Somehow he knew that he wouldn’t have told Cohaagen about the true nature of the alien complex. Cohaagen was the wrong person; he would be an abuser rather than a user. Maybe Cohaagen had subjected him to the memory implant in an effort to make him tell. Somehow the alien knowledge must have been proof against Cohaagen’s interrogation. But who was the right person to tell?
He saw an expanse of ice, now, at the bottom of the complex; he must have moved to another region. The ice was punctured by hundreds of round wells, like a giant pegboard. He looked up and saw that a column was suspended directly above the hole, like a peg.
A peg. A peg that could be lowered into the hole, where it would start a reaction, activating the system, starting a complex chain of events that would in due course . . .
Kuato had not been able to read much of the No’ui message; that had been for Quaid alone. Evidently the No’ui knew how to shield against telepaths too, even in a memory of a message received fifty thousand years after being recorded! So they must have been able to keep it from Cohaagen. But now Kuato caught on.
“A nuclear reactor!” he exclaimed. “To make an atmosphere!”
But Kuato’s attention remained on Quaid. “Think, Quaid! How does it work?”
Quaid returned to the memory. He soared up through space, needing no support because he was exploring a design that was now stored in his head, and could be explored by mere thoughts. It was the eidetic implant of the No’ui: the alien presence in his mind. He passed temporary scaffolding on the side of the abyss. He approached a ledge at the very top of the pit. There was a walkway leading to what he knew was a control room. He floated into it.
There were electronic consoles surrounded by enormously complex mechanical systems—the tops of the corroded columns. But the corrosion was nothing; the No’ui would have guarded against it had it mattered. The key elements of the machinery were protected. He passed a textured wall.
He knew how to start this device. The question was whether Kuato was the one to tell. There was something that made him doubt, not because Kuato was a bad person—that wasn’t the case—but because of a wrongness in the situation. Something didn’t jibe, and until he knew exactly what was wrong, he was stalling.
“There!” Kuato cried. “Go back . . . More . . . There.”
An abstract mandala, a concentric configuration of geometric shapes that might represent the cosmos, had been sculpted into the stone. It was covered with weird hieroglyphics that did not derive from Sumer or Egypt or any Earthly culture. It was a No’ui representation, and Quaid understood it now, but did not care to interpret it for anyone else. The wrongness was still there—not Kuato himself, but—
“Closer,” Kuato said eagerly. Evidently he could read the mandala, see the figures, but did not know their meaning.
In the center of the mandala was an image of startling familiarity: a human hand.
Kuato saw the hand, but didn’t get it. “How do you start the reactor?” he demanded. “Concentrate!”
Quaid focused on the hand, tracking toward it, as if drawn into it. Oh yes, he knew—
Suddenly the hand began to vibrate. A low-pitched rumbling filled the chamber. Quaid’s eyes snapped open and the rumbling continued. It wasn’t part of his vision!
Sand and gravel rained down from the ceiling. Hairline cracks spread through the walls and then expanded into wide fissures. A mining mole bored through the chamber wall and burst into the room. Quaid leaped from his chair and George followed suit, buttoning his shirt as he ran for the door. A rebel threw it open and they entered the chaos of the outer chamber.
Another mole had bored into the catacombs, churning through the mummified bodies. Fifty soldiers mowed down the outnumbered, outgunned rebels. The mole ground its way out through another niche-lined wall, heedless of the sacrilege. Soldiers followed the juggernaut farther into the chamber. Some rebels tried to fight, but they had been caught unprepared. This was no more than a mop-up operation for Cohaagen’s forces.
“Where’s Kuato?” said the rebel at the door. An explosion ripped through the room, throwing everyone to the floor. Quaid helped George to his feet and bent to lend a hand to the rebel fighter, but the man was dead.
Melina and Benny found their way to Quaid’s side. George’s bloody shirt had been torn open in his fall and they stared at Kuato’s wizened head in amazement. But there was no time for explanations.
“This way!” George shouted. He led them through a concealed door into a passageway. Soldiers tried to block their path, but Melina mowed them down. Benny and Quaid grabbed guns from the fallen soldiers and ran on through a series of chambers until they reached an airlock. Quaid guarded the rear as George, Melina, and Benny squeezed through the door. As he closed the door and flipped the lever to bolt it in place, he heard more gunfire—from within the airlock!
Quaid spun just in time to see Benny riddling George’s body with bullets. There had been a traitor in their midst. Kuato himself would have known it had he looked into Benny’s mind. But he had been watching Quaid and so had overlooked the obvious. Benny had used Quaid as a shield to get near Kuato.
Before Quaid could move, Benny seized Melina and pointed the gun at her head. “Freeze!” he shouted. Quaid froze and Benny sneered. “Congratulations, folks. You led us right to him.”
Quaid ignored the jibe and knelt to examine George’s still form, trying to find a last flicker of life. If Kuato could strike at Benny’s mind, set him back just long enough for Quaid to—
“Forget it, bro,” Benny said. “His fortune-telling days are over.”
Kuato’s head was dead weight. George’s head hung limp. The body seemed dead.
Melina glared at Benny, as astounded as she was outraged. “Benny, you’re a mutant!”
The man’s lips quirked. He displayed a flashing beacon hidden in his artificial hand. “It pays to keep in touch. Your boys never checked me. Hell, Kuato never caught on. He may have had weird powers, like the rumors say, but he wasn’t smart, and this organization wasn’t smart. You can bet nobody would’ve sneaked into Cohaagen’s den like this!”
Quaid had to agree. He had noted the laxity of the rebels himself. They had depended too much on Kuato’s mutant power, and let something obvious and stupid happen. They weren’t professionals.
But Benny was. His eyes glittered cruelly as he added: “Sorry, Mel. I got five kids to feed.”
Five? “What happened to number six?” Quaid asked.
Benny grinned. “Shit, man. I ain’t even married.” Then he was suddenly authoritarian. “Now put your fucking hands on your head!”
From alien majesty to human ignominy, so quickly! It seemed that the No’ui had been right to doubt the likelihood of man’s success. With men like Cohaagen in control, the alien gifts weren’t worth it.
As Quaid complied with his order, Benny pulled Melina with him while he edged over and kicked open the bolt on the airlock door. Quaid remained alert for any mistake on Benny’s part, but the man was alert, too. Only by sacrificing Melina could he have gotten the man—and Benny knew he wouldn’t do that. Benny had been standing right there when Quaid had acknowledged his love for her.
Then Quaid heard a muffled choking sound from Kuato’s head. He bent close to hear the barely audible whisper.
“Quaid . . .”
“Back off, Quaid!” Benny snapped.
Kuato struggled to speak again. “Start the reactor . . . Free Mars.” Quaid jumped back as a burst of gunfire obliterated the head. He heard a muffled exclamation from Melina. He looked up—and there was Richter standing above him, holding an automatic rifle.
“Make a move,” said Richter. “Please.”
Quaid’s eyes burned into the man with hatred. But he was helpless. Benny’s betrayal had wiped out both the Resistance and Quaid’s hope.
Quaid and Melina were roughly shackled and thrown into a mole for transport. “I’m sorry,” he told her, over the roar of the engine. “If it hadn’t been for me, Ben
ny wouldn’t have gotten to Kuato.”
“I brought you in!” she said. “I thought—feared—”
“That I was the traitor,” he finished for her. “I know. I don’t remember much of what we were to each other before, but I think for me it was supposed to be business. When I fell into the pit, I realized that I loved you. That’s why that memory kept coming back to me. It was the last I had seen of you. I guess Cohaagen didn’t know about that, or thought the memory implant would wipe it out. It did wipe out all the other memories, but not the love.”
“I couldn’t forget you,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I could trust you, but somehow . . .”
“I guess we were destined for each other, corny as that sounds. But you know, there was more I found down there, before they—I guess they captured me. I don’t remember that, but I remember the alien message.”
“The what?”
“The No’ui. An alien trading species. They set this up for us, when we came of age. If we qualified. Which I guess we don’t. But—” He paused, remembering something else. “Do you know anything about hydrazoic acid?”
She concentrated, as they bumped along in the mole. “It’s a colorless, poisonous, highly explosive liquid. I sniffed some once. It was vile!”
“What would it be like on a planetary scale? I mean, thousands of tons of it?”
“Like hell, I think! Why?”
“The aliens—they were going to use it to make air. I mean, with water. They were going to melt the ice, and combine—I don’t know, I’m no chemist. Does it make sense?”
“I’m no chemist either, but I think it could make sense only to an alien!”
“But with advanced alien technology, would it be possible? I mean, to break apart hydrazoic acid and water, and recombine them into air, and use the extra for a nuclear reactor to power the whole thing?”
She shook her head. “I’d have to ask someone who knew more about it than I do! But it sounds crazy to me.”
He sighed. Maybe it was crazy. But it was also in his mind. He hoped the aliens did know what they were doing.
The mole ground on, carrying them to Cohaagen. Quaid did not expect to enjoy the encounter.
CHAPTER 23
Worse
The next morning, still shackled, uncomfortable, but not actually mistreated (to Quaid’s surprise), they were hauled into Cohaagen’s fancy office. He had assumed that Richter would beat on him even if forbidden to kill him, and that Melina would be fair game for the goons, as a beautiful and helpless (because bound) woman. But they had been given food and a chance to use sanitary facilities, and left alone (but monitored) to sleep. Naturally they had not talked, knowing that their every word could be examined for evidence against the Rebels. So it had been uncomfortable but not bad.
Now he knew it was going to get bad. They had been saved for Cohaagen’s direct interrogation, and Quaid knew that the man would do whatever he thought was required to achieve his ends. Richter was a thug, brutal but without the imagination to generate real mischief. Cohaagen, in contrast, was a white-collar criminal, less violent in manner but ten times as dangerous overall.
Go tell your species . . .
Tell Cohaagen? Not likely! The man did not have the interest of the species in mind, let alone the interest of the galaxy. He wanted only what was good for the Mars Colony, as defined by himself: in short, power for Vilos Cohaagen. The No’ui science represented power beyond that known by man; it must not fall into the hands of this petty dictator.
In fact, Quaid expected to suffer horrible torture, rather than yield that information. Cohaagen did not know about the alien message center; it had been hidden amidst the tangle of twisting paths, so that only a person with a special curiosity and persistence would find it. Hauser had been assigned by the Resistance to discover the meaning of the riddle of the alien artifact, so he had been motivated; otherwise he would not have been so persistent. Also, fresh in the realization of his love for Melina, he had done it for her, to make her trust him, and love him back. No, he would not give the No’ui message here!
Make it understand that the choice is upon it. For mankind had either to ignore the artifact, as it had done so far, or to invoke it and use it positively, as the No’ui intended. If man tried to use it negatively, it would be destroyed. That was what the nova symbol meant: a nova was a flaring star, in effect an explosion, destroying what was around it. The alien complex would explode, perhaps by setting off that hydrazoic acid buried beneath the subterranean glacier, taking itself and the local human colony with it. That was the choice: to use it or lose it. But Cohaagen would only pretend to use it properly; he would instead make a scientific monopoly of it, using that power to make himself the dictator not only of Mars but of the entire human species. That was what the aliens hadn’t counted on, being unfamiliar with duplicity. To them a thing either was or was not; they could not grasp even the relatively innocuous concept of “figurative.” They were literal-minded creatures, hatched with their knowledge genetically encoded, their values set.
We put the matter in your hands. That was the essence of their conclusion. They had given their message to one person—the one who happened to come to their message center—and trusted him to do what was right. They had made him their emissary, and he intended to honor the trust they had extended. He wanted mankind to become a trader, one of the significant species of the galaxy. So he was going to keep the secret from Cohaagen, letting the alien complex be destroyed rather than perverted. He was prepared to give his life and Melina’s to that end. He knew she would want it that way. He had told her nothing so that she could not give away the secret herself.
Melina! Suppose Cohaagen had her tortured in Quaid’s presence? Surely Cohaagen would, if he thought that would be effective. Could Quaid hold out against that?
There was only one answer: he had to.
Maybe they would be lucky, and Cohaagen wouldn’t know what Quaid had discovered. After all, it seemed he hadn’t known before, when he set up the memory implant and sent Quaid to Earth. The traitor Benny hadn’t caught on, otherwise he wouldn’t have killed Kuato. He had thought the only secret was that the alien artifact made atmosphere, and how to turn it on. That was the least of it!
Quaid’s thoughts were interrupted by men tramping into the office, carrying a body. They dumped it onto the conference table. It was Kuato, the shriveled head growing from George’s chest.
Cohaagen stared down at it. “So this is the great man!”
Richter and Benny, standing guard over Quaid and Melina, chuckled. They were pleased with their accomplishment. They had unriddled the mystery of the leader of the Mars Liberation Front, and destroyed him and his organization.
Quaid saw Melina wince. She still blamed herself for the colossal mistake of bringing Benny into the inner sanctum. Yet how could she have known? Benny had been on her side, helping her cause, helping them escape pursuit. Benny had been a pro; that said it all. It would be better to blame Quaid, or his Hauser-aspect, for not recognizing another pro when he saw him.
Cohaagen gingerly examined Kuato’s head. He grimaced with disgust. “No wonder he kept out of sight.” He turned away, nodding to the goons, who picked up the body and hauled it away. Another goon wiped off the table. Cohaagen was fastidious about appearances; he didn’t want any ugly smears remaining.
Then Cohaagen walked over to where Quaid sat, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, congratulations, Quaid,” he said jovially. “You’re a hero.”
Quaid’s reply was to the point. “Fuck you.”
Cohaagen, oddly, was not annoyed. He smiled. “Don’t be modest,” he said. “Kuato’s dead; the Resistance has been completely wiped out; and you were the key to the whole thing.”
Quaid saw that Melina was regarding him ambivalently. She had never been quite certain of his loyalty to the Resistance, and wasn’t certain now, despite her love for him.
“He’s lying,” Quaid said. They might both be about to die
, but he wanted her to believe in him.
Cohaagen spoke to Melina. “Don’t blame him, sweetheart. He didn’t know anything about it.” He smiled. “That was the whole point.”
Now Melina was confused—and so was Quaid. What was the man talking about?
“You see, Quaid, the late Mr. Kuato had an uncanny ability to detect our spies,” Cohaagen continued. “We didn’t know he was a telepath, or whatever. None of our people could get near him. So Hauser and I sat down and invented you—the perfect mole.”
“You’re lying,” Quaid said. “Hauser turned against you.”
“That’s what we wanted you to think. Actually, Hauser volunteered to be erased and reprogrammed. That was after he failed to get to Kuato the first time. This canny bitch—” Cohaagen nodded toward Melina, who responded by making a gesture as of spitting in his face. “She never took him into the catacombs. She took him directly to the Pyramid, never saying a word about the entrance there. Just that empty cave they never used. When he dropped in the pit, she didn’t flee to Kuato, she went back to the dome and her cover. It was all for nothing; they just didn’t trust Hauser. Nor far enough. We needed some way to nudge them into complete trust.”
“Get your story straight,” Quaid said, disgusted. He pointed to Richter as well as the shackles permitted. “He’s been trying to kill me since I went to Rekall. Harry too, and Lori, back on Earth. You don’t kill somebody you’re trying to plant.”
“Richter wasn’t in on it,” Cohaagen said. “The others were under his orders.”
“Then why am I still alive?”
Cohaagen smiled with a certain pride. “He’s not in your class. And we gave you help. Benny here . . .”
Benny made a little mock bow to Quaid. “My pleasure, man.”