit.

  He’s still down there, somewhere.

  “So how the hell do we get across?” the Ukrainian growled.

  Keresny began unpacking one of the bundles and took out a grapnel gun. He inserted a compressed-air canister and after three or four tries managed to sink the grapnel in the far bank of the river. Then we made the muzzle end of the line secure around a big hunk of rock and tested the line for tension.

  We were going to have to go across, hand over hand, at least the first of us.

  I volunteered for that job. I pulled on the heavy fiberglass gloves, got a good hold on the line and slid over the edge. My feet were swinging free about nine or ten feet meters above the upper layer of poisonous mist. But it wasn’t the gas that scared me; if I fell, I’d die of a broken neck before the gas could bother me. Because the floor of Death River is solid rock, and it’s a long way down.

  Carefully, I began to swing hand over hand the length of the line. The heavy gloves kept the wire from cutting into my hands, and the weak gravity field made me only four-tenths my usual hundred and ninety pounds. But it was not a comfortable trip. And I kept thinking about that grapnel and wondering how securely the airgun had shot its prongs into the ancient, soft, crumbling rock.

  Once across, I swung my legs up and elbowed myself prone on the bank.

  It wasn’t a thing I’d like to do every day.

  The girl came next. Since the south bank of the gorge was a little higher than the bank where I stood, the Doctor had thought she could cross more easily using a roller. This was a little hand bar with hollow-rimmed wheels which rode the line. They helped her over the edge, and she kicked off gamely and came flying across the gorge, hair streaming loosely.

  I watched the grapnel with steady eyes, ready to grab for it at the first sign her weight was beginning to pry the prongs loose.

  Her face was pale, and her little jaw was set grimly, and she had forgotten to breathe, but she was game and flew across the River of Death without the
fainting fits or hysterics most Earthside girls might be expected to have.

  As the north wall of the gorge swung up toward her, she kicked out against it with booted feet, braking the slide. Then I reached down over the edge, got one arm around her small waist, and hoisted her up to solid ground.

  She was a light little thing, like a child; and she fitted snugly into the curve of my shoulder.

  As I boosted her onto her feet, a lock of her straw-colored hair whipped silkenly against my cheek. I drew in a breath of warm fragrance, the odor of her hair.

  Then she snatched herself away from me, eyes blazing with a cold fury. “I don’t like being touched—by a thing like you!” she hissed.

  I said nothing as she spun on her heel, turning away from me. What was there I could say?

  * * * *

  We got the others across safely too. The Doctor came next, and he used the hand roller, which I slid back along the line to him. Getting the sledge across was going to be an impossible job, so he left it where it was. Bolgov lashed each of the packs to the roller and slid them across to us, one by one.

  Then it was his turn. Scorning the roller, he swung across hand over hand, as I had done. He crossed slowly, huffing and blowing, face purple, beefy body swaying like an ungainly pendulum, kicking out with his heavy boots for extra momentum. Wheezing and panting from the exertion, he scrambled up and sat down on the ledge by us, flexing his tired hands.

  Then we knocked off and had some lunch.

  Then Ilsa screamed!

  She had gone on further up the Rill, exploring a bit while we got the packs across. She had gone around a bend between two huge, hill-sized boulders.

  The scream was flat and devoid of echoes in the thin air. I jumped to my feet, heart trip-hammering in the cage of my ribs, and went after her, boots thudding against loose rock, raising swift-settling clouds of canary-yellow dust.

  I rounded the bend and came to a halt beside her.

  She was standing all stiff, hands clasped at her chin. I saw at once the thing that had startled her. It would startle most people.

  A dead man hung head down on a beam of wood.

  He was very, very dead and had hung there for a very long time, years maybe—from the condition he was in it was hard to tell. A crudely hammered copper nail had been driven through his crossed feet at the ankles. That was all; no other wounds on the body. They had nailed him to the beam and left him there to die slowly.

  The dry Martian air had sucked every drop of moisture from his naked body, leaving it shrunken and lean and leathery as a mummy. Behind me Bolgov was swearing in a shaking voice in Russian. At my shoulder the Doctor was breathing lightly and rapidly in little short gusts, like a bird.

  “What is it?” the girl whimpered.

  “It…seems to be a crucifixion, my dear.”

  “It’s a marker,” I said. “We must be getting into clan territory.” I pointed at the old flakes of weathered blue paint on the bony breast of the shrunken thing. “That is the marker of the Moon Dragon nation. The dead man is a sort of no-trespassing sign.”

  We shivered, although it was no colder than usual.

  As a warning sign it was very effective.

  We went back to where we had left the packs and rested for a time and had lunch. Then we pushed off, circling around the wooden beam and its grisly burden and went up the Rill until the world darkened with the coming of night.

  5. Into the Sea of Darkness

  This part of Mars, the Mare Cimmerium, the Sea of Darkness as the old Earthside astronomers called it, is one of the wildest, most rugged, least known, and most dangerous portions of the planet.

  That warning sign was a bordermark.

  The crucified man had been a member of some rival or stranger clan.

  He had trespassed on the borders of the Moon Dragon nation, and they had killed him for it.

  We were trespassing too.

  It was something to think about…

  The People call this plateau Chun. The Riders of Chun are fierce warriors, deadly foes, firm friends. The Low Clans hail me as Jamad Tengru; they are vowed to serve my will. But what about the High Clans, like the Riders of Chun, the warriors who fight under the Moon Dragon banner? Would they recognize the Iron Crown? Would they respect the vow?

  Something else to think about.

  * * * *

  That night I couldn’t get to sleep, so after a while I gave it up, got into my thermal suit and boots, unsealed the tent flap, and went out under the cold ferocity of the stars to think.

  Ilsa was there, leaning against a rock, her yellow hair a pale flame in the star glow.

  I would have gone silently back to my tent and let her be, but she heard the crunch and squeak of boot heels in the powdery sand and turned and saw me. So I went up to her.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  She shook her head.

  “Take a pill; sometimes slogging by foot makes you so tired, even in this light gravity, that you can’t sleep without one. Our bodies were not designed for this world…”

  “It’s not that,” she said a bit stiffly. “It’s just that I’m dying for a smoke.”

  I laughed. “Well, you’ll get over that; you’ll have to, I’m afraid. Can’t smoke wearing a respirator and can’t live without one, either. So you’ll have to learn to live without aromatiques!”

  Her face was a cool mask in the starry brilliance. She was so beautiful the sight of her made my throat go dry. I had not felt this way toward any woman since Yakla…died.

  She said nothing.

  “Sure it’s just that you need an aromatique? Or is it something else?”

  She shrugged dispiritedly. “It’s this whole messy business, I guess,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. Grandfather has always been a decent, honorable man. And now he’s trying to steal treasure from people who never harmed him…breaking laws. It’s—it’s just not like him!”

  I nodded somberly. “Gold fever, they call it. It can hit anybody.”

  “But he’s never been an—an adventurer! He’s a scientist, a scholar; a respected man in his field, with a reputation. I have the most awful feeling that we’re going into bad trouble…and I don’t know anything I can do to stop it from happening.”

  “Why did you come along if you feel like this? You could have stayed back home in Switzerland or wherever your home is.”

  “I went to school in Switzerland. Our home is in Paris, or near there, in a little village up the Seine. We’ve been living there quietly ever since grandfather retired from the museum and left the Moon; I’ve been taking care of him. He’s all the family I’ve got now. Somehow it just didn’t seem right that I should let him go off on this crazy treasure hunt without me.”

  “Well, I don’t much like the idea of the treasure hunt either, but I think it will all come out in the end. Your grandfather may not get any treasure, but I don’t think he will lose anything more precious than a dream,” I said. “I think I can understand what happened to him. An old man’s dreams…”

  She turned to look at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  I spread my hands. “Scientists are dedicated men, sure; but they’re human enough, God knows. There’s a spark of ego way down deep under all that selfless dedication. There’s not a man of them that doesn’t hanker to be remembered as another Pasteur or Einstein. Your grandfather finished a lifetime devoted to his work and found himself with nothing to show for it—nothing but a ‘reputation.’ That’s small change, for a man who hoped to be one of the immortals of science. Reputations are a ten-for-a-penny these days.”

  She turned on me like a cat.

  “You should know all about that—yours is rather unsavory,” she flashed. “It is sickening to hear a cheap traitor like you defaming an old man who worked all his life for science! He may have come out of it all with nothing much to show for all those years of hard work—but at least he still has his patriotism!”

  My face was stiff, and my mouth
felt wooden, but worse words than those have been flung in my teeth before this, and I have become accustomed to the taste of them.

  I let the silence stretch between us for a time. Then I said, softly: “Is that what’s been between us all this time—the word traitor? Because something’s been wrong. You’ve disliked me from the moment we met. From before we met. Is that what it is?”

  After a while she said yes in a small voice.

  I thought it over for a little. Then: “I’m not going to try to defend my actions to you, but not because they don’t maybe need defending. Because I don’t think you are the proper person to judge them.”

  She started to say something, but I overrode her and went on.

  “Listen to me. There are two kinds of traitors. The first is the man who betrays a name, a word, a bit of cloth, a colored place on a map. The second is the man who betrays his own instinct; who goes against what his heart and reason tells him is the truth. I am the first. I will not be the second.

  “Listen! When I came here ten years ago to work for the Colonial Administration, I was just as young and good and patriotic as you. They put me in the Office of Native Affairs, and most of my work was out among the People, as the Martian natives call themselves. I had all your own fine ideals. I loved home and flag and mother. But when I got out here and saw the things that were being done under that same flag, I wanted to tear it down and dirty it. I wanted to raise my voice in a yell so loud that every single human soul back Earthside could hear me. I wanted to tell them the things I had seen out here. I wanted my voice to reach into the council chambers of the fine and glorious world state you love so much and tell them the horrors that our own people were wreaking out here in the high, holy name of that world state.”

  I had forgotten to keep calm. My face was hot, and my voice was bitter and loud. But to hell with keeping calm.

  “I saw a proud, poor, ancient culture being ripped apart. I watched a magnificent civilization being looted with all the expertise of modern technology. Tombs and temples—shrines that had been holy places before we crawled out from under the last ice age—being knocked apart by bulldozers to get at the gold that might or might not be there. Oh, Christ, the Conquistadors who gutted the Aztecs and the Incas should have had bulldozers! And flame guns too: you should watch a couple dozen Colonial guards tie an old priest up and burn his legs off with a flame gun to get him to tell them where gold is hidden. And then rape his daughter in front of his eyes—one grinning Earthman after another—until she dies of it—and even after—making him watch it, all the while, until he is dead too. Oh, yes, even a Swiss finishing school education can’t help you against a sight like that! You forget all about loving home and flag and mother, and you forget about our sacrosanct and perfect world state after a few sights like that one.”