Rebels of the Red Planet Page 4

  4

  Fancher Laddigan made his way down a long dim corridor in the rearportion of the Childress Barber College, in Mars City's eastern quarter.He stopped and hesitated, with some trepidation, before an unmarked doornear the end of the corridor.

  Completely bald, bespectacled and well up in years, Fancher looked likea clerk and he had the instincts of a clerk. Yet he utilized thatappearance and those instincts in a perilous cause.

  Fancher knocked timidly on the door. On receiving an indistinctinvitation from inside, he pushed it open and entered.

  Fancher had a tendency to shiver every time he had occasion to see theChief, whose real name was unknown to Fancher and to most others here atthe barber college.

  Small as a child in body, wagging a thin-haired head larger thanlifesize, the Chief surveyed Fancher with icy green eyes. The eyes werelarge and round as a child's, but there was nothing childlike abouttheir expression. As though to deny his physical smallness, he smokedone of the fragrant, foot-long cigars produced only in the HadriacumLowlands.

  "Sit down," commanded the Chief in a high, piping voice.

  Fancher swallowed and sat, facing his superior across the big desk. TheChief opened a drawer, took out another of the long cigars, and handedit to Fancher. Fancher did not like cigars, but he had never dared sayso to the Chief. He lit it gingerly, coughed at his first inhalation,and smoked at it dutifully and unhappily.

  "You recognized this man certainly as Dark Kensington?" asked the Chief.

  "Well ..." Fancher began, and started coughing again. The Chief fixedhim with an unwinking green stare. When the coughing spell ended,Fancher sat silent, his eyes stinging with tears, fumbling at what hewanted to say.

  "You knew Dark Kensington before his disappearance twenty-five yearsago," said the Chief, with a trace of impatience in his tone. "I am toldthat you saw this man and talked to him. You are qualified to recognizeDark Kensington. Is this man Dark Kensington, or not?"

  "Well," said Fancher again, "the man was walking alone across thedesert, and when someone picked him up he asked how he could find theChildress Barber College, and of course our men heard of it and went outto--"

  "I have received a full report on the man's appearance and our initialcontact with him. I asked you a question."

  "Well, Chief, it's a peculiar thing. If this man, as he is now, hadreappeared twenty-five years ago, I'd _know_ it was Dark Kensington. Buthe looks exactly as Dark did when he disappeared, not one day older. Andhe doesn't remember a thing beyond his disappearance except events ofthe past two weeks, he says.

  "Yet his memories of Dark's activities before his disappearance areunquestionably accurate and clear. It's as though Dark had been put onice at the time of his disappearance and just now thawed out, withoutany aging or memory during the interim."

  "Perhaps he was," said the Chief dryly. "But is it possible that thisman, looking so much like Dark Kensington, could have studiedKensington's personality and activities carefully and be posing asKensington?"

  "No, sir," said Fancher promptly. "Dark and I were very close friends atone time. He remembers that, although he had difficulty recognizing mesince I'm so much older. We went through some experiences together thatI never told to anyone, and I'm sure he didn't. He remembers them inevery detail. Like the way we trapped a sage-rabbit once when we'd runout of supplies out in Hadriacum."

  Fancher chuckled.

  "Then we couldn't eat the thing," he reminisced.

  "Very well, if you're sure of his identity, that's all I wish to know,"said the Chief. "I don't want to be trapped by a Marscorp trick withplastic surgery. But if this man is Dark Kensington, it's the bestfortune the Phoenix has met with in a long time."

  He fell silent, and busied himself with papers on his desk, paying nomore attention to Fancher. Fancher waited, then concluded reasonablythat the interview was at an end. And, since the long cigar agonizedhim, he rose and moved quietly toward the door.

  "I have not given you permission to leave," said the Chief, withoutraising either his eyes or his voice. "Kensington is due to arrive in afew moments, and I want you here when I talk to him. If any of his wordsor actions appear inconsistent in any way to you, I want you to let meknow."

  Fancher sighed silently, returned to his chair and puffed disconsolatelyon the cigar.

  Some five minutes passed. Then there was a firm rap on the door.

  "Come in!" called the Chief in his reedy voice.

  The door opened, and in walked a man whose entire presence radiatedstrength, confidence and the potentiality of instant violence. DarkKensington was tall and broad-shouldered, clad in dark-blue tunic andbaggy trousers. His face was darkly tanned, strong, handsome. His hairwas black as midnight. His eyes were startlingly pale in the dark face;eyes of pale blue, remote and filled with light.

  "I'm Dark Kensington," he said, striding up to the Chief's desk. "You'rethe man known as the Chief?"

  "Yes," answered the Chief, and waited.

  Dark nodded to Fancher. Fancher, feeling rather green about the gills,returned the greeting.

  Dark turned his attention back to the Chief, and he, also, waited. Therewas a long silence. The Chief broke it first.

  "What do you know about Dr. G. O. T. Hennessey--Goat Hennessey?" askedthe Chief calmly.

  Fancher blinked at this unexpected line of questioning. A cloud passedover Dark's face, as though the name had triggered something in himthat he could not quite remember.

  "He was a very good friend of mine," answered Dark, "although it seemsthat something happened between us that I can't quite recollect. He wasone of the most brilliant geneticists of Earth, and came to Mars with anexperimental group that was to try to develop a human type that couldlive more comfortably under Martian conditions. The project was backedby the government."

  He stopped. It was the Chief who added:

  "Then Marscorp stepped in."

  The expression on Dark's face was blank.

  "You don't know what Marscorp is, do you?" asked the Chief curiously.

  "The name's familiar," replied Dark. "It's a spaceline, isn't it?"

  "If your amnesia is genuine, you might very well react in such afashion," said the Chief reflectively. "Marscorp is the MarsCorporation, and it's the only spaceline that serves Mars now. It's agiant combine on Earth which has a virtual monopoly on the spacelinesand exports and imports between Earth and all the colonized planets.

  "Marscorp is against any development of human beings who can live undernatural extraterrestrial conditions, because that would end thecolonies' dependence on Marscorp for supplies. As it is, the coloniesliterally can't live without Marscorp. Marscorp controls enough senatorsand delegates in the World Congress to block other important projects ifthe Earth government refuses to co-operate with it, so thegovernment--that is to say, Marscorp--put a ban on the experiments byHennessey and other scientists here."

  "I remember the government ban on the projects, but I wasn't aware thatMarscorp had anything to do with it," said Dark. "Goat Hennessey was oneof a group of us who retired to the desert to continue work despite thegovernment ban."

  "Goat sold out," said the Chief. "Perhaps your memory doesn't includethat important point, but Fancher remembers it well. It was a littlebefore my time. Goat sold out, and betrayed the others to thegovernment in return for assistance in carrying out more limitedexperiments. Some of the group escaped and formed the nucleus of therebel movement which now is centered here at the Childress BarberCollege. We call ourselves the Order of the Phoenix."

  The Chief allowed himself the luxury of a very faint smile.

  "Marscorp and the government call us the Desert Rats," he said. "Veryappropriate. They consider us in the same category as rats."

  Dark had been standing, casually at ease, before the Chief's desk, withthe air of a man who does not tire from standing. Now he did somethingFancher would not have dared: without the Chief's invitation, Dark satdown in a comfortable chair, leaned back and stretched out his legs
inrelaxation.

  "It's a little hard for me to realize there's a twenty-five-year gap inmy memory," he said. "It seems to me that it has been less than a monthago that Goat and I were together, with other refugees from thegovernment edict, in the Icaria Desert. Why did you ask me about Goat?"

  "Because the government brought him back to Mars City not three monthsago," answered the Chief. "None of us had any idea where he was, but itturns out that the government has had him working under surveillancesome place in the Xanthe Desert north of Solis Lacus. Since it was notfar from Solis Lacus that you were picked up, I wondered if you had hadany contact with him."

  "Not that I remember," said Dark. "Do you have another of those cigars?"

  "Why, yes," answered the Chief, startled. He produced another Hadriacumcigar and handed it to Dark. Dark lit it and puffed the fragrant smokewith evident enjoyment.

  "As I say, the last time I remember seeing Goat was in the IcariaDesert, in a dome we had set up there," said Dark. "The next thing Iremember is waking up in the midst of some sort of cave in a differentpart of Icaria, surrounded by Martians.

  "I could communicate with them in a fashion--something I was never ableto do before--and they were able to write the name of the ChildressBarber College so I could read it. But they evidently don'tdifferentiate our dome cities by name. I had no idea the college washere in Mars City until your men contacted me; I just assumed it was atSolis Lacus."

  "You'd have waged a merry search for it, clear on the other side ofMars," remarked the Chief. "What was your purpose in finding it?"

  "I don't know that I had any specific purpose," replied Dark easily. "Igathered from the Martians that here I could find someone who concurredwith my philosophy of resisting the government edict against seekingself-sufficiency on Mars, and this was more or less confirmed by yourtwo men who contacted me at Solis Lacus."

  "I'll see to it that in the future they're not quite so frank untilthey're sure of their man," said the Chief darkly. He looked quizzicallyat Fancher, and Fancher nodded slightly. "But it's true. As a matter offact, the Phoenix follows the path toward self-sufficiency that yourecommended, rather than the one sought by Goat Hennessey."

  "That's the wrong way to approach it," said Dark promptly. "Goat and theother scientists were following a line offering valid possibilities intheir genetic research. The only reason the rest of us chose to attemptthe extrasensory powers--particularly teleportation--was that we werenot qualified in genetic research and this seemed a field in which westood a chance to contribute along alternate lines. The effort should befollowed along both lines."

  "The government managed to capture all the scientists at the time ofyour disappearance, and it was assumed that you had been captured, too,"said the Chief. "We don't have any scientists in the Phoenix who arecapable of doing Goat Hennessey's type of research."

  "You say he's in Mars City? I wonder if it would do any good for me tocontact him."

  "I told you that he was the one who betrayed the whole thing to thegovernment, and he's been working under government supervision theselast twenty-five years. I wouldn't trust him."

  The Chief surveyed Dark's strong face with speculative green eyes, thenadded:

  "As a matter of fact, we've made a certain amount of progress followingyour line of research. Since there are probably a good many things youdiscovered in this work that we haven't stumbled on yet, we could useyour help in developing it, if you're interested."

  "Very definitely," answered Dark. "I'm interested in seeing what you'vedone, and I'll be glad to help in any way I can."

  "There's one thing," said the Chief, measuring his words. "I've heldthis organization together despite some pretty severe reverses for morethan fifteen years now. The reason I've been able to do it is that Iexpect and must insist on absolute obedience to my orders."

  Dark smiled. "I said that I would be willing to help you," he repliedgently. "I follow no man's orders."

  The green eyes fixed themselves unwinkingly on the pale-blue ones for along moment. The blue ones did not waver.

  At last, to Fancher's utter amazement, the Chief nodded agreement.