DARK MISSION

The rays of the sun lanced down over the tops of the trees and into the clearing, revealing a scene of chaos and havoc. Yesterday there had been a wooden frame house there, but now only pieces of it remained. One wall had been broken away, as by an explosion, and lay on the ground in fragments; the roof was crushed in, as if some giant had stepped on it and passed on.

But the cause of the damage was still there, lying on the ruins of the house. A tangled mass of buckled girders and metal plates lay mixed with a litter of laboratory equipment that had been neatly arranged in one room of the house, and parts of a strange engine lay at one side. Beyond was a tube that might have been a rocket. The great metal object that lay across the broken roof now only hinted at the sleek cylinder it had once been, but a trained observer might have guessed that it was the wreck of a rocketship. From the former laboratory, flames were licking up at the metal hull, and slowly spreading towards the rest of the house.

In the clearing, two figures lay outstretched, of similar size and build, but otherwise unlike. One was a dark man of middle age, completely naked, with a face cut and battered beyond all recognition. The odd angle of the head was unmistakable proof that his neck was broken. The other man might have been a brawny sea Viking of earlier days, both from his size and appearance, but his face revealed something finer and of a higher culture. He was fully clothed, and the slow movement of his chest showed that there was still life in him. Beside him, there was a broken beam from the roof, a few spots of blood on it. There was more blood on the man’s head, but the cut was minor, and he was only stunned.

Now he stirred uneasily and groped uncertainly to his feet, shaking his head and fingering the cut on his scalp. His eyes traveled slowly across the clearing and to the ruins that were burning merrily. The corpse claimed his next attention, and he turned it over to examine the neck. He knit his brows and shook his head savagely, trying to call back the memories that eluded him.

They would not come. He recognized what his eyes saw, but his mind produced no words to describe them, and the past was missing. His first memory was of wakening to find his head pounding with an ache that was almost unbearable. Without surprise, he studied the rocket and saw that it had come down on the house, out of control, but it evoked no pictures in his mind, and he gave up. He might have been in the rocket or the house at the time; he had no way of telling which. Probably the naked man had been asleep at the time in the house.

Something prickled gently in the back of his mind, growing stronger and urging him to do something. He must not waste time here, but must fulfill some vital mission. What mission? For a second, he almost had it, and then it was gone again, leaving only the compelling urge that must be obeyed. He shrugged and started away from the ruins toward the little trail that showed through the trees.

Then another impulse called him back to the corpse, and he obeyed it because he knew of nothing else to do. Acting without conscious volition, he tugged at the corpse, found it strangely heavy, and dragged it toward the house. The flames were everywhere now, but he found a place where the heat was not too great and pulled the corpse over a pile of combustibles.

With the secondary impulse satisfied, the first urge returned, and he set off down the trail moving slowly. The shoes hurt his feet, and his legs were leaden, but he kept on grimly, while a series of questions went around his head in circles. Who was he, where, and why?

Whoever had lived in the house, himself or the corpse, had obviously chosen the spot for privacy; the trail seemed to go on through the woods endlessly, and he saw no signs of houses along it. He clumped on mechanically, wondering if there was no end, until a row of crossed poles bearing wires caught his eye. Ahead, he made out a broad highway, with vehicles speeding along it in both directions, and hastened forward, hoping to meet someone.

Luck was with him. Pulled up at the side of the road was one of the vehicles, and a man was doing something at the front end of the car. Rough words carried back to him suggesting anger. He grinned suddenly and hastened toward the car, his eyes riveted on the man’s head. A tense feeling shot through his brain and left, just as he reached the machine.

“Need help?” The words slipped out unconsciously, and now other words came pouring into his head, along with ideas and knowledge, and that seemed wrong somehow. The driving impulse he felt was still unexplained.

The man had looked up at his words, and relief shot over the sweating face. “Help’s the one thing I need,” he replied gratefully. “I been fussing with this blasted contraption darned near an hour, and nobody’s even stopped to ask, so far. Know anything about it?”

“Ummm.” The stranger, as he was calling himself for want of a better name, tested the wires himself, vaguely troubled at the simplicity of the engine. He gave up and went around to the other side, lifting the hood and inspecting the design. Then sureness came to him as he reached for the tool kit. “Probably the…umm…timing pins,” he said.

It was. A few minutes later, the engine purred softly and the driver turned to the stranger. “Okay now, I guess. Good thing you came along; worst part of the road, and not a repair shop for miles. Where you going?”

“I—” The stranger caught himself. “The big city,” he said, for want of a better destination.

“Hop in, then. I’m going to Elizabeth, right on your way. Glad to have you along; gets so a man talks to himself on these long drives, unless he has something to do. Smoke?”

“Thank you, no. I never do.” He watched the other light up, feeling uncomfortable about it. The smell of the smoke, when it reached him, was nauseous, as were the odor of gasoline and the man’s own personal effluvium, but he pushed them out of his mind as much as possible. “Have you heard or read anything about a rocketship of some kind?”

“Sure. Oglethorpe’s, you mean? I been reading what the papers had to say about it.” The drummer took his eyes off the road for a second, and his beady little eyes gleamed. “I been wondering a long time why some of these big-shot financiers don’t back up the rockets, and finally Oglethorpe does. Boy, now maybe we’ll find out something about this Mars business.”

The stranger grinned mechanically. “What does his ship look like?”

“Picture of it in the Scoop, front page. Find it back of the seat, there. Yeah, that’s it. Wonder what the Martians look like?”

“Hard to guess,” the stranger answered. Even rough half-tones of the picture showed that it was not the ship that had crashed, but radically different. “No word of other rockets?”

“Nope, not that I know of, except the Army’s test things. You know, I kinda feel maybe the Martians might look like us. Sure.” He took the other’s skepticism for granted without looking around. “Wrote a story about that once, for one of these science-fiction magazines, but they sent it back. I figured out maybe a long time ago there was a civilization on Earth—Atlantis, maybe—and they went over and settled on Mars. Only Atlantis sunk on them and there they were, stranded. I figured maybe one day they came back, sort of lost out for a while, but popped up again and started civilization humming. Not bad, eh?”

“Clever,” the stranger admitted. “But it sounds vaguely familiar. Suppose we said instead there was a war between the mother world and Mars that wrecked both civilizations, instead of your Atlantis sinking. Wouldn’t that be more logical?”

“Maybe, I dunno. Might try it, though mostly they seem to want freaks—Darned fool, passing on a hill!” He leaned out to shake a pudgy fist, then came back to his rambling account. “Read one the other day with two races, one like octopuses, the other twenty feet tall and all blue.”

Memory pricked tantalizingly and came almost to the surface. Blue—Then it was gone again, leaving only a troubled feeling. The stranger frowned and settled down the seat, answering in monosyllables to the other’s monologue, and watching the patchwork of country and cities slip by.

“There’s Elizabeth. Any particular place you want me to drop you?”

The stranger stirred from the half-coma induced by the cutting ache in his head, and looked about. “Any place,” he answered. Then the surge in the back of his mind grabbed at him again, and he changed it. “Some doctor’s office.”

That made sense, of course. Perhaps the impulse had been only the logical desire to seek medical aid, all along. But it was still there, clamoring for expression, and he doubted the logic of anything connected with it. The call for aid could not explain the sense of disaster that accompanied it. As the car stopped before a house with a doctor’s shingle, his pulse was hammering with frenzied urgency.

“Here we are.” The drummer reached out toward the door handle, almost brushing one of the other’s hands. The stranger jerked it back savagely, avoiding contact by a narrow margin, and a cold chill ran up his back and quivered its way down again. If that hand had touched him—The half-opened door closed again, but left one fact impressed on him. Under no conditions must he suffer another to make direct contact with his body, lest something horrible should happen! Another crazy angle, unconnected with the others, but too strong for disobedience. He climbed out, muttering his thanks, and made his way up the walk toward the office of Dr. Lanahan, hours 12:00 to 4:00.

* * * *

The doctor was an old man, with the seamed and rugged good-nature of the general practitioner, and his office fitted him. There was a row of medical books along one wall, a glass-doored cabinet containing various medicaments, and a clutter of medical instruments. He listened to the stranger’s account quietly, smiling encouragement at times, and tapping the desk with his pencil.

“Amnesia, of course,” he agreed, finally. “Rather peculiar in some respects, but most cases of that are individual. When the brain is injured, its actions are usually unpredictable. Have you considered the possibility of hallucinations in connection with those impulses you mention?”

“Yes.” He had considered it from all angles, and rejected the solutions as too feeble. “If they were ordinary impulses, I’d agree with you. But they’re far deeper than that, and there’s a good reason for them, somewhere. I’m sure of that.”

“Hmm.” The doctor tapped his pencil again and considered. The stranger sat staring at the base of his neck, and the tense feeling in his head returned, as it had been when he first met the drummer. Something rolled around in his mind and quieted. “And you have nothing on you in the way of identification?”

“Uh!” The stranger grunted, feeling foolish, and reached into his pockets. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He brought out a package of cigarettes, a stained handkerchief, glasses, odds and ends, that meant nothing to him, and finally a wallet stuffed with bills. The doctor seized on that and ran through its contents quickly.

“Evidently you had money… Ummm, no identification card, except for the letters L. H. Ah, there we are; a calling card.” He passed it over, along with the wallet, and smiled in self-satisfaction. “Evidently you’re a fellow physician, Dr. Lurton Haines. Does that recall anything?”

“Nothing.” It was good to have a name, in a way, but that was his only response to the sight of the card. And why was he carrying glasses and cigarettes for which he had no earthly use?

The doctor was hunting through his pile of books and finally came up with a dirty red volume. “Who’s Who,” he explained. “Let’s see. Umm. Here we are. ‘Lurton R. Haines, M.D.’ Odd, I thought you were younger than that. Work along cancer research. No relatives mentioned. The address is evidently that of the house you remember first—‘Surrey Road, Danesville.’ Want to see it?”

He passed the volume over, and the stranger—or Haines—scanned it carefully, but got no more out of it than the other’s summary, except for the fact that he was forty-two years old. He put the book back on the desk, and reached for his wallet, laying a bill on the pad where the other could reach it.

“Thank you, Dr. Lanahan.” There was obviously nothing more the doctor could do for him, and the odor of the little room and the doctor was stifling him; apparently he was allergic to the smell of other men. “Never mind the cut on the head—it’s purely superficial.”

“But—”

Haines shrugged and mustered a smile, reached for the door, and made for the outside again. The urge was gone now, replaced by a vast sense of gloom, and he knew that his mission had ended in failure.

* * * *

They knew so little about healing, though they tried so hard. The entire field of medicine ran through Haines’ mind now, with all its startling successes and hopeless failures, and he knew that even his own problem was beyond their ability. And the knowledge, like the sudden return of speech, was a mystery; it had come rushing into his mind while he stared at the doctor, at the end of the sudden tenseness, and a numbing sense of failure had accompanied it. Strangely, it was not the knowledge of a specialist in cancer research, but such common methods as a general practitioner might use.

One solution suggested itself, but it was too fantastic for belief. The existence of telepaths was suspected, but not ones who could steal whole pages of knowledge from the mind of another, merely by looking at him. No, that was more illogical than the sudden wakening of isolated fields of memory by the sight of the two men.

He stopped at a corner, weary under the load of despondency he was carrying, and mulled it over dully. A newsboy approached hopefully. “Time a’ News out!” the boy sing-songed his wares. “Scoop ‘n’ Juhnal ! Read awl about the big train wreck! Paper, mister?”

Haines shrugged dully. “No paper!”

“Blonde found muidehed in bath-tub,” the boy insinuated. “Mahs rocket account!” The man must have an Achilles’ heel somewhere.

But the garbled jargon only half registered on Haines’ ears. He started across the street, rubbing his temples, before the second driving impulse caught at him and sent him back remorselessly to the paper boy. He found some small change in his pocket, dropped a nickel on the pile of papers, disregarding the boy’s hand, and picked up a copy of the Scoop. “Screwball,” the boy decided aloud, and dived for the nickel.

The picture was no longer on the front page of the tabloid, but Haines located the account with some effort. “Mars Rocket Take-Off Wednesday,” said the headline in conservative twenty-four-point type, and there was three-quarters of a column under it. “Man’s first flight to Mars will not be delayed, James Oglethorpe told reporters here today. Undismayed by the skepticism of the scientists, the financier is going ahead with his plans, and expects his men to take off for Mars Wednesday, June 8, as scheduled. Construction has been completed, and the rocket machine is now undergoing tests.”

Haines scanned down the page, noting the salient facts. The writer had kept his tongue in his cheek, but under the faintly mocking words there was the information he wanted. The rocket might work; man was at last on his way toward the conquests of the planets. There was no mention of another rocket; obviously, then, that one must have been built in secret in a futile effort to beat Oglethorpe’s model.

But that was unimportant. The important thing was that he must stop the flight! Above all else, man must not make that trip! There was no sanity to it, and yet somehow it was beyond mere sanity. It was his duty to prevent any such voyage, and that duty was not to be questioned.

He returned quickly to the newsboy, reached out to touch his shoulder, and felt his hand jerk back to avoid the touch. The boy seemed to sense it, though, for he mined quickly. “Paper?” he began brightly before recognizing the stranger. “Oh, it’s you. Watcha want?”

“Where can I find a train to New York?” Haines pulled a quarter from his pocket and tossed it on the pile of papers.

The boy’s eyes brightened again. “Four blocks down, tuihn right, and keep goin’ till you come to the station. Can’t miss it. Thanks, mister!”

* * * *

The discovery of the telephone book as a source of information was Haines’ single major triumph, and the fact that the first Oglethorpe he tried was a colored street cleaner failed to take the edge off it. Now he trudged uptown, counting the numbers that made no sense to him; apparently the only system was one of arithmetical progression, irrespective of streets.

His shoulders were drooping, and the lines of pain around his eyes had finally succeeded in drawing his brows together. A coughing spell hit him, torturing his lungs for long minutes, and then passed. That was a new development, as was the pressure around his heart. And everywhere was the irritating aroma of men, gasoline, and tobacco, a stale mixture that he could not escape. He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets to avoid chance contact with someone on the street, and crossed over toward the building that bore the number for which he was searching.

Another man was entering the elevator, and he followed mechanically, relieved that he would not have to plod up the stairs. “Oglethorpe?” he asked the operator uncertainly.

“Fourth floor, Room 405.” The boy slid the gate open, pointing, and Haines stepped out and into the chromium-trimmed reception room. There were half a dozen doors leading from it, but he spotted the one marked “James H. Oglethorpe, Private,” and slouched forward.

“Were you expected, sir?” The girl popped up in his face, one hand on the gate that barred his way. Her face was a study in frustration, which probably explained the sharpness of her tone. She delivered an Horatio-guarding-the-bridge formula. “Mr. Oglethorpe is busy now.”

“Lunch,” Haines answered curtly. He had already noticed that men talked more freely over food.

She flipped a little book in her hand and stared at it. “There is no record here of a luncheon engagement, Mr.—”

“Haines. Dr. Lurton Haines.” He grinned wryly, wriggling a twenty-dollar bill casually in one hand. Money was apparently the one disease to which nobody was immune. Her eyes dropped to it, and hesitation entered her voice as she consulted her book.

“Of course, Mr. Oglethorpe might have made it some time ago and forgotten to tell me—” She caught his slight nod, and followed the bill to the corner of the desk. “Just have a seat, and I’ll speak to Mr. Oglethorpe.”

She came out of the office a few minutes later, and winked quickly. “He’d forgotten,” she told Haines, “but it’s all right now. He’ll be right out, Dr. Haines. It’s lucky he’s having lunch late today.”

James Oglethorpe was a younger man than Haines had expected, though his interest in rocketry might have been some clue to that. He came out of his office, pushing a Homburg down on curly black hair, and raked the other with his eyes. “Dr. Haines?” he asked, thrusting out a large hand. “Seems we have a luncheon engagement.”

Haines rose quickly and bowed before the other had a chance to grasp his hand. Apparently Oglethorpe did not notice, for he went on smoothly. “Easy to forget these telephone engagements, sometimes. Aren’t you the cancer man? One of your friends was in a few months ago for a contribution to your work.”

They were in the elevator then, and Haines waited until it opened and they headed for the lunchroon in the building before answering. “I’m not looking for money this time, however. It’s the rocket you’re financing that interests me. I think it may work.”

“It will, though you’re one of the few who believes it.” Caution, doubt, and interest were mingled on Oglethorpe’s face. He ordered before turning back to Haines. “Want to go along? If you do, there’s still room for a physician in the crew.”

“No, nothing like that. Toast and milk only, please—” Haines had no idea of how to broach the subject, with nothing concrete to back up his statements. Looking at the set of the other’s jaw and the general bulldog attitude of the man, he gave up hope and only continued because he had to. He fell back on imagination, wondering how much of it was true.

“Another rocket made that trip, Mr. Oglethorpe, and returned. But the pilot was dying before he landed. I can show you the wreck of his machine, though there’s not much left after the fire—perhaps not enough to prove it was a rocketship. Somewhere out on Mars there’s something man should never find. It’s—”

“Ghosts?” suggested Oglethorpe, brusquely.

“Death! I’m asking you—”

Again Oglethorpe interrupted. “Don’t. There was a man in to see me yesterday who claimed he’d been there—offered to show me the wreck of his machine. A letter this morning explained that the Martians had visited the writer and threatened all manner of things. I’m not calling you a liar, Dr. Haines, but I’ve heard too many of those stories; whoever told you this one was either a crank or a horror-monger. I can show you a stack of letters that range from astrology to zombies, all explaining why I can’t go, and some offer photographs for proof.”

“Suppose I said I’d made the trip in that rocket?” The card in the wallet said he was Haines, and the wallet had been in the suit he was wearing, but there had also been the glasses and cigarettes for which he had no use.

Oglethorpe twisted his lips, either in disgust or amazement. “You’re an intelligent man, Dr. Haines; let’s assume I am, also. It may sound ridiculous to you, but the only reason I had for making the fortune I’m credited with was to build that ship, and it’s taken more work and time than the layman would believe. If a green ant, seven feet high, walked into my office and threatened Armageddon, I’d still go.”

Even the impossible impulse recognized the equally impossible. Oglethorpe was a man who did things first and worried about them when the mood hit him—and there was nothing moody about him. The conversation turned to everyday matters and Haines let it drift as it would, finally dragging out into silence.

* * * *

At least, he was wiser by one thing; he knew the location of the rocket ground and the set-up of guards around it—something even the newspapermen had failed to learn, since all pictures and information had come through Oglethorpe. There could no longer be any question of his ability to gain desired information by some hazy telepathic process. Either he was a mental freak, or the accident had done things to him that should have been surprising but weren’t.

Haines had taken a cab from the airport, giving instructions that caused the driver to lift his eyebrows; but money was still all-powerful. Now they were slipping through country even more desolate than the woods around Haines’ house, and the end of the road came into view, with a rutted muddy trail leading off, marked by the tires of the trucks Oglethorpe had used for his freighting. The cab stopped there.

“This the place?” the driver asked uncertainly.

“It is.” Haines added a bill to what had already been paid and dismissed him. Then he dragged his way out to the dirt road and followed it, stopping for rest frequently. His ears were humming loudly now, and each separate little vertebra of his back protested at his going on. But there was no turning back; he had tried that, at the airport, and found the urge strong enough to combat his weakening will.

“Only a little rest!” he muttered thickly, but the force in his head lifted his leaden feet and sent them marching toward the rocket camp. Above him the gray clouds passed over the moon, and he looked up at Mars shining in the sky. Words from the lower part of the drummer’s vocabulary came into his throat, but the effort of saying them was more than the red planet merited. He plowed on in silence.

Mars had moved over several degrees in the sky when he first sighted the camp, lying in a long, narrow valley. At one end were the shacks of the workmen, at the other a big structure that housed the rocket from chance prying eyes. Haines stopped to cough out part of his lungs, and his breath was husky and labored as he worked his way down.

The guards should be strung out along the edge of the valley. Oglethorpe was taking no chances with the cranks who had written him letters and denounced him as a godless fool leading his men to death. Rockets at best were fragile things, and only a few men would be needed to ruin the machine once it was discovered. Haines ran over the guards’ positions, and skirted through the underbrush, watching for periods when the moon was darkened. Once he almost tripped an alarm, but missed it in time.

Beyond, there was no shrubbery, but his suit was almost the shade of the ground in the moonlight, and by lying still between dark spells, he crawled forward toward the rocket shed, undetected. He noticed the distance of the houses and the outlying guards and nodded to himself; they should be safe from any explosion.

The coast looked clear. Then, in the shadow of the building, a tiny red spark gleamed and subsided slowly; a man was there, smoking a cigarette. By straining his eyes, Haines made out the long barrel of a rifle against the building. This guard must be an added precaution, unknown to Oglethorpe.

* * * *

A sudden rift in the thickening clouds came, and Haines slid himself flat against the ground, puzzling over the new complication. For a second he considered turning back, but realized that he could not—his path now was clearly defined, and he had no choice but to follow it. As the moon slid out of sight again, he came to his feet quietly and moved toward the figure waiting there.

“Hello!” His voice was soft, designed to reach the man at the building but not the guards behind in the outskirts. “Hello, there. Can I come forward? Special inspector from Oglethorpe.”

A beam of light lanced out from the shadow, blinding him, and he walked forward, at the best pace he could muster. The light might reveal him to the other guards, but he doubted it; their attention was directed outward, away from the buildings.

“Come ahead,” the answer came finally. “How’d you get past the others?” The voice was suspicious, but not unusually so. The rifle, Haines saw, was directed at his midsection, and he stopped a few feet away, where the other could watch him.

“Jimmy Durham knew I was coming,” he told the guard. According to the information he had stolen from Oslethorpe’s mind, Durham was in charge of the guards. “He told me he hadn’t had time to notify you, but I took a chance.”

“Hmmm. Guess it’s all right, since they let you through; but you can’t leave here until somebody identifies you. Keep your hands up.” The guard came forward cautiously to feel for concealed weapons. Haines held his hands up out of the other’s reach, where there was no danger of a direct skin to skin contact. “Okay, seems all right. What’s your business here?”

“General inspection. The boss got word there might be a little trouble brewing and sent me here to make sure ward was being kept, and to warn you. All locked up here?”

“None. A lock wouldn’t do much good on this shack; that’s why I’m here. Want I should signal Jimmy to come and identify you so you can go?”

“Don’t bother.” Conditions were apparently ideal, except for one thing. But he would not murder the guard! There must be some other way, without adding that to the work he was forced to do. “I’m in no hurry, now that I’ve seen everything. Have a smoke?”

“Just threw one away. ’Smatter, no matches? Here.”

Haines rubbed one against the friction surface of the box and lit the cigarette gingerly. The raw smoke stung against his burning throat, but he controlled the cough, and blew it out again; in the dark, the guard could not see his eyes watering, nor the grimaces he made. He was waging a bitter fight with himself against the impulse that had ordered the smoke to distract the guard’s attention, and he knew he was failing. “Thanks!”

One of the guard’s hands met his, reaching for the box. The next second the man’s throat was between the stranger’s hands, and he was staggering back, struggling to tear away and cry for help. Surprise confused his efforts for the split second necessary, and one of Haines’ hands came free and out, then chopped down sharply to strike the guard’s neck with the edge of the palm. A low grunt gurgled out, and the figure went limp.

Impulse had conquered again! The guard was dead, his neck broken by the sharp blow. Haines leaned against the building, catching his breath and fighting back the desire to lose his stomach’s contents. When some control came back, he picked up the guard’s flashlight, and turned into the building. In the darkness, the outlines of the great rocketship were barely visible.

* * * *

With fumbling fingers, Haines groped forward to the hull, then struck a match and shaded it in his hands until he could make out the port, standing open. Too much light might show through a window and attract attention.

Inside, he threw the low power of the flashlight on and moved forward, down the catwalk and toward the rear where the power machinery would be housed. It had been simple, after all, and only the quick work of destruction still remained.

He traced the control valves easily, running an eye over the uncovered walls and searching out the pipes that led from them. From the little apparatus he saw, this ship was obviously inferior to the one that had crashed, yet it had taken years to build and drained Oglethorpe’s money almost to the limit. Once destroyed, it might take men ten more years to replace it; two was the minimum, and in those two years—

The thought slipped from him, but some memories were coming back. He saw himself in a small metal room, fighting against the inexorable exhaustion of fuel, and losing. Then there had been a final burst from the rockets, and the ship had dropped sickeningly through the atmosphere. He had barely had time to get to the air locks before the crash. Miraculously, as the ship’s fall was cushioned by the house, he had been thrown free into the lower branches of a tree, to catch, and lose momentum before striking earth.

The man who had been in the house had fared worse; he had been thrown out with the wrecked wall, already dead. Roughly, the stranger remembered a hasty transfer of clothing from the corpse, and then the beam had dropped on him, shutting out his memory in blackness. So he was not Haines, after all, but someone from the rocket, and his story to Oglethorpe had been basically true.

Haines—he still thought of himself under that name—caught himself as his knees gave under him, and hauled himself up by the aid of a protruding bar. There was work to be done; after that, what happened to his own failing body was another matter. It seemed now that from his awakening he had expected to meet death before another day, and had been careless of the fact.

He ran his eyes around the rocket room again, until he came to a tool kit that lay invitingly open with a large wrench sticking up from it. That would serve to open the valves. The flashlight lay on the floor where he had dropped it, and he kicked it around with his foot to point at the wall, groping out for the wrench. His fingers were stiff as they clasped around the handle.

And, in the beam of light, he noticed his hand for the first time in hours. Dark-blue veins rose high on flesh that was marked with a faint pale-blue. He considered it dully, thrusting out his other hand and examining it; there, too, was the blue flush, and on his palms, as he turned them upward, the same color showed. Blue!

The last of his memory flashed back through his brain in a roaring wave, bringing a slow tide of pictures with it. With one part of his mind, he was working on the valves with the wrench, while the other considered the knowledge that had returned to him. He saw the streets of a delicate, fairy city, half deserted, and as he seemed to watch, a man staggered out of a doorway, clutching at his throat with blue hands, to fall writhing to the ground! The people passed on quickly, avoiding contact with the corpse, fearful even to touch each other.

Everywhere, death reached out to claim the people. The planet was riddled with it. It lay on the skin of an infected person, to be picked up by the touch of another, and passed on to still more. In the air, a few seconds sufficed to kill the germs, but new ones were being sent out from the pores of the skin, so that there were always a few active ones lurking there. On contact, the disease began an insidious conquest, until, after months without sign, it suddenly attacked the body housing it, turned it blue, and brought death in a few painful hours.

Some claimed that it was the result of an experiment that had gone beyond control, others that it had dropped as a spore from space. Whatever it was, there was no cure for it on Mars. Only the legends that spoke of a race of their people on the mother world of Earth offered any faint hope, and to that they had turned when there was no other chance.

He saw himself undergoing examinations that finally resulted in his being chosen to go in the rocket they were building feverishly. He had been picked because his powers of telepathy were unusual, even to the mental science of Mars; the few remaining weeks had been used in developing that power systematically, and implanting in his head the duties that he must perform so long as a vestige of life remained to him.

Haines watched the first of the liquid from the fuel pipes splash out, and dropped the wrench. Old Leán Dagh had doubted his ability to draw knowledge by telepathy from a race of a different culture, he reflected. Too bad the old man had died without knowing of the success his methods had met, even though the mission had been a failure, due to man’s feeble knowledge of the curative sciences. Now his one task was to prevent the race of this world from dying in the same manner.

He pulled himself to his feet again and went staggering down the catwalk, muttering disconnected sentences. The blue of his skin was darker now, and he had to force himself across the space from the ship to the door of the building, grimly commanding his failing muscles, to the guard’s body that still lay where he had left it.

Most of the strength left him was useless against the pull of this heavier planet and the torture movement had become. He tried to drag the corpse behind him, then fell on hands and knees and backed toward the ship, using one arm and his teeth on the collar to pull it after him. He was swimming in a world that was bordering on unconsciousness, now, and once darkness claimed him; he came out of it to find himself inside the rocket, still dragging his burden, the implanted impulses stronger than his will.

Bit by bit, he dragged his burden behind him down the catwalk, until the engine room was reached, and he could drop it on the floor, where the liquid fuel had made a thin film. The air was heavy with vapors, and chilled by the evaporation, but he was only partly conscious of that. Only a spark was needed now, and his last duty would be finished.

Inevitably, a few of the dead on Mars would be left unburned, where men might find the last of that unfortunate race, and the germs would still live within them. Earthmen must not face that. Until such a time as the last Martian had crumbled to dust and released the plague into the air to be destroyed, the race of Earth must remain within the confines of its own atmosphere, and safe.

There was only himself and the corpse he had touched left here to carry possible germs, and the ship to carry the men to other sources of infection; all that was easily remedied.

The stranger from Mars groped in his pocket for the guard’s matches, smiling faintly, darkness swept over him, he drew one of them from the box and scraped it across the friction surface. Flame danced from the point and outward—