Madmen of Mars

The Malignant Inertia Complex started while we were in space and was already pretty widespread when Bill and Mike and I brought the Banshee in from a Venus haul, and during the three weeks we spent getting ready for the Mars transit and installing the Professor's latest special equipment I had the creeping geevils constantly. There was a sour, stagnant undercurrent to life in Spaceport City. For once the rowdy place was actually quiet, dead in fact, and although there were a dozen ships in, the Ursa Major Tavern was almost deserted.

Day and night the telaudio jabbered about the Complex, mostly learned doctors issuing statements that it was a purely psychological phenomenon, a sort of hysteria induced by this, that and the other factor in a civilization altering too rapidly for human minds to adjust.

Most of them followed the line that the disease would cure itself soon, but behind their seven-jet words they seemed a bit uneasy themselves. And I'll never forget the particularly learned gent who suffered an attack right in the middle of his broadcast speech. He was talking reassuringly when all of a sudden his voice petered out. His eyes got all glazed and his face took on an empty look, and he sat there staring at the mike until the control room cut him off. It gave me the shivers.

It was like that all over Earth. Each day more and more people got longer spells where they'd do absolutely nothing. It was raising the very devil with organized civilization and nobody could do anything about it. And the worst of it was that the victims didn't seem to mind. Everything was slowing down, and it made it plenty tough to do business with the outfits that furnished our supplies. People kept acting more and more like zombies--or Martians. But nobody thought of connecting the Complex with the Cultural Emissaries.

The whole thing hit me right in my pet phobia.

Then it was blast-off morning, with me trying to keep my mind off my phobia and those nagging fears that had nothing to do with space-hopping. I cornered the Professor in the Banshee's control room.

"The power drain of this widget of yours has me worried," I complained. "The secondaries are already running overloaded."

As pilot-engineer, power was my responsibility.

Professor Tim Harrigan looked around, but not in his usual quick, birdlike way, and his eyes were dull.

"I'm sorry, Olsen." His voice sounded as though something were missing. "I haven't been able to reduce input requirements yet. The circuit changes keep eluding me."

Worms started squirming inside me. If the Professor, with his brilliant brain, were getting the Complex--

"Polly will tell Mike to be careful of power," he tried to reassure me.

Naturally Polly was scheduled to handle the ground end. She usually did whenever we were testing one of the Professor's inventions. In some ways she was more like a partner than a daughter to him. The set in the Professor's laboratory was rigged for her, while the Hustic aboard ship was adjusted to Mike's brain-wave pattern.

That's right. The thing we were going to test en route to Mars was the Harrigan Unimodulate Subetheric Telepathic Interspatial Communicator. Yes, I know that officially the Hustic wasn't invented until nearly a year later. Keeping it under wraps after what it did was one of our security measures. We were afraid someone might add two and two and get us hanged, shot, stabbed, defenestrated, etc.

That first set was a bulky, power-hogging, spit-and-solder job very different from the perfected, foolproof, universal-type transceivers that have now replaced the clumsy old Luminophones on all interplanetary routes.

Terence Michael Burke, our red-headed astrogator, was standing as close to Polly as he could get, and from the gleam in his eye he was quoting some more of his abominable romantic poetry at her. But she wasn't responding as usual. Not even blushing. She just stood there looking pale and wan, frozen up inside. Typical symptoms of the Complex, and it made me wince.

Mike looked around, missed something, and turned to me.

"Where'd you put my books?" he demanded.

"Cargo hold," I growled at him. "Had to use that space for the Hustic modulator."

"Barbarian squarehead!" he yelped.

"If you'd gas off to sleep like a human being--!" I squawked right back at him. The Wilsons weren't warming yet, but already my nerves were tightening up in anticipation.

"Come on, Polly," he said. But she didn't follow him until he took her hand.

Mike was born in San Francisco, but he's a professional Irishman. Red Irish. And a prolifically lousy poet. Had a picture of himself as the spiritual descendent of Fin McCool and Francois Villon and Robin Hood and Sir Henry Morgan and all the other poet-adventurers and troublemakers of history. He was one of those romantics--and still is.

When he and Polly came back a few minutes later he had his bag of books under one arm, a smear of lipstick across his mouth, and a worried expression on his face. That was unusual. Ordinarily Mike was too slugnutty to worry about anything. On Polly's much prettier countenance there was no expression at all. And that was all wrong.

Wild Bill, Professor Harrigan's younger but larger brother and skipper of the Banshee, came up from checking the drive room.

"Final tests," he said.

So we built up the secondaries until the whole ship howled and shrieked with their noise. Then when the needles came over without indicating radiation leakage we cut them to idling again.

Polly had snapped out of her daze and was clinging to Mike.

"I'm scared," she shouted in his ear, not realizing the noise had died. "Think nice thoughts to me on the Hustic, Michael dearest."

Mike's arms tightened around her. "Of course, my one and only love, pearl of my universe and lodestar of my life. Every day."