Marsport, the largest—if you excluded the prospecting encampments within a hundred-mile radius of the place—city on the Planet, had grown fast, from the time of its founding in 2014. Originally simply a mining site for the Tri-Planet Refining Corporation, it had spread backward from the area of the original mines in a rough circle, beginning with the monotonous quonset huts of the miners, and modulating in its move toward the perimeter to smart iron-and-adobe structures. Some of these, thanks to the less-than-half Earth's normal gravity, as high as fifteen stories.
The planet, barely half the diameter of Earth and a tenth of Earth's mass, was a minerologist's paradise. The rusty red sands of the Martian desert were almost pure ferrous oxide, a source of both iron for the profitable refineries and oxygen for the inhabitants of Marsport.
Going Los Angeles one ridge better, Marsport was completely circumscribed by high crimson hills, and this natural bowl formation, plus oxygen's heavier-than-air-density, allowed the city to be filled with breathable atmosphere, much as tobacco smoke can lie surging gently within an ashtray if the air in a room is still. This made planetary wind-storms a hazard.
Outside the hills, of course, the air was thin, cold and barely able to support life, being comparable to the biting cold air atop Mount Everest. Human lungs could not breathe it for long without freezing. Naturally, there was a high casualty rate amongst the prospectors, despite their pressurized metal huts and oxygen masks. But uranium, as it had been since the advent of the atomic age, was enormously well-paying to the one miner in twenty to find any in Mars' body breaking hinterlands with its roasting dry heat of day and blood-freezing cold by night.
And then there was parabolite.
This mineral, found in abundance beneath the Martian sands, was, theoretically, worth ten times its weight in gold to the people who might mine it. I say theoretically, because no one had as yet found a way of getting any ore. Paradoxically, the feature which made parabolite so vitally desired was the same feature which prevented anyone from mining it: it was totally indestructible.
The name had been given it by the scientists who studied the three solitary fragments of it found small enough for shipping back to Earth. There was just no way of chipping a piece loose for analysis. The name was due to the oddly shaped molecules which made up this mineral. All of them seemed to be joined atomically into perfect parabolas, no matter which way you came at them. Which meant, in effect, that when anything was brought to bear against the substance, pressure which struck one end of the parabolically curved molecules was retransmitted by the other end, back to the thing putting pressure on it. Result: it "hit back" with a violence equal to that applied to it, and sustained no damage whatsoever to itself. Chemicals were tried when pickaxes had failed, but the substance was inert. It gave no sign of reacting either to hydrofluoric acid, which could eat its way through glass, or to aqua regia, which could eat through anything else.
They even tried using the collapsers on it. These deadly weapons, which worked by the simple process of killing the attraction between the protons and electrons, could, in the briefest time, reduce anything to less than dust. The electrons spun away in a blinding blue-white flash, and the stripped-down protons, being less than atomic in size, fell silently down into the heart of the planet, leaving a virtual nothingness where the object had been.
But on parabolite, even these mighty weapons were useless. Oh, they had found that training a battery of them on a chunk of parabolite, for a period of days, with an enormous drain of power keeping the weapons firing continuously, did get results. The overall mass of the chunk was reduced by one-millionth of a gram. Which was less than useless, because not only was that amount completely impractical to obtain, but it was not even obtained, thanks to the collapsers' destructive potency. It was merely destroyed.
And so, vast acres of this fortune-making mineral lay all about the planet, as common as sandstone was on Earth. And no one had any idea of how to get any of it, not even the natives.
Yes, there were natives, of a sort, on Mars. Strange beings, albeit friendly, made up, except for a fraction of a percent, of sugar.
They were crystalline, these beings, covered over with prisms of bright red sugar that gave them, with their scuttling gait and long pointed tails, the appearance of man-sized lizards. A lot of their metabolism was a mystery to us, but we did know that they, like plants on Earth, lived by a sort of modified photosynthesis.
At first thought, this seems strange, since we are used to green as the primary necessity in a photosynthetic metabolism. But it made sense when you remember that foliage looks green because the green rays of the sun are reflected, and the red rays absorbed. Since a crystal passes only the rays which correspond to its color-structure, they did quite well, photosynthetically. Air and water were their chief foods, of course. The water they inhaled through rubbery-looking hollow tongues which extended a good two feet from their wide, dragon like mouths. The distance was a necessity, due to their exteriors, which, as I've said, were made of red crystalline sugar. They could take water on the inside, but it was fatal on the outside.
The first men on Mars had felt pretty silly standing guard over their encampments with water pistols. But the sugarfeet, as they came to be called, proved friendly enough in a nonobsequious way. They seemed, on investigation, to be the Martian equivalent of cats.
By that I mean that they must have been the self-sufficient pets of the Ancient Martians. They tended to be standoffish and annoyingly smug, but not menacing in any way. After all, why should they be menacing? We had nothing they wanted. Our food was useless to them, as were our clothes, gold or anything else in the way of possessions. They liked our water, of course, but long evolution in the Martian deserts had kept their physical need for this commodity down to a minimum. The average sugarfoot drank about a pint of water per week, which was no menace to us, even when we'd first landed and water was in short supply.
But of the Ancients, they could tell us nothing, any more than an alien landing on a depopulated Earth could find out about men from an alley cat. We knew there had been intelligent life, though. There were remnants of buildings still to be seen half-buried in the rust-red sands, and bewildering little artifacts for which no conceivable use had as yet been convincingly postulated. There was one thing, though, that bothered us about these buildings and artifacts.
They were made out of parabolite.
How had the Martians carved, or molded, or otherwise affected the shape of this indestructible mineral? We had no idea.
Marsport had a population of about one hundred thousand families, averaging five people to a family, so it was a good-sized city for Snow to hide herself in.
On the other hand, I wasn't absolutely sure just why I was looking for her. After all, I didn't really need the Amnesty. A collapser carries a lot of weight on its own. And an Amnesty's power was only in proportion to the esteem in which an approached individual held the authority of the World Government.
The more I thought of it, the more I wondered why I was so determined to find Miss Snow White. She'd only be a hindrance to me, really, what with short-circuiting my spotting technique. And a man on a mission of such grave importance wouldn't simply seek out a girl because she had cornsilk hair and red velvet lips, would he? Well, would he?
As I thought all of this, I was striding swiftly along Von Braun Street, the main thoroughfare, ignoring the stares of passers-by as they spotted the golden collapser belted about my waist. Passing a small bar, I happened to glance in through the window. And there was her photograph on the stereo over the bar. The men along its polished metal length were staring at her with interest.
Curious and puzzled, I turned back and went inside the bar to hear what was being said about her.
"Shoot to kill! Repeat: Shoot to kill!" said the announcer's voice from the speaker. "She is not to be obeyed under any circumstances. The Amnesty is a forgery. Repeat: A forgery."
I found myself leaning weakly against a wall by the door as the sense of the message came home to me. Baxter had lost no time making up for my stupidity in losing the Amnesty. He didn't dare admit it had been stolen, because Amnesty-bearers, like myself, were considered by the populace to be intelligent, and very clever. It wouldn't do to weaken public opinion of IS.
But to kill! From Baxter's viewpoint, it made sense. If she were simply shot down, then she couldn't mention the fact that it had been stolen, either.
As a patriot, I should have been happy to see my government operating with such efficient dispatch. For some reason, I was not happy at all. I thought of those soft warm lips pressing gently upward upon my own, albeit in the act of deception, and felt suddenly sick inside.
"Something for you, buddy?"
I looked up. The bartender, his voice mirroring the polite caution with which people spoke to collapser toters, was down at my end of the bar, by the doorway, his face strained into a nervously hearty anxiety to please.
Irritably, I leaned forward to rasp a negation into his face at close range, and then I decided to create no more ruckus than I had to. "Okay," I grunted.
"Yes, sir," he said, spinning about and commencing to do dexterous things with the flashy array of bottles behind the bar and a tall frosty mixer.
"Down the hatch," he smiled, setting the glass of shining chartreuse liquid before me.
I nodded, and took a sip. It was good, whatever it was. It was a little nose-tingling, like a stinger, and yet there was something, a not unpleasant bitterish aftertaste. The glass fell from my suddenly numb fingers and shattered loudly on the bar. I tried to get up, and couldn't.
The floor of the bar was warping, tugging at me. I was unconscious halfway down.
My first awareness was the whine of the converters, audible everywhere in Marsport, if not by ear, then by the soles of one's feet. Their thundering dynamos plunged potent destructive rays against the Martian sands, leaving in their wake invisible fountains of nascent oxygen and shimmering puddles of orange-white molten iron. They went on day and night without ceasing, partly to keep the mining companies on Earth from losing their franchises with Tri-Planet, but primarily to keep the Marsport populace from tumbling down in the streets with cyanosed lips and glazing eyes, as the breathable atmosphere sloughed away over the hilltops.
So I knew that I was in Marsport, at least. But not much else. My hands, when I tried to move them, proved to be bound, and tightly, at that. My fingers felt swollen and numb when I tried to flex them. There was something, a hood, a sack, a cloth, over my head, fastened about my throat, impairing my breathing slightly and my vision altogether.
I found, though, that I could move my legs, but it was little help when I wouldn't know where they were carrying me if I chanced using them. For all I knew, I was lying on my back atop a precipice. Moving about could be disastrous.
So I lay still and spent my time wondering why that bartender should have slipped me a mickey.
It was senseless, in a way. I mean, even granting that there was some sort of inimical agency here attempting to forestall investigation of the missing Space Scouts, how did they know that I was the proper Amnesty-bearer? Or that there was an Amnesty-bearer around? And, knowing this, how would they know that I'd turn into that particular bar?
The thoughts were too confusing, so I gave them up, and just lay there in darkness, worrying. And not, strangely enough, about my fate, but about Snow's. Security Agents were keen-sighted and perfect shots. And a collapser beam wasn't choosy about what it annihilated.
I'd come to while lying on my back, but had chanced turning over on my face to get my body weight off my hands. A little life seemed to be oozing back into my thickened fingers. I tried the cords on my wrists again, but they were still taut and firm. Then one of my fingers found the loose end of the cord, and felt its surface. It was one of those nylon ropes with a steel wire center. I gave up trying to undo it.
How long had I been lying wherever I was, anyhow? I had no means of knowing. It might have been an hour, a day, or merely minutes. How far behind Snow's trail had I fallen thanks to this damnable delay? And did she know she was being hunted?
I shifted over onto my right hip to feel if my collapser holster were still in place. Something pressed back against me, but it had too much give to it. The holster was there, all right, but it was empty.
Obviously, I couldn't do anything else until I could see. I tried catching at the hooding material with my teeth, but it was stretched tautly across my features, and evaded them with maddening efficiency. On reflection, I saw that this was the reason I hadn't smothered. Looser cloth would have leaped easily to block mouth and nostrils against my unconscious breathing. I wondered if the tautness was an over-sight, or purposely done to ensure my staying alive.
That took me about three seconds to figure out. If I was still alive, then they wanted me for something further. If they hadn't, then the cord binding the hood to my neck would have been used as a simple, efficient garrote.
If my hands could reach the neck cord, though, I might be able to untie it, and then try my hand cords with my teeth.
Slowly, I managed to slide my knees forward until I was resting solely on kneecaps and chin. Then I twisted, stretched, and tugged with my arms until the binding cord slipped over my rump and slid to the backs of my knees. My chin, from all the weight on it, felt as though it had been kicked by a fullback, but I ignored the pain and flopped awkwardly over onto my side, then rolled carefully onto my back, with my ankles somewhere over my face.
Now came the rough part. I found myself, in the next five minutes of torture, wishing I'd done more toe-touching exercises in my erstwhile sedentary life. The cord slipped down as far as the tendons behind my heels, but would budge no further, no matter how I strained. With my boots off, I might have made the last inch or so, but they were on, and had thick durex heels. It was going to be a struggle.
When it happened, it happened all at once. I was wrenching at my bonds, gritting my teeth and pulling, despite the binding agony that flared in my wrists. And then I smacked myself in the face with my own hands as my feet jackknifed back to the ground. I lay there panting awhile, then started feeling about my neck for the end of the cord fastening the hood in place.
My fingers, thicker than ever after my struggles, were almost without the power to feel as I fumbled them against the knot in the cord. In their bloated state, they were just slightly more manageable than sausages.
I let them work by touch, and kept my mind away from what they were doing, lest I begin to scream in frustration at their bumbling efforts. Then something slipped and gave way. The bottom folds of the hooding cloth fell open from my throat. I fairly tore the thing from my head and looked around me.
There wasn't much light to see by, just a pallid gray glow in the air, but I could tell I was in a cellar of some sort. The walls had that dusty look to them, and there was a flight of stone stairs going up toward a door, under which seeped a dim sheet of light. I started looking around for some other way out. There was none visible, although I couldn't see too much outside the area where that dim light struck and diffused before vanishing into darkness.
I licked my lips, took in some deep draughts of air, then began dulling my incisors on the wrist cords. The knot, unfortunately, was on the ulnar side of the wrists, just behind the little fingers. The only way I could get at that was to bend my hands tightly up to my neck, as though I were about to choke myself, and work over the underside of my wrists. It was awkward as hell, but finally that cord, too, dropped away, and I was free.
Well, relatively free. I didn't know how my chances were of getting out of that cellar or whatever it was.
While it was probably only setting myself up for a return to my bonds, I decided to do the obvious thing and head up that flight of stairs.
But before I did so, I scouted around for some sort of weapon. On a pile of empty crates I located a pair of shears, the sort used to snip through the metal tape that binds bulky crates like those. It wasn't much, and was clumsy to hold, but it was all I had, so I took it along with me.
Creeping up the stairs, I found the door locked from the outside, but it was a handle-or-key operated lock, the kind that can be opened from the inside by simply turning the knob. Apparently my captors were less concerned about me getting out than they were about anyone else getting in. It figured, though. I was supposed to be unconscious, hooded, and bound.
Shutting the door behind me, I found myself in a corridor, not itself lighted, but getting light from somewhere at the far end. As I moved cautiously down its length, I was thankful for the treeless Martian topography which had occasioned all edifices being built of metal and/or stone. There wasn't a chance of my making the floor creak.
I arrived at the end of the corridor, and paused behind the edge of an open door, through which the light came streaming.
And there were voices, too. Voices, and odd clacking noises.
Gingerly, I lowered myself all the way to the flooring and peeked around the very bottom of the door frame, below, I hoped, the eye level of anyone in that room.
It was, I saw, the bar in which I'd been mickeyed. But long opaque blinds were latched in place over the windows and glass door, and the people in the place didn't seem to be customers. Some of them were seated on the barstools, and some on the bar itself. Others occupied tables and chairs along the wall opposite the bar. All were facing the area between the bar and the tables, in which was set another table. There was a man seated at it. A man, and something else.
It was this something else which was emitting the clacking noises I'd heard. I looked with fascinated horror at its long, flare-nostrilled face, and rheumy-looking wide-set eyes. It had no hair, nor could I discern anything like ears, until it turned its head and I saw the hole just behind the back edge of the cruelly-toothed jaw. The overhead light, as this creature turned its head, glinted red off squarish conical scales, and I realized with a little shock that I was seeing my first sugarfoot.
Seen in the flesh, as it were, it looked considerably more menacing than the photos I'd seen of it back on Earth. At that cosmic distance, I could believe that it was docile, albeit standoffish, and was, while not a friend to man, at least an accepted neutral. But looking at those eyes and teeth, I decided the Public Information Bureau on Earth was full of beans. That damned thing looked dangerous!
As I watched, it made some more clacking noises, and the man beside it, whom I recognized as the bartender, frowned and clacked something back. His sounds didn't have the same snapping quality to them, but I couldn't doubt they were conversing in some language. Which language just had to be the sugarfoot's.
And that was another thing the PIB on Earth hadn't mentioned. Contact between man and sugarfoot was supposed to be impossible, except in the form of rudimentary gestures. They were supposed to be able to learn to follow certain Earth words, if you dinned them at them often enough. But that was all. Now, here was an Earthman talking to one! It'd make interesting news for Baxter when I got back.
If I got back.
The bartender, in the course of his speech, pointed at something on the table before him and shook his head. I raised up slowly on my hands from my prone position, and got a glimpse of the object under discussion. It was my collapser, goldenly glinting in the incandescent light.
Just from following the bartender's gestures and facial expressions, I began to gather some of what was going on. I didn't know why, but they seemed to be dickering over possession of the weapon. And unless I misjudged the man's now-and-then pointing in the direction of where that stone cellar lay, I, too, was on the auction block.
The way I figured it, this sugarfoot wanted me, and it wanted the collapser. The bartender seemed willing enough to surrender me, but was nixing a deal on the weapon.
The drawn blinds and the men's lowered voices indicated that it must be nightfall. I'd started out into Marsport at midday. The rotation of the planet is only fractionally different from Earth's, so that meant that at least six hours had gone by since my capture. But a bar closing down at sunset, just when its business would begin picking up, would look pretty suspicious, so I could figure on probably another six hours, putting the time at somewhere past midnight.
I wished I could leave with the collapser, but I had my doubts that I could cross the floor of that room to snatch it from the table without being grabbed by someone. I shook my head and withdrew back into the corridor to think. No point in risking my life to get that weapon back, when I could simply slip out some other way and alert IS. A team of agents could reduce the bar to a sparkling crater in seconds, along with the men, sugarfoot and collapser.
It wouldn't be quite as glorious as acting the hero by myself, but it'd be considerably safer. I got back to my feet and started inspecting the rest of the corridor, seeking a less populated exit than the one onto Von Braun street.
Back the way I'd come, there was only the door to that cellar. I doubled back toward the other door by the bar itself, ducked down low, and scuttled past it on my hands and knees. No outcry came from the room, just the vociferous clacking noises, and an occasional mutter from one of the surrounding men. I figured I'd made it okay. The corridor bent, just past that doorway, and ended in a window. It was open. I stuck my head out and looked around.
Something was glowing just beneath me, something that reflected almost intolerable heat against my face when I looked down at it.
A river of liquified iron, ten feet wide, ran along a bed carved into the rocky soil. It was a good five feet between the bottom of the window and the sullen smolder of that hellish stream, but my face and throat felt already parboiled. Before ducking back into the relatively cooler temperature inside the corridor, I shot a glance toward the source of this impassable moat, and understood why it was there.
About two miles along this radiant river, I saw the towering metallic hulk of the converters, their shimmering molecule-blasting rays leaping from a multi-noded sender plate to a cup-shaped receiver. And, silhouetted against the black velvet night sky, above and between these deadly twins, was a monster escalator, carrying ton after ton of rich red Martian sand to a point in space directly above the flashing beam, and spilling it downward through the raw energy below.
Where the sand—pure ferrous oxide—struck the beam, I could not look without daring blindness, so violent were those disruptive reactions. But just above it, a silvery cloud arose and dissipated itself; the freed oxygen, enriching the atmosphere in this gigantic crater that was Marsport. And below it, a cataract of burning metal sprayed downward into an enormous vat, the sides of which were spouting a continual flow of this dangerous liquid into troughs which spread out in a fanlike pattern that must have encompassed the entire city.
It took me a few minutes of thought, but I figured it out, as I drew back through the window from the heat. It was not enough that the converters could supply the citizenry with breathable air. The planetary temperature at night was below the level at which a man could live, save with the most cumbersome, demanding precautions, such as are demanded by arctic exploration on Earth.
And so, instead of merely letting the metal cool into ingots before it was shipped where it was needed, it was channeled through the city, passing behind all the buildings where alleys would normally be, and warming the environment so that going into the night air would not mean sure death by freezing. I could not see the far end of the trough, but I knew that beyond the city limits the troughs would converge, and iron would be cooled, shaped and shipped.
It was ingenious, and something I'd never run across in my readings about Mars. But then, I was never much of a space exploration fan. However, ingenious or not, it was a crumby trick on me, really. I hadn't a chance of passing through that rushing inferno outside.
That left me one way out: through the front door.
Hefting the wirecutter in my hand, and breathing a silent prayer, I moved back to that open doorway.
Things, when I peeked out, seemed no more advanced. Man and sugarfoot were still clacking away at one another, neither side giving ground. However, the other men round about were showing signs of restlessness.
"Whyn't ya just blast him, Jim, and forget it?" suggested an oldster just over to my left.
Jim, the bartender, faced the other men with a black scowl, furious at the interruption. "You keep your mouth shut, Barry! You know these things can understand a little English!"
The older man, Barry, subsided with a sullen look at Jim, and I turned my gaze there to see what would happen next. I'd quite overlooked the fact that Jim's looking toward Barry had sent his eyes in the general direction of the corridor, and that I was leaning my fool head around the doorway. Jim was looking right at me, his mouth wide open.
"Hey!" he cried, leaping to his feet and pointing with such violence that his chair crashed to the floor. "He's loose!"
I took a step back, as the entire roomful of men jumped up and turned to face me. My mind leaped about, like a fish flung alive onto a skillet, trying to make some sensible decision. Should I chance flinging myself over that red hot river outside, or rush back to the deadend of the cellar? Neither course seemed very profitable, somehow.
But my time was running out. After the first startled pause at seeing me there, the group came at me in a rapid scuttle, hands outstretched to take me.
So none of them ever saw what I saw, facing into the room. The sight they missed was one which sent me diving to my left, to fall prone on the corridor floor, hugging the raw stone there and clamping my eyes shut.
I heard that terrible throbbing buzz in that bar room, and then my skin prickled and stung as an eight-foot segment of the wall above me vanished into a cloud of white sparks.
When I at last lifted myself carefully for a look, the sugarfoot was gone. Gone with the collapser I'd seen it snatch up from that table when Jim's guard was down.
And the men were gone, too. Gone with most of the wall, half the bar, and a large quantity of chairs and tables.
A collapser is nothing to fool with.
The sugarfoot must have flicked it on and sent the blue-white beam in a sweeping curve that turned everything it touched into hot protons and electrical energy. He'd turned it off, however, as soon as the last man vanished from his ken.
I realized with a sick feeling of shock that a second's more energy would have dissolved the back wall, and I would have been buried beneath a flood of molten iron.
When I got outside, there was no sign of the sugarfoot along the street. In fact, there was no sign of anyone. Marsport, despite the caloric values of the heating troughs is still pretty chilly at night. I gathered no one went out much, or that this was a slack night for the local merchants, because even the stores were closed, and the public stereovision auditorium was shut down, too.
It was eerie, walking down that rocky street, with no sound but that of my durex heels smacking the ground. To left and right, dark shuttered windows moved by as I advanced. My nose still felt irritated by the good whiff of ozone it had inhaled when the sugarfoot cut loose with the collapser, and I was rubbing the tip of it with the back of my wrist when I saw a figure down the street, facing toward me.
It seemed to be a man, but his figure was lost in the deep shadows thrown by the eye-searing glow of the distant converter. I kept moving toward him, but slowed my pace. There was something in his attitude that I didn't like. He was waiting there for me, I realized with a small shock. And I sensed his intentions weren't the best possible.
While moving toward him, I started darting my eyes about me, to see if there were some way of getting off the street. But the buildings were all side-to-side with one another, and shut tight. I could, of course, hurl myself through the glass front of one. But assuming I didn't brain myself on the blinds in the process, what then? All these places were backed by that infernal molten river. There'd be no escape. And then my eyes saw something that sent brazen alarm bells clanging through my nervous system. In the entrance of one store, the glass curved at a forty-five degree angle to my line of movement, and, reflected in its depths, I could see the broad avenue behind me.
It was filled with creeping figures.
I spun about with an involuntary cry, and looked at them, head on. It was a group of men, armed with rude weapons, mostly clubs, but a few glittering knives. And they were obviously after me.
As soon as they knew I'd spotted them, they left all pretense of stealth, and came at me in a run, brandishing their weapons.
I staggered back one frightened step, then turned and ran down the street like a madman. Not one of them, however, was making a sound. Only their heavy footfalls told me they were still in earnest pursuit as I stumbled up the street toward that solitary waiting figure in the shadows. It was like a nightmare; the relentless pursuers chasing one down an endless avenue with no turnoff.
My ribs ached with panicky breathing, and my vision was swimming giddily as I came to where the solitary figure stood. "Here we go," I said to myself. "Now he steps out and stops me. And I'm too winded to put up a fight."
As I came nearly abreast of the figure, it stepped out into the blue-white glow that glared from the converter. Brilliant light coruscated over glassy scales as it moved out into the avenue in a queer scuttling motion.
The sugarfoot! I knew it was the same one. My collapser was still clutched in its three-fingered hand. Blindly, I shot my arms in front of me to wrest the thing from its grasp, but it simply tossed the gun into its other hand, and with the free hand caught me by the collar and held on.
Then a humming blaze filled the avenue for a split second, and I got my second whiff of ozone that night. The sugarfoot released me, and I fell to the street panting. I managed to lift my head, and look back toward where my pursuers had been. They were gone.
I raised myself on my hands, and looked up into the scaly face of my rescuer, wary and alert. But the sugarfoot had lowered the collapser, and wasn't menacing me with it.
"Why did you kill those men?" I asked, bewildered.
It flickered out a horrible-looking tongue that resembled a segment of hollow rubber tubing, and made some clacking noises. I shook my head. The thing ceased making noises, and tried sign language instead. It pointed toward where the men had been, then pointed at me.
"You mean," I said slowly, "you annihilated those men simply because they were after me?"
The thing didn't change expression—I didn't really see how it could, what with its rigid crystalline structure—but it gave a slow nod. It seemed to have difficulty doing it, as though it weren't used to that particular form of expression.
"But why?" I said, getting to my feet and staring at the creature. "Why go to these lengths to protect me? Is there something special about me?"
Again the ponderous nod. Then the sugarfoot pointed at me, and pointed at its head. I simply shook my head. It did the action again, patiently.
"Because I'm smart?" I choked, not really thinking this was the case.
The lumpy red head moved from right to left and back to center again.
"Then what?" I demanded.
It looked about, suddenly, then pointed to the ground and shook its head again.
"Not here, you mean?"
The sugarfoot nodded, then raised a hand and beckoned.
"You want me to come with you; is that it?" I said.
It nodded, with less patience, and moved off a few paces. When I didn't go with it, it turned to face me again, and gave its head a questioning tilt.
"Because," I answered its unspoken question, "I don't know if I can trust you, that's why."
It stared at me with its wide-set eyes for a second, then pointed to the empty space in the street, then to the collapser, and nodded.
"I—I should trust you because you didn't use the collapser on me? Because if your motives were bad, you would already have destroyed me?"
The sugarfoot nodded violently.
"Unh-uh!" I said, backing off. "Not a chance. You tell me why, and maybe I'll come along. But not before." Even as I said it, I felt regret for my own irrationality. Were its intentions even the best, it could certainly not prove them to me, or even demonstrate its reasons with the language barrier between us.
It stood there, looking at me, apparently thinking hard. We seemed to be at an impasse. I didn't want to go with it. On the other hand, I didn't want it to go off and leave me with the most baffling mystery of my life unsolved. I had to know why it had spared me, and what it wanted.
But an alien, on a strange planet, with that dragonish form, and the shark-mouth full of teeth, not to mention a thick three-foot tail ... I couldn't bring myself to trust it.
At that moment, there was a shout down the street, and a flashing light. Someone was coming. Probably, I realized an instant later, the Security men from the rocket field. They had a gadget there that could not only spot, but track down, any use of atomic energy in the region. And there had been, within ten minutes of each other, two such uses of that all-annihilating collapser.
The sugarfoot took a step backward.
"Hold on," I said. "These guys are okay. Maybe, after I get a tranquillizer, I'll be more in the mood for coming with you. If you'll just wait a moment."
But the sugarfoot was having none of it. It gave me an angry glance, then, before I could dodge, it grabbed my arm. I went to pull away, then saw that it was trying to tell me something. The fingers not holding my arm were indicating my wrist. It took me a second to catch on.
"Wrist—wristwatch?" A swift nod. "Time of some sort?" Another. "You—You'll come for me at a later time?" A very brief nod, then a surprisingly friendly clasp of those clawlike fingers on my shoulder.
Then, with a bound that took my breath away, the sugarfoot sprang upward from the street and landed on the rooftop of one of the nearby stores. It landed running, and as I watched, it reached the rear of the store and took a soaring leap out over the molten river between it and the next rooftop. Then it vanished into the blackness beyond the trough alley. I turned to await the arrival of the Security men.
Charlie and the other Security Agent, whose name turned out to be Foster, sat stolidly listening as I recounted events since I'd last seen them.
"You say," Charlie interrupted with a frown, "this here sugarfoot told you why he didn't shoot you down?"
"Not quite," I said. "He didn't seem to have the time. But he said he'd see me l—"
"Look, Delvin, that's not what I mean. Everybody from Mars to Venus knows that the sugarfoots are dumb animals. So I'd like to know what you're trying to hand us."
There was something funny in his tone. As though he were saying, not "It can't be true," but, "It's not supposed to be true, and that's the way things stay!"
I paused, considering. I'd had a hard time for a while, when I was first picked up. But I'd been able to get myself brought, by the men who found me, to Charlie and Foster, after giving Charlie's name and describing the two. They'd identified me, and gotten me off the hook for the damage to that bar. It was damage possible only by a collapser. And I, of course, had been picked up wearing a collapser holster.
But from the time I'd been left with them, there was a bothersome something about their attitude; an impatience, as though they had something to say to me, or even do to me, but had to hold off until I was through.
"He told me by sign language," I said. "He made a gesture, and I interpreted it. Nothing baffling in that, is there?"
Foster gave me a half-lidded stare, as though suppressing anger. Then he said, "Tell me, Mister Delvin. Just what is the sign for 'I must go now, but I'll see you at a later time'?"
I took a deep breath and controlled myself. "Look, I was picked for this job because I have a gift for interpretation, or deduction, or whatever you want to call it."
"If you're such a hotshot figure-outer," Charlie snapped, "how come you didn't get suspicious when that bartender was forcing free drinks on you? Any sap would've expected a mickey with the guy acting like that!"
"The reason," I said, stiffly, hating to admit my mental weakness, "is that at that particular moment, the picture of Miss Snow White was on the stereo. That's why! I—I don't function properly when there are women about."
Charlie and Foster exchanged a look, and both shrugged: I felt a hot blush of embarrassment and anger burning upon my face. "And that's the story!" I finished stubbornly.
Charlie heaved himself lazily to his feet. "What do you think, Foster?"
Foster, emulating the same lazy motion, looked thoughtful for a second, then nodded. "I think that's all we're going to get. Come on, let's stash him away."
"Stash me away?" I cried indignantly. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"You're going into a nice cell, buddy," said Charlie, an ugly smile on his face. "And you'll be let out when the time comes. So quit your bellyaching and come on. It'll be easier if you don't try to get rough."
"You can't arrest me," I said. "I'm—or, I should be—the Amnesty-bearer!"
It was as if they hadn't heard me.
"Come on, come on," said Foster, crooking a finger at me.
"You guys can't pull this kind of trick!" I said. "When Chief Baxter hears about this—"
Charlie and Foster threw back their heads and laughed.
"W-what's so funny?" I asked, a dreadful inkling growing inside my mind.
The door opened and a third security man walked in. It was Chief Philip Baxter. He gave me a tolerant smile.
"They're laughing, Delvin," he said smoothly, "because I gave the order for your arrest."
The cell was of cold Martian stone, and had no window. I sat, miserable, on the thin cot provided for me, and pondered all that had happened to me in the last few days. None of it made the slightest sense to me. Not my selection by the Brain, nor my arrest by Baxter's men. It was crazy!
Baxter, when I'd demanded to know the reason for his duplicity, had merely said, "You've served your purpose." And then Charlie and Foster had taken me away, their collapser muzzles forming unarguable persuaders against my spine.
I didn't even give a moment's consideration to thoughts of escape. I was in a Security prison, and a maximum-security Security prison at that. The door to my cell was a massive foot-thick stone which swung into place on ponderous hinges, and sealed by making a half-twist in the circular entrance. Air was provided through vents, vents which could be closed off if the prisoner showed signs of aggressive tendencies. A few hours without air made most men pretty docile.
I wondered how long I'd sit there before they fed me. Or if they would feed me at all. Hell, no one knew I was on Mars. My last contact with my regular associates had been my good-by to Marge at the office. For all anyone knew, I'd been arrested for anarchy, or something. I knew, with a cold sinking feeling, that no one would even ask about me. Security had taken me, Security was good for the country, and Security never made mistakes. Topic closed. Jery Delvin written off as an uninteresting memory.
There seemed to be nothing to do but think, so I did a lot of it.
I noted with chagrin that they hadn't removed my belt, or socks. I could, if I so desired, escape my fate by simply knotting them into a cord, and passing one end through the overhead air grillwork and the other about my neck. Maybe that was the reason why they hadn't taken them. I had a distinct feeling, a served-my-purpose feeling, that whether I died by my own hand or of claustrophobia made little difference to Baxter and his boys.
I folded my hands behind my head and sank back onto the hard cot, puzzling over everything that had happened to me.
The Brain selects me as the key figure in the finding of the missing Space Scouts. Fine, so far. Just what my duties are, it doesn't say, but I'm the man for the job, whatever it is. Okay.
So Baxter hands over the Amnesty, I get a preliminary lead from Anders, the pilot of the Scouts. I take off for Mars to find the kids, who seem to have left of their own volition. Swell. Only, a cute blonde by the unlikely name of Snow White filches the Amnesty, and nearly has me tossed in prison. Except that Baxter, still on my side, gets me loose. I take off looking for Snow, and get mickeyed in a Martian bar. Then—
Then things start getting confusing.
I get loose and come upon a sort of council of Earthmen, dickering with a sugarfoot, a supposedly dumb animal, for me and my collapser.
I get spotted, the men try to snatch me, and they all get vaporized by the sugarfoot, who runs off. I follow, and next thing, another mob is on my heels. Same bit with the sugarfoot. Zzzzzzurp! No more men! Only this time it doesn't run off. It dallies a bit, and tries to get me to go somewhere with it. Why it has suddenly decided to take me along, I don't know, because it had the opportunity much earlier, when it made its first massacre.
However, I decline the invitation, and, like a good boy, report all events to Security. Upshot: I am stashed in a solid rock cell, possibly never to emerge alive.
I lay there pondering these facts. One thing seemed clear: I didn't know the angles. What was Snow's angle? Or Baxter's? Or the sugarfoot's? Or the mob's?
Hell, what was mine?
I snorted and sat up, rubbing my neck. I had a headache coming on, and it felt like the start of a migraine, an occupational hazard with ad men. I tried rotating my head on my neck, a good relaxer for those tensed neck muscles. And then I noticed that I was perspiring like mad, and that my throat felt hot inside.
With a sick apprehension, I sprang up and thrust my nose near the grill on the wall. Nothing. I tried poking a finger between the latticework. It was stopped by a metal plate.
The air-supply grill was sealed off. In that tiny cell, I had maybe two hours more of breathing time. After that—Well, I wouldn't be feeling my oxygen-starvation headache any more.
I sat down on the cot once more and scowled at the floor. I was tired of puzzles, but even this didn't make sense! Why take the time and trouble to smother me?
A collapser could wipe me off the slate in seconds. No annoying corpus delicti cluttering up the premises. Not even a bit of fingernail left, nothing to incriminate the murderers. So they smother me.
But why kill me, for heaven's sake? It couldn't be to keep me from telling what I knew! I didn't know a damned thing. Except that Baxter, motive unknown, must have left Earth immediately after I spoke to him on that interplanetary hook-up. Or was it interplanetary? Come to think of it, he could've been in the next room when I talked to him. Damn. It was baffling.
Why he hadn't simply told me that it was no use, and sent me back to Earth, I couldn't figure out. He could have made all sorts of reasonable excuses for my not continuing in my search for the missing boys, and I'd have swallowed any one of them. Instead, he locks me up, throws away the key, and turns off the air supply.
What did I know that I could communicate to people back on Earth? What knowledge did I have that was a menace of some sort to Security? Or, to be more near the truth, to Baxter?
The only interesting fact I'd stumbled on was—
But maybe that was it: the fact that the sugarfeet were something other than what Earth had claimed. That one I'd met was certainly no dumb animal. He had a language; I'd heard that bartender talking to him. That put him a few steps ahead of cats and dogs. Maybe a lot further.
But what difference did it make if the sugarfeet were or weren't dumb animals? I didn't care one way or the other. And I was pretty representative of an Earthman, wasn't I? Who'd care, anyhow, if it turned out the sugarfeet were nearer human than had been supposed?
Well, I knew the who, if not the why.
Baxter obviously cared tremendously. Which deduction left me approximately nowhere.
The air seemed to be getting staler by the minute. I found I could breathe better lying flat on my back, not even using enough energy to remain in a sitting position.
My skin was clammy with sweat from head to foot, my windpipe felt like someone had just given it a brisk toweling with a hot doormat.
I thought desperately of pounding on that impervious stone door, in the chance that my suffocation was an over-sight on their part. But I knew in my heart it wasn't.
I held myself on the cot, fighting that deadly tug of irrational emotion. If I was going to suffocate, I wanted to do it with as little pain as possible.
My lungs, though were telling me a different story. They had that "time to go up for air" feeling, the hideous pre-strangulation hot wave that floods through the ribs, begging, and then ordering, the swimmer to head to the surface before his lungs rip apart.
I fought the feeling, breathing faster to keep that dull nudging from becoming a full-scale command. But it was harder and harder not to fling myself at that bare store and try, in the last few minutes of life, to dig my way free with my fingertips.
And then, with my eyes burning in my own perspiration, and tongue half-protruding between gaping lips, I felt that stinging, prickling sensation along my limbs.
Then a blinding blaze of blue-white sparks showered me, and I jumped to my feet in fright.
The wall opposite the cell door was raggedly missing, its three-foot slabs of granite jutting wildly into the area where their companions had just been. And there was air; cold, chilling air, terribly thin to breathe. But it was air, and I leaped through that gap like a madman, flooding my hot lungs with the elusive draughts of black Martian night.
I staggered, dizzy at the sparseness of the atmosphere, and then a tight clamp closed upon my arm and kept me from falling. A three-fingered clamp.
I looked into the glittering face of the sugarfoot. It had the collapser in its free hand, and its eyes were locked on mine. It was waiting for me to say something.
"Brother," I said, managing a grin, "I would love coming with you, no matter where!"
Surprisingly, it shook its dragon head, and made gestures toward my blouse, then an upward movement of its arms.
"You want me to take it off?" I said, in bewilderment. "But I'm half frozen already."
The sugarfoot was adamant. Again it pointed to the blouse, and did that slip-it-over-your-head motion.
I gave up fighting it. The creature was obviously not inimical to me. Even if it were, I thought, I owed it something for pulling me out of that stone coffin.
Hoping pneumonia was less painful than outright suffocation, I obediently tugged it, loose from within my belt, and slid the thing over my head and off.
The sugarfoot took it from me, turned it inside-out, and held it out close to my face for inspection, in the dim criss-cross lighting of tiny Phobos and barely larger Deimos, as they scurried across the cold black sky.
I stared stupidly at the inside surface of the blouse, the black one which Baxter had insisted I wear, and then I caught the glint of reflected moonlight where there should have been plain shirt material. Tiny metallic filaments had been woven into the garment, too light and flexible for the wearer to feel them, but strong enough not to break with constant flexing.
I nodded, and handed the blouse back to the sugarfoot. "I see them. Wires," I said. "But what does it mean?"
The sugarfoot pointed toward the Security prison, which at this point of the topography was on the outside of the hills which surrounded Marsport. Security had burrowed into those hills to make themselves an escape-proof dungeon. Even though I was out of it, I hadn't yet, in the real sense of the word, escaped. It was easily twenty below zero, and the air was thin as the inside of a vacuum tube.
I was dizzy, and sick, and barely able to keep from falling, but I made myself ask, "What's the blouse got to do with the prison?"
The sugarfoot pointed to the prison, the blouse, and made a circular gesture with his finger.
"The prison...." I said slowly. "It—It tracks the shirt around!"
A nod. Then the sugarfoot turned its head and, extending that hollow tongue, produced a shrill piercing whistle through the vibrating tip. I heard a scrunching sound on the rocky hillside where we stood, and then the damnedest little beast hove into view. It was about the size of a burro. But it had six legs, no visible head or neck, and was covered with spiky hairs that seemed more like lengths of straw than anything else I could think of. This ambulant bale of hay approached us, and halted before the sugarfoot. The sugarfoot whistled again, and from somewhere in the front—I assume it was the front—of this creature, a claw-tipped tentacle wormed out through the hay, and took the blouse from the sugarfoot's hand. A third and final whistle, and the thing, clutching the blouse, went off down the hillside with remarkable speed, heading toward the open desert that lay sullenly gray beneath the moonlight. It had that busy-busy-busy ant-motion to it, the front and rear legs on one side moving forward simultaneously with the middle leg on the opposite side, then a swift, jerky reverse and the other trio of legs moved forward, giving it a strangely graceful—awkward wriggling gait. But it was fast, damned fast. Within a minute, it was out of sight.
I swayed woozily, and hung onto the sugarfoot's shoulder for support. "Blazing a false trail, huh?"
It didn't answer, but reached out for me, and swung me up into its powerful arms, as a man carries a child. It clacked something which I took to be a term of reassurance, and then, holding me tightly so I wouldn't get jounced to death, it took off in a leaping bound in a direction at right angles to that taken by the hay-bale creature. It jolted me a little, but the cold and lack of enough oxygen had taken its toll of my stamina. I passed out before the third bound.
And when I awoke, there was warmth and air, and a comfortable bed beneath me. And I was looking into the face of Snow White.
I forgot I was supposed to be mad at her. Instead of chewing her out for her sneak-thievery, I grasped her soft little hands, and murmured, "Are you okay?"
"Miraculously," she said. "I hadn't got twenty yards into town before my face and name were being blazoned on every stereo in Marsport. Things were a bit rough for a while."
I propped myself up on my elbows, the better to see that lovely face, framed in a halo of silky pale yellow hair, and said, "What happened? How'd you escape? What's with these mobs and sugarfeet, and—And where are we, for pete's sake?"
"Whoa, boy!" she laughed, pressing me back onto the bed, her hands lingering on my chest for a delicious moment before she sat back again. "You've been very sick, whether you know it or not. Here, take a look."
She picked up her handbag from the floor, took out a small mirror, and held it in front of my face. I took one look, then shut my eyes. My face was the cheery color of porcelain, with purplish eyelids and gray lips.
"What hit me?" I sighed, opening my eyes again.
"Oxygen-starvation, exposure, and near pneumonia. I thought you were dead when Clatclit carried you in here. You've been sleeping for nearly thirty-six hours."
"Clatclit?" I said. "Is that the ambient hunk of dextrose who blasted me out of stir?"
"Let's not be colorful," said Snow, deprecatingly. "You owe your life to him, you know."
"I know," I said. "That was the ad man in me coming through. But look, my mind's a whirlpool of confusion. Could you please tell me what's been going on here, anyhow?"
"Lie back and rest," said Snow, "and I will."
I burrowed deeper into the warm coverlet, sighed, and kept my eyes on her lovely face. In the midst of her discourse, I even sneaked a hand out and laid it gently over her own. It was smartly slapped, without rancor, and I withdrew it from active duty for a while.
"Well, first thing, I'd like to apologize for that dirty trick I pulled back on theValkyrie," Snow said. My heart turned over, and I felt an idiot grin of forgiveness spreading across my ghastly features. I found it quite impossible to stay angry with the girl. As I've said, something happens to my brain when around women.
"Accepted," I croaked.
"I knew that you'd have no trouble getting away from those Security men I sent," she said smilingly.
"Then why did you send them?" I asked.
"To keep them from asking me any questions," she said, with a small shrug. "For all I knew, they were expecting a man with the Amnesty. However, knowing that just having it carried a lot of weight, I gave them the order to pick you up as soon as they approached me at the customs booth."
"And if they hadn't believed me?" I complained.
"Well," she said carefully, "I suppose I'd have sent them a note, or something, telling them to release you."
"Thanks for the kind thought," I muttered.
Snow ignored my minor irritation, and went blithely on.
"My next move was to go to the Port Authority, and find out just where thePhobos IIwas berthed before takeoff. I thought that Ted might have left me a clue of some sort."
"You sound as if he were expecting you to traipse up here after him," I said, dubiously.
"He wouldn't count on my coming, if that's what you mean. But Ted's a good kid. I've practically had to raise him myself. He knew I'd worry if I didn't hear from him. He couldn't know, of course, that IS would send forged letters to the relatives of the missing boys. So I assumed that, if he had the chance, he'd leave a clue of some kind for me, in case I did come."
"An assurance of sorts, you mean?"
"Something like that. Like 'I'm okay, Snow, so don't worry,' or some such message. So that's what I looked for at the rocket berth."
"Just a minute," I interrupted. "I used to be a boy, once, myself, and while I didn't have any sisters of my own, I knew a lot of buddies who did. The last thing in the world they'd expect would be for their sister to follow them into danger! Hell, they'd feel like sissies if they had to count on a sister for aid."
"I—" Snow hesitated. "I'm not what you'd call the typical sister, Jery."
"Oh?"
She blushed prettily. "When you have to raise a brother, you have to learn a lot of things, if you're going to bring him up fairly normally. I had to teach him to play ball, to box, to ski, to—Well, I was more like a father to him than anything. So Ted, knowing my more belligerent side, would just about figure I'd come storming up here to find him."
"I don't know," I pondered aloud. "If you and Ted have this friendly relationship, why the hell would he put you to all this trouble? It seems like a lousy thing on his part to go wandering off without a word."
"It would be," Snow agreed, "unless there was a mighty important reason for his going. And it wasn't without a word."
"Then you did find a message?" I exclaimed.
She nodded. "After a few minutes' inspection of the berth, I found it scratched onto one of the supporting beams."
"Funny IS didn't spot it," I remarked.
"It's in our specialcode, silly!" Snow said. "To anyone else, it'd look like hen scratches."
"Just what is this code of yours?" I asked, curious.
Snow looked at me a moment, frowning.
"I'll carry the secret to my grave." I said generously.
She laughed, then, and said, "All right, Jery. Just a second."
From her handbag, she took out a small address book and a pencil, found a blank sheet at the back, and drew the following diagrams: