There was no strength in his arms and hands, yet they moved in front of him as though things detached from his body; skillfully, surely, playing deftly across the colored studs.
Scanners on. Scanners on, kid....
He watched the screens again, unconscious of what his fingers did on the panels. The dull red sphere loomed large once more. The picture was off-center; without knowing what he did he rectified course with the bow jets; it was centered again. But it was a different place. Still the desert, but with ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places....
It was coming up fast, now; faster, until the horizon was only a gentle arc against a thin span of blackness, and the rest was cold red.
Hardly knowing what he did, his fingers suddenly raced over the control console, even before the scanner-alarms began their ear-splitting clanging!
The ship lurched into a direction-change that threatened to wrench the hull apart, and the picture in the scanner reeled crazily. He knew his own brain was not dictating the commands of control to his fingertips, nor was it evaluating for itself the madly fluctuating values indicated on the panels. A human brain could not have done it, he knew that....
He had cut power. At least there was no power. He was falling at a crazy angle and the desert was rushing up now, hurtling up to smash him.
They"d hit him, then, yet he"d felt nothing....
It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosphere of Mars--it was a long fall. Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch.
The ocean of sand rushed up.
And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud.
It was as though he"d been hit from behind with all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the t.i.tanic force of full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless.
He was running. In a nightmare of a dead planet that was not dead, he ran, away from something.
That was how his consciousness returned. While he ran. He stopped, stumbling, turned to look behind him.
And the ship was there. Landed perfectly, stubby bullet-nose pointing to the sky. And above it--
_Run!_
The command hit his brain with almost physical force. A will that was not his own took hold of his whole being, and he was running again, plowing his way through the sucking sand with strength summoned from a well of energy within his body that had never been there before.
Through the thin gla.s.site walls of his helmet he could hear the _thuk, thuk, thuk_ of his boots as they pounded somewhere below him, and there was another pounding, a deadly rhythmic bursting pressure in his chest.
And a whine in his ears....
The wind-strewn sand stretched flat and infinitely before him. Then leaped at him headlong and there was no horizon; there was only the sudden awful wrench of concussion, a tremor of pure sound which would, in denser atmosphere, have destroyed him with the inertia of his own body.
He could not move. Only cling to the shifting desert floor that rocked sickeningly beneath his outstretched body ... cling to it for dear life.
There was no thought, no understanding. Only a sensation which he could not comprehend, and the sure knowledge that none of this was real. Not real, but the end of survival nonetheless.
Pain, and seeing two bright objects transiting the darkness at which he looked; seeing something then between.
His brain began identifying. The darkness; sky. The bright objects; Diemos, Phobos.... And the something between--
It was a transparency of some sort; curved, or he would not have been able to detect it at all. A vaulted ceiling through which he could see....
His full consciousness came flooding back, then. He tried the muscles in his neck, they hurt, but they worked, and he could move his head from side to side. There was the same transparency, as though he were covered by some huge, invisible bowl.
And there were men. Big, muscular creatures, yet thin, tall.... Not like the others at all....
He sat bolt upright, and they did not move. It was not the same as before. No small room. No voice that he could not see. They had not even removed his suit or his helmet, and he was lying on a hard, cold substance.
Then he saw what they were doing. There were two of them apart from the others, working to bring a compact-looking machine into position near him. A gleaming, short cylinder, swung on gymbals between slender forks, mounted on a thin wheeled standard. They were aiming it at him.
"No! _No_--" He tried to get to his knees, but it was as though there were no muscles in his body.
"Man of--Earth! We are friendly. Is that understood?"
The thought-words formed in his brain as the strange images had before, and then he knew. _Should have guessed it_, part of his mind was telling him in a fantastically detached way, _the dreams ... the compulsions over which he had had no control in the ship.... This--thing. It probably--_
"You are quite astute, Earthman. But it is not our technology which created this device. To save you and the civilization which you represent--and ultimately, our own--it was necessary for us to steal it.
It cost six lives."
"Steal...."
"From your former captors. It is their invention, as are so many things with which they destroy. With this instrument, they have succeeded in taking one of Nature"s more subtle phenomenon--psychokinesis--and amplifying its energies nearly a million-fold. Those stepped-up energies can then be projected in a tight or fanned beam at will.
"They can make a man "dream," as you did--or they can destroy him outright, depending on which of the "psi" factors, ESP or PK, is given dominance during projection. But we are not skilled in its operation--they detected our use of it on you while you slept, and from that moment on you were so well screened that even at the risk of burning this unit out, we were not able to project powerfully enough to do more than merely touch your brain--"
There was a strange calm in his mind, now. He understood the words and accepted them as matter-of-factly as they were given. Even now they were manipulating him like some intangible puppet, yet he was convinced it was not a malevolent manipulation. Convinced. The conviction--manipulation, too....
"Only partly, Earthman. We said we are friendly, and we are. We have calmed you and erased your fear. From this point on, we will use this instrument only for communication."
And then he felt the fear in him again, gnawing, and his body was again damp and cold. But he had control, now. Control enough to speak.
They stood before him, immobile, watching.
Somewhere, Johnny Love found his voice.
"Look, I"ve been through this "friendly" act before...." He hesitated, and they did not try to interrupt him. "Well don"t just stand there!"
The fear was suddenly turning to the bitter anger of frustration, they had him whipped, and he was tired. "Tell me why! You stick that thing into my head when I"m blasting for home. You force me to drop back. You blow up my ship. Real friendly! Real sports!" For a moment he had run out of words, and again they made no effort to answer him. "All right! I don"t understand you--I don"t know what you want. But n.o.body is trying to hurt you, n.o.body"s after your little desert paradise. We had an idea, that"s all. We thought we could make it work. People have been talking "go to Mars" on my planet for longer than most of "em can remember. So we finally gave it a whirl! Sorry!"
He looked at them hard, then, and thought that there was something almost like a smile on the face of one. Smile, then, d.a.m.n you....
"We want nothing, Earthman, but to prevent from happening on your planet the thing that happened on this. If they succeed in destroying you as they have us, then this System will always be under their heel, and we shall never be rid of them. Understand, their numbers were too few ever to conquer a planet with a civilization as large and as highly organized as that of Earth, by physical means.
"Knowing that, we--they call us gypsies, nomads, desert-sc.u.m today--we were not too alarmed when they landed here two centuries ago. We were glad to take from them, without paying a price. We were awed by their gifts. Their papers and their books, which would show us how to rebuild our waning civilization--advance us a thousand years in less than fifty; restore to us our lost arts.... And compared to you, we were so very few.
"In return, they said that all they wanted was permission to set up a research site. They told us they were a scientific expedition from far out-System. Aldeberan, they said. Part of a vast exploratory program which they had been conducting for centuries.
"We believed them--why not? One day, we thought, we too will be in s.p.a.ce. And with that day would begin one of the greatest projects of exploration that our race had ever known. So we agreed, and gladly."