The Secret Martians, Jack Sharkey [hardest books to read TXT] 📗

seeming satisfied, he put his hands on the biggest slab of granite and pushed.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then the slab began to pivot about some central axis, and a one-foot gap was exposed on either side of its bulk. Beyond the open spaces, bright fluorescent tubing lighted a grim prison corridor.

"Isn't there an easier way to the spaceport?" I said.

A prison meant guards, and guards meant collapsers, and collapsers meant, possibly, good-by Jery Delvin.

But Clatclit shrugged, pointed into the tunnel, and made zig-zag motions with both hands, all the while shaking his head in weary disgust.

"There is, but it'd take forever to get there, huh?" I interpreted. He nodded. Oh well.

Clatclit leading the way, we sidled through the right-hand gap, then he pressed the mammoth stone back into place.

"You're coming with me all the way?" I asked, surprised. Somehow, I'd thought his guideship ended at the same place the tunnel did.

Clatclit nodded vigorously.

"Is it that the Ancients don't trust me?"

Headshake.

"You have nothing better to do?"

Negative.

"Okay, I'll bite. Why?"

Clatclit stepped toward me, placed a hand on my shoulder, then placed his free hand over my heart, moved it over his own, held up two fingers and crossed them.

"Because we're friends," I said softly.

Clatclit nodded.

It took us an hour to locate Baxter. Clatclit showed no signs of surprise when I did not go to the ticket office and book a passage for Earth. Apparently, not being in on the finer points of the Ancients' scheme, he found no wild incongruity in my being brought all the way from Earth to obliterate a man who could just as easily have been dispatched by a sugarfoot. Or else, through some extrasensory awareness, something born of our friendship, he knew that imparting the location of Baxter to the Ancients might well mean my death.

Whatever his reasons, Clatclit simply followed me in my progress through the prison dungeon which, thanks to its completely escape-proof stone-corked cells, was left without guards. We went up into the more well-appointed section of the building, the warmly plastic-decorated halls that were open to the public who passed through the Security inspection when entering or leaving the planet. It was good business to hide the grimmer realities from colonists or casual tourists.

And those who learned about the dungeons were never in a position to pass the word around. Your first view of a Security dungeon was usually your last view of anything.

The public part of the building had too many people in it to suit me. Even if I could get by the flight officials and robo-scanners unchallenged, Clatclit couldn't. The building was rigidly off-limits to extraterrestrials.

So we went up the outside.

Built against, and a good ways into, the high hills that surrounded the town, the building was easy prey for anyone who cared to clamber up the rocky slopes from which it jutted and climb through a window. These slopes were lighted, but not patrolled. After all, under ordinary circumstances, no one in his right mind would try sneaking into an IS stronghold!

Baxter, as it turned out, was seated at a desk not unlike his own back on Earth, in the very office where I'd been last interrogated by the team of Charlie and Foster. He was staring into space, and smoking a cigar, the solitary incandescent lamp on his desk making his ice-white mane of hair a sort of angelic aurora about that pleasantly rubicund face. It was like seeing Satan sporting a good-conduct medal.

Clatclit and I were crouched outside the window, on a narrow ledge we'd reached from the slope. To my intense interest, lying before Baxter, in the glaring circle of lamplight, was the black shirt I'd been wearing when I was rescued by Clatclit, the shirt which had been towed off by that hay-bale to obviate Baxter's being able to track the route of my flight.

I was about to whisper a question about the shirt to Clatclit, when Baxter turned partway about in his chair, and started to stub out the cigar in a black onyx ashtray. The question stuck in my throat, as I caught sight of Baxter's breast.

On a silver chain about his throat, he wore the Amnesty!

18

Something was very definitely wrong.

Until that moment when Baxter turned, I'd been certain that the Amnesty was in Snow's possession. And now here it was, gleaming in bright red and bronze against the front of his crisp black linen blouse.

The sight of it twanged a chord in my mind, and I crouched there on that narrow ledge, trying to grasp the fleeting thread of thought. The Amnesty was exactly the same color as that parabolite wall down in the tunnels, the barrier to the lair of the Ancients. Was it a coincidence that this token of power was designed to match in shade and intensity of color that unearthly mineral of another dimension?

A queer notion began to take root in my mind. Baxter had given me the Amnesty before I set off to find the missing boys. Or had he? Was that the Amnesty I'd carried, or a copy, a perfect duplicate constructed not of metal, but the impervious mineral.

My brain was spinning as little unimportant facts suddenly burgeoned and grew, and took on terrible significance. According to our science, parabolite was invulnerable to all tools, and could not be worked or shaped. Yet the Martian had said to me that Baxter possessed the means to disengage the fragile bond that linked the two dimensions by—The truth came home to me with an icy shock.

By detonating a portion of their contact-material! And the Amnesty, my Amnesty, was that material. I looked past Baxter to the black blouse, its lining sparkling beneath the incandescent lamplight with thousands of tiny metal filaments, and then I knew at last Baxter's monstrous plan.

Cold fury welled up inside me. I could easily, at that moment, have leveled my collapser at him and flashed him out of existence with no more feeling than that engendered by crushing a gnat between finger and thumb. My hand was sliding back toward that cold metal handle jutting from my holster, when there came an interruption.

The door before Baxter's desk opened, and Charlie and Foster came in. Clatclit and I ducked back from the pane, and listened, holding our breaths.

"About time!" Baxter growled. "Since you two are alone, I assume this was another wild goose chase!"

His fist slammed down atop the crumpled shirt, and I caught his meaning. Apparently, when they'd discovered my cell empty, they'd tracked my trail by whatever electronic device followed up the location of that rigged garment, and had been led miles astray in the Martian desert, finding only the empty blouse at the end of their quest.

"Yes and no, sir," Charlie said. "It's—it's the weirdest thing."

"Well? What?" Baxter snapped angrily.

Charlie, while replying, was unhitching a sort of tanklike apparatus from his back, from which a flexible tube ran into the end of the pistol at his belt. With the surprise of sudden memory, I recognized one of the weapons of the earlier settlers at Marsport: a sugarfoot-repelling water pistol, with three-gallon ammunition tanks.

"We got out the pack, sir, when we returned."

"Yes, yes," Baxter interrupted violently. "You took the dogs and trailed Delvin by scent from his cell. Fine. But did you find him!"

"We had trouble, sir. It was outside the crater, and the dogs needed air-booster muzzles, which cut down their sense of smell. And the trail was spread way out, too, as if Delvin had only touched the ground every thirty feet or so!"

I remembered Clatclit's bounding transportation from the cell, and had to smile. The dogs must have been starting and stopping every five minutes over that sporadic trail.

Baxter, at the end of his patience, flattened both hands on the desktop, and grated, spacing his words for emphasis, "Did you find him?"

Charlie exchanged a look with Foster, then hung his head. "No, sir, we didn't."

"Lost the trail, I suppose," Baxter growled.

"No, we kept at it, all right," Charlie said. "It took us underground, into the lava tunnels and grottos. We even found a cot where he'd been sleeping."

I stared at Clatclit. They'd done better than I thought possible. Clatclit tilted his head to one side and shrugged. It meant the same thing in both our languages.

"Of course, you idiot!" Baxter said, with disgust. "It's obvious he had help from the sugarfeet. I'd have guessed that the moment I saw the intervals of his trail! What else but a man carried by a sugarfoot could travel in bounds like that?"

"Gravity here's only half that of Earth," Charlie protested weakly.

"Even so," Baxter muttered, "only an Olympic champ could make leaps like that! You've seen Delvin. Did you really think that gawky frame of his had such galvanic energy?"

I could resent his slurs later. Right now, I wanted to find out just how damned far those guys had tracked me.

"But we finally came to a bridge, over an underground river, sir. At the end of the tunnel beyond it, the trail came to a dead end, in front of a whole damned wall of parabolite. And something about that wall scared hell out of the dogs, too! They were whining, high up the scale, like they do when there's something wrong, and growling at that wall, sir."

Halfway through Charlie's discourse, I had jerked my head around to stare a baffled question at Clatclit. Where, I was about to ask him, were you when the posse scuttled by?

But he'd already anticipated the question, and I watched as he pointed to himself, then made a serpentine forward-stab with his hand, then an up-down-and-around motion with his palms over his torso.

"You scooted up the tunnel for a brisk toweling?" I said.

A firm nod.

I couldn't blame him. After all, Snow and I were gone for a spell. No reason for him to stand there and melt with the water already beading his candy-coated hide. So that meant that Charlie and Foster were outside the wall while Snow and I were in council with the Martian. I found I was glad Clatclit hadn't been there to spot them. Because if he had been, and they had those water guns, I'd have found nothing but a sticky puddle where I'd left a friend. If, indeed, I'd been able to get back that far.

Baxter's voice interrupted my thoughts. "And so," he said, mockingly bitter, "you return once again, empty-handed!"

"Not quite, sir," said Foster, stepping forward and setting a trim plastic rectangle on end atop the desk. "We found this just outside that wall."

It was Snow's handbag. Probably she'd dropped it in her initial fright when that wall had gaped open before us. I hadn't noticed it then, because I'd been pretty shaken, too. And when I made my ungracious exit from the Martian's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't den, the handbag was already gone, on its way up to Baxter via Foster.

Apparently Clatclit had known a shorter route to the IS building than the IS men did.

Baxter had the bag in his hands, now, staring at it with the first faint flush of elation coming into his face. "But this must be that girl's bag! The one who stole that other Amnesty!"

It hit me like a blow in the stomach. Of course! Baxter had had no idea that I was with Snow. Not until now. And he knew Snow had that Amnesty, the one he planned to use to blow the Martians out of our dimension. And now he knew where she was: deep in the rock of the planet, with a virtual bomb on a chain about her neck!

He didn't need his gimmicked blouse any longer, the one he was going to use to track me until I was in the chamber of the Ancients. That had been his plan, of course. The Amnesty was a remote-controlled bomb, which I, as his dupe, was to have worn during my search for the boys. Baxter, knowing that I'd find them, and the Ancients with them, had suggested that I wear that blouse so that he could trail me into their lair. Then the flick of a switch, and Jery Delvin would be blasted to shreds, while the Martians found themselves stranded forever in immovable Location.

And yet I was still puzzled. How could he have known that I'd find them? I decided not to vaporize him just yet. I had a few points to clear up, or go out of my mind wondering about for the rest of my days.

I unholstered the collapser, slid the window open with one hand, and swung my legs over the sill.

"Good evening, gentlemen," I said.

They didn't seem very glad to see me.

Charlie and Foster stood stiffly before the desk, watching me warily as I completed my clamber into the room. Their eyes widened a fraction as Clatclit sprang lightly in after me, but that was all. Baxter, however, had lifted