Part 1

MARTIAN NIGHTMARE

A novelet by BRYCE WALTON

Three tough, cynical fighting-men of Earth--Danton, Keith, Van Ness--rose from their tomb of forgetfulness ... to find themselves space-wrecked on Mars, the last hope of mankind against the evil and immortal Oligarchs. It was weird, incredible, it was a horrible dream ... but it was real. Or was it?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories January 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_His name was Burton. John R. Burton._

_He was as happy as anyone could expect to be. His wife loved him and he loved his wife. Their children were very well adjusted, as was everyone of course in the New World system._

_Burton worked ten hours a week in a coal mine, though the job was merely one demanding the overseeing of machines. The rest of the week was one of leisure devoted to gardening, hobbies, play, music. There was no more hate, no violence, no feelings of insecurity. It wasn't that everyone loved everyone else particularly. It was just that no one was afraid of the future anymore._

_Sometimes though, Burton had bad dreams. Sometimes they were very bad. In these dreams it seemed that he was somebody else. Someone who--_

_But after he woke up he never remembered the dreams, so, he thought, maybe they didn't matter._

_Burton guessed that what he was in the dreams was too horrible to remember._

* * * * *

Danton sat in the chair before the control bank and stared at his hands until they seemed to stop shaking. It had been a long, long way to Mars. A long, long time in which to think.

Of, for example, who had he been for the last hundred years? He had been someone, someone with a name, a job, a ritual, a wife, kids, everything. A valuable worker, a nice round peg in one of countless millions of nice round holes. Who and what you had been for the past hundred years was certainly a question that could bother you, he thought.

He glanced at Keith and Van Ness. It wasn't bothering them now. They had been two other people for a century also--but they weren't bothered now. They had passed out cold on pre-New World bourbon.

They had better snap out of it, Danton thought a little desperately. The ship had about reached Mars. They had better get up from there.

His hands started shaking again. He got a cigarette lighted and the opiate stuff crawling in his throat. He closed his eyes. For an instant it felt better, hiding in there behind the darkness of his closed lids. But then the thoughts came faster, like schools of irritated fish.

A final war like the last one, destructive beyond memory anyway, was one most of the survivors had been more than happy to forget. They had welcomed reconditioning, the moving into the PLAN, into the New World system of non-violence. People became, largely, depending on the amount of reconditioning necessary, someone else. You can't change solidly laid foundations of thought and still be the same person.

So it was a New World. In it the people were New. Everything starting over again from scratch. A small decentralized population. Beneficent leaders, masters of psychology. No weapons, not even in museums, no conception of war, no fears of tomorrow. There were no enemies on Earth. In fact, the mind was conditioned so that the concept of an enemy was impossible. Outer space was merely a region of lovely stars on clear nights.

Of the few New System soldiers left, most were willing to be reconditioned. Three of them hadn't been willing. Richard Danton, Don Keith, Dwight Van Ness. They had degenerated into drunken pariahs, people without a group with which to identify themselves, lonely, lost, aging and ailing. Finally they did accept reconditioning. Not because they wanted to. But because they had to or go completely insane. Seers, Secretary of Social Security, said this was bad, but that they might be able to bring about an adjustment. It would be difficult, he said, because of involuntary conditioning, but he would see what he could do.

Evidently he had done all right. Danton couldn't remember the subsequent hundred years. But he had been someone. They had blotted him out, fixed him up with another name, twisted ganglia, altered synapsis, probed lobotomy here and there. Everything went, name, identity, the entire business inside and out.

But all the time, Richard Danton had been there, a pattern. A circuit disconnected. When they had needed him, they had merely twisted ganglia back, altered synapsis, probed lobotomy again. And after a hundred years here he was again, resurrected, like a ghost. And when they were done with him, after his assignment was finished, he would go back into the grave, and that someone else would go on living.

But maybe not this time. Maybe not again. This could be a dangerous assignment for him and Keith and Van Ness. They might never get back to Earth, and that might be all right--for them.

He would rather die fighting, as a soldier, than keep on living as someone else, someone he didn't even know.

According to Seers there was a chance that the final war had not been quite so final. The Oligarch Council had evidently escaped Earth in secretly constructed spaceships, destined for Mars. If they had actually gotten to Mars, and had survived, they were there still, and it would be only a matter of time until they returned to Earth and destroyed it.

Other factors made it even more complicated. Earth couldn't defend itself, for one thing. It had no weapons. It had no human being capable of manning a weapon if it had one. Seers had said that the sanity of the world depended on absolute secrecy. The population was never to know anything at all, never to suspect that they might be threatened. Such knowledge, Seers said, would destroy the New System. The people weren't psychologically capable of receiving knowledge of insecurity, not for a long time yet.

But what bothered Danton was--_who have I been for the last hundred years?_

* * * * *

Keith was crawling across the floor, gasping at an oxygen inhalor. The small, thin-faced and cynical soldier got up and sat down. He grinned. "Are we in Valhalla yet, Captain?"

"You still take this whole thing as a joke, Keith?"

"The psyche boys are good," Keith said. "Plenty good. And I still say this is just delusion they're feeding us, on suggestion tape, after good shots of hypnosene."

"Why would they do that?"

"They tried to recondition us, make good little workers out of us. But it didn't take. We don't remember, sure--but that's no sign we were successfully changed. I say we weren't. I got it all figured out, Captain. They're killing us. Mercifully, of course, making us die happy. But we're dying just the same, dying in a dream. A dream of soldiering, of heroics, of sacrifice and high honor. Just the way we'd want it. And instead of waking up, we'll really die, in the line of duty. Like a good soldier should."

"But--"

"I'm not blaming them. I think it's a fine idea. For one thing, we aren't sure it's not really happening, so we'll have to accept it as truth. It's the real thing any way you look at it." Danton saw the grin fade slowly across the mask of Keith's face. "Are we really here, Captain?"

Danton peered into the scope again. "Yes," he whispered.

"Mars, the god of war," Keith said, "awaits his favorite sons."

A big dull reddish ball, like an eyeball, a blood-shot eye. The cone of its giant shadow streaming out, a quadrant of the heavens. And then all at once, as if the eye were closing, it darkened except where the sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of sickly light radiating outward into dissipating orange and brown.

Danton thought of the Oligarchs down there, or what remained of them. The Oligarchs and the slaves they would have brought with them in their ships. In a hundred years they could have multipled considerably. And the Oligarchs themselves, the last of the old world type of faithless human madness--essentially amoral, no empathy, tremendous egotism--filled with the old ideas of class superiority. They destroyed with utter casualness. What advanced stage had their paranoid culture reached in a century? It wasn't something one wanted to think about.

The planet was reaching up like a clenched red fist. He felt the impulse to duck. Sweat ran down his face, itched along his ribs. A hundred years was a long time to be someone else, and now Danton was wondering if he dared trust himself anymore as a soldier. His hands moved again over the controls.

The wrecked Oligarch ship had been found off the Mindanao Deeps by a sub-sea exploring party, brought up, reconditioned, studied. There were records and documents in it, and from these Seers made his decision. He brought back Danton. In secret, of course; send them to out of living graves. They were trained, made into astrogators, cosmologists. Everything in absolute secrecy, of course. And after the ship blasted off for Mars, only the three of them and Seers retained any knowledge that there had been a ship at all. The reconditioners had fixed that up. Those who had found it, the scientists who had studied it, no one remembered a thing.

"Find out what you can, then come back," Seers had said. "Don't fight. If you fight, you might never come back. We would never know then what to do. We can prepare ships like this one, Danton. In secret, of course, send them to Mars. But we don't want to take a chance like that unless we have to. If activity like that ever leaked out to the people, that would be the end of the New System. A sudden blast of insecurity would wreck our delicately balanced new order."

It was a fine ship, Danton thought. The Oligarchs knew machines. They worshiped them. The ship was also a monstrous arsenal, a hurtling fountain of destruction, loaded with hydrogen bombs and something called a proton cannon that could curl a planet up in space like a moth in a flame.

Power, death, throbbing around him, hot and terrible ... the ordnance console key inches from his fingertips. Keith had said he didn't want to go back to Earth. Not and face all that business again. Why not let go, blast, die right here when the attack came? That was a soldier's way!

"I'm going to throw her into an orbit," Danton said.

He saw the weird swirling light of the moons then, the moons of Mars, as the ship slowed in its orbit. Heavy cloud-banks drifting low in colossal valleys. And then he saw the ships. Three of them rising like giant silver beetles.

* * * * *

He didn't know whether he deliberately bungled and failed to lift the ship out of its orbit in time, or whether--but psychologically there weren't such things as accidental blunders. Anyway, now it was too late. Maybe everyone on earth would be wiped out because of it, but Danton blundered, moved too slowly. From the ships a white cloud of released energy flashed, blinded, billowed. His ship bucked and swerved and lurched.

Keith whispered tensely, "I'll take that ordnance, Captain. _I'll take it!_"

Van Ness weaved upright, sucking at an oxygen capsule, mumbling.

Danton said, "They're not firing now. They're curious, maybe. Let them get in close. They'll come in, try to identify us. It must have just occurred to them that this is one of their old ships. Then we fire, clear our course, and run."

"Run, run, get your gun!" Van Ness mumbled.

Danton swung the view-plate. The ships hovered behind, slightly above, coasting, waiting, watching. Danton laughed aloud. For a hundred years he had been dead. Now he was alive. Really alive. His fingers were hot and wet as he gripped the T-bar, and he saw that the ships were improved types. He couldn't escape back to earth now, even if he wanted to. And he didn't have time now to figure out whether he wanted to or not. It was too late now for thinking. He preferred it that way. He said, "They're coming in close now. Keith, this is it!"

Keith nestled into the ordnance chair like a bird. His body was tight with anticipated pleasure. His fingers hooked, spread, began to tremble individually. Death was there, all around.

Without looking up, seemingly without reason, he asked, "You were engaged to marry a very pretty girl when the war ended, weren't you, Captain? Someone named Mara?"

Danton hadn't forgotten. "That's right. I couldn't explain it to her--why I wouldn't be reconditioned. She married someone else. A cybernetics engineer, named George."

"The hell with them, all of them!" Keith said. "You wouldn't want to go back there. That's what they all think about us, Captain. While they need us we're great guys, and afterwards--don't touch. No, Captain, whether this is delusion or the real thing, this is how we were meant to go. We're lucky, Captain!"

Keith manipulated the ordnance keys. Danton's eyes went blind before the incredible flash of kinetic energy release. His eyes closed. Music, lifting, whirling round and round and he was rocking with gentle joyous softness in a cradle of death....

But Danton got his hands up against the darkness, held on to it, pushed it this way and that, got it away from his eyes. He crawled back into the chair, blinked into the viewer. He didn't see the ships now, anywhere. Only the great clenched fist of the war-world, the red world, rushing up, growing with a silent onrushing fury, looming, broadening.

Keith's fingers dug into Danton's shoulder. "I got 'em, Captain! Burned them out like ants on a hot plate. They burned so beautiful...."

The ship had suffered from the repercussion; nothing responded right. Danton shoved more intensifier units into the stern tubes, straightened her a little with a couple of bursts from the steering jets, then power-dived with the tubes roaring.

He fought the controls. The numbness, the roaring, the intolerable rising temperature of the walls. Fighting for some sort of balance to get the ship hurtling in at least a low-level orbit. The walls quivered, then the whining, sighing, falling through a dense sea of twisting vapor.

Danton watched the altimeter, the power gauges, manipulated the power-tube stops. His body was an unfeeling, unconscious circuit of responses. Somehow he got the ship at vertical. The plate brought the landscape up to him, presented it to him like the unveiling work of a mad artist. Up-pushing violence of mountain walls, a valley, forest, dense alien looking stuff, thick and high and entangled and phosphorescent with a pinkish glow drifting like the reflection of a vast roaring furnace.

And--a senseless glimpse of something archaic, too primitive to be real. Only a glimpse, so that immediately after, he decided he must have seen something else. A long trail of armored cars. Amtracs, it seemed, bristling with ancient types of guns. Armored cars. Amtracs. A few hundred years ago they had had them in Earth museums.

The ship roared and shook. The scream of metal penetrated Danton's skull, became part of an iron ball grinding in his head....

No sentience possessed him now, no mind, no body, no hate or joy or hope or confused indecision about his twisted motivations. He thought simply, death possesses me.

* * * * *

But death was only nearby. Life was a power-tube, dimming to a dull yellow, flickering dangerously. Movement was without real substance. Shapes, voices vague and distant. He heard Van Ness and Keith talking once. Someone yelled. There was the burning sigh of the electronic rifles they had evidently been able to salvage.

The light brightened slowly. He sat up. Keith and Van Ness stood beside him. Clothing torn, faces scratched and bleeding. Keith's mouth was tight, his jaw muscles rigid and pale. He turned, held his rifle steady. Van Ness wanted to know if Danton felt all right now, anything else wrong besides the knock on the head.

Danton said he didn't know. "I thought it would be cold here." He was sweating. The air was muggy, quiet. The lake was huge before him, the mountains beyond it gigantic and blue-misted. The lake was glassy and still. Behind him was thick forest, reddish leaves, high trees, thickly entangled, odd flowers, shadows. A feeling of things alive--but of a cautious kind of living. Little eyes waiting and watching in the bushes, on the fringes.

"Out of this valley, on the desert, it would be plenty cold," Keith said.

Danton asked then, "What happened?"

Keith watched the forest warily. "We hit the lake out there, had to swim in."

"So now what?" Van Ness wanted to know.

"We still have a kind of advantage," Danton said. "They don't know who we are, or where. They know nothing."

"Neither do we," Keith said. "There's a chance Seers was wrong about the Oligarchs. Maybe their culture has changed. Maybe they don't intend to attack Earth."

"Their ego couldn't stand to forget their defeat," Danton said. "They had a highly advanced technology that could conceivably control any environment, rather than the other way round. In some ways they were ahead of the rest of the world."

Keith grinned. "That's right, Captain. You're so right."

Danton looked Keith in the eyes. "You mentioned earlier, something about sometimes thinking you should be an Oligarch. You really feel that way, Keith?"

"Why not? We didn't have a choice whose side we would fight on. We were conditioned from the time we were old enough to think, and we fought the Oligarchs for fifty years. Three-quarters of the world's population rubbed out. And then we had a world that didn't want us--unless we were three other people. We fought to destroy the old values, help build a new society. But let's face it, Captain--those old values we destroyed were our own! We helped destroy our own kind of world. So what does it mean? It means we should have fought _for_ the Oligarchs, and that we really sympathize with them. Their system is a war system, probably still is. With them, there would always be a place for a fighting-man. A soldier among the Oligarchs could expect honor and privilege."

Danton had nothing to say. He had thought in a similar way more than once.

Van Ness said, "Wrong, Keith. We've committed ourselves, and now we have to go on to the end of the road."

The words drifted with the wind across the glassy lake. You walked along the road, Danton thought, while the road was visible and you walked it to the end. And neither road nor the end was your own choice. Maybe the only glory was in walking it bravely. But maybe, as Keith had said, they had been on the wrong road. The Oligarchs, had they conquered, would have always provided an honorable place for a soldier. Banners, flags, women, the rise of battle fever, the ecstatic explosions of power, the enemy dead.

Keith fired once into the forest wall. A shape fluttered away over the tops of the trees, then fell, crying at first, then screaming like a woman. "We've been followed by those things for about a mile along the shore edge," Keith said. "They don't seem friendly. They're intelligent. Big, with wings, and old-style weapons. Very old. Explosive powder stuff."

"Martians," said Van Ness.

* * * * *

Danton said, "I caught a look at some human beings just before we hit the lake. Maybe I was seeing things that weren't, but there seemed to be ancient amtracs, old-style cannon, marching men."

Keith nodded. "This whole business is crazy. A highly advanced technology with spaceships in the air--and centuries-old amtracs and gun-powder on the ground! If this is all a dream and we're really on earth in a psyche-cell, somebody's got a devil of an imagination!"

An explosion, then the whine of steel missiles sent the three on their stomachs among the small sharp shells. Danton raked the forest with flash-gun fire.

Finally Danton said, "We have to move."

"Without a plan of action?" Keith said.

"No. Our plan is the same. Find out all we can and return to Earth. Seers has to know. He doesn't want to prepare a secret attack unit to send up here unless he's absolutely sure it's necessary."

"Even if we live long enough to find out something, how do we get back to Earth? By teleportation?"

"We'll have to get a ship, or try," Danton said.

The sound of explosions drifted to them, the flat reverberating roar of bombs. Van Ness looked to the right and said, "That way. And not so far either."

* * * * *

Ten miles from the lake, the three crawled into the dense brush beside the trail. They could hear now the approach of laboring gasoline motors, the shouts of men. Danton waited. He waited tensely, as though somewhere inside of him was a knowledge of what he waited for.

The moons moved across the high valley. The light was clear, still, with a reddish cast. Purple shadows bent and swayed in the slight and cooler wind. Through the odd light, a column of wheezing amtracs came. Broad wheels grinding, coughing engines, voices murmuring, bodies wearily slogging, humans, weary ghosts.

Van Ness whispered, "Looks as though they're in retreat."

Danton nodded. Van Ness said, "The wounded, the dead and the dying. I guess you could say we've come home again."

Danton slowly licked his lips. The fifty-years war against the Oligarchs hadn't been like this. His war had been swift and clean and shiny as the metal cities that went with the bright hot flames of atomic fission. Now the smells of sweating men drifted to him, the smell of blood and of death.

Weary, white-faced, shabbily-uniformed men filing by. Many hobbled, wounded, swinging along in a freakish dance. Crude stretchers carrying others, somewhat resentfully. Amtracs hauled still others, some wounded, others dying, some already dead. The sounds of bombardment edged nearer through the moonlight. The column moved faster. And Danton noticed then that the women were there, uniformed, hardly distinguishable from the men.

The ground jarred. Projectiles screamed. An amtrac rose up in a blossoming cone, fell apart, metal shining and bodies disintegrating. A small detachment swung in squarely toward Danton's position. The three men faded back into deeper concealment.

A tired, thickly-bearded line-officer barked an order. "Thomas! Rennin! Take the bodies away at once. According to the map, there's a disposal mart half a mile east!"

The torn bodies were rolled onto stretchers and carried into the shadows.

Danton thought: some pestilence probably. They have to get rid of the bodies fast. But why under the stress of immediate attack?

The line-officer was saying, "Men. We've been under constant attack for eighty-five days. Our survival depends on orderly retreat until we combine forces with Rudolph's Second Army."

A woman stopped walking. Her face was streaked with dirt. She yelled, "Why doesn't the Power give us some real weapons? With a real power gun we could kill every Redbird that--"

The line-officer brought his revolver up, fired. The back of the woman's head exploded as the flattened bullet came out. The officer's face twitched. "Barrows! Select a man, take her to the disposal mart."

"Yes, sir."

After the body was gone, Danton stared dazedly at the spot where the woman had fallen. The officer was saying, "Any reference to the Powers other than that necessitated by duty and reverence, is punished immediately by execution." Then the officer sat down and looked blankly into the moonlight. That was a quotation from a manual, Danton thought. But the officer--hadn't meant it. He hadn't wanted to shoot the woman. That might be very important to consider.