Adventures on Other Planets Read online

  “We’ve got to find that machinery,” Kennedy continued. "Got to! I was depending on getting a line on it from the creation of this subdivision.”

  MI know,” Blount said. “But we didn’t. Either the control forces bypassed our detectors or our equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to catch them. You can look at the recordings yourself.”

  Kennedy turned away. If Blount said the recordings were blank, then there was no use in anyone else looking.

  In the west the sun was setting in a cloudless sky. Long shadows reached out from Traxia. The new subdivision was already in shadow.

  The population had increased, Tryor had said. So new housing had been provided. It was as simple as that. And as complicated. Back on Earth, building a new subdivision was also a complicated process, though the complications were different. They involved capital and labor, the work of skilled men, conformity with a building code, and the subtle factors of profit. And other things.

  Trees were chopped down and the trunks sawed into lumber. Clay was dug and pressed into bricks. The lumber and the bricks were fitted together, each in its proper place. Copper was dug for electric wires and iron for nails. Gravel and cement for the foundation. If plastics were used, the manufacturing processes were different, but the end-product was the same and had the same function—a house where people lived.

  On Earth you could follow every step of the process if you wished. You could watch the trees being cut, the brick clay being dug. You could see the raw materials with your eyes, feel them with your fingers, taste them, smell them. You could watch the men building the house, hear the ring of hammers driving nails, the rasp of the saw cutting boards to exact lengths.

  Here on Mars you saw figures moving in a blue haze, you heard atomic bells ringing. Then the haze was gone and the end product was before your eyes. Dazed, you talked of miracles.

  In a ship from Earth was a man who wanted the secret of that miracle. Kennedy did not doubt that he knew the reason why Doak wanted that secret. It was not wealth. Doak already had the secret of wealth. It was power. The same process used to create a new subdivision could also be used to create a fleet of space ships. The machinery would have to be modified, the blueprints changed. That was all. The man who knew that secret would have power over all men.

  At the thought, Kennedy knew he would cheerfully cut Doak s throat from ear to ear and spit in the man's face as he bled to death. When he thought of the 12-year-old child, kidnaped back on Earth where such things could happen, he knew he would gladly use his fingernails to tear Doak’s jugular vein from his throat. Fingernails were the far-removed remnants of the claws that men had needed once, to live, and needed still, and would need as long as there were Doaks in the universe.

  A step sounded in the sand. Blount was there beside him.

  “What’s wrong?” Blount said quiedy. “I know something is.”

  With Blount was Tryor. The Martian’s ears, large for picking up every sound transmitted by the thin atmosphere, were turned toward Kennedy, questioningly. His figure was almost identical with the human figure, except for the larger, movable ears and the slightly smaller eyes with their extra membrane to cut out the sand glare in the daylight.

  With slight variations, nature had apparently almost duplicated the human body here on Mars. As to whether or not nature had duplicated the human mind, no one knew. Kennedy suspected it had not. Ever since he had arrived here he had felt that the Martian mind was different but where that difference lay, he did not know.

  Kennedy looked at the Martian. In his mind a slow thought turned. Tryor knew where the machinery was hidden. If he could reach the Martian's mind, convince Tryor of his desperate need! His eyes went to the ship, dull in the growing twilight. The hate in his eyes was a living thing.

  Tryor’s ears stood straight up. “Help,” the Martian whispered. "You want—you need—” He fumbled with unfamiliar sounds and with alien concepts back of them. “You —need help?” he questioned.

  “Yes!” Kennedy breathed. He told them what had happened.

  “Its not possible!” Blount, instantly angry, blurted out. “He can't get away with this. Kidnaping and extortion are felonies. I don't care who Doak is, he can be put in jail for the rest of his life.”

  “He can be, but will he be?” Kennedy answered. “The courts and the jails are on Earth. Doak is here. Tryor—”

  The listening Martian had not understood one word in ten. His ears drooped and he appeared to meditate. Kennedy waited. Wild thoughts of shaking the information from the Martian mind flashed through his brain. Hopeless thoughts. There was no way of shaking comprehension from a mind. And comprehension was what was needed.

  Kennedy had discussed both the source of the water supply and the grain with Tryor. The result had been embarrassment on both sides. Tryor had tried to explain. He had tried hard and long. Kennedy had been embarrassed because he had begun to suspect he didn’t have the mental equipment to understand the explanation.

  Tryors embarrassment, he had suspected, had resulted from the unwillingness of the Martian to point out the deficiency of the human brain. The Martians were the politest people he had ever known, much too polite to embarrass a guest by saying or hinting that he was actually only a high-grade moron.

  “Again?” the Martian whispered.

  Kennedy told it again. He included the fact that his equipment had been set up with the idea of locating the hidden machinery. Tryor seemed not to mind that at all. Kennedy was relieved. Though there might have seemed to be an element of trickery in his own actions, he knew in his heart that he had been motivated by the desire to know, and by nothing else. Tryor seemed to understand, and to approve.

  But the rest of it—

  “Mond notal te?f the Martian said. (“Can you draw me a picture?”)

  Kennedy sighed. Always the Martians wanted a picture.

  “Come my house,” the Martian said. “Draw picture.”

  “You stay here,” Kennedy said to Blount. ‘Tm going to try to draw a picture of the word 'help/ ”

  “You don’t need to draw a picture for me,” Blount said, hotly.

  “I know. But you can’t work miracles either/’ He looked at the ship and again the hate in his eyes was a living thing. Doak, you made a mistake, he thought.

  Side by side, Kennedy and the Martian walked toward the city. They passed through the new section that had been added. The residents were already in their new homes, preparing the evening meal.

  On a plot of grass, a child was playing with a ball. He left oif to wave at the strange alien striding along the winding walk. Kennedy waved back. In the thin soft air was the fragrance of flowers, blooms growing where an hour earlier had been the sand of the desert. A musical instrument was tinkling.

  “This is Paradise,” Kennedy whispered.

  “Paradise?” Tryor sought the meaning of the word. “Picture?” he said, hopefully.

  “There are no pictures of Paradise. It’s only a dream of a land without hunger and without cold, vithout fear, where all men have enough and none too much. You've got it here in this city. Or you had it/’ He looked back at the space ship resting on the sand. “Now the serpent is at your gate—in a space ship.”

  “Serpent?” Tryor questioned.

  Kennedy uttered an exclamation of despair and sighed.

  Tryor lived in a rose-colored dome. Red flowers bloomed beside the door. On the walk, Kennedy paused. “This house?” He made gestures with his hands. “Was it made like the domes I saw yesterday?"

  “Yes,” Tryor said. “Of course. How else?”

  The question seemed to astonish him. The fact that he had understood it astonished Kennedy and gave him hope. Not much hope, perhaps, but a little. They entered the dome. Soft lights sprang into existence as they crossed the threshold. Kennedy had never ceased being amazed at the feeling of comfort in this simply furnished place. Even more than comfort, the feeling here was of fitness, of rapport with ancient unities.

  He kn
ew that Tryor spent much time here, reclining on the low couch again the wall, apparently asleep. But actually not sleeping. Dreaming would be a better word for it. Dreaming seemed to be the main occupation of all Martians.

  A people who lived in a land where manna fell from heaven and housing problems were solved by miracles could afford to dream. But humans could not. Humans still had to get things by hard work. They still had to fight and sweat, to know neither security nor peace of mind. Bugles always blowing! The challenge of soil and weather, of desert, mountain, and sea, the challenge of the atom and of space, these men had met. Did the bugles ever cease?

  Here on Mars they had ceased. Or had never blown. But Kennedy knew that was not the correct answer. The slow failure of the water supply over the centuries had been in itself a supreme challenge. The Martians had solved it. And had solved all other problems with it.

  Somewhere there was machinery!

  Many times Kennedy had imagined the nature of that machine. It was not a mechanical device of turning gears and sliding valves. That was much too crude. Nor spinning generators nor grunting atom giants. Still much too crude. It was a machine in which the moving parts were molecules or atoms or parts of atoms. Maybe it was electrical, maybe it utilized some form of energy that men had not discovered. Out from it flowed subtle lines of force that transformed sand, or perhaps the intimate fabric of space itself, into pre-determined forms.

  “Picture?” Tryor said, hopefully.

  Kennedy tried to draw a picture of the word Help. True, Tryor had used the word but the Martian had not really understood it. All he had got was an impression of need. It was Kennedy's task to translate that impression into concrete terms. Once Tryor got that much it would be necessary to translate Doak and Doak s purpose into terms that Tryor could grasp.

  Kennedy drew a picture of two men, one drowning in a pool, the other standing on the bank. The man in the pool was reaching up a despairing hand to the man on the bank.

  Trvor studied it and looked up brightly to Kennedy. He got the idea. “Water?” he said, happily. “You want water?”

  “No!” Kennedy said.

  “Bath?” Tryor said.

  “No,” Kennedy said.

  He drew another picture, this time of a woman and child, gaunt and starved. Beside them a fat man gobbled food from an overloaded table. They held out their hands to the eater, begging for crumbs, for life, for help.

  Tryor studied the picture. He shook his head. “Wait,” he said. He left the house.

  When he returned, he had six Martians with him. One by one they examined the pictures while Kennedy tried in every way he knew to tell them what he needed and what they needed. If he failed, they were in danger. Before Doak was through with them, they too, would need help.

  Not one of them got the idea. Suddenly Tryor brightened and left the room. He returned with the child that had been playing ball. At sight of the youngster the Martians nodded to each other.

  The child studied the pictures. He shrugged, bounced his ball on the floor, and spoke rapidly in the ringing bell tones of the Martian language, bell tones with sound nuances so subtle that no human ear had ever been able to grasp them. The Martians listened. They turned to Kennedy. He saw comprehension in their eyes.

  “A kid gets the idea where they don’t get it,” he mumbled. He was acutely uncomfortable.

  “Help,” Tryor rolled the word around his tongue. He had the idea now and was shocked by it. His face showed pain. Kennedy could see the Martian testing the word for its fringe meanings, following the idea out from its basic root meaning to its subtle secondary implications. If you needed help you were in danger, if you were in danger it was because something threatened you. What threatened Kennedy?

  The field man drew a picture of Doak and of the space ship, he put a knife in Doak’s hand, and drew another picture of himself with the knife threatening him. The child looked frightened. But he translated this picture too. And the Martians understood at least that Doak threatened Kennedy, and them.

  They whispered to each other. Tryor spread his hands. “What do?”

  Kennedy, with sweat on his hands, drew what he hoped was his last picture—of the new subdivision coming into existence. From it he drew lines of force radiating to the source of that construction miracle.

  “The machines,” he whispered. “The machines that can create a subdivision can also create weapons, forces powerful enough to disintegrate Doak and his space ship. Where are the machines?”

  This was his plan, to use the titanic energies involved in the miracle his own eyes had seen, to obliterate the enemy at the gate.

  “Machines?” Tryor’s voice wondered over the meaning of the word. “What machines? There are no machines/’

  “No machines?” Kennedy gasped. Deep in his heart he knew that Tryor must be lying. There had to be machines.

  Perhaps Tryor had not actually grasped how vital was the compulsion that drove him.

  Kennedy drew his last picture then, of Doak with a knife in his hand. But now the knife was presented at the throat of a child.

  Crude and melodramatic as was the drawing, it was no more so than life itself. And it was presented on a level so low as to prevent misunderstanding of its meaning. Basic concepts were here, the rawness of a knife and of death. The voice of the Martian child translating the drawing was the plaintive note of a frightened bird awakening in the night and crying out in fear. The child understood the meaning of that picture, too well. His soft whimper filled the room.

  Instantly Tryor was on his knees beside the child, whispering to him, patting him, telling him everything would be all right. The other Martians crowded around. Kennedy was forgotten. The Martians patted the child. He would not be comforted. Finally in desperation one took him by the hand and led him from the room.

  Tryor, his eyes blazing, rose to his feet. Never before had Kennedy seen an angry Martian. He saw one now.

  “You frightened child!” he hissed. “Because of you, child grow crooked all his life. Child never forget.”

  It sounded like a damning indictment. Kennedy's voice was a choked and wretched thing.

  ‘Tm sorry. I was trying to show you the pressure that is on me.”

  He pointed to the picture he had drawn. “This is my child,” he said.

  Tryor grasped the meaning. Apparently he had not fully understood the meaning of the child in the last picture. Now he saw it. The rage began to go from his face. And little by little a warm sympathy replaced the anger. Tryor understood!

  Kennedy wiped the sweat from his face. He had won a battle. The lines of communication were open at last.

  Outside in the night was the sound of a man running

  and a voice calling, hoarsely, “Kennedy!”

  Blount's voice.

  Kennedy opened the door.

  “Eight men from the ship!” Blount panted. “They jumped us. I think they killed Anders. I got away.”

  Something had gouged a groove down the side of Blount’s face. Blood still flowed from the edges of the cut.

  In the darkness a human voice called. Running footsteps sounded. Blount turned a startled head in the direction of the sound.

  “They followed me,” he whispered.

  “Come in this dome,” Kennedy said. “Quickly!”

  Blount moved but the running footsteps moved faster. From the soft darkness a powerful flashlight jutted a sudden stream of blinding light.

  “Stand where you are!” a voice ordered.

  “They've got guns,” Blount whispered.

  “I don't doubt it,” Kennedy answered. He turned his head and called within the dome. “Tryor!” There was no answer. The running feet came up the walk.

  “Get your hands up!” Guns prodded them. They lifted their hands. Fingers probed their pockets. “They’re clean,” a voice said.

  “Tryor!" Kennedy called again.

  “Shut up, you!” A fist smashed against his mouth. “Mr. Doak? Here they are, sir.”

>   “You've got Kennedy?” Doak called from the darkness.

  “Got him!”

  Kennedy hit the man who had struck him. All the pent-up emotional storm raging in him gave strength to the blow. The man turned a double somersault backward.

  “Tryor!” Kennedy called again.

  There was no answer. The flashlight poured over him and Blount. Soft clicks sounded in the darkness, safeties being released.

  “Stand still, you! If you don't, 111 blow you in two.”

  Kennedy stood still. Blount stood still. Doak came out of the darkness. Doak seemed pathetically glad to see the field man.

  "I almost made a mistake,” Doak said.

  “Uh!” Kennedy said, “So you finally thought of that?”

  “I thought of it,” Doak said. He spoke to his men. “Find out what is in this house.” There was suspicion in his voice. And fear.

  Kennedy knew that Doak had realized that the machines which could create a new subdivision could also create weapons. Doak was afraid of those machines, desperately. But Tryor had said there were no machines and Tryor had failed to answer.

  A man stepped inside the door of the dome. His voice came back. “Just a bunch of goonies squatting in a circle. Thats all.” The voice was contemptuous of the Martians.

  Then the voice came again. “Theres something going on here that I don't understand. Come and look at this, Mr. Doak.”

  Doak moved forward. Kennedy followed. Doak stepped into the room. Kennedy halted in the doorway.

  Tryor and the six Martians were squatting in a circle. The sound of the clamor outside, the pound of Doak's footsteps must have been clear to them, but they did not turn. In the center of the room, like a ball, floated a sphere of blue haze. As Kennedy watched, the haze seemed to thicken and become a darker shade of blue. He felt his pulse leap. The blue haze of the sand moversl

  There was no obvious origin of the blue sphere. It appeared to come from nowhere. Something from nothing, he thought. Then his own phrase came back to his mind. “Something tangible to our senses comes from something intangible to them.” This was happening here.