The Secret Martians by Jack Sharkey (best historical fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

my injured arm.

"Neatness," said Baxter, not to be outdone, "is a virtue."

"Come on, come on," Baxter said impatiently, waving the muzzle of the collapser at us. "Can we get to the labyrinth from here?"

"Why bother, now?" I said, jerking a thumb toward the lobby above us. "Way things look, you won't have any empire to come back to, even if you do knock off the Ancients."

"A minor skirmish like this cannot but fail in its purpose," said Baxter. "On my return, I fully expect to see the sky filled with Security ships from Earth, leisurely razing the entire city."

"Won't that be rather difficult to write off as 'Unserviceable,' even the way you keep inventory?" I needled.

"Move!" said Baxter, beyond patience.

Clatclit and I moved. We went back down the long ramp that led toward the dungeons. At gunpoint or not, I called back over my shoulder, "By the way, just what do you intend doing when we arrive at the ogre's castle? I should think that it was the last place you'd want to be found. Kind of like telling off a lion while your head's in his mouth."

Far off behind us, there was a growing shout of voices. Apparently, the rebels had managed to negotiate what was left of the stairway and were hot on our trail.

"Faster!" said Baxter, quite unnecessarily. I was in no mood to test whether or not the rebels checked one's ideology before blasting away. A disintegrated bystander is beyond apology. So we went faster.

We reached the dungeon level, and Clatclit proceeded to shove open that movable section of wall. Baxter raised his eyebrows in surprise, but then simply gun-motioned us through the gap. We went, and he followed a moment later. I watched with amusement as he tried vainly to shove that granite mass back into place. I don't know exactly what sugarfeet use for muscles, but it beats what we've got.

Angrily, Baxter stepped back against the curved wall of the tunnel, and said, "You! Move that back. We don't want them following us in here."

Clatclit moved over to obey, while I remarked, "Why not? Maybe they'll get lost. It'll save your city-razing ships a little collapser-power."

Baxter ignored my statement, and simply waited until Clatclit had moved back beside me, his taillight going on pyrotechnically as the moving granite cut us off from the light in the dungeon corridor.

Then we were once again moving down that frozen-lava slope toward the deeply hidden lair of the Ancients.

As we moved along, side by side, with Baxter coming relentlessly after us, Clatclit's hands started working furiously. He flicked an index finger toward me, then toward himself. Then he put the heels of his hands together and, after a brief waggling of the fingertips, clamped his hands into fists, and made that serpentine forward jab with one hand. He was asking, in his pantomimic way, if he and I, under cover of sudden blinkout of his taillight, might scoot off into the labyrinth and escape Baxter.

I held up a forefinger and waggled it left and right in a signal of "Better not, chum."

He put his palms up, fingers flipping open in a mute "Why not?"

I curled the fingers of my right hand into the palm, then pointed the index finger forward, and lifted my thumb up; an antique Earth gesture dating back to the times when hand guns had fanning hammers on them. I spun the muzzle of this simulated weapon up, down, and every which way, to indicate to Clatclit that Baxter might manage, through sheer blind blasting, to polish us off before we got very far.

Clatclit slammed his right fist into his left palm in a furious symbol of an exasperated "Damn!"

"What are you two plotting up there?" Baxter demanded suddenly.

"We were discussing the futility of a lights-out scurry for cover, since that weapon of yours would slice right through these tunnels," I said, deciding the truth was the best way to avoid suspicious repercussions. "If your bolt didn't get us, the falling ceiling might."

"I'm glad you're using your intelligence, Delvin," Baxter answered. Then: "Why are we stopping?"

"Because," I said, halting where Clatclit had suddenly paused in his forward motion, "that thunder you hear is the reason the Ancients never find themselves neck-deep in the sugarfeet. An impassable river is up ahead."

"Impassable?" Baxter scowled.

"Not for us, but for Clatclit, here," I said. "He can't even go around this corner without risking deadly corrosion. And, in case you didn't notice back in your office, he's had a pretty nasty exposure already."

"Nevertheless," said Baxter, "I must insist that he either accompany us, or be destroyed right here."

"What!" I said, appalled. "You can't ask him to do that! He wouldn't last any longer than you would in boiling oil!"

"I certainly do not intend to leave him here," Baxter snapped. "He might alert others of his kind, and—"

"And what?" I growled. "You could fend off a million of them with that weapon of yours."

"And risk the ceiling falling in on my head?" Baxter said. "No, Delvin, I'm not about to take that chance."

"And just how," I said savagely, "did that peanut brain of yours plan on your getting out of here without him?"

Baxter paused, his gun hand wavering.

"Because if he melts in the river, or is vaporized right here and now, you will be stuck without a light. Stuck in a rock-hard maze that you couldn't negotiate alone if you had a light."

Baxter just stared, thinking furiously.

"Of course," I went on, "you could simply aim that thing upward, and disintegrate your way out. But that, too, might make the ceiling fall in. And if it didn't, you'd have the small difficulty of climbing the glass-sided well you'd created. Climbing, by the way, into the Martian desert, where there is no air, no water, and very little heat. You'd be dessicated, suffocated, and a popsicle to boot!"

"I—I could very easily slant the bolt into Marsport," Baxter blustered. "I could climb the slope easily enough, and there'd be fresh air waiting for me, too."

"Yeah," I mocked, folding my arms. "Fresh air and a city full of insurgent Baxter-haters. Assuming, of course, that you didn't strike an underground stream in the process, and get washed away into the depths of the planet when your hold-off stance with the collapser tired you out, when you'd completely dissipated the charge."

"I—" Baxter said, desperately nervous.

"And also assuming," I continued, "that you know in which direction Marsport is, chum! Of course, you could swing that thing in a full circle of slant-blasts toward the surface, but then that would make the ceiling fall in, wouldn't it, once you'd cut away all supports."

Baxter trembled with impotent rage, but his gun's muzzle was finally slumped all the way toward the floor of the tunnel. He was beaten, and he knew it.

And that's when I jumped him.

My still-working right arm shot down and gripped his right wrist, a very awkward stance to take, but my left arm was still weak and useless from my fall. But Clatclit moved in, then, his rocky talons sinking like so many fangs into Baxter's right arm, all three of us a writhing tangle on the tunnel floor, each of us frantically aware that the gun had better not emit any bolts while an arm, leg or tail flailed in front of it.

Baxter shrieked with fear and rage as those steely fingers took hold. I think he was too upset otherwise to feel the pain.

And then a bolt buzzed blindingly into the tunnel, and as we all three flattened ourselves and waited for the ceiling to come crashing down, it spattered into nothingness against the wall.

We sat up, staring at the spot where the so-called invincible bolt had simply been dissipated, all of us looking pretty silly, flat on our bottoms, leaning back on our hands on that curved stone surface, momentarily losing sight of our belligerent behavior of a moment before.

"The wall!" I said, first to realize the significance. But I couldn't go on. Baxter finished for me.

"It's parabolite!" he cried.

Then my eyes were dazzled by the blaze of light that suddenly materialized all around us, and my stomach turned over sickeningly as I realized that the converse was probably true: We had just materialized inside the dazzling light!

We were, all three of us, within the metallic-shimmering chamber of the ancient Martians.

"Well done, Jery Delvin," said a familiar voice, and then the light before us trembled and warped, and I was looking into the disconcerting triple face of the Ancient again.

I was not, however, in the mood for compliments.

"Where is my woman?" I said peremptorily.

"On your departure, she expressed a desire to inquire further into the health of her sibling," said the Martian. "She is even now with him and his companions."

"In that cage?" I cried angrily.

"I assure you she is—"

"Kindly forego the lecture on metabolic stasis and raise the damned thing, will you?" I interrupted.

The Martian warped and sparkled in a dizzying movement that I could only interpret as a shrug, and then the huge parabolite cage came rising up from that not-quite-there flooring.

"Jery!"

"Snow, baby!"

We clung to each other awkwardly, and our lips met between the columnar bars. I pulled back and called, "Can't you open this thing up, now?"

"Your mission is not quite accomplished, Jery Delvin," said the Martian. "The man Philip Baxter is within our realm, but as yet undestroyed."

"You mean I've still got to—"

"As told you repeatedly: Physical contact between our races is impossible, Jery Delvin."

"Hey, what about that?" I said. "After I left here, I got to wondering how, if what you just said is true, you people were able to manipulate the Brain to select me."

"The Brain of which you speak works on a principle of force-fields, generated by induction coils. We simply placed the right counterforces in the right places. No actual contact was necessary."

"Well, damn it," I said, after a glance back at Baxter and Clatclit, who were staring bewilderedly toward the source of the voice, "can't you just keep him here? He's bound to perish from lack of food, or water, or—"

"Jery Delvin, the metabolic stasis which I have already mentioned to you is not something we used specially for these boys. It is a necessary contingent of our world. Where there is absolute Location, there is absolutely no change of the sort you mentioned."

I gave up. "All right, all right. I won't argue the point. If you could get at him, I guess you would. Not a chance of dropping him down a hole, or something, though?"

"By the very nature of our world, hazardous localizing is an impossibility. Our universe possesses a self-regulatory locale-control that obviates the contingency of perilous placement of an individual."

"Their universe has what?" Snow asked me, her blue-violet eyes wide.

"A built-in safety feature," I muttered. "It figures, now that I think of it. If Location is absolute, it is One. That means that it's either all-safe, or all-dangerous. It can't have a bit of one thing and a bit another. Which means that I'm still carrying the ball."

"Correction," said Baxter, behind me, "you have fumbled."

I looked back at him. He had the collapser in his hand yet, despite our space-warping materialization in the cavern. And the muzzle was pointed right at Snow's breast, at the Amnesty.

"Jery!" she cried, hanging onto my arm.

"Baxter!" I yelled, stepping in front of her and flattening myself against the bars. "Give us a chance! If that damned thing triggers the parabolite, you'll go with us!"

"How little you know, Delvin," Baxter smiled. "There are any number of features of this other dimension which even your fantastic intellect has not guessed. Did it never occur to you to wonder just where I'd learned the construction of a teleportation machine?"

"I—I'd assumed you learned it somehow from the Ancients," I said. "Before they realized you intended their destruction."

"I take my hat off to you," said Baxter, with a slight nod of grudging admiration. "I didn't realize you'd thought things out quite that far."

"Hell, it was the only way you could have learned," I said. "But what's it got to do with—"

"With the fission-bomb?" Baxter said, smiling. "Why, only everything. You see, Delvin, teleported matter, in order to bypass distance, must travel in the place where there is no distance: the fourth dimension. And so, the brunt of the blast will be absorbed by the Ancients, not by me."

I heard the Martian gasp. Apparently, they weren't aware of this fact. It was more than just displacement they faced, it was death.

"Your agents," I temporized, "they'd then be using a system that transported them via radioactive chaos!"

Baxter shook his head. "Since the transfer is an instantaneous one, I rather doubt that they'd absorb any roentgens to speak of."

That seemed to be that. He was set to fire, and I was all out of arguments. And