The Secret Martians Page 14

  “Well, damn it,” I said, after a glance back at Baxter and Clatclit, who were staring bewilderedly toward the source of the voice, “can’t you just keep him here? He’s bound to perish from lack of food, or water, or—”

  “Jery Delvin, the metabolic stasis which I have already mentioned to you is not something we used specially for these boys. It is a necessary contingent of our world. Where there is absolute Location, there is absolutely no change of the sort you mentioned.”

  I gave up. “All right, all right. I won’t argue the point. If you could get at him, I guess you would. Not a chance of dropping him down a hole, or something, though?”

  “By the very nature of our world, hazardous localizing is an impossibility. Our universe possesses a self-regulatory locale-control that obviates the contingency of perilous placement of an individual.”

  "Their universe has what?” Snow asked me, her blue-violet eyes wide.

  "A built-in safety feature," I muttered. “It figures, now that I think of it. If Location is absolute, it is One. That means that it’s either all-safe, or all-dangerous. It can’t have a bit of one thing and a bit another. Which means that I’m still carrying the ball.”

  “Correction,” said Baxter, behind me, “you have fumbled."

  I looked back at him. He had the collapser in his hand yet, despite our space-warping materialization in the cavern. And the muzzle was pointed right at Snow’s breast, at the Amnesty.

  “Jery!” she cried, hanging onto my arm.

  "Baxter!” I yelled, stepping in front of her and flattening myself against the bars. “Give us a chance! If that damned thing triggers the parabolite, you’ll go with us!”

  “How little you know, Delvin,” Baxter smiled. “There are any number of features of this other dimension which even your fantastic intellect has not guessed. Did it never occur to you to wonder just where I’d learned the construction of a teleportation machine?”

  “I—I’d assumed you learned it somehow from the Ancients,” I said. "Before they realized you intended their destruction.”

  “I take my hat off to you,” said Baxter, with a slight nod of grudging admiration. “I didn’t realize you’d thought things out quite that far.”

  “Hell, it was the only way you could have learned,” I said. "But what’s it got to do with—”

  “With the fission-bomb?” Baxter said, smiling. “Why, only everything. You see, Delvin, teleported matter, in order to bypass distance, must travel in the place where there is no distance: the fourth dimension. And so, the' brunt of the blast will be absorbed by the Ancients, not by me.”

  I heard the Martian gasp. Apparently, they weren’t aware of this fact. It was more than just displacement they faced, it was death.

  “Your agents,” I temporized, “they’d then be using a system that transported them via radioactive chaos!”

  Baxter shook his head. “Since the transfer is an instantaneous one, I rather doubt that they’d absorb any roentgens to speak of.”

  That seemed to be that. He was set to fire, and I was all out of arguments. And my stance between Snow and that ray-pistol was only a fleeting protection. She’d go about one second after I did.

  Then, behind me in the cage, I heard a movement, and Snow gave a little cry. I jerked my head about.

  Ted, with more sense than his sister, had simply taken the Amnesty from about her throat and flung it away. All of us followed its flight with dazzled eyes.

  Baxter swung up the barrel of the collapser and fired. And in the same instant, the spinning disc halted, and then dodged out of the trajectory of the bolt.

  The Martian was protecting himself in the only way he could: Changing the parabolite-bomb’s location.

  I crouched involuntarily, clutching Snow’s hand through the bars, as the life-and-death contest went on. The tiny disc of destruction flitted here, there and everywhere, in a dizzying erratic course, while Baxter kept the trigger of the collapser depressed tightly, and slashed wildly in the eyedazzling light of that place with the pulsing beam.

  I Wasn’t in favor of the Ancients, exactly, but I was bound and determined to halt Baxter’s reckless blasting with that gun, one flick of whose ray would disintegrate me, Snow or Clatclit, not to mention the frightened huddle of small boys in that cage. And there was one way to halt him.

  “At him!” I cried to the Martian. “He won’t fire if it’s anywhere near himself!”

  He must have heard me. The disc skidded to a wobbly halt, and then it dove like an eagle toward Baxter in a swift, graceful fine. A straight line.

  “ZIGZAG, YOU IMBECILE!” I yelled, an instant too late.

  Even the poorest shot can track an object moving toward or away from him. Baxter’s collapser caught the descending disc a good twenty yards before it got to him.

  My eyes clamped shut against the monstrous blaze of heat and light. Then, Snow’s hand tightly gripped in mine, I was enveloped in inky blackness, with nothing but empty air beneath the soles of my boots. And falling.

  20

  “Snow! Darling, are you all right?” I asked, getting groggily to my feet and pressing her hand between both of mine. The fall hadn’t been as bad as the one I’d taken earlier through that hole in the floor, but it was enough to shake me up.

  “Y-Yes, I think so, Jery,” she said, pressing one slim hand to her forehead, then brushing a wisp of hair back out of her eyes. I took her tightly in my arms and held her.

  Only then did I suddenly realize where we were.

  The light came from the trylon tip of Clatclit’s tail. It reflected in a red glow from the cavern floor, but vanished over our heads into an impenetrable darkness. Beyond Snow, I saw the Space Scouts getting to their feet. The kids were in much better shape than I was. With consistent bad luck, I’d taken the fall on my injured left arm, and now it was throbbing like crazy. Ted came rushing over to us.

  Then I remembered Baxter and looked swiftly about. He was nowhere to be seen. “Clatclit!” I shouted.

  My crystalline buddy came hurrying over to me, his little taillight bobbing as he ran. His glittering eyes looked a question at me.

  “What happened to Baxter?” I said.

  Clatclit pointed off into the darkness, and made that serpentine movement with his hand.

  “Into the labyrinth?” I exclaimed. “But why?”

  Clatclit pointed toward the floor. I followed his gesture with my eyes, and saw on the rocky ground the reason. The collapser lay there, its firing chamber cracked in half. It was useless as a coercion any more, unless Baxter had a good throwing arm.

  “But why didn’t you follow him?” I asked.

  Disgusted stare. Clatclit pointed to me, Snow, and then the boys, and followed with an attention-getting tremor of his tail.

  “Oh, yeah. We would have trouble getting out of here unguided, at that!” I said sheepishly. When Snow was around, I couldn’t even see the obvious.

  "Any chance Baxter can find his way out of here alone?” I said. "If he gets to the spaceport before we do, he may get back to Earth and get an army back here after us.”

  Clatclit thought it over. Then he placed an arm across my shoulders, and an arm across Snow’s, and looked hopeful.

  “Damn,” I said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, “it’s mighty nice of you to offer, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives down here with you, Clatclit!” I shook my head. "We’ve got to get out of here and get the word to the World Congress before Baxter sews the Earth up tight.”

  “Say,” Ted’s small voice interrupted, “what happened to the bars and stuff, hey?”

  I blinked, startled, and looked about us. Then, on an impulse, I dropped to my knees and felt the ground. It was plain old lava. I rocked back on my heels, bewildered, and then I understood, and started laughing.

  “Jery, what is it?”

  “Snow, baby, it’s the laugh of the century, that’s all. Unstable is hardly the word for the Ancients’ universe! Not only did they dislocate, bu
t they took their contact-material with them! MY guess is that right now there is no longer a splinter of parabolite in the solar system.”

  “But why is that funny?” she asked, as I got to my feet again.

  “Because, honey, it means that all Baxter’s deep, dire and devious schemes have come to naught, and by his own hand, at that! He’ll never build his teleportation machine, now!”

  “His what?” she said.

  “You see, baby, he—Oh, hell, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you when we have more time. Right now, we have to head Baxter off, or things won’t be very funny at all.”

  Following Clatclit’s light, Snow, the boys and I moved swiftly across the floor of that vast cavern, emptied of its space-stressed metal lining and occupants after heaven knows how many eons of existence there. The only hitch we encountered in our upward race was that spray-happy torrent which Clatclit couldn’t cross without dribbling to death.

  However, a Space Scout is true, brave, and loyal, and he always carries a rubber poncho inside his travel-kit. It took three of them to swaddle our guide, but, with the assistance of two of the more surefooted Scouts, I was able to tote him bodily across that perilous bridge, with nothing showing of him but his taillight, and that high in the air, away from most of the eroding spray. Once unwrapped, he took the lead again, tail high. Then, Snow’s hand tightly in mine, we all took off like cross-country racers up those winding tunnels of Mars.

  We emerged on the hillside overlooking the airstrip, from one of those “Forbidden to Enter” cave mouths, in the bright glow of the sand-converter, towering at the far end of the field. Despite political intrigue, insurrection, and the disappearance of the entire Martian race from the solar system, it stood there on its girder legs, monotonously separating the molecules of ferrous oxide into molten iron and atmosphere.

  “Things seem to be quiet at the terminal building,” I observed, looking across the field. “I wonder who won the battle?”

  “What battle?” said Snow.

  “Boy, honey,” I kissed her lightly on the forehead, “you are going to take years to bring up to date.”

  To forestall any more questions, I turned and started off across the landing field, with my alien-plus-female-plus-adolescent group tagging cautiously after me. I was just busy wishing I still had my collapser, when, from a cavemouth to our right, a pallid glow appeared, and then a figure darted out onto the strip, in the glow of the terminal lights.

  Baxter! If he got inside first, and IS men were in charge—But he hadn’t seen me yet. I couldn’t just hope for a rebel win. I took off like an Olympic sprinter, racing toward that staggering silhouette before me, my hands outstretched in the hopes of throttling him a bit before I turned him over to the World Congress. Unless, of course, the rebels ruled Mars-port.

  And then one of the more excitable Space Scouts blurted an involuntary, “Get him!”

  Baxter whirled, five feet away from my fingertips. His right hand came swinging up toward my face.

  And then I was coughing, and sneezing, and waving frantic hands at a blazing something that engulfed my features.

  By the time I realized it was only tunnel-fungus, and at the same moment realized how Baxter had lighted his way out, he was on his way into the terminal, his old legs whipping like pistons. Well, he’d be the first to see who’d survived the battle. Clatclit and the others had caught up to me, by then, and we moved in a desperate bunch toward those lighted glass doors, in a last hope of getting our man before our man’s men got us.

  Any second I expected a cordon of armed guards to come galloping out of there with collapsers ablaze in our direction. Any moment now, we’d all be separated into hot protons and flying clouds of electronic sparks.

  I came to a stumbling halt, and ceased all conjecture.

  For just inside those glass doors, Chief Philip Baxter was standing with his hands raised over his head, and there were men approaching him with drawn weapons. And not the rebels, either. His own security guards! IS had won.

  “Hey!” said Ted, tugging at my arm. “They must have gotten my message! Lucky thing the rebels were the losers, hey?”

  I spun about, giving him a dazed look. “What message?” was all I could choke out.

  “In the Phobos II,” he said happily. “I scratched it on the wall over my takeoff rack.”

  “I didn’t see any message,” I complained.

  “It was in code,” he explained, with the head-shaking condescension toward an idiot of which only small boys are capable. “Snow and me, we have a secret code.”

  “I know that!” I growled. “But how in the world—”

  He gave a lazy what-does-it-matter shrug. “You probably didn’t notice it because you didn’t know the code. Otherwise, it looks like chicken-scratches. But I was pretty sure a good cryptograph man would figure it out. It’s only a substitution code, after all.”

  “And what was the message?” I said, repressing a sudden urge to swear at him.

  Ted yawned idly and scratched his stomach. “I just said: ‘Help! We have been kidnapped by Chief Baxter of Interplanetary Security. Sincerely yours, Ted White, Space Scout First Class.' It wasn’t the truth, of course, but I figured it’d get an investigation started. And then Baxter’s goose would be cooked.”

  Before I could mutter a small curse, there came a sudden blast of energy from the terminal building, and the glass doors came flying open. I saw a figure come dashing out of there, and realized that Baxter was once more on the loose.

  “The shield!” I groaned.

  His hands-over-the-head had been only a reflex action. I only gave one quick glance toward the terminal lobby, where the remaining men were just getting their wits about them, then I took off after him again.

  It was going to be a close thing, I realized. He had a good lead on me. At the end of the strip opposite to where we’d emerged from the labyrinth stood a ship. It was Baxter’s personal ship, marked with the colors and seal of IS. If he once got aboard, he could get away forever. But even worse, he could train his ship’s artillery-size collapser on the entire spaceport, and blast us all out of existence.

  I could see I wasn’t going to make it. He was a full hundred yards ahead of me. By the time I reached the ship, he’d be pressing the starter button, and all I’d get for my efforts would be the searing fires of the rockets in my face as the great ship lifted.

  Then a bounding, red-glinting form was whizzing past me, covering thirty feet at a leap. Clatclit was on the trail of the man who had threatened his destruction back in the labyrinth.

  Shrill, furious clackings came from within those sharp-fanged jaws as the sugarfoot rapidly closed the gap between himself and the man.

  And still, something kept me racing across that field, some subconscious foreboding that things weren’t finished yet. Then Baxter came to a halt, still twenty yards from the ship, and turned about, something in his hand from the ship-readying cart. The hose for the water tanks!

  “Clatclit!” I yelled frantically.

  As if not realizing his danger, the hurtling form of my alien friend zoomed down toward Baxter, powerful claws held wide for grasping his enemy.

  Things happened terribly fast. From behind me, I heard a scream, and then a curse. I staggered, and turned. Snow was wrestling on the ground with a Security Agent, one of the still-shaken survivors of the backlash of Baxter’s shield. Evidently, he’d been about to try another shot at the fleeing Security Chief, and Snow, with unladylike good sense, had given him the benefit of one of her brother-training flying tackles, before we all died in a new rebounding ray.

  A wild trilling whistle came from the ship, and I jerked my head about. Baxter had let loose with the hose, and Clatclit was rolling on the ground, in a wild effort to shake the caustic droplets from his melting scales.

  My head was spinning. Which was to turn? Snow was in a furious fight with a full-grown man behind me, and my best friend was being dissolved before me. I didn’t know what to do. Should
I run and stop her from being vaporized, or him from being turned into taffy?

  Baxter took the decision out of my hands.

  “Delvin!” his voice came.

  I .turned back toward him. Clatclit, still shuddering with the shock of that water-spray, was facing me, Baxter behind him with an arm across the sugarfoot’s throat. And in Baxter’s other hand he held the water hose, its pistol-control barrel aimed right at Clatclit’s eyes.

  “Tell the others to stand back,” he shouted, “or I’ll bum your friend’s eyes out!”

  By now, Snow had explained the situation somewhat to the guard, I guess, because she and he came abreast of me and stopped, listening to Baxter’s threat.

  The guard’s gun came up swiftly.

  “Don’t, you fool!” I said, my hand clamping on his wrist. “He’s got a shield!”

  “I know that,” said the guard, whom I suddenly recognized as the corporal who had led his men to investigate the blast in the upper corridor. “I’m only going to disable the ship!”

  “No,” Baxter called. “If the ship goes, then so do this creature’s eyes!”

  The corporal looked at me, wavering. “It’s—it’s only a sugarfoot,” he said, uncertainly.

  "Only a—!” I shrieked. How could I tell this idiot what I felt for Clatclit! “You’ll shoot over my bloody corpse!”

  “We can’t let Baxter get aloft in that thing!” the corporal said beseechingly. “If he does, we’re all dead!”

  I was trembling with fear and frustrated rage. Baxter was backing toward the ship, taking the weakened Clatclit backward with him. They were only a few feet from the entry port, now.

  Then my hand went out, and I took the corporal’s collapser from him. He stared at me confusedly, but let me take it.

  “Everybody hit the dirt!” I said, lifting the weapon and taking careful aim. Guard, girl and Scouts took a dive.

  I was neither aiming at Baxter, nor his ship. The blazing bolt of energy from the collapser, an instant before I joined Snow, the corporal and the Space Scouts on the ground, went where I’d intended it to.