Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 Read online

  DEVIL'S PLANET

  By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

  Fresh from Earth, Young Dillon Stover is Plunged into a Mystery on Mars! Tour Pulambar, the Martian Pleasure City, with this Intrepid Earthman as Your Guide...... 15

  DEVIL'S PLANET

  By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

  Author of **Island in the Sky,** **Sojarr of Titan," etc.

  “Help!" Girra called. “My rrobot hass oone out of contrroll” (Chap. X)

  Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II Martian Holiday

  CHAPTER III Sudden Death

  CHAPTER IV The Law in Pulambar

  CHAPTER V The Escape

  CHAPTER VI The Girl in the Game-Dive

  CHAPTER VII Thirst

  CHAPTER VIII The Hope of Mars

  CHAPTER IX Scene of the Crime

  CHAPTER X The Second Explosion

  CHAPTER XI And Then the Third

  CHAPTER XII Fight and Fall

  CHAPTER XIII Half a Key

  CHAPTER XIV Three Calls at Midnight

  CHAPTER XV Captain Sharp

  CHAPTER XVI Malbrook’s Archives

  CHAPTER XVII The Roundup

  CHAPTER XVIII The Testament of Mace Malbrook

  CHAPTER XIX The Murder Weapon

  CHAPTER XX Table for Three

  CHAPTER I

  Water, Water—Nowhere

  YOUNG Dillon Stover woke easily and good-humoredly, as usual. He knew he was in bed, of course—but was he? He felt as though he were floating on a fleecy cloud, or something.

  He stretched his muscular long legs and arms, yawned and shook his tawny-curled head. He felt light as a feather, even in the first waking moment. He was alert enough to remember now. This was Mars, where he weighed only forty percent of what he weighed at home in the Missouri Ozarks. He’d come here to carry on the scientific labors of his late grandfather, which labors he’d inherited along with old Dr. Stover’s snug fortune. For the first time in his life Dillon Stover had fine clothes, independence, money in his belt- pouch—and responsibility.

  That responsibility had brought him to Pulambar, Martian City of Pleasure, for study and decision.

  He sat up on the edge of his bed, looking around the sleepiing room. Its walls were of translucent stuff like ground glass. Upon them, delicate as dim etchings, rippled a living pattern of leaves and blossoms that waved in the wind—a sort of magic- lantern effect from within, he decided. Such leaves and blossoms had once existed on Mars, long ago before the planet began to dry and choke with thirst.

  Somebody looked in. It was Bucka- lew, his grandfather’s old friend, to whose care Dr. Stover had entrusted his grandson’s Martian wanderings in a posthumous letter of introduction.

  Robert Buckalew was a man of ordinary height, slender but well proportioned, with regular, almost delicate features that seemed never to change expression. Like most society sparks whose figures were not too grotesque, he wore snugly tailored garments and a graceful mantle. He looked very young to have been a friend of Stover’s grandfather. His dark hair was ungrayed, his expressionless face unwrinkled. What kind of man was Buckalew? But Dr. Stover had died—suddenly and without indication of the need to die— and his grandson must trust to that letter of introduction.

  “Good morning,” Buckalew greeted Stover. “Good afternoon, rather, for it’s a little past noon. Sleep well?”

  Again the young man from Earth stretched, and stood up. He was taller than Buckalew, crawling with muscles. He grinned, very attractively.

  “I slept like a drunkard without a conscience,” he said. “That flight in from Earth’s tiring, isn’t it? When did I get here? Midnight? Thanks for taking me over like this.” He glanced around. “Am I in some de luxe hotel?”

  “You’re in my guest room,” replied Buckalew. “This is a tower apartment. I’m in what they call the ‘Hightower Set’, living ’way above town. Come to breakfast.”

  THE meal was served in the parlor, a dome-ceilinged chamber with rosy soft light and metal chairs that were as soft as the bed had been. Or was that more Martian gravity? The servant was a clanking figure of nickeled iron with jointed arms and legs and a bucketlike head with no face except a dimly glowing light bulb. Stover had seen few robots at home on Earth, and he studied this one intently.

  “A marvelous servant,” he commented to Buckalew as the metal creature went kitchenward for more dishes. “I’ve never been served better.”

  “Thank your grandfather,” replied Buckalew, who was not eating, perhaps having had a meal earlier. “Dr. Stover made all these very successful machine-servitors now in use throughout Pulambar.”

  Stover had heard that. But his grandfather had ceased his robot building long ago. Why? Perhaps it was because his latest work, the problem of the Martian water shortage, had absorbed him.

  “They aren’t exactly alive, are they?” the young man asked Buckalew.

  Buckalew’s dark head shook, rather somberly. “No. They’re only keyed to limited behavior-patterns. This one is good for personal service, others as mechanics’ helpers, some of the best as calculators or clerks. But—” He broke off. “Where do you want to go first? I’m at your service, Dillon.”

  Stover wiped his mouth. “I suppose that business had better come before any pleasures. I’m here to look at drought conditions. Can you help me there?”

  “Of course.” Buckalew went to a wireless telephone instrument at the wall. “Short-shot rocket,” he ordered into it, and led the way out upon the front balcony.

  By bright daylight Stover now saw Pulambar spread far below the tower in which Buckalew lived.

  Martians built Pulambar long ago at the apex of that forked expanse of verdure called Fastigium Aryn by Earth’s old astronomers. Their world was dying in spite of science and toil, and in a pleasure city the doom might be forgotten. Pulambar had its foundations in the one lake left on Mars— canals for streets, open pools for squares, throngs of motorized gondolas and barges.

  This was all the more wondrous since the rest of the planet fairly famished for water. Above towered clifflike buildings of every bright plastic material, rimmed with walks, strung with colored lights, balconied with gardens, spouting music and glare and gaiety, and crowded with tourists of all kinds and from all planets. If the laughter was a trifle hysterical, so much the better.

  Above this massed roar and chatter rose towers and spires from the blocky masses of buildings. Here was Pulambar’s upper segment — Tower Town, where wealth and society reigned. A world of its own, as Stover saw it, the highest peaks a good two miles from ground level and strung together with a silvery web of wire walkways and trolley tracks. Independent of the coarser turmoil below, it needed no such turmoil, having plenty of its own. It had its own law, sophistication; its own standard, glitter; its own ruler, bad but brilliant, Mace Malbrook.

  Of all these things Stover had only dreamed in the simple and sober surroundings of his boyhood. Orphaned at six, he had gone to dwell with his grandfather, the doctor, at the laboratory farm in the Ozarks. Study, exercise, health — all those his grandfather had supervised, making him into a towering athlete and something of a journeyman scientist. But the old man had always discouraged long jaunts even to such places as St. Louis, the World Capitol, let alone to other planets. Well, thought Stover, he was able all the better to savor the excitement of the great Pleasure City of Mars.

  “I’m certainly pro-Pulambar,” he said to Buckalew, and he meant it.

  “Here’s our rocket cab,” replied Buckalew, as a cartridge-shaped vehicle swam to the balcony railing. They entered the closed passenger compartment at the rear. “Tour us over the desert,” Buckalew ordered the
pilot through a speaking tube.

  AWAY over the complex glitter of Pulambar they soared, turning their stern-blasts to the fork of scrubby vegetation that cuddled the lake-based city. Beyond and below Stover could see the desert, rusty red and blank.

  “Looks as if it needs a drink bad,” he said to Buckalew. “No wonder nobody lives in it.”

  “Oh, people live in it,” surprisingly replied Buckalew. “Martians aren’t as numerous as Terrestrials, but there’s not enough good land for what there are.” Again he addressed the speaking tube: “Pilot, go lower and slower.”

  The rocket dipped down. Stover could see the desert features more plainly, dunes, draws, expanses of red sand.

  Buckalew pointed.

  “You see that dark blotch like mold down there?” he asked. “It’s a sign of life. Set us down by that hutch, pilot.”

  A minute later the cab dropped gently to the sand. Buckalew and Stover emerged.

  Stover looked curiously at the blisterlike protuberance a few yards away. It rose perhaps five feet from the sand, and was twice that in diameter. At first sight it seemed of dull dark stuff, but then he saw that it was a semi-transparent shell, with clumpy vegetation inside.

  “Come close,” said Buckalew, and they walked up to the blister. “This is the desert camp of a Martian.” Inside the hummock grew a single bush or shrub. Its roots were deep in the sand, its broad-leafed branches spread out inside the shell to receive the sunlight.

  Beneath those branches sprawled what looked something like four big, limp spiders.

  “Martians,” said Buckalew.

  Stover stared. The few Martians he had seen on Earth wore braces and garments to hold them erect in semi- Terrestrial posture. These, naked and unharnessed, showed as having soft bladder-bodies, each with six whip-like tentacles. Their heads, pink and covered with petal-like sense organs, all turned close to the big shrub. Stover saw that each of the Martians held a long pipe or tube in its tentacles, one end in the mouth orifice among the face petals. The other end of the pipe quested among the leaves of the shrub.

  “They are probing for water to keep them alive,” Buckalew explained.

  Then Stover understood. The shrub’s roots, deep and wide in the sand, drew to themselves all surrounding moisture. It concentrated in the leafage, a droplet at a time. These wretched creatures sealed the plant in lest the precious damp be lost by evaporation.

  “Martians make such enclosures from the glassy silicates in the sand,” Buckalew was saying. “A Martian doesn’t need much food—a few ounces of concentrate will last for ever so long. What they need is a little water, and the plant can give that for a time.”

  “For a time?” repeated Stover, staring again. “What happens when the plant’s water-production gives out?”

  “The Martians die.”

  “That must happen pretty often,” said Stover soberly, unconsciously quoting Through the Looking-Glass.

  It may be that Buckalew was deliberate in rejoining, from the same work:

  “It always happens.”

  HE STEPPED close to the sealed shelter, tapping on it with his knuckles. A Martian wriggled toward them. Buckalew held up something he had brought in the rocket— a clayware water jug, stoppered carefully, holding about two quarts. The Martian inside made frantic, appealing gestures.

  Buckalew set the jug close to the foot of the glass wall, and the Martian burrowed quickly under, snatching it.

  Stover turned away, almost shuddering, from the sight of all the creatures crowding around that pitiful container of water.

  “We go back now,” said Buckalew, and they re-entered the cab.

  Stover was somewhat pale under his healthy skin.

  “This is ghastly,” he said at last. “They have to suck up to that poor plant—ugh!”

  “That is but one little encampment of many such,” Buckalew told him. “Shall we stop at the fringe of Pulambar when we go back? To see the water-lines?”

  “Water-lines?” repeated Stover. “Are they like bread-lines used to be on Earth?”

  “Very much like that. Long processions of wretched poor, coming to get half-pint rations.”

  “I don’t want to see that,” Stover told him. “Let’s get back to something gay.”

  “Back to my apartment,” Buckalew told the pilot. To Stover he said: “We'll visit the Zaarr tonight—best public house in Pulambar.”

  CHAPTER II Martian Holiday

  ZAARR, in the slurring language of Mars, means Unattached. The public house mentioned by Buckalew was almost what the name implied—a dome-shaped edifice of silvery alloy, floating at a fixed point among four tall towers. From each tower flashed a gravity-lock beam, like an invisible girder, to moor the Zaarr in space. The only way there was by heliocopter, short-shot rocket, or other sky vehicle.

  Admission was by appointment, costing high.

  The table of Stover and Buckalew was at the raised end of the inner hall. Below them, the crystal floor revealed the pageant of Pulambar’s lower levels a mile below. A Terrestrial orchestra, best in the Solar System, played in a central pit while brigades of entertainers performed. Over all, at the highest point of the dome, hung a light that changed tint constantly, a Martian “joy-lamp” whose rays brought elevated visions to Martians, and sometimes madness and violence to Terrestrials.

  It would have been more of a treat

  to Stover if he hadn’t kept remembering that other dome-shaped structure he had seen earlier where four wretched Martian paupers prisoned themselves to suck miserable life from the distillations of a poor plant. Again he wanted to shudder, and beat down the impulse. He was here to enjoy himself. Pulambar was the most exciting spot in the habitable universe, and the Zaarr it’s greatest focus of fun.

  HE CONTRASTED all this with his familiar Ozark home, white utilitarian walls, laboratory benches and surrounding greenery, inhabited by sober technicians and caretakers. In the changing joy-light, the guests seemed the more exotic and picturesque, clad in all colors and richnesses, their hair—male and female— dressed and curled and often dyed with gay colors.

  No hysterical howl at the Zaarr. Here was society, restrained even under the joy-lamp. Most of them were Terrestrials or Terrestrial-descended Jovians, for such had most of the money in the System. There was just a sprinkling of Venusians, and the only Martian anywhere in sight was the proprietor, Prrala, over by a service entrance.

  The attendants were robots, great gleaming bodies with cunning joints and faces blank save for round white lamps.

  To Dillon Stover, who had never seen such things, they looked like animated suits of ancient armor.

  “Intriguing to notice,” he said to Buckalew in his gentle voice, “how, after so many millennia, people still turn to the same basic items of entertainment—sweet sounds, stimulating drink or other narcotics, palatable food, and parades of lovely girls.” He eyed with mild admiration the slim, tawny young woman who stood on the brink of the orchestra pit and sang a farce novelty number about a rich man who was sick.

  “That entertainer,” commented Buckalew, “might fit as well into an ancient Roman banquet scene, a tournament of song in old Thuringia, or the New York theatrical world of the twentieth century. There’s been nothing new, my young friend, since the day before history’s dawn.”

  Stover looked at the girl with more interest. He replied only because Buckalew seemed to expect some sort of a reply.

  “That’s new, to me at least,” he argued, jerking his head toward the joylamp. It shot a sudden white beam to light him up, and he was revealed as easily the handsomest man“of all those present.

  Even sitting, he showed great length and volume of muscle inside his close-fitting cloth of gold. His hair, shorter than fashionable, gleamed only less golden than his tunic.

  His young face was made strong by the bony aggressiveness of nose and jaw. His intensely blue eyes carried the darkly glowing light of hot temper in them.

  “I’m trying not to let that lam
p stir me up too much,” he went on. “It seems to intoxicate everybody except you.”

  “I’m saturated,” retorted Buckalew. “Well, how will you like to go to work when this holiday’s done?”

  “Let work be left out of the present conversation,” Stover pleaded. “I want complete relaxation and excitement. Tomorrow I’ll visit the lower levels, Mr. Buckalew.”

  “They get rough down there,” Buckalew reminded. “Lots of rowdy customers—space-crews on leave, confidence men, and all that.”

  “I can get rough, too,” said Stover. “You know, I feel a scrap coming on. I won’t deny I’m a fighter by temperament, Mr. Buckalew.”

  “Your grandfather was a fighter, too,” said Buckalew, his deep, dark eyes introspective as if gazing down corridors of the past. “Much like you in his youth—big, happy, strong. Later he turned his back on all this, Pulambar and other pleasure points, and became the highest rated natural philosopher of his time. You inherited his job, you tell me—the unfinished job of perfecting the condenser ray.”

  “A job that ought to be done,” nodded Stover.

  “A job that must be done,” rejoined Buckalew earnestly. ‘‘You tell me how much you like Pulambar, but doesn’t that extravagant lake down below make you feel a trifle vicious? Don’t you stop to think that the poor thirsty deserts of Mars could suck up a thousand times that much water without showing it?

  “Don’t you understand how this great planet, with what was once the greatest civilization in the known universe, is dying for lack of water— or, rather, for the ability to keep that water? And that’s what the condenser ray will do. By the way, you may call me Robert, if you like. That’s what your grandfather called me.”

  Stover turned back to a remark he had begun earlier. “I said I’d like to fight—Robert. That’s because I think, and keep thinking, of this man Mal- brook who seems to own Pulambar and this wasteful lake and all. Why doesn’t he divide the water with the unfortunate poor?”