Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay (best thriller books to read .TXT) 📕

or by tones beyond Dark's powers of hearing, but both Old Beard and Happy seemed to understand him readily.

"How do you happen to be here, Old Beard?" asked Dark as they left the recess and resumed their progress down the walkways.

"I was captured when the government broke up the experimental groups," answered Old Beard. "I was the leader of the section of the experiments dealing with extrasensory perception, and, instead of executing me at once, they tried to persuade me to continue this work for the government along specific lines and under supervision. I refused, because I knew that anything I helped them develop would not be used for the benefit of the Martian colonists, but for greater profits for the spacelines.

"At last I was able to escape into these underground caverns where they grow food plants hydroponically and sell them to supplement the produce of the dome farms and the gardens in the dome cities. These caverns are extensive and, with the friendship and help of the Jellies, I've evaded discovery for twenty-five years."

"Just who and what are the Jellies?" asked Dark. "I haven't been able to get a very satisfactory answer to that question from Happy."

"They're human experimental animals," answered Old Beard. "The terrestrial food plants grown hydroponically and sold in the dome cities actually are a supplemental sideline to the real purpose of this place. Marscorp is conducting its own experiments here, with a crew of expert geneticists.

"What Marscorp is trying to do is to breed native Martian plants, that will grow in the open lowlands without expensive[Pg 96] oxygenation and irrigation, that are not poisonous to humans and can be used for food. At the same time, they're approaching the problem from the other side, and the Jellies are men and women whose glandular structure has been altered in an effort to make their physiology more receptive to native Martian vegetation. If they succeed, of course, Marscorp has just as complete a monopoly over such a food supply as it does over imports from Earth, but at considerably less expense."

"And the Toughs?"

"They're human experimental animals, too, based on a different type of glandular alteration. They're neither as docile nor as intelligent as the Jellies, so they can't be used for slave labour as the Jellies can. About the only way they're ever used is as occasional goon squads to terrorize the Jellies and keep them in line."

"You've been here twenty-five years and have never been able to escape?" asked Dark incredulously.

"This place isn't guarded," replied Old Beard, with a wry smile. "They don't have to guard it. All they have to guard are the supply room where the marsuits are kept and the motor pool of groundcars. This place is in the middle of the Desert of Candor, and no one can live in the Martian desert without oxygen."

They came now to one of the walls of the underground cavern, and Old Beard led them suddenly into a fissure that was well concealed from the walkways by a tangled screen of vegetation. They stumbled along a narrow passageway for a few feet, and emerged into a rude shaft, around the walls of which a roughly-chiseled and steep stairway led upward into pitch darkness. Here Old Beard halted.

"When I told you there's no way of escape here, it was not that I haven't tried many times," he said to Dark.

"This shaft leads up into the walls of the structure above—above, although it is still underground—and I have been up there often at night. It has long been my hope that I might be able to get a marsuit or a groundcar and make my escape,[Pg 97] but they are kept locked up and always guarded, against the Jellies and the Toughs.

"I want to take you up and give you an idea of the place now, and later perhaps you will have some ideas to contribute. Happy and Shadow will stay down here until we get back."

Old Beard mounted the steep steps slowly, and Dark followed at his heels. Although the bottom of the "well" was lighted with the same dim light as that which spread throughout the entire underground area, there was no light at all higher up, and they had to feel their way carefully lest they fall off the narrow steps.

At the top, Old Beard stopped and Dark bumped sharply into him.

"I'm going to move down the space between the walls," Old Beard whispered. "Hold onto my hand and follow me. But don't say anything or make any more noise than you can help, because anyone beyond the wall may be able to hear you."

They moved ahead. The way was very narrow, very dark and very difficult, and frequently was choked with ventilator pipes or tangles of wiring. They had gone some forty or fifty feet, when Old Beard stopped.

By Old Beard's movements, Dark knew he was working at something. Then a section of ventilator pipe came away from a ventilator grill, and faint light illuminated the space in which they crouched. In this dimness, Old Beard gestured to Dark to look through the ventilator.

Peering out, Dark saw that they were near the ceiling of a large, high-ceilinged room. In it, under glaring lights, a group of half a dozen white-clad men were working with knives and other instruments on the body of a man, either anaesthetized or dead, which lay on a surgical table.

Old Beard put his face against the grill next to Dark's, and the two men watched the scene below for a few moments. Then one of the men around the table raised his head, revealing a thin face, with watery blue eyes and a straggly goatee.[Pg 98]

The two men inside the wall gasped as one man.

"Father!"

The single loud word was torn from Dark's throat without his volition, without his actually realizing he had spoken.

The heads of the men in the room jerked up at the cry, and they looked around and at each other, with puzzled expressions. Old Beard clapped a firm hand over Dark's mouth and hissed in his ear:

"Fool! Let's get out of here!"

As quietly as possible, they made their way back. Through the ventilator behind them came the murmur of querulous voices.

When they had climbed back down the stairs and, with Happy and Shadow, made their way back through the fissure, Old Beard fixed penetrating eyes on Dark and said:

"I told you to keep quiet up there! What was that exclamation all about?"

"It's something very strange," murmured Dark, his face thoughtful and bemused. "But you evidently recognized that man, too. Who is he?"

"Yes, I know him very well," answered Old Beard, with deep bitterness in his tone. "That's Goat Hennessey. But that's the first time I've seen him in twenty-five years. He must have just come here recently."

"Goat Hennessey? I heard of him when I was in Mars City."

"Goat Hennessey was one of my most trusted friends," said Old Beard. "If you bear my earlier memories, I'm surprised you didn't recognize him as Goat Hennessey, too."

"I recognized him as someone else," said Dark in a low voice.

"We worked together," went on Old Beard. "I was a leader in the effort to solve our problem through extrasensory perception, and he was the major scientist in the group attempting to solve it by genetic change. We worked together and we went into the desert together with the others when the government banned our experiments.

"But Goat was the man who sold out. He betrayed us to[Pg 99] the government—for what price I don't know. And when government agents raided us and broke up our organization and captured me, Goat Hennessey kidnapped my young and pregnant wife, and I never saw her again.

"I'm glad Goat Hennessey is here, because now I can get to him. And when I can reach him, I'm going to kill him. I'd like to kill him as slowly and painfully as he killed the heart inside of me!"

As Old Beard spoke these last words, his face was tense, his fists clenched and a somber fire burned in his pale eyes. Then, slowly, the fire died out and he turned his eyes, once more cool and rational, a little quizzical, on Dark.

"Didn't you call him 'father'?" he asked.

"Yes," said Dark in a low voice. "But I'd rather not talk about it right now."

He looked at Old Beard, and seemed to be ridding himself, with an effort, of a deep introversion.

"There's one thing that I've remembered as a result of seeing Goat Hennessey," said Dark in a firmer voice. "This place isn't too far from a place in the Xanthe Desert where Goat conducted some significant experiments. If he left any of his records there—and I'm thinking of some in particular—they might go a long way toward solving the problem we've all be working on for so long. So now I know what to do next: I'm going to Ultra Vires."

Old Beard smiled sadly.

"Have you forgotten we can't get out of this place?" he reminded. "We can't get at either the marsuits or the groundcars."

It was Dark's turn to smile.

"I believe you said there aren't any guards on the airlocks to stop one from walking out at night?" he said.

"That's true, but—"

"There's something you don't know," continued Dark. "You were wondering at the basis of the regenerative power that permitted me to revive here after being shot in the stomach with a heatgun. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it's something that also permits me to live without oxygen.[Pg 100]

"Happy can testify that I was fully alive and conscious underwater. I discovered, before I was shot, that I can operate just as well outside, in the Martian atmosphere, without a helmet. And that's why Goat's records may solve our problem.

"So tonight I'll leave this place and go to Ultra Vires. If there are any marsuits and groundcars left there, I'll come back here with them, and you and Happy and Shadow can escape with me. If not, you may have to wait a while longer.

"But I'll be back!"

13

Brute Hennessey plodded westward through the Xanthe Desert, naked, wearing no marsuit, his head bare to the thin, oxygen-poor Martian air. The two small moons shone in the star-spangled sky above the lone figure, casting fantastic shadows on the sands.

But this was not the stupid, shambling Brute Hennessey of a few months past. He walked surely and proudly, and the light of intelligence shone in his eyes.

He called himself, now, Dark Kensington.

Dark's muscular body had not regained, quite, the firmness and tone it had had before he was shot down at Solis Lacus, but he had recovered greatly from the bloated flabbiness of a few days ago. Most of that had been water in his tissues, and resumption of normal physical activity had wrung it out in short order.

As he plodded through the Martian night toward Ultra Vires, Dark was remembering, with something of awe, that emotional explosion within him that had occurred on his first sight of Goat Hennessey at the Canfell Hydroponic Farm. It was this sudden, overwhelming recognition that had wrung from his lips the cry: "Father!"

In that moment, memory had returned with terrible impact and he had been overwhelmed by the re-experience of those moments when he had stood before the man he admired and[Pg 101] loved as his father and had seen the bitter realization of rejection by that man written with the point of a knife.

Now he remembered it all. He remembered his childhood at Ultra Vires, he remembered Adam and their experiences together, he remembered their treks through the desert at Goat Hennessey's command, he remembered his slaying of Adam and his acceptance of death at Goat's hands. He remembered that he, Dark Kensington, was Brute Hennessey, somehow brought to life once before in the Icaria Desert even as he had himself regained life a second time in the vats of the Canfell Hydroponic Farm.

So Goat Hennessey was his father, apparently. And Old Beard, the real Dark Kensington, vowed vengeance on Goat. Dark was able to view this with equanimity. He no longer felt any admiration or affection for Goat, whatever relationship might exist between them.

But, since he was Brute Hennessey and thus not old enough to be the real Dark Kensington, how and why had he acquired the memories of Dark Kensington? That question remained unanswered.

Phobos was setting for the first time that night when Dark reached the great hulk of Ultra Vires, manipulated one of the airlocks and entered its dark corridors. There was no light, and a test of the light switch proved that the electrical system was no longer operating. But Dark knew every inch of this place from early childhood. He felt his way