Part 2

"Take it off! Take it off!" he shouted. "The Martians are after me!" He shook his head but the helmet stayed on, held by the chin strap.

I cut the main switch and the tubes went dark.

"It's all right, Mike!" I yelled across his screaming. "It's off now!"

"No! No! No!" he gibbered. "They're coming through the helmet! Take it away! Take it away!"

I knew I had to get that helmet off, much as I didn't like getting near him. I reached for the buckle, but he kept whipping his head about so I had trouble catching it and had to bend over him.

Suddenly a long arm snaked around my neck and jerked me off balance. Then a ham-sized fist clipped my chin before I could even get my guard up.

* * * * *

When I came to I was in the cushions with the air turned on full. The release valve wasn't in my hand where it should have been.

"Mike!" I yelled.

He put his tongue between his lips and made a rude noise. He was patching the rubberized fabric of the other set of cushions, the ones in which he had been confined, and on his face was that wild look I had seen before when a good brawl was in prospect.

"Mike!" I pleaded. "You can't do this to me!"

"No? If Polly hadn't reminded me of this I'd be in there yet."

He held up the shamrock good luck pin Polly had given him, a little thing he kept pinned to his coveralls at all times. He had managed to unfasten it and puncture the pneumatic cushions.

But I had no good luck pin. I lay there helpless with all the stories I'd ever heard about the supernormal cleverness of lunatics running through my brain. I knew it would be three days, maybe four, before Bill returned. No chance of help from him.

Mike opened the Hustic case, whistling off key as he moved around, and replaced the original bar and tube shield and condenser with his homemade parts. Then he got to work on the bar with my delicate and expensive set of instrument files ruining them completely on the soft copper alloy.

"Be quiet, lunatic!" he barked every time I protested.

He spent hours filing on that bar, putting on the helmet and testing, then filing some more. And there was absolutely nothing I could do. He had so much air pressure in my cushions I couldn't even squirm.

At last he tested once more, and this time snapped the set off almost at once with a smile of satisfaction.

Next he started tracing the secondary power circuits, but he didn't get very far. Every time the Professor had come up with a new idea we had rewired the _Banshee_, running new leads through the bulkheads but leaving the old circuits in place. The original wiring diagrams were nothing but propaganda by now, with the up-to-date dope all in my head and Bill's.

I must have been getting hysterical from being pinned there so helplessly with a lunatic at large, for when he got into the metal rat's nest behind the meter panel I laughed. Then I wished I hadn't.

"Swede," he said earnestly. "I want to double the voltage and step up the amperage by eight on the direct current. I want the frequency of the AC boosted to at least 850 cycles, and I need at least two thousand ehrenhafts on the magnetic flux leads."

I blinked at those figures.

"Now Mike," I said, trying to be calm. "Let me out of here and we'll talk this over." I had my eye on a heavy wrench I hoped I could grab in time.

"Oh no, Swede. You're insane. I couldn't possibly let you loose."

He chuckled at his own stupid joke. "Tell me how to rig it," he demanded.

"No soap. That much overload would probably blow the packs and the whole ship with it."

"That's a chance we'll have to take. For all Earth's sake," he said, really serious this time. "There's no other way. Now tell me."

I shook my head.

Instead of arguing he got out a soldering iron and started it heating.

"You scared of me?" he asked ominously.

"No, Mike. Of course not. We're shipmates." But it was a lie, a damned big lie. He knew it and I knew it, and I knew that he knew it.

He touched a wet forefinger to the iron. It sizzled.

"My!" he said, sounding like the smooth menace from some telaudio spooky-show. "What a nice red nose you're going to have--if you don't start talking!"

"Mike!" I begged. "You can't do that to me! We're old friends! Remember?"

But he did it. The tip of the iron on the tip of my nose, and it hurt. I yowled, mostly in utter panic rather than pain. My phobia was working overtime.

"Enough?" he asked. "I'll keep it up if I have to."

I thought it over. Crazy as he was, he might throw a dead short across the secondaries. Fission packs won't stand that without exploding. So I talked. Once I tried to give him a bum steer that would cut down the current, but he sensed it and waved the soldering iron at me again.

When he had all the dope he needed he took time out to smear ointment on my nose. It made me look cross-eyed and I still wanted to touch the burn, but he refused to reduce the pressure even enough for me to work one arm loose.

"Sorry, Swede," he chuckled. "It's for your own good. You're insane, so I can't take chances."

"Me?" I bellowed, for a moment forgetting even my blistered nose. I called him several names.

Mike laughed--like crazy.

"Now to get Bill back here. We'll even leave the port open for him."

I thought that was good, until he removed a tank of sleep gas from its brackets and dragged it to the entry.

"You can't reach Bill on the Hustic," I reminded him. "Use the radio."

"And let him know who's making like a caterpillar in a cocoon?" Once more I thought of the supernormal cleverness of lunacy.

He made some painstaking adjustments on the Hustic and flicked the changeover switch to _send_.

Through the open port I could see three of the Marties watching the _Banshee_. If they'd been humans I'd have yelled for help, but with Marties I'd have been wasting my breath.

Mike kept stepping up the power. His lips were tight and his eyes squinted in concentration. And then I saw one of the Marties move. Actually make an aimless movement. He shifted from one foot to the other. The second turned his hand from side to side as though uneasy. The third took a few steps back and forth. And Martians just didn't act like that.

"Secondary effects," Mike grunted. "I'm not tuned on them, but the wave spills over."

"Huh?"

Mike didn't answer. He just sat there _thinking_ into the Hustic.

* * * * *

An hour passed that way. Then I heard a sound like a whole forest full of infuriated parrots. It came from the direction of T'lith, and it grew louder by the minute.

Mike looked up. "Bill should be here soon."

He was right. I heard the sandcycle, and then the squeal of its brakes below the entry port.

"Olsen!" Bill was yelling as he scrambled in. "Hell is loose out there! The Marties--"

"Look out!" I yelled, but too late. Bill was panting and didn't have a chance to hold his breath as Mike slapped the sleep mask over his face. Mike caught him as he fell and loaded him into the other cushions.

There must have been at least a hundred green-skinned Marties milling about outside. They'd followed Bill from T'lith and they were really milling in a most un-Martian fashion.

"What have you done, Mike?" I cried, then I understood what the word "aghast" really means. That's what I was. Aghast.

Mike slammed and dogged the port, but even through the insulated hull I could hear the uproar outside.

Bill opened his eyes, gave me one look of utter disgust, and started struggling.

"Mike!" he roared. "Get us the hell out of here! Turn me loose! All the Martians have gone crazy! They chased me, damn it!"

Mike just grinned, but tensely.

"You let me out of here at once!" Bill bellowed. "Damn it all, this is mutiny!"

"Oh no," Mike protested. "I'm not responsible. I'm crazy. You put it in the log that way yourself."

Wild Bill's face went purple. "Then blast us out of here yourself, before they kill us all," he yammered. "You were right! They're on the warpath!"

"No!" Mike refused flatly. "I'm not finished yet."

Bill's language grew luridly unprintable, and when he refused to quit shouting Mike finally gassed him out again.

Then he went back to the Hustic. Mostly he kept it on _send_, but every few minutes he'd flip over to _receive_ for just a second or two. Then he'd make another infinitesimal adjustment.

Once he froze in his chair. One of his arms was half raised and it stayed that way, unnaturally motionless. He looked like a statue--or a Martie--or someone who had the Malignant Inertia Complex.

"Mike!" I yelled, more frightened than ever.

He shook his head dizzily and flipped the switch out of the _receive_ position.

"Thanks, Swede," he said. "That Thing almost had me that time, but now I've got it."

He twisted the power knob full over. The transformers howled under the overload. He jammed the helmet down more firmly on his head and stood up, staring blankly at the bulkhead as though looking through the solid steel.

"Listen, Thing!" he growled.

I shivered. Sheer lunacy.

"Get every thought and word of this! You will cease interfering with Earth immediately--_or I'll blow Mars and you both clear out of the universe_!"

Paranoia, I thought, delusions of grandeur. Somehow this was worse than anything that had gone before, though that had been bad enough.

"_I can blast Mars out of the Universe at will--and if there is any further interference with Earth minds I shall do so. You are afraid of me!_

"_Now get this, Thing. All of it. Individuality, the freedom of independent, individual action, is the right of every living creature! That includes Martians as well as Earthmen._

"_You are going to stop being what you have become. You will make no more decisions for anyone. You will become once more what you were intended to be, a source of information only. You will make no more decisions, dominate no more activities, and will give out information only when it is requested._

"_You will forget entirely the ideas with which you have become imbued, particularly the idea that the elimination of all activity not absolutely essential for survival is the goal of existence._

"_Here is the data which you will release to all Martians upon their mental request. But you will release it as information only and will not make their decisions as to conduct._"

Then, while the Martians jabbered and howled outside the _Banshee_, while Bill snored away in one set of shock cushions and I lay pinned helplessly in the other set, Terence Michael Burke stood with the Hustic helmet on his head and recited from memory all the poetry he had ever written--and there was a lot of it. Too much, and all of it highly emotional. Most of it was about either romantic love or epic battles, or both.

When that was finished he began to read every scrap of printed matter we had aboard, even the astrogation tables and a set of seven place logarithms. I hadn't realized until then what a complete but heterogeneous library Mike had managed to stash away in various nooks and crannies around the ship. There were volumes of history and treaties on economic theory, some drama, a textbook on psychology, a cockeyed work on ethical thought. Then he dragged out my standard engineering references, including the manuals on Wilson drivers and fission power-pack operation.

After that he got into the novels, and I think that's what did most of the damage. Most of them were either wild adventure stuff or incurably romantic, and almost all of them had been written by Irishmen who saw the world in a keyed-up and highly emotional way, just as Mike himself did. Naturally there was a complete set of Donn Byrne's works, for Mike swore that Byrne was the greatest writer who had ever lived.

And there was a reprint of something called WARLORD OF MARS, written by a fellow named Burroughs way back in the days before spaceflight. When the novels were exhausted there came a bunch of science-fiction magazines, mostly the copies of PLANET STORIES he had missed while we were out on that long Venus haul.

Finally there was a newspaper we'd brought aboard at the spaceport just before blast-off. He read it page by page and column by column, including the advice to the lovelorn section, the comics, the editorials, and all the ads. His voice droned on for hours, while the Hustic transformers whined and the air in the ship misted with the acrid fumes of overheated insulation and I soaked myself in cold sweat. The whole scene had the irrationality of a nightmare. But I was awake and knew it, and just wished I were dreaming the whole thing.

* * * * *

Then, inevitably with that overload, the Hustic spouted black smoke. The line surge that flashed back up the cables bent the meter needles around their stop pegs, and down in the belly of the ship the power packs sizzled and crackled. But somehow they didn't explode.

Mike staggered and covered his face with his hands. He dropped to his knees and for an instant I thought the current had followed the helmet cable and electrocuted him.

But he grasped a stanchion and pulled himself upright. His face was haggard and gaunt, but there was a wildly triumphant gleam in his bloodshot eyes and a twisted grin on his lips.

Then I got my worst scare of all as he lurched toward me, fumbling in his pocket for the spring-opening knife he always carried. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

But he didn't stab me. Instead the air swooshed out of my cushions as he ripped the fabric. Then he turned and yanked the sleep mask from Bill's face.

I scrambled out. My legs felt rubbery from being pinned in the cushions so long but I managed to stagger over and twist Bill's air release valve just as Mike crumpled to the deck.

Bill opened his eyes. "What the--?"

Then he remembered what had happened, and heard the Marties still howling outside in a most unpleasant way.

"Let's get the hell out of here!" he bellowed.

We went out with Bill on the throttles and me down in the drive room with the portable emergency power-pack and a handful of wires to get the Wilsons firing. Mike was out cold on the control room floor. We went out with a swish and a swoop on an uncontrolled skew curve, and only the low .38 gravity and 3.1 mile per second escape velocity of Mars kept us alive.

As soon as we straightened out of the escape spiral Bill and I hustled Mike into the cushions. It wasn't necessary to gas him, for although he had recovered consciousness he did not resist at all. Instead he fell into a long normal sleep, twice around the clock as though completely exhausted.

That trip still haunts my nightmares. Everything powered off the secondaries--which meant nearly everything but the main drivers--was dead. Mike had really fixed that.

Then one of the Wilsons burned a liner, and with grave misgivings we had to turn Mike loose. We didn't like the notion of spacing a trajectory on power settings plotted by a crazy man, but the calculations for unbalanced drive needed his astrogating skill. With the mechanical astroplotter out of action it was too much for Bill and me.

He didn't get violent, so after that we gave him the run of the ship, though of course we never left him on watch alone. He seemed harmless enough, and spent most of his time at a typewriter he had rebuilt to operate in variable gravity. He wrote a few poems to and about Polly. The usual mush.

Then he wrote a story. Maybe I've mentioned before that he collected rejection slips. Bill and I laughed when we read it, because it was much too farfetched for publication. All about a mysterious artificial brain--he didn't specify whether animal, vegetable or mineral--invented to serve as a combination integrating calculator and reference library, working on a form of telepathy. But the creatures for whom it was built kept using it more and more to solve their problems instead of working them out for themselves. After a few generations the creatures became nothing but eyes and hands for the brain, letting it do all their thinking and make all their decisions.

And because the Thing was aware of every sensation of a whole planetful of creatures it grew very tired of processing irrelevant information and began to propagate the idea that any thought or action not absolutely essential for survival was wrong and should be suppressed, and that emotions--which interfered with transmission of factual data--were unthinkably degenerate, to be shunned at all costs. After a few more generations the creatures did not even realize they were being controlled by the Thing, had even forgotten its existence and believed its thoughts and decisions were their own.

That was the story.

Then he got to fooling with the burned-out ruins of the Hustic and made a sheaf of graphs, all in five and six colors. They were too complex for Bill or me.

A few days out from Earth, a worried Bill got me up in the middle of my off-shift and motioned to the forward view-plate. There, coming toward us from the inviting blue-green ball of Earth, were thirty closely grouped orange specks. Spaceship driver flares.

Mike took a look too, then held both hands to his forehead with index fingers protruding and wiggled them at us. When I got the idea I wasn't happy about it. The wiggling fingers meant antennae. Martians.

Bill and I gnawed our fingernails. The poor _Banshee_ could neither run nor fight. But the Martian ships went right on by without even trying to contact us on the Luminophone. Mike just grinned through it all.

* * * * *

We landed rough, on account of the burned-out driver, but when things stopped bouncing we were all in condition to limp away.

Mike saw the car pull up outside and had the hatch open before we could stop him.

Polly met him with open arms and a kiss that would have been censored on any telaudio show. She wasn't the pale, subdued, inertia-ridden girl of a few months before. Not at all.

The Professor was dancing up and down with excitement behind her, trying to shake one of Mike's hands.

"You did it, darling!" Polly released her lips long enough to say. "They're gone, every one of them! And so is the Complex."

"Huh?" Bill and I stared.

Then Bill grabbed his brother.

"You mean Mike isn't--?" he began.

"Of course not," the Professor snapped. "He never was." Then he turned to Mike.

"What capacitance were you using when you picked up the Thing's radiations?" he demanded. "What power factor? What wave form? Sine wave or flat top or sawtooth? Did you have the transportation grid shielded or were you getting a reinduction feedback?"

"Father!" Polly said sternly. "Later!"

Mike reached in his pocket and handed his fancy graphs to the Professor, who seemed to understand them at a glance.

"Oh," he said. "There's just enough similarity of wave form here so the telepathic inertia influences directed at the Cultural Emissaries would heterodyne in their receiving organs and be re-emitted exactly on a generalized human brain-wave pattern.

"And that makeshift capacitance bar you rigged just happened to sensitize the set to the Thing's own wave form."

We listened, but right then Mike was more interested in Polly. About that he displayed good sense.

* * * * *

Bill's _Banshee III_ and my _Thor_ are between-trips at the same time, so it was only natural that we got together last night. And when we met Miu Tlenow, the Venusian cat-man, it was also natural that we head immediately for the Ursa Major Tavern.

"Mewargh!" Tlenow purred, extending and retracting his clawlike fingernails with pleasure as the second drink took hold. "Really it is good to get away from that madhouse."

"What madhouse?" Bill asked.

"Mars."

We sat up straighter. Somehow in the five years that had passed without authentic news from the Red Planet we had taken it for granted that things there had settled down once more to a slow, lethargic normality. We hadn't realized the full impact of Mike, as amplified by the Hustic.

"Those Martians!" Tlenow mewled, his whiskers twitching in agitated disgust. "They are crazy. All crazy. They mate, but they use no sense in how they mate. Like Earthmen. Such complications! They have many different governments with a hundred different political parties, and they talk and talk, vote and vote. They argue.

"Things like Earthmen's gloves they make. Of course they will not fit Martian hands and they carry them only to hit in each other's faces. Then they fight duels.

"They make liquor and drink it, and how crazy-drunk they get. Then, Great Space, they even try to sing!

"They make jokes and play pranks, too, something they never did before."

Tlenow was slit-eyed with amazement at such illogical Martian behavior.

"They do this one day, do that the next. Always they grow more like Venusians or Earthmen, only with not so much sense. What they will do on any tomorrow one can never tell."

He finished his drink and leaned forward.

"They make writing--too much writing--everything in writing--and all of it funny kind. What you Earthmen call--I think--poetry. Yes, that is it. Poetry. And each day gets worser. They never make like that before. By the Seven Black Comets, how they get that way?"

That was when Bill and I knew we had to break our silence.

* * * * *

So the Marties have not yet learned to think for themselves. Five years, after all, is a very short time. Perhaps some day. In the meantime they're nothing but reflections of the more uninhibited and generally screwy aspects of Terence Michael Burke's personality. And I'm afraid they'll share his disturbing ideas of humor.

Do we want anything to do with them? Frankly, I don't know. That's up to you, Citizens of Earth, when you vote on the new treaty.

But don't say I didn't warn you.