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"Dark Mission" is a 5,000-word short story by Lester del Rey, about a man with amnesia, who wakes up inside the wreckage of a crashed spaceship. It was first published in the July, 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

A man awakens in the middle of a crash site, not remembering who he is or how he got there. Nearby he finds another man dead, a house smashed and burning, and the wreck of a rocketship. By some overwhelming inner impulse, he walks along a nearby path until he comes to a highway, and hitches a ride into town. The driver of the car tells him about a rocket ship sponsored by a millionaire named Oglethorpe, due to be launched toward Mars soon, but the picture in the newspaper of Oglethorpe’s rocket is different from the one at the crash site. The amnesiac goes to a doctor in town, and finds some ID in his wallet indicating his name is Dr. Haines. He finds that he seems to be partly telepathic, and is able to read the doctor’s mind; he also discovers that he has an inner compulsion to avoid touching any other person.

He goes to meet Oglethorpe in the big city, again following his subconscious compulsions, and tries to convince Oglethorpe that another ship has gone to Mars and found the trip dangerous. Oglethorpe still insists on flying his rocket to Mars, but the amnesiac gleans enough information from reading Oglethorpe’s mind to figure where the ship is located. He goes to the site of the rocketship, sneaks past most of the guards, kills one guard, and finds the rocket. His memory now comes flooding back to him—he is himself a Martian, from a race of humans who left Earth long ago, and have lived on Mars ever since. But his people were devastated by a plague that killed virtually everybody on Mars—a contagious virus that could only be transmitted by contact with a carrier. Because of his telepathic ability, he was chosen to take a rocket to Earth, to see if Earth medicine would help to cure the plague, but now he knows that Earth medicine is still too primitive. The only solution now is to delay Earth’s contact with Mars until all the Martians are dead, and the plague along with it. And since he had the plague as well, he must incinerate his own body, as well as the guard he touched, along with Oglethorpe’s rocket. He pulls the body of the dead guard in, rigs the rocket for explosion, and then lights a match.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940), and in the author's own collection, And Some Were Human (1948).