Rebels of the Red Planet | Page 9

yet?"
"You'd destroy them anyhow, as you have the others, not long after the births. And that brings up another thing. When you get to Mars City, watch your tongue. You almost revealed to Miss Cara Nome that the government has been kidnapping an expectant mother now and then for your experiments."
"Years of work, gone to waste," mourned Goat somberly. "When must I do this?"
"As soon as possible. You'll be expected in Mars City within two weeks. Now, I'd like to see these experimental humans."
A few moments later, they made their way together through a large dormitory in which all of Goat's charges were sleeping. Nuwell shuddered at the sight of the small, deformed bodies.
"I don't worry that you could ever take any of these to Mars City undetected. But," he said, pointing to Brute, "that one looks too near normal. I want to see him destroyed before I leave."
"Brute? But he's the most successful one I have left!"
"Exactly. That's why I want to see him destroyed, tonight."
Goat awoke Brute, and the monster man sleepily followed them back to the study.
Goat picked up the huge knife, still stained with Adam's blood, and looked Brute squarely in the face. Brute returned the gaze, no comprehension in his dull blue eyes.
"You think I can't kill you, Brute?" said Goat coldly. "I'll show you!"
With a surgeon's precision, Goat plunged the sharp point between Brute's ribs and into the heart.
Shock swept over Brute's mind.
Father kills me!
Reject! Reject!
Father, all kindness, all hope, all wisdom and love, wants me no more. Father rejects me! Father kills me!
Despair!
Reject! Reject!
Blackness swept fading through Brute's despairing brain.
One agonized note of pleading in the pale-blue eyes, and they closed in acceptance. Brute swayed and fell forward, crashing to the floor, driving the knife into his chest to the hilt.
Brute shuddered and rolled over on his back. He lay sprawled, arms flung out limply, the knife hilt protruding upward. He sighed, and his breathing stopped.
Goat stared down at him. He picked up Brute's wrist and held it. There was no pulse.
* * * * *
Shortly after dawn, Maya awoke. Remembering what she had seen dimly the night before, she went curiously to the window.
There were two of them now. They were bodies, human bodies, naked and unquestionably dead. In the night, the dry, vampirish Martian air had dessicated them. They were skeletons, parchment skin stretched tightly over the lifeless bones.
Even as she stood and looked, a group of figures appeared on the horizon and came slowly nearer. They were Martians--monstrous creatures, huge-chested, humpbacked, with tremendously long, thin legs and arms, their big-eyed, big-eared heads mere excrescences in front of their humps.
Trailing slowly through the desert toward Aurorae Sinus, they passed near the skeleton bodies. One of the Martians saw them. He boomed excitedly at the others, loudly enough for Maya to hear through the double window.
The Martians stopped and gathered around the bodies.
What, she wondered, could interest them in two corpses? There was no guessing. Martian motives and thought processes were alien and incomprehensible, even to one who had lived among them and communicated with them as a child.
One of the Martians picked up one of the corpses, and the whole group moved away toward the lowland, the Martian carrying the body easily with one long-fingered hand. Wisps of sandy dust trailed them as they dwindled and slowly vanished.
The second body lay where they had left it. A gaping wound in its throat seemed to mock her.

4
Fancher Laddigan made his way down a long dim corridor in the rear portion of the Childress Barber College, in Mars City's eastern quarter. He stopped and hesitated, with some trepidation, before an unmarked door near the end of the corridor.
Completely bald, bespectacled and well up in years, Fancher looked like a clerk and he had the instincts of a clerk. Yet he utilized that appearance and those instincts in a perilous cause.
Fancher knocked timidly on the door. On receiving an indistinct invitation from inside, he pushed it open and entered.
Fancher had a tendency to shiver every time he had occasion to see the Chief, whose real name was unknown to Fancher and to most others here at the barber college.
Small as a child in body, wagging a thin-haired head larger than lifesize, the Chief surveyed Fancher with icy green eyes. The eyes were large and round as a child's, but there was nothing childlike about their expression. As though to deny his physical smallness, he smoked one of the fragrant, foot-long cigars produced only in the Hadriacum Lowlands.
"Sit down," commanded the Chief in a high, piping voice.
Fancher swallowed and sat, facing his superior across the big desk. The Chief opened a drawer, took out another of the long cigars, and handed it to Fancher. Fancher did not like cigars, but he had never dared say