The Caves of Mars

By Emil Petaja

Scanned by BW-SciFi

I

Ric Coltor looked down, way down, to where Calcity winked in the night. Calcity stretched out over what had once been coast, then forest, then desert. Now it was a maze of towers, steel and glass business battlements, spidery flow-ramps. Further down some self-conscious older buildings huddled, ashamed. There were a few private copters and late cabs idling across the night. But up here Ric was the only evidence of life. He had the winter wind and the foretaste of death all to himself.

He'd stopped at a bar and downed two quick drinks before his climb up this neon-splashed ad pylon on the highest building he could find. But he wasn't fuzzy. By no means! Wind pressed his leanness against a narrow strut; three inches of steel supported his booted feet. His normal one-seventy muscular pounds had wasted to one forty-eight those months in the space hospital; that, taken together with enforced abstinence, and the alcohol should have hit him like a ton of bricks. But it didn't. State of mind, he decided, grimly. Never had his mind cut so sharp a swath at life; never had his senses taken such a hungry bite at conscious existence. Why way up here? That was easy. Space had been his life. This was as close to it as he'd ever get again.

The dope they'd kept him on, against unbearable physical and psychological pain, was all worn off. Back in the hospital time had mushed together in a mindless lump, a vehicle for continuous torment. So they'd kept him under drugs practically all of the time.

Now, suddenly, this rush of intense feeling.

He didn't want it. He couldn't bear to think ahead, either. He couldn't bear to look down at the plastic arm they had glued onto his right shoulder stump. It worked after a fashion, sure. It had helped him climb up here. But, being the kind of man he was, an awkward mechanical arm just wasn't enough. He couldn't take it. He wouldn't. So ...

The thoughts churned up. Happy ones. Angry ones. They took hold of his sharpened senses and somehow they only honed down the knife.

From the time Richard Franklin Coltor was old enough to grab a hold of whatever chunk of matter his parents had first tossed him to play with, he had grabbed it with both hands. That was the key. Both eager fists. At fourteen he stowed away on a moonship because they laughed at his eagerness and kicked his tail out of the Union office when he swaggered in demanding a space job, any kind so long as it was spaceside.

Guts and perspicacity won out and they kept him on. To Ric Coltor life was not to be nibbled at but gulped dry, ravished with your whole being.

Pushing thirty now, the arbitrary age when hardcore spacemen were given a penetrating twice-over by the meds—especially pilots—Ric would normally have been given the emphatic nod for a good twenty more years of exploratory seat-of-the-pants spacing.

It fed his soul, being part of the big push which now included a landing or near-look at all the Sol planets, major and minor. Next stop, Alpha. Ric had done his share; more. He'd crossed swords with death on a daily basis. He loved it. To toe dance down that skittish ribbon that separates life from death was to know what existence was all about.

But now ...

"Come back early next week. Tuesday okay? We'll check up on that new arm." Doc Ace Rannigan was wiry and all elbows, like a grasshopper, the way he moved and cocked his head, but thank God he didn't talk with that enforced Pippa cheery tone some of the others used on him. That did make Ric curl up at the toes. Flat. Dry. Efficient.

Ric flexed his new fingers and shuddered. It wasn't that moving this skillful mechanical member caused pain, which it did, it was knowing what it represented. "I don't want to live half a man," shot-up soldiers used to say. But usually they would come around. Not Ric. He simply wasn't the type.

He said nothing. Doc Rannigan had done his best. What more could he do? Medical science hadn't reached the miracle stage yet. They couldn't grow him a new arm, could they?

His two cute nurses seemed to have been handpicked to keep him wanting to live. He played along. He tried. It was an uphill battle. There was continuous massage, enforced exercise, psychological byplay. Ric was a top pilot so he got the red carpet treatment. Now he was free to walk out of his room, this sanctuary from life, to take up the suddenly obnoxious business of breathing and functioning.

"So long, Doc," he just said. "Thanks."

Dr. Rannigan nodded severely. No slop. No land words.

Walking down the long antiseptic corridor toward the front door Ric shivered. A cold hand pressed down on the back of his neck. Suddenly he knew he would never make it. Spacing was out. And spacing was his life. So ...

"Oh, Coltor." A Plorix Consolidated official caught hold of his plastic arm just as the automatic door swooshed open. "I'm James Ledbetter. Remember me? Well, perhaps not. You were in pretty bad shape last time we met. Will you come into my office, please?"

"Sure."

For many weeks walking out through the front door had represented a desirable goal. Now, somehow, it didn't matter a damn.

"Sit down, Coltor." The man indicated a leathery chair on the other side of his crescent-shaped desk. "Drink?"

Ric shook his head. He wanted one, but not here. Not with this hawk-faced character, whose eyes behind those focals reminded Ric of a bug-eyed Venurian swamp lizard. He took a cigarette, though.

"Keep the pack," James F. Ledbetter urged, magnanimously.

"What do you want to see me about?" Ric asked. "Doc says I'm a free man."

Ledbetter gave him a sharp calculating look of measuring a client for size. "Part of my job as Personnel Head is coordination between the Pilot Union and the insurance settlements." He rattled a dossier of papers on his desk. "It so happens that our Board meeting took your case under advisement just this morning. I'm glad I caught you so I can give you the good news."

"Good news?" For one fleeting moment Ric thought that maybe the enormous space metallics company was going to relax its strict rule about physically handicapped on ships. The hope died aborning.

"They voted you the full disability compensation!" James F. Ledbetter's saurian eyes gleamed. "Wonderful, no? Of course it won't keep you in caviar, but it will tide you over until you can snag onto something—er—suitable. Office job, I imagine."

Ric just looked at him. The Personnel Manager's frown was reproachful. "I know it's bad to lose a—limb. Especially for a man with a record as dramatic as yours. But consider our standpoint, the Company's. The vote was by no means unanimous and it could have gone flat against you. After all, that jaunt of yours to the Polar Cave wasn't authorized. It was strictly on your own. Under the provisions of the injury and Accident Liability contract between the Pilot Union and Plorix—"

While his glib legal verbiage droned crisply on, Ric's thoughts flicked back to the fateful weekend. He was on three day leave. Port Mars. Alan had snagged him down in one of the bars with his wild proposition, excited as hell that Ric should be on Mars coincidentally with his own project. Alan Tork wasn't just an old school buddy anymore. He was Dr. Alan Tork, with half a dozen degrees after his name, one of the foremost space-bio savants of the day, young as he was. Alan had this bug in his ear about the Polar Cave. Ric had to join him in an explorative project up there. He had to. It would only take two days. Alan's entourage was all waiting and ready. They could take off right away.

"What for?" was Ric's natural objection.

It turned out that years of examining microscopic specimens gleaned from various sections of the Martian wastes, particularly in the Lacus Mæris and Lacus Solis areas, and a significant double-canal complex that threaded north to the region of winter ice caps and orange clouds, had led Alan to believe that once fantastically great cities had existed in these areas and that some enormous catastrophe had culminated in a vast exodus to the Cave.

"It's not a new theory, exactly," Ric pointed out.

"No. But my evidence is. In my opinion the migration was not caused by any lack of water or dwindling atmosphere. They had progressed to the point of producing their own, or evolved beyond the point of need. No. Some sudden overwhelming tragedy occurred. Possibly self-inflicted. Something that wiped away all trace of the existence of these great cities and reduced them to electronic dust."

"What could do that?"

"We almost succeeded in doing the same thing," Alan pointed out. "Had it not been for an almost perfect stalemate, the Third War would have brought Earth to exactly the same land of an ending."

Ric nursed his drink and scowled. "Those caves have been gone over dozens of times. Nothing but ice and rock."

"They didn't probe deep enough," Alan said. "I'm prepared to go deeper. Follow microscopic animal and plant leads with an utterly new type of probe."

"Yeah?" Ric gulped down his drink hastily, already figuring it to be his last. "What'd you expect to find?"

Alan's sallow face grinned an oddly solemn grin. "Suppose you come along and find out?"

They took full advantage of the earlier digs. Alan had secured the most detailed maps available from colleagues who had explored the polar cavern and its network of honeycomb sub-caves—and who had been so sharply disappointed. Mars had always been special. It was the only Sol World where highly intelligent life could logically be expected to be found, even residually. But none had been found. Not a trace.

Newer, more efficient bores were put into action by Alan's crew. Quarter of a mile down from the deepest earlier dig they found breathable atmosphere. A last breakthrough opened out on a huge chamber where the warm rock was laced through with loamy soil. Heat, apparently from a series of fissures and minor tunnels leading to the interior of the planet, made them drag off their outer parka-like clothing, and microscopic vegetable life slicking the damp walls glowed with a blue spectral light.

Then they found the fungi.

"Look at the size of them!" Alan chortled. "They remind me somewhat of our lepiota procera, with the long thin stems and the umbrella crests. But that greenish color is unlike any—"

Ric left Alan to his ecstatic snipping and on-the-spot testing, moved further in beyond a stalagmite wall to the cave's end. A wide arc that reminded him of a cathedral window, or one side of it, caught his curious eye. It was so clean-cut. One might imagine that it had been tooled, like one side of a sealed door which had been snapped open by an age-old earthquake. Ric ran his hand along the smooth rim thoughtfully, then in, further and further in and down, where the crevice widened near the floor.

It happened then, and fast.

His arm was bitten off, as if by sudden lightning. His torment-scream was sheered off by oblivion. All that he knew next about being alive was a drug-saturated blur in the Port Mars space-facility hospital; blurred changes indicative of a ship's dispensary; then—fire and brimstone of a hell that centered itself in a right arm he didn't have anymore.

"—so you see, Coltor, the Company has been more than generous." Ledbetter's babbling terminated and that brought Ric back to reality with a wrench.

"The locals thought Plorix might derive favorable publicity out of the dig," Ric said.

"Sure, sure. It is quite true that Dr. Alan Tork is a great man in his field, that he did bring back some interesting specimens, although perhaps it would have been better if he—never mind all that. In any case official permission should have been obtained from our head office."

"There wasn't time."

Ledbetter shrugged, then put on a forgiving smile. "There's no point in discussing it further. I only wanted you to know that the full disability payment will reach you in due course. Just let us know your address. Then of course there's your new plast-arm. In my view, Pilot Coltor, you're a very lucky man."

A very lucky man.

Yeah. So lucky that even Alan hadn't once bothered to contact him, in person or otherwise, at the hospital, even though most of his lab work was centered in or near Calcity. Nor Candi. Candi was Dr. Candida Lucas-Long. Candi was Alan's beautiful green-eyed assistant when he worked at the Cal-U labs and, emotionally speaking, she seemed to be divided into two roughly equal parts. On the one hand there was the pale, scholarly Alan, whom she adored. On the other hand, there was Pilot Richard Coltor, exciting and virile and shot through with the glamor of deep space.

What's to chose now? Ric mused.

It was ex-Pilot Coltor, now, with his right arm cut off at the triceps. While Alan had hit the jackpot with his Martian fungi, and not just with the scientific world either. The fungi must had made him billions. Along with Candi's wide-eyed adoration of Alan's stature as a biochemist there was all that money. No wonder she hadn't sent him a get-well card, Get lost was more like it.

Candida Ric said her name softly into the wind. And the thought of her statuesque beauty, of those green eyes, of that flame of pale burgundy hair, put a head on his cup of hemlock.

Ric could endure all thoughts but this one with icy-cold dispassion, standing here an inch from eternity, while the night wind mourned through the pilings and nagged at his silvery space-pilot's tunic with the chevrons stripped off.

His blue-gray eyes moved up from the dizzy spectacle far below—up, up, up into the blackness and the secret star-paths he used to plunge through. He looked up one last time and now he was glad. He'd had it. The good space life. A man can have no more. There isn't any more.

When his glance dragged away from those winking stars his eyes were caught by something that made them widen, then narrow in disbelief. Something forbidden. A copter and a hypno-ad-writer. Messing up the clean black sky with a luminous message for him.

It said: "Ric Coltor! Don't do it! We know how you feel, but don't! Try Martian Panacea—the Miracle Fungi! It will solve all your problems." A needle of light searched, probed, found him, clung. "Don't jump, Ric! Use M-P! Live forever!"

II

He kept to the deepest shadows of seamy waterfront street and had to grin wryly at himself. Ric had been so sure that all his feelings and emotions had been squeezed out; but right now there was one small cocklebur of feeling inside his brain, roweling him on.

What? Curiosity, of course. What killed the cat. He had to find out why that sky-adman risked prison and perhaps death to single him out for his pitch. After he found out he could then pick his spot and keep that rendezvous with death.

Walking randomly along the black asphalt he thought about hypno-advertising. Unscrupulous companies still occasionally toyed with it wistfully and, of course, lobbied for it like crazy. Some fifty or sixty years ago the ad groups had contented themselves with hiring psychologists and brain-boys to determine peoples' weak points and play up to them via video, news sheets, or whatever. There were subliminals, invidious low-pressures, snide snob-pitches. Then one day some bright greedy egghead rang in overt hypnotism, which included personal ESP probes of specific groups of customers. These all-too-personal findings were religiously taped onto central IBM banks and this information peddled to admen. It got pretty rough. In fact, it went so far out of line that pretty soon nobody was safe—not one busy housewife nor one nine-to-fiver—and when the vicious competition began to percolate it wasn't long before the available nut-hatches were filled to overflowing.

The law stepped in with a very heavy foot.

So now it was back to the old drawing board. Advertising as a whole took two giant steps backwards; housewives could stop cowering and snivelling in corners because they forgot to use the right deodorant, and office workers could switch to a different cigarette every week without walking in terror of some vague nemesis overtaking them. The reaction was bad, at first. Conditioned themselves to believe in the rightness of their cause, admen didn't give up easily. There were dirty messes, a kind of warfare, and even now some trigger-happy skycop might just take a shot at an adman who flaunted his pitch the way Ric's skybuddy had.

Why? Why Ric? Up to this point nobody had cared whether Ric lived or died. Candi and Alan, for instance. Then who?

Who wanted him to try M-P, and why?

Prowling the Bay fog that clung wetly to the old section of warehouses and cheap bars, Ric kept wondering, hearing the mournful hooting of a foghorn at the Gate and passing a mangy cat that sprang out, spitting wrathfully at him for invading its malodorous domain.

Ric's ad-needled brain ran over what he had read about M-P in the periodicals they had brought him in the hospital, and what he had seen on the hospital video. Martian Panacea. That cure-all connotation was the tip-off. Anything that cured everything just had to be phoney. Whether the fungi derivatives the users had pumped into their veins by hypodermic needles were in any way connected with the mushroom Alan had found in that deep chamber of the Polar Caves was something Ric had no way of knowing at this point. Maybe so. Or maybe the promoters of M-P only used Dr. Alan Tork's discovery as a gimmick.

Anyway, M-P—the pushers tagged it fun for fungi—enjoyed the biggest promotional scheme of any product ever made available to a hope-hungry planet. Every ad-medium was saturated for the period of three months. The ads never mentioned Dr. Alan Tork; they never even mentioned the Polar Caves, but they implied a lot. And, short of the outlawed hypno-ads, they spread the gospel. If there breathed a single man, woman, or child in the world who hadn't heard of M-P and its "miraculous benefits," that person must have spent the last six months in a diving bell.

M-P didn't need hypno-ads. Everyone who tried it praised it to the skies. Their health was so improved they were reborn. New teeth sprouted in octogenarian mouths, diseased organs replaced themselves, sightless people saw. Deaf-mutes chortled their heads off, extolling M-P. The strange fungi spores swept the world like a beautiful plague.

Then the backlash.

What started the reverse action was hard to figure. Was it because M-P was too good? Was it that after using it for a couple of months a person tended to glow bluely in the dark? Or was it, perhaps, that Dr. Morton Krill—who began by giving his important name openly and extravagantly to M-P promotion—suddenly did an abrupt about face?

Whatever it was, M-P promotions dwindled, then vanished altogether. The Law took the present view that all its "benefits" must be potentially dangerous. The Earth Medical Association, after exhaustive testing, found nothing in the fungi that could (or should, anyway) bring about such wonderful transformations, and declared that there must be a catch to it somewhere. Perhaps some hideous reaction. They were unanimous in damning Dr. Morton Krill for having given it his unqualified blessing, pointing out that now Dr. Krill had disappeared. Nobody knew where. That alone, the medics said, was reason enough to ban the use of M-P entirely.

These severe warnings swung the Law into action. M-P users went under cover; use of the fungi was equated with opium addiction. Anyone caught with the raw fungi or the injective distillation from them got a stiff prison sentence. Some local authorities went even further; there were unexplained deaths of transportees to the special M-P prisons.

Yet rumors persisted of secret cults dedicated to M-P. Dr. Morton Krill's name kept cropping up, even though he had mysteriously vanished from public life.

Still . . .

Hope dies hard, and its filmy hand had a clutch on Ric's heart and guts, as he moved like a lanky one-armed shadow down the street.

If M-P could grow new internal organs and new eyes . . .

When he paused in a black doorway to warm his cold-bitten limbs and to light up a cigarette, he saw that he was being followed. He had been so absorbed he hadn't noticed until just now. When he stopped the man following him did, too. Ric dragged on his smoke and waited. The dark ill-dressed figure just stood there.

It was an educated guess that whoever engineered the hypno-ad was having him tailed. Maybe because they wanted to steer him to an M-P outlet. Underground as these outlets were now, he might need help finding one. Ric had employed elementary deduction when he had come down here south of the Market Street move-walk; one was most likely to find an M-P cell down here in the slums.

So he had an escort. Of course there was the off-chance that his stalker was a legitimate mugger out on late-evening business.

Ric's muscles tightened to potential danger. The adrenaline pounding into his heart, the razor-edged wariness, the urgency for hair-trigger action when the need came—all of this was quixotically familiar. To smell danger, where and when it came, was a Spaceman's life. It made life desirable; even to gulp in the cold marine-scented air was a good thing.

He finished his smoke and waited for his tailer to make his move. He moved finally, in a shuffling vag's gait, up even with Ric. Then he stopped.

"Got another smoke, Spacer?" Ric's silver-gray uniform (the only clothes he had) was distinctive and respect-commanding, and the slouchy figure couldn't see where his Grade One chevrons had been neatly scissored off. Spacers had a reputation for hardness; they earned it.

"Sure."

Ric jerked up a cigarette from his rumpled pack, then flicked on his lighter for the man so he could get a brief but clear look at his face. The man's clothes were dirty; they looked crawly too. His square-jawed face was grimy. The hand that propelled the smoke to his thin lips shook like a wino's, but the whites of his eyes were too clean for a wino, and his fingernails were too clean underneath.

He showed narrow insunk teeth when he grinned thanks. "Cold night," he said.

"Getting that way," Ric agreed. "Know this part of town?"

"A little."

"Know where I can find some?"

"Some what?"

Ric shrugged. "Fun." He accented the word a little, but left room for other meanings.

"I'm not quite sure just what you mean."

Ric came to the point. "M-P. I'm looking for an M-P pusher."

The play-bum jerked a rapid glance up the street, then down in the direction of the Bay. The street was empty except for a couple of low-flying seagulls. The foghorns gave out their mechanical keening.

"Maybe I can help you out, Spacer. I'm not a user, nothing like that. But a guy hears things."

He started walking. Ric followed him into deeper dark without further conversation. His muscles and nerves were still ready for the unexpected. He felt an angry ganglion twinge in his stump, and that brought up a new and critical problem. Could he handle himself? He was moving into a strange, off-color league. During those final months Doc Rannigan had forced him to exercise what was left of him and he had done it, out of boredom more than anything, so that his sinews and muscles weren't the pudding they could have been, even though they weren't quite the old iron-tough Ric Coltor; but how could he possibly match any man with two good arms?

When his escort dipped abruptly into a narrow squalid alleyway, Ric sucked in a sharp breath and missed a stride. If he was going to get taken, this was it. He ought to have gotten hold of a blaster or at least one of those hollow switch-blades with stun-juice in them which the young hoods affected these days. At least then he'd have a fighting chance. Die, sure. He wanted it. But not like this. Not giving some sadistic punk his kicks mangling him to a pulp in a black alley.

He waited a couple of breaths, watching the red glow of his escort's cigarette float off to a central point down the alley. Then, with a shrug, he moved in. A few yards off, he pressed his wide shoulders against the dank building, ears pricked for any telltale sound, such as the gulp of intake before a sudden attack.

It didn't come. Ric flicked on his lighter. They were standing in front of a narrow door, just a peeled-paint metal slab. No sign. No number.

"Here?" Ric asked.

"Like I said, I'm not sure. Want to try?"

When he stepped aside Ric rapped his knuckles sharply on the little door. They waited, breathing out little vaporous ghosts.

The door opened just a crack.

"Yeah?" a rough voice asked.

It appeared Ric was to take over. "We're looking for some fun," he said.

"Fun?"

"Yeah. Fun as not in fun and games."

From the dark interior came an indignant snort. "So go someplace else. You won't find any here."

The door closed but not before Ric's space-boot jammed the crack. "Listen, Bud, I want some M-P and I want it now. And my friend told me—"

"Which friend is that?" A ring of torchlight splashed Ric's face, then swept the area around him.

Ric's eyes moved with it and he grunted his surprise. His escort was gone, evaporated into the night. Oh, well. He'd done his job. He'd got Ric here.

The light from the torch lingered thoughtfully on Ric's false arm.

"How about just a drink?" Ric said. "It's damn cold standing out here."

"I guess I can sell you a drink, Spacer."

The door closed quickly behind them and Ric followed the man with the torch down a stretch of musty hall; it was dark out of the perimeter of the beam and Ric noticed an odd phenomenon. The man who'd let him in was not tall but he was very wide, like a wrestler. His grizzly-bear mid-section and sloping shoulders were limned by a blue-white glow, a nimbus, a fox fire that exuded from the man himself, through his clothes.

At the hall's end the big man stopped. He rapped at the closed door three times, looked over the cavernous room, with its sickly pale wall-lights which didn't quite reach the high metal rafters and the peeled gray walls. There were deal tables, around which men were playing poker, as if killing time. Waiting. There was a beat-up bar at the far end with a row of dusty bottles behind it.

Ric moved to the bar and slid onto a stool. The big man was the bartender. He moved behind it and swiped a bar rag in front of Ric. "What's your pleasure?"

"Bourbon. Straight."

The big man frowned, as if he disapproved not only of Ric's choice but of drinking in general. But he nodded and poured out a liberal shot.

Sipping, Ric eyed the heavy jowls and the thatch of black eyebrows. "This is for the cold night air. Later I would like something more to the point."

"Such as?" Carefully.

Ric held out his new arm. "As you see, I've got a problem."

The bartender nodded gravely.

"You glory boys do get yourselves in trouble."

Ric sipped deep. "Any suggestions?"

The big man's worried look relaxed into a deep-throated chuckle. "My suggestion is stay the hell out of the sky. We got enough trouble right here."

"Looks like I don't have any choice." Ric gave the stripped chevrons a glum look.

Ric thought he glimpsed a flicker of sympathy behind those pinched careful eyes.

"I'm Rolff," the bartender said, adding, "stick around." He edged out from behind the bar and over to the hall door. A thin, hollow-eyed youngster with a tousle of uncombed hair had a chair tilted against the door and was perched on it, unhygienically cleaning his fingernails with a small fang. The bartender said something to the boy, and the youngster nodded and sauntered off through a back door and vanished.

When Rolff came back he leaned across the bar and asked, "What put you onto M-P? Most people nowadays think it's a ten-carat phoney and a dead one."

Leaving out all but crucial facts Ric told him about the pylon and the hypno-ad.

"Those ESP probes work like lightning," Rolff whistled. "Imagine putting you on by name."

"That was their initial gimmick," Ric said. "Everybody likes the sound and sight of his own name."

"Guess you're right." He jerked his thumb at Ric's arm. "You really think M-P can do it? Grow you a new arm?"

Ric's forehead tightened. "Don't know what to think. I've been out of circulation over eight months. All I know is what I read in the papers." He downed his double shot. "Suppose you tell me!"

Rolff grinned uneasily. "Me? How should I know? Course," he went on like stepping over eggs, "I hear lots of stories. How people ...