Read Ebook: Madmen of Mars by Fennel Erik Elkan Max Illustrator

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Ebook has 233 lines and 11251 words, and 5 pages

There's really no excuse for what I did then, except that I wasn't thinking clearly and ten days of supersonics will bring out all the petty meanness in anyone. And I thought that for once the Professor had missed the boat and the Hustic was a floperoo. It didn't bring in thoughts. Just stuff, and I wasn't going to have such a no-good gadget draining the power-packs all the way to Mars and back. I forgot that first Hustic wasn't like a radio or these new universal models the space liners all carry. That experimental set had to be adjusted to the individual brain wave pattern of the operator. But I didn't remember that.

So I disconnected one of the power leads and removed three parts. A curved metal bar, a small condenser, and the shield of one of the intricate little tubes.

I went back to sleep thinking Mike would wake me to get the parts and we could write notes back and forth to settle the matter, forgetting entirely how stubborn he could be.

It was a dirty trick, but I'm glad now I did it. It helped save Earth.

Before I was fully awake I knew something was really wrong. Mike was shaking me roughly and there was a wild gleam in his eyes. A glance showed me he'd pulled off Bill's sleep mask too.

Then he shoved a pad under my nose.

"MARTIANS TAKING OVER!!! EARTH IN DEADLY PERIL!!!" he had written.

Little slimy bugs with ice-cold, prickly feet marched up and down my spine. Every man has his private, personal phobia, something that throws him into an irrational panic, and mine has always been lunatics. Ever since I can remember I've had a morbid fear of mental disorders, which is why the Malignant Inertia Complex had had me so thoroughly frightened. And now I knew the supersonics had driven Mike space-batty.

I didn't for a moment believe what he had written. I'd been to Mars before, seen Marties in their home environment, slow-moving and lethargic, entirely without initiative, completely unwarlike.

"DISCOVERED PLOT VIA HUSTIC," Mike scribbled.

The bugs on my spine quit parading and started running. I grabbed the pad.

"IMPOSSIBLE," I wrote. "HUSTIC NOT WORKING. NO GOOD. DISCONNECTED."

Mike dived across the cabin in the light gravity, hauled himself up neatly on a handgrip and raised the cover of the selector unit. Then he thumbed his nose at me.

Bill and I took a good look. That stubborn, crazy Irishman had made a new bar to replace the one I'd hidden and cut down an empty food can as a tube shield.

"GOT TO TURN BACK, WARN EARTH," Mike wrote. "THE CULTURAL--"

Bill and I looked at each other. Swinging a ship in mid-transit can be done, but it's hardly safe or good practice. Mike was no puny infant, and we knew we had to get him before he became really violent.

Mike read our faces and started to draw back, but he was too late. Bill pinioned his arms in a bear hug and I slipped a sleep mask over his face. He struggled and tried to hold his breath, but the gas got him at last and he went limp.

Sadly we loaded him into the pneumatic cushions and placed the air-release valve out of his reach. Few victims of space-battiness ever recovered, and both of us were feeling pretty sick. Mike had been space-hopping with us for three years, and despite his screwballisms we liked the big lug. And we knew Polly was going to take it awfully hard.

The rest of that transit was twelve on and twelve off for Bill and me, and every minute I was awake I was afraid I might follow Mike down Lunacy Lane. Or that he might get loose. A couple of times we brought him awake, but each time we were glad we'd turned extra air pressure into his cushions. He struggled, and by watching his lips we knew he was still raving.

Within a few minutes a dozen Martians were striding toward us from the beehive-domes of their city. They came straight as though walking ruled lines, not hurrying and not lagging, semi-human in outline and size.

A couple of hundred feet from the ship they deployed and began to watch. Then we could see their bulging, faceted eyes, their puckered, three-lipped mouths and the two rodlike antennae that waved slowly back and forth on their greenish foreheads. We didn't know then why they watched, or who--or what--told them to watch. But always there were a dozen on hand whenever a spaceship landed, watching in a passive, detached way with neither approval nor disapproval in their manner. They watched, just as the Cultural Emissaries on Earth kept an eye on everything that happened without asking a single question or interfering in any way that we could see.

Bill opened the port and gobbled at the watchers in their own language, telling them we wanted to pick up a cargo of rhudite ore and had Earth gadgets to exchange. They didn't give any sign they heard us, but we didn't expect them to. The answer, if it came at all, would come minutes or even hours later. We didn't know why. Not then. We'd never heard of the Thing.

Bill pulled his head in again, and while we waited we turned off Mike's sleep gas once more. This time we really had a faint hope that with the Wilsons off he'd be himself.

But his first words were, "Will you damned fools turn me loose? I'm not crazy! We've got to do something, and quick. Hell, I don't want to be like a damned Martie! They don't get any fun out of life."

He started to kick and squirm, so we gassed him out again. It seemed the only merciful thing to do.

"Olsen," Bill said thoughtfully. "We can't leave him alone and one of us has to rustle up a cargo."

"You're elected. You know the lingo better than I do."

"You don't mind?"

I snorted. I wasn't any first-tripper who had to go sight-seeing. The bleak domes of T'lith were no different from those of M'nu or V'rad or any of the other cities. And the Marties themselves weren't my idea of jolly companions.

After Bill left I checked Mike's pulse. It was weakening slighty from over-anaesthesia so, much as I dreaded having a lunatic awake in the ship with me, I had to let him recover consciousness.

He glared at me and fought against the pneumatic cushions that held him gently but tightly.

"You fool!" he raved. "You abysmal idiot! Don't you realize you're dooming Earth to an eternity of Martianization?"

It gave me a squirmy feeling to hear him talk that way.

"There is no war," I said soothingly, trying to reason with him. "It's all in your head. If the Martians were attacking Earth it's only logical they'd jump on us here and now. But you'll snap out of it when we get you back home."

"It isn't that kind of a war," he insisted irritably.

Finally he calmed down. But his eyes, crazy and wild, kept following me around the room. That made me so nervous I went down and tinkered with the engines.

"Hey, Swede!" Mike's voice reached me after a while. "I'm thirsty."

So I brought him a drink and fed him a sandwich bite by bite.

"I'm okay now," he said when he had finished. "I know I blew my top, but I'm all over that. How's about turning me loose?"

I shook my head unhappily. He didn't even argue.

"Then how's about reading to me?"

"What would you like?" It was the least I could do for the poor fellow.

So I read some of Donn Byrne's things, stuff that looks like prose but is really poetry. Then he wanted Shakespeare's sonnets, but when I started reading he recited them from memory, his voice half a word ahead of mine.

He slept a while and later I fed him again. He seemed resigned now to staying in the cushions.

"How's about letting me try the Hustic again?" he asked. "The Professor wanted a planet-to-planet test, and the helmet cable will reach over here."

I hesitated and he glowered at me.

"I know that Martian stuff was all a delusion," he insisted. "I'm sane now, but if you don't let me prove it to myself once and for all I might go off the deep end again."

That got me. I wanted to be sure he had every chance.

"Put back the parts you took out," he directed.

I did. Then I stuck the helmet on his head and warmed the tubes.

"Send," he said. I flipped the switch up and he lay there concentrating.

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