Space Station 1
A startled look came into the eyes of the oldest, a grizzled scarecrow
of a man whose beard descended almost to his waist. He was a Martian
geologist, and a good one.
"Eh, Lieutenant. I was just going to ask you. Shouldn't we get started?"
"We should and we will," Corriston said. "But a good many men collapsed
from the cold this morning. If we don't arrive at that ship in force,
we may live to regret it. Where's Freddy? Have you seen him?"
The grizzled man raised his arm and pointed: "Over there," he said.
"His coming along was just about the craziest thing I ever heard of."
Corriston walked across the churned up sand to where Freddy sat
perched like a disconsolate gnome on a metal-rimmed food container
shaped like an old-fashioned water barrel.
Dr. Drever's son was almost twelve, but he was small for his age and
Corriston had seen boys of nine who were much huskier looking.
Corriston had no way of knowing that on Earth, shoulder to shoulder
with other schoolboys, Freddy had never thought of himself as
particularly small. It was only on Mars, all alone with his father and
other grownups, that he had felt even smaller than he actually was. He
had felt like a dwarf child.
"Why did you do it, Freddy?" Corriston asked. "Your father is very
upset and worried."
Freddy looked up quickly and just as quickly lowered his eyes again.
"I had to come," he said. "I had to."
"But why?"
"I don't know."
"I see."
Corriston stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then he said: "I
think perhaps I understand, Freddy. Just suppose we say you succumbed
to an impulse to roam. The exploring urge can be overwhelming in a
boy of your age. It usually is. If you were on Earth right now you'd
be dreaming about exploring the headwaters of the Amazon. You'd be
dreaming about birds with bright, tropical plumage and butterflies as
big as dinner plates."
Freddy looked up again, not quite so quickly this time. There was
wonder and admiration in his stare. "How did you know?" he gasped.
"I guess I was pretty much like you, Freddy--once," Corriston said.
"Gee, thanks," Freddy said.
"Thanks for what?"
"Thanks for understanding me, Lieutenant Corriston."
Corriston walked out between the tractors and raised his voice so that
everyone within earshot could hear him.
"We're starting again in ten minutes," he said. "Better have another
cup of coffee all around."
20
The sand had been blowing for forty minutes. It was a flying avalanche,
a flailing mace. Even inside the tractors it set up an almost
intolerable roaring in the eardrums, and when it struck the wind-guards
head on the battered vehicles shook. For five or six seconds they would
rumble on and then come to a jolting halt. Often they would start up
again almost immediately but equally often they would remain stalled
for several minutes, and at times there were more stalled tractors than
moving ones across the entire line of advance.
The pelting never ceased, never let up even for a moment. Minute after
minute the sand came sweeping down in red fury, tons upon tons of
it, in great circular waves from high overhead and in jet velocity
flurries close to the ground. In that assault of billions upon billions
of spinning particles the brightly colored lichens which covered the
Martian plains were uprooted, lifted high in the air, and carried for
dozens of miles, flying carpets so small they scarcely could have
supported the tiniest of elves.
For three hours the sandstorm continued to rage in fury, and then,
abruptly, the wind died down, the last flurry subsided, and the
colonists got under way again. And just for a change a few of them
descended from the tractors and advanced on foot, keeping a little
ahead of the swaying vehicles.
Dr. Drever, a tall, stooped man with graying temples but surprisingly
youthful eyes accelerated his stride a little and fell in with the
scarecrow geologist who was walking at Corriston's side.
"We can't be far from the ship now," he said. "I wish there was some
way I could send Freddy back. If I thought you could spare a tractor
and one man to accompany him...."
"Freddy will be all right," Corriston said. "You don't know what it
means to a kid like Freddy to ride through a sandstorm in the company
of grownups. He had to prove something to himself, and I think he's
done it."
The stillness was almost unnatural now, and Corriston could see that
most of the men were becoming uneasy about it. The desert seemed too
bright and far too quiet. It was one of those mysterious, brooding
silences that are a menace to start with. You think of unsuspected
pitfalls, hidden traps. Imagination leaps ahead of reality and leaves
an insidious kind of demoralization in its wake.
"I'm not surprised that all the animal life on Mars went underground,"
the scarecrow geologist said, and it seemed a strange thing for him to
have mentioned at that moment, when the stillness was so absolute and
the thoughts of everyone should have been on the ship, which had to be
very near now.
"Yes, and what a vicious, horrible kind of animal life it is," Drever
said, as if he too welcomed the opportunity to talk irrelevantly,
perhaps to relieve his inner tension.
"They're a very primitive form of life, really," the geologist said.
"They look like large gray snakes, but they're actually more like
worms. Worms with sucker disks instead of mouths. When once they've'
attached themselves it's almost impossible to dislodge them. You've
seen marine worms on Earth often enough, I'm sure. They come in all
shapes, sizes and colors, but there are one or two species that look
quite a bit like lamprenes in miniature. Lamprenes are usually about
three feet in length. But some of the very old ones grow to eight feet
or longer. Their natural prey is a small running lizard--the galaka--as
you know."
"All right," Corriston said, a little of his raw-nerve exasperation
returning. "Now I suppose you're going to tell us exactly how they kill
their prey."
"I don't have to tell you how they kill men," Macklin said. "You know
as much about that as I do. You've been on Mars before. You've seen at
least a few of the victims. You know exactly how they come up under a
man when he's asleep, puncture his clothes and attach themselves. He
doesn't just get nipped; the lamprene can seldom be pulled off that
quickly. And when two or three of them attack you, it can be pretty
horrible. They're more than just vampires; they sting. The poison is as
deadly as aconite. It works a little slower, but almost immediately the
victim starts to degenerate, his nerves first, and, then...."
"All right, now I've heard an expert confirm it. I'd be grateful if
you'll just shut up."
"Lieutenant, I told you--"
"Never mind, Doctor. I'm asking him to shut up."
In silence they continued on, the tension between them increasing
almost intolerably, their nerves becoming more and more frayed. And
then, finally, it seemed to them that they could see the ship, and the
great cliff wall surrounding it through the slight haziness left by the
sandstorm and the vaguer haziness which distance imposes, could see the
tumbled, flat slabs of rock that radiated out from it in all directions
across the desert.
But it was hard to be sure it was really the ship. It was perhaps only
one of the many desert mirages which were far more common on Mars than
they were on Earth. A man who has once looked at the bright, scarred
face of a cliff wall in the Martian sunlight will remember it even in
his dreams and no mirages are really necessary. He is certain to see it
a second and a third time, like an after-image so indelibly imprinted
on the retina of the human eye that its recurrence becomes inevitable.
And yet, the running man could not have been a mirage. He was much
nearer than the ship appeared to be, and he was falling and getting
up and falling again in so frenzied a way that his movements bore the
unmistakable stamp of reality.
Corriston came to an abrupt halt. For an instant he simply stared,
watching the distant figure fall to the sand for the fourth time and
drag himself forward over the sand, his shoulders heaving convulsively.
For an instant Corriston could not have moved if he had wanted to.
The scarecrow and Drever were standing too close to him, so that the
shoulders of the three men formed a compact unit, and their arms were
in each other's way to such an extent that no real freedom of movement
was possible.
Corriston had almost to disentangle himself by sheer physical effort.
Disentangle himself he finally did, turning completely about and
shouting to the colonists behind him.
"Get to that man as quickly as possible!" he ordered. "There's no time
to be lost. Try to tear the lamprenes off him, but watch out for your
hands. Don't let them coil around you, watch out for the disks. Get
them off if you can. If you can't, bring him here. Carry him slung
between you."
Two men left the line of march and started off across the desert,
walking very rapidly but not breaking into a run. Corriston had
forgotten to warn them that running with their weighted shoes would be
difficult, and would only delay them, and he was glad that they had
thought of it themselves.
He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror
at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence--a man
attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an
instant before.
But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in
any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of
time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary
precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost
as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.
Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by
just one lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"
It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets
into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a
suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve
poison and it spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it,
no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few
recoveries."
Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two
colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear
the lamprene--or lamprenes--from his flesh. They were bending over him,
and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or
not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture,
unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning
or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The
man was Stone.
It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric
torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it
scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.
Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and
shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He
forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a
threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at
all.
"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not
likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."
"I--I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler ... double-crossed Henley.
I guess ... he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken
her. I'm telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."
"All right," Corriston said, easing Stone back on the sand. "I believe