Clifford D. Simak - Madness from Mars

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Title : Madness from Mars

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1939

Genre : science fiction

Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book

Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0,

proofread in MS Word 2000.

Date of e-text : February 14, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

======================================================================

Madness from Mars

Clifford D. Simak

The _Hello Mars IV_ was coming home, back from the outward reaches of space, the first ship

ever to reach the Red Planet and return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus

Observatory on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving its position. Hours

later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote that flashed in the outer void.

Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship's outward voyage, far out until

its silvery hull had dwindled into nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or

sign of _Hello Mars IV_ - nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up again that minute speck

in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.

Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On the Moon, powerful radio stations

were capable of hurling ultra-short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But

man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million miles of space. So _Hello Mars

IV_ had arrowed out into the silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder over

its fate.

Now, with Mars once again swinging into conjunction, the ship was coming back - a tiny gnat of

steel pushing itself along with twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel. Heading Earthward out of

that region of silent mystery, spurning space-miles beneath its steel-shod heels. Triumphant, with

the red dust of Mars still clinging to its plates - a mote of light in the telescopic lenses.

Aboard it were five brave men - Thomas Delvaney, the expedition's leader; Jerry Cooper, the

red-thatched navigator; Andy Smith, the world's ace cameraman, and two space-hands, Jimmy Watson

and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-Moon run.

There had been three other _Hello Mars_ ships - three other ships that had never come back -

three other flights that had collided with a meteor a million miles out from the Moon. The second

had flared briefly, deep in space, a red splash of flame in the telescopes through which the

flight was watched - the fuel tanks had exploded. The third had simply disappeared. On and on it

had gone, boring outward until lost from sight. That had been six years ago, but men still

wondered what had happened.

Four years later - two years ago - the _Hello Mars IV_ had taken off. Today it was returning,

a gleaming thing far out in space, a shining symbol of man's conquest of the planets. It had

reached Mars - and it was coming back. There would be others, now - and still others. Some would

flare against the black and be lost forever. But others would win through, and man, blindly

groping, always outward, to break his earthly bonds, at last would be on the pathway to the stars.

Jack Woods, _Express_ reporter, lit a cigarette and asked:

'What do you figure they found out there, Doc?'

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Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, puffed

clouds of smoke from his black cigar and answered irritably:

'How in blue hell would I know what they found? I hope they found something. This trip cost us

a million bucks.'

'But can't you give me some idea of what they might have found?' persisted Woods. 'Some idea

of what Mars is like. Any new ideas.'

Dr. Gilmer wrangled the cigar viciously.

'And have you spread it all over the front page,' he said. 'Spin something out of my own head

just because you chaps are too impatient to wait for the actual data. Not by a damn sight. You

reporters get my goat sometimes.'

'Ah, Doc, give us something,' pleaded Gary Henderson, staff man for the Star.

'Sure,' said Don Buckley, of the _Spaceways_. 'What do you care? You can always say we

misquoted you. It wouldn't be the first time.'

Gilmer gestured toward the official welcoming committee that stood a short distance away.

'Why don't you get the mayor to say something, boys?' he suggested. 'The mayor is always ready

to say something.'

'Sure,' said Gary, 'but it never adds up to anything. We've had the mayor's face on the front

page so much lately that he thinks he owns the paper.'

'Have you any idea why they haven't radioed us?' asked

Woods. 'They've been in sending distance for several hours now.'

Gilmer rolled the cigar from east to west. 'Maybe they broke the radio,' he said.

Nevertheless there were little lines of worry on his face. The fact that there had been no

messages from the _Hello Mars IV_ troubled him. If the radio had been broken it could have been

repaired.

Six hours ago the _Hello Mars IV_ had entered atmosphere. Even now it was circling the Earth

in a strenuous effort to lose speed. Word that the ship was nearing Earth had brought spectators

to the field in ever-increasing throngs. Highways and streets were jammed for miles around.

Perspiring police cordons struggled endlessly to keep the field clear for a landing. The day

was hot, and soft drink stands were doing a rushing business. Women fainted in the crowd and some

men were knocked down and trampled. Ambulance sirens sounded.

'Humph,' Woods grunted. 'We can send space-ships to Mars, but we don't know how to handle

crowds.'

He stared expectantly into the bright blue bowl of the sky.

'Ought to be getting in pretty soon,' he said.

His words were blotted out by a mounting roar of sound. The ear-splitting explosions of

roaring rocket tubes. The thunderous drumming of the ship shooting over the horizon.

The bellow from the crowd competed with the roaring of the tubes as the _Hello Mars IV_

shimmered like a streak of silver light over the field. Then fading in the distance, it glowed

redly as its forward tubes shot flame.

'Cooper sure is giving her everything he has,' Woods said in awe. 'He'll melt her down, using

the tubes like that.'

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He stared into the west, where the ship had vanished. His cigarette forgotten, burned down and

scorched his fingers.

Out of the tail of his eye he saw Jimmy Andrews, the _Express_ photographer.

'Did you get a picture?' Woods roared at him.

'Picture, hell,' Andrews shouted back. 'I can't shoot greased lightning.'

The ship was coming back again, its speed slowed, but still traveling at a terrific pace. For

a moment it hung over the horizon and then nosed down toward the field.

'He can't land at that speed,' Woods yelled. 'It'll crack wide open!'

'Look out,' roared a dozen voices and then the ship was down, its nose plowing into the

ground, leaving in its wake a smoking furrow of raw earth, its tail tilting high in the air,

threatening to nose over on its back.

The crowd at the far end of the field broke and stampeded, trampling, clawing, pushing,

shoving, suddenly engulfed in a hysteria of fear at the sight of the ship plowing toward them.

But the _Hello Mars IV_ stopped just short of the police cordon, still right side up. A

pitted, battered ship - finally home from space - the first ship to reach Mars and return.

The newspapermen and photographers were rushing forward. The crowd was shrieking. Automobile

horns and sirens blasted the air. From the distant rim of the city rose the shrilling of whistles

and the far-away roll of clamoring bells.

As Woods ran a thought hammered in his head. A thought that had an edge of apprehension. There

was something wrong. if Jerry Cooper had been at the controls, he never would have landed the ship

at such speed. It had been a madman's stunt to land a ship that way. Jerry was a skilled

navigator, averse to taking chances. Jack had watched him in the Moon Derby five years before and

the way Jerry could handle a ship was beautiful to see.

The valve port in the ship's control cabin swung slowly open, clanged back against the metal

side. A man stepped out - a man who staggered jerkily forward and then stumbled and fell in a

heap.

Dr. Gilmer rushed to him, lifted him in his arms.

Woods caught a glimpse of the man's face as his head lolled in Gilmer's arms. It was Jerry

Cooper's face - but a face that was twisted and changed almost beyond recognition, a face that

burned itself into Jack Wood's brain, indelibly etched there, something to be remembered with a

shudder through the years. A haggard face with deeply sunken eyes, with hollow cheeks, with

drooling lips that slobbered sounds that were not words.

A hand pushed at Woods.

'Get out of my way,' shrilled Andrews~ 'How do you expect me to take a picture?'

The newsman heard the camera whirr softly, heard the click of changing plates.

'Where are the others?' Gilmer was shouting at Cooper. The man looked up at him vacantly, his

face twisting itself into a grimace of pain and fear.

'Where are the others?' Gilmer shouted again, his voice ringing over the suddenly hushed

stillness of the crowd.

Cooper jerked his head toward the ship.

'In there,' he whispered and the whisper cut like a sharp-edged knife.

He mumbled drooling words, words that meant nothing. Then with an effort he answered.

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'Dead,' he said.

And in the silence that followed, he said again:

'All dead!'

They found the others in the living quarters back of the locked control room. All four of them

were dead - had been dead for days. Andy Smith's skull had been crushed by a mighty blow.

Jimmy Watson had been strangled, with the blue raised welts of blunt fingers still upon his

throat. Elmer Paine's body was huddled in a corner, but upon him there were no marks of violence,

although his face was contorted into a visage of revulsion, a mask of pain and fear and suffering.

Thomas Delvaney's body sprawled beside a table. His throat had been opened with an old fashioned

straight-edge razor. The razor, stained with blackened blood, was tightly clutched in the death

grip of his right hand.

In one corner of the room stood a large wooden packing box. Across the smooth white boards of

the box someone had written shakily, with black crayon, the single word 'Animal'. Plainly there

had been an attempt to write something else - strange wandering crayon marks below the single

word. Marks that scrawled and stopped and made no sense.

That night Jerry Cooper died, a raving maniac.

A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There

were no heroes left to welcome back.

What was in the packing box?

'It's an animal,' Dr. Gilmer declared, 'and that's about as far as I would care to go. It

seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast - fast, that is, for it - it

probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison.'

Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found

in the packing box marked 'Animal'.

It looked like a round ball of fur.

'It's all curled up, sleeping,' he said.

'Curled up, hell,' said Gilmer. 'That's the shape of the beast. It's spherical and it's

covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something

descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the

North Pole could offer. It's thick and it's warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold.'

'Maybe we'll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars,' Woods suggested. 'Big fur

shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices.'

'They'd kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that,' declared Gilmer. 'A foot a day

would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy

would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn't afford to waste it by running

around. He'd just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of

just living.'

'It doesn't seem to have eyes or ears or anything you'd expect an animal to have,' Woods said,

straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.

'He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize,' declared Gilmer. 'You must

remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment - perhaps he rose from

an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There's no reason why we must

believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and

Mars.

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