“Not ruptured, but they took off one of the landing motors and tested it,” Zeera said, “and they built a kind of token wall around the nuclear pile. Radiation must have made someone sick.”
“They didn’t cut the cable?”
“No, they’re letting it run.”
“Who am I fighting?”
“I started a war, coming down. The people around the Tanker were human. These things with all the arms and no bones, they’re astronomers. I’m not guessing, Svetz. They use radio. I tuned in and used the translator. There was some kind of long-term truce. The men had the Tanker and the … astronomers—”
“Softfingers.”
“—Softfingers had the telescopes, but they both saw the Minim come down, and that set things off. I heard them fighting over me.”
“Sanity check,” Svetz said. “You hovered above the crater because you wanted to see the telescope setup. The Softfingers saw you then. Then you went into a landing pattern over the Tanker. They fired on you?”
“Yes, the men. They had impact weapons. I put some mountain between me and them, fast, but I could see the astronomer ships coming down at me. They’ve got aircraft like two saucers set lip to lip. They were blasting the camp around the Lander when I got out of sight. One came after me. He got me with a heat cannon. My engines started to shut down. I hit the override and got down as fast as I could, and I’ve been here since.”
“Okay. Stay put. I’m on it.”
“The astronomers killed most of the people and kept the rest as … the translator says slaves. Hanny, what are you going to do?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. If you heard them, they could listen to us.” Svetz didn’t believe they could translate, but he didn’t have a plan, either.
* * *
He was well up Mons Olympus now, just a few klicks high, though that still put him above where a man could breathe. He might still be too small to notice, but as soon as he fired a blaster, they’d be after him.
The Tanker had taken pictures all the way down. Gorky had maps of every size, and Svetz had studied them for months. He didn’t expect to have trouble finding the Tanker. But where was it?
He could not keep circling forever in hope that something would look familiar.
Wait now … he knew that white rock formation from Gorky’s maps. Miya had dissected a Softfinger, and she said this was the shape of its skull. So the Tanker should be … there. Svetz looked for a compact silver bullet shape. The Tanker was Moon-built motors, turbines, compressors and the nuclear pile to power them, but most of its volume would be tanks.
It was there. It was nearly hidden in a maze made up of ladders and pipes and flattened spheres, a long silver line of cable that led to the nuclear power source on its tractor treads, a dismounted rocket motor braced against a hillside, and a score of little buildings too pretty to be prefabs, too hastily built to be houses … martian work in the style of Hangtree Town … and two bigger structures that looked more like beehives.
Still, he could not imagine how he’d missed the Tanker. It sat on the highest flat spot the Tanker’s computer could find. Space Bureau wouldn’t hide the fuel it would take to get their samples home!
“Zeera, I have the Tanker in view. Tell me again how you get them to shoot at you.”
“Any time I try to take off. Any time the airlock door wiggles. Sometimes if they see me in the flight dome, they blast a granite outcropping. I’m right under it.”
“So the rocks around you would be covered with scorch marks, would they?”
“Yeah! Look for kind of a big rounded granite skull. They shoot it any time I poke my head into the flight dome. They shot the eyeholes first. Now they’re shooting just over my head and making gaps for teeth. Human skull.”
He’d found another little beehive high above the Tanker, beside what might be a heat cannon, though he’d never seen a weapon like that one. A line ran down to a patch of black cloth or paint. Heat radiator?
He flew wide around.
Zeera couldn’t have flown very far … and she hadn’t. The human brain is configured to turn random patterns into faces. The moment he glimpsed a skull carved into the granite cliff, he dropped, then eased the flight stick uphill.
He was rising up an arc of ridge, maybe part of an old meteoroid impact. Mountains weren’t immune. The ridge might hide him. He eased up the slope, then veered away fast. At the crest was another beehive-shaped building.
He followed the ridge around and came up at the other end.
The Minim was in a shallow dish, the impact point of that old meteor strike. It was about the same size as the Tanker. Most of the Minim must be tanks too: he knew how cramped the skimpy cabin was. The cone at the top was the flight dome. He’d expected to see Zeera inside, but he didn’t.
The beehive hut had the Minim in full view, and a good view of the blasted cliff. Through a door—one meter tall, two meters wide—he could see a small telescope pointed at the Minim. The heat cannon was a big tube on a massive swivel. What must be a control chair was mounted in the swivel, behind the tube. A black strip—not a cable, more like a line of paint—led to a broad black patch on the slope below.
Fine. “Zeera?”
“Hanny?”
“Wiggle the airlock door for me.”
“Why—” She chopped it off.
Svetz didn’t watch the Minim. He wasn’t looking straight at the gun either: he’d been blinded once already. He watched for the line of flame that speared down from the granite skull and bathed the Minim.
Svetz said, “Wait it out, then stand up in the dome. Eyes closed.”
The flame died. He looked up the granite mountainside, past the crudely blasted skull pattern, and found the wok ship perched above the eye sockets. A point on its rim was glowing orange, brighter than sunlight. “Now. Stand up. Wave,” he said. If Zeera was right, the wok ship couldn’t fire again.
There was no second blast.
“Good. Thank you, Zeera,” Svetz said, measuring angles with his eye. Two guns, she’d said. They’d held the second in reserve, and that had to mean that there wasn’t a third. Right?
He took careful aim on the wok ship, and fired.
Immediately he lifted and dropped below the ridge, swept around the curve and rose on the blind side of the beehive hut. Fired and held his aim. The hut flared into a rising fireball, and behind the fireball was the heat cannon glowing orange and red, and flame colors streaming from the control chair where there had been a Softfinger gunner.
The wreckage of the wok ship was still rolling downhill. Svetz rose into full view, held the pose for a long moment, lifted at two Earth gee, looped and dove behind the ridge again, circled far around and rose, making himself a target.
Nothing.
“Open the airlock,” he said, already diving. “And get me a ration bar!” At the last moment he veered hard, looped—still no heat blast—settled into the airlock and punched the cycle point. He was aiming through the outer door until it had actually closed.
He’d done it.
The inner door opened. Zeera gaped at him from one of the command chairs.
He was gasping for air that wasn’t getting through the filter helmet fast enough. He pulled it off and took the ration bar out of her hand.
* * *
He went through them as fast as possible, the things he’d planned if he got this far:
Eat! Stuff more ration bars in his pockets for himself and Miya. He ate steadily, and talked through a full mouth.
“Zeera, find the maps the Tanker made coming down.”
Zeera nodded. Where he’d been expecting joy and gratitude, she only looked exhausted. But she set to work. Presently she had the display he remembered, complete with Willy Gorky’s overlaid contour lines and notes. “Yes. Now, Zeera, what did you see coming in? Sketch it for me.”
She looked up. “There’s more.”
Put the needle gun back on the wall. Fat lot of use it would be on Mons Olympus, where every friend and
enemy wore an armored pressure suit! Plug the blaster into the wall for a recharge. Take down the other, freshly charged blaster. He was fizzing with energy. It would be dreadful if he forgot something crucial, and they couldn’t have very much time.
Take a sonic too. There was still enough air to transmit sound. Blasters made noise, but the sonic stunners were too shrill for human ears. What kind of ears did Softfingers have?
Why was she still looking at him? “Zeera? There’s more than what?”
“Svetz, they’ve shot down the Orbiter.”
“What?”
“I was linked up and recording. Multiscreen, orthogonal views and a window for data. I thought I could learn something more before I landed. The Orbiter was crossing over the tree, and then something came up from the Mars direction and hit me between the eyes and everything just went! It’s gone, Hanny. We can’t go back to Earth.”
He absorbed that. “No wonder you’re a little twitchy. A week ago? Trapped here with nobody to talk to and nobody to help. Have you been eating?”
“Eating? Yes. Sleeping, no.”
“There are things we have to deal with now. Maybe none of the Softfingers saw me burn this place out and nobody got a message off, but that can’t hold forever. We should be out of here. Can you expand this map?”
“They’ll kill us.”
“They will if they find us still here. They’ve got more than heat cannons, Zeera. They took projectile weapons off the humanoids. We need to move. I want you to rescue Miya.”
“I’m low on fuel.”
“How low?”
“I saved some, actually. The Minim wasn’t as massive coming down, because you and Miya weren’t in it.” Her hands moved. Displays changed: she’d set the Minim’s pile to warming. Then the map shrank and all of Mons Olympus was in view. “Where is she?”
“We’ve been following this dry canal. I don’t know what she’ll do when she gets close, and I don’t want to lose her. You take off, you follow the canal until you see a car with pale blue sails.”
Unexpectedly Zeera giggled. “Right, so I can tell it from all the other sailboats running around Mars. Svetz, it sounds like fun!”
“We’ve been starving.”
“H—”
“It was fun.”
“Svetz, what if they follow me?”
“You’re on a ballistic parabola. These martian ships are dirigibles. They can’t follow you, but they’ll try. Anything that lifts off, I shoot it.”
“Shoot it?”
“I burned down a wok ship last night. I’m armed and maneuverable and too small to see.”
“You start a war and they’ll wreck the Tanker!”
“The Tanker has the same superconducting shell that saved you.”
“They stripped off some of it. Didn’t I say?”
Futz! Svetz said, “Zeera, they still can’t kill us. The Minim’s safe. They can only trap us again. So in a few minutes I’ll take my flight stick out and bring the war to them.”
She nodded. “Bring the war to them,” she repeated. “War? I don’t expect they’ll worry much about one man on a flying stick! And if you kill everyone on the mountain, we still can’t get home!”
“Zeera, it’s not as bad as that. We can use your FFD to move us.”
“Say again?”
He’d hated the use of initials all his life, and now they had him doing it! “The Institute’s Fast Forward device that got us here in the first place. Turn it on and ride it to present time. Base One is buried, so we can’t find it without Miya, but she knows the codes that’ll get us into the Base. Of course Willy will want our heads.”
“Fast Forward. I never thought of that,” Zeera said.
Good! “One more thing.” Svetz took the bag from Miya’s flight stick and spilled five golden globes. “We’ve got seeds. We both think we only got the seeds that grow into roots to anchor the big one, but Willy can’t scream too loud if we cut the expedition short.”
“Oh, Hanny, that’s great!” She picked one up. “Futz, it’s heavy.”
“Storage?”
“There.”
While Svetz put the seeds away, Zeera was at work. “Hanny, I’ve got the Minim on a ballistic trajectory down to here, where the flats meet the foothills. It’s where the canal peters out. I’ll phone her once I’m out of these rocks. It looks like I’ve got fuel to get back up, but I can’t hover at all. Up and down and unless I spot her in time, she’ll have to come to me. And the Minim can’t fight. You’ll have to do that.”
25
Svetz went out the airlock, over the ridge and down and around and up the mountain, following the route he’d marked using Zeera’s map. By now it felt like he’d been born riding a flight stick. He was moving fast as he rose into view of the Tanker and the laboratory facilities around it.
The Minim lifted into view. The flame of its exhaust wasn’t much brighter than the daylit mountain.
There were octopoids everywhere. Several were sunning themselves on the hill. What looked like an open cafeteria served several more. A few wore what must be pressure suits, star-shaped with a glass dome in the center. He wasn’t trying to count, and he’d miss some anyway. Twenty in view?
Big eyes bulged beneath the skullcap shells. A few had noticed the tiny Minim. Svetz was rising fast, and now he couldn’t tell if any had seen him. Nobody was shooting at him.
He hadn’t seen any wok ships on his first pass. He didn’t see anything in the air now. He did find two beehive-shaped huts and the heat cannon mounted beside them, looking down from the edge of a mesa.
The Minim’s rocket flame went out and he lost it.
* * *
Svetz and Miya must have been shot at by every kind of Martian who ever stalked the nightmares of primitive Man. Even so, the danger Svetz feared most was Zeera Southworth.
Zeera was on a short fuse, and that put Svetz on a time limit. If she was really as desperate as she’d seemed, then all she had to do was abandon her crew, turn on the Fast Forward device and ride to the present. Find Base One—which was buried, but surely they’d mark it with paint! No need for Miya’s codes if Zeera could talk her way in.
Svetz and Miya would be left as involuntary colonists on a doomed world.
He’d done what he could. If everything went right, Miya would be with Zeera, safe until Svetz could join them both. The trick was to move fast.
He rose level with the mesa. It was painted with a gigantic ten-pointed asterisk. There was a bigger beehive building at the edge. He pegged it as a broad landing field with warehousing, and no aircraft currently in residence. Where was the big wok ship?
If he’d seen a ship he’d have had to go after it. Seeing no ship, he had a problem. He’d seen a big wok ship last night, coming here. By now it should have reached Mons Olympus crater.
He was rising fast. The wind blew straight down, battering at his bubble helmet. Then glare-white plasma blew past him from below and he knew he’d been seen.
It missed him by a fair distance. He’d left the asterisk far below. The lip of Mons Olympus crater was near, and he turned off his lift and coasted upward.
Radio messages must be alerting the observatory even now.
He’d hoped to reach the observatory without giving warning. Too bad. They might be expecting him, but they couldn’t expect what he was about to do.
* * *
The crater in Mons Olympus would have held all of the Hawaiian islands.
Dots of sunlight glare ran in rays along the bottom, tremendous sheets of mirror in a far larger array. Two or three square klicks of landing field had been marked off with another asterisk. As Svetz dropped closer, he could pick out a hexagon of beehives, and then the big double wok ship. A score of octopoid astronomers were unloading cargo from a big hatch under the rim.
If everything else works out, Svetz thought, the Minim will still have to be refueled. There must be nobody to attack the Tanker while we do that. Best to take out everything that can f
ly, now.
He tried not to think how many Softfingers he would have to kill. He was not used to killing people.
Svetz dropped toward the ship, took aim beneath the hatch and fired.
In daylight the light didn’t blind him. He played the flame against the ground, bouncing the backwash into the ship. Bearers who weren’t caught in the flame dropped their burdens and fled into the shadow of a mirror. With all their rubbery limbs functioning as legs, they looked like so many pinwheels. But he’d killed ten in less than ten seconds.
Then the big double wok lurched into the air and turned with its hatch closing, and Svetz was falling too fast. If he didn’t lift quick he’d be nothing but a smear.
Lift and thrust. The flight stick pulled out of its swoop, and Svetz ran beneath several acres of mirror, slowing, slowing. He didn’t want to ram the framework! No hurry. Softfinger astronomers would flinch from firing on their own mirrors.
They flinched, maybe, but they fired. He saw flame wash around the mirror’s edge, and he turned away. There were big arcs and pillars under the mirror fabric to shape the paraboloid. He could see well enough to dodge.
He emerged into sunlight and immediately veered under another mirror just ahead of a blast from above. And emerged again, almost under the big ship’s belly.
The ship flew tilted, but the aperture in the rim wasn’t looking at him yet. He lifted hard, firing at the ship’s belly, and rose past the rim and fired down. The disc was spinning on its vertical axis, heat cannon coming around, and his blast hadn’t hurt the belly at all. Why would it? That must be its reentry shield! But he kept rising, and veered and rose again, playing his fire against the upper surface.
The blaster was searing his hand through the glove—waste heat—but he’d melted a hole. He held his fire on it.
Something puffed fire from inside the ship. It lurched. Its heat cannon was coming around, and Svetz veered hard. Plasma washed past him once and again. This ship had two cannons!
With a flight stick, the only way to dive was to turn off the lift and let feeble Mars gravity have its way. He had lateral thrust, but if he wanted to change his path quick, the only way to go was up.