Dream thief

1

… IT'S No USE, ADJANI. He's gone. We've got to turn back." Packer's big hand flipped a switch and he talked into his headset. "Sandcat 2 to Sandcat 1-we are returning to base. Repeat. We are returning to base. Over."

"Just one more pass along the rift valley," pleaded Adjani. His eyes did not leave the thermograph screen. The Sandcat swayed on its springs as the Simoom screeched around them.

Packer, blue in the light of the thermoscreen, turned his face toward his friend. He placed a hand on his shoulder and gripped it firmly as if to establish a physical hold on reality. In a voice deepened with fatigue and sadness, he said, "It is twenty below out there and only an hour after sundown. In another hour it will be fifty below. The storm is bucking to full force by morning-we haven't seen the worst of it yet. We lost visual four hours ago, and the thermograph shows a solid blue field. If we don't head back now, we won't make it."

He paused and added, squeezing the shoulder once more, "It's over."

"I let him get away. I am responsible," protested Adjani.

"You're lucky he didn't injure you for life. There was no stopping him. God knows we've done everything humanly possible."

"He's out there somewhere-alive. I know it. I feel it."

"If he is still alive, he's past help." Packer turned the Sandcat and watched the instruments as he punched the return course into the onboard navigator. He took his hands from the wheel and let the computer guide them home.

Adjani buried his face in his hands and began rocking back and forth in his seat. Packer turned away. Neither one spoke for a long time. They sat and listened to the rattle of the sand and rocks upon the shields.

The radio on the overhead panel squawked to life. "Kalnikov at I-base. MAT units 1 and 2 return to I-base immediately. Acknowledge."

The message was repeated and Packer responded, giving their ETA to the base. There was a long pause; static crackled over the speaker. "Your loss is to be regretted…"-more static_ "I am sorry." The transmission was lost once more to the storm. Packer reached up and switched the radio off.

"I guess I'll send a report as soon as we get back to base. I don't exactly know the proper procedure-this has never happened before."

"Couldn't we wait a few days? I want to look some more." "Sure, we can wait. But it won't make any difference." "I would like to find the body at least."

"Adjani, the storm is likely to blow for days. By the time you are able to search again there would be nothing left to find." "It is the least I can do. Please…" "All right. I won't stop you."

They sat silent until the computer flashed the outline of the installation on the vidscreen. "We're almost there," sighed Packer heavily.

Adjani turned with an urgency, laying a hand on the big man's arm. "Please, let us pray for him now. Before the others…" "Of course."

Both men bowed their heads and Adjani spoke a simple, heartfelt prayer as the Sandcat entered the installation compound, safe from the storm. …

SPENCE LIFTED HIS THROBBING head. His limbs were numb; he could no longer feel his hands or feet. Heavy vapors of sleep tugged at him, luring him to slip lightly away on their easyflowing stream to oblivion. For a moment he nearly gave in and let the stream take him where it would, but something about giving in that easily rankled him.

With an effort he pushed himself up, shifting the debris which had settled over him. He placed his unfeeling hands on the ground and steadied himself. Gritting his teeth with jaw muscles stiff with cold, he straightened and swayed unsteadily on his knees. Overhead the bright disk of Deimos shone down on him – the Simoom had abated for the moment, allowing the ghostly light to spill down into the rift canyon.

He looked around him as rattling shudders racked his body. His muscles were contracting violently in their last effort to produce life-saving warmth. These contractions would pass soon, he knew. And then he would lie still.

Spence did not want death to find him sitting down. He stood on wooden, unfeeling legs and tried to walk. The loose debris shifted and he was thrown down the incline of the canyon still further. His helmet struck a rock and he stopped.

He lay there exhausted, staring up at the black sky of Mars, imagining that he was the first man, and possibly the last, to ever lie awake under a Martian night sky.

The convulsions gradually lessened. He felt a tingling warmth spread through his frame-the illusion of warmth, the last remnant of his body's defenses exhausting itself.

A misty darkness closed around him, narrowing his field of vision, blurring the edges with a velvet softness. But the stars above, in the center of his sight, still burned hard and bright. Untwinkling, unmoving, unlike stars at all. It was as if the eyes of the universe watched him to see how a man died.

"No!" he shouted, hearing the empty ring of his voice in his helmet. "No," he said again; his voice was but a murmur.

Watching the stars he saw a pale white mist pass over them like a diaphanous veil. He thought it a trick of his failing eyesight. Then he saw it again-just the faintest trace of color against the night, the frailest of silken threads.

Odd, he thought. What could produce such a phenomenon?

His scientist's brain turned over this bit of novelty. He raised his head and saw, a little below him on the slope, a silver tracery on the rocks, glowing in the light of the moon.

On nerves and determination alone he stirred his useless limbs and half-slid, half-swam to the spot. He touched a gloved hand to the faint white outline of the stuff on the rocks. It gleamed in the clear light. "Crystals," he muttered to himself. "Ice crystals. Frost."

All around the immediate area he noticed the white hoarfrost, and below, the wisps of mist rising out of the ground.

Scarcely thinking or attending to what he was doing, he scrambled further down the slope and found himself peering into a pitch-dark hole. A fissure in the canyon wall had opened up, perhaps due to the rock slide earlier. Out of this fissure the slightest trace of pearly mist rose into the deathly cold Martian atmosphere.

The crack was just large enough for a man to squeeze head and shoulder through. Without thinking a second time, Spence thrust himself into the opening.

He found the hole beyond somewhat wider as he wriggled awkwardly into the opening. He inched forward into the blackness bit by bit and discovered the crevice dropped away at a sharp downward angle. He sat down and used his heels to pull himself along, sliding on his seat.

Down and down he went.

I have chosen my own grave, he thought. My bones will not be blown to dust on the winds.

The thought strangely cheered him. …

DEEPER INTO THE BRITTLE crust of the Red Planet he went. Sometimes sliding, sometimes walking nearly upright, calling on his will alone to move his body. Blind as a cave bat he moved, abandoning himself to all else but the moving. Onward; deeper and deeper still.

How long he walked, how far he burrowed, he did not know. The blackness around him penetrated his mind, covering it with itself, removing all thought, all memory, leaving only the present moment and the raw will to move on.

When the first ghostly glimmer reached his eyes out of the darkness around him, he thought it a trick of his failing mind: his faltering brain cells firing off minute electrical charges and somehow producing light in the cortex or optic nerve.

But the faint greenish glow did not fade. Instead it grew stronger. Spence, shuffling forward like a zombie, willing his legs to carry him along, stumbling over the uneven downward pathway, stayed on his feet and moved toward the gleam he saw in the distance.

He reached a spot where the glow seemed brightest and found as he came upon it that the faint light was a reflection on a blank wall of stone. He placed his hand upon the stone and saw the green cast on his glove.

He turned to see what produced the glow, as one reeling in a dream. What he saw rocked him back against the wall in disbelief: a wide tunnel glowing with interlacing veins of living light stretched before him. The thin green color glistened on the walls and roof of the gallery like a luminous dew.

Spence tottered into the tunnel and pressed his face close to the rock surface, as close as his helmet would allow. The glowing stuff oozed from the rock, clinging there like a slime. He thought of the phosphorescent plankton and algae in the oceans of Earth.

Can it be? he wondered. Have I discovered life on Mars?