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Austin Vermont
The tall man loitered a moment before a garish window display, his eyesimpassive in his space-burned face, as the Lillis patrolman passed.Then he turned, burying his long chin in the folds of his sand cape,and took up the pursuit of the dark figure ahead once more.
Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now hehad another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to passhimself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city,after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest wouldnot be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and hehad to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the TriplanetPatrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country,and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his onlysafety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He hadto get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough.
He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street andthen boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until theshort, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared overthe top of the ramp, and then followed.
Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, andstarted to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quiteyoung, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather,and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw.
Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyeson the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the nextstreet he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other sidea block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass theintersection, and then followed again more cautiously.
Up ahead was the Founders' Tower, the tallest building in Lillis. Theboy strode into the entrance lobby, bought a ticket for the observationplatform, and took the elevator. As soon as his car was out of sight inthe transparent tube, Syme followed. He put a half-credit slug into themachine, took the punctured slip of plastic that came out. The ticketwent into a scanning slot in the wall of the car, and the elevatorwhisked him up.
The tower was high, more than a hundred meters above the highest levelof the city, and the curved dome that kept air in Lillis was closeoverhead. Syme looked up, after his first appraising glance about theplatform, and saw the bright-blue pinpoint of Earth. The sight stirreda touch of nostalgia in him, as it always did, but he put it aside.
The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distanceaway. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward thesilent figure.
It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned bysome slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the stillair. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat itssilent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with aminute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.
Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. Hisbody hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, thecorpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying alittle and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.
Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm intoplay, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel thesweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His armsfelt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hookslipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.
He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. Hetried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold onthe smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could holdon for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.
Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The otherpulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managedto get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.
They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found acafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had justkilled. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed onthe first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't befound until morning.
"Sure," said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AGplate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twistingin its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of theirdelicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilkafter them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glowof culcha inside him.
For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protectedLillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysisas it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended bothabove and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knewwhat had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors ofthe present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knewanything about them or about Kal-Jmar.
In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earthscientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed itfrom every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robotsthat still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then theyhad tried everything they knew to pierce the wall.
Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identicalin properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found aforce that would break it down.
And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-fourhours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to SymeRector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand creditson his sleek, tigerish head.
"They're unpredictable," Syme told him. "They're built differently, andthey think differently. They breathe like us, down in their cavernswhere there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen thatway."
The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of awilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring onsliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down againon the other side.
Syme nodded and moved the sand car up to the edge of the gully. Then hepressed a stud on the control board; a metal arm extruded from the tailof the car and a heavy spike slowly unscrewed from it, driving deepinto the sand. A light on the board flashed, indicating that the spikewas in and would bear the car's weight, and Syme started the car overthe edge.
As the little car nosed down into the gully, the metal arm left behindrevealed itself to be attached to a length of thick, very strong wirecable, with a control cord inside. They inched down the almost verticalincline, unreeling the cable behind them, and starting minor landslidesas they descended.
Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of theirharpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, andthe gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeperblackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,"Look out!" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.
Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tatesaid, "I guess we walk from here on." Then he looked up again andcaught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gullytoward them.
Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and thelips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick blackfur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches ofwhite were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise;or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, whichhelped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right nowthey were mostly black.
One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward andmotioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment andthen gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience,could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the samespot long enough.
The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was aphosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn'tdecide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though.
"There's air here," he said to Tate. "I can see dust motes in it." Heswitched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membraneon the outside of the helmet. "Kalis methra," he began haltingly,"seltin guna getal."
"We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless onits surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is toignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own forseveral thousand years."
He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy facewas expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. "Yes, you'reright," he said. "The language you and your fellows struggled to learnis a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you."
"No," the Martian interrupted him, "revealing the extent of ourcivilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yoursis an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether youthought you were taking it from equals or not."
It was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yethe could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keepthe Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martianmust have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,holding himself in check with an effort.
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