Sea Kings of Mars Read online

  Remembering the faint pungent odor, he wondered if that had had anything to do with preserving the bodies.

  The cabin appeared to be hermetically sealed. The metal of the ship was some unfamiliar alloy, incredibly strong to resist the ages of immersion on the sea floor, and the further ages of dryness and wind and rubbing sand.

  It was worn thin as paper under his fingers, but uncorroded.

  They had had knowledge, those ancient scientists of the Lost Islands, that no one had ever found again. That was why men lost their lives in the desert, hunting for them.

  Brandon looked forward along the deck. The storm had nearly buried the ship again, but the wings of the bird on the high prow still gleamed defiantly

  He grinned half derisively at the thick pulse of excitement beating in him. He was lionized as a dashing explorer, publicly cursed and secretly patronized by scientific men, the darling of wealthy collectors—all because of the archaeological treasures he stole from under the noses of planetary governments.

  All this gave him money and fame and adoring fans, mostly feminine. It gave him the continual heady excitement of dancing on the edge of disaster. It gave him glamour and a gay flamboyant theatricalism, in all of which he reveled.

  But underneath all that was the something that drew him to the old forgotten places and the lost and buried things. The poignant something that was real and sincere and that he didn't understand at all.

  Only that he loved catching glimpses through the veil of time, finding the scraps of truth that lay solid under legends.

  He went back into the cabin. The gray metal circlet he scooped out of the dust and set jauntily on his gold-brown hair. He paused over the skeleton of the woman, reluctant to touch it, but he wanted the girdle.

  He reached for it. And then, oddly, he took the dull-blue ring instead.

  He put it on his ring finger and was suddenly giddy. He gulped a food tablet and felt better. The woman's skeleton had fallen into grayish powder, broken by his slight touch.

  He picked the girdle out of it and clasped it around his lean waist and turned to search the cabin.

  There were chests of scrolls acid-etched on thin metal that blackened and flaked as he looked at them. The letters he did glimpse were older than any he had ever seen.

  There were instruments and gadgets of utterly inexplicable design, far too many to carry. The frailer ones were ruined, anyway. He stuffed a few of the more enduring into his pockets and went out.

  At the broken door he paused with a small, unpleasant shiver. To break down a door simply by touching it —

  Then he grinned. "Duck up, Brandy. This metal is so thin that a baby could knock holes in it."

  As though in mocking answer, the port rail crumpled, sending a flood of red sand across the deck. The bird on the prow trembled, and for an instant Brandon thought it was going to fly.

  It fell into the dust, and was buried.

  He got away from there, and watched the ship die her final death in the dry red sea, And then he said to himself:

  "Now what? No water, precious little food, no idea of where I am. Speaking of water—"

  That stuff in the bottle had certainly been potent. It had revived him like a shot of adrenalin. But now-

  He was thirsty again.

  He tried to ignore it, making his plans. He had thought he was near the Lost Islands when he landed. In fact, he'd landed because he thought he saw the outline of dry harbors and stone quays.

  "But I didn't. And the position of the Lost Islands is only conjecture, anyway. No two authorities agree."

  He stood there, his scarred, handsome face twisted into a defiant grin that he knew was as hollow as his stomach, the wide-winged bird on the gray circlet glittering above his forehead. Then he forced himself to shrug jauntily and start off across the ocher sand.

  Thirst grew in him with the arid touch of dust. The wind whined at him, and presently he heard a voice in it. He knew it was delirium, and refused to listen.

  The spurt of strength the strange amber fluid had given him drained away. He fell in the blowing dust and cursed it in a choking whisper. And the voice said:

  "Strike it with your hand."

  He did, because he thought it was his own desire speaking. He struck the side of the dune before him, weakly, with his doubled fist.

  There was a flash and a small thunderclap, and water ran.

  He caught it in his cupped hands and drank like an animal, splashing himself, sobbing. Then he got up and stood staring at the wet place in the dust and his wet hands.

  He backed off, slowly, his blue eyes widening and paling in a stricken face. He shuddered and passed a hand across his damp beard.

  "Merciful heavens!" he whispered. And gripped hard at the rising terror in him.

  "The power isn't yours," said a gentle thought voice in his brain. "It's merely transmitted through your body."

  Brandon closed his eyes and held his clenched fists against his temples.

  "No," he said. "I'll die decently of thirst if I have to. But I won't go mad."

  "You're not mad," said the voice. "Don't be frightened."

  The last was faintly condescending, which made Brandon angry. He threw his head back, so that he looked rather like the bird of prey on his circlet.

  "Who are you?" he demanded. "And where?"

  "I am Tobul, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. My body is dust. But the essential frequencies that activated that body are in you."

  "That's witchcraft," said Brandon curtly, "and that's madness."

  "Witchcraft to the ignorant," murmured the voice coolly. "Simple science to the learned. Life is essentially a matter of electrical frequencies, a consumption and emission of energy. There is nothing strange about charging metal with electrical life. Why should there be anything strange in charging any other substance with any other phase of the basic stuff of the universe?"

  Brandon looked at the restless desert, tasted the dust on his tongue, listened to the wailing wind.

  He pulled a hair from his tawny beard, and felt the hurt of it. He took a deep breath.

  "All right," he said. "How did you get into me?"

  But the voice whispered now, and not to him.

  "Desolation," it said. "Death and desolation. The sea, the clouds, the strength and power of life, all gone. Is this truly Mars?"

  Max Brandon felt a wrenching sadness, go through him, and then a swift stab of fear, very faint, like things in a half-forgotten dream.

  "I must get to Rhiannon," said the voice of Tobul. "At once."

  There was no emotion in it now. Brandon sensed an iron control, an almost barbarian strength.

  "Rhiannon," he repeated. "I never heard-You said Tobul, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms?"

  Brandon sat down, because his knees wouldn't hold him.

  "Rhiannon," he whispered. "That's the ancient name for the Lost Islands. And 'Lord of the Seven Kingdoms' was the title of the sorcerer-scientist who ruled half Mars, from his seat in Rhiannon."

  Ancient things. Things deeply buried, nearly forgotten, clouded by superstition and legend. Forty thousand years—

  Brandon sat still, just clinging to his sanity. At length he repeated quietly:

  "How did you get into me?"

  "When the ship sank, so suddenly that nothing could be done, I transferred my essential to a bottle of liquid prepared for the purpose—a faintly radioactive suspension medium. Those were troubled times—one went prepared.

  "The collective frequencies that form my consciousness remained there unharmed, until you drank the liquid. Fortunately it was not poisonous, and you gave me easy entry into a satisfactory host."

  A picture of the man at whose side the bottle had been came back to Brandon-the fair, grave face and the impenetrable eyes. That man, dead forty thousand years.

  Brandon ran his tongue over dry lips. "When are you going to get out of me?"

  "Probably never. I should have to build another body, and the secret of that is known onl
y. . . Brandon!"

  It was as though a hand gripped his brain. The impact of that will was terrifying. Brandon felt his mind stripped naked, probed and searched and shaken, and then dropped,

  "Her jeweled girdle he took," murmured Tobul, "and my circlet, and some instruments. The girdle is only metal and jewel-look at your hands!"

  Brandon looked, raging, but unable to help himself.

  "The blue ring, Brandon, that you took from her thumb, is it there?"

  It glinted dully in the sun. Brandon looked at it and said simply: "I don't understand. What ring?"

  Tobul whispered: "His eyes don't see, he has no memory. Yet I can't be sure. I was faint with the effort of breaking the door, after so many centuries of quiescence. She may have blanked his mind. But it's a chance I must take.

  "Brandon, we go to Rhiannon."

  Brandon got up, and there was something ominous in the set of his broad shoulders.

  "Just a minute," he said evenly. "I want to find the Lost Islands, too. This possession business has its fascinating angles, I'll admit, so I'm trying to be tolerant of you. But I won't be ordered about."

  "Take the instrument out of your left-hand pocket and look at it." Tobul's voice was utterly without emotion.

  "Do you hear me, Tobul? I won't have the privacy of my mind invaded. I won't be ordered—"

  He stopped. Again the hand of that iron will closed on his brain. The sheer calm strength of it numbed him, as though he had been an ant trying to stem an avalanche.

  He fought, until sweat ran down the channels of his face and his lean body ached, fought to keep his hand from reaching into his pocket for the instrument.

  But the dark iron power of Tobul's mind rolled in on him, wrapped and crushed and smothered him with a slow, patient ease.

  Trudging over the ocher waste, following the mysterious, quivering needle in Tobul's instrument, Max Brandon still could grin.

  "Brandy, Brandy," he murmured. "I always said drinking would get you into trouble!"

  Two chill Martian nights passed, and two days. Brandon got used to drawing water from the dust with a blow of his fist. It pleased him, like a small boy with a firecracker.

  Tobul, in a rare fit of communicativeness, said it was simply a matter of releasing mental energy which caused oxygen and hydrogen to unite from the air. The blow was only a means of directing the mental concentration.

  The Lord of the Seven Kingdoms had withdrawn himself utterly. Brandon felt no discomfort, nothing different from his usual tough health. Only when he tried to disobey the pointing of the compass, he was forced back to obedience.

  It galled him, but there was nothing he could do. It was terrible to think of living out his life as host for a parasitic intelligence. It outraged his pride, his individuality.

  And yet, to have contact with a mind forty thousand years old; to be taken to the Lost Islands of Rhiannon, the greatest archaeological mystery of Mars—

  He asked about the compass. Tobul answered absently.

  "It obeys a directional impulse from the vault." And then, even more distantly: "The vault is still there, safe, in all this."

  For a fleeting instant, through his own excitement at the mention of a vault, Brandon caught the unguarded sorrow of Tobul, looking through an alien's eyes at the withered mummy of his world.

  More and more, as he accustomed himself to his strange condition, Brandon's mind went back to the girl with blue hair, sitting proud in her shackles across from Tobul.

  "Who was she?" he asked.

  The leashed fury of Tobul's answer startled him.

  "The most dangerous creature on Mars. In a short time I should have destroyed her. But, somewhere, her mind lives as mine does, and defies me—Brandon! Go on!"

  But Brandon stood still, with a curious chilly crinkle to his spine.

  "Sorry," he said. "But the compass is shot."

  Tobul's armor dropped, then, for an instant. Brandon felt what a lost planet must feel, torn from its sun. He never forgot it.

  "Kymra! Somehow, she has gone before me—Go on, Brandon!"

  Brandon shrugged and went. "May as well die walking as sitting," he said. "It may not be Kymra of the Prira Cen, though. It may be just plain Dhu Kar of Venus, which is worse!"

  And then, just before the swift sunset, a flier came droning low over the ocher sand, swinging in wide circles, searching.

  Brandon danced like a madman on the top of a dune, obeying Tobul's command as well as his own urge. The flier came down.

  A tall, slender figure in grease-stained flying togs leaped from the port and ran toward him in a cloud of dust.

  "Brandy!" yelled a clear voice. "Brandy, you idiot!"

  "Good Lord!" said Brandon. "Sylvia."

  She swept into his arms, kissed him, cursed him, and shook him all at once.

  "Are you all right? What happened? I've been hunting for three days."

  He helped her off and grinned into her eager gamin face, framed in a perpetually tousled mop of curly black hair, set with eyes as sea-blue and adventurous as his own, and smudged slightly with grease.

  "Syl," he said, "for once I'm glad to see you."

  "Some day," she grinned back, "you'll realize my sterling worth and marry me. Then I shan't have to fight mom about being a glamour girl, and pop about you being a bandit hunting the Eustace cash—"

  "And I won't be able to rob graves in peace—"

  She was suddenly pressed against him, gripping his arms with painful fingers, making choking, sounds at his shoulder.

  "Oh, Brandy," she whispered. "I thought you were dead."

  Tobul spoke harshly in Brandon's mind. "Hurry. Get into the flier. We'll try to find Rhiannon from the air. Hurry!"

  Brandon was apprehensive about that, because of the compass suddenly going dead. If Kymra of the Blue Hair was really there ahead of them, it meant trouble for Tobul, which meant trouble for Max Brandon, and, consequently, for Sylvia.

  He hesitated, and Sylvia said, "Brandy, you'd better give up hunting for the Lost Islands. Jarthur is hopping mad, because you know what relics from there would mean to Mars, and Dhu Kar—"

  "Dhu Kar?" snapped Brandon.

  "He left the day after you did, as soon as he found out. And Jarthur went storming off with a bunch of policemen, to look for both of you. Of course," she added hopefully, "they may have got lost in a sandstorm."

  Brandon shook his head. "It's a big desert, and they may not have been fools like me. I got too far away from my ship."

  If it was Dhu Kar who had broken into the vault at Rhiannon, that meant trouble, too. The Venusian played for keeps. Brandon had skirmished with him before, and he knew.

  And yet, if he could help it, he wasn't going to let that semi-human pirate from the Venusian coal swamps steal Rhiannon from him.

  He stood there, thinking these things, his profile hawk-clear with the wide-winged bird glittering above it, the red sunlight caught in his fair beard and shaggy hair, looking rather like a Viking.

  And Sylvia Eustace, with a curiously puzzled look in her blue eyes, took the ring from Brandon's finger and put it on her own. Then she said calmly:

  "Come on, Brandy. We're going to Rhiannon."

  He followed her, not noticing the ring. Tobul, grim and silent inside him, seeing only through his eyes, knew nothing of it, either.

  The flier was small, fast, lovingly worked over and expertly handled. Sylvia went directly to the controls. Brandon scowled, trying to plot the most likely course, combining his own conjectures of the position of the Lost Islands with the way shown by Tobul's compass.

  Sylvia sent the ship hurtling upward. When he started to speak, she cut him short.

  "I think I know the way."

  He stared at her. "Nobody does. It's all guesswork."

  "Well," she snapped, "can't I guess, too?"

  He shrugged and sat back in the padded seat. Sylvia's tall, boyish form, the despair of her society-loving mother, hunched over the controls. The flier shive
red with the thrust of power from the rockets, and the thin, cold air screamed along the hull.

  Sylvia always flew fast, but there was a tenseness about her now that was unlike her.

  "We can't do much looking at this pace," he said mildly.

  "I tell you, I've studied up on it and I know the way!" There was an imperious bugle note in her voice that startled him.

  Then she glanced at him. Just for an instant her eyes were puzzled and frightened and altogether Sylvia's. But that was gone in a flash, and the ship rushed on, racing the rising moons.

  In the third hour before dawn, with little Phobos rushing ahead of them and Diemos a ball of cold fire overhead, Brandon saw a shadow more solid than the shifting dunes.

  Sylvia put the ship down. "We're there," she said. Then she laughed and shook him by the shoulders, and her blue eyes sparkled.

  "Think of it, Brandy! The Lost Islands. And we'll see them together!"

  "Yes," said Brandon, and the lines of his scarred brown face were deeper. He was thinking: "Funny she knew the way." There came before him suddenly the picture of a reckless, vital face set with unconquerable golden eyes, and hair like a living waterfall.

  Tobul said softly: "I see what is in your mind. Kymra may have taken her, as I took you. I dare take no chances. Kill her."

  "No!"

  Sylvia looked at him, startled. He gripped his seat with corded hands, and argued desperately.

  "It wouldn't do any good! If Kymra is in Sylvia, she'd only go back into-wherever she was before."

  "Into some inanimate thing, Brandon. Perhaps in that state she could be forced- She would be helpless to move, as we both were in the ship. The cohesive frequencies of a disembodied intelligence undergo a violent change under solar bombardment, unless protected by some denser matter."

  "I won't!" whispered Brandon.

  He clung to the seat, fighting the inexorable command of Tobul's mind. He looked at Sylvia's eager, vital face, and his heartstrings knotted in him like the straining muscles of his body.

  It was futile. Slowly he drew the small needle gun he always carried and slid the clip of poisoned needles into place. He raised it and aimed, at the girl who neither moved nor spoke.