Dream Thief (21 page)

The cruel Martian night closed its fist around him and he knew no more.

I
T'S NO USE, ADJANI.
He's gone. We've got to turn back."

Packer's big hand flipped a switch and he talked into his headset. “Sandcat 2 to Sandcat 1—we are returning to base. Repeat. We are returning to base. Over.”

“Just one more pass along the rift valley,” pleaded Adjani. His eyes did not leave the thermograph screen. The Sandcat swayed on its springs as the Simoom screeched around them.

Packer, blue in the light of the thermoscreen, turned his face toward his friend. He placed a hand on his shoulder and gripped it firmly as if to establish a physical hold on reality. In a voice deepened with fatigue and sadness, he said, “It is twenty below out there and only an hour after sundown. In another hour it will be fifty below. The storm is bucking to full force by morning—we haven't seen the worst of it yet. We lost visual four hours ago, and the thermograph shows a solid blue field. If we don't head back now,
we
won't make it.”

He paused and added, squeezing the shoulder once more, “It's over.”

“I let him get away. I am responsible,” protested Adjani.

“You're lucky he didn't injure you for life. There was no stopping him. God knows we've done everything humanly possible.”

“He's out there somewhere—alive. I know it. I feel it.”

“If he is still alive, he's past help.” Packer turned the Sandcat and watched the instruments as he punched the return course into the onboard navigator. He took his hands from the wheel and let the computer guide them home.

Adjani buried his face in his hands and began rocking back and forth in his seat. Packer turned away. Neither one spoke for a long time. They sat and listened to the rattle of the sand and rocks upon the shields.

The radio on the overhead panel squawked to life. “Kalnikov at I-base. MAT units 1 and 2 return to I-base immediately. Acknowledge.”

The message was repeated and Packer responded, giving their ETA to the base. There was a long pause; static crackled over the speaker. “Your loss is to be regretted …"—more static— "I am sorry.” The transmission was lost once more to the storm. Packer reached up and switched the radio off.

“I guess I'll send a report as soon as we get back to base. I don't exactly know the proper procedure—this has never happened before.”

“Couldn't we wait a few days? I want to look some more.”

“Sure, we can wait. But it won't make any difference.”

“I would like to find the body at least.”

“Adjani, the storm is likely to blow for days. By the time you are able to search again there would be nothing left to find.”

“It is the least I can do. Please…”

“All right. I won't stop you.”

They sat silent until the computer flashed the outline of the installation on the vidscreen. “We're almost there,” sighed Packer heavily.

Adjani turned with an urgency, laying a hand on the big man's arm. “Please, let us pray for him now. Before the others …”

“Of course.”

Both men bowed their heads and Adjani spoke a simple, heartfelt prayer as the Sandcat entered the installation compound, safe from the storm.

SPENCE LIFTED HIS THROBBING
head. His limbs were numb; he could no longer feel his hands or feet. Heavy vapors of sleep tugged at him, luring him to slip lightly away on their easy-flowing stream to oblivion. For a moment he nearly gave in and let the stream take him where it would, but something about giving in that easily rankled him.

With an effort he pushed himself up, shifting the debris which had settled over him. He placed his unfeeling hands on the ground and steadied himself. Gritting his teeth with jaw muscles stiff with cold, he straightened and swayed unsteadily on his knees. Overhead the bright disk of Deimos shone down on him— the Simoom had abated for the moment, allowing the ghostly light to spill down into the rift canyon.

He looked around him as rattling shudders racked his body. His muscles were contracting violently in their last effort to produce life-saving warmth. These contractions would pass soon, he knew. And then he would lie still.

Spence did not want death to find him sitting down. He stood on wooden, unfeeling legs and tried to walk. The loose debris shifted and he was thrown down the incline of the canyon still further. His helmet struck a rock and he stopped.

He lay there exhausted, staring up at the black sky of Mars, imagining that he was the first man, and possibly the last, to ever lie awake under a Martian night sky.

The convulsions gradually lessened. He felt a tingling warmth spread through his frame—the illusion of warmth, the last remnant of his body's defenses exhausting itself.

A misty darkness closed around him, narrowing his field of vision, blurring the edges with a velvet softness. But the stars above, in the center of his sight, still burned hard and bright. Untwinkling, unmoving, unlike stars at all. It was as if the eyes of the universe watched him to see how a man died.

“No!” he shouted, hearing the empty ring of his voice in his helmet. “No,” he said again; his voice was but a murmur.

Watching the stars he saw a pale white mist pass over them like a diaphanous veil. He thought it a trick of his failing eyesight. Then he saw it again—just the faintest trace of color against the night, the frailest of silken threads.

Odd,
he thought.
What could produce such a phenomenon?

His scientist's brain turned over this bit of novelty. He raised his head and saw, a little below him on the slope, a silver tracery on the rocks, glowing in the light of the moon.

On nerves and determination alone he stirred his useless limbs and half-slid, half-swam to the spot. He touched a gloved hand to the faint white outline of the stuff on the rocks. It gleamed in the clear light. “Crystals,” he muttered to himself. “Ice crystals. Frost.”

All around the immediate area he noticed the white hoarfrost, and below, the wisps of mist rising out of the ground.

Scarcely thinking or attending to what he was doing, he scrambled further down the slope and found himself peering into a pitch-dark hole. A fissure in the canyon wall had opened up, perhaps due to the rock slide earlier. Out of this fissure the slightest trace of pearly mist rose into the deathly cold Martian atmosphere.

The crack was just large enough for a man to squeeze head and shoulder through. Without thinking a second time, Spence thrust himself into the opening.

He found the hole beyond somewhat wider as he wriggled awkwardly into the opening. He inched forward into the blackness bit by bit and discovered the crevice dropped away at a sharp downward angle. He sat down and used his heels to pull himself along, sliding on his seat.

Down and down he went.

I have chosen my own grave,
he thought.
My bones will not be blown to dust on the winds.

The thought strangely cheered him.

DEEPER INTO THE BRITTLE
crust of the Red Planet he went. Sometimes sliding, sometimes walking nearly upright, calling on his will alone to move his body. Blind as a cave bat he moved, abandoning himself to all else but the moving. Onward; deeper and deeper still.

How long he walked, how far he burrowed, he did not know. The blackness around him penetrated his mind, covering it with itself, removing all thought, all memory, leaving only the present moment and the raw will to move on.

When the first ghostly glimmer reached his eyes out of the darkness around him, he thought it a trick of his failing mind: his faltering brain cells firing off minute electrical charges and somehow producing light in the cortex or optic nerve.

But the faint greenish glow did not fade. Instead it grew stronger. Spence, shuffling forward like a zombie, willing his legs to carry him along, stumbling over the uneven downward pathway, stayed on his feet and moved toward the gleam he saw in the distance.

He reached a spot where the glow seemed brightest and found as he came upon it that the faint light was a reflection on a blank wall of stone. He placed his hand upon the stone and saw the green cast on his glove.

He turned to see what produced the glow, as one reeling in a dream. What he saw rocked him back against the wall in disbelief: a wide tunnel glowing with interlacing veins of living light stretched before him. The thin green color glistened on the walls and roof of the gallery like a luminous dew.

Spence tottered into the tunnel and pressed his face close to the rock surface, as close as his helmet would allow. The glowing stuff oozed from the rock, clinging there like a slime. He thought of the phosphorescent plankton and algae in the oceans of Earth.

Can it be?
he wondered.
Have I discovered life on Mars?

T
HE TUNNEL, GLOWING SOFTLY
with the light of the tiny green organisms, stretched beyond Spence's sight. It was smooth and round, and large enough for a man to walk erect without touching the top or sides. Its circular symmetry reminded him of a water conduit; the notion occurred to him that the shaft had been formed long ago by the water which had once run in the arroyo above.

He stepped into the shaft and started walking, not knowing or particularly caring where it led. As he moved along he saw that the green light wavered as he passed, as if his passing disturbed the tiny luminescent creatures. The glow dimmed as he drew near and then flashed brighter behind him. The creatures, if creatures they were, apprehended his presence.

He moved on; it seemed like hours that he pursued the unbending downward course of the shaft before he noticed a slight curving of the tunnel walls ahead.

When he reached the place where the curve began he noticed a gap in the floor of the shaft. Not a large crack—one he could jump across if he were careful about it, but dark so that he could not see how far down it went.

Spence reached out over the edge of the hole and after a few moments felt a tingling sensation in his fingers as warmth began to seep through his gloves.

The fissure was a natural vent which carried heat from a deep reservoir beneath the crust of the planet, perhaps from some ancient volcanic source or, reasoned Spence, from the molten core of the planet itself.

With shaking hands he grasped his helmet and gave it a sideways twist and lifted it off his head. He felt the warmth drift out of the hole and wash over his frozen features. This was perhaps the source of the fragile mist he had seen on the slope of the arroyo trough.

He replaced his helmet momentarily and took a lungful of air; then, stepping away from the crack he blew it out and watched the steam roll away in great billows. Clearly, the tunnel was still desperately cold, but by contrast with the surface it was a virtual tropic. It was at least warm enough to keep the tiny glowing algae alive. He doubted whether it was enough to keep himself alive for any length of time. Without real warmth the cold would eventually get to him, if more slowly than it would at the surface.

Spence, balancing himself carefully, leaped with extreme caution over the crack and trudged off, feeling every weary step deep in his bones. He wondered how much longer he would be able to keep going and feared that if he stopped to sleep he would not wake up. The cold would overcome him. Pushing the thought aside he gritted his teeth and moved on.

After a while he noticed that the green glow shining around him grew brighter. Looking at the walls of the tunnel he saw that the strange organisms grew in greater profusion. Perhaps it meant that the shaft was becoming warmer. He continued on.

Soon he walked, not in a faint glow, but in the green half-light of a moon-bright night. The light-making creatures clustered in thick colonies over every available inch of surface, radiating a steady green fluorescence which made him feel as if he walked inside a beam of light.

He welcomed the illumination, but the floor of the tunnel was now so covered with the algae-like organisms that walking became a hazard.

His unsteady feet, aching with the rigors of his ordeal, slid as on glare ice while he propelled himself along the shaft. He fell often, each fall wearing him down further; it took him longer to regain his feet each time. He began to think that the next time he would not rise again.

But he did rise again. Something urged him on, kept him climbing back onto legs wobbling with pain and fatigue. Again and again he rose, sliding, stumbling, staggering ever downward into the bowels of the planet.

The tube twisted and turned like a snake. It sank in sharp downward angles and he lay on his back and slid like a man on a sled. He followed it without thinking where it would lead him.

Where the tunnel walls pinched together he wormed his way through. Where crevices opened in the floor, he found the strength to get across. Where the roof lowered he went on hands and knees. He kept moving.

Time lost significance. He lost all comprehension of the passing hours. His suit's chronometer, shattered in the fall into the arroyo, presented only a fixed present—time frozen, as if his life had stopped at that moment. Past, present, and future merged into one mingling amorphous element through which he moved as through water.