"Anyway, don"t you see that it doesn"t matter who attacked first? My leaders and yours wanted complete domination. Eventually, despite the menace of the cobalt bombs, the Soviet would have tried for a surprise blow."
"I see," Quiroga replied. "But what can we do about it? We"re little men, p.a.w.ns, helpless pieces in a big game."
"You must know men with authority, men who would like to stop this senseless slaughter?"
Quiroga said, "The commandant of the Deimos garrison. He"s a good friend and my cousin on my mother"s side. He has stated his sentiments so clearly, however, that I"m afraid h.e.l.l be arrested at any moment"
"Do you think he"d listen to me?" said Broward.
Quiroga turned widening eyes to him. " You must be mad? Do you actually think that my cousin would... ? It"s true he does not believe in this war of extermination. But he is a patriotic man, a brave Argentinean!"
"No, I am not mad. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, I would consider it hopeless to approach him. But I have something with which to bargain. Listen carefully to me, Quiroga. Realize the implications of what I"m about to tell you."
Quiroga listened quietly, but he paled and his face showed horror. Broward finished; Quiroga said, "G.o.d! Will you really do that?"
"So far, I haven"t a choice. I don"t want to, but I must to keep your people from doing the same to mine.. What do you suggest as a way out?"
"I don"t know the recognition code for Deimos. Undoubtedly it has been changed since the last time I was there. But if I made a plea, my cousin might listen, he might allow us to land. However, he probably would think it was a Soviet trick."
"Even if he accepted you and your story, things won"t be that simple," Broward said. "I have to guard against a trick, too. I can"t place my mission in jeopardy. But we"ll give your cousin a try... now..."
Things were not that simple. Neither were they so complicated, but it did take time to bring them about.
Broward altered course to take him far out and then to bring him in again within radarshadow of the moonlet, where the Martian detectors would not find him. Even so, he was open to detection for a long time. At any moment, he expected his equipment to announce the presence of radar or laser beams crossing across his ship or to tell him that it had picked up blips that must be missiles or ships rising from the surface of Mars. He did not expect to see anything coming from Deimos itself, for Quiroga had told him that it had suffered heavily from attack. First, the Soviet missiles had blasted it when the Axe had sprung their attack on Mars. The base on Deimos had expended all its missiles during the repulse. Moreover, its radar and laser external equipment had been wrecked.
New equipment had been brought up from the planet and installed, but Howards would give it no missilesbecause of a shortage. Then, the South Africans, trapped near this sector, had tried a landing and a storming, the first attack by armed personnel outside a vessel in the history of Mars. Though the South Africans had been killed, they had gained entrance. The price for victory by the Axe was high. Quiroga did not know, but he surmised that the little moon was now being used more as an outpost than anything. He did know that his cousin, Patricio Sullivan y Saavedra, had survived the attack and was commandant-as of the time that the ship, in which Quiroga served, had started out on its mission.
Having determined from the Argentinean that the Deimos base still had some communications equipment, Broward then approached Deimos within two hundred kilometers. It was easy to obtain and maintain the tight-beam contact with Deimos. The moonlet always kept one face toward its primary.
No challenge came from the base. Evidently, the Axe personnel did not want to invite attack; they were playing dead. But, on the side opposite from him, was a beam sending messages to the main base, Osorno, in the area of Eos.
"This is Pablo Quiroga speaking. Commandant Saavedra! Patricio Saavedra! For the love of G.o.d, answer!
This is Pablo Quiroga, your cousin!"
There was no answer. Quiroga continued to call. Minutes pa.s.sed. Then, a voice said, "Pablo? What is the matter? What are you doing out there? What is going on?"
Quiroga said, "I am in a lifeboat; I am the only survivor of a battle with a South African fleet. I want permission to land."
Saavedra"s voice, with much relief in it, said, "Thanks to Mary, then, that we are out of weapons. Otherwise, I would have had to follow orders and fire on you, even if you were my cousin. That is, unless you had given the proper code, and you could not do that. It has been changed."
"O.K.," Broward said. "Into your suit."
Quiroga got dressed. Broward eased the scout onto a landing circle. This was formed of stone which the Argentineans had smoothed out and filled in. Around it rose the tortured broken peaklets that covered the surface of the tiny satellite. At the base of one of the projections was a metal protrusion, the port for entrance of personnel.
The scout"s inner port opened, and Broward said, "Out you go. I"ll be waiting to hear from you. But not for long."
The inner port closed; the outer opened. Broward delayed a few seconds to give Quiroga time to get clear before shooting the scout away. In the view plates, he could see the armored figure of the man get smaller, then disappear. Presently, even the landing circle was indistinguishable. The cragged and peaked surface became smooth, and Deimos was a small spindle against the round red-and-bluegreen-and-gray sphere of the mother planet Tense, Broward waited. He kept his eyes on the scopes for the first intimations of enemy action from the surface. Now and then, he flicked a look at the moonlet, though he knew that any communication from it would not be visual. What could be going on beneath its rocky cover, in the many hollowed-out rooms and tunnels? Quiroga would have a strange and unconvincing story to tell. For all the commandant knew, there might be a fleet of Soviet vessels nearby. Not that he could believe that very long. Since Quiroga knew the true state of Deimos" defenses, and since he must have been landed by a Soviet, the Soviet must also know that Deimos was defenseless.
In fact, Quiroga"s story would be so extraordinary that Saavedra would have no choice but to consider it true.
The question was, would he then take the last chance that Mars, and perhaps the human race, had? Or would he attempt to seize Broward?
A half-hour pa.s.sed. An hour. Deimos and the scout ship kept pace in their hurtling around Mars. Every few seconds, Broward looked at the chronometer on the panel. Fifteen more minutes. If Quiroga had not convinced Saavedra by then, neither of them could stop the death of all life on Mars. He, Broward, would not give them a second past the specified time.
As it was, he had placed his mission in deep peril. But he did have a little hook on which to hang a little hope.
That was the fact that Saavedra had not contacted Osorno yet about the Soviet ship. If he had, ships would have appeared on the radarscopes.
Ten minutes. Broward looked at the b.u.t.ton that would send the bomb flashing towards the target. It would take the shortest route possible, and it did not care what part of Mars it struck. Any place was as good as any other. It would be traveling so swiftly that it was extremely improbable that an intercept missile could destroy it. So tremendous would its velocity be that, if it had been an ordinary missile or ship, it would have burned up even in the very thin air of Mars. But it was enclosed in a sheath of intertron, a material that would have lasted a long time in the thick atmosphere of Jupiter before melting.
Five minutes. Broward raved and cursed. Did he have to do this because of a man"s stupidity or his loyalty to a mad-man or to a flag? Three minutes. Why wait? Quiroga was probably under arrest. Or was arguing in vain, would argue until doom"s day.
Then, the receiver came alive. "Captain Broward! The commandant agrees to talk to you!"
"All right," said Broward, aware that he was sweating and that he was trembling. "We"ll do as I said. No tricks now. I"ll be on the watch!"
"I give you my word of honor, may Christ strike me dead, if we are planning any treachery."
Broward sent his scout in but not back to the circle. It landed on a ledge of rock which overlooked the port Should the Argentineans charge out with a mobile laser, they would be cut down by his own beams. Or he could dart off to one side before they could bring it into action and duck behind the peak.
Two men in suits stepped out from the port. They looked around, spotted him, waved, and then leaped intos.p.a.ce. Unhampered by the feeble gravity of Deimos, they soared up. Before they had gone far, they were controlling the packs on their back; these sped them straight to the scout. Broward lifted the ship up and back over the peak to take him out of sight and range of the port. A second later, the men rose over its narrow jagged top and landed beside the ship.
After an examination to make sure they carried no weapons, he opened the port. Moreover, he made them abandon the packs outside the craft. And, after they had entered the port and he had shut it, he did not yet open the inner port. Instead, he moved the ship behind another ma.s.s of rock. It was possible that the packs, besides containing gravity units, also held small atomic charges. They might be capable of blowing themselves up with the ship or, at least, trying it. Though an explosion outside the tough metal of the scout probably would not hurt it, it might damage or wreck his sensory equipment He shut the outer port and opened the inner just enough so that he could see the two men within.
"Strip off your suits," he said.
"We haven"t got anything hidden under them," said Saavedra loudly. Nevertheless, he and Quiroga obeyed.
Saavedra was a tall powerfully built man whose handsome face had a family likeness to his cousins. His hair was much darker, but his eyes were blue, and his nose was much bolder.100 "I have a gun beside me on this seat," Broward said. "I hope I won"t have to use it. I would like it if I never had to use a gun again."
"There has never been a time in man"s history when somebody, somewhere, wasn"t using a weapon,"
Saavedra replied. "But that is no reason for thinking that the future has to be like the past. We are in a situation new to the world."
"You talk like a man I could like," said Broward. "Tell me, what is the situation on Mars?"
"I don"t know what use the information will be to you," said the commandant. "But I will do almost anything to keep that bomb-if there is such a bomb-from being delivered. I..."
"There is such a bomb. Believe me."
"I can"t afford not to believe you. The situation on Mars? It is not what anyone would expect."
Saavedra paused, and Broward said, eagerly, "What do you mean?"
Saavedra took a deep breath, then exploded it. "Rats!" For a moment, Broward misunderstood him. "Who are rats?"
"Rats. The rats themselves. The rats on Mars."
Broward said that he did not understand.
"There are rats on Mars," Saavedra said slowly. "Rats from Earth. They are in our bases in every conceivable hiding place. And they are thriving in that complex of caverns that exists beneath the base of Osorno. Perhaps you do not know it, but Osorno was built about a tangle of caverns that must run for hundreds of miles under the surface. It was discovered when the base was first established, about twenty years ago. It had an atmosphere, although not as thick as Earth"s, of course."
Broward said, "You Argentineans kept quiet about it, but we heard of it. You pumped more air into it, didn"t you?"
"Yes. We found the first indigenous life of Mars. Several species of plants that flourished without sunlight.
And some very small creatures unlike anything on Earth. Blind and brainless.
"Anyway, the rats that stowed away on the ships, though how they did it, I don"t know, adapted there and bred mightily. We have known for some time about them; occasionally, we found one in Osorno. Not only there but the other bases, too, though how they traveled to there is another mystery."
"There were some rats on the Chinese base," Broward "But these were exterminated. I believe that rats have Journeyed across s.p.a.ce with us because they are like us in many ways. Intelligent, highly adaptable, omnivorous, curious, ! vicious."
"Perhaps so," said Saavedra. "In any event, they did not const.i.tute a direct threat. But something happened to them ; in the caverns below Osorno. They must have caught and eaten the little creatures that thrive there. And, in so doing, must have been bitten now and then and become infected with a disease that afflicts the creatures. This was a mild among the animals of Mars, but, in the bloodstream of the rats, the microbes mutated.
"That is the theory of our scientists. The first we of it, we found a few dying rats in our store-rooms and occasionally in the corridors. Then, a man became sick with an undiagnosable malady. He had intense headaches and backaches, his kidneys felt as if they were on fire, he vomited, he alternately suffered from high fevers and raging chills. His tearducts became inflamed, and he wept. "When the second man fell sick, we named the disease el fuego de Iagrimas-the "fire of tears." Since the rats were suspected, we made a campaign to exterminate them. We killed thousands, but I doubt we got all of them. They are such cunning creatures; they want so hard to live. By that time, one man was spreading the sickness to another. It appeared in all the bases. I think that the disease grows slowly, that many must have been infected before the violent symptoms became present"
"Is it fatal?"
"One person out of twenty has died so far," replied Saavedra. "And the rest are immobilized. Those who have recovered are very weak. It is true that two people out of ten do not seem to be affected. But these are very busy and overworked taking care of the sick."
"Then Mars is prostrate?"
"As if the hand of G.o.d had struck," said Quiroga. "Why should He strike us?" said Saavedra angrily. "We are not atheists. If He wished to strike anybody, it would be the G.o.dless Soviets.""I would say that He-if He did it-has struck mostly at Earth," replied Broward. "And He hasn"t spared the Soviets on the Moon, either, although He did his damage by causing them to slay each other. That is, if He thought it necessary to intervene."
"So far, the disease has not appeared on Deimos," said Saavedra. He crossed himself. "May G.o.d spare us here!"
"How many personnel do you have here?"
"Ten. The Soviet and South African attacks took many. And after the sickness, all but ten were transferred back to Mars."
"Has Quiroga told you of my offer?"
"Yes. I thought he was mad, but he convinced me. Rather, the fact that you saved his life when you did not have to and that you had no need to ask for help to carry out your mission, convinced me. You must hate your leader and the ideology of the Soviets as much as I hate that madman, Howards, and his anti-Christian policies." Broward"s eyebrows rose.
Saavedra said, "Yes, Howards has always posed as a Christian. But he has cooperated with the Church only when it suited him. Where the Church resisted, Howards has always managed to get rid of the opposition. Of course, always in a subtle or underhanded manner. But my brother, a priest, was one of those who were killed-accidentally- when be spoke out against Howards" confinement of the Pope to his house."
"You are ready to go ahead?" asked Broward. "It seems to be our only salvation. But what guarantee do I have that your commander will not enslave or kill us?"
"No more guarantee than I have that you will not betray me," said Broward. "But I plan to get rid of my chief just as you plan to get rid of yours. To do that, I may need your help. First, will you swear on your honor and to your G.o.d?"
"I will swear. I do swear."
"Then here is what we must do."
Several hours later, the scout returned the two Argentineans to the port. Broward then lifted the little ship from the moonlet and hurled it at top speed towards the area to which the navigational computer directed it. This took an hour and a half. Then, automatically, the radio broadcast the pretaped code call.
For the minutes that it took the waves to get to the area where a robot relay vessel should be located, Broward chafed. Then, he became even more impatient while counting the minutes it would take for the waves to travel back to his ship with the message that the code had been detected, amplifed, and was being sent on to the vessel supposedly waiting near the Moon.
Since Broward had arrived in the neighborhood of Mars, Earth had slid around the great curve of the sun and was barred from straight-line communication with the red planet. the relay ship had been following Broward-he hoped- had established a position where it could receive and transmit messages both from the scout ship and the Moon. On schedule, Broward"s receiver came to life. His call had been picked up and was sent on its way. Broward, not wanting to wait any longer, then gave his report in the code-form he had prepared on the flight out. This would be pa.s.sed on, and Scone could digest it, then ask his questions.
The slow torturing moments twisted him. What if there was do one on the Moon to receive? Or what if the Axe had triumphed and were now trying to decipher the code? "Broward!" Scone"s voice said, speaking in English.
Broward almost whooped with joy. The fact that Scone was not using code indicated that the menace of the Axe fleet no longer existed.
"Broward! We received your report. So Mars is dead! Well done. But are you sure that the bomb did the damage it was supposed to? You said that you had delivered the bomb and that it had created the expected havoc in Mars" crust and that the bases on the surface appear to be destroyed. But what about any ships that the Axe might have had in flight at the time the bomb struck? What about Deimos and Phobos? Are they still occupied by the enemy?
"You will investigate them first. Then, you will land on Mars and examine the base of Osorno. Afterwards, return to a point where you can contact the relay and send us a report. We must make sure.
"Meanwhile, for your information, we have utterly defeated the Axe armada. All ships were put out of commission except for two destroyers. These eluded us and are probably on the way back to Mars. Watch for them. If you sight them, avoid them. Note in what direction they are proceed-As long as they exist, we cannot breathe easily.
We suffered heavy losses in gaining victory. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you," replied Broward. "But, before I return to Mars, I would like to speak to my wife. She is all right, isn"t she?"
The almost intolerable waiting period pa.s.sed. Scone"s voice sounded again, "Broward! I do not like your disobeying my orders. But, in this great moment of triumph, I inclined to overlook it. Especially since you did carry out mission on which so much depended.
"Unfortunately, you cannot talk to your wife, "Or to mine.
"What do I mean by this? Just this. You may or may not know that it is now the law that every man is to have a mate, even if this means that one woman must have two or more to ensure this. So, I told Ingrid Nashdoi that she must share you with me. She refused and is, therefore, now under arrest. I am sure that she will change her mind later on. She is just having difficulty adjusting to the new ways inevitable because of the conditions. Once she gets over her irrationality and sees the logic of the law, she will agree. "Perhaps, you would like to speak to her and try to get her to see reason?"
For at least a minute Broward was speechless, his gaze fixed on the speaker as if he could not believe whathad come from it. Then, his face a bright red, he roared out obscenities and threats. The veins on his neck were purple columns. He shook his fist, he dredged up every foul name he could think of, and he also told Scone his true sentiments about Scone"s methods and philosophies. But he did not tell Scone what he planned to do on Mars.
Breathing harshly, tears running from his eyes, he finally quit his tirade. He did not wait for a reply from Scone because be had little doubt of what it would be. From now on, as far as he was concerned, Scone had another war on his hands.
Later, after he had cooled down somewhat, he realized that he had reacted exactly as Scone wished. Again, the crafty tiger of a man had killed two birds with one stone- a mixed metaphor that happened to be true. He had gotten Broward to carry out a mission for him and then gotten rid of him. He had placed Ingrid in a position in which, by rejecting Scone, she was breaking a vital law. And he had used this very fact to drive Broward to open rebellion. Thus, he hoped that, when Ingrid had given up hope of seeing Broward again, she would decide to accept Scone.
After all, wasn"t Scone now on a footing equal with the greatest of conquerors and emperors of the past? He was the leader of at least 90% of humanity, and be ruled with a direct and powerful fist.
That was not quite true, Broward told himself. In the first place, Scone had several times only killed one of the birds, even if he had thought he was getting both. It was true that Broward had returned from Earth with the bomb, but Moshe Yamanuchi was alive and had an excellent future. Moreover, the Mars question was not settled, far from it Perhaps, Scone was not as clever as he thought himself to be.
Thus, Broward found moments of consolation, although these alternated with worries over what would happen to Ingrid and with rage at Scone. Deimos came into view, and he was too busy from then on to think much about Scone or Ingrid.
As he had planned, he took the scout to the bottom of a very narrow creva.s.se. This was on the side that faced Mars. While the menacing orb hung above him, seeming to be falling towards him, he worked with the tapes.
Finally, having checked his instructions, he put on his s.p.a.cesuit and left the ship. The port closed after him, and he tested the effectiveness of his orders by pointing a pencil-sized emitter at it The coded frequencies were accepted; the port swung open.
Broward then lifted himself by means of his gravpak from the fissure and shot over the nightmarish surface towards his destination. He was not worried about locating the ship again. When he wished to retrace his way, he would circle the moonlet at a distance far enough away so he could send a radio signal with the pencil-transmitter and be a.s.sured that it would cover the area. The ship, on detecting the signal, would rise up from the creva.s.se until it was within sight.
Outside the port at which he had left the two Argentineans, Broward pressed the activation b.u.t.ton. The port opened, and he stepped inside. Quiroga and Saavedra, clad in their service uniforms, were waiting for him.
"I am happy that you returned," said Saavedra. "Frankly, I had my doubts..."
"Are things ready for us to take off?" Broward asked.
He walked down the corridor with the two while Saavedra talked.
"Events are working out even better than I had hoped. Almost as if somebody were helping us. Shortly after you left, we received a message from Osorno. A supply boat was coming; this we expected. But we are to send half our personnel back to Mars to help take care of the sick or to replace those who have become sick. So, we won"t have to think of an excuse to get down to Mars."