The Hairy Ones

Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.

There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a deep crevice.

In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death.

Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden.

The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit.

He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor stretching out ahead.

Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white light reached his eyes Rolf did not know--it had seemed an eternity of endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel.

Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars.

"They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!"

Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet! He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly with a mysterious all-pervading radiance.

His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.

It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!

The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction--from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond.

The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life.

So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him.

A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up mass of stone blocks that was the wall.

Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged bushes.

"Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the Enemy."

The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern floor might be their headquarters.

"But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he wears the uniform of a patrolman."

"May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader, Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and kidnap you."

The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said.

Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was, with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.

"Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly.

An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side. "Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe.

The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman, "is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the minds of others."

She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed," she said. "I am not angry that you think I am--well, not too unattractive."

Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded.

"That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk."

"Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the Hairy People."