Part 1

Design For Doomsday

By Bryce Walton

Slogging through Venus' reeking muck and groping horrors toward the forbidding dome of Solar Science City--treasure-vault of the best brains in the System--Guardsman Venard remembered the frightened whispers: "An evil god rules there!"

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The tone of the slurred, emotionless voice was cold and deadly, as were the tones of all Martians who had taken to their grotesque hearts the mystic, dictatorial disease of Zharkonism. It droned an implacable death song from the audio. It echoed horribly down the shadow-eaten labyrinth of that sprawling death-mart which was officially labeled Terro Concentration Camp Seven.

... _Another exalted warrior of the Occupational Armies of Zharkon, the Undying--Zharkon, the ever-just and divine director of the Solar System--Zharkon, the voice of the Gods--has been brutally slain by terran underground subversives. In retaliation, five hundred Terran inferiors will go to the experimental wards by decree of our divine Martian Zharkon--Zharkon, our illustrious solar father_ ...

The audio droned on. But none of the tier on tier of doomed men imprisoned in the rehabilitated ruins of Washington's subterranean levels listened any more. They were ragged, skeletal shapes crouched like frightened animals in the filthy shadows. Feverishly bright eyes stared with a fanatic's hunger for death, the release from hopeless, mind-shattering pain and indignity. Those who would not wilfully sign away their futures to colonial slavery under the Martian dictatorship were killed in devious and ghastly ways. The death toll was high.

In each of the little prison cubicles two figures waited, helpless behind cold metal. It would seem impossible to find even one face which did not wear the terrible scar of resignation which marks the souls of the hopeless. Yet in one of these prison cubicles there were two such. Two Terran Guardsmen.

The great Terran Guards, what few remained of the once colorful and renowned Solar Patrol, semantically-trained, objective yet warmly human, knew there was no resignation. That was death if carried to its obvious conclusion. While one lived, one moved, acted, and was acted upon. While one lived there was conflict, and there was always hope.

Although perhaps only the few remnants of the Guards and the small Underground which flourished dangerously somewhere in the ruins of the Earth retained this pre-Solar War attitude. Perhaps this stubborn minority totaled one percent. Perhaps. No one knew.

The tall, gaunt figure gripped the prison bars in two big hands. Karl Venard, Ex-Lieutenant, strained hawk-like features outward, his thin lips twisted. He turned suddenly to snarl, "This is it, Louie. We're the only two Guardsmen left in this sad hole. We'll be among this draft. Start praying."

Louie Larson, the little man who still, somehow, managed to be overweight in spite of being half-starved, shivered.

"The least you can do is die like a man," snarled Venard. "You're a disgrace to the Guards."

The fat little man grabbed Venard's ragged sleeves.

"Remember what the grapevine said last night, Karl? It said that the Underground on Mars had managed to blow up the Zharkon's throne room and him in it. It said the Zharkon had been injured, maybe killed, that his double-brain was on the blink. Maybe that's right, Karl. Maybe it might really have happened! Gad, Karl. If they've done that, I don't care about dying. Knowin' that, death would be a pleasure, almost. Tell me you think it's so, Karl. I'll not be scared any more, if you'll say you believe it's true."

"How the devil should I know," murmured Venard. "I doubt it. Maybe there is an Underground operating on Mars as efficiently as the one here on Earth, but I doubt it. The Marties fell for that Zharkonism mania like a degravitated dwarf star. And even if they do have a working Underground organization there how could they ever get into the Zharkon's throne room? That's carrying wishful thinking a little too far, Kewpie Doll. Forget it."

"Listen," sputtered the little man desperately, "how about them Martians who went to the Academy with us? They'd never fall for Zharkonism. They was semantically-trained, too. They're too smart for all this myth and legend stuff. I'll bet every solar credit I might have had that Jhongan could have gotten into that throne room."

Venard's harsh features softened for an instant. Jhongan, the Martian, had studied in the Academy during the golden days of the Solar Democratic Federation. Yes, Martians like Jhongan would never have become Zharkonites. But there were too few of them. His hardened mouth curled cynically.

"Start praying, Kewpie Doll. If semantics can turn out an anachronism like you it can even manufacture incipient Zharkonites. Why, you can't even speak good old Terro-English."

Louis Larson looked as though he were going to cry. "We gotta do something, Karl. It only takes a few minutes after one of them announcements for them heathen Marties to start playin' human grab bag. We gotta do something!"

"What do you want to do, Kewpie Doll, live forever?" grinned Venard. "Besides, there is a way out for us. We don't have to go to the experimental wards. Have you forgotten this little memento from my long lost love?"

* * * * *

With infinite caution, Venard disclosed the memory-crystal, taking it with a kind of dignified stealth from beneath the rags that had once been a shirt. Dreamily he studied the small, delicate translucence of the sphere. He had managed to retain that from the pawing Marties' greedy scanners. Looking back into Venard's eyes from the shifting beauty of the sphere, the three-dimensional, almost frighteningly life-like figure of Vale who had once loved Venard, preened and sighed provocatively. The figure moved, danced in lithe grace through shifting clouds. A strange, heart-aching vision of reality and dream.

Louie Larson's beady black eyes bulged, sweat popped out of his pallid skin and trickled down through the bristles of his dirt-caked beard. "You--you're gonna use _that_?"

"Suicide, that's better than the experimental ward, isn't it? Kewpie Doll, sometimes you leave the experimental wards alive, but no one would ever guess you had once been human. They work on the genes, son. And they're devilishly clever." He gripped the memory-crystal. "This is a quick and easy way. There's enough of that amazing explosive developed by the Venusian Sea People in this crystal to blow everything for fifty yards around us to hell. Oh, I'll use it, Kewpie Doll."

"Sure, I'd prefer it to the wards," moaned Larson softly, "but this--this suicide, it's so final."

"There's something pretty nice about finality, Kewpie Doll. If you can really find it."

They waited. Larson picked at his beard, lips twitching. Venard looked dreamily into the cloudy depths of the memory-crystal. Next to them in a stinking cell, a man began to cry, a series of burbling choking cries of fear and hopeless hate. From somewhere far down the corridor, a woman was singing an ancient hymn.

Venard was extremely fortunate to have retained the memory-crystal. A few prisoners had been able to do likewise. Because of the unique physiogenic quality of the little spheres, ordinary scanners failed to detect their presence. They were small and could be concealed under one's clothing, and passed from one prisoner to another to escape discovery. Others had used their suicidal capacity for a final escape from unspeakable pain and horror.

Because of the difficulty in finding them, the memory-spheres constituted a constant threat to the Martian guards. Many a Martie had developed violent neurosis from knowing that the prisoners they guarded might be hiding a memory-crystal, and might also at any moment, merely by pressing a small release within the spheres, set off the mutually antagonistic elements and blow up guards, prisoners and things surrounding them to bloody ruin.

The incredibly beautiful and life-like face floating inside the crystal laughed mockingly up at Venard through opaque, silvery mists. No horror there. The little, diaphanous, three-dimensional figure dancing through the shifting vapors of the memory-sphere floated in a never-ending dream of things as they might have been. Vale, lovely and enchanting Vale, the way she had looked and danced when she had loved him in those carefree happy days before the Solar War. Nostalgia, bitterly sweet, of lost and unrecoverable nights, dream-lost beauty of Luna nights the blood-drenched holocaust. Vale, before she had went away to Venus and to that hungry maw that ate up _the_ best minds of the Solar System, Solar Science City.

Venard swore softly to himself. How silly he was to feed on memory, like a parasite gnawing on itself and growing hungrier with each futile bite.

The little man's eyes stared through the bars into the dreary shadows of the cell block. "Gods, Karl!" he moaned suddenly. "Karl! I hear 'em comin' down the line! Dirty heathens."

Ex-lieutenant K. Venard looked down curiously at the bald head. No one would guess the existence there of steel nerves, iron will, somehow strangely integrated with a golden heart.

"I hear 'em," Larson whispered hoarsely. "Swissshhh--swissshhh--swisshhhh. I hear their slimy feet squeegyin' along. I hear their body juices sloshin' around inside their cold bellies like walkin' quarts of _stihn_. Karl--if I only had a quart of _stihn_!" Abruptly he sank down in a sad, dejected heap.

"Yeah," growled the ex-lieutenant. "Keep crying, Kewpie Doll. If something happens to our memory-crystal here, we'll be drinking vat-acid tonight."

"Oh, don't talk that way, Karl!" moaned Larson. "Things is bad enough. Things is simply terrible. Either we blow ourselves to tendons or get pried and peered into by these furriners. We're gonna have those probosci dinnin' into our innards. We're gonna--"

"Shut up!" yelled Venard. Maybe the little man really was cracking up. No man is infallible. Maybe he, Karl Venard, would crack up too. He and Larson had been through a lot. But never anything like this. This was definite, inescapable. Maybe a little rationalizing, and wishful thinking, would be a good idea. Maybe he could even talk himself into believing that grapevine story about the Zharkon.

"What do we care, Kewpie Doll," he said, grabbed Larson and lifted him onto his feet. "I been thinkin' it over, and I think maybe that story about the Zharkon getting his double-brain injured might have some basis in fact. The way I figure it, that story is too fantastic to be handed out with any expectation of having it believed if it weren't true. Or at least we can assume it has some basis in reality."

Larson's round, staring face altered with sudden violence. His hands clutched Venard's sleeves. His eyes brightened. "Say it again. Keep on sayin' it."

Venard said it again. It was working. He really was beginning to believe it himself. "Sure it's very, very possible that the old semantically-trained Martians like Jhongan got into that throne room someway and conked out the Zharkon's double-brain, and that's a lot of conking. And do you know what that means? It means the whole Zharkonistic set-up will be thrown off center, maybe disintegrate entirely. Remember, the Marties have regressed in a social sense. They're primitives now. They worship the old gods--Styx, Amphoor, Aalghor. Their leader, the Zharkon, is the mouthpiece of the gods. If he goes, the gods and the whole militaristic mythology could very possibly crumble overnight."

It sounded magnificent. And it was possible, if one was sufficiently desperate.

"But it ain't true, an' you know it, Karl," moaned Larson.

"Oh, the devil with you," yelled Venard. "You're a negativistic melancholic, among other unmentionable things. As an example of the semantically-trained mind, you speak oddly for the world of null-A."

"The awful disgrace of it, Karl. The whole Solar System taken over by barbaric sponges with legs. Who'd ever thought they had it in 'em?"

Venard gripped the cell bars in his big hands and pressed his forehead tightly against the cool hardness. "Yeah," he muttered. "Damnation, Kewpie Doll! I wish we could've escaped to the Underground. If the Martian Underground have really managed to injure Zharkon, that means maybe the Martian Terro-Colonial Armies of Occupation might disorganize, fall apart. And if we could only contact the Underground here--"

Venard shook his head; sweat speckled the metal wall. Fools. There was nothing to the rumor, because such a thing was impossible. There was no escape. Only the memory-crystal, a quick, self-administered destruction. Blackout.

Larson's voice was a faint, far-away whisper. "They're comin' for us. Look at them furriners--"

* * * * *

Metal doors had been clanging open. Venard was suddenly aware of the shuffling of feet and the lifeless stirring and phlegmatic voices of those whose minds had surrendered. Venard leaned against the wall of the cubicle. He wouldn't stand at attention now. Not again. He had once to avoid being beaten. But they couldn't do anything more to a man than kill him. And he would take care of that now, his own way. A much quicker and less complicated way than was to be found in the experimental wards.

The women were the first of the pathetic line of chained humans who staggered into sight around a turn in the dark corridor. Their cells were on the west half of Concentration Camp No. 7 and they were always first in the hostage lines. Bony human wrecks in drab and ragged sack-like garments. Grey faces behind dry strings of unhealthy, scaly hair.

"The Marties, they ain't got any intelligence at all," whispered Larson, "to make beautiful females look that way. They're fiends. I remember when maybe them very ladies used to dance to a Ganymedian orchestra in the Lunaville escapeasy. That first one, now, she might be Glora Karstedt. Glora was the most beautiful woman in the System. Hey, Glora! Remember me, Kewpie Doll Larson?"

The pathetic skin-and-bone shape didn't even smile. Dull eyes stared straight ahead, pallid, blood-streaked face that was a blank mask of frozen horror. Venard gripped the bars. His knuckles shone whitely, his whole body a tense, helpless arc of mental torture. "If they could only die as Earthmen," he said softly. "And not as slaves."

Two Marties paused, one pressed a button.

"It's us all right," said Venard tensely. The cell door ground open. Boneless lengths of purple-veined arms, muscled like serpents, reached in and dragged the little man out first. Others reached for Venard. Animate sacks of liquid intelligence. Four sliding and contracting feet like snails. Filamented arms of great strength guided by highly emotional intelligence. Judged by human standards, these were horrors. Yet intelligence can hide behind any kind of facade. A mind adjusted to Solar concepts is influenced by intelligence and behavior alone, not by exterior physical aspects. These Martians had been good Solar citizens once, responsible and progressive. But they had been seduced by delusions of grandeur. The old Martian Royalists who had been overthrown a hundred years ago had returned. And returning, they had conquered democratic progressive thought, returned Mars to the old gods of carnage and dark evil, had plunged the Solar System into an orgy of primitive blood-lust, barbarism and hate.

Venard swore, threw off a heavy, plopping arm. Somehow, the heavy bulging body sacks had always resembled punching bags. He had longed to test this visual impression with tactile experimentation. A squeeshing smack belched out from beneath his fist. The shocked Martie stumbled back against the line of apathetic prisoners. Articulation on the tips of its appendages writhed after the butt of its sheathed H-gun.

But it didn't kill. Sadists in the experimental wards wanted every organism for their grisly research.

"Oh, Karl, you shouldn't ought to have done that," groaned Larson as he lifted the chain another Martie was trying to lower around his thick neck. Larson wrapped it around the Martian's purple-veined head instead, and with considerable force. Then a heavy arm slashed like a huge whip, thudded across Larson's flat nose. Blood spattered as the little man slumped, groaning, to his knees.

Venard was struggling in blind, hating helplessness with a number of arms that had encircled him like cable coils. And after that, as the line shuffled along, the chains were cold as space around his neck. And the thudding of the leathery arms flailing his back burned deeper than any Martie knew.

But against his side, in a little plastic pouch, the memory-crystal nestled. It was a comfortable feeling, the memory-crystal gave him. A comfortable chilling sensation, both warm and cold. Like an acrostic sonnet to death.

II

They were chained to a wall like dumb, dangerous beasts, though such a precaution appeared pitifully unnecessary. At frequent intervals, a contingent of Martian sycophants entered the narrow but high corridor and took a varied number of human slaves through a huge oval door. A door that had once been a gateway of learning into worlds devoted to peace and progressive research. This great structure, now in ruins from the Solar War between Mars and the rest of the System (except the world of the enigmatic Jovians who had remained neutral) had once been known as World Tech. Now it was a huge torture chamber made more hideous because of its modern scientific equipment used for such savage, barbaric research.

There was a terrible kind of silence between these episodes of the opening of the door, except for the half-crazed breathing of resigned humans. But when the oval door opened, screams came out. There were dim, quick impressions of steam and odors. And of shadows that seemed only partly human now, writhing on a wall.

Blobs of sweat rolled down the little man's red face. A thick two-week's beard itched. Venard brooded over the three-dim memory-sphere of Vale, when no Guards were close enough to detect his furtive actions.

"About two more trips and we're going to be taken in there," choked Larson. "Karl! Look at me an' listen now." His voice lowered, trembled. "It's against my religious principles to take my own life. I'd rather get mine fighting fair. If we fight, maybe we can make 'em blast us with them H-guns."

"We've tried often enough," said Venard. "They're too handy with those whips they call arms."

Venard looked sardonically into the three-dim photo-crystal at the beautiful blond figure floating in it, shifting among multi-colored clouds. Red lips smiled, and deep, impassioned eyes shone up at Venard from the incredibly realistic opening that might almost have been a doorway into another world.

"Karl," moaned Larson, wringing his hands like a frightened girl. "Don't waste the last mortal seconds of your life moonin' over that faithless female."

The oval door opened. A long cry fluttered out. It bounded down the hall and through dark shadows and hollows. It was like a long nerve of cloth torn in two. It was a tattered, terrible sound. Larson shook, his jowls quivered, his eyes bulged. "Gods, Karl! What do they do to people in there? It's like hell, ain't it? Just like Dante's hell!"

"Beautiful," answered Venard softly. "Lovely as freedom. Soft as a night in Theophilus Crater."

"Huh? Oh, you mean her? She did you dirt. Why can't you forget her? She walked out on you. She wanted to be a scientist, not Mrs. K. Venard. Forget her! Listen, I'm gonna make 'em blast me with their H's. You with me, Karl? Hey, she ain't worth a man's last thoughts."

The woman's face shifted, seemed to wink at Venard. His big, dirty hand caressed the cloudy dream stuff of the image. His ragged fingernail looked grotesque beside the cloudy loveliness.

"Ironic, isn't it, Kewpie Doll? She still lives, free and immune, I guess. Only traitors live and know freedom. But she loved me anyway, Kewpie Doll, even if she was only a passing fantasy. She was okay, just too intelligent for love. An I.Q. of 200. That's a lot of quotient. I said to her that night under the rim of Theophilus, 'Vale--this is it. Take your choice. Either me or your internship in Solar Science City. You either go into that science convent on Venus to wither away the rest of your unnatural life, or you and I take a honeymoon right here.' And, Kewpie Doll, you know what she said to me then?"

"How could I know?" slobbered Larson, eyes bugging at the oval door. It was opening again. "I heard it only eleven hundred and fifty-eight and one half times. Karl! I think they'll get us this trip. They--"

* * * * *

Venard continued softly, as if unaware of the approaching Martie guards. "She said, Karl, darling. I love science and what it means to the System. All Venus is a wilderness, except for the odd under-sea civilization of the Sea People, and the great domed University called Solar Science City. Something's terribly wrong there--I don't know what, but there's something. Solar Science City was established by the best mentalities and resources of the entire System, for the good of the System. But for almost a hundred years Solar Science City has been an isolated, mysterious, incommunicative shell hiding something dark and evil. Because of my I.Q. I've been given the privilege of going there, if I desire. And I've decided to go. I'm going to find out why S.S.C. has retreated into its own shell, and no longer serves mankind. I'm going to find out what happens to all the great mentalities that go there. When I find out, I'll be back, Karl. Back to you."

"A nice speech that, Kewpie Doll. But she never came back. No one ever comes back if they go into S.S.C. as either a faculty or student-member. If the war hadn't come along I was going to S.S.C. and find out the score. I wonder what the mystery is, and what happened to Vale. Two years, and not a word from her. She probably never even knew the Martians attacked the System. Or, if she did, I'll bet she never cared."

"Why worry now!" howled Larson, mopping at his head. "What can it matter now?"

"It does matter, in a way," said Venard. "Because S.S.C. could have saved the System. On our side, S.S.C. could have enabled us to defeat the Martians. The fact that they never even considered helping us proves that they are, themselves, somehow allied to decadence and evil. And they're safe. Even the Marties don't have weapons strong enough to break into S.S.C. And S.S.C. has weapons of science perfected in its super laboratories that could have defeated the Martian warlords in a few days. Wonder what is the secret of S.S.C.? The barbaric Martian desert tribes say that it is now ruled by an alien god. Anyway, dear Vale knows. But she won't tell."

"Alien god! Prepare," admonished Larson, "to meet your own."

"I'm ready." Venard clutched the memory-crystal tightly in his hand.

* * * * *

Dim fluorescents high in the plastic ceiling of the lofty corridor shed faint cold night. The purplish hue of the Martian's body sacks reflected the light like radioactive matter. Stocked eyes wavered, yellowish pale, iridescent horrors.