Part 2

This time the banks functioned, and Red ducked down out of sight. The panel slid slowly into the wall. The Officer standing framed in the opening was grossly huge, with a pasty dead white face and expressionless glassy eyes. His voice was low and hollow. He stepped inside and the door slid closed. Ward felt a smothering trapped cloud enveloping him, greater than any he had known so far, thick like poison air. Even the Executive Officer of a luxuriant space liner like the _Sol_! The inhumanness of the creature was obvious to Ward, but he could understand why it wouldn’t be to those uninformed. A little insight made all the difference. Why hadn’t Red needled him as he stood here? The cage, of course, but then--besides no one would suspect a passenger listed as Professor Limerick, harmless botanist and--

“You will come with me, Professor Ward.” It wasn’t a question.

“You must have the wrong compartment. I’m Professor Limerick. I’m going to study the indigenous spores along the canal at--”

“Doctor Ward, please,” the phlegmatic voice said. “You’ve suspected we are telepathic. Now you know. It is a superior weapon. We know you killed one of us in Washington, and that you registered as Professor Limerick and his assistant--” the cumbersome head swayed. “By the way, where is he?”

“In the gaming rooms,” said Ward quickly. “He ... er ... plays chess.”

“You will come with me now,” repeated the monotonous voice. The body shifted slightly.

“Will I?” said Ward. “You have no such right. As a passenger of--”

“You are a labeled psycho. I have full authority to confine you in a psychocell until we reach Mars. There is no other way. Our other methods have failed. For a human male, you have rather a finely developed mind. You will die enroute of--natural causes. A ship can never be held responsible for what happens to a psycho’s unpredictable nervous system in space.”

Ward’s eyes circled the room. Red! For God’s sake, Red! The cage of mercenaries rustled. The Mo-Sanshon retreated instinctively, then suddenly, with amazing agility, jumped between Ward and the cage. “It is too late,” it said. “We shall take care of the cage for you. We shall release it in space.” He reached for Ward.

He would have fought, but he knew there were others waiting outside. Red had said so, and he believed Red. The important thing was to clear this room long enough for Red to take the cage out and conceal it somewhere on the great liner.

“I’ll come,” he said. It eased his badly depressed ego to admit the obvious.

* * * * *

Blackness and indescribable pain indefinitely prolonged, intermingled with a kind of eternity in the stygian night of the psychocell. There was no time in the blackness, so that forever and now, all concepts of time, merged into only pain. The Mo-Sanshon were killing him with sound.

There would be no evidence. The pain impinged with hideous slowness, played over his nerves like liquid flame. It coursed through his veins, his spine, until he shook and twitched with agony for which there is no speech interpretation. It exploded again and again in his mind, and grew steadily into a monstrous continuous hell.

He was aware of periods of screaming and slobbering. He remembered indefinite episodes in which he was on his feet, hopping and jerking catatonically like a mad electric marionette. Every nerve cell jiggled; each separate nerve was erratic anguish.

Sometime later, still in the timeless blackness, he was stiffly outstretched on his face, his lips murmuring in a salty-tasting pool, either blood, sweat, or both, making hoarse, rattling animal noises.

What a way to die! How many others would die this way, or in even more ingeniously inhuman ways, beneath the emotionless alien dictates of the Mo-Sanshon!

And, sometime after that, he discovered that the ghastly torture had stopped. His body reacted like rubber stretched to maximum, then abruptly released. He was rolling, sobbing in an ecstasy of freedom.

He heard the sliding of a grate, and saw a narrow slit of pale light. He couldn’t move toward the sound, and even the harsh whisper had little reality for Ward.

“Doc. Doc. It’s me, Red. You still kicking?”

Ward listened for a long time before he finally heard a voice resembling his. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“I finally found the subsonic generator and reversed it. Have to do it that way, gradually, or the shock kills you. Took quite a while. I hid the cage down in the cargo hanger, and I stay down there and guarded it most of the time. They’ve searched almost everywhere, but I keep moving it from place to place. If you want to know how I got in good with the duty watch down there, it cost me a hundred platinum credits. And don’t ask me how I got the credits. You sure you’re all right now?”

“Guess so. Little weak. What are you going to do now?”

“This is the climax of the ‘Hounds of the Void’ picture,” said Red. “The hero is going to get you out of here. I’m going to wreck the _Sol_. In the confusion we can escape.”

“Wreck the--!” Ward subsided in the darkness, resigned.

“It’s simple, Doc. I’m going to destroy the forward fuel-injectors. The braking rockets won’t work then, and everybody aboard will have to bail out in air-sleds. They’ll never notice us in all the bedlam. We hope.”

“But the cage of mercenaries...?”

“Take that along in an air-sled. We won’t be the only ones that’ll grab up some excess luggage.”

“But Red,” whispered Ward. “You can’t do that until we get inside Mars gravity. By that time the Executive Officer will start working on me again. I couldn’t stand another dosage, Red.”

That thin cold laugh again. Ward didn’t know why he shuddered. “These psychocells fool your duration sense, Doc. We’re already inside Mars gravity. You been in there a long time. Here’s some food concentrate. Now rest up and be ready. See you.”

* * * * *

Later, Ward’s tautly waiting senses were jarred by a thunderous explosion. For a moment it seemed the whole ship would fall apart as the liquid oxygen and its catalyst power units beneath the control turret went off. Even inside the padded walls of his psychocell, Ward could hear the repercussions of the dreadful explosions--cries and screams of fear, horror, confusion, mass hysteria. From an inter-ship audio in the corridor outside his cell door, he heard the Captain’s frantic desperate tone, the voice of a man unused to emergencies.

“What has happened down there, Thomas?”

“Forward fuel-injectors completely destroyed, sir. Braking rockets beyond repair.”

Panic was ill-concealed in the Captain’s voice now. “Break out pressure suits. And prepare air-sleds! Neutralize gravity plates! Abandon ship on signal!”

The _Sol_ was a doomed ship. She was well inside Mars’ maximum gravity pull, and even its tellalloy hull couldn’t stand the unbraked friction of its inevitable roaring drive. The neutralized gravity procedure of the Captain was a frantic irrational command, such a method being employed on asteroids and moons or such byway stops. The _Sol_ would soon blister and melt and smash into Mars, a charred shell.

The door opened quickly. The Executive Officer’s gross mass filled the glaring light of the opening. Ward struggled to his feet, hopelessly unprepared for fight. He wasn’t an aggressive man, physically, and had never been athletic. But he knew the theoretical value of attack, and he leaped with all his minimized strength straight at the massive barrel chest.

Then they were struggling in the narrow, shuddering corridor. The creature made no sound, but fought with a stolid, elephantine power, without emotion or expression. And Ward was like tinsel in those alien arms. His clawing hands found no flesh, but only thick, leatheroid syntheskin, hard and unresilient. He struggled, writhed, and struck frantically, but nothing about this creature was vulnerable to such an attack. His fists were bruised and smashed. The creature’s arms tightened in inexorable jerks about him. His brain was swelling, preparing to burst....

The sound was familiar now, the sharp _thunggg_ of Red’s needle-gun. The plopping sound as it pierced the anthropomorphic. He felt the creature stiffen and its arms flew away from Ward, flailing in terrible anguish. An inhuman cry rang in his ears. He saw Red crouched there in that tigerish, fiendish manner he had displayed in the Federal Building.

Again he was watching the incredible, reeling metamorphosis--the rapid disintegration of that towering organism into--

Nothing remained but some buttons and a large zipper talon.

As they ran up the corridor, now growing noticeably warmer from the terrific friction on the hull, Ward’s strength seeped slowly back into his veins, and his eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Soon he and Red were molecules in a surging agitated stream of a running, shouting, stamping and utterly frantic mob. No one noticed them in the bedlam.

Suddenly Red grabbed Ward’s hand. “Trust me, Doc. I’ll take the cage. They will recognize you, and I think I can make it all right. We’ll both take different air-sleds. See you.”

Ward yelled--but Red was gone in the bedlam. But what could he have said? How could he have objected? It was logically the best way. He trusted Red because he had to. Ward fought his way through the yammering crowds, got his pressure suit, entered an air-lock and climbed into the spherical cramped interior of a jam-packed air-sled.

The Ensign at the controls was visibly trembling. Two ancient dowagers were hysterically screaming like frightened parrots. A chubby, bejeweled Martian Monel Metals representative was taking para-pills to quiet his nerves, enough to kill a horse. He passed out. The daughter of Vasco Von Belscon, who practically owned the Space Lines, was clinging to a young man who was, in turn, clinging to someone else and mumbling fearfully about the obviously untrue axiom that everything would be all right.

“This--this sled is overcrowded,” quavered the Ensign. “Be calm and don’t try to cause trouble. We’ll be lucky if we don’t smash up. I don’t think our levitation plates are sufficiently heterodyned for this great a load. And there’s no adjustment can be made at this short notice.”

“See here,” yelled Ward, “why commit suicide then?”

The Ensign turned a wan face. “I’ll try to coast her in. Perhaps the balance is such that a long trajectory and a crash landing is possible.”

Then the single light in the air-lock flashed twice. The lock opened, and the air-sled catapulted out with the outrushing atmosphere. Awed, helpless screams reverberated through the jammed interior as they watched the upward hurtling ball of Mars. A reddish crescent blur, with directly below a wide long crimson streak; to the side was the fading radiance of Deimos’ disc, while to the other side the planet seems to slumber in a darkness more profound than that of oceanic space, the black tomb where Phobos had just died.

The many air-sleds disgorged by the _Sol_ were scattered so that only one or two others were visible in the far distance. And plunging down and away in a smoking trajectory that would take it almost clear around the planet, the _Sol_ was crashing to her doom.

And, as far as Ward was concerned, so was the air-sled.

The geography of Mars was discernible. Ward saw the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom, soon obliterated by mountains; the rusted tundras of Taclos bordered by the thousand-mile-long, towering mountain chain of the Aljontors passed beneath them. On the other side was the seemingly endless red desert expanse that sloped into the artificial Cehlaz Sea and the ancient city of Marsport, formerly Ogolkor.

“I think we can crash-land,” said the Ensign faintly. “We could be lighter though.” Ward looked down. They were cutting through incredibly rarefied air. The sky was cloudless, of an intensely dark blue shade that spoke at once of a thinned atmosphere. They were crashing directly into the great clay desert. Well, that’s where he’d been trying to get all the time, but now he didn’t have his mercenaries with him.

The desert--a blazing expanse of ferric oxidized clay, a brilliant red, glazed by centuries of heat and wind until it glistened like the side of a vast porcelain bowl. Veins of millions of cracks that were really gigantic chasms crossed it like the roadways of millions of mad engineers. Deep down in those catacombs were the intricate, unexplored regions of the Mo-Sanshon and practically the whole insect species remaining on Mars. Part of the folklore and legend of the earliest known history of surface tribes, they had been feared, revered, studied, ignored, and ridiculed by successive stages of surface civilization.

A strained, paralyzed silence pervaded the spheroid. Not even a whimper broke it.

“This is it,” shouted the Ensign hysterically, and Ward closed his eyes as a long horrible jarring grind seemed to rip his nerves to pieces....

* * * * *

The red desert was an incredible desolation of dehydrated, shimmering emptiness before Ward’s blurred and burning eyes. Dry, gasping heat, enhanced by thin air filled with fine particles of rust. The ancient, devastated planet kept clinging to life; Ward had often wondered why.

The clay on which he was outstretched was like burning metal against his bruised body. Through pain-mist, he saw the twisted wreckage of the air-sled about a hundred feet away. Low hills that looked unbelievably far away--everything wavering feverishly through the shimmering haze. Then he looked down the length of his body at his right leg. It was crushed, swollen, blue, with little sharp bone splinters edging through tattered flesh.

He unscrewed his helmet and unzippered his pressure suit, to crawl out of it painfully with the shattered leg. He lay, gasping, his fingers scraping along the glazed clay. Phobos was setting in the East again. Deimos was a crimson-rimmed eye, hesitating above the desert before blinking out. He’d been out for quite a while. No other figures were stirring in the yellow moonlight, the startlingly bright moonlight as clear as Earth dusk. Probably all the passengers were dead, or there would be some sign of life, unless those who survived had wandered away.

He gritted his teeth as tears of pain smarted in his eyes; he commenced dragging himself along. He kept crawling. Deimos had set. A thick darkness settled over him, and bitter cold. And, sometime later, just as Phobos rose brightly in the rarefied air, he was stopped by a gaping dark depth of fissure. He had gone as far as he could go toward--

--Where? There wasn’t a place for him now. He wanted to see the end of the Mo-Sanshon’s dreams of conquest, and he wondered if he ever could, now.

The whining of a jet-car spiraled toward him. The sound of it died, as he saw its shadow settle on the gleaming surface of the desert clay. A Martian make, from the sound, new style. A figure emerged and walked toward him. Soon she was close enough to distinguish in the soft glow of the moonlight.

An unattractive girl was very exceptional. But no less exceptional than beauty such as this girl displayed boldly and proudly. She was running swiftly toward him, the thin gauze garments styled by Martian women moulding her body like wet silk. The soft thin boots of desert _jhan’s_ hide made no sound on the stone-hard clay. Her shadow elongated across the softly glowing brilliance of the surface like shading in a Rulahn three-dim painting.

Suddenly, intuitively, Ward’s skin crawled with horror, and he tried to drag himself away to the edge of the bottomless crevice. Then her arms were reaching down. Her shadow covered him like a shroud. Her hands clutched his jacket and pulled him away from the brink of the abyss.

Ward could sense them now even before they touched him. Their alien radiations impinged on his raw nerves now like a mental file. She appeared so human. But then you touched her, and felt those terrible alien tendrils in your brain, and you knew--

And from some deep reservoir he summoned the strength to act. He grabbed frantically for those shapely, but synthetic legs.

One of them jerked out of reach, but both his hands closed over the other. He heaved sidewise, and the beautiful bronzed torso went over him. Half of it dangled down into the crevice. Her legs flailed for traction. A low grunting as of effort came up stolidly from the chasm, as he tried with rapidly waning strength to push her over. But her arms dug in while she struggled in a frothing sea of titian-colored, synthetic hair that shone in the moonlight like liquid copper. Great surges of alien power battered at his rebounding mind as he fought. The body lifted and the perfect oval face edged into view, twisted with effort. Even, pearly teeth glistened with strain. The weird, intangible light of the whole Mo-Sanshon shown on that rigid expressionless face--no emotion, no human consciousness. A face from an antediluvian hell, with instinctual motivations lost in the slime of time.

Ward called up another ounce of reserve and she cried out as she went almost entirely over the edge of the chasm. She was clinging now with only one leg and arm. He was pushing against that face, beating desperately, sobbing, beating with smashed fists against a beautiful face like thick leather.

And then something emerged into the moonlight out of the crevice.

Ward, entomologist though he was, found it hard to realize that he was looking at a kind of Corynocoris Distinctus almost a third as large as a human body. He fell back before it, crawling, dragging himself like a groveling dog. Hideous, unworldly creature, with six horny legs, a pair of popping-out eyes, two shining _ocelli_ which looked straight into the rapidly frosting air, and a long, ferocious, quivering beak partly hidden behind one of the forelegs. The furry, spiny horror jumped at him. A sickening stench enveloped him as the body covered him, the legs pinning him in as in a cage.

Ward felt something insane creeping into his consciousness. He felt his rationality, such as remained, leaking out through his tortured eyes like blood. He prayed for a quick death, now that Red had the cage and would release the mercenaries. What did it matter about him? He was washed up anyway, and--

The titan-haired pseudo-woman with her Dianaesque body and her dead eyes, was on her feet and stood familiarly beside the distorted crab-like Corynocoris. Very difficult to believe that they might be from the same stalk. But Ward’s senses were dulled now. He lay helplessly waiting. He had lost much blood and had been drained of energy. Her form shifted hazily like a mirage. She must be desperate, filled with burning hatred of him, burning white-hot, and her emotionless, stolid voice was more horrible because of that.

“You did not bring the cage from the ship. But you know where it is, and other information which we demand.” A statement. “You must come with me to the Cavern of the Queen.”

She said nothing more, only made a gesture and the Corynocoris dragged him away. Down into the chasm, down further than Ward dared think about, and through corridors and labyrinthine passages that glowed with a strange phosphorescent effulgence. And reeked with some other vague, intangible quality of alienness that filled Ward’s fevered brain with horror.

Mists cleared, thickened, swirled, died and solidified; consciousness returned in degrees of awareness, stirred with nightmare. And, some time later, he heard the toneless voice of the sexless beauty say simply:

“Our Queen. Your conqueror.”

* * * * *

He shook foggy poisonous vapor from his head and sat up. He was in a gigantic cavern of ominous, crushing size, a roughly arching height that disappeared into steamy vapor. Stalactites and stalagmites barred the openings of numerous side tunnels like monstrous teeth in gaping mouths.

From somewhere came the monody of dripping waters. A sickening, silent iridescence filled the chamber of horrors with a clear yellow light. Ward’s eyes focused on--

He shrank back away from the awesome height and the narrow slit of white light high, high above through the mist that might have been the new Martian sun. His eyes kept returning to the thing in the middle of the cavern floor. It rested in a transparent plastic bowl that sat on top of a huge iridescent bell-shaped stalagmite built up through thousands of years of dripping calcareous water.

Inside the bowl rested a giant slug-like body. It exuded a greyish glow as it pulsed and shimmied. Two vast compound eyes looked out into the cavern and a number of simpler eyes moved slowly about with a placid kind of rhythm.

“The Queen,” he whispered, repeating the word of the woman-creature. He’d thought it part of a nightmare. His whisper echoed violently through the cavern like a rising wind of fear. The Queen of the Mo-Sanshon. The Queen Mother. Summation, final cause, goal, archetype, of the State.

The woman-creature moved, eyes fixed on the bowl as though communicating.

She finally turned toward where Ward crouched helplessly on the cold, moist stone, his crushed leg projecting out uselessly. The nerveless face moved, gave out sounds like frost. “Our Queen has decided. You know where the cage of mercenaries is. You had it on the _Sol_. Because of your inferior nervous system which is so vulnerable to attack, you will soon give us the information we want. You and the cage are all that stands in our way.”

“I don’t know where it is,” said Ward truthfully. “So regardless of what you do to my inferior nerves, I can’t tell you where it is. Someone else took it with them from the _Sol_. Of course you don’t believe me.”

The great sentient blob of breeding-brain machinery called the Queen Mother, pulsed on without perturbation. The creature beside him seemed unaffected; yet both of them must be trembling with fear, hate and indecision. An organization of females. And up there was the one Queen Mother for the lot of them who layed all the eggs of her species, and dictated the policies for the rest. The workers, soldiers, nurses--everyone was female. Even those who had assumed male humanoid form, such as the Executive Officer on the _Sol_ and the Guard in the Federal Building, they were also female.

And the male--those representatives, those voters of humanoid cultures--where were they? They didn’t exist as such. They were simply created as mates for the younger Queens. After the marriage flight they died, after a brief wholly utilitarian span devoted solely to the continuation of the Colony.

And he, Ward, a lowly Male, stood in their way. Ward reasoned that only through intense study over centuries of time had they been able to grasp enough humanoid concepts to even be able to recognize such an impossible situation. He, a lowly male--part of a ruling class!

A twenty-foot, brown, chitinous form scurried ferociously out of the shadows and rushed toward Ward. He tried to rise and escape, but his shattered, swollen leg stopped him in a burst of blinding pain.

It was an incredibly big giant of the Myriapoda class, having a long hard shiny body with many similar pairs of legs, each as large as Ward’s finger. He plainly saw, without benefit of microscope now, the pair of antennae, three pairs of mouth parts, two groups of simple _ocelli_ which ogled him hungrily. And then Ward’s fevered, shocked consciousness was concentrating on the poison fangs projecting out from its first body segment.

He knew they were intended for him.

* * * * *