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

sure that I was looking very bad, and however severely I'd been shaken up by what had happened I still had a fair measure of control over my emotions.

I hadn't stayed in the train or on the platform to assist in the investigation, but I didn't feel guilty about it. Trilling could square all that with the authorities easily enough and he wouldn't have wanted me to talk to the police and have to identify myself. I was sure of that. My evidence would be taken down and turned over to the proper authorities in good time. The rule for me—the only rule I had a right to consider—was no entanglements.

I shut and locked the front door and almost called out: "It's me, darling!" as I usually do when I come home late, because when Joan is alone in the apartment and hears a door opening and closing she gets angry when I just walk in unannounced. It's part woman-curiosity, part fear, I guess—the thought that it could be a prowler and why should she be kept in suspense while I'm hanging up my hat and coat?

But this time something prevented me from calling out. Possibly the quarrel we'd had was still rankling a little deep in my mind and I wasn't quite sure how she'd take the "Darling."

My stubborn pride again. Or possibly it was just the feeling I had that the apartment was quieter than usual, that when you're keyed up and alert enough to hear a pin drop and you hear nothing—just a stillness that's a little on the weird side—your anxiety becomes too great to be relieved by calling out a cheery greeting.

I felt somehow that it would be wiser, and set better with the way I felt, if I just hung up my coat and walked into the living room without saying a word.

So I walked into the living room without saying a word and she was sitting right in the middle of it, on a straight-back chair with all of her bags packed and standing on the floor by the window, and with all of my bags packed and standing cheek-by-jowl with hers, and the three trunks that were going with me to Mars all sealed up and double-locked, and she wasn't angry or shaking her head or looking at the luggage with scorn.

There was pride in her lustrous brown eyes and the adorable tilt of her chin, and a warmth and a tenderness, and she was smiling at me and nodding.

"Oh, darling," she said. "Darling ... darling ... come here. Did you think I'd ever let you go to Mars without me? It was just talk—just stubborn, wild, crazy talk and it didn't mean a thing."

If you marry a woman like Joan and ever have a moment of doubt ... well, it means you ought to have your head examined. But you're twice as far removed from sanity if you throw away the check. For you can always be sure it will be redeemed eventually, in full measure and brimming over.

I didn't even have to put on my uniform and attach the small silver hawk to it.

6

We were not the only passengers in the eight-cabined forward section of the big sky ship which had been assigned to us. But it had taken us almost a week to get acquainted. To get really acquainted, that is, so that we could relax and feel at ease and really enjoy one another's company.

We were sitting in lounge chairs on the long promenade deck that ran parallel with all eight of the cabins, staring out through translucent crystal at a wide waste of stars.

Sitting in the first chair was a tall, sturdily built man of thirty-eight, with keen blue eyes and a dusting of gray at his temples. His name was Clifton Maddox and he was an electronic engineer. He had stories on tap that could turn your hair white, because he had been to Mars and back eight times.

Seated next to him, with her hand resting lightly on his arm, was a woman in her early twenties, with honey-blonde hair and eyes that held unfathomable glints and an enigmatical ingenuousness that could keep a man guessing in an exciting way. Her name was Helen Melton and she had eyes only for the man at her side. She had managed to make of the trip a continuous honeymoon, despite a few lovers' quarrels and the stern exactions which her work as a medical laboratory technician had imposed on her.

I mention these two because they were fairly typical of the group as a whole. They were all unusual individuals, the kind of people you take a liking to straight off, when you meet them casually at a party and exchange a few words with them that you keep remembering for days.

Joan and I sat in the last two chairs on the promenade deck, a little apart from the others. Joan was deep in a book and a little weary of talking and I ... was thinking about the robots.

The robots were a story in themselves—a story that could bear a great deal of re-telling. If right at that moment I'd had a son—a bright and eager lad of six or eight—I'd have set him on my knee and talked about the robots.

The five hundred passengers in the big sky ship were not alone in the long journey through interplanetary space. In the last years of the twentieth century, I'd have taken pains to make very clear to him, and in the early years of the twenty-first, a great new science had grown from an infant into a giant.

The science of cybernetics, of giant computers that could do much of Man's thinking for him on a specialized technological level, had transformed the face of the Earth and was continuing to transform it at a steadily accelerating pace.

The rocket's four giant computers were of the newest and most efficient type—humanoid in aspect, with conical heads, massive metal body-boxes, and three-jointed metal limbs which had all of Man's flexible adaptability in the carrying out of complex and difficult tasks.

Robotlike and immense, they towered in the chart room with their six-digited metal hands on their metal knees, their electronic circuits clicking, their tiers of memory banks in constant motion, but otherwise outwardly indifferent to the human activity that was taking place around them.

Four metal giants in a metal rocket, functioning cooperatively with Man in the gulfs between the planets, might have made an imaginative fiction writer of an earlier age catch his breath and glory in the fulfillment of a prophecy. An H. G. Wells perhaps, or an Olaf Stapledon. But the reality was an even greater tribute to the human mind's inventive brilliance than the Utopian dream had been.

The four giant computers were capable of solving problems too technical for the human mind to master without assistance, usually with astounding swiftness and always with the more-than-human accuracy of thinking machines whose prime function was to correlate without error the data supplied to them on punched metallic tapes, and to perform intricate mechanical tasks based upon that data.

The robots were tremendous, by any yardstick you might care to apply, and if I'd had a son—

I stopped thinking about the robots abruptly and sat very still, listening. A sound I'd heard a moment before had come again, much louder this time—a chill, unearthly screeching.

The chart room was just outside the eight-cabin section and I could hear the sound clearly. My nerves again, my over-stimulated imagination?

In space strange and unusual sounds are as common as pips on a radar screen. It was queer how quickly you got used to them. You had to walk around with your ears plugged up, in a sense, but the plugs didn't have to be inserted. They were just natural growths inside your ears—invisible and without substance, but plugs notwithstanding. They produced a kind of psycho-somatic deafness which didn't otherwise interfere with your hearing.

Just the very unusual sounds, the totally inexplicable raspings, dronings, creakings—usually of short duration—were blotted out.

You didn't hear them unless something deep in your mind whispered: "This one is different. This is an emergency. Take heed!"

The screeching was very different. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before, on Earth or in space.

The others must have heard it too, for it had been too loud, the second time, to be ignored. But apparently that strange acceptance of strange noises in space which goes with the kind of deafness I've mentioned had only been shattered for me. The six men and women in the lounge chairs had looked a little startled for a moment and exchanged puzzled glances. Which meant, of course, that they had heard it despite the mental earplugs in some inner recess of their minds. But that didn't prevent them from shrugging it off and resuming their conversation.

Joan also looked a trifle uneasy. She stopped reading just long enough to raise her eyes and frown, then became absorbed in the book again.

I got up quietly and pressed her wrist. "See you," I said.

She shut the book abruptly and straightened in her chair. "Where are you going, Ralph?"

"Just stay right where you are, kitten," I said. "I'll be back in a moment."

"That screeching noise," she said. "I was wondering about it, Ralph. I guess you'd better see what's causing it."

So she'd been disturbed by it too, and ignoring it had taken a deliberate effort of will which I hadn't realized she was exerting. It made me happy in an odd inner way, because it proved again what I'd always known ... that we were very close and there were currents of understanding which flowed back and forth between us and I had a wife I could be proud of.

"It's probably nothing," I said, not wanting to alarm her. "But I might as well take a look. It seems to be coming from the chart room."

"All right," she said and squeezed my hand.

I had to open and shut two sliding panels and pass along a blank-walled passageway to get to the chart room. To my surprise the door was standing open. It's usually kept locked, because there's no section of the sky ship where a man who didn't want anyone to suspect that he harbored within himself the most dangerous kind of destructive impulses could do more damage.

The shattering of a photo-electric eye or the ripping out of a single live connection in just one of the four cybernetic robots could have wrecked the rocket, and sent it spiraling down through the space gulfs in flaming ruin, depending on just how vital to the robot's functioning the shattered part happened to be.

There was a security alert system which would have to be disconnected first, but anyone resourceful enough to get inside the chart room at all, without identification-disk proof that he had a right to be there, would have known precisely how to take care of the preliminary obstacles.

I didn't waste any time in getting to that wide-open door, for my mind was racing on ahead of me like the most alerted kind of alarm system, its jaggling warning me that every second counted and that what I dreaded most might very well be true.

What I actually saw, when I reached the doorway and stood there looking in, took me completely by surprise. It wasn't the way I'd pictured it at all. But it was just as unnerving, just as much of a threat to the safety of the ship and it startled me so I must have looked almost comic, standing there idiot-still. But there was nothing comic about what I saw.

The woman I'd almost asked to go to Mars with me was staring straight at me, her hair still piled up high, a look of terrified appeal in her eyes. She wasn't alone. She was struggling furiously with a crewman I'd talked to a few times and neither liked nor disliked—a heavyset man with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He was gripping her savagely by the wrist and they were both backed up against one of the robot giants.

Suddenly as I stared her head went back and a convulsive trembling seized her. She began to scream.

7

It was a christ-awful moment—for her and for me. For her because she had no right to be in the Chart Room, or even on the ship, as far as I knew, and there was a look on the crewman's face that chilled me to the core of my being. It went beyond the anger of a duty-obsessed man, outraged by her infringement of the regulations. It was a completely different kind of anger. There was a savage cruelty, a killing rage in his eyes, impossible to misinterpret.

It was just as awful a moment for me, because I wasn't sure I could get to him before he broke her wrist