Chapter 12: At Rope's End

With Boulton lying across the back seat, the four men acted simultaneously. Thinking only of self-defense, they drew their pistols and fired point-blank into the monsters attacking them. As the men emptied their guns, the Martians in front stumbled, fell, rolled over, or began to run aimlessly as the heavy slugs tore through them.

They were not easy to kill--which was to be expected of creatures without much of a central consciousness--but on the other hand, once struck or injured, they seemed to lose contact with their fellows and to act wholly without direction. They plunged wildly into each other, and before the men in the jeep had finished their barrage, the clearing was a milling, confused mob. Body clashed against body, legs scrambled under legs, and the angry buzz was now lost amid the clattering and banging of shell against shell.

Haines slid into the front seat behind the steering wheel, stepped on the gas, and drove toward a momentary gap in the mob. The jeep tore through, raced around the corner, and headed down an empty street. Crouching in the back, Burl, Russ, and Ferrati hastily reloaded.

“We can’t let ourselves get stopped, or even hole up. That A-bomb’s going to go off in about twenty minutes, and we’d better be back at the ship before then,” cried Russ.

As they bumped along, they noticed that the Martians who came within fifty feet of their jeep suddenly stopped whatever they were doing and turned toward them, hostile. They were like a stick drawn along among bees--as they traveled they left fury in their wake.

“It must be Boulton,” Russ yelled to Burl above the roar of their passage. “He must be charged with the irritating vibration.”

Burl nodded as he looked back. The Martians had started after them on foot, and could lope fast when they wanted to. “They’ve got some sort of organized action going,” he called to Haines. “I think it’s steam carts!”

“The mass mind caught on fast,” said Russ. “And look! They’re warned in advance now!”

They were nearing the edge of the city, and looming before them, blocking their right-of-way, were two steam carts--big ones carrying a large number of Martians. They were holding metallic rods and instruments in their hand-members.

Ferrati opened a chest built against the back of the seat and took out a light machine gun. Climbing into the front, next to Haines, he kneeled down behind the windshield, raised the gun, and blazed away.

The steam carts suddenly swerved, one after the other, ran wildly into the side of a building, and turned over. The jeep roared past them, raced across the last hundred feet of city paving and out onto the desert. Haines had to slow down to navigate safely the uneven layers of barren soil, rock and sand. Burl holstered his gun and reached across for one of the abandoned walkie-talkies.

In the excitement of their exit, none had noticed the change in the Martian scenery. But now it occurred to Burl that the day was distinctly lighter, and he fancied the Sun--small though it was--felt warmer. The Sun-tap demolished, this was to be expected, and by the same token, radio communication should now be practical.

Sure enough, he got Lockhart’s voice at once. Hastily, he warned the commander of what had happened.

As they drew nearer the Magellan, the great spaceship lowered toward the ground and let down its grapples and ladders. Burl saw that there was no time to be lost. A stream of Martians and steam carts was pouring out of the city on their trail.

They reached the spaceship and slammed to a halt. The men leaped out. Burl and Russ lifted Boulton’s unconscious body from the jeep and, between them, managed to hoist him awkwardly up the dangling rope ladder.

The others hooked grapples onto the jeep, and when it was secure, leaped for safety themselves.

As the first of the Martian steam carts was almost on them, the Magellan lifted into the air. It rose high above the surface and swung off into the desert. The Martians drew to a halt. Burl, looking down from the doorway of the cargo hatch, could see them milling aimlessly around. None, he noticed, ever glanced up. Air flight, apparently, was an inconceivable phenomenon to them.

After the jeep had been pulled into the cargo hold and secured, the outer ports were sealed. When everyone was safely in the inner sphere, the Magellan drew away from Mars and started on the next lap of its long mission.

Boulton was carefully examined. Nothing could be made of his condition. He seemed to bear no physical hurt, although he slept on. He was placed in his bunk, and there he rested, breathing slowly, temperature normal, dormant.

The life of the spaceship resumed, for the time being, without him. The next port of call was Jupiter, and that presented problems of its own. Between Mars and Jupiter was the great asteroid belt, a region of many thousands of tiny planetoids, ranging in size from worldlets of two or three hundred miles in diameter down to rocks the size of footballs. “The debris of an exploded planet,” was the comment Russ made to Burl. “That’s the most likely explanation. Anyway,” he added, “there seems to be no Sun-tap station on any of them. The next one is beyond the asteroids, in Jupiter’s orbit.”

During the next few days, Lockhart and the two astrogators were busy working out a rather complex maneuver, which consisted of having the ship jump over the asteroid belt rather than travel directly through it. While the orbits of thousands of the larger asteroids had been charted, there were thousands more that consisted of just chunks of rock too small to notice. They could not chance a collision with one of these--yet to work out the whereabouts of all of them was impossibly time-consuming.

What the Magellan did was to depart from the plane of the ecliptic, that level around the Sun to which all the planets generally adhere, and to draw outward so as to avoid the path of the asteroids, then to come back in onto the orbit and plane of Jupiter. This involved some tricky work with the various gravitational lines, using Mars and the Sun for repulsion and certain stars for attraction.

There were quite a number of gravity shifts, and during this period no one could be quite sure what his weight would be from one moment to another. There were several periods of zero gravity, when the crew members would float and face the complex annoyances of a steady feeling of free fall. Burl, after a couple of such sessions, got the hang of it rather comfortably.

Lockhart looked at him oddly and smiled. “Glad to know it. I may have a task for you soon, then.”

Others found the weightless conditions not so bearable. One of the engineering crew, Detmar, had to be hospitalized. What he had resembled severe seasickness. Oberfield also experienced moments of acute upset.

Boulton’s condition did not change. Once or twice he stirred slightly in his sleep, and seemed to murmur something, but then he would lapse back into his coma. Fortunately he did not resist food, and did swallow liquids forced into his mouth.