Read Online Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 by Devil's Planet (v1.1) - Free Book Online

hold water vapor. And so, as the moisture in his body was sweated forth, it
was fairly snatched from him. He was dehydrating, like a prune or a date in a Sahara breeze, like a clay brick in a kiln.
                 Thirst
was making him forget the lesser agony of the bracelet.
                 “I’d
give up anything for a drink,” he thought. “A thousand
dollars of my legacy. My house in the Ozarks, that once belonged to my grandfather. I’d give up—but hold on. As a criminal I have
no property to give up. Who would help me, if anyone were here? Buckalew? I wonder. Phogor? I doubt
it. Bee MacGowan? Poor thing, she’d probably do what
she could for me. But how long can this go on?”
                 Not
long. For soon Dillon Stover fell on his face.
                 He
struggled up to his hands and knees. More than ever he was down to first
principles, a four-legged creature again, as man had been ages ago, before
civilization or even savagery, struggling for life against the bitterest of
environment.
                 He
didn’t intend to be killed, unjustly or otherwise. It wasn’t on the books. Not
for Dillon Stover. He managed to get up again. His tongue was swollen between
dry lips, his stout knees wavered under his weight
that seemed even more than Earth weight. But he’d get away from pursuit. And
he’d drink.
                 Water ahead!
                Both moons were up now, and they
showed him a gleaming, rippling pool. With trees on the far
side. He gave a joyful croak, and tried to run toward it. Again he fell
forward and crawled painfully to the brink.
                 There
was no brink.
                 Mirage. Or imagination. Dillon
Stover would have wept, but there were no tears in his evaporated eyes. He sat,
elbows on knees, and struck his forehead with his knuckles.
                A LITTLE recovery now, enough to know that the bracelet’s vibration
was increased to a sharp agony. He had come miles away from Pulambar.
Suddenly he wished he were back, even in jail. After all, there was comfort
there, a bed to lie in, and doctors—and water. The Martians were right to prize
it. If he could only wet his lips and wash his eyes. Then he’d think a way out
for himself.
                 The
sun was going to come up.
                 That
would be the end. The dry Martian night had almost done for him; the blazing
sun would finish the job. Perhaps it was just as well to lie down and die as
quickly as possible. In the back of his head a little cluster of
scientific-thinking cells computed that his night in this desert approximated
five days of such an experience on Earth. Few people could survive that, even
if they were as strong as Dillon Stover, and got help at the eleventh hour. And
here was no help.
                 Wasn’t
there? He saw a shiny, semi-transparent blister among the sands, catching the
first rays of dawn.
                 Under
that would be Martians, a water plant—and water. Ever so little of the precious
stuff would be a blessing.
                 He
crawled there somehow. Remembering how the Martians inside a similar structure
had burrowed out to the jug Buckalew donated, Stover began to paw and dig with
his hands. The sand came away in great scooped masses. He got his head and
shoulders under the glasslike under-rim, poked like a mole into the interior.
                 Something
crept toward him, a Martian dweller. It had one of the artificial larynxes, for
it formed words he could understand:
                 “Who arre you? Why do you darre—”
                 “My
name is Stover,” he whispered a wretched reply. “Dillon Stover. I am dying
without water. Help me. Just—”
                 And
he fainted.
                 So
this was heaven.
                 The
old talk about harps and songs and