Part 1

THE DERELICT

BY WILLIAM J. MATTHEWS

The end of the trail ... he knew it, she knew it, old Hanu knew it and so Jeff Thorne stumbled off into the Martian desert--to die. But death takes strange forms out there....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Geoffrey Thorne was "on the beach." Face down on it, in fact, head and shoulders deep in the brackish eddies of the slowly rising tide, the sluggish waters of the North Nergal Polar cap. And it was odds he would die there miserably in his drunken stupor, had not there come a sudden interruption of the t'ang-ridden miasm in which he lay.

A sibilant rush of feet dashed across the worn Martian sand, splashed into the shallows, and Thorne felt quick, vital hands snatch and roll him face up, slapping a dull sensitivity into his addled wits. He shook his head dazedly, realized his predicament, and feebly struggled to rise. It was beyond his power.

With a snort of disgust, his rescuers caught him under the arms and dragged him unceremoniously backward. Once clear enough of the dull waters rolling languidly upon the low, hot beach, he let go and Thorne sat down heavily in the sand.

"I'd call that a waste of effort," a well-fed voice coldly observed.

"Paul, please!" replied a woman's softer voice. Thorne shook his head viciously, raised himself on one arm, and sought to focus his blurred vision on the group facing him.

There were a dozen or so, well-dressed, well-fed, bright with color and metal in the sunshine. Tourists. He looked up at the young petty officer of International who had dragged him from the water. There was a pained look of weary resignation on the clean-cut young face as he turned to his temporary charges.

"I must apologize, ladies and gentlemen. This bit of local color was unscheduled. It happens occasionally on the inner planets. Conditions grow too rigorous and a man--uh--goes down."

Thorne laughed, a dreadful, choked hacking that set the fluttering tourists back a step or two in sheer fright.

"A man goes down, kid." He rubbed his eyes and leered at them. "Damned far down that you show him off like a Martian."

The officer of International Airways, Inc., winced and then added, to his group, "He's right, you know. Privacy's about all that's left up here on this station. Shall we go on? There are the caves I promised to show you, farther along."

He moved up the beach, the tourists straggling after him, still looking back at the dejected figure of Thorne half-lying, half-sitting in the hot sand. Their voices came drifting back upon his throbbing consciousness.

"But, Mr. Atlee," a woman's voice urged, "we can't just leave him there like that. Mightn't he drown?"

"The tide doesn't come much higher, Miss Thurland. He'll be all right. Once out of that coma, he won't drop into it again for a day or two, unless he gets more t'ang."

"What is this t'ang, Mr. Atlee?" another woman asked. "A Martian drink?"

"Yes, it is. High explosive ... and one drink wrecks a man for life. They never get it out of their systems, and they don't much care. It's like the opium off Jupiter, only worse. They'd kill for it. Fortunately, they can't get it any too easily--but it's not fortunate for poor devils like Thorne."

They were gone, then. The last had vanished in the misty haze spun by the blazing sunshine on the northern rocks. Heading for the Vulhan caves farther along no doubt. Rock crystals and ancient weapons from some forgotten battle there for the picking up, glittering gew-gaws to pleasure lazy, personally-conducted school-teachers and insurance-brokers on holiday. A crooked grin twisted Thorne's lips. It hadn't been so easy a few years ago.

It had been hard. Too hard for Jeff Thorne.

Well, there was always t'ang.

* * * * *

He heaved himself up, shook the sand from his ragged clothes, and lurched unsteadily to the water's edge. Kneeling, he splashed the cool, brackish stuff on his muddy face, his swollen hands. He was running them listlessly through his dark hair, trying to conquer its wild disorder, when a sound behind him brought him about with an oath. His brows darkened.

"You're missing the show at the Caves," he pointed out, a sneer in his rasping voice. "Or do you prefer this?" He waved rudely at the hot sand, the dulling ripples, the low, pulpy vegetation crowning the long slope up the beach.

The girl watched him steadily, her hands tight upon a small red and white bag, and under her grave, slow regard a dull flush crept along his cheek-bones to lose itself in the stubby tangle of beard. The dark blue eyes were soft and thoughtful and more than a little sad. Mirrored in them, for the first time in many months, Thorne saw for a moment what he had become and the flush died away in a gray-white pallor. It was not pleasant.

"You--are Mr. Geoffrey Thorne?" she asked. The rich tones of her voice sent a tingle through the hapless derelict of the void. How long since he had heard a woman say "Mister Thorne"? How long since he had heard a woman so much as address him? His crooked grin returned. "My name is ... Jeff Thorne, Miss," he replied.

She smiled in answer, a smile only slightly less awry. "You don't know me, Mr. Thorne. I'm Helen Thurland. A friend of mine, Nancy Bertrand, was once stewardess on your Venus-Titan run. She thought the world of you."

"Then I'm glad she didn't accompany you," Thorne rasped. He plunged raggedly up the slope toward the inviting shade of the floppy vegetable trees cresting the rise. "Get out of that sun, girl. It's hotter than you think."

In silent obedience she followed, but he turned at the top to lower at her. "Is Miss Bertrand at Vulhan City?" he demanded. "If she is, and you bring her here to look at ... at me...."

The girl looked down at the glittering sunlight on the sea. "Nancy isn't at the City."

He sighed gustily with relief. "I thought plenty of her myself," he admitted, slumping down against a thick tree-trunk. "The best I...." He paused; then looked out to sea himself, fingering his whiskers.

"The best stewardess you ever had," she completed. Taking off the huge, floppy hat affected by tourists in the Martian heat, she looked down thoughtfully at him.

"She's dead, you know."

He stiffened, "Nancy?"

"Yes. A meteor in the tubes, they said. And the pilot couldn't land anywhere but on Io--and not good even there. There weren't many left. She's buried there, by a little green lake. I went there first this spring. I--I wish I hadn't. And just now, when Mr. Atlee named you, I thought of a space-pilot who wouldn't have left those stones on Io. The best pilot International ever had."

His lean, dirty fingers wrung aimlessly together. His heel ploughed a recurrent furrow in the shadows. "That pilot is as dead--as Nancy. Poor little kid." He gnawed his lip. It would not do to go maudlin. Not now.

"You are Geoffrey Thorne, International?" she insisted, sitting on a fallen trunk and dropping her hat at her side. Leaning forward, she watched his pallor darken. "You are the pilot who pioneered the Jupiter and Pluto runs, who rescued the Argonaut expedition, who broke up the Wind River and Merton gangs?"

* * * * *

He looked at her and she shrank from the pain in his glare. "You heard Atlee. I'm Thorne, if that's anything. You saw him, a green space-kid fresh from the Lunar way-stations with two-year ratings on his pretty red uniform ... saw him drag a sodden bum from what passes for a gutter here. He was nice to me, Atlee. They're all nice to me. But I can't even enter Vulhan City any more. One of the worst sink-holes in the System and I can't get in ... I can't get in ..." his voice trailed away aimlessly and he picked at a thread dangling from his burst tunic.

"But--is there anything for you?" she asked. "It _is_ a sink-hole. I suppose that's why Mr. Atlee was detailed to take us out to these caves on the stop-over. But there's no work there, no good chance for a pilot such as you."

He laughed. It was a better effort than the one he had achieved on the beach, but she preferred the former. "No chance, indeed! But there's t'ang. There's always t'ang!" he laughed, then caught at his ribs as a shuddering spasm tore at him.

"Please!" She touched him, ever so slightly, shaking his trembling body. "You mustn't! Is there nothing you can do? Nothing? Can you not go home?"

He faced her squarely and his eyes, she noted, were less bloodshot and oddly steady as he looked into hers. "You don't know. It isn't generally known, I suppose, anywhere in the System. We can't go back."

"You can't give it up?"

"That among other things. But no ship will take a t'anger, even as a passenger. That's what they call us, when not worse. They say it's incurable. Lord knows I couldn't disprove it. I can't give it up, and, if they took it away from me ..." he shrugged and a chill rippled up her spine. "You might say we're marooned here, on Mars, on Pluto, on Venus ... all who take up with these weird native brews and weirder natives. We don't go back. We can't. And we don't want to."

"I can't believe that," she protested. Then, at his tragic, sidelong glance, she hastened on. "But this t'ang? What is it? How--how did _you_ ever come to--to get mixed up with such...?" She floundered helplessly, and some inborn instinct of gentility prompted him to rise and scan the sea for a moment. Then he turned, watching her. Again his eyes and fingers sought a ragged strip of scarlet tunic to twist aimlessly.

"It wasn't much," he admitted. "There was a crash a couple of years ago. Faulty tube drive. We lost some passengers and all our stores. It was a two-hundred mile trek to Luxtol City, over the Phidian desert. I suppose you saw it, flying up here. Nothing but t'ang bushes ... and their berries to eat. I got the taste and it's...." His voice faded away and, looking up, she saw a strange wryness pass over his face.

* * * * *

Then he shrugged, laughing. "What's the use? You're not for that old line. Just a line. A sponger's plea." His voice stung. "It got money once. Handouts. And now it's worn out and I can tell you the truth ... a simpler truth than a simple lie. No, I didn't get the taste in any such soul-satisfying way. T'ang berries are deadly poisonous.

"I was young and a fool for luck with gun or ship. I dragged in a little fame, notoriety if you will, breaking up a gang or two preying on the International. We pioneered, those days, and drank. Lots of things, among them t'ang. Grandstanding to the old-timers. Nothing could down the great Jeff Thorne. I took a drink--and another. You see the result. Two years ago I was cock of the walk and king of the space-ways; today a snotty drags me out of the muck to keep me from stifling ... and no great favor, either."

She was silent for a long time. Then she took up her hat and slowly rose to her feet. "It's too late, then?" There was sadness in her eyes as she met his sullen glance. He shrugged and turned away, deliberately rude. There was the rumble of the sea beneath it all.

"Too late."

"Is--is there anything...?"

"Thank you, no." He did not see her hesitate, then open her bag. Several paper notes were thrust into his lax hand. He turned angrily, but she looked so shame-faced and embarrassed he cut short his first instinctive outburst. She put out her hand. "Please. It isn't much--for either of us. Let it be a present from Nancy, too. To Jeff Thorne, International."

He looked down at the money, System credits on Terran banks. "Twenty. You know where it'll go, I suppose. For t'ang."

"That's no matter, Mr. Thorne. It's your life. I spend most of my time telling others what and what not to do, as a teacher. Let me forget on my vacation."

He smiled through the tangle of his unkempt beard, an almost savage gleam of white teeth in the shadows. "I'll forget, won't I? I've forgotten so much already, you see." He crushed the credits in grimy fingers. "This, too. But ... I thank you ... and you'd better go. Beachcombers, even on Mars, aren't any more savory than the old kind on Earth, and I'd not have those others talking, Miss. I'll remember Nancy and I'll remember her friend; you forget Jeff Thorne, unless to point a moral to your students."

She smiled, holding out a hand, pink-palmed and clean. "Not that, Mr. Thorne. Goodby."

Instinctively he met her grasp, using the hand which he clutched her money. For a moment he paused, then slowly let his hand drop back to his side.

"Not that way, either, Miss ... Miss Thurland. Just goodby."

He watched her walk swiftly up the beach, a slender, graceful figure in the bright sunlight. Sleek and clean and decent, copper-tinted hair glittering about her small head until she put on her hat. She did not pause or look back. And then she was gone.

A fresh shadow fell across the sand. Thorne, breaking in upon his moody abstraction, turned with a start to face a tall Martian native who stood impassively watching him. A slim spear glittered and twinkled in the moving foliage above the man's grey-polled head.

A smile spread vacuously across Thorne's countenance, loosening his lean jaw and dulling his eyes. He held out the credits. "Look, Hanu! Money! We can send one of your young men now to the City. I shall have it again."

The Martian did not stir. From the thick grey mane of hair mantling his lean and apish countenance two great unblinking eyes stared disconcertingly at the bedraggled Earthman he had fed and sheltered this past year. The bony figure on its thin legs did not seem to breathe, so still he remained, and Thorne shambled forward in slow alarm, mumbling a question. The Martian evaded him with silken ease, but as he stepped aside his thin arm stretched out, prehensile fingers extended like claws. They struck the notes from Thorne's lax hand.

"Here! What the devil, Hanu?" Indignation stirred the returning lethargy gripping the derelict, and he came up with an angry jerk. The long fish-spear dropped, the razored blade resting across the fallen money as if to slice it in two. The Martian's voice was thin, but gravely dignified.

"No, Thorne. No man goes to the City."

"What the devil do you mean?"

* * * * *

Hanu groped for words in the lingua franca which served the races for communication on all the inner worlds. He stroked thoughtfully at his thick Boer beard, pain in his great round eyes.

"You came here, friend Thorne, in great trouble. The devil-juice was in your blood and your friends had driven you forth as all who drink the t'ang must go. We are simple folk. My people were glad of you, for we have been friendly to your Earthmen, and I have been glad, truly glad. You have been good and our friend, in spite of the t'ang. We have asked nothing of you."

"I know that," Thorne rapped impatiently. He edged nearer the fallen money. "I've had food, clothing, and shelter from your people. Perhaps I've even had friendship. I needed it. But why refuse me now?"

The Martian impaled a note on his spear and held it out to Thorne. His long-nosed face grew stern and the lean body tightened. "We refuse nothing, friend Thorne. You are no longer with us, or of us. Take up your money if you will, but go."

"Why?"

The great eyes swung up the beach, then back to the sagging beachcomber. The note fluttered from his blade. "A woman's money, friend Thorne. Not even t'ang can excuse beggary."

Thorne staggered back. Shuddering, icy nausea ripped through his worn frame. Clenching his fists, he turned his back on the tall Martian that his blinding shame might not be seen. A rustle of paper told him the native chieftain was gathering up the fallen currency. He did not turn. But a gentle poke from the spear-butt awoke him from his daze and he turned at last, to find his money presented at his breast upon the chief's blade. Slowly he took it, slowly tore it across and across, dropping it listlessly upon the sand.

"Where shall I go?" he asked, more of the empty air than of the grave Martian watching him so sadly. The native shook his grey-maned head.

"Where shall any t'anger go?" he replied. The sting of the epithet, although innocently meant by the generous Martian, twisted Thorne's sodden mind until he pounded his temples with a groan of empty pain.

"Where, indeed, good Hanu?" Almost he laughed, throwing wide his tattered arms in the remnants of the brave red International jacket. "To the north Vulhan City and the gutter, to the south your people and a greater contempt than theirs, for I have tried to be their friend. Oh, I know, Hanu! It's in your eyes. It's in mine, too. There for good and all. So what's left but the sea again ... and no petty fool to drag me forth to shame me even before you, the last of all my friends."

"I am your friend always, friend Thorne." The Martian's voice was gentle. "But you have come to the end. You know that now. But not in the sea."

"Where else?" Thorne sat down abruptly, his legs giving way beneath him. A haze was descending over his foggy mind and he pressed his temples again, burying his face in his hands, Hanu nodded to the left.

"The desert."

Thorne looked up, amazed. "That horror!"

"The desert is slow ... but not unkind. There will be many things to think on as you walk." Hanu leaned on his spear, regarding the sunken wreck sitting before him. "Our old men go forth in the evening when they no longer care to live. Our wicked pass from us across the sand, for we do not kill. There is peace there ... and rest. What else, we do not know. They never return."

A shudder passed over the beachcomber. Slowly he rose to his feet. "No," he admitted, staring with a grudging, affectionate admiration at the grey one. "You do not kill." Abruptly he offered his hand. "Before I go?"

Hanu smiled, pulling his whisker. "You will go? The woman is already gone and we will forget her like yesterday's tide, but we shall not forget the man who was with us that far-off day. We shall not forget." The pink-palmed, five-fingered hand clasped Thorne's. "Forget us not, friend Thorne."

"I won't, Hanu. Goodby ... and thanks. It's all I can leave you, friend, but I know it counts, even from a space-rat like myself." Abruptly he wheeled and trudged away up the slope toward the higher trees back of the beach. He did not look back, even when Hanu's spear plunged into the sand twenty feet ahead and the grieving Martian wailed a piercing call of farewell.

Taking the gift, Thorne staggered wearily on. Trees rose and fell about him, rude, stubby giants with the fat, pulpy stems designed to catch and store the precious polar waters melting before the first summer sun. The ridge passed and the rolling, bushy foothills along the coast led him endlessly down through the salt marshes where strange shapes moved and stirred at sight of the alien intruder. Then the arid hills beyond and, at last, cresting a bush-straggled rise, Thorne saw before him the first dun sweep of the vast inland deserts that have laid Mars waste and brought low a proud civilization.

He slept there that first night, hollowing a little scoop of reddish sand for his ragged hip and a mound for his neck. For a time, after the first quick darkness, he lay watching Mars' rolling moons wheel across the horizon, silvering all the desolation and shimmering into a clear, alien beauty the ruin time had brought.

Hanu, the chief, had been right. There were thoughts. But gradually the bitterness and ache of defeat sank away on a flood-tide of weariness and Thorne slept beneath the Martian moons.

* * * * *

An inquisitive sand-lizard, poking at his spear with its horny nose, awoke him before dawn. Not hungry enough to destroy the little monstrosity, Thorne shooed it away and scrambled up. There was a thirst inside him blurring his vision ... but not for the water he was abandoning. Again, as so often in the recent past, he would have sold what remained of his soul for a bottle of the dreadful, numbing t'ang. But here one was as remote as the other. He gritted his teeth and moved slowly down the ridge toward the distant south.

Hour after hour plodded wearily on as the dull-eyed Earthling lurched in a slow, dreadful stride farther and farther into the blazing Martian desert. The hot sunlight glanced and blazed in glittering splendor from his keen spearblade, slung across his back with a strip torn from his ragged tunic. It scorched fiercely and persistently at the hat he had made from a withered desert plant's dun leaf. It burned the reddening sands to blister the man's half-bare soles through the torn pilot's boots. It crisped the thin atmosphere to nostril-tingling flame....

From time to time he came on bushes, tiny, low-squatting bushes with yellow pads for leaves and deadly stings for thorns. Their flesh was death. Twice he passed a thin-stalked t'ang bush, hiding in the lee of some crested dune, flaunting its crimson and black fruit at the weary, shuddering traveler. There, too, was death. Thorne grinned. And what else but the slower death and decay brewed from these devil-berries drove him thus hopeless into the wastes to be at peace and die?

The second day he found a body. Perhaps one of the old men of Hanu's wise, grave tribe, setting out into the sunset like Ulysses to seek one last wonder before the long night overtook him. Perhaps a condemned man sent gravely forth to wander and seek repentance before suffering his natural penalty. Thorne could not tell. It was a skeleton by now. A polished spear lay across the arching ribs and the bony hands were clasped upon it in a strange gesture of resignation, as though the man had laid himself down at last to rest.

He found two more such skeletons before night. The spear of one lay through the broken ribs, and he shuddered. The man had not waited. Although his body, numbed and ravaged by the fires of t'ang, required little now to sustain its life, it was weakening fast and a deeper lethargy was creeping over him. He wondered when it would be that he, too, must lie down at last, folding his hands on his breast, and watch the sun go down or rise for the last time. Well, it would find him ready.

For Hanu had been right and all his tribesmen in their strange, funereal rites had known well what they had been about. The great, eternal waste of rolling sand and barren rock, the solemn passing of the ageless sun and silent moons had borne down upon Thorne until from their unhurried peace had been born a quieter peace within his breast. Hunger and thirst, numbed by the strain of the t'ang in his system, faded almost unnoticed into a lethargy. Even the screaming need of the drugging liquid which had tortured him at first was fading.

Soon there would be nothing left but the silent golden sun, the ruddy sands ... and another quiet skeleton watching the brassy sky with dark, unseeing eyes of bone. Thorne cracked his tortured lips in a grin. At least it would not be in a gutter of Vulhan City or face down in the flooding Nergal tide, a shoaling hulk....

Slowly he moved on through the night. He had lost track of how many nights. It was cooler so. He watched Phobos rise in cool splendor far across the sands, a thin black streak standing upright across her shining disk. For a moment he stared in dull, uncomprehending wonder, then bent his head and plodded quietly onward.

Why he walked he did not know, for he had long ceased to question this strange, ultimate Odyssey on which he had embarked. He only knew he must go on and on, the one unreasoning urge linking him to the old, proud heritage of the pioneers of trail and sea and space. And for such as he there was no turning back....