Barney said, “Even if I lose the suit–”
“It will still greatly damage Chew-Z sales. Most colonists have a nagging feeling anyhow that the translation drugs are in the long run biochemically harmful.” Faine added, “The toxin in that tube is relatively rare. Leo obtained it through highly specialized channels. It originates on Io, I believe. One certain doctor–”
“Willy Denkmal,” Barney said.
Faine shrugged. “Possibly. In any case there it is in your hand; as soon as you’ve been exposed to Chew-Z you’re to take it. Try to have your first grand mal attack where your fellow hovelists will see you; don’t be off somewhere on the desert farming or bossing autonomic dredges. As soon as you’ve recovered from the attack, get on the vidphone and ask the UN for medical assistance. Have their disinterested doctors examine you; don’t apply for private medication.”
“It would probably be a good idea,” Barney said, “if the UN doctors could run an EEG on me during an attack.”
“Absolutely. So try if possible to get yourself into a UN hospital; in all there’re three on Mars. You’ll be able to put forward a good argument for this because–” Faine hesitated. “Frankly, with this toxin your attacks will involve severe destructiveness, toward yourself and to others. Technically they’ll be of the hysterical, aggressive variety concluding in a more or less complete loss of consciousness. It’ll be obvious what it is right from the start, because–or so I’m told–you’ll reveal the typical tonic stage, with great muscular contractions, and then the clonic stage of rhythmic contraction alternating with relaxation. After which of course the coma supervenes.”
“In other words,” Barney said, “the classic convulsive form.”
“Does it frighten you?”
“I don’t see where that matters. I owe Leo something; you and I and Leo know that. I still resent the word ‘atonement,’ but I suppose this is that.” He wondered how this artificially induced illness would affect his relationship with Anne. Probably this would terminate the thing. So he was giving up a good deal for Leo Bulero. But then Leo was doing something for him, too; getting him off Mars was no minor consideration.
“We’re taking it for granted,” Faine said, “that they’ll make an attempt to kill you the moment you retain an attorney. In fact they’ll–”
“I’d like to go back to my hovel, now.” He moved off. “Okay?”
“Fine. Go pick up the routine there. But let me give you a word of advice as regards that girl. Doberman’s Law–remember, he was the first person to marry and then get divorced on Mars?–states that in proportion to your emotional attachment to someone on this damn place the relationship deteriorates. I’d give you two weeks at the most, and not because you’ll be ill but because that’s standard. Martian musical chairs. And the UN encourages it because it means, frankly, if I may say so, more children to populate the colony. Catch?”
“The UN,” Barney said, “might not sanction my relationship with her because it’s on a somewhat different basis than you’re describing.”
“No it’s not,” Faine said calmly. “It may seem so to you, but I watch the whole planet, day in, night out. I’m just stating a fact; I’m not being critical. In fact I’m personally sympathetic.”
“Thanks,” Barney said, and walked away, flashing his light ahead of him in the direction of his hovel; tied about his throat the small bleeper signal which told him when he was nearing–and more important when he was not nearing–his hovel began to sound louder: a one-frog pond of comfort close to his ear.
I’ll take the toxin, he said to himself. And I’ll go into court and sue the bastards for Leo’s sake. Because I owe that to him. But I’m not returning to Earth; either I make it here or not at all. With Anne Hawthorne, I hope, but if not, then alone or with someone else; I’ll live out Doberman’s Law, as Faine predicts. Anyhow it’ll be here on this miserable planet, this “promised land.”
Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step.
TEN
Next day both Norm Schein and Tod Morris spent the early hours with him, teaching him the knack of operating the bulldozers and dredges and scoops which had fallen into various stages of ruin; most of the equipment, like old tomcats, could be coaxed into one more effort. But the results did not amount to much; they had been discarded for too long.
By noon he was exhausted. So he treated himself to a break, resting in the shade of a mammoth, rusty tractor, eating a cold-rations lunch and drinking tepid tea from a thermos which Fran Schein had been kind enough to bring up to him.
Below, in the hovel, the others did whatever it was they customarily did; he didn’t care.
On all sides of him their abandoned, decaying gardens could be seen and he wondered if soon he would forget his, too. Maybe each new colonist had started out this way, in an agony of effort. And then the torpor, the hopelessness, claimed them. And yet, was it so hopeless? Not really.
It’s an attitude, he decided. And we–all of us who comprised P. P. Layouts–contributed willingly to it. We gave them an out, something painless and easy. And now Palmer Eldritch has arrived to put the finish on the process. We laid the path for him, myself included, and so what now? Is there any way that I can, as Faine put it, atone?
Approaching him, Helen Morris called cheerfully, “How’s the farming coming?” She dropped down beside him and opened a fat seed catalog with the UN stamp plainly marked throughout. “Observe what they’ll provide free; every seed known to thrive here, including turnips.” Resting against him, she turned the pages. “However, there’s a little mouselike burrowing mammal that shows up on the surface late at night; be prepared for that. It eats everything. You’ll have to set out a few self-propelling traps.”
“Okay,” Barney said.
“It’s quite some sight, one of those homeostatic traps taking off across the sand in pursuit of a marsle-mouse. God, they go fast. Both the mouse and the trap. You can make it more interesting by placing a bet. I usually bet on the trap. I admire them.”
“I think I’d probably bet on the trap, too.” I’ve got a great respect for traps, he reflected. In other words a situation in which none of the doors lead out. No matter how they happen to be marked.
Helen said, “Also the UN will supply two robots free of charge for your use. For a period not to exceed six months. So better plan ahead wisely as to how you want to employ them. The best is to set them to work constructing irrigation ditches. Ours is mostly no good now. Sometimes the ditches have to run two hundred miles, even more. Or you can hatch out a deal–”
“No deals,” Barney said.
“But these are good deals; find someone nearby in one of the other hovels who’s started his own irrigation system and then abandoned it: buy it from him and tap it. Is your girl at Flax Back Spit going to come over here and join you?” She eyed him.
He did not answer; he watched, in the black Martian sky with its noontime stars, a circling ship. The Chew-Z man? The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing.
Amazing, he thought, how strong the self-destructive drive can be.
Helen Morris, straining to see, said, “Visitors! It’s not a UN ship, either.” She started toward the hovel at once. “I’ll go tell them.”
With his left hand he reached into his coat and touched the tube deep in the interior pocket, thinking to himself, Can I actually do this? It didn’t seem possible; there was nothing in his makeup historically which would explain it. Maybe, he thought, it’s from despair at having lost everything. But he didn’t think so; it was something else.
As the ship landed on the flat desert not far off he thought, Maybe it’s to reveal something to Anne about Chew-Z. Even if the demonstration is faked. Because, he thought, if I accept the toxin into my system she won’t try Chew-Z. He had a strong intuition of that. And it was enough.
From the ship stepped Palmer Eldritch.
No one could fail to identify him; since his crash on Pluto the homeopapes had printed one pic after another. Of course the pics were ten years out of date, but this was still the man. Gray and bony, well over six feet tall, with swinging arms and a peculiarly rapid gait. And his face. It had a ravaged quality, eaten away; as if, Barney conjectured, the fat-layer had been consumed, as if Eldritch at some time or other had fed off himself, devoured perhaps with gusto the superfluous portions of his own body. He had enormous steel teeth, these having been installed prior to his trip to Prox by Czech dental surgeons; they were welded to his jaws, were permanent: he would die with them. And–his right arm was artificial. Twenty years ago in a hunting accident on Callisto he had lost the original; this one of course was superior in that it provided a specialized variety of interchangeable hands. At the moment Eldritch made use of the five-finger humanoid manual extremity; except for its metallic shine it might have been organic.