Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02
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Authors: Devil's Planet (v1.1)
DEVIL'S PLANET
By MANLY WADE
WELLMAN
Fresh from Earth, Young Dillon Stover is
Plunged into a Mystery on Mars! Tour Pulambar, the
Martian
Pleasure
City
,
with this Intrepid Earthman as Your Guide...... 15
DEVIL'S PLANET
By
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Author of **
Island
in
the Sky
,*
* **Sojarr of Titan," etc.
“Help!"
Girra
called. “My rrobot hass oone out of contrroll” (Chap. X)
Contents
CHAPTER IV The Law in Pulambar
CHAPTER VI The Girl in the Game-Dive
CHAPTER X The Second Explosion
CHAPTER XIV Three Calls at Midnight
CHAPTER XVI Malbrook’s Archives
CHAPTER XVIII The Testament of Mace Malbrook
CHAPTER I
Water
,
Water—Nowhere
YOUNG
Dillon Stover woke easily and good-humoredly, as usual. He knew he was in bed,
of course—but was he? He felt as though he were floating on a fleecy cloud, or
something.
He
stretched his muscular long legs and arms, yawned and shook his tawny-curled
head. He felt light as a feather, even in the first waking moment. He was alert
enough to remember now. This was Mars, where he weighed only forty percent of
what he weighed at home in the Missouri Ozarks. He’d come here to carry on the
scientific labors of his late grandfather, which labors he’d inherited along
with old Dr. Stover’s snug fortune. For the first time in his life Dillon
Stover had fine clothes, independence, money in his belt- pouch—and
responsibility.
That
responsibility had brought him to Pulambar, Martian City of Pleasure, for study
and decision.
He
sat up on the edge of his bed, looking around the sleepiing room. Its walls
were of translucent stuff like ground glass. Upon them, delicate as dim
etchings, rippled a living pattern of leaves and blossoms that waved in the
wind—a sort of magic- lantern effect from within, he decided. Such leaves and
blossoms had once existed on Mars, long ago before the planet began to dry and
choke with thirst.
Somebody
looked in. It was Bucka- lew, his grandfather’s old friend, to whose care Dr.
Stover had entrusted his grandson’s Martian wanderings in a posthumous letter
of introduction.
Robert
Buckalew was a man of ordinary height, slender but well proportioned, with
regular, almost delicate features that seemed never to change expression. Like
most society sparks whose figures were not too grotesque, he wore snugly
tailored garments and a graceful mantle. He looked very young to have been a
friend of Stover’s grandfather. His dark hair was ungrayed, his expressionless
face unwrinkled. What kind of man was Buckalew? But Dr. Stover had
died—suddenly and without indication of the need to die— and his grandson must
trust to that letter of introduction.
“Good
morning,” Buckalew greeted Stover.
“Good afternoon, rather,
for it’s a little past
noon
.
Sleep well?”
Again
the young man from Earth stretched, and stood up. He was taller than Buckalew,
crawling with muscles. He grinned, very attractively.
“I
slept like a drunkard without a conscience,” he said. “That flight in from
Earth’s tiring, isn’t it? When did I get here?
Midnight
?
Thanks for taking me over like this.” He
glanced around. “Am I in some de luxe hotel?”
“You’re
in my guest room,” replied Buckalew. “This is a tower apartment. I’m in what
they call the ‘Hightower Set’, living ’way above town. Come to breakfast.”
THE
meal was served in the parlor, a dome-ceilinged chamber with rosy soft light
and metal chairs that were as soft as the bed had been. Or was that more
Martian gravity? The servant was a clanking figure of nickeled iron with
jointed arms and legs and a bucketlike head with no face except a dimly glowing
light bulb. Stover had seen few robots at home on Earth, and he studied this
one intently.
“A
marvelous servant,” he commented to Buckalew as the metal creature went
kitchenward for more dishes. “I’ve never been served better.”
“Thank
your grandfather,” replied Buckalew, who was not eating, perhaps having had a
meal earlier. “Dr. Stover made all these very successful machine-servitors now
in use throughout Pulambar.”
Stover
had heard that. But his grandfather had ceased his robot building long ago.
Why? Perhaps it was because his latest work, the problem of the Martian water
shortage, had absorbed him.
“They
aren’t exactly alive, are they?” the young man asked Buckalew.
Buckalew’s
dark head shook, rather somberly. “No. They’re only keyed to limited
behavior-patterns. This one is good for personal service, others as mechanics’
helpers, some of the best as calculators or clerks. But—” He broke off. “Where
do you want to go first? I’m at your service, Dillon.”
Stover
wiped his mouth. “I suppose that business had better come before any pleasures.
I’m here to look at drought conditions. Can you help me there?”
“Of course.”
Buckalew went to a wireless telephone
instrument at the wall. “Short-shot rocket,” he ordered into it, and led the
way out upon the front balcony.
By bright daylight Stover now saw
Pulambar spread far below the tower in which Buckalew lived.
Martians
built Pulambar long ago at the apex of that forked expanse of verdure called
Fastigium Aryn by Earth’s old astronomers. Their world was dying in spite of
science and toil, and in a pleasure city the doom might be forgotten. Pulambar
had its foundations in the one lake left on Mars— canals for streets, open
pools for squares, throngs of motorized gondolas and barges.
This
was all the more wondrous since the rest of the planet fairly famished for
water. Above towered clifflike buildings of every bright plastic material, rimmed
with walks, strung with colored lights, balconied with gardens, spouting music
and glare and gaiety, and crowded with tourists of all kinds and from all
planets.
If the laughter was a trifle hysterical, so much the
better.
Above
this massed roar and chatter rose towers and spires from the blocky masses of
buildings. Here was Pulambar’s upper segment —
Tower
Town
, where wealth and society reigned. A world
of its own, as Stover saw it, the highest peaks a good two miles from ground
level and strung together with a silvery web of wire walkways and trolley
tracks. Independent of the coarser turmoil below, it needed no such turmoil,
having plenty of its own. It had its own law, sophistication; its own standard,
glitter; its own ruler, bad but brilliant, Mace Malbrook.
Of
all these things Stover had only dreamed in the simple and sober surroundings
of his boyhood. Orphaned at six, he had gone to dwell with his grandfather, the
doctor, at the laboratory farm in the Ozarks.
Study,
exercise, health — all those his grandfather had supervised, making him into a
towering athlete and something of a journeyman scientist.
But the old
man had always discouraged long jaunts even to such places as
St. Louis
, the World Capitol, let alone to other
planets. Well, thought Stover, he was able all the better to savor the
excitement of the great Pleasure City of Mars.
“I’m
certainly pro-Pulambar,” he said to Buckalew, and he meant it.
“Here’s
our rocket cab,” replied Buckalew, as a cartridge-shaped vehicle swam to the
balcony railing. They entered the closed passenger compartment at the rear.
“Tour us over the desert,” Buckalew ordered the pilot through a speaking tube.
AWAY
over the complex glitter of Pulambar they soared, turning their stern-blasts to
the fork of scrubby vegetation that cuddled the lake-based city. Beyond and
below Stover could see the desert, rusty red and blank.
“Looks
as if it needs a drink bad,” he said to Buckalew. “No wonder
nobody
lives in it.”
“Oh,
people live in it,” surprisingly replied Buckalew. “Martians aren’t as numerous
as Terrestrials, but there’s not enough good land for what there are.” Again he
addressed the speaking tube: “Pilot, go lower and slower.”
The
rocket dipped down. Stover could see the desert features more plainly, dunes,
draws, expanses of red sand.
Buckalew
pointed.
“You
see that dark blotch like mold down there?” he asked. “It’s a sign of life. Set
us down by that hutch, pilot.”
A
minute later the cab dropped gently to the sand. Buckalew and Stover emerged.
Stover
looked curiously at the blisterlike protuberance a few yards away. It rose
perhaps five feet from the sand, and was twice that in diameter. At first sight
it seemed of dull dark stuff, but then he saw that it was a semi-transparent
shell, with clumpy vegetation inside.
“Come
close,” said Buckalew, and they walked up to the blister. “This is the desert
camp of a Martian.” Inside the hummock grew a single bush or shrub. Its roots
were deep in the sand, its broad-leafed branches spread out inside the shell to
receive the sunlight.
Beneath
those branches sprawled what looked something like four big, limp spiders.
“Martians,”
said Buckalew.
Stover
stared. The few Martians he had seen on Earth wore braces and garments to hold
them erect in semi- Terrestrial posture. These, naked and unharnessed, showed
as having soft bladder-bodies, each with six whip-like tentacles. Their heads,
pink and covered with petal-like sense organs, all turned close to the big
shrub. Stover saw that each of the Martians held a long pipe or tube in its
tentacles, one end in the mouth orifice among the face petals. The other end of
the pipe quested among the leaves of the shrub.
“They
are probing for water to keep them alive,” Buckalew explained.
Then
Stover understood. The shrub’s roots, deep and wide in the sand, drew to
themselves all surrounding moisture. It concentrated in the leafage, a droplet
at a time. These wretched creatures sealed the plant in lest the precious damp
be lost by evaporation.
“Martians
make such enclosures from the glassy silicates in the sand,” Buckalew was
saying. “A Martian doesn’t need much food—a few ounces of concentrate will last
for ever so long. What they need is a little water, and the plant can give that
for a time.”
“For
a time?” repeated Stover, staring again. “What happens when the plant’s
water-production gives out?”
“The
Martians die.”
“That
must happen pretty often,” said Stover soberly, unconsciously quoting
Through the Looking-Glass
.
It
may be that Buckalew was deliberate in rejoining, from the same work:
“It
always happens.”
HE
STEPPED close to the sealed shelter, tapping on it with his knuckles. A Martian
wriggled toward them. Buckalew held up something he had brought in the rocket—
a clayware water jug, stoppered carefully, holding about two quarts.
The Martian inside made frantic, appealing gestures.
Buckalew
set the jug close to the foot of the glass wall, and the Martian burrowed
quickly under, snatching it.
Stover
turned away, almost shuddering, from the sight of all the creatures crowding
around that pitiful container of water.
“We
go back now,” said Buckalew, and they re-entered the cab.
Stover
was somewhat pale under his healthy skin.