Title: Martian Nightmare
Author: Walton, Bryce
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Martian Nightmare" ***


                           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.

Presently the officer stood up. "Men. The Redbirds will follow up this
bombardment with a winged attack. They always do when the moons are
right. We'll remain hidden along the trail and take them as they come
in. They've never learned the strategy of ambush. Make ready for the
attack. Be alert!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Danton motioned and the three of them retreated slowly, as silently as
possible. They had crawled probably a hundred yards when the attack
came.

The Redbirds were red. They also might be considered birds, with a
reptilian dominance. Their wingspread was enormous, and their bodies
were very nearly human to look at--with an alien deviation that made
them seem grotesque when they really weren't grotesque at all. In a way
they were beautiful. Red feathers and gold-flecked eyes.

And then the air was torn apart. Explosions, rushing bodies, breaking
wings, burning feathers and singeing flesh and hissing screams. The
moonlight fluttered with winged shadows.

"This is real war," Danton heard Van Ness yell. "Hand to hand. The real
thing."

Danton couldn't see either Van Ness or Keith. He fought, firing wildly
at shadows and substance. The real thing. It was strange, he thought,
but in that fifty years of the bloodiest war, the most destructive in
history--he'd never killed anything hand to hand. It had been coldly
impersonal, that war. A million here, a million there. Nine million at
once. And nothing remaining except charred craters. No bodies around.
No one crying either. Nothing at all. But this--

Van Ness's fading scream chopped down like hot steel. Danton couldn't
fire, afraid of burning Van Ness, who was being lifted up by a Redbird.
Van Ness was gone almost before Danton realized that he was being
carried up and away over the tree tops.

Danton crawled around in the flame-blasted clearing. His rifle was
gone. The Redbird's powerful wings had slammed it into shadows and
brush. He looked for Keith.

Keith!

He didn't find Keith either.

He lay still, very still. Several soldiers were poking around in the
tangled debris of bodies and blood and torn brush. It was so still all
at once. No sounds at all except the hard breathing of men. No wings
threshing, or screams penetrating.

Danton played dead. He was surprised at how easy it was.

He recognized the officer's voice. "Load everything that looks human in
a couple of amtracs and drag them to the disposal mart."

"Yes, sir."

Motors idling. Men lifting and grunting and cursing. Danton opened his
eyes just a little, stared upward into the broad river of sky far up
between the mountains:

"How many casualties?"

"Not bad. We lost a quarter maybe. We probably burned down a thousand
Redbirds."

"Where do they all come from? We'll never kill them all. They keep
coming and they'll always keep coming."

"They're supposed to come from across the white desert. We'll never
find out. Anyone striking out across that desert never comes back."

The officer. "On the double, men!"

"Why does it go on?"

"Who knows?"

"Will we win?"

"No one can win. The Redbirds will keep coming. We keep killing!"

"The Powers are happy though. Fifty bodies to the marts. Counting
yesterday's casualties, that's over three hundred to the marts since
this battle started."

"And how many since the war started?"

"Who knows? When wasn't there a war, pal? What the hell would a guy do
around here if there wasn't a war on?"

Danton felt hands on his ankles and wrists. He forced limpness down his
body and felt himself tossed among the dead. He was hardly noticed at
all, dead or otherwise. His uniform was torn, covered with blood and
dirt until it looked like any other uniform. He must look pretty bad to
be taken for dead.

Swarms of insects, drawn by the blood, settled in clouds. The amtrac
jerked forward. Danton saw the drivers sitting up there like gray
plaster figurines. One of the men started to mumble a song, a kind of
chant, more like a dirge.

"Shut up! You'll get us shot!"

"Borkan's back there. He can't hear."

Danton listened. His stomach went hollow and icy at the song. It was
old. It was full of ghosts, ghost treads, and ghost shadows marching
out of the past, out of the present.

    "The men of the tattered battalion, which fights 'till it stumbles
       and dies,
    Dazed with the scream of the battle, the din and damned glare and
       the cries,
    The men with the broken heads backward, and the blood running out
       of their eyes!"

"Shut up!"

    "The Powers have all of the music, the glory and color and gold;
    Ours be a handful of ashes, a bountiful mouthful of mould."

"Shut up, I tell you! We'll be shot! If you--"

    "Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the
       cold--"

The song faded slowly, died out. It seemed to die of weariness, to run
down. And Danton kept on hearing it--circling mournfully through his
head like swirling muddy water round a stake.

One thing he was seeing now, graphically so that he would never
forget: Wars weren't all the same. Sometimes fighting-men hated war.
He had known only the swift clean war, the septic war, a gigantic
street-cleaning machine with a ray gun in front and a rotary brush in
the back, with individuals turned abruptly into the earth from which
they had come, and no one knowing the difference.

But in different times and places, wars could be different.

       *       *       *       *       *

The amtrac stopped. "Let's get 'em out of here!"

Danton was thrown up, over, out and down, and other forms fell around
him. He heard a moan from something not quite dead. Metal clanged.
Machinery whirred. He thought of the mart, disposal mart. He thought
of dropping through a hole maybe into a pit of fire, or into a vat of
something. All through him as from an intravenous injection--horror.

He looked. A mound of metal, as though a bald giant had been buried up
to his eyebrows. Metal corroded with green slime. And there, an opening
appearing as heavy metal doors slid open. A railcar with a spherical
truck bed emerging from the opening and waiting with an eery suggestion
of eager sentience in its cold metal.

The men throwing the bodies into the railcar.

"What happens to them?"

"Who knows? No one ever hears of them again. Morlan mentioned it the
other day. He said the Powers demand sacrifice, like gods maybe. I'm
not superstitious or anything, but--"

"Why not? Something's taking care of us, making us move around, dance
on the invisible wires. Maybe the Powers are gods. Why not? They're
supposed to live forever. Never grow old."

"Push the button! Push it! Get them out of here. Wait, here's another
one."

Danton felt himself plunging, striking, rolling among the other dead
logs. He didn't move. Some of the horror was dissolving, because this
whole disposal system was too elaborate. There was something basic and
symptomatic about it, and Danton felt that it was a key. Van Ness and
Keith were gone. He couldn't think about them now. Their disappearance
had seemed so very final. He was alone. He still had his duty, and he
was curious. He wanted to find out what he could, although the idea of
somehow getting a ship and returning to Earth with what information
he could garner was no longer part of his thoughts. You could take
advantage of the impossible if it happened perhaps. You couldn't
anticipate it as a basis for action.

But he was still curious, and that was part of his duty. The Oligarchs,
the Powers, seemed interested in gathering in the blossoms of death
from the fields. Very interested. One of these soldiers had said the
Powers would be happy. Surely then the bodies wouldn't simply go into a
vat or a flame.

"Here she goes!"

Darkness. Silent movement whirring, rapidly accelerating speed, hot
wind sighing dry past his face. The body of the dead girl, her body
tight up against him in the darkness, moved a little. She sighed
brokenly.

Danton felt around, found the belt, holster, ancient revolver he had
spotted earlier. He removed it, buckled it around his own waist. He
was careful not to raise his head. Above him, close, he felt a ceiling
rushing back.

Feeling the girl beside him, the girl soldier, still alive somehow, he
thought of Mara who had found him unbearable because he still had the
mind of a soldier and had refused to be reconditioned. She had grown
to hate him--no, not hate, revulsion. It was natural. She had been
reconditioned to hate anything suggesting violence.

Well, that was long ago and far away. Further away than long ago.

The car slowed, tilted. Doors slid open and a soft blue radiance
filtered through. Danton clung to the metal and stared down a gleaming
metal chute. He began to hear incoherent sounds coming out of his
own throat, uncontrollably, as the car tilted further. He grabbed
desperately, hung on as the car dumped its load into the chute, down,
down into a giant pit. The pit was surrounded with high mesh walls and
a steel rail. And behind the rail a circular walkway, with panels, or
doors, spaced at regular intervals. Maybe a hundred or more doors.

And cranes, cranes lifting metal mouths full of the squirming mass in
the pit, lifting them to the railing and onto moving belts that carried
them through the walls and out of sight.

To what? _God, to what?_ Danton thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

Danton clung frantically to the empty car. Sweat made a stream down his
chest, though the pit was refrigerated. Cold. The metal was frosted,
it shone like ice. And in the pit some of the bodies moved and made
sounds. The girl soldier. She got to her knees.

Danton tried to crawl back, back up the slippery metal of the railcar.
He sought darkness back there, a place to hide. Then he stopped trying
and felt his fingers loosening as he watched the girl. Her face was
unrecognizable behind a mask of blood and dirt. But she was standing
up now. She raised one hand. She looked up at the many expressionless
doors.

The strength with which she forced the keening death-song from her body
was not the strength of her body. It came from someplace else. From
outside, from memory, from a last defiance that could no longer suffer
punishment, from the buried ghosts of thousands of years that had died.

    "You sing of the great clean guns, that belch forth death at will.
    Oh, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!"

Danton's hands let go, and he slid down the chute.

    "... sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry
       before.
    Oh, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more."

He scarcely felt the bodies under him. He looked at the woman singing
and he listened.

    "... sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and hew,
    Will you sing of maimed ones, too, who die and die anew?"

Danton stumbled. He reached her side.

    "Sing of feted generals who bring the victory home.
    Oh ... but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!"

Danton touched her shoulder. Her uniform hung in tatters. A line of red
ran down her torn arm. She sank to her knees. He could barely hear the
last two lines of her song.

    "... sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men.
    And will you sing of the shadowy hosts that never march again?"

He lifted her and stood, holding her like a child. Now her eyes were
closed. She would have a pretty face, he thought. The army uniform cap
fell away and her hair tumbled down over his hand and arm like red
dust. Her lips moved. She whispered: "No one hears. No one--ever hears."

"I hear you," Danton said.

But you don't hear me, he thought. Her body was limp. She's dead, he
thought.

The crane dipped, steel jaws champing, steel-thewed neck stiff and
superior, now lifting.

Danton put the girl down, leaped, caught the metal lips, clung as the
crane lifted, swung, caught the rail, pulled himself over onto the
walkway. His breath was hot and his lungs burned.

He slid the ancient revolver free and examined it quickly. Its
mechanism was simple enough. He twirled the cylinder, removed the
safety catch. Doors? Where did they go? None of the doors seemed
inclined to tell him; nothing moved around him except the crane and the
conveyor belt.

He walked round the circular way once, came back. It would seem
that he must crawl onto the belt to escape the pit. That would take
him--somewhere. It seemed that he was destined to follow the dead
wherever the dead went in this place where the dead seemed to have lost
the last faint tinge of dignity or honor.

Silently, simultaneously, the doors slid open. A man was born from
the darkness of each black rectangle. Bronze giant men in tunics that
glittered like finely-woven metallic-silk. There was some variation,
yet they were amazingly alike, expressionless, cold, removed. Far
removed.

Danton heard the conveyor belt moving softly, swiftly behind him,
carrying its macabre load. The revolver felt heavy in his hand. Then,
from somewhere, a voice crackled in the pit like ice shifting.

"Bring this soldier to the Council Room."

A man's voice, without any particular characteristic other than one of
detachment. It might have been the voice of a machine, or something on
a tape.

[Illustration: _Danton fired seven times ... after that he stopped,
because the gun was empty...._]

Danton fired seven times. After that he stopped because the gun was
empty of cartridges. Each time he fired, a man fell soundlessly,
without dramatics, calmly. Each time, the man next in line stepped
forward to receive the next bullet. After the last bullet was gone,
three other men lifted the fallen bodies and placed them on the
conveyor belt. Five others surrounded Danton. They did not touch him.
If the episode had had any emotional significance at all for these men,
Danton hadn't seen it. Further resistance was futile; the firing of the
revolver had been only token defiance anyway.

Danton felt the refrigerated air of the pit clinging to him as the men
marched him down a long tubular hall walled in dull metal.

       *       *       *       *       *

The room was large, metal-vaulted, brittle. Mesh grid screens
surrounded him at a distance, and the useless revolver hung cold and
damp in his hands. Three men and three women sat behind a half-moon of
bright silver suspended from the high ceiling by shimmering strands of
silver, like very fine wire.

As architecture, the things he had seen were the final stage in
constructivism. An elimination of the sense of weight and solidity of
traditional forms. Everywhere were space constructions of metal sheets,
glass, plastic, beams of angular light, some vaguely related to human
figures, largely as abstracts of geometrical shapes, technological
forms.

Environment and people were each a balanced projection of the other.
The general effect was one of machine-like precision, brittle coldness
in which man and machine had reached emotionless synthesis.

One of the men said, "Rhone, will you question this?"

The woman's voice was musical, but without warmth, like a nicely
constructed music-box. "What is your name?"

He did not answer.

"You should answer, soldier. Voluntarily. I can assure you that we have
ways to force your mind to give up all of its secrets."

She waited. He did not answer.

"Your actions have been peculiar, soldier. We are interested."

Danton thought fast. They had spaceships. Three of them he had seen,
the three they no longer had, thanks to Keith. If he admitted being
from Earth it would certainly incite immediate reprisal, and Seers
wasn't ready. He wouldn't be ready for a long time. He would never be
ready to receive an attack from Mars. His idea was to send a secret
force to attack Mars, so that the New World populace would never know
about it.

A well-planned series of lies, elaborate, complex, provoking. Find out
facts. Try to postpone or avert any immediate attack on Earth. Reduce
things to as individual a level as possible. He had one advantage:
from his observations to this point, the Oligarch culture seemed not
to have changed its basic pattern. Evolution had merely moved that
pattern forward a hundred years, solidified its static essence. Cold
efficiency, egomania, class superiority--the system supported by
scientific method and a fanatical, one-track dogma based on paranoia.

He had fought this force a long time. He thought he understood it.

"Your name, soldier. Your unit and rank."

"Danton West," he said. He remembered the line-officer's words, a quick
frame of reference. "Captain. Second Army. That was a while back. More
lately of the Revolutionary Forces."

"Revolutionary--"

Danton saw their expressions alter, almost imperceptibly, but alter
they did under the masks. When that fifty-years war had ended, none of
the central ruling clique, the Oligarch Council, had been found. And
one thing seemed incredible to Danton as he stood there:

These three men and women seemed to be the same individuals who had
made up that Oligarch Council on Earth a hundred years before.

That was logical enough. Except--

They hadn't aged at all. There had been no sign of change.

That soldier back there had said, "... _They're supposed to live
forever. They never grow old._"

"That is impossible, of course," the woman Rhone said. "Now--explain
your uniform. It is unorthodox. In fact it is a duplication of the
uniforms worn by officers of a certain army of another time and place
of which you should know nothing. Can you explain this?"

"I can and will. We do know about those certain armies in another time
and place. A hundred years ago. Earth. You think we have forgotten?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Silence. The woman's eyes widened, only slightly, though a tremendous
inner emotional surge was obvious. One of the men leaned forward.
Danton was relieved. He felt a bit more secure, seeing even this slight
degree of individuality and emotion. There was the psychological
effect, he knew, of feeling a subtle lessening of the unification of
forces against him.

They hadn't aged, he thought. The same ones, without grayness, without
wrinkles, without any sign of physical degeneration.

The woman said, not to him, voicing her thoughts, "Impossible. No one
beyond the Walls can possibly know of the past. We took great pains
to assure that--Mars is the only world they have ever known, the only
world that ever was. Our world."

"We know," Danton said. "Others know too. The Revolutionists know. I'm
telling you this much because nothing you can do can stop it. It's
developed too far. Revolt. Did you think it would ever be stamped out?"

Beneath the masks, Danton could see concern, incredulous concern.
Maybe they had thought they had set up an impervious regime. And maybe
they actually had. But there was doubt here. Just enough of a doubt to
play upon. One thing he knew, and that was that there was resentment
out there beyond the Walls, whatever the Walls were, and those songs,
hopeless as they were, had been songs of revolt against oppression. The
germ was out there....

"You have a choice," the woman said. "Tell us everything you know.
That, or suffer the kind of pain we cannot describe to you, a kind you
will find out for yourself."

He could imagine. The Oligarchs had been efficient at everything.
That had been their god--efficiency, mastery of the machines, the
maintenance forever of the master-elite over the rabble.

Like an amoeba, the social forces of the world had split, the old
values solidifying, the new values pulling away, coming back again,
overrunning, defeating. But the Oligarchs had fled and here they had
developed their particular systems to some final state.

Whatever they had waiting for him, to open his mind, it would be
efficient.

She said, "You entered our Walls voluntarily. Why?"

She said it as though it were totally inconceivable that anyone beyond
the Walls should seek to enter voluntarily. Maybe it was inconceivable.

"Curiosity," Danton said. He managed to smile at each of them in turn.
"There have been so many rumors growing old, becoming legends and
myths. I came in to find out for myself."

"You do not expect to escape?"

Danton shrugged. "I don't care one way or the other. I had hoped to
remain here." He waited. He thought. Finally he added, "I had hoped to
become one of you."

"What?" one of the men said in a whisper.

The man on Rhone's right said, "A curious type. Obviously he has
insight. One might almost think--"

The woman said, "We can speculate later, if we have to, Weisser. Right
now we are interested in facts. Facts!"

She kept looking into Danton's eyes. Her own eyes had a curious green
quality. She was beautiful, of course, physically. No one had ever
denied the physical beauty of the Oligarchs. Hereditary physical beauty
was important to them. They developed it by selective breeding and--no
one had figured out by what other means.

There was the indication of an edge to the woman's voice now. "Three of
our ships vanished. Do you know anything about those ships, soldier?"

Danton smiled. "Yes," he said, and paused for perhaps five seconds. "We
destroyed them."

The silence then was longer than five seconds. It was very long. It
lengthened until it was painfully heavy. The woman's voice was a
whisper. "How could the rabble do that? It isn't true, of course. It
couldn't be true."

"You'll never find the ships," Danton said. "There aren't any ships
now. We blew them to pieces. Our scientists did it. I don't know where
the scientists and their secret laboratories are. I don't know too much
about the inner workings of the revolt. But I know some things you
might find very valuable."

"But, Weisser, it is impossible, isn't it?"

"Of course. The man is obviously lying. They couldn't possibly have
evolved any such weapon. They couldn't even have developed the concept
of revolt. Their cultural patterns, their attitudes and hereditary
capabilities are set. They can't change."

"Then how do we classify this soldier?"

"Why bother? Some sort of crazy deviant. We put him under the Scanners
now, then dispose of him. His body has some value."

The woman said, "There still remains the question of what happened to
our ships."

Danton thought: the Oligarch Council operates on a strictly top-down
principle. Who is the extreme top? The woman, Rhone? Or the man,
Weisser? One of them certainly. That might be important to know.

Danton dipped into the small supply packet at his waist, lifted a
food-capsule to his mouth. He looked first at Weisser, then at the
woman. "I can tell you a lot. And if you don't find out what is
happening out there very soon, you'll be destroyed. Like those ships.
I'll bargain with you. Let me remain here, enjoy certain privileges
I've thought about often when I was crawling around out there in the
mud. Show me what you have here, let me understand. For that, I'll give
you valuable information you need to survive."

Weisser said coldly, "_We_--bargain with a mongrel?"

"This capsule is poison, and it isn't partial to blue-blood," Danton
said easily. "A few seconds after putting it into my mouth, I'll be
dead. I'll be silent then. I can tell you how the ships were destroyed,
the weapons used, some things about the planned revolt. If I don't tell
you, you'll never find out. And if you don't find out what is happening
out there in a short time, it will be too late--for you."

The woman pointed. "Take that door out, soldier. Perhaps you'll be
contacted later."

Danton smiled. "Don't wait too long. You don't have much time,
beautiful."

       *       *       *       *       *

A corridor led into a circular room, one section paneled entirely in
glass. Furnishings were suspended at odd angles, the concepts of an odd
structural art, from various lengths of silver strands. He stood there,
then tried the door. He couldn't open it. He was locked in. He felt
eyes on him.

Later he turned, moved back until he was facing the door through which
he had entered. He kept the food-capsule near his mouth as the door
opened and she stood there looking at him strangely.

Then she strode toward him, long slim legs and an easy imperious
stride. The metallic-silk skirt that came half-way to her knees tinkled
like a thousand infinitely tiny bells.

She said, "The records have been checked. One of our ships failed to
get out of Earth's atmosphere when we came here a century ago. We had
assumed the ship had burned up. It has been suggested that you are from
Earth, that you found that ship. It would be odd if you were one of the
Equalitarian soldiers who fought against us a hundred years ago."

Danton shrugged. Self control was difficult now. He had to resist
an urge to reach out, put his fingers around her throat. She seemed
weaponless, and it could be accomplished rapidly enough. There would be
a great deal of personal satisfaction. But he still clung to the shreds
of his duty. His duty to Seers, to Earth millions who could so easily
die under the bombs of an enemy they had never been allowed to know
even existed. Or was that the real reason? _Maybe I don't really want
to kill her._

"Think whatever you wish. I've told you the facts. I know nothing about
such a ship. If you believe such a fantastic idea, then where is this
ship now?"

"You'll answer that," she said. She moved nearer, nearer than necessary
for conversation. How ageless and smooth her face was, he thought.
Smooth and pale. And her eyes like exotic books, concealing strange and
terrible secrets.

He shrugged again. "It doesn't matter much to me," he said. "My offer
still stands. Take it or leave it. As I said, this capsule will kill me
in seconds. After that the troubles are all yours. You won't be able
to escape. Those mongrels out there, as you call them, they don't need
Earth. They have minds of their own."

"That's impossible! They're mongrels."

"You think you have them set solidly and forever in a static mold,
just the way you want them? The perfect slavery--culturally molded,
so they don't even realize they're slaves. That's the idea? It isn't
working out that way. They're human, with minds too complex--they can
never be wholly predictable. Of course you could send an agent to Earth
to find out. It would reduce the odds against us."

"Us? But you've asked to become one of the Oligarchs."

"Yes. I would prefer that, frankly. But it isn't too important. I'm
interested in your system for only one reason--because you never grow
old. You will notice that I am growing old, hair graying, wrinkles
creeping in around my eyes. I don't like that. To be ageless like you,
I would bargain."

"You seem so sure of yourself. I almost believe you."

"I am sure of myself. The mongrels can manage a successful revolt. But
with the information I can give you, you could put down that revolt. I
can't say about the next revolt, or the one after that, or any of the
revolts that will go on as long as there are men who have minds for
figuring out reasons for revolting. If you try to force the information
from me, I'll take the poison."

"Would you really do that?"

He nodded.

"We could go out there and get the information directly from the
mongrels."

"From them, you would find out nothing. The mongrels don't know
anything. Only the leaders know, the scientists, the secret
underground. You would never find them. The revolt is latent in every
man beyond these walls, in every man and woman and child. The leaders
know how to bring out that latent desire to revolt, when the time
comes. There will be adequate weapons, too. Like the ones those three
ships were blasted with."

He touched her throat. He felt the stirring of the pulse. A flush rose
to her cheeks. "Show me why you haven't grown old during this last
hundred years, Rhone, as I have."

Her face was near his. He could see the trembling in her lips, the
enigmatic brightness of her eyes. "You're attractive," she whispered.
"And that's odd, that a mongrel could be attractive."

"There are differences among the mongrels," Danton said. He moved his
hands down her arms. She shivered a little. "And maybe there's a need
in you that makes me seem something I'm not."

"That may be, yes. Maybe it isn't so easy to live forever. We have all
you would think anyone would want here. But there are so few of us. And
the men--always the same, with faces the same and walks the same and--"

"Then you really are the same Rhone, the Oligarch of a century ago?"

"Yes."

"And it's true, you never grow old?"

"It's true. We won't grow any older. And we'll never die."

She looked into his eyes and the seconds went by and time dissolved
around Danton. And he thought: the lies I have told here--are they
really a conscious effort to deceive? Do I really want, unconsciously,
to become an Oligarch? Why not? He had wondered about it before.
Immortality. A system depending on eternal warfare for its existence.
Was this not his system after all?

"Come," she said, and took his arm. "I'll show you. You interest me.
You're a diversion, soldier. I'll show you what we are."

       *       *       *       *       *

They sat in a small spherical car. It made no noise. It slid silently
over the smooth floor by working a simple lever around. It darted like
a silver beetle. First she took him back to a place he remembered well.
The Pit.

She didn't seem to see things actually. She talked with a calm
detachment, and sometimes her thoughts seemed far away. Danton's
thoughts weren't far away.

She was saying, "The war goes on outside the walls. Their culture is
one of war, and that is all they know. We established it that way. We
intend to keep it that way. You see this is the Pit; here the bodies
come, the ones who have died. Here the bodies are sorted roughly onto
the conveyor belts which take them to the Dismembering Wards."

The car whirred them away. The next station, gleaming white rooms,
shining and sterile. Danton felt the perspiration streaming down his
throat.

Electronic machinery examined the bodies, mechanical hands removed
them from the conveyor belts with deft selectivity, deposited them on
wheeled, white slabs.

"You will notice," Rhone said calmly, "that the bodies have come
through an antiseptic room, and their clothing dissolved. Now they are
ready for dismembering."

Men in white moved silently down the line and did their work with
sharp, quick strokes. Scalpels and tiny whirring saws and the bodies
slowly dwindling into isolated parts. There was no blood, no mess,
everything was efficient and thorough and clean.

"The usable body-parts are selected here," Rhone said. "Notice the
departments along the walls by each slab? They are refrigerated. They
contain separate sections for each of the salvaged body-parts that are
worth preserving."

Behind glass in the walls, Danton saw neatly placed parts of the
bodies. Hearts, fingers, hands, legs, feet, bone sections, eyes and
interior organs. Kidneys, spleens, livers, carefully preserved, neatly
arranged and labeled and waiting.

Danton slowly licked his lips. Her voice seemed far away now, droning
like an insect on a lazy day far from anywhere, and the endless length
of that room seemed dust-mantled and still, so still, he thought, and
unreal; but it was real.

"From here, any part of a human body can be replaced by our surgeons.
Here is the source of our immortality. When any body organ becomes
worn, it is replaced. We are stocking our body-banks, soldier. As you
can see."

Danton could see. What he saw was blurring a little though, and his
legs seemed numb when he tried to move them.

"Why does it affect you so?" she was asking him then, and he turned and
looked at her.

"Why?"

He didn't really know, or else his brain wasn't functioning at the
moment. Why? It was beyond horror. It was alien, and yet why should it
be alien? As a soldier, why should he find it disturbing? He had been
conditioned, and his conditioning had allowed him to destroy millions
by pressing buttons, by directing missiles he never saw in flight to a
target he never saw dissolve in a great white-hot flame.

Here it was planned, and here death had some transcendental meaning.

"There's one more thing for you to see," she said.

A dimly-lighted series of chambers. She pointed them out. Refrigerated
banks. As far as Danton could see, the long chambers were lined with
huge banks. Each filled with spare body-parts.

"You see the pattern now, soldier? We started with a select group. From
among the Oligarchs only the elite of the elite was selected to come
here to Mars. There are fifty of us now, as there were fifty then. No
children, of course. Why complicate things?

"Our slaves out there know nothing except that they must fight the
Redbirds. Theirs is a war society. We arranged it and we've perpetuated
it, and now it's the only life they know--unless your story of a revolt
is true, of course, which I can hardly believe. They have only the
crudest weapons. The kind of weapons we fought with on earth, soldier,
left little for body-salvage, did they? We feel we've found the only
way of being immortal. Why does it affect you like this, soldier?
Doesn't it seem logical and fair to you?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Danton didn't say anything. He couldn't. His throat was dry and his
blood hammered past his temples. She was putting the question to him,
all right; and in a way it was the same question he had asked himself
more than once. To an efficiently conditioned soldier class, killing
was an end in itself. Why not go on from there, carry it out to its
final denominator?

"The brain never wears out," she was saying, "the only damage possible
to it is due to the wearing out of supplementary body-parts, and they
are seldom used to such a point. And even parts of the brain can be
replaced. We have blood banks, of course. We cannot die of natural
causes. If death comes from any kind of violence or accident, we can
bring that body to life again.

"We are storing up reserve body-parts to keep us strong and un-aging
for as long as one would care to imagine. When we are ready, of course,
we shall return to Earth. We have kept that in mind, naturally. We are
almost ready now to return. On Earth, of course, the same system will
be established--but there our system will of necessity be slightly
different. Perhaps wars will not necessarily go on unceasingly. There
will be breathing spells ... it won't matter particularly to us."

She looked at Danton closely. "First we shall wipe out most of the
population. We only need a small stabilized population to provide for
us."

"What about the Redbirds?" Danton said. His voice sounded weak. It was
weak. "This is their planet, doesn't--"

"Their bodies are too alien," she said. "They can't be of any benefit
to us. Except, of course, they provide conflict for the mongrels."

Danton closed his eyes. There was no more confusion. He knew now where
the road led if you stayed on it to its end. It ended here with bodies
stacked up in refrigerators. It ended with the cancellation of all
human values, except the values of the fifty select--and they were no
longer human in any familiar sense.

He felt sick, very sick. It might be embarrassing, he was so sick.
He said, "I don't feel very well. Maybe I could rest here for a few
minutes?"

She laughed. She stopped laughing, and Danton heard the sound of doors
sliding and the approach of softly moving feet. Two Oligarchs--Guards,
evidently, for each wore a flash-gun at his side. And between them--

Danton didn't quite believe what he saw, and if what he saw was true,
he didn't know whether to be glad or not. Keith and Van Ness. The
latter was terribly wounded, his face a red smear, blood soaking his
side. And Keith--Keith, Danton had decided, was a dangerous man.

One of the Oligarchs said, "We brought them directly to you, on
Weisser's orders. Weisser talked to them, then sent them down here. He
said that you would know--"

She raised her hand and the Oligarch guard stopped talking. Danton
looked at Keith's rigid, white face. Keith's lips thinned back over his
teeth as he grinned at Danton. "Captain," he said. "I guess you beat me
to the punch. I see you're already on friendly terms."

Van Ness moaned softly and fell to his knees. He stared sightlessly
from his broken face.

Danton said, "I thought you two were gone for good."

"So did we," Keith said. "But the Redbirds dropped us over a tower,
down a chute. I don't know why."

Rhone said, "The Redbirds fight for us too. We pay them. For every body
they bring to us, they receive pay. A kind of drug."

She stared from Danton to Keith, then at Van Ness. "You three seem to
know one another. I'll find out from Weisser." She started to tune in
the communicator on her wrist. Keith stopped her. "Don't bother," he
said. "I've already talked to Weisser. This man here has been lying.
I'll tell you the truth."

Danton had been afraid of this. "Keith! Don't tell them anything!" But
he knew somehow that his own game was over. It had never had a chance.
Even without Keith's selling out, it wouldn't have had a chance. It was
walking the road bravely that counted, anyway....

Keith said, "I'm talking, and I'll be glad to talk."

Danton shouted, "Keith! Don't do it. Don't tell them anything. You
don't realize what they are!"

"It doesn't matter," Keith said, "what they are. I've been on the wrong
side. Maybe I was always an Oligarch, and it's probably the same with
you, only you're just too stupid to admit it. You think I want to go
back to Earth, even if we had a chance to do it, which we'll never
have? I hate Earth, and maybe I always have hated it--the way the New
Order remade it! It's sane! Everyone an angel, filled to the hair roots
with the milk of human kindness. We found it no place for us. Weisser
says he'll take me in. I know where I belong!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Rhone stood up in the car, looking into Danton's face. "It's true then.
The three of you are from Earth. I thought they were planning a culture
down there that couldn't possibly be aggressive. How could they have
sent you?"

Danton's eyes went from face to face, round the immediate area of the
vast chamber. Keith was grinning thinly, watching him narrowly. This
was it, and there seemed nothing to do but to go down fighting in the
classic vein. A futile gesture, but what else?

He said, "It was done in secret. Only we three and one other knew
about the flight." Tell the truth. It might keep them from invading
Earth for a while. If they thought Earth had an army they would strike
before Earth grew any stronger. The truth might keep them quiescent
for a while longer. "The new social system there, it has no conception
of warfare or violence. You wouldn't understand it. And they wouldn't
understand you, not now."

"You used our ship to get here," she said. "That would indicate that
you have no ships of your own there?"

Danton nodded. Keith laughed, a thin high laughter. He moved toward
Rhone. He dropped to one knee and raised his hands to her. "They have
no armaments, no ships. Psychologically they have no power to resist.
Weisser said I could become one of you."

Danton pushed Rhone from the car. He shoved the control lever and the
car whirled violently, slammed into the foremost Oligarch guard, sent
him spinning across the metal floor. The car swerved again, struck down
the other guard. Danton jumped free, ripped the weapon from the man's
waist. The guard was groaning and his hands were sliding about vaguely
over the floor.

The hand-gun was familiar. It was similar to the flash-guns used by the
guards on Earth a century before; there would have been no need to have
altered that weapon.

Keith ran at him, kicked out, and Danton fired. Keith went to his knees
and looked at Danton dully and then fell forward. He rolled over and
lay there, grinning blankly at nothing at all.

Deliberately, without feeling anything, Danton burned the life out of
the two Oligarchs who had lain stunned where they fell. As he spun
back, the woman stood stiffly almost up against him. He had expected
her to attempt to run away.

She said softly, "I know what it is now. It's because you're human.
It's human to grow older. It's human to die. Maybe we have the wrong
idea, or maybe we've approached it wrong, I don't know. It doesn't
matter now. I--"

He pressed the flash-gun toward her. She didn't seem to notice the
gun. She continued to look at his face, into his eyes, searching, for
something he couldn't tell what, and he didn't care.

"Did you know you have gray eyes," she whispered, "and that they
deepen, get darker and darker?"

"No."

"No. No one ever told you."

Mara had told him. He barely remembered that time when she had told him.

She put her slightly opened mouth against his lips and pulled him
closer.

He pulled the trigger. Her body quivered as though from the kiss, and
then he stepped away and she fell at his feet. He wasn't thinking now.
There was no time for that. He lifted her, carried her toward one of
the refrigerated banks. Her skin had turned a mottled ugly color and
her eyes were open and rigid. Quite suddenly her eyes moved up into her
head, and ugly groups of purple little veins appeared underneath the
skin.

He put her on the frosty floor of the huge bank. Around her, like some
hideous garnishing, were eyes that looked at her accusingly. He dragged
the two Oligarch guards and Keith's corpse into another bank, slammed
the heavy door. Van Ness groaned and Danton lifted him into the car.

"I can't see," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see. I'm dying."

"Hang on," Danton said. "Only fifty Oligarchs, understand, Van? Forty
seven now. Maybe less if those seven I shot down in the pit didn't all
recover. Maybe we can get some more of them, Van!"

"I'm dying," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see."

       *       *       *       *       *

Danton tooled the car. As he approached doors in the long tubular
halls, the doors opened automatically, closed again behind. There were
turns, drops, risings, more doors, other halls.

He stopped the car. Lost, alone, somewhere. Only fifty of them--no,
forty-seven now at most. They wouldn't have too large a structure here.
Somewhere there would have to be a central power source. If he could
find such a power unit, strike at the heart--

He shook Van Ness. He felt for the heart. It was still beating. Van
Ness moaned, "I'm dying. If I could see--"

"Do you know what I'm saying, Van? Can you hear me?"

"Yes ... sure I can hear you."

"Listen to me. We're in the Oligarch's fortress. I don't know how big
it is. But it seems to be one unified structure. There has to be a
central power source here. You were an engineering expert. Where would
it be? Van, listen. There are only a handful of Oligarchs here now. We
stand a slim chance...."

"But I can't see--"

"I can see."

"Yes--a central power source. I remember the words to an old song,
Captain. You know, soldiering used to be a great sport. There was one
about a chocolate soldier with a uniform so pretty...."

"_Van Ness!_"

"Yes."

"Where would they build that central power room? Up? Down?"

"Down."

He started the car moving. Oddly curving and angling corridors bending
with geometrical precision. He saw an elevator door and he pressed
the button; the door opened and he drove the car into it. Down, fast,
sickeningly fast.

"Bottom ... clear down," Van Ness mumbled. "Start from there. I can't
see--"

Danton kept the elevator dropping and then it stopped. He hadn't
stopped it.

He stepped to the side as the door slid open. He hit the entering
Oligarch, hit him with a short hard blow in the solar plexus and when
the man gasped and bent forward, Danton brought his knee up. Bone and
cartilage crunched. The man slewed to one side, and Danton hit him
again and the man smashed into the wall and slid down toward the floor.

"I can't see," Van Ness said. "But what I hear has a sweet sound."

Danton dragged the Oligarch up, held him against the wall. The man
sagged and lifted his hands to protect his face. His lips were torn,
his nose bleeding. He stared dazedly at Danton, his eyes filled with
terror, shock.

"Wha--" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into
the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped
into the scream.

"I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want
to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units."

The man shook his head, no.

Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and
the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left
leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he
started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them
back again.

"Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts
from your banks won't put back together again."

The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton
killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment,
though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been.
"Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!"

"Yes...."

Danton told what he saw. He was Van Ness' eyes. The generators,
huge oscilloscopes, vacuumtube voltimeters, electronic power-supply
panels, rolls and skeins of hook-up wire, shielding of every color,
size and shape, panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate
transceivers, long solid surfaces of gleaming bakelite, color-indexed
files of resistors and capacitances....

Van Ness told Danton what to do. Van Ness took a long time to say
a few words, and after that he didn't seem to be able to say
anything else. He didn't move either. Danton released the force of
the flash-gun, left the gun in the position Van Ness had indicated,
its beam burning deep into the heart of the complicated soul of the
Oligarch fortress.

He would have taken Van Ness with him, but Van Ness wasn't interested
anymore. He was dead. Danton left him. He would remember Van Ness alive
as long as he was capable of remembering anything. Van Ness as clay he
had already forgotten.

He ran toward the elevator. As it whirred upward, he felt the
reverberation, the trembling, the beginnings of a low deadly murmuring.
The elevator continued to rise smoothly, carrying Danton and the car,
but Danton felt a giddy swaying like that of an earthquake.

A social system strictly of the top-down variety. But in the final
analysis, the top wasn't the mind of Rhone or of Weisser. It was
something above both of them, above the Oligarchs. Machines. And above
the machines, generators and switches and volts and tubes.

The electronic interdependence was going insane within the fortress,
like the intricate cellular structure of a mind within a skull.

In a hall somewhere in a catacomb of metal, Danton sat in the car,
wondering which way to go, wondering if it would make any difference
now, feeling the fortress above, below, all around him, breaking apart.

What about the Oligarch spaceships? Perhaps they were someplace else,
away from here, and they would survive the destruction of the fortress.
And maybe one or two or three Oligarchs would also survive. Even one
ship, one Oligarch, returning to Earth, would be one too many.

He was looking at the far door as it slid open and a car sped through,
skimming along the polished metal floor frantically, desperately.
The occupant of the car, a woman, took no notice of Danton. Her face
was damp and pale with fear as her car sped past. Her machines were
forsaking her. Her efficiency, her gadgets and the tremendous power
that had existed for so long at her fingertips, were disintegrating,
and she appeared to be disintegrating with them.

She would be intent only on escape, of course, not realizing that
without her machines, she was doomed. But she might find a temporary
escape from the death around her, the metal walls of the gigantic
coffin.

Van Ness was gone. And Keith--convinced that soldiering was an end in
itself, rather than a means to an end--had found the inevitable end for
a soldier.

Danton wondered about that. He knew one thing--that the test was yet to
come for him. He was not sure yet that Keith had not been right....

He followed the woman through a door into a chamber. It was a nice
room, Danton thought. A great deal of pleasure had drifted through
this room, and in it, time had probably never meant anything. Perfumed
incense. Music, drifting, still rising from somewhere, pneumatic
couches--but underneath something was cracking open, veins and arteries
of power choking, blocked off; but the power had to go somewhere;
short-circuit, the madness of a great machine-mind.

The woman had opened a panel, and beyond her, Danton could see the
Martian afternoon. He had never seen a Martian afternoon before. It was
beautiful, he thought, though he was hardly in a position to study or
appreciate it properly. Then he saw what she was doing--the woman was
escaping out the panel. There must be some way she was planning to get
safely to the ground outside. It seemed to be a long way down.

But she wasn't worried about that.

She jumped. She looked back at Danton, her face pale and twisted, then
she jumped. Danton ran, looked out. He looked out just in time to see
her body hit. It was too far down for anyone to go that way. Her body
bounced a little.

       *       *       *       *       *

Insane, Danton thought. They had each become such component parts of
the bigger machine that very likely they were all going crazy now,
right along with the machine. And the machine wasn't going to last much
longer either, insane or otherwise. It was beginning to quiver, to
shake and shudder, and its metal skin was beginning to groan and twist.
Its metal joints were grinding together, its skein nerves wrenching and
singing.

Danton looked around hurriedly. He saw the wires again, everything
suspended by wires, shiny and strong. He gave a heavy table
slab--legless, of course, a suspended disc of metal--he gave it a
tremendous shove and it began to swing to and fro; it made a heavy
pendulum, swinging wider and wider, and it began to crash into other
suspended things, into chairs and into weird sculpture, crashing
through structural images and distorted faces of metal. It made a sound
like off-key bells bonging and clanging.

Wires finally snapped with a whine and Danton felt the hot sharpness
as a strand cut across his arm, sinking in like the slash of a knife.
He pushed the table slab to the wall, against the window. He managed
to get several strands of the wire tied together by complicated knot
designs. He yanked down an ornamental drape that seemed to have a
swirling life of its own, made sheaths for his hands from finely-woven
metallic-cloth, and looped the wire three times around the metal
sheathing.

He slid down toward the ground. It was further down than it had seemed
from above. The wind was high and cold and strong. He began to sway
dangerously and the wind threatened to tear him from the wire.

He glanced upward. The structure of the Oligarchs was huge, a shining
silver metal thing of coldness rising up out of bare rocks. It was
built on the side of a cliff, very high, and very far below was a
valley. Perhaps it was the valley in which he had landed ... no, that
must have been far away from here. He saw no lake. But, of course, the
valley itself stretched windingly away further than he could see.

He ran out of wire. He managed to lift his weight with one arm enough
to unwrap the wire coils from the other. That gave him another three
feet. He dropped. Pain came from a wrenched ankle and the shock of the
weight on his bones. But he hit running and he kept on running.

For somehow, though he had killed her, she was alive.

Just before dropping he had seen her, running away from the Oligarch
tower. Running along a steel walkway. A fine-mesh railing separated the
walkway from a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet. It was Rhone.
She was running fast, too. Very fast.

He ran hard. He didn't feel the pain in his ankle. He couldn't afford
to feel anything now except urgency. The cold thin air burned.

She stopped and he stopped too, flattening against the hard
rust-colored rock. She was pushing a lever or something; whatever it
was it got results. A silver nose projected outward from the cliff,
slanting slightly upward; it blossomed out as though someone were
blowing a silver bubble from stone. Out and out. It stopped.

It was a spaceship, all right. Danton figured that the power shut-off
had prevented her from reaching the ship from a subterranean route.
Evidently rigged for such an emergency, the wall of the cliff could
also summon the ship out into the open, prepare it for blasting off
from a cradle cut down into the cliff like a giant cannon barrel.

When the outer door in the side of the ship opened, Rhone ran for it.
Danton was right behind her. She heard him just as she went through and
into the air-lock. She turned, her mouth opened, and then he struck her
with his shoulder, carried her on through the inner air-lock door and
into the tubular corridor leading forward into the control room.

He dragged her forward with him as the doors closed behind him. The
controls were the same in principle as those of the ship he had brought
from Earth. Once set, they were automatic. He strapped Rhone in the
shock-seat at the side. He strapped himself into the chair before the
control panel....

       *       *       *       *       *

Seers, Secretary of Social Security, was a fat man with a serious round
slate-gray face. He looked at Danton thoughtfully, waited. Outside the
office of Sociology Section in New World Square, the sky was a soft and
promising blue.

Finally Seers said, "Well, Danton, what happened then?"

Danton shrugged. "First I dropped enough atomic fire to finish
destroying the Oligarch fortress completely, and to get any ships that
might have been left inside the mountain. There's nothing there now but
a big black crater. I don't think there will ever be any need to worry
about the Oligarchs anymore. I landed the ship in the Pacific in as
isolated a spot as I could find--midway between New Zealand and Cape
Horn. Then I contacted you by short wave. And here I am and here you
are. And I guess that's all there is."

"Why did you bring Rhone back?"

"I had no choice," Danton said. "I guess when I killed her and put her
in the refrigeration bank, that saved her life. Some surgeon did a
quick job on her." Danton leaned toward Seers. "If all of it, or any of
it, really happened."

"What makes you think it didn't?"

"For one thing, I'm back here alive, an impossible mission
accomplished. For another--I--well, this time I _want_ to be
reconditioned."

"Your experience has changed your outlook, Danton?"

"Considerably. I--want to be changed. I want to be someone else,
anything else. I've seen things too horrible to remember anyway.
I'd rather forget everything. It could all have been delusion,
hallucination rigged up in your psyche labs. As Keith said--you boys
are good at that sort of thing. If that's how it was--it was good
therapy. There's a doubt in my mind, you see. It _might_ have happened,
and just the bare possibility that it did happen is enough to make me
gladly volunteer for reconditioning."

Seers nodded. "I'm very glad you're approaching it this way. It will
make the processing easier to perform, and the new personality easier
to maintain. We probably will never need your kind again, Danton. Now
that the Oligarchs are gone, the last threat to our new system is gone
with them. The chance of some other intelligent life-form being in the
universe at all is remote, and the further chance that they would take
aggressive action against Earth makes the whole thing something we can
logically ignore."

"That's fine," Danton said.

"You've seen where the psychology of war would lead, inevitably. If you
can justify killing human beings at all, the final result is bound to
be, in some form or another, what you saw on Mars."

"If I actually saw it. If I was on Mars at all."

Seers signaled through the intercom. A door opened. Rhone stood there,
a tablet in her hand, and a pencil. She sat down and crossed attractive
legs. Very attractive legs, Danton thought.

"Miss Tannon, this is Richard Danton. Mr. Danton, my new secretary,
Miss Tannon."

She nodded, turned her nose down once more, very business-like, into
the tablet.

Danton thought, It's Rhone all right. A reconditioned Rhone. They must
be good at their reconditioning to change an Oligarch mind into that
of an efficient secretary. Danton said, "What about the others up there
on Mars?"

"We'll take care of them, peacefully of course," Seers said. "We have
plenty of time. We won't bring them back. We will set up our new system
there."

Danton listened to Seers' dictation. "To Chief Psyche-adjustment
Administrator. From Seers, Department of Social Security. Subject:
Voluntary reconditioning of Richard Danton. To take place at once under
the jurisdiction of...."

There was more. Danton didn't hear it ... and later they injected
something into his veins and he sat there, feeling Richard Danton
dying, for the last time, going away. Richard Danton, fading out, all
around him bit by bit, cell by cell, dying, never to awaken again. And
remembering what he had experienced on Mars, Danton thought: It's as
good a reward as anyone could ask. Goodbye, Richard Danton. It was nice
knowing you, but Goodbye....

       *       *       *       *       *

_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._

_And Burton was no longer bothered by bad dreams either, and so he was
what one might consider perfectly happy, perfectly adjusted._

_The perfect happiness of one who does not remember._



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Martian Nightmare" ***

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