Here's the very first s-f story by the Hugo-winning author of A Canticle for Leibowitz and "Six and Ten Are Johnny." —The Martians invade Earth—in a huge dome that H-bombs can't dent—plunk down in the desert for ten years, vivisect a few curiosity-seekers, then make one mistake. They let Barney Willis—or what was Barney Willis—go back to his bride!
SECRET OF THE DEATH DOME WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
THE martians came in a huge dome from out of the sky and sat it down in the desert, to watch. Earth was their zoo, and their dome an impregnable cage. So it seemed at first. Then it was whispered in the halls of Man that Earth was the cage, and the dome was the Outside. For Man had thrown himself in vain fury against the dome's outer surface, while the dome-men yawned and watched from their unassailable fortress.
Their mission was obscure. They did not attack. Neither did they offer friendship. For ten years thereafter Earth was like a house of glass. Man lived in it uneasily, but without change. Boys who were eleven had grown to adulthood with the dome as a constant, ominous shadow. They were tired of hearing about it. They got married and had children. Martians? So what?
A state of war existed in theory. The Martians had behaved in a manner that justified war. They seized curiosity-seekers and used them as specimens. The dome was the target of the most magnificent of Earth weapons. Its resistance was passive. It sat unharmed. Martian hostility was evidently only curiosity. And when H-bombs exploded harmlessly, Earthmen blushed and ceased the attacks to save themselves embarrassment. For want of a better course, they finally decided to ignore the dome.
But the military maintained an alert. Towns grew up at a safe distance from the dome to house scientific investigators and the men who patrolled the neighboring desert. They had jobs to do—routine jobs with government salaries.
Then Barney Willis came in out of the desert and died. Another specimen for the Martians. He died at the edge of town. Masterson, the blacksmith, saw him pitch off his horse and lie in the road. He saw the uniform of the special patrol—blue and gray—fluttering in the hot wind off the desert. He went out and felt his wrist: then he called the colonel.
The colonel sent Jerry Harrison to see about it. Jerry was just a sergeant, but there wasn't any need for brass. Death is for privates. And Barney's death was his wife's tough luck, but it was nothing new. Of course, the colonel didn't stop to think that Barney was Jerry's best friend—so good a friend that they were still friends after Barney married Jerry's girl. Big blond Barney with the damnfool grin and thin hard Jerry with the angry eyes—side-riders. MacPearson, who ran the Tavern, chained a couple of barstools together for them as a joke. Sort of a marriage ceremony, he said.
Jerry got to Barney while the crowd was gathering. Barney was a limp heap. The blank face looked queer without its grin. Stand back, stand back for the special patrol! Give him light! It's almost dark and he's got to see!
There wasn't any blood. The body was still hot—too hot, fresh from the desert and the sun.
"You women scram," Jerry growled. "I'm going to loosen his clothes. It may not be pretty."
The women retreated to the outer circle.
"How long is this going to last?" somebody wanted to know.
"Blow them off the planet, I say!" said a plump man in a business suit.
Jerry opened the dead man's shirt. No chest wound. The abdomen, maybe. Maybe they borrowed his liver to see how it worked. They were like that.
"Blow the dome ten light-years into space!" said the plump man. "If we can't dent it, we can move it half to hell."
"Then what'll we breathe for air?" asked a calm voice. "Alpha particles? Do you realize how much uranium..."
Jerry loosened the dead man's belt. Then he buckled it again lest the crowd see what he had seen. Earth men were funny about some things, especially in crowds. They might form a mob and go out to the dome. Damn-fool living, loving, hating humans.
"What's wrong with him, sergeant?" asked the plump man.
Jerry stood up with Barney in his arms. "He's dead. That's all." Then he added— "Sunstroke, mister.'.'
It was true. Barney had left his hat at the dome. He'd left something else too. They'd closed the wound with the strange white film they used for surgery, so there wasn't any blood. But the crowd didn't have to know about that.
Jerry put him in the back of the station wagon and drove toward headquarters. He was glad Barney had left his hat behind. Barney would be glad too. He was mercifully dead. Because he wasn't a man anymore. And Betty was young and brown and firm as a grape. And loyal. She wouldn't have left him if he'd lived. She'd have moved to another bedroom to save embarrassment; but she'd have gone on cooking his meals and singing while she worked. That was the way she was. Barney couldn't have faced it.
Knowing Barney, Jerry was puzzled. Why had he tried to come back at all?
Colonel Beck's rock-ugly face wore its usual hard hatred as he peered over the coroner's shoulder at the body laid out on a table under the glaring light. He turned to glare at Jerry who sat slumped by the door.
"Why the hell did they do that, sergeant?" he snapped.
Jerry shook his head.
The colonel cursed softly and looked back at the body. "You'd think they knew he just got married. You'd think they. . ." He paused and frowned. "Now how the hell would a damn sexless Martian think of a thing like that! Make an eunuch of him and send him home to his new bride. It beats me, sergeant."
"How do you know they're sexless?"
"Hell, man! Their broadcasts from the dome! Don't you listen?"
Jerry knew what he meant. The Martians barged in on the broadcast-band to ask questions about earth biology and other things that they couldn't learn by dissecting captives. They offered information about Martian society and Martian science in return. The government finally ordered that non-secret material be released to them in the hope that the brutal vivisections would cease. The dome-men replied by radioing lectures on Martian history, psychology, and physiology. But how much of it was true?
"What bothers me," Jerry muttered, "is why Barney came back at all—like that."
The colonel snorted indifferently.
"Maybe he had something to say. Maybe he found out something new and important that he wanted to report. Maybe. . ." The colonel was impatient. "Use your head, sergeant," he said. "The Martians can erase a human mind like a blackboard. Nobody that's ever come back from them alive can remember anything about them. Even what they look like. You know that! They get through with a man and then pick the memories out of his mind like fleas off a dog."
It was true. Yonkers, who had left his legs in the dome, could remember riding out on patrol and passing the jutting rock. Then his memory cut off like a light. He could then remember being in a blackened room whose ceiling was so low that he had to stoop. Then memory stopped again. He remembered intense pain and a grating sensation in his legs, but no visual image accompanied it. The Martians pinched out just those memory images that they didn't want to be there.
"Maybe he knew or saw something that they didn't know he saw," Jerry suggested.
"That's silly!"
"Then why did he come back?"
"Because he wanted to live, man!"
With his new bride? Like that? The colonel didn't know Barney like Jerry did.
The coroner called it death by sunstroke, and there was no use running an autopsy.
"Sergeant Harrison," the colonel said sweetly. "I'm detailing you to find out what it was you think he saw. You take his patrol tomorrow."
Jerry nodded. He had meant to ask for it anyway. But Colonel Beck was angry. He had lost a scout. Good scouts were scarce. He couldn't get back at the Martians, so he took it out on Jerry. But Jerry was willing.
"Check your little theory, sergeant," the colonel went on in a sugary tone. "Get close to the dome. Poke around a bit. Prod it with a stick, maybe. Don't forget your magnifying glass."
Jerry stiffened. No horseman had ever been that close—voluntarily. Only infantry and tanks.
"You think I'm afraid?" he asked.
"I don't give a damn whether you are or not!" Colonel Beck growled. "It's an order."
Jerry stood up to leave. "Yes, sir. I'll see what I can find."
The colonel's sadistic appetites were not yet satiated. "One other thing, sergeant," he said. "Take Willis home to his wife."
"Colonel! . . ."
"I'll call her, of course—and drop in to pay my respects tomorrow. But you take him home. The jailhouse is no place for a dead family man. We can get an embalmer out of the city tomorrow."
"I'd rather not. . ."
"Sergeant! You don't have to tell her what they did to him. Just sunstroke, that's all."
There was no arguing with him. Jerry obeyed reluctantly. It wasn't going to be a pleasant task—carrying Barney in to Betty. He drove as slowly as he could on the way.
Two questions troubled him. The colonel's and his own. How had such an amputation occurred to a sexless Martian? And—why had Barney come back—unless he knew something? There were a lot of maybe's, but none seemed satisfying.
Barney's house was like all the houses in the row—government construction—a white frame house with ivy-trellises. One thing was different—the woman who kept it. She stood in the doorway when they drove up—white, tight-faced, grim, beautiful. A strong girl. No girl to wail helplessly with grief. Barney knew her well—too well. She would sit and think and hate. She would be a widow until the Martians were driven from the earth.
Jerry and the corporal took the stretcher up the walk. Barney was covered with a sheet. She held the door open for them.
"Save it, Jerry," she said when he opened his mouth. "The colonel called me."
No use complaining about it, she might have added. He did what he could for Earth.
They laid him out on the bed, and the corporal went back to the car. Betty bent over the body in the evening gloom that came from the window. And her thin fingers barely touched his yellow hair. Her own dark hair shrouded her face, a black curtain about her cheeks, hiding whatever she felt. Then she kissed him—lightly as she might kiss a child. Jerry shuddered. A childish kiss. No use kissing him like a man, even in death. Not after what they did to him.
She turned, but he couldn't see her eyes in the dim light. Thank God for that! It hurt bad enough just to look at her, he had loved her long before Barney.
"When are we going to get even, Jerry?" Her voice was icy.
Vengeance—an Earth-woman's concept. Good old Earth, with its grief and its rage and its fiery hate. Martians couldn't feel such illogical emotions—so the broadcasts said.
"Sorry, Betty," he said weakly. "I'm just a scout, not a senator."
She watched him for a silent time. Then she turned away. "And I'm just a woman."
Her tone struck him like a slap. There were a lot of things in it—scorn, hate, determination.
He left as quickly as he could. He sent the corporal back with the car and walked silently home ward in the moonlight.
The Martian dome glimmered faintly in the distance across the desert. High, proud, evil. Shining in the moon-glow. What right had Martians to bask under the Earth's moon? He passed a couple with two small children—going home from the movie, maybe. Life went on; there was nothing else it could do. While the dome watched it.
The couple with the children reminded him of Barney. And Betty. She was built just right for bearing kids. Efficiently constructed...
Jerry hated himself suddenly for the thoughts that began creeping up from the depths. But hell! He couldn't help feeling what he did. The Id had a hairy chest and carried a stone axe; it never heard of moral law.
The Martians had no Id—so the lecturer said. Their minds operated entirely on the conscious level.
He stopped in the Tavern for a beer. MacPearson saw him coming and sneaked around to unchain his stool from Barney's. But Jerry saw him do it. A hush fell over the place when he came in, and several voices murmured at him as he passed. "Sorry to hear about. . ."
He took a seat and the conversation picked up again. For awhile he listened to the sibilant murmer of angry voices.
"Get all the uranium on earth and blow the dome to hell!"
It was the old argument, and Jerry was sick of it. How to get rid of the dome. It had been blasted and bombed and gassed and infected with bubonic plague. But the dome's radio voice congratulated the bombardiers for their accuracy—on the aircraft command frequency. And thanked them politely— ominously, perhaps—for such an insight into Earth's military science. The dome was undented.
"Keep pumping lewisite into the vents. Their air-filters can't last forever."
Jerry looked disgustedly at the speaker. But the speaker was too interested in his own opinions to notice. Everybody had helpful suggestions; but nobody was mad enough to spend millions of dollars and millions of lives. After all, who had died? Only a few scouts. Everyone was intellectually angry; no one was mad down deep in the belly. Except Betty, maybe.
And Jerry?
Why should Jerry be mad? Now he had a chance at Barney's widow. Wasn't that just fine?
He pushed his beer aside and left the bar quickly. He went home to a breezy bed. The wind came off the desert, bearing with it the familiar odor of—of whatever the Martians were doing. It kept him coldly awake.
Four blocks away was another bed—with a dead man in it. And Betty sleeping on the couch. Life went on. And death.
Funny, though—the Martians didn't die. They just went to sleep and split in half like amoebae—and then there were two. They kept their sexless daddy's memories. Why not? Same brain, divided between them. The lecturer said so. Wouldn't it be funny if you could remember when your thousand-times-great grandfather bashed in his brother's head with a club? And stole his wife, maybe?
Betty. He kept thinking of Betty. When are we going to get even, Jerry? Vengeance. Earthbound Betty, corn-fed, and raised up by common old earth-standards. A dark little snake who could love or sting.
Did she think hate would work better than H-bombs?
Did he hate the big pink bodies inside the dome? With the red stripe down the middle where they divided? The headless creatures with humps on their back for brain-cases? They loved to have the line stroked—so the lecturer said. Maybe the lecturer lied. Maybe they didn't like to have the stripe stroked. Maybe they had screaming meemies if you even touched it. Everybody believed the lecturer. They drew sketches of the Martians from the lecturer's descriptions. But why should the lecturer lie about such trivialities?
The Martians were so polite. They thanked the scout when they plucked out his eye to see how he saw. Not torturers—just curious. And when the engineers burrowed under the dome secretly to plant a few H-bombs, the dome picked itself up out of the crater, sat down a mile away, and ignored the incident as a lady ignores a drunk.
Jerry couldn't sleep. He could hear Minnie shifting about restlessly in her stall. So he pulled on his boots and went out to keep company with his mare. Maybe she was thirsty. He had forgotten to water her.
But ten minutes later he had saddled up. He gathered his paraphernalia, swung into the familiar seat, and trotted westward under the midnight moon. The dome was a faint luminescence in the distance. He had no idea what he meant to do. It was just an urge.
He rode for two hours until he reached the row of stainless steel stakes that marked a five-mile circle around the dome. It was the scouting radius; he had ridden it thousands of times. He reined up and gazed at the hemispherical fortress. Its impenetrable surface shimmered slightly in the silvery light, like an asphalt road in the hot sun. Perhaps it was the desert air. Or perhaps the Princeton professor was right in his theory that the dome's metallic sheath was immersed in a field that increased the inter-molecular forces by a tremendous amount.
The dome appeared to be sleeping peacefully under the moon. But Jerry knew that it was awake and watching. It saw the single rider on the scouting circle. It could devour him if it wished. But it could feel neither anger or amusement. Its only dangerous sentiment might be curiosity.
How many more days would he ride around it before they got curious? Or needed another specimen. Then they would pluck out his heart, or muse over his cortex. Or do what they did to Barney. He was helpless before it.
He dismounted and sat under the edge of a bluff to think. He felt more comfortable in the shadows. There was nothing he could do—except his job. Just ride circles around the beanpot and hope for the best.
Soon he dozed. He was awakened by a faint thump. He started up. Another thump. It came from nowhere in particular. He could feel it more than hear it. It was in the ground and in the air. Suddenly he knew what it was. It had happened to an old prospector once. He got too close to the dome and said he felt a kind of thudding in the air that grew and grew until it beat him senseless. He told about it just before he died of a brain hemorrhage.
Thunk! Thunk!
He winced and looked for a place to hide. Minnie neighed and strained at her rope. The thunks were little twinges in the bones.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
Harder this time. He made a dash for the mare. But Minnie reared up with a shriek and the rope pulled loose from the rock. She set off homeward at a gallop.
The thudding stopped, as if its purpose had been accomplished. The Martians had driven away his horse. Why?
He looked around. He had stashed his Thompson sub and his walkie-talkie under the edge of the bluff. But he'd left the two canteens of water on the horse.
He thought of calling for help on the radio. But no one but the Martians guarded the frequency at night. He would have to wait for daylight, or try to go back on foot. But if the Martians wanted him, walking away would do no good. They could thump him down or prod him with the stinging beams that hurt on the side away from the dome and made the victim run screaming toward it, to escape the intense burning that followed behind.
He sat down under the bluff again to wait for dawn. He stared at the hateful fortress until he could close his eyes and see its pale, floating, after-image.
The sky grew gray, then red in the east. The dome took on the color of the sunrise. He called control. The channel was silent. He tried again in half-an-hour, this time with results.
"Scout Three from Control. What happened. Jerry? Your horse came trotting into town at six o'clock."
"Martians sent her scampering. Get somebody out here with another. Six miles east of the bean-pot."
A cold metallic voice cut into the frequency. "That will be unnecessary. That will be unnecessary."
And that was all. The dome had spoken and fallen silent. Jerry breathed heavily into his mike but said nothing. He watched the dome fearfully. It wanted him. No use sending another horse.
The dispatcher lowered his voice as if to keep the Martians from hearing "Sit tight, Jerry. We'll get somebody out there right away. We'll send everybody that's not out looking for Betty Willis."
Jerry found his voice again quickly. "Looking for who?"
"Betty Willis. She may be off her rocker. Sat up all night with the body. When your horse came in, she called up the colonel and said it was her fault. Something she said to you. Next thing you know somebody saw her galloping out of town. She's headed for rough country, or she'd have taken the car."
The metallic voice cut in again. "Tell us why the woman reacts in this manner. Tell us why she behaves illogically."
The dispatcher began cursing and went off the air to finish the oath.
"Hate, beanpot," Jerry hissed at his mike. He had nothing to lose by being brazen. "Now tell us one. Why did you do that to her husband?"
The voice came back calmly and quickly. "We wish to examine human heredity mechanisms. We wish to make a human organism. We have tried previously without success. Now we shall succeed.
Jerry's vision clouded with red flashes of hate. Make a human organism! "Why don't you just borrow one," he choked. "Me, for instance."
"Thank you. But we wish to make several changes in the structure. Thank you."
Jerry pushed the walkie-talkie aside and stood up. Then he lifted it for a last word to the dispatcher. "When you find Betty, tell her we're going to get even." Then he dashed the radio to the rocks. And with the submachine gun under his arm, he began walking toward the dome.
He was running amok. He knew it. Don Quixote. Damn fool. They could kill him any instant. He was going to die. Foolishly. For nothing at all. He couldn't even make it count. Still he walked on.
Make a human organism!
And the Lord God made man of the slime of the earth. And breathed in his face the breath of life. And man became a living soul. Maybe that wasn't true. But it sounded better than the way the Martians said it.
The impotency of his wrath! He realized it. It made him more angry. The meaninglessness of his gesture. Of his grim march toward the omnipotent enemy.
The radio was still working. Far behind him he could hear its voice. The dispatcher was calling excited questions. The Martian was asking about illogical behaviour.
Why didn't they shoot him? Or blast him with the thumping outfit. (Was it supersonic?)
A sane spark in Jerry's mind told him to go back. The sane spot spoke coldly, logically. But it had no control of his rage. For years he had ridden the circle, knowing every moment that he was helpless. A mouse stalking a tiger. A foolish strutting little earthling, at the mercy of the dome. He had grown to resent it more and more. Now the resentment broke the dam and swelled into a torrent of hate. He stalked onward.
In two hours he was within tommygun range of the dome. He stopped to slip a fifty-round drum on his weapon. No one but infantry and tanks had been this close before. They had assaulted it futilely. It closed its shell and went to sleep while they gnawed at the impenetrable—what?
It looked like ordinary steel. But diamonds couldn't mark it. Uranium couldn't dent it. Acid was harmless to it. It was curiously non-conductive to electricity and heat; the Martians could not be roasted out. Its thermal conductivity had been estimated—somewhere around a billionth of a BTU per hour per degree Fahrenheit per cubic foot. It could sit on the surface of the sun for awhile with that kind of insulation.
Jerry fired a burst at it, just to spend a little anger. The bullets never ricocheted. They stuck to the surface, like iron to a magnet. Maybe the Princeton professor was right. There wasn't any such metal.
Well, here he was. And there it was. Why didn't they come out and get him? But they never came out. Even the desert was too humid to suit them. Moisture made them itch. The lecturer said so.
He was thinking more calmly now. They had let him come this close for a reason. Maybe they wanted to observe anger reactions. Martians couldn't feel anger. The lecturer—damn the lecturer! Maybe they'd take out his adrenals to see how they worked.
Maybe it gave them a warm feeling to see him wandering about helplessly. "There goes the enemy, but here we are nice and safe in our igloo."
The sun was getting hot. It gleamed on the glazed ground, where the uranium blasts had fused the rocks. Once the ground had been grazing land—poor land, to be sure, but covered with a sparse grass. But that part of the desert had had no rain for ten years. Since the Martians came. Mother Earth had changed her weather to suit Martian comfort. But the meteorologists said it was a coincidence.
He started walking around the dome. They knew he was there. They watched silently. They hadn't even bothered to retract the stilts it stood on. It sat on three short fat legs, its flat bottom three feet above the desert floor. When the infantry came, it pulled in the legs and sat down on its belly. Once it sat down on some of the infantry. They had crawled under to find an air-vent through which to pump gas. The Martians had evidently cleaned up the G.I. cadavers for specimens, because the ground beneath the dome was barren and boneless.
He shouted at the fort. "Come out and get me, you bastards! Come on!"
Of course they couldn't answer him without his radio. They had no vocal cords. But their bodies could generate radio waves and modulate them in any way they pleased. The lecturer said their synaptic connections were so quick-triggered they could perceive each separate radio frequency pulse and duplicate it exactly with a modulated carrier wave. That was the way they communicated with each other. They could vary their output from a whisper to a hundred watts.
"Well, damn it! Do something!" he shouted helplessly.
The desert was silent, and the dome shimmered in the heat. He glanced back toward town. A single rider was approaching the scouting circle. Too late now.
The sun was beating upon him heavily. His throat was dry and burning for water. He wandered about aimlessly for a time, cursing and firing bursts against the dome.
Hell, if they wouldn't come out, then he'd try to get in! There were bound to be vents under the dome. He slung the tommy-gun and crawled under the edge. The center would be the logical place to look. But it was a half-mile crawl. He set out over the slag determindely dropping to his hands and knees. As he moved slowly and painfully along, the darkness deepened and the white desert sunlight was a painful band of brightness in the distance. Folly upon folly. The Martians were playing with him. Willfully he was moving into their trap. When he was far enough under, they would start to sit down—slowly, so he would make a run for safety. Then when he was almost out, they would drop their low, flat belly upon him. He began to feel the things a claustrophobiac feels.
I'm just a woman, Jerry. Betty's scorn was a whip that lashed him on. Or maybe the scorn wasn't in her tone, but rather—in his own conscience. And in the conscience of the world. Why isn't humanity man enough to do something?
A sudden shrill sound made him freeze. It came from behind. Far behind. He knew the death-shriek a horse sometimes makes. It chilled him. A rider had followed him to the dome. The Martians had killed the animal—and perhaps the rider.
He crawled on.
He kept bumping against the ceiling. Had the dome moved, or was the ground rising slightly? The metal felt body-temperature—illusively. But that was because it was non-conductive, according to the Princeton theory. The physicists said it was near absolute zero, its molecules locked tightly in place by the strength of a field which was thought to irradiate it from within. The particles could not even vibrate with heat energy. What would happen if the field were suddenly released? A wine-glass dropped in molten steel?
His hands and knees were bloody from the rough ground. But as he neared the center, he felt a strong draft of air. He was approaching a vent.
He found it by moving downwind and feeling with his hands. He could see nothing but the thin vein of white light around the rim of the dome.
He found it—and his heart sank. It was protected by heavy louvers, set a few inches back in the opening. He stretched out in exhaustion beneath the vent. A gale of air arose about him. He fired a short burst up into the vent, but nothing happened. The sound was deafening, and the flashes lit up the blackness for a moment. That was all.
He lay quietly recovering his strength and waiting.
Thump! Thump!
He felt the shocks pass through him and his hand went numb. At close range, the sonic cone was narrow. It missed his body. The Martians were firing in darkness. He looked around quickly. Some; thing broke the thin vein of light. A silhouette! It moved, scrambling drily feet away.
He rolled over and blasted at it with the tommy-gun. Something crumpled and fell to the ground. Then the metallic slap of a hatch closing. He crawled to his target and felt it cautiously. A hot gritty little body. Hard as a rubber tire. But the rubber had holes in it, and they oozed a thick, viscous fluid that began to crystallize in the dry air. Martian bodies were dry-fleshed.
But was this a Martian? He had seen sketches of them, done from the lecturer's descriptions. The sketches were wrong. He could tell just by feeling the body. The wrongness was quantitative. The sketches showed huge, thick-limbed creatures. This dead beast was bony and rather small. The lecturer had lied. Why? Were they afraid, in spite of their impenetrable dome?
He struck a match and looked. A spindly, pink, headless creature, whose brain was in the bulge on its back. The dividing line was a livid red scar that ran along the bulge and around under the belly, marking the creature exactly in half.
Before the match flickered and burned his fingers, he made another discovery. The lecturer had lied more than once. He said the Martians were sexless. But this dead thing was obviously a female!
It startled him. They might try to hide weakness with lies. But why sex?
They split, all right, like the lecturer said. There was the red tear. But two sexes. The female probably must be fertilized before the could divide. And perhaps the male couldn't divide at all. The male shouldn't have the scar — or else only a vestigal one. ...
allforjesus2001