Podkayne of Mars

  Well, it wasn’t quite true; Clark had barely whispered—and I did find that I was “hearing” him as much from watching his mouth as I was from truly hearing him. This is a very funny thing but Clark says that almost everybody reads lips more than they think they do, and he had noticed it and practiced it and can really read lips—only he never told anybody because sometimes it is most useful.

  He had me talk so low that I couldn’t hear it myself and he didn’t talk much louder. He told me, “Look, Pod, I don’t know that Old Lady Grew”—he didn’t say “Lady”—“has this room wired. I can’t find any changes in it since she had me in it before. But there are at least four places and maybe more where a mike could be. So we keep quiet—because it stands to reason she put us together to hear what we have to say to each other. So talk out loud all you want to . . . but just static. How scared you are and how dreadful it is that I can’t hear anything and such-like noise.”

  So we did and I moaned and groaned and wept over my poor baby brother and he complained that he couldn’t hear a word I was saying and kept asking me to find a pencil and write what I was saying—and in between we really did talk, important talk that Clark didn’t want her to hear.

  I wanted to know why he wasn’t deaf—had he actually been in that tank? “Oh, sure,” he told me, “but I wasn’t nearly as limp by then as she thought I was, either. I had some paper in my pocket and I chewed it up into pulp and corked my ears.” He looked pained. “A twenty-spot note. Most expensive earplugs anybody ever had, I’ll bet. Then I wrapped my shirt around my head and ignored it. But stow that and listen.”

  He was even more vague about how he had managed to get himself trapped. “Okay, okay, so I got hoaxed. You and Uncle don’t look so smart, either—and anyhow, you’re responsible.”

  “I am not either responsible!” I whispered indignantly.

  “If you’re not responsible, then you’re irresponsible, which is worse. Logic. But forget it, we’ve got important things to do now. Look, Pod, we’re going to crush out of here.”

  “How?” I glanced up at Titania. She was nursing Ariel but she never took her eyes off us.

  Clark followed my glance. “I’ll take care of that insect when the time comes, forget it. It has to be soon and it has to be at night.”

  “Why at night?” I was thinking that this smoggy paradise was bad enough when you could see a little, but in pitch-darkness—

  “Pod, let that cut in your face heal; you’re making a draft. It’s got to be while Jojo is locked up.”

  “Jojo?”

  “That set of muscles she has working for her. The native.”

  “Oh, you mean Pinhead.”

  “Pinhead, Jojo, Albert Einstein. The happy-duster. He serves supper, then he washes the dishes, then she locks him up and gives him his night’s ration of dust. Then he stays locked up until he sleeps it off, because she’s as scared of him when he’s high as anybody else is. So we make our try for it while he is caged—and maybe she’ll be asleep, too. With luck the bloke who drives her sky wagon will be away, too; he doesn’t always sleep here. But we can’t count on it and it has got to be before the Tricorn shapes for Luna. When is that?”

  “Twelve-seventeen on the eighth, ship Greenwich.”

  “Which is?”

  “Local? Nine-sixteen Venusberg, Wednesday the twentieth.”

  “Check,” he answered. “On both.”

  “But why?”

  “Shut up.” He had taken his slide rule from his bag and was setting it. For the conversation, I assumed, so I asked, “Do you want to know the Venus second for this Terran year?” I was rather proud to have it on the tip of my tongue, like a proper pilot; Mr. Clancy’s time hadn’t been entirely wasted even though I had never let him get cuddly.

  “Nope. I know it.” Clark reset the rule, read it and announced, “We both remember both figures the same way and the conversion checks. So check timepieces.” We both looked at our wrists. “Mark!”

  We agreed, within a few seconds, but that wasn’t what I noticed; I was looking at the date hand. “Clark! Today’s the nineteenth!”

  “Maybe you thought it was Christmas,” he said sourly. “And don’t yip like that again. I can read you if you don’t make a sound.”

  “But that’s tomorrow!” (I did make it soundless.)

  “Worse. It’s less than seventeen hours from now . . . and we can’t make a move until that brute is locked up. We get just one chance, no more.”

  “Our Uncle Tom doesn’t get to the conference.”

  Clark shrugged. “Maybe so, maybe not. Whether he decides to go—or sticks around and tries to find us—I couldn’t care less.”

  Clark was being very talkative, for Clark. But at best he grudges words and I didn’t understand him. “What do you mean—if he sticks around?”

  Apparently Clark thought he had told me, or that I already knew—but he hadn’t and I didn’t. Uncle Tom was already gone. I felt suddenly lost and forlorn. “Clark, are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. She darn well saw to it that I saw him go. Jojo loaded him in like a sack of meal and I saw the wagon take off into the smog. Uncle Tom is in Venusberg by now.”

  I suddenly felt much better. “Then he’ll rescue us!”

  Clark looked bored. “Pod, don’t be stupid squared.”

  “But he will! Uncle Tom . . . and Mr. Chairman . . . and Dexter—”

  He cut me off. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Poddy! Analyze it. You’re Uncle Tom, you’re in Venusberg, you’ve got all the help possible. How do you find this place?”

  “Uh . . .” I stopped. “Uh . . .” I said again. Then I closed my mouth and left it closed.

  “Uh,” he agreed. “Exactly Uh. You don’t find it. Oh, in eight or ten years with a few thousand people doing nothing but searching, you could find it by elimination. Fat lot of good that would do. Get this through your little head, Sis: nobody is going to rescue us, nobody can possibly help us. We either break out of here tonight—or we’ve had it.”

  “Why tonight? Oh, tonight’s all right with me. But if we don’t get a chance tonight—”

  “Then at nine-sixteen tomorrow,” he interrupted, “we’re dead.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Figure it out yourself, Pod. Put yourself in old Gruesome’s place. Tomorrow the Tricorn leaves. Figure it both ways: Uncle Tom leaves in it, or Uncle Tom won’t leave. Okay, you’ve got his niece and nephew. What do you do with them? Be logical about it. Her sort of logic.”

  I tried, I really tried. But maybe I’ve been brought up wrong for that sort of logic; I can’t seem to visualize killing somebody just because he or she had become a nuisance to me.

  But I could see that Clark was right that far: after ship’s departure tomorrow we will simply be nuisances to Mrs. Grew. If Uncle Tom doesn’t leave, we are most special nuisances—and if he does leave and she is counting on his worry about us to keep him in line at Luna City (it wouldn’t, of course, but that is what she is counting on anyway), in that case every day she risks the possibility that we might escape and get word to Uncle.

  All right, maybe I can’t imagine just plain murder; it’s outside my experience. But suppose both Clark and I came down with green pox and died—That would certainly be convenient for Mrs. Grew—now, wouldn’t it?

  “I scan it,” I agreed.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll teach you a thing or four yet, Pod. Either we make it tonight . . . or just past nine tomorrow she chills us both . . . and she chills Jojo, too, and sets fire to the place.”

  “Why Jojo? I mean Pinhead.”

  “That’s the real tipoff, Pod. The happy-duster. This is Venus . . . and yet she let us see that she was supplying dust to a duster. She won’t leave any witnesses.”

  “Uncle Tom is a witness, too.”

  “What if he is? She’s counting on his keeping his lip zipped until the conference is over . . . and by then she’s back on Earth and has lost herself among eight billion people. Hang
around here and risk being caught? Pod, she’s going to wait here only long enough to find out whether or not Uncle Tom catches the Tricorn. Then she’ll carry out either Plan A, or Plan B—but both plans cancel us out. Get that through your fuzzy head.”

  I shivered. “All right. I’ve got it.”

  He grinned. “But we don’t wait. We execute our own plan—my plan—first.” He looked unbearably smug and added, “You fubbed utterly and came out here without doing any of the things I told you to . . . and Uncle Tom fubbed just about as badly, thinking he could make a straight payoff . . . but I came out here prepared!”

  “You did? With what? Your slide rule? Or maybe those comic books?”

  Clark said, “Pod, you know I never read comic books; they were just protective coloration.”

  (And this is true, so far as I know—I thought I had uncovered his Secret Vice.)

  “Then what?” I demanded.

  “Just compose your soul in patience, Sister dear. All in good time.” He moved his bag back of the bed, then added, “Move around here where you can watch down the hallway. If Lady Macbeth shows up, I’m reading comic books.”

  I did as he told me to but asked him one more question—on another subject, as quizzing Clark when he doesn’t want to answer is as futile as slicing water. “Clark? You figure Mrs. Grew is part of the gang that smuggled the bomb?”

  He blinked and looked stupid. “What bomb?”

  “The one they paid you to sneak aboard the Tricorn, of course! What bomb indeed!”

  “Oh, that. Golly, Poddy, you believe everything you’re told. When you get to Terra, don’t let anybody sell you the Pyramids—they’re not for sale.” He went on working and I smothered my annoyance.

  Presently he said, “She couldn’t possibly know anything about any bombs in the Tricorn, or she wouldn’t have been a passenger in it herself.”

  Clark can always make me feel stupid. This was so obvious (after he pointed it out) that I refrained from comment. “How do you figure it, then?”

  “Well, she could have been hired by the same people and not have known that they were just using her as a reserve.”

  My mind raced and another answer came up. “In which case there could be still a third plot to get Uncle Tom between here and Luna!”

  “Could be. Certainly a lot of people are taking an interest in him. But I figure it for two groups. One group—almost certainly from Mars—doesn’t want Uncle Tom to be there at all. Another group—from Earth probably, at least old Gruesome actually did come from Earth—wants him to be there but wants him to sing their song. Otherwise when she had Uncle Tom, she would never have turned him loose; she would just have had Jojo shove him into a soft spot and wait for the bubbles to stop coming up.” Clark dug out something and looked at it. “Pod, repeat this back and don’t make a sound. You are exactly twenty-three kilometers from South Gate and almost due south of it—south seven degrees west.”

  I repeated it. “How do you know?”

  He held up a small black object about as big as two packs of cigarettes. “Inertial tracker, infantry model. You can buy them anywhere here, anybody who ever goes out into the bush carries one.” He handed it to me.

  I looked at it with interest; I had never seen one that small. Sand rats use them, of course, but they use bigger, more accurate ones mounted in their sand buggies—and anyhow, on Mars you can always see either the stars or the Sun. Not like this gloomy place! I even knew how it worked, more or less, because inertial astrogation is a commonplace for spaceships and guided missiles—vector integration of accelerations and times. But whereas the Tricorn’s inertial tracker is supposed to be good for one part in a million, this little gadget probably couldn’t be read closer than one in a thousand.

  But it improved our chances at least a thousand to one!

  “Clark! Did Uncle Tom have one of these? ’Cause if he did—”

  He shook his head. “If he did, he never got a chance to read it. I figure they gassed him at once; he was limp when they lifted him out of the air wagon. And I never had a chance to tell him where this dump is because this has been my first chance to look at mine. Now put it in your purse; you’re going to use it to get back to Venusberg.”

  “Uh . . . it’ll be bulky in my purse, it’ll show. You better hide it wherever you had it. You won’t lose me, I’m going to hang onto your hand every step of the way.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “In the first place I’m not going to drag this bag with me and that’s where it was hidden, I built a false bottom into it. In the second place we aren’t going back together—”

  “What? Why not? We certainly are! Clark, I’m responsible for you.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion. Your opinion. Look, Poddy, I’m going to get you out of this silly mess. But don’t try to use your head, it leaks. Just your memory. Listen to what I say and then do it exactly the way I tell you to—and you’ll be all right.”

  “But—”

  “Do you have a plan to get us out?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up. You start pulling your Big Sister act now and you’ll get us both killed.”

  I shut up. And I must confess that his plan made considerable sense. According to Clark there is nobody in this house but us, Mrs. Grew, Titania and Ariel, Pinhead—and sometimes her driver. I certainly haven’t seen or heard any evidences of anybody else and I suppose that Mrs. Grew has been doing it with an absolute minimum of witnesses—I know I would if I were (God forbid!) ever engaged in anything so outrageously criminal.

  I’ve never seen the driver’s face and neither has Clark—on purpose, I’m sure. But Clark says that the driver sometimes stays overnight, so we must be prepared to cope with him.

  Okay, assume that we cope. As soon as we are out of the house we split up; I go east, he goes west, for a couple of kilometers, in straight lines as near as bogs and swamps permit, which may be not very.

  Then we both turn north—and Clark says that the ring road around the city is just three kilometers north of us; he drew me a sketch from memory of a map he had studied before he set out to “rescue Girdie.”

  At the ring road I go right, he goes left—and we each make use of the first hitchhike transportation, ranch house phone, or whatever, to reach Uncle Tom and/or Chairman Cunha and get lots of reinforcements in a hurry!

  The idea of splitting up is the most elementary of tactics, to make sure that at least one of us gets through and gets help. Mrs. Grew is so fat she couldn’t chase anybody on a race track, much less a swamp. We plan to do it when she doesn’t dare unlock Pinhead for fear of her own life. If we are chased, it will probably be the driver—and he can’t chase two directions at once. Maybe there are other natives she can call on for help, but even so, splitting up doubles our chances.

  So I get the inertial tracker because Clark doesn’t think I can maneuver in the bush without one, even if I wait for it to get light. He’s probably right. But he claims that he can steer well enough to find that road using just his watch, a wet finger for the breeze, and polarized spectacles—which, so help me, he has with him.

  I shouldn’t have sneered at his comic books; he actually did come prepared, quite a lot of ways. If they hadn’t gassed him while he was still locked in the passenger compartment of Mrs. Grew’s air buggy, I think he could have given them a very busy, bad time. A flame gun in his bag, a Remington pistol hidden on his person, knives, stun bombs—even a second inertial tracker, openly in the bag along with his clothes and comic books and slide rule.

  I asked him why, and he put on his best superior look. “If anything went wrong and they grabbed me, they would expect me to have one. So I had one—and it hadn’t even been started . . . poor little tenderfoot who doesn’t even know enough to switch the thing on when he leaves his base position. Old Gruesome got a fine chuckle out of that.” He sneered. “She thinks I’m half-witted and I’ve done my best to help the idea along.”

&nbsp
; So they did the same thing with his bag that they did with my purse—cleaned everything out of it that looked even faintly useful for mayhem and murder, let him keep what was left.

  And most of what was left was concealed by a false bottom so beautifully faked that the manufacturer wouldn’t have noticed it.

  Except, possibly, for the weight—I asked Clark about that. He shrugged. “Calculated risk,” he said. “If you don’t bet, you can’t win. Jojo carried it in here still packed and she searched it in here—and didn’t pick it up afterwards; she had both arms full of junk I didn’t mind her confiscating.”

  (And suppose she had picked it up and noticed? Well, Brother would still have had his brain and his hands—and I think he could take a sewing machine apart and put it back together as a piece of artillery. Clark is a trial to me—but I have great confidence in him.)

  I’m going to get some sleep now—or try to—as Pinhead has just fetched in our supper and we have a busy time ahead of us, later. But first I’m going to backtrack this tape and copy it; I have one fresh spool left in my purse. I’m going to give the copy to Clark to give to Uncle, just in case. Just in case Poddy turns out to be bubbles in a swamp, I mean. But I’m not worried about that; it’s a much nicer prospect than being Pinhead’s roommate. In fact I’m not worried about anything; Clark has the situation well in hand.

  But he warned me very strongly about one thing: “Tell them to get here well before nine-sixteen . . . or don’t bother to come at all.”

  “Why?” I wanted to know.

  “Just do it.”

  “Clark, you know perfectly well that two grown men won’t pay any attention unless I can give them a sound reason for it.”

  He blinked. “All right. There is a very sound reason. A half-a-kiloton bomb isn’t very much . . . but it still isn’t healthy to be around when it goes off. Unless they can get in here and disarm it before that time—up she goes!”

  He has it. I’ve seen it. Snugly fitted into that false bottom. That same three kilograms of excess mass I couldn’t account for at Deimos. Clark showed me the timing mechanism and how the shaped charges were nestled around it to produce the implosion squeeze.