Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

port clearance building. It's the largest of the four—if size makes any difference when about all we'll see when the cylinder explodes is a blinding flare. We won't see the bulkheads collapsing, or a robot cyb crumbling, that's for sure. It will happen too fast."

"What good will it do us to watch at all?" Joan asked. "I'd rather stay right here. We'll see the flash, won't we?"

"You'll see it, all right," Littlefield said, grimly. "It will look like an exploding star for about ten seconds. My sky ship—an exploding star. I never thought it would ever come to that."

He started to turn away, thinking, no doubt, that I'd fallen in with Joan's idea of passing up a view of it on the screen. But I hadn't at all and when he started walking toward the port clearance building I was right at his side. So was Joan, because she was that kind of a wife. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him—questions of the utmost urgency, such as how much progress he'd made in finding out who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral and just what news he'd received from the hospital, when Nurse Cherubin had informed him I was trying to get back to the spaceport, that went beyond that bare statement—I was sure she'd briefed him in detail—and ... well, a lot of questions. But this hardly seemed the right time to ask him, because his inner torment was too great.

I could sympathize and understand, because I knew what a hell he was passing through. Nothing could prevent the destruction of his sky ship, but he had to see it with his own eyes, no matter how much agony it caused him.

He didn't have to do any explaining to the Port Clearance men, because they'd either assumed he'd pick out their screen well in advance of our arrival or their own curiosity had proved overmastering.

The screen was lighted and the sound tracks whirring when we walked into the projection room. It was just like walking into the sky ship's chart room and staring across it at the four robot giants who had followed both emergency instructions in space and the routine kind and were doing their best to perform a man's job now. A mechanical best, which meant, of course, that they had no way of knowing how close they were to annihilation. They would be blown apart without pain and had nothing to lose that a man would have valued. But they were not men, and who can be sure that mechanical brains and the thought processes which take place in them are not faintly tinged with emotional coloration?

Probably not ... for it would have been something that laboratory tests have never succeeded in establishing. A cybernetic brain can become fatigued, yes—but it is not really a human fatigue. It is on the metal-fatigue level. But knowing all that, a chill would have gone through me if the robots had been able to talk to us.

The image on the screen was three-dimensional, and in full color and the illusion that we were standing right in the sky ship's chart room was so startling that Joan whispered: "I wish we'd stayed outside. It's terrifying. Almost as if ... we could be blown up ourselves when the blast comes."

"No danger of that," I said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "You'd better sit down."

There were ten hollow-tubed metal chairs in the room, but all except one were occupied. I reached out and drew it toward her, but she shook her head. "No, I'll stand, Ralph. I may want to leave in a minute."

One of the port clearance lads got up and offered Commander Littlefield his chair, assuming I'd take the one that Joan had refused. But we were both of one mind about standing. Only Littlefield sat down, as if the burden of torment which rested upon him had added ten years to his age.

No sound at all came from the screen for a full minute. Then a scream broke the stillness. It was so totally unexpected, so horrifying, that two of the port clearance men leapt to their feet, sending their chairs spinning backwards. Commander Littlefield was on his feet too, but he hadn't leapt up. He'd arisen jerkily, his hands pressed to his temples, as if to shut out the sound or keep his head from bursting.

We saw her then. She had come into the chart room and was staring directly at us, and just knowing she could see us as clearly as we could see her made her plight seem even more terrible. To me, at least, because it wasn't hard to imagine what was passing through her mind.

I'm alone on the ship ... just as I feared. They've sent me out alone into space. If Commander Littlefield isn't on board ... if he's in that room watching me with all those other men ... what else can it mean?

She'd be ten times as sure of it if she'd been inside the port clearance projection room and knew what it looked like, and I was almost certain she had, because there was an unmistakable look of recognition in her eyes, and the Port Clearance building was where they took passengers for questioning.

20

She looked as she always had, with her hair piled up high on her head and the full lips drowsily sensuous, and her breasts thrusting firmly upward against the tight-clinging fabric that ensheathed them just below the curve of her throat, and the soft whiteness of her upper bosom.

Only her eyes had changed. Stark terror looked out of them and suddenly as she stared at us she pressed one hand to her throat and swayed back against the bulkhead on the right side of the doorway. It brought her up short. But I was sure that if it hadn't she'd have gone right on retreating backwards until she either started screaming again or crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

She neither screamed again nor fainted, for Commander Littlefield gave her no time to succumb to utter panic. But if his voice hadn't rung out as sharply as it did—at the precise moment that it did—the outcome might have been quite different.

"Why did you return to the ship?" he shouted. "Why did you do such a reckless thing? Was it because we suspected you? Was it because you knew we were about to place you under arrest? Answer me! Your life may depend on it."

"Yes ... I went back," she said. "But only to get ... something I didn't want you to find. I was pretty sure I'd hidden it where you'd never think of searching, but when you started suspecting me—"

"I see. A damaging piece of evidence? Something of the sort?"

She nodded. "Yes ... yes ... a paper. It would have proven my guilt."

"You admit your guilt then? We can still save you, but not if you go on lying, clinging to the story you told us. Every part of that is false."

"No, no!" She almost screamed the words. "Most of what I told you was true. My brother did work for Wendel and ... I didn't know that he had died. I just found that out a few hours ago. I came to Mars to help him, to save him if I could. I was a Wendel agent, but only because I had no choice. They threatened to kill my brother ... used that as a weapon to make me spy for them and do—uglier things."

Her voice rose pleadingly. "Bring the ship back. Don't send me out alone into space. You can't be that cruel—"

"We can't bring the ship back. But we can save you. Just tell the truth. Wendel knew that the Board was sending someone to Mars to investigate the combine, a man who couldn't be bribed to shut his eyes to what he was sure to see here. You had instructions to kill that man before he could set foot on Mars. Wendel wanted him killed because they knew the Board was backing him to the hilt and he had been given enough authority to make him the most dangerous kind of adversary. Wendel also knew that you were the most resourceful and intelligent agent in their employ.

"You proved that, to my satisfaction, when you did what no one has ever done before—outwitted a Mars' rocket security alert system by concealing yourself in a cybernetic robot. I'm sure it didn't take Wendel long to discover that you are as intelligent as you are beautiful—both valuable assets in a secret agent. Priceless assets. The time is very short. Am I right so far?"

"Yes ... it's all true. Please ... help me!"

"You tried to kill, without success, the man the Board was sending to Mars to investigate and crack down on both Wendel and Endicott. You tried to kill him three times."

"No, only once. I'm telling you the truth. I didn't fire that dart. There were other Wendel agents on board. One tried to blow up the ship. And there were other Wendel agents in New Chicago, with instructions to assassinate him if they could."

"I see. But you did try to kill him in New Chicago. Why did you come to Mars, if you didn't intend to try again?"

"I told you. I didn't lie when I said I came to save my brother, that I wanted to see Wendel exposed ... forced to face criminal charges. When I tried to stab him in the New Chicago Underground and failed ... I realized what Wendel had done to me, what a vicious person I'd become. I decided I couldn't go on being that kind of person any longer, not even to save my brother. I took the only other way I could think of to keep Wendel from killing my brother. I am a resourceful woman, I am intelligent ... why should I deny it? I might have made the Wendel Combine think twice about killing him. But now my brother's dead and—"

Her shoulders sagged and a look of torment came into her eyes.

"All right. One thing more. When that Wendel agent surprised you in the chart room and the man you'd tried to kill saved you ... why were you so frightened? Why did the agent go into such a rage? You must have thought he intended to kill you. And if you were both Wendel agents—"

"I wasn't supposed to be on the ship. He knew it, and must have been pretty sure I'd turned traitor. He knew all about my brother. There wasn't much he didn't know about me, because he was a very high-placed agent. He knew I had every reason to hate Wendel. And I think he was also the kind of man who turns sadistic when he has a woman completely at his mercy."

She saw me then. I could tell by the way her eyes widened and then fastened on me, staring straight past Littlefield as if he was no longer her only accuser.

But she was mistaken if she thought I had any desire to accuse her. I was furious with Littlefield, sickened by his relentless attack on her and if I hadn't been stunned for a moment, caught up in a kind of hypnotic spell by the suddenness of that attack and the startling candor she'd displayed in replying to it I'd have interfered sooner.

What she'd told him was evidence. It would help me to smash Wendel in a legal way, which is always the best way, when backed up as it would have to be by armed, completely lawful authority. All I'd have to do would be to put what she'd just said into one package and what Wendel agents had done to an Endicott fuel cylinder in a densely populated section of the Colony in another and bring the two packages together and there would take place, on Earth and on Mars, the kind of explosion that would blow the Wendel Combine into the rubbish bin of history. The Wendel-Endicott war would be over, and the Colonists would have a new birth of freedom.

A death-bed confession has the strongest kind of legal validity and when a woman thinks she has been sent out into space on an unmanned rocket perhaps to die ... she is not likely to lie about anything. An unforeseeable accident—a blind fluke of circumstance—had dealt Littlefield a winning hand and he had taken full advantage of it. He had done it to help me, God pity him ... for I hated him for it.

Every question he'd asked her and every reply she'd taken a minute or two to make explicit had cut down her chances of staying on this side of eternity.

She was looking straight at me.

"Ralph!" she said. "I don't