Part 2

"Your girls are under suspensene," said Shaan. "I'm not going to hurt any of you. I just want a marsuit and your groundcar."

He motioned with the heat-gun and followed MkDowl out of the bedroom. Shaan appropriated the two guns from the radio table, then made MkDowl stand by the living room window, in his line of sight from the marsuit racks in the hall.

"You'll never get away, you damn traitor," snapped MkDowl.

"I can make a good try," retorted Shaan pleasantly. He checked the supplies of the largest marsuit with one hand, holding the gun on MkDowl with the other. "A groundcar can't outrun planes, but I think I can make the cactus forests of the Hadriacum Lowlands before they spot me. They won't find me there."

"You'll never get out of this dome. I can find a way to stop you before you can get that groundcar through the airlock."

"We'll see," said Shaan, turning from the rack with the hypo from the third marsuit. "Why are you so bitter against a man you don't know?"

"You're a traitor," said MkDowl defiantly.

"I just said I believe in a democratic form of government. It hasn't been long since we were all democrats on Mars."

"The democratic government was corrupt. You won't find many friends."

Shaan knew that was true--both statements. There was no longer any organized democratic movement on Mars. He was completely alone. There was no place for him to go anywhere.

He moved toward MkDowl, with the hypo in his hand. MkDowl watched him closely, not moving. It was when Shaan shifted the gun to his left hand and the hypo to his right that MkDowl moved.

Shaan had been prepared for a desperate attack. But MkDowl leaped head-first out the window, in a single swift motion.

Shaan went after him. MkDowl disappeared around the corner of the house as Shaan jumped through the window.

Shaan regretted it, but he would have to blast MkDowl. Even if he could get away, MkDowl would tell the soldiers which way he had gone.

As Shaan turned the corner of the house, MkDowl was climbing into the groundcar. Shaan let go with the heat beam, but the groundcar's metal and windshield were strong enough to resist it at that distance. MkDowl's head disappeared beneath the dashboard.

With a sputter of smoke, the groundcar's engine started. MkDowl had to have the engine running for power to use the groundcar's swivel-mounted heat-gun. Shaan saw the muzzle of the weapon begin to swing slowly toward him.

As MkDowl's head came in view in the windshield to aim, Shaan's own beam penetrated the glass at full power. Hair aflame, MkDowl slumped forward over the wheel.

MkDowl's body evidently hit the forward drive lever, for the groundcar suddenly plunged toward Shaan, wheels spinning. Shaan ducked behind the house and ran for the front door.

As Shaan reached the door, the groundcar caromed off the edge of the house. Without slackening speed, it plunged across the yard and plowed through the side of the dome near the airlock. The plastic hemisphere began to collapse with a whistle of escaping air.

In desperate haste, Shaan got into the marsuit in the hall. He switched on its oxygen supply. He opened a cabinet beside the marsuit rack and got a map of Mars, shoving it into a breast pocket of the suit.

Shaan started for the front door. Then he stopped.

* * * * *

Could he depend on the soldiers finding the two girls when they arrived? Could he even know for sure that soldiers were coming? Mars City might have instructed Vali just to shoot him down. If the girls awoke from suspended animation in the thin Martian air, their simulated death would become real.

Shaan went back into the bedroom. He took Lori under one arm, Vali under the other. They were easy to carry in Martian gravity.

The plastic of the dome had settled, clinging. He had to burn his way through the diaphragm of it that barred the door.

Carrying the girls, he walked across the wrinkled plastic to the ground. Half a mile away, the groundcar had overturned in the canal sage. Fed by the oxygen from beneath the plants, it was burning slowly.

Shaan laid the girls on the ground in the cleared area around what was left of the dome. They could be seen easily here by anyone approaching by air.

What next? He pulled the map from his pocket and opened it.

It was easy to see why he had remembered MkDowl Dome would be here. It was the only dome in Alpheus Canal. There were no others anywhere within walking distance--or in crawling distance, when his oxygen supply failed. There was Charax, about 1,800 miles southeast. Mars City was about the same distance north, and Hesperidum about the same distance northeast.

The nearest dome of any kind was a private dome, Kling's Dome, on Peneus Canal at least 250 miles away.

He had been just as well off before he ever came to MkDowl's Dome. But now MkDowl was dead and his two daughters were homeless.

His marshelmet radio buzzed.

"MkDowl Dome, we're nearing you," said a faint voice. "Should land in half an hour. Light beacon and give us a radio beam."

The radio antenna and the beacon had gone down with the dome. Without these, would the government 'copters ever find MkDowl's Dome in the night?

The sun dropped behind the far cliffs and the red twilight of Mars deepened suddenly into darkness. Shaan was safe from discovery for the night now, but the girls might not be rescued in time.

He picked them up from the ground and started off in the general direction of the cactus that had been his temporary home before. He plodded through the canal sage, the girls a dead weight under his arms.

Twice the government 'copters plaintively demanded directional help. After the second time, he switched off the helmet radio.

He was doomed to death if he were discovered. Nowhere on Mars did he have a friend. Even the unconscious girls he carried would hate him now.

And what was to become of them? MkDowl's Dome would not be rebuilt by another tenant. If he gave up his marsuit to one of them, that would be only one, and the marsuit radio would not reach Kling's Dome. At least one, probably both, were stranded with him.

Not for them would he give up his own life to stay near MkDowl's Dome and call the 'copters in.

* * * * *

Shaan was a democrat and by virtue of that was engaged in a war without quarter against almost everyone else on Mars. He was a lone relic of a defeated army, and he had been driven to the wall. He could surrender to death, or he could fight for survival.

Many men before him, and many living creatures before man appeared on Earth, had faced that situation in one form or another, he thought. Some had succumbed. Others had lived.

The ancestors of man himself had faced it and lived, when they were driven by voracious creatures of the sea into the shallows and at last to the inhospitable land. Now he was driven to a shore more inhospitable than any on Earth, oxygen-poor, water-poor: the Martian shore.

Many years ago his ancestors had learned to crawl instead of swim. He and his descendants--the descendants of Lori and Vali--could learn to crawl instead of walk. Those who crawled could survive and evolve, without domes, without marsuits, without any man-made equipment.

He reached the base of a giant cactus. He was sure it was not the one he had inhabited before, but now he had a knife.

In the distant night sky, he heard the drone of 'copter motors.

Shaan laid the girls down at his feet and dropped prone at the foot of the cactus. When the leaves of the canal sage had closed slowly above them, he took off his marshelmet.

"Man is man because he thinks, not because he walks erect," Shaan murmured to the unconscious girls. "Would your fate be better if you birthed children who had to live in a plastic dome?"

Shaan was a democrat. Rightly or wrongly, he was convinced that the Imperial Government bore within it the seeds of dissatisfaction and strife, eventually a war of rebellion that would crumble the domes and leave all the people of Mars to gasp away their lives.

Let them destroy themselves. Men would still live on Mars, without the domes.

With the handle of his knife, he smashed the marshelmet.