Читать книгу Operation Crimson Storm - Robert Reginald - Страница 13

CHAPTER EIGHT

DREAM STORY

Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Alex Smith, 3 Bi-July, Mars Year vii

U.S.S. Armageddon, in Transit from Earth to Mars

But I wasn’t the only one who had trouble sleeping during those long days of voyaging through the æther. The ladies were being increasingly bothered, almost on a daily basis, by visions, nightmares, even waking dreams of the Martian homeworld. A few of the male members of the expedition seemed to be headed in the same direction. The Advisory Council was charged with finding the commonality between these disparate groups, but other than the fact that all of the affected men seemed to have had some direct contact with the invaders more than a dozen years earlier, nothing else was obvious.

I left a message with Dr. Jarmann back on Earth. The xenobiologist had been invited to join the expedition, but had declined for personal reasons, being now rather elderly and not wanting to leave his Bavarian Mountain Retreat on the Zugspitze.

He spoke no English, and my German was insufficient to conduct a conversation, so we had to work back and forth through the translation programs available on the Interlink.

“Herr Doktor Smith,” he said, when we finally made contact.

“Herr Doktor Jarmann,” I said, explaining to him the reason for my call.

“This is very interesting,” the old scientist said. “As you know, we have been trying to sequence the DNA of the Martians and their plants, but it has taken us a very long time to get any results that are actually usable. The alien genome is extraordinarily different from ours, particularly since they reproduce asexually. This is true, by the way, of both the plant and animal life on Mars.

“What we have discovered, my young friend, is that there are surprising underlying similarities between all of the Martian life forms. The plants appear to share some of their genetic structures with the animate creatures of Mars, and vice versa. We do not know yet whether this is because they have been deliberately bred that way by the Martians, or whether this occurred naturally over a long period of time.

“We suspect that all of the Martian creatures live together symbiotically, that they each require something of the others to continue to survive and prosper. This would lead us naturally to the conclusion that the Martian intelligences actually died, not of infection by the Earthly microbes, as had been previously supposed (and which we had personally already discounted, since the Martians varied so widely in their physiology from any Earthly species); but through a failure to obtain some essential nutrient or ingredient necessary to their continued existence. Perhaps it was the inability of the Martian flora to establish themselves permanently on Earth that led to the demise of their masters.”

“I find all this intriguing, of course,” I said, “but what does it have to do with our present situation?”

“Ah,” he replied, after the usual pause in communication caused by the huge distance the message had to travel from Earth to the Armageddon. “Do you know of any individuals who have been affected by this disease which we might have called the Traumnovelle?”

He employed here the title of an Arthur Schnitzler tale; it meant something like “Dream Story.”

“Well, I’ve been having nightmares myself,” I said, “and they’ve been getting steadily worse as we approach ever closer to Mars.”

“Ach, this is what we might have expected,” Jarmann said. “And you had some contact with the Martians in Upper California, no?”

I explained my brief history to him.

“This is not exactly what we meant by this interrogatory,” he said. “What we really want to know is whether or not you actually touched a living Martian.”

To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t. The tentacle of one of the handling-machines had brushed the heel of my foot (which was encased within its shoe), just briefly, during those terrible weeks I was trapped in the ruined house in Marin County, but I hadn’t actually felt one of the buggers, and I told him so.

“What about the red weed or the other Martian growths?” he asked.

“The weed was everywhere,” I said. “You couldn’t move around without encountering the stuff. I stepped over and through big patches of it, I moved it out of the way with my hands, I even cut some pieces of the weed and ate it, I was so hungry.”

“Ach,” he said again. “Ahhhh! Well, there we have it, you see. You ingested some of the plant, and it has become part of you, my dear friend. Martian life is very adaptable, or so we have found. Even here on Earth, we have now discovered that the weed and its cousins did not totally disappear from our fields and streams, as we had first thought. In places it has now actually come back, never as much as before, but it has such an amazing capacity for survival. What an interesting species it is!”

“But you said yourself that Martian DNA is very different from ours,” I noted.

“So we did,” he said, “and this is true, my dear Doctor. Nonetheless, we suspect that the Martian genome is capable of adapting itself to an almost infinite variety of homes and environments, including other organic structures. Of course, some of my colleagues would disagree with this theory, and actually proving it will take many more years of research. Also, if such a transmission takes place, how much contact is actually required; and does the transmission proceed in both directions? All of these are very, very fascinating questions.

“We have ourselves eaten the red weed and pieces of the other Martian plants. We can fix them in a salad with a few fava beans, spinach, onions, pepper, chili, and olive oil, and they are, as you say, quite, quite delicious. They also mix well within an olio of lentil beans, well roasted pork, onions, cilantro, a sprinkling of havarti cheese, and black pepper. We have not yet perceived any of the dreams that you described, although we occasionally suffer from the gas and the indigestion.”

He belched quite noticeably.

“Uh, thank you, Doktor,” I said, and terminated the connection.

Later that day, I spotted my friend Mindon in the gym, and reported on my conversation with Jarmann. Min was working hard on a stationary cycle, where he had to strap himself into place to generate any tension. We had all been urged to do an hour’s worth of exercise daily to avoid deterioration of our muscles; some of us did better at this than others.

“I thought you looked kind of red-faced these past few days,” he stated, chuckling, his legs pumping furiously.

“Right,” I said. “But what do you think? Is some kind of cross-transmission of genetic material actually possible between species?”

“I’m really the wrong person to ask,” he replied. “You’d do better running that one by Zee.”

“I would if I could,” I said, laughing a little.

Zee was in no shape to answer much of anything these days.

“Well, Alex, you can,” Mindon said. “I saw him just the other day.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“Swear to God. He served in the Guard, you know. They called him up again when this expedition was being put together.”

“But they couldn’t,” I said. “He’s, he’s, well, you know.”

“He works down in Hydroponics. Helps fix some of the fresh veggies we’ve been having, I understand.”

Eating salad in a zero-G environment was always a challenge, but having the newly-grown greens available was well worth the effort.

“It’s like Old Home Week up here,” I said. “All of the people that I knew during the War keep reappearing suddenly. I heard the other day that Reverend Lesley’s still alive. She’s apparently serving on the flagship.”

“Really? I always thought she might be an interesting one to meet, from what you told me.”

“You’re certainly welcome to her. She’s almost as bad as that blasted fortune teller, Madame Stavroula, who keeps turning up in my life like a bad Penelope.”

Mindon stopped his pumping for a moment, and gazed at me very intently.

“You know, actually, Alex, I’ve run into her recently,” he said. “She’s not half bad. ‘Stavroula’s just a stage name, you know.”

“Well, I could have guessed that one.”

“Yeah, but her real name, oddly enough, is Nomsah.”

“Nomsah.” I ran it over my tongue. “You know, Min, that one sounds very familiar somehow.”

“She says that her father was Greek and one of her grandmothers or someone way-back-when was African, deriving originally from a mixed bloodline somewhere on Providence Island, wherever that is. Anyway, they had this tradition on both sides of her family of what she calls ‘cheiromanteia’ or something like that. The women were frequently ‘moiraia gynaika,’ which can apparently be interpreted in a number of different ways.”

“Hey, I met her!” I suddenly clapped my hands and nearly lost my balance as a result. “Twice! The first time was in her guise as a palm reader, several years before the War, and the second time was during the conflict, when we were both stuck one night in a hotel on Nob Hill. She looked and acted completely different. I just never made the connection before. Amazing!”

“She has that ability to morph herself into whatever anyone wants to see,” Mindon said.

Suddenly an alarm sounded.

“The ship is under attack! This is not a drill! Remain where you are and secure yourselves immediately! All airtight doors will automatically close in ten seconds.”

The entrance porthole to the gym suddenly slid shut with a loud bang and a click.

“Now what?” I asked. “Another exercise?”

Night and day for weeks now, Colonel Timlett had been running the vessel through its paces. Even without the dreams, I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, I think.

“I don’t think so,” Mindon said, dismounting and pulling himself over to a chair, where he strapped himself in. The vessel suddenly began to rumble with a distant but distinct thudding.

“Those sound like our laser cannons to me.”

“Cripes,” I said, pulling myself across the room and also securing myself to one of the exercise chairs.

The Armageddon shuddered once with a deep-set trembling that signaled an impact somewhere on its massive frame.

“A hit!” Mindon said.

There were two more quivers that we could register before the “All Clear” signal was given.

I immediately headed for my cabin, where I found Becky and Mellie safe and secure, watching the ship’s communications channel.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“Somehow they lobbed a rock several hundred feet in diameter at the fleet,” she replied, “and we didn’t detect it until now. One of our ‘Interference Runners’ hit it squarely and blew it to bits, the remnants peppering the Armageddon and several other ships. The Rapace was badly damaged; they say it’ll have to be stripped and abandoned. They lost at least half their crew through massive depressurization.”

“What about us?”

“We’re OK, all of us,” she said, turning around and smiling at me. She had one arm around Mellie’s waist, holding her in place. “The ship’s OK and we’re OK, Alex.”