Chapter II

A sound in the tunnel broke into his reverie, bringing him instantly to the alert. Soft padding footsteps. He drew his gun and aimed at the sound.

"Don't!" Susan's hand dragged his gun down. "It won't hurt us."

"Huh?" Indoctrination had taught that everything that moved upon Mars was hostile, to be killed on sight. The impulse was still strong.

"It's a _cajora_. The Martians keep them as pets," she insisted.

Nick's scalp crawled as the big animal glided through the darkness and its coarse fur made sandpaper sounds against Susan's legs. He had seen the six-legged beasts on the surface, large as Earth tigers.

"_Mel nikko twa Klev_," Susan said soothingly. "_Mel nikko twa Klev?_"

The creature purred.

Nick kept his gun ready and swung toward the girl. She could feel him tense with suspicion. Indoctrination had impressed upon Nick's mind the story that Jackson Jones and his daughter had turned traitor to Earth, siding in with the dangerous and degenerate Marties.

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"That's Martian." Her answer was matter-of-fact. "I asked him where Klev is."

"Martian?" Nick was astonished. "Have they a real language? Then they're really intelligent?" He had suspected but hadn't known.

"Of course," she whispered. "Ssh! You're disturbing the _cajora_."

"What's Klev? What do you want?"

"He's a Martian. My friend," she answered, and talked to the _cajora_ again as though it were a dog or cat.

"I think he understands," she said after a little. "Keep your hand on him and follow."

Nick was hesitant, but the only alternative was to remain in the pitch black, musty tunnel.

For hours they shuffled blindly along, their hands meeting in the loose fur of the beast's neck. The tunnel sloped downward, turning right and left so that within minutes Nick was hopelessly lost. Time and again his outstretched fingers, trailing along the wall, encountered the emptiness of side tunnels and branchings, but the _cajora_ moved purposefully ahead. Several times Nick tried to talk, to ask the questions which were perplexing him, but each time the girl silenced him.

"You'll distract the _cajora_," she warned.

The animal stopped short as they rounded a turn and saw a glimmer of light ahead.

"They don't like light," she explained. "We'll have to go on alone."

The light came from a cross tunnel, from patches of some glowing substance in the hard, smooth walls. The tunnel was roughly circular in section, large enough for Nick to walk upright despite his height.

He whistled in amazement.

"Who built these?" he asked, for they had come several miles in darkness and now the lighted tunnel stretched away into the distance, a major engineering project.

"The Martians."

"How?"

"With their _voras_."

He wanted to ask her to explain, but she was examining some markings on the walls, combinations of triangles and curved lines that were obviously writing. She seemed to understand them, and Nick began to understand now how she and her father had evaded the Mec patrols so long. The leaders of the Martian Exploitation Company did not even suspect the existence of this extensive underground labyrinth.

"We're a long way from Klev's home," the girl declared. "The faster we get there the better."

"Why? What's the danger? The Mecs won't follow us down here?"

"Martians."

"Huh? I thought you were friends with them."

She shook her head sadly.

"Only a few now. The rest have grown to hate us. Come on."

They had covered several more miles when they were stopped. Susan's faint gasp sent Nick's hand automatically to his holster and he looked up to see three Martians emerging from a side tunnel just ahead.

He stared. They were the first living Martians he had seen at really close range, and the bodies of those hunted down by the patrols had always been as crumpled and collapsed as spiders caught in the flame of a blowtorch.

* * * * *

They were slightly taller than humans, with great glowing eyes in their bulging heads and thin, many-fingered arms that reached almost to the knee joints of their stubby legs. Their noses were almost flat and their mouths too small, and their heads were topped by erect crests of skinlike material. Two of them were a dull greenish color, but the third, evidently the leader, had a marked bluish tinge to his face. All three wore shapeless brown clothing.

The three made no threatening move at first, but training and the habit of self-preservation were still strong in Nick. He raised his gun.

Before he could fire something uncoiled itself from the shoulders of the leading Martian and flapped down the tunnel like an ugly, distorted bat. It knocked him off balance as it struck his head and shoulders and clung there, heavy and warm and _alive_. Numbness raced through his body wherever it touched. His muscles refused to respond when he tried to squeeze the trigger and his struggles only brought part of the thing around his throat in a powerful, strangling grip.

Susan called out something in the same language she had used to the _cajora_ and took the pistol from his helpless fingers. But to his dismay she did not raise it.

The Martian made a chirping, almost inaudible sound and the thing relaxed its throttling grasp. Feeling began to return to Nick's arms. He could feel tiny pulsations running through the boneless, rubbery mass that still clung tightly to his shoulders.

Susan had made no move to help him. Now she cringed back at the look on his face, a look that spelled murder. He reached for her, but instantly his arms fell limp and numb again as the Martian chirped.

"You sold me out to these--these," he gritted. "You slimy little doublecrosser!"

One of the Martians interrupted, directing a sharp, chirping question at Sue.

She looked down at the jacket she wore, Nick's uniform jacket, and shook her head negatively.

The Martian made an angry gesture, and under Nick's baleful stare she unfastened the garment and dropped it. Equipment in the pockets clanked against the stone floor. The girl blushed beneath the dirt that covered her face.

The blue-complexioned Martian scooped up the discarded jacket with one long arm, and meekly Susan extended the pistol as he spoke again. The Martian held it against his waist, and immediately what Nick had assumed to be part of his clothing formed a pouch around it. The clothing was _alive_ too, he realized.

The three aliens watched them through bulging eyes and conferred in a series of chirps and clicks.

"What are they saying?" Nick demanded, a bit confused by the turn events were taking. They weren't treating the girl in too friendly a fashion.

"That you're an Exploiter, and because of that damned jacket that I joined the Exploiters too. If only we could have reached Klev first!"

She broke into the Martians' discussion. "_Mel nikko ne cho ke twa Klev._"

The Martians focused their attention on her, their voices taking on a note of uncertainty. She spoke to the bluish one at length, and at last he shook his head dubiously, making sweeping gestures to indicate movement.

"We'd better go," Susan said dully.

"Just where do you stand with these things?" Nick asked anxiously as they walked. It was the most urgent question of the moment.

"I don't quite know any more." Her voice betrayed her uncertainty. "They liked Dad and me at first, and when we came back from Earth the second time many of them even came out into the sunlight to meet us. But then the Exploiters came. It was only because they blasted the _Trailblazer_ and opened fire on Dad and me too that the Martians didn't kill us right then."

"Then they weren't hostile at first? Weren't they plotting a war on Earth?"

"Of course not." Her tone was scathing. "They were just friendly and sick and dispirited and dying. They couldn't even live on Earth."

"Then why did your father organize the Mec?"

Susan halted in mid-stride and her stinging two-handed slaps left angry marks across his face.

"Say anything like that again and I'll scratch your eyes out!" she spat.

"But your father--"

"He did not!" she snapped. "What he told Gerald Harmon was--"

"Harmon?"

One of the Martians clucked impatiently and motioned them to move along.

Nick recognized the name. Gerald Harmon was the ruler of Earth's greatest industrial combine, Harmon Enterprises. From his factories had come the War's most deadly weapons, and Gravinol had been developed in his laboratories. A finger in every pie and a profit for every finger had always been the Harmon method.

"Harmon told Dad he'd send out colonists as soon as things could be arranged in an orderly manner and another ship built, and he persuaded Dad to keep it secret that we had reached Mars on our first flight. Harmon had backed Dad's work, so Dad trusted him in spite of everything people said. And people were right. When his first ship came ... that cold-blooded murderer--"

She sobbed, unable to continue.

* * * * *

Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Nick's brain. During the last months of the War when governments were merely hunted groups of men blasted out of one underground shelter after another, when armies went on killing because there was no one to tell them to stop, when work and comfort and productive effort and all the normalities of life had vanished in the dust of ruined cities, the great masses of people who wished only to live out their lives in peace had at last learned their lesson. At last it had been thoroughly beaten into their skulls that wars were the inevitable price of over-organization, of allowing a few individuals--whether politicians or industrialists or the priests of hatred-creeds made little difference--to assume unlimited power over the fates of others. The people had learned, and they were bitterly determined it should not happen again. It was because of this lesson that the unthinkingly obedient survivors of the Special Corps had been so cordially hated and feared. The age of the overlords, of the few exploiters and many exploited, was to be finished.

On Earth.

Harmon had seen the trend. And he had been shrewd enough to combine the possibilities of the secret Jones Drive and the Gravinol-addicted survivors of the Corps for the foundation of a new and more completely dominated empire as his domain on Earth crumbled.

On Mars.

And perhaps, some day when he had gathered sufficient power, once again on Earth.

Often around the barracks of Central Camp the Mecs had speculated on the identity of The Man, the mysterious and unapproachable top link in the chain of command. Now Nick Tinker knew the whole story.

"My God!" he said.

Susan's shoulders sagged. "We're through, and the Martians are finished too. And sooner or later he'll manage to wreck the New Governments also."

"Damn it, we're still alive!" Nick exploded. "There's still a chance."

She smiled weakly and brushed at her tears.

Twice they passed side tunnels, and at a third opening turned in at a Martian's gesture. A short passage opened into a series of three rooms.

Nick looked around. The glow-plates in the ceiling were the same as those in the abandoned surface cities, but far brighter. The first room was furnished with a single broad couch and three peculiar objects he decided were chairs. There were no shelves or cupboards, but niches had been cut into the smooth stone walls at irregular intervals.

The second room was completely bare, giving the impression that furnishings had been recently removed.

The blue-faced Martian emitted a series of chirps, and at once the creature around Nick's shoulders pulsated, uncoiled and fell to the floor with a dull thump. Nick jumped aside in distaste as it collected itself into a flattened ball and rolled toward the doorway. There it changed shape again, flowing into a slot in the door frame.

"He says the _varlu_ will kill us if we try to escape," Susan translated the Martian's chirpings.

Nick decided that if there were any other possible escape route he would not try the doorway.

"_Mel nikko ne cho twa Klev?_" Susan asked again.

The Martians conferred, and finally the bluish one made a gesture of reluctant assent. All three withdrew.

"Just who is this Klev?" Nick demanded. "Why did old Blueface get so bothered whenever you mentioned him?"

"He's an old, old Martian," Susan explained. "He was dying of the Plague when Dad's experiments saved him. He remained our friend even when most of the others turned against us because of the Exploiters."

"Who's Blueface?"

"That's Merlo. He has the Plague and will die soon, just as the Martian who lived here must have died recently."

"_Voras?_ Plague? What's it all about?" Nick sank into one of the chairs, suddenly conscious of fatigue. Despite the light gravity the human body tired rapidly in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

"The Martians lived on the surface long ago, in those cities that are still there," Susan explained. "Dad studied them a long while and said they're partly like plants, but with blocked electronic and electrostatic charges in their systems that even he didn't pretend to understand.

"We learned all this bit by bit. Metals have always been scarce on Mars, so the Martians concentrated on biological engineering instead of mechanics, breeding special creatures to fit their needs. Those are _voras_, their living tools and servants and clothes and weapons. That _varlu_ is just a specialized _vora_. They respond to thought waves and Martians can control them from quite some distance. Klev taught us a little about them, but human thought waves are of a different pattern and I have to actually touch them. Like that screen-vora back in the city."

"Can you--?" Nick interrupted.

* * * * *

Susan shook her head. "No. _Varlus_ answer only to their owners, and even another Martian couldn't pass that one without Merlo's consent.

"Seven or eight centuries ago," she continued. "A spaceship crashed on Mars. Dad believed it came from clear outside this solar system. All the creatures inside were dead when the Martians reached the crumpled hull.

"It brought the Plague. Shortly afterward Martians began to turn blue and shrivel and die. For a while they thought water had something to do with the disease, so they developed huge water-_voras_ that could tunnel through solid rock and pump water, and they drained all the surface water down into caverns deep inside the planet. But still the infection spread.

"Finally they discovered that sunlight and the Plague were connected, so they abandoned the surface cities and had their _voras_ carve out this great system of tunnels. The plan worked, somewhat. Darkness stopped the spread of the disease.

"But Martians are partly plants. Without sunlight they die just as surely as though killed by the Plague. So for the last several hundred years they have barely existed in a precarious balance between the Plague and sunlight starvation.

"Nick, they're a doomed race. In the year Dad and I've been here we have seen only two Martian children."

"But Klev?"

"Yeast. Just plain yeast. I'd brought one package in the Trailblazer, for cooking. But there is no more yeast on Mars."

"About the water?" Nick asked. "How come your father didn't tell Harmon about that? Colonel Hammer had us drilling all over the planet."

"Luck," Susan replied seriously. "We didn't know where it was ourselves until after we came back from Earth, after we learned more of their language."

"But all our drilling," Nick protested. "Surely at least one--"

"Twice, at least. But each time the water-_voras_ pumped it to other caves. Martians don't drink, but they saw the Exploiters shipping water clear from Earth and realized its importance. We, and they, hoped the Exploiters would eventually give up and leave. Oh, if only Dad had told Harmon that Mars was completely arid!"

Nick got up and prowled restlessly around the room.

"Are they going to starve us?" he asked petulantly. His emergency rations were in his jacket, which Merlo had kept.

"Oh, no." Susan realized she was hungry too. "There's food here."

She led him into the back room, where a series of shelves were carved into the walls. Each shelf was covered with disc-shaped, fungoid-looking growths.

"When they turn pink like this they're ready to eat," she explained.

Nick found them tasteless and unsatisfying. She saw his grimace.

"Dad and I lived on them ever since the Exploiters came," she declared.

"No wonder you're thin," he retorted ungraciously, chewing on the pulpy mass.

It was only at his remark that she realized her face and hands were grimy and her clothing totally inadequate. She blushed.

"Don't stare at me like that!" she snapped.

Nick found the queer faucet-like arrangement in one corner.

"Water!" he said, gulping thirstily.

They both drank and washed, cleaning their skins of the powder-fine sand that could work its way into the pores and cause a tormenting rash.

"What were you and your father doing on the surface when you tried to scrag me?" he asked without rancor. He had been shot at so often in his short life that he bore no ill feelings. It was a normal incident.

"Dad was desperate. He was going to get an Exploiter's uniform and try to sneak in and steal the supply ship. But poor Dad wouldn't shoot from ambush and that Exploiter got his gun out as he died."

"Oh!" Nick was astounded and somewhat puzzled by the quixotic idealism of the scientist. A gunman with Gravinol-speeded reactions was no joke, and Nick, trained to kill in the most efficient manner possible, would have fired from ambush without hesitation.

They sat for a while, each immersed in his own thoughts. Nick tried to lay multiple plans for whatever might happen, but his thoughts grew blurred and fuzzy. He threw himself down upon the couch.

"Let's sleep," he said. "There's nothing we can do now, and we'd better be in shape when things do start popping."

"Well!" Susan gasped. He showed no intention of giving her the single bed. Evidently he had never heard of chivalry.

"Are you coming to sleep or not?" he demanded in irritation.

She considered carefully, and at last lay down as far away from him as possible. The chairs were uncomfortable and the stone floor was cold.

As she settled herself a brown roll at the foot of the couch unfolded and flowed up over them like a cover. For a moment Nick threshed, remembering the _varlu_, but when it did not squeeze or numb him he quieted.

"Another _vora_?" he asked, still uneasy.

Susan nodded.

For a minute or two he squirmed restlessly, but the _vora_ was warm, with a surprising fleecy texture. Then he was sound asleep. The girl lay awake a minute longer, revising her estimate of his age as his face relaxed and lost its tense, hawklike look.