Part 1

MADMEN OF MARS

By ERIK FENNEL

Why do the Martians drink red wine, swagger about, spout vile poetry and fight endless duels with each other? How did Terence Michael Burke change their minds about invading the Earth?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

All this time we've kept quiet as a whole cageful of mice. And with good reason. During the Big Scare, while everyone was afraid that the Exclusion Ultimatum meant the Martians wanted an interplanetary war, the Earth Governments would have been only too ready to hang, shoot, stab, gas, electrocute, freeze, burn, poison, impale and/or defenestrate the dastardly culprits responsible. If they could have discovered who did what to whom. They didn't savvy Marties then--and still don't.

But we are lucky. The Marties never explained why they called home their Cultural Emissaries, abandoned space travel, cut off Luminophone contact and excluded Earthmen and Earth ships from Mars. They couldn't, because they themselves weren't sure what had happened. And amid the confusion on Earth the last Mars transit of the spaceship _Banshee_ escaped official attention, which was largely due to Polly's good sense in making Mike see he'd better keep his big mouth shut. Our story would only have caused us trouble, even after the Scare died down.

All that was five years ago, but we still thought it best to keep still when this rather surprising diplomatic angling for resumption of Martio-Terran relations began just recently. The five of us were closer to what caused the Malignant Inertia Complex than all the big-name psychologists who have written books of wrong guesses since it disappeared, and we could see no danger of it starting up again. Mike was sure the Martian Thing had lost its grip. So we were willing to let the new treaty come up for a popular vote, as all interplanetary treaties must under the Earth Governments charter, without sticking our oars in or our necks out.

But last night Wild Bill Harrigan and I bumped into Miu Tlenow, a North Venus cat-man and veteran space-hopper who had just brought the Venusian diplomatic intermediaries from Mars to Earth for more treaty talks.

Naturally Bill and I were curious about what cooked on Mars. Tlenow talked, openly puzzled, while Bill and I looked at each other and remembered.

I'm not mad at anyone. Not even at the Thing. Mike swears the Thing meant no harm and the Cultural Emissaries couldn't help themselves, and I believe him. In fact I feel rather sorry for the poor Marties themselves. It must be tough on them to have to live with themselves and each other.

The psychos would probably name the Marties' current condition Acute Virulent Mass Burke-itis and laugh it off. But the psychos don't know Mike as Bill and I do. So Bill insists it's our duty as Earth citizens to divulge everything, and I'm inclined to agree. The thought of a whole planetful of Marties obsessed with Mike's sense of humor is appalling.

Telling this really should be Mike's job--he's the only human who ever made contact with the Martian Thing--but he and Polly live at Venus Central now and the Professor is out there now visiting his grandchildren, Mike, Jr. and Bridget Dorrene. So I'm stuck. But I still think Bill ran in his own dice when we rolled to see which of us had to write this.

* * * * *

The Malignant Inertia Complex started while we were in space and was already pretty widespread when Bill and Mike and I brought the _Banshee_ in from a Venus haul, and during the three weeks we spent getting ready for the Mars transit and installing the Professor's latest special equipment I had the creeping geevils constantly. There was a sour, stagnant undercurrent to life in Spaceport City. For once the rowdy place was actually quiet, dead in fact, and although there were a dozen ships in, the Ursa Major Tavern was almost deserted.

Day and night the telaudio jabbered about the Complex, mostly learned doctors issuing statements that it was a purely psychological phenomenon, a sort of hysteria induced by this, that and the other factor in a civilization altering too rapidly for human minds to adjust.

Most of them followed the line that the disease would cure itself soon, but behind their seven-jet words they seemed a bit uneasy themselves. And I'll never forget the particularly learned gent who suffered an attack right in the middle of his broadcast speech. He was talking reassuringly when all of a sudden his voice petered out. His eyes got all glazed and his face took on an empty look, and he sat there staring at the mike until the control room cut him off. It gave me the shivers.

It was like that all over Earth. Each day more and more people got longer spells where they'd do absolutely nothing. It was raising the very devil with organized civilization and nobody could do anything about it. And the worst of it was that the victims didn't seem to mind. Everything was slowing down, and it made it plenty tough to do business with the outfits that furnished our supplies. People kept acting more and more like zombies--or Martians. But nobody thought of connecting the Complex with the Cultural Emissaries.

The whole thing hit me right in my pet phobia.

* * * * *

Then it was blast-off morning, with me trying to keep my mind off my phobia and those nagging fears that had nothing to do with space-hopping. I cornered the Professor in the _Banshee's_ control room.

"The power drain of this widget of yours has me worried," I complained. "The secondaries are already running overloaded."

As pilot-engineer, power was my responsibility.

Professor Tim Harrigan looked around, but not in his usual quick, birdlike way, and his eyes were dull.

"I'm sorry, Olsen." His voice sounded as though something were missing. "I haven't been able to reduce input requirements yet. The circuit changes keep eluding me."

Worms started squirming inside me. If the Professor, with his brilliant brain, were getting the Complex--

"Polly will tell Mike to be careful of power," he tried to reassure me.

Naturally Polly was scheduled to handle the ground end. She usually did whenever we were testing one of the Professor's inventions. In some ways she was more like a partner than a daughter to him. The set in the Professor's laboratory was rigged for her, while the Hustic aboard ship was adjusted to Mike's brain-wave pattern.

That's right. The thing we were going to test en route to Mars was the Harrigan Unimodulate Subetheric Telepathic Interspatial Communicator. Yes, I know that officially the Hustic wasn't invented until nearly a year later. Keeping it under wraps after what it did was one of our security measures. We were afraid someone might add two and two and get us hanged, shot, stabbed, defenestrated, etc.

That first set was a bulky, power-hogging, spit-and-solder job very different from the perfected, foolproof, universal-type transceivers that have now replaced the clumsy old Luminophones on all interplanetary routes.

Terence Michael Burke, our red-headed astrogator, was standing as close to Polly as he could get, and from the gleam in his eye he was quoting some more of his abominable romantic poetry at her. But she wasn't responding as usual. Not even blushing. She just stood there looking pale and wan, frozen up inside. Typical symptoms of the Complex, and it made me wince.

Mike looked around, missed something, and turned to me.

"Where'd you put my books?" he demanded.

"Cargo hold," I growled at him. "Had to use that space for the Hustic modulator."

"Barbarian squarehead!" he yelped.

"If you'd gas off to sleep like a human being--!" I squawked right back at him. The Wilsons weren't warming yet, but already my nerves were tightening up in anticipation.

"Come on, Polly," he said. But she didn't follow him until he took her hand.

Mike was born in San Francisco, but he's a professional Irishman. Red Irish. And a prolifically lousy poet. Had a picture of himself as the spiritual descendent of Fin McCool and Francois Villon and Robin Hood and Sir Henry Morgan and all the other poet-adventurers and troublemakers of history. He was one of those romantics--and still is.

When he and Polly came back a few minutes later he had his bag of books under one arm, a smear of lipstick across his mouth, and a worried expression on his face. That was unusual. Ordinarily Mike was too slugnutty to worry about anything. On Polly's much prettier countenance there was no expression at all. And that was all wrong.

Wild Bill, Professor Harrigan's younger but larger brother and skipper of the _Banshee_, came up from checking the drive room.

"Final tests," he said.

So we built up the secondaries until the whole ship howled and shrieked with their noise. Then when the needles came over without indicating radiation leakage we cut them to idling again.

Polly had snapped out of her daze and was clinging to Mike.

"I'm scared," she shouted in his ear, not realizing the noise had died. "Think nice thoughts to me on the Hustic, Michael dearest."

Mike's arms tightened around her. "Of course, my one and only love, pearl of my universe and lodestar of my life. Every day."

I didn't like that "every day" stuff. I never approved of running secondary power-packs to the limit. But before I could say anything Bill glanced at the chronometer.

"Clear out and dog down," he ordered.

Mike grabbed Polly and kissed her thoroughly, but she had gone back into her trance and he might as well have been kissing a rag doll. That was all wrong, too. She usually wasn't that way at all, not with Mike. Finally the Professor shook his head as though clearing away a mental fog, grabbed his daughter and led her out through the airlock.

Outside, at the edge of the spaceport, one of the Martian Cultural Emissaries was watching. Just watching. He wasn't excited or even particularly interested by the _Banshee_ about to blast off for his home planet, as far as Bill and I could see as we tugged on the heavy circular door. Just standing there as though about to take root. That's all the three hundred Cultural Emissaries who had come in from Mars a few months before ever did. Stood around.

That's all the Marties did on Mars, too. The first Earthmen to ground on the Red Planet thought the Marties were incredibly dull and stupid because of their slow reactions. They began to change their minds after a few months contact, when the Marties copied our spaceships, adapting them to their own peculiar physical requirements, and displayed a disconcerting savvy in trading. But still their thoughts were alien, and we didn't understand them.

When the red hand touched fifteen Bill Harrigan was already in his cushions with a sleep mask over his craggy face. I envied him, but it was my turn to ride the chair out. Mike was in the other set of pneumatic cushions, but he hadn't gassed out. He grinned at me.

Then the red hand came straight up. I gritted my teeth and tripped the master throttle of the multiplex. The seven big Wilsons hit with a soundless shock and the _Banshee_ went out.

* * * * *

The first few shifts were routine. Nasty, of course. The only pleasant part of spaceflight before the Halstead-Jenkins Mass Diminutors replaced Wilson drivers two years ago were the off-shifts when you could crawl into the cushions and turn on the sleep gas. Every sane and normal spacehand gassed out as much of the time as possible. It was safest.

For the Wilsons radiated supersonics with a frequency somewhere in the neighborhood of a fingernail scratching down a blackboard. Only amplified a million, billion, jillion stinking times.

That's why space wasn't crowded in those days, and why some of the earlier ships didn't come back. Wilsons did something to a man's nerves and emotions. A crew might be good friends on the ground, but that constant barrage of driver supersonics made them hate each other as long as they were in transit. Occasionally some poor guy would crack wide open, go space-batty, and when that happened the victim almost always wanted to kill his crewmates and wreck the controls. Earplugs were useless, for you don't hear supersonics. They sneak in through your pores and get under your toenails and even come down through the hairs of your head. They get in everywhere.

Whenever the auto-timer cut the gas on me and I had to go on watch I always felt as though all the fiends of hell were digging at my nerves with red-hot power tools. I itched inside and couldn't get at the itches to scratch. But I was used to that.

* * * * *

Then, on one of my watches, the meters showed a heavy drain on the secondaries. I wrote a note asking Mike to limit his test calls with the Hustic, and then rewrote it six different times to keep it from sounding too nasty. That's how you get with Wilsons running.

On my next time up I found a sketch of myself wet-nursing the power packs fastened to the bulkhead, and an alleged poem that was mostly putrid puns. Mike's idea of humor.

Out of curiosity I put on the electrode-studded Hustic helmet and turned the set to receive.

Wham! Stars wheeled and comets fizzed and vague dark shapes glided and circled and balls of fire grew and exploded in showers of multicolored sparks.

I yanked the helmet off. But quick.

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.

"---- ---- ----!" Mike yelled, but of course I couldn't hear him. In those Wilson-drive spaceships it was utterly impossible to talk between blast-off and landing.

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.

The calculations for landing spiral made us sweat. We'd left the astrogation to Mike so completely we'd gotten rusty. We missed him even more making contact. I had to handle both throttles and calculator while Bill took the cumbersome Luminophone mechanism. It took hours to line up the color-modulated beam, and then in typical Martian fashion more hours for them to answer with a landing clearance. But at last the _Banshee_ scrunched into the red desert just outside T'lith, and as the Wilsons died Bill and I wiggled our fingers in our ears to get them back to normal.

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.

So Bill packed the saddlebags of the little sandcycle and went sputtering off to question Marties about other Marties who might know of still other Marties who might know what _rhudite_ was and perhaps with enough patient prodding might divulge some method for making a trade and getting the stuff to our ship. And each question would take ten minutes, minimum, for an answer. The three hundred Cultural Emissaries had been admitted to Earth on the theory that they might pick up Earth ideas that would facilitate trading. At least that's the story the peculiarly nebulous Martian government had given the Earth authorities.

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.

"Receive," he said, his face taking on a _listening_ expression.

"Tighten the chin strap, please," he asked. I did it.

"Send." More concentration.

"Receive."

A fatuous grin lifted across his face.

"It's Polly," he whispered.

That made me uneasy. I thought it was just another delusion. I'd tried the Hustic once and it hadn't worked at all.

"See," I said. "There aren't any Martians in there. They aren't making war on Earth."

"Stop interrupting," he snapped.

How much of what happened next was his own idea and how much he got from Polly I still don't know. For minutes at a time he'd _think_ into the machine. Then I'd switch over and he'd lie there and grin. Finally he lay there _listening_ so long and so quietly I thought he'd gone to sleep. I began to relax.

Then Mike screamed and I came out of my chair like a shot.