Part 6

Ed put out the light in his cell, but as he crept into his cot, he held a bit of paper from his coat pocket in one hand. He left his fountain pen open, on top of his clothes. For maybe an hour he lay quietly in the dark, listening to the scattered noises of the troubled night. Then he slept.

He awoke as dawn grayed the east and glanced at once at the paper in his hand, which he had kept outside the blanket. Ed's heart leaped. A message had been written. Perhaps it had taken all night to toil it out at a creeping pace: "_Nipper--argue police--you go Port Smitty--Mars--at once_."

The final _e_ of _once_ was already written, except that a line of it was still being extended. A little dot of wet ink was still laboring across the paper.

Ed had no microscope or pocket lens, but he risked turning on the light. He peered hard. He was not at all sure that he saw anything special. But imbedded in the dark liquid he thought for an instant that he beheld a suggestion of form--impossible or entirely fantastic. Then the tiny minuscule of ink quivered, and the hint was gone.

Ed whispered, so low that he himself could not hear, "Uncle Mitch. I know that you're around--in some form. I wish I understood what you're up to."

Ed tore the message from the sheet of paper, chewed it to a pulp, and spat it on the floor. At least he was destroying concrete evidence that might provoke greater attention than his psyched memories. Of course they would psych him again--that was why they had held him, hoping that he would learn more. But he had learned very little.

* * * * *

The psyching was done. Chief Bronson and Carter Loman knew all that he knew. Now Ed offered his proposition: "Suppose I got to Mars, as Mitchell Prell suggests? I seem to be the only man to contact him. You are aware that I myself haven't more than a wild glimmer of where the trail leads. But you know that I'm badly worried about what a human-and-android conflict can mean, and that I want to break the danger somehow. If you want to find Prell, track me by the best means that you know."

Chief Bronson nodded, musingly.

"Hmm-m--very good!" Carter Loman grunted. "Of course you would prefer to act alone, Dukas, because you are fond of Prell. You offer to combine forces with us only because it is the only way that you can do what you want to do at all. All right, we agree."

"Tickets and passport will be arranged for immediately," Bronson said. "And now there is someone here to see you."

It was Ed's father, angry with him but more angry with the restraint under which his son had been put.

"Damn it, Eddie, I tried to get to you last night, and they sent me away!" he stormed. "And what have you been up to? What's this nonsense about a message from Prell? Damn, has everything gone completely crazy? I was for this man Granger and his return to rustic simplicities; but he's gone wild, too! Isn't there any way to handle what's happening? Phonies, and things from a witch's caldron, but grown to elephant size. And more of them all the time! Where does it stop?... Well, it helps a little that lots of people went out last night breaking up fights. Even some Phonies did that, they say; but should we believe it? Scientists were on the run everywhere, as maybe they should be for inventing so much new trouble. The Schaeffer lab is barricaded. I'm glad for your sensible people, Ed, but can they hold the peace for more than a little while? And would it do any final good if they could?"

Jack Dukas, the "memory man" of old-time flesh, was more like a dad to Ed again, and Ed was almost as glad for that as he was for the awakening of the forces of calm and order.

"Thanks, Dad," Ed said with a cryptic meaning of his own. "It's a small lessening of danger, anyway. It's a fact, though, that the situation, at the moment, is an explosive magazine which one well-placed idiot could set off. And it's hard to see how there could ever be less than many. Say that our population is split three ways. Android, human and that mixed group which is trying to keep them from each other's throats. It's hard to see how the latter can succeed for very long."

For a moment Ed and Jack Dukas were almost close, in spite of differences. Ed was a little reassured.

"I'm going out to Mars, Dad," he said. "With police co-operation. Maybe to find my uncle. And--who knows?--maybe even to find some useful answers."

Jack Dukas shrugged. "More science, no doubt," he said. "Well, anyway, good luck."

The brief spell of companionship was broken.

For a moment Ed was tense with the thought of precious time possibly wasted, chasing off to the Red Planet, when perhaps he should be trying to hunt down the perpetrators of offenses to a new biology--in vitaplasm. He knew that time remained still desperately short, with nuclear hell building up. But a choice had been made, and he sensed that it was the best one.

Ed and Barbara went to see Les Payten that morning. He lay in a bed, his body encased in an armor of plastic, under which fluids circulated. He had mended enough to listen and speak. Ed partly explained his intentions. About them, Les showed a mixture of a sick man's insight and weariness: "I hope we'll see each other again, Ed. And that the world will still be around. And that you won't be changed too much--strong, weak, big or little. Because I've got things figured out _for me_ at last, Ed. Granger is right, as far as I am concerned. I was a romantic kid, but now I've had enough! The stars are still farther out of reach than we realize. Got to fight the murdering Phonies and all of the vitaplasm menace, no matter what. Because there never was a menace like it--not to me." Les grinned wanly. "So long, pals."

In a park, some hours later, Barbara and Ed walked in the beautiful dusk, while the arch of silvery murk that had been Luna masked a few of the first stars. Something with long webbed wings was visible in silhouette against it for an instant--another creature that never existed before. It added a chill to their low mood. Ed was thinking that he must say goodbye to Barbara, too, very soon, and to all the chaotic wonder and charm that was Earth. Earth maybe in its last days.

Barbara said, "I wish I were going along, Eddie."

"So do I. Babs, go out to the asteroids. Like my mother. It's safer there."

"I _meant_ my wish, Ed," Barbara protested earnestly. "Of course, a girl is still sometimes rated as a nuisance that a man has to take extra pains to look after--no companion for one to concentrate on the dangers ahead. Maybe it's true."

He looked at her sharply and gulped hard. But gay little bells seemed to tinkle in his head. "Maybe a lot of things," he commented. "But I think you, as much as anybody, know what we're up against. Possible death, of course, which could be permanent. Or some fantastic loss or change of identity. How can we guess just what? If you can take all that mystery and hardship, too--well, I won't say no. Maybe if you were Mrs. Ed Dukas we could have Bronson provide your tickets to Mars."

Her smile came out, like the sun. "You're heartlessly matter-of-fact and unromantic, Ed," she told him.

He drew her into the shadow of a tree. A couple of minutes later, when he released her, they both looked dazed--as though, crazy as life was, it still could be heaven. She was beautiful. He'd never seen anyone so beautiful.

Fifteen hours later they were aboard the _Moon Dust_.

V

As the ship rose on its column of fire some of the old love of distance and enigma came back to Ed. There was also a sense of adventurous escape, like that of city workers of centuries ago, when, chucking business and office routines, they had rushed to the country on weekends to regain a little of primitive nature while they scorched a steak over a smoky fire in the woods.

On the _Moon Dust_ there were more women and children than men: refugees from danger. But would old Mars be much safer? Didn't it now belong to the same human civilization, with its dark undercurrents?

The Dukases were smoothly hurled across the vast trajectory to Mars. They landed at a high south-temperate latitude, not far below the farthest extent limit of the polar cap; though now, in summer, it had dwindled to a mere cake of deep hoarfrost a few hundred miles across and on high ground. Around this remnant stretched a yellow plain made up of crusting mud, swiftly drying lakes scummed with the Martian equivalent of green algae, and white patches of ancient-sea salt and alkali.

But Port Smitty itself was in a wide, shallow valley, or "canal," a bit farther north. Its many airdomes, necessary to maintain an atmosphere dense enough and sufficiently oxygenated to sustain human life, loomed among vast greenhouses and thickets of tattered, dry-leaved plants. The central dome was topped by a statue of old Porter Smith, this region's first human inhabitant; he was still alive but long gone from the Mars he had loved. For he had associated himself with the building of star ships.

Port Smitty already boasted a population of half a million. And there were other cities of almost equal size. On Mars, many of the first rejuvenated had settled. And many colonists of every sort had come there since.

On the rusty bluff overlooking the city were the remains of a far older metropolis--towers, domes and strange nameless structures for which anything manlike could have no use. Fifty million years ago the Martians, like the people of the Asteroid Planet, had been wiped out in war.

Ed Dukas and his bride rode by tube train from the flame-blasted spaceport to the city. Their hotel room overlooked a courtyard lush with earthly palms and flowers. Birds twittered and flitted from branch to poppy bloom. From somewhere in the hotel came dance music.

Their room was supposed to be energy-shielded, but Ed remained cautious. He merely left his penpoint bared in his coat pocket, with the envelope of an old letter. He had already told Barbara all he knew about Uncle Mitch's message and had added some wild guesses. So now she gave her husband a smile of understanding as he hung his coat carefully on a chair. Then she came into his arms.

Later that evening, dancing, they covered their wariness carefully. They might be under observation in any of a hundred different ways: by probe beams, hidden cameras, or by individuals, android or human, whom they did not know. In spite of old loyalty, Ed Dukas was not entirely at ease with the thought of contacting Mitchell Prell. Yet, he wished to avoid being trailed so that he could act alone and separate from the dictatorial and often panic-stricken opinions of others.

On Mars there had been considerable violence, too, though there had been no gliding, sinuous things that brought nocturnal terror. But here, too, there was a mingling of android and human being, with no visible marks to distinguish the one from the other, though to many the difference was as great as that between man and werewolf.

Barbara seemed to grow sleepy in Ed's arms as they danced. Ed yawned slightly. So they drifted from the room and back to their own quarters.

Ed pulled the old envelope from the pocket of the coat on the chair. As he had hoped, a message was traced waveringly on it: "_Go Port Karnak--then E.S.E. into desert._"

Both Ed and his wife knew that Martian deserts surpassed all earthly conceptions of desolation. They looked at each other. The challenge was still in Barbara's eyes. The fact that she could carry a pack was a matter that had been settled long ago.

Now Ed risked speaking--in the lowest of audible whispers: "So, instead of going to bed, as people in our position should, we start traveling--fast."

He felt the safety pouch under his belt. Personal recordings were in it: tiny cylinders, a pair for each of them. A precaution. In the vaults on Earth there should still be others. But one could not always be sure of those. Some had disappeared.

As memory of what he thought he had seen in a tiny ink drop still clutched rather frighteningly at Ed Dukas's brain. It was a hint of how Mitchell Prell wrote his messages--in an utterly simple and heroic way, but with fantastic, dream-shot implications. Could it be part of android flexibility? Well, probably his fancy had tricked him, because things couldn't be that odd. Still....

Often Ed had felt bitter over the confusions created by the advance of science. But now enigmas led him on as thrillingly as ever. There had to be wonders ahead, for thinking of Mitchell Prell without thinking of new science was impossible.

"Let's go, Babs," he whispered.

Casually, like ordinary guests checking out, they put two light valises into the conveyer and dropped to the main floor by elevator. The rest of their stuff they left behind. They paid their bill and took an auto cab to the central tube station. In the washrooms they changed from leisure clothes to the rough gear used in the Martian wilderness: light-weight vacuum armor and oxygen helmets equipped with air purifiers and small radios--all fitted over light trousers and shirts. The remaining contents of their discarded valises they transferred to rucksacks.

In the station they mingled with farmers, miners and homesteaders. Couples such as themselves were common on Mars; they were going out to make their fortunes.

They bought their tickets to Port Karnak. Ed and Barbara looked around them. A half-dozen men among the waiting passengers wore no oxygen helmets. True, this underground depot was pressurized, but the outer thinness and oxygen-poverty of the Martian air had to be prepared for. The absence of helmets, then, almost had to be the mark of the android. To keep its vital processes going, the versatile vigor of vitaplasm merely disintegrated a tiny bit of its atomic substance, to make up for the shortage of chemical energy.

Ed and Barbara boarded the train with the crowd. Much of this underground system of transportation had merely been converted to human beings' use from that which had remained from the ancient culture of Mars. Behind the projectilelike coaches, close fitting in the tubes, air-pressure built up. Acceleration was swift. Covering the thousand-mile distance to Port Karnak took twenty minutes.

Once arrived, Ed bought the additional equipment they needed; then in a small restaurant they ate a last civilized meal. They took an auto bus out along a glassed-in, pressurized causeway and descended at the final stop, beside a few scattered greenhouses, the outermost of which provided the city with fresh, earthly vegetables.

Here the desert was at hand, utterly frigid at night, under the splinters of stars. Deimos, the farther moon, hung almost stationary in the north. Irregular in shape, it looked like a speck of broken chinaware, just big enough to make its form discernible. Probably it was a small asteroid which the gravity of Mars had captured.

The Dukases began to plod. The desert came under their boots, and the solidity of the ground gave way, gradually, to a difficult fluffiness, like that of dry flour. It was millions of square miles of dust the color of rusted iron, which, in part, it was. Dust, ground to ultimate fineness by eons of thin, swift wind. Under the dim light of the sky, colors dropped in tone to a monotonous grayness that only faintly revealed the nearest dunes, and showed plumes of soil moving on the wind like ghosts. The dust made a constant, sleepy soughing against their helmets, like an invitation to death.

Barbara pressed Ed's gloved hand, as if in reassurance, and he pressed hers in return. Maybe they had eluded all pursuit or probe-beam tracking. Certainly the blowing dust itself would be an effective screen against the most refined radar device. Yet to vanish from the view of men could mean another kind of danger. It came to Ed that even when Mars had teemed with millions of its own inhabitants, perhaps no one had trod within a mile of where he and his wife were now walking.

The Dukases marched on for an hour without saying anything. But during a momentary rest Barbara gripped Ed's arm, thus establishing a firm sonic channel, so that they could talk without using their helmet radios, which might betray them.

"I hope we're not too crazy, Ed," she said. "Going out into a wilderness like this, on the basis of a couple of strange notes, and with blind faith that somehow we'll be guided. I hope; I hope!"

Her tone was light and courageous, and he was more than ever glad.

"Think of our muddled home world, and make that a prayer," Ed said. "We might be doing something to help."

So they kept up their march through the night and into the weirdly beautiful dawn. The desert was rusty dun. The sky was deep, hard blue. The dunes were dust-plumed waves, in which a footprint was quickly lost. The rocks were wind-carven spires. Earth was the bluish morning star. It looked very peaceful, denying the need for haste. Its ring was a nebulous blur.

Barbara and Ed sucked water into their mouths through the tubes which led back from their helmets to the large canteens in their rucksacks. They swallowed anti-fatigue and food tablets. For a moment they even removed their oxygen helmets. There was no great harm in that; only the distention of blood vessels under swiftly lowered air pressure and an ache and ringing of eardrums, and of course the stinging dryness of the Martian cold against their cheeks. Forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, below zero, it was just then.

"No more clowning," Ed said as they replaced their helmets. "We might get dazed by oxygen starvation and forget what we're doing."

They kept up their march, through the morning, past the almost warm Martian noon, and on into the frosty chill that came long before sunset. They were still plodding on when it was dawn once more. In spite of anti-fatigue capsules, they were getting pretty groggy.

In his breast pouch Ed had his pen and the envelope on which the latest message from Mitchell Prell had been inked. Now, surely, there had been time enough. So he ventured to disturb the writing materials. There were more words on the envelope: "_True on course--keep moving_."

So they continued to follow the pointer of their small gyrocompass, set to stab precisely toward east-southeast. Ed no longer questioned an odd miracle. It was simply there, and he was grateful.

An hour later Barbara glimpsed fluttering movement near by: a fleck of bright yellow. Then it was gone behind a large chip of stone. Then it appeared again. Ed saw it, too, for an instant. It fluttered, it chirped plaintively. It was an impossibility in the wastelands of Mars, or anywhere else on the Red Planet, outside of an air-conditioned cage. It was a small, earthly bird. A canary.

Barbara stared at it. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and scared. The tired droop of her cheeks deepened.

"Darling," she said rather lamely. "I think that fatigue is about to get the better of us."

"Think again," Ed said.

"I guess you're right," she answered. "Even without vitaplasm, it's not much of a stunt to give a guided missile or a spy-robot the form of a little bird, with television eyes. And a Midas Touch weapon, or something equally unpleasant, built into it. At the hotel in Port Smitty, it was unrecognizable among the other caged canaries. Here, though, it's unmistakably identified. Which means that whoever is guiding it--the police looking for your Uncle Mitch or friends of Granger's, or whoever else--don't care any more that we know what it is. We're helpless now--they think."

A dull fury came to Ed Dukas. He might have guessed that all chances of their eluding surveillance would have been countered carefully. This birdlike mechanism must have followed them all the way from Port Smitty, keeping just out of sight.

Then a more hopeful idea hit him. But reason conquered it. "No," he said aloud, gripping Barbara's shoulder so that she could hear. "If the pseudo-canary was Uncle Mitch's guide for us, it would have revealed itself sooner, and the messages on paper would not have been necessary."

In a flash Ed drew his own Midas Touch and fired it at the place among the broken rocks where the canary had just vanished. At a little distance there was the usual spurt of incandescence, fringed now with red dust. But from the projecting boulders near its base, a small yellow form spurted with a faint and musical twitter of mockery. Then a heavy voice spoke--one which neither Ed nor Barbara recognized just then:

"Better luck next time, robot lovers. Lead on!"

Thereafter, the false canary was careful not to show itself. And Ed was left with his frustrated anger, and with other uncertain thoughts. What if the written messages had not come from Mitchell Prell at all, but from someone else with an unknown purpose? Or, what if they were from Uncle Mitch, but had been prepared long ago and left to be presented to him, Ed Dukas, by means of some mechanical agent? What if--well--many things.

Using his tiny portable radar unit to locate the bird drew only a blank. Perhaps the little mechanism with a radio speaker for a voice was effectively shielded against such detection, even at short range.

To attempt evasive action would be a waste of time and waning energy. There was nothing to do but go on, see what developed, and trust to luck. There was the certainty that real pursuit would come, but what shape it would take remained unknown.

As Ed and Barbara plodded on through the day, their minds became fuzzy with weariness. Once, in a kind of retreat from present harsh facts, Ed's thoughts touched a vivid daydream that he'd had before, of a planet of some star. He looked down at imaginary dry ground under imaginary feet and saw that each pebble under the strange, brilliant sunshine had a little hole in it. And something shaped like a cross, with four rough, brownish-gray arms that could bend in any direction, scrabbled away, flat against the soil, its equipment glinting. The thickets all around were stranger than those of Mars.

Yes, it was just a daydream, originating from within himself, like an old, half-buried hope of some distant exploration. He wondered if it could ever still have any fulfillment, or if that even mattered any more? Perhaps, for all he knew, his wife and he were now headed for an even stranger region.

Ed shook his head to clear it. He did not want to disturb the envelope in his pouch too often. To expose the ink to the dried-out Martian air, while the writing was in progress at hour-hand speed, might spoil a vital message. But at last he chanced it. It seemed that the writer was not much troubled by the presence of the bird-thing or what it might mean.

Barbara and Ed read avidly: "_Base of capped granite rock before you. Lab._"

Barbara nodded toward a formation which loomed a half mile ahead in the freezing cold of late afternoon. The slab, balanced crosswise on a slender pinnacle, identified it beyond doubt, though there were other similar spires around it. It cast its shadow on the sunlit dunes. Or was all of that dark, irregular patch shadow?

Ed Dukas and his bride had not enjoyed the luxury of natural sleep for a long time. But summoning their flagging strength, they hurried forward. Ed felt that at last he was approaching the solution of ten-year-old enigmas.

The darker area at one side of the capped rock was not all shadow. But the Dukases had scant attention for the bluish masses of plushy stuff that grew in this aridity. At another time it might have been fascinating, for it was vegetation related to the android as moss is related to a man. It was a growth of vitaplasm--another of Mitchell Prell's experiments. But Ed and Barbara had no chance to ponder this.