Space Station 1, Frank Belknap Long [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

"Why did you do it, Freddy?" Corriston asked. "Your father is very upset and worried."

Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.

"I had to come," he said. "I had to."

"But why?"

"I don't know."

"I see."

Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: "I think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you'd be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You'd be dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as big as dinner plates."

Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was wonder and admiration in his stare. "How did you know?" he gasped.

"I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy—once," Corriston said.

"Gee, thanks," Freddy said.

"Thanks for what?"

"Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston."

Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that everyone within earshot could hear him.

"We're starting again in ten minutes," he said. "Better have another cup of coffee all around."

The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche, a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than moving ones across the entire line of advance.

The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have supported the tiniest of elves.

For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then, abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little ahead of the swaying vehicles.

Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston's side.

"We can't be far from the ship now," he said. "I wish there was some way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor and one man to accompany him...."

"Freddy will be all right," Corriston said. "You don't know what it means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he's done it."

The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.

"I'm not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground," the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be very near now.

"Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is," Drever said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly, perhaps to relieve his inner tension.

"They're a very primitive form of life, really," the geologist said. "They look like large gray snakes, but they're actually more like worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they've' attached themselves it's almost impossible to dislodge them. You've seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I'm sure. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard—the galaka—as you know."

"All right," Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation returning. "Now I suppose you're going to tell us exactly how they kill their prey."

"I don't have to tell you how they kill men," Macklin said. "You know as much about that as I do. You've been on Mars before. You've seen at least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a man when he's asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He doesn't just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty horrible. They're more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then...."

"All right, now I've heard an expert confirm it. I'd be grateful if you'll just shut up."

"Lieutenant, I told you—"

"Never mind, Doctor. I'm asking him to shut up."

In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions across the desert.

But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.

And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the unmistakable stamp of reality.

Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared, watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.

For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to. The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were in each other's way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement was possible.

Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort. Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and shouting to the colonists behind him.

"Get to that man as quickly as possible!" he ordered. "There's no time to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your hands. Don't let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get them off if you can. If you can't, bring him here. Carry him slung between you."

Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert, walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had thought of it themselves.

He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an instant before.

But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.

Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by just one lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"

It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve poison and it spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries."

Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.

The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man was Stone.

It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.

Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.

"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."

"I—I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler ... double-crossed Henley. I guess ... he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken her. I'm telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."

"All right," Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. "I believe you. Take it easy now. They've got the lamprene off."

He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again, telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked him down.

There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley's vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But Corriston wasn't thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few minutes, or hours before?

He'd have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he'd put off asking it, dreading the thought of what Stone's answer might be. But now he had no choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could not be immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away across the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and that tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would have to be a joint undertaking.

It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston's rage, his bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent enough to destroy anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in relentless pursuit of Saddler and if it took days to track him down....

It was Freddy's voice that brought him back to reality, startling and sobering him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors, shouting at the top of his lungs.

Corriston couldn't quite catch what the lad was shouting at first. Something about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught the name of Helen