The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum Part 3

CAPTAIN HARRISON of the Ares expedition turned away from the little telescope in the bow of the rocket. 'Two weeks more, at the most,' he remarked. 'Mars only retogrades for seventy days in all, relative to the earth, and we've got to be homeward bound during that period, or wait a year and a half for old Mother Earth to go around the sun and catch up with us again. How'd you like to spend a winter here?'

d.i.c.k Jarvis, chemist of the party, s.h.i.+vered as he looked up from his notebook. 'I'd just as soon spend it in a liquid air tank!' he averred. 'These eighty-below-zero summer nights are plenty for me.'

'Well,' mused the captain, 'the first successful Martian expedition ought to be home long before then.''Successful if we get home,' corrected Jarvis. 'I don't trust these cranky rockets - not since the auxiliary dumped me in the middle of Thyle last week. Walking back from a rocket ride is a new sensation to me.'

'Which reminds me,' returned Harrison, 'that we've got to recover your films. They're important if we're to pull this trip out of the red. Remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures? Our shots ought to pack 'em to the doors. And the broadcast rights, too; we might show a profit for the Academy.'

'What interests me,' countered Jarvis, 'is a personal profit. A book, for instance; exploration books are always popular. Martian Deserts - how's that for a t.i.tle?'

'Lousy!' grunted the captain. 'Sounds like a cookbook for desserts. You'd have to call it 'Love Life of a Martian,' or something like that.'

Jarvis chuckled. 'Anyway,' he said, 'if we once get back home, I'm going to grab what profit there is, and never, never, get any farther from the earth than a good stratosphere plane'll take me. I've learned to appreciate the planet after plowing over this dried-up pill we're on now.'

'I'll lay you odds you'll be back here year after next,' grinned the Captain. 'You'll want to visit your pal - that trick ostrich.'

'Tweel?' The other's tone sobered. 'I wish I hadn't lost him, at that. He was a good scout. I'd never have survived the dream-beast but for him. And that battle with the pushcart things - I never even had a chance to thank him.'

'A pair of lunatics, you two,' observed Harrison. He squinted through the port at the gray gloom of the Mare Cimmerium. 'There comes the sun.' He paused. 'Listen, d.i.c.k - you and Leroy take the other auxiliary rocket and go out and salvage those films.'

Jarvis stared. 'Me and Leroy?' he echoed ungrammatically. 'Why not me and Putz? An engineer would have some chance of getting us there and back if the rocket goes bad on us.'

The captain nodded toward the stem, whence issued at that moment a medley of blows and guttural expletives. 'Putz is going over the insides of the Ares,' he announced. 'He'll have his hands full until we leave, because I want every bolt inspected. It's too late for repairs once we cast off.'

'And if Leroy and I crack up? That's our last auxiliary.'

'Pick up another ostrich and walk back,' suggested Harrison gruffly. Then he smiled. 'If you have trouble, we'll hunt you out in the Ares,' he finished. 'Those films are important.' He turned. 'Leroy!'

The dapper little biologist appeared, his face questioning.

'You and Jarvis are off to salvage the auxiliary,' the Captain said. 'Everything's ready and you'd better start now. Call back at half-hour intervals; I'll be listening.'

Leroy's eyes glistened. 'Perhaps we land for specimens - no?' he queried.

'Land if you want to. This golf ball seems safe enough.'

'Except for the dream-beast,' muttered Jarvis with a faint shudder. He frowned suddenly. 'Say, as long as we're going that way, suppose I have a look for Tweel's home! He must live off there somewhere, and he's the most important thing we've seen on Mars.'

Harrison hesitated. 'If I thought you could keep out of trouble,' he muttered. 'All right,' he decided.

'Have a look. There's food and water aboard the auxiliary; you can take a couple of days. But keep in touch with me, you saps!'

Jarvis and Leroy went through the airlock out to the gray plain. The thin air, still scarcely warmed by the rising sun, bit flesh and lung like needles, and they gasped with a sense of suffocation. They dropped to a sitting posture, waiting for their bodies, trained by months in acclimatization chambers back on earth, to accommodate themselves to the tenuous air. Leroy's face, as always, turned a smothered blue, and Jarvis heard his own breath rasping and rattling in his throat. But in five minutes, the discomfort pa.s.sed; they rose and entered the little auxiliary rocket that rested beside the black hull of the Ares.

The under-jets roared out their fiery atomic blast; dirt and bits of shattered biopods spun away in a cloud as the rocket rose. Harrison watched the projectile trail its flaming way into the south, then turned back to his work.

It was four days before he saw the rocket again. Just at evening, as the sun dropped behind thehorizon with the suddenness of a candle falling into the sea, the auxiliary flashed out of the southern heavens, easing gently down on the flaming wings of the under-jets. Jarvis and Leroy emerged, pa.s.sed through the swiftly gathering dusk, and faced him in the light of the Ares. He surveyed the two; Jarvis was tattered and scratched, but apparently in better condition than Leroy, whose dapperness was completely lost. The little biologist was pale as the nearer moon that glowed outside; one arm was bandaged in thermo-skin and his clothes hung in veritable rags. But it was his eyes that struck Harrison most strangely; to one who lived these many weary days with the diminutive Frenchman, there was something queer about them. They were frightened, plainly enough, and that was odd, since Leroy was no coward or he'd never have been one of the four chosen by the Academy for the first Martian expedition. But the fear in his eyes was more understandable than that other expression, that queer fixity of gaze like one in a trance, or like a person in an ecstasy. 'Like a chap who's seen Heaven and h.e.l.l together,' Harrison expressed it to himself. He was yet to discover how right he was.

He a.s.sumed a gruffness as the weary pair sat down. 'You're a fine looking couple!' he growled. 'I should've known better than to let you wander off alone.' He paused. 'Is your arm all right, Leroy? Need any treatment?'

Jarvis answered. 'It's all right - just gashed. No danger of infection here, I guess; Leroy says there aren't any microbes on Mars.'

'Well,' exploded the Captain, 'Let's hear it, then! Your radio reports sounded screwy. 'Escaped from Paradise!'

'Huh!'

'I didn't want to give details on the radio,' said Jarvis soberly. 'You'd have thought we'd gone loony.'

'I think so, anyway.'

'Moi aussi!' muttered Leroy. 'I too!'

'Shall I begin at the beginning?' queried the chemist. 'Our early reports were pretty nearly complete.'

He stared at Putz, who had come in silently, his face and hands blackened with carbon, and seated himself beside Harrison.

'At the beginning,' the Captain decided.

'Well,' began Jarvis, 'we got started all right, and flew due south along the meridian of the Ares, same course I'd followed last week. I was getting used to this narrow horizon, so I didn't feel so much like being cooped under a big bowl, but one does keep overestimating distances. Something four miles away looks eight when you're used to terrestrial curvature, and that makes you guess its size just four times too large. A little hill looks like a mountain until you're almost over it.'

'I know that,' grunted Harrison.

'Yes, but Leroy didn't, and I spent our first couple of hours trying to explain it to him. By the time he understood (if he does yet) we were past Cimmerium and over that Xanthus, desert, and then we crossed the ca.n.a.l with the mud city and the barrel-shaped citizens and the place where Tweel had shot the dream-beast. And nothing would do for Pierre here but that we put down so he could practice his biology on the remains. So we did.

'The thing was still there. No sign of decay; couldn't be, of course, without bacterial forms of life, and Leroy says that Mars is as sterile as an operating table.'

'Comme le coeur d'une fileuse,' corrected the little biologist, who was beginning to regain a trace of his usual energy. 'Like an old maid's heart!'

'However,' resumed Jarvis, 'about a hundred of the little gray-green biopods had fastened onto the thing and were growing and branching. Leroy found a stick and knocked 'em off, and each branch broke away and became a biopod crawling around with the others. So he poked around at the creature, while I looked away from it; even dead, that rope-armed devil gave me the creeps. And then came the surprise; the thing was part plant!'

'C'est vrai!' confirmed the biologist. 'It's true!'

'It was a big cousin of the biopods,' continued Jarvis. 'Leroy was quite excited; he figures that all Martian life is of that sort - neither plant nor animal. Life here never differentiated, he says; everything has both natures in it, even the barrel-creatures - even Tweel! I think he's right, especially when I recall howTweel rested, sticking his beak in the ground and staying that way all night. I never saw him eat or drink, either; perhaps his beak was more in the nature of a root, and he got his nourishment that way.'

'Sounds nutty to me,' observed Harrison.

'Well,' continued Jarvis, 'we broke up a few of the other growths and they acted the same way - the pieces crawled around, only much slower than the biopods, and then stuck themselves in the ground.

Then Leroy had to catch a sample of the walking gra.s.s, and we were ready to leave when a parade of the barrel creatures rushed by with their pushcarts. They hadn't forgotten me, either; they all drummed out, 'We are v-r-r-iends - ouch!' just as they had before. Leroy wanted to shoot one and cut it up, but I remembered the battle Tweel and I had had with them, and vetoed the idea. But he did hit on a possible explanation as to what they did with all the rubbish they gathered.'

'Made mud-pies, I guess,' grunted the captain.

'More or less,' agreed Jarvis. 'They use it for food, Leroy thinks. If they're part vegetable, you see, that's what they'd want - soil with organic remains in it to make it fertile. That's why they ground up sand and biopods and other growths all together. See?'

'Dimly,' countered Harrison. 'How about the suicides?'

'Leroy had a hunch there, too. The suicides jump into the grinder when the mixture has too much sand and gravel; they throw themselves in to adjust the proportions.'

'Rats!' said Harrison disgustedly. 'Why couldn't they bring in some extra branches from outside?'

'Because suicide is easier. You've got to remember that these creatures can't be judged by earthly standards; they probably don't feel pain, and they haven't got what we'd call individuality. Any intelligence they have is the property of the whole community - like an ant-heap. That's it! Ants are willing to die for their ant-hill; so are these creatures.'

'So are men,' observed the captain, 'if it comes to that.'

'Yes, but men aren't exactly eager. It takes some emotion like patriotism to work 'em to the point of dying for their country; these things do it all in the day's work.' He paused.

'Well, we took some pictures of the dream-beast and the barrel-creatures, and then we started along. We sailed over Xanthus, keeping as close to the meridian of the Ares as we could, and pretty soon we crossed the trail of the pyramidbuilder. So we circled back to let Leroy take a look at it, and when we found it, we landed. The thing had completed just two rows of bricks since Tweel and I left it, and there it was, breathing in silicon and breathing out bricks as if it had eternity to do it in - which it has.

Leroy wanted to dissect it with a Boland explosive bullet, but I thought that anything that had lived for ten million years was ent.i.tled to the respect due to old age, so I talked him out of it. He peeped into the hole on top of it and nearly got beaned by the arm coming up with a brick, and then he chipped off a few pieces of it, which didn't disturb the creature a bit. He found the place I'd chipped, tried to see if there was any sign of healing, and decided he could tell better in two or three thousand years. So we took a few shots of it and sailed on.

'Mid-afternoon we located the wreck of my rocket. Not a thing disturbed; we picked up my films and tried to decide what next. I wanted to find Tweel if possible; I figured from the fact of his pointing south that he lived somewhere near Thyle. We plotted our route and judged that the desert we were in now was Thyle II; Thyle I should be east of us. So, on a hunch, we decided to have a look at Thyle I, and away we buzzed.'

'Der motors?' queried Putz, breaking his long silence.

'For a wonder, we had no trouble, Karl. Your blast worked perfectly. So we b.u.mmed along, pretty high to get a wider view, I'd say about fifty thousand feet. Thyle II spread out like an orange carpet, and after a while we came to the gray branch of the Mare Chronium that bounded it. That was narrow; we crossed it in half an hour, and there was Thyle I - same orange-hued desert as its mate. We veered south, toward the Mare Australe, and followed the edge of the desert. And toward sunset we spotted it.'

'Shpotted?' echoed Putz. 'Vot vas shpotted?'

'The desert was spotted - with buildings! Not one of the mud cities of the ca.n.a.ls, although a ca.n.a.l went through it. From the map we figured the ca.n.a.l was a continuation of the one Schiaparelli called Ascanius.'We were probably too high to be visible to any inhabitants of the city, but also too high for a good look at it, even with the gla.s.ses. However, it was nearly sunset, anyway, so we didn't plan on dropping in. We circled the place; the ca.n.a.l went out into the Mare Australe, and there, glittering in the south, was the melting polar ice-cap! The ca.n.a.l drained it; we could distinguish the sparkle of water in it. Off to the southeast, just at the edge of the Mare Australe, was a valley - the first irregularity I'd seen on Mars except the cliffs that bounded Xanthus and Thyle II. We flew over the valley-' Jarvis paused suddenly and shuddered; Leroy, whose color had begun to return, seemed to pale. The chemist resumed, 'Well, the valley looked all right - then! Just a gray waste, probably full of crawlers like the others.

'We circled back over the city; say, I want to tell you that place was-well, gigantic! It was colossal; at first I thought the size was due to that illusion I spoke of - you know, the nearness of the horizon - but it wasn't that. We sailed right over it, and you've never seen anything like it!

'But the sun dropped out of sight right then. I knew we were pretty far south - lat.i.tude 60 - but I didn't know just how much night we'd have.'

Harrison glanced at a Schiaparelli chart. 'About 60 - eh?' he said. 'Close to what corresponds to the Antarctic Circle. You'd have about four hours of night at this season. Three months from now you'd have none at all.'

'Three months!' echoed Jarvis, surprised. Then he grinned. 'Right! I forget the seasons here are twice as long as ours. Well, we sailed out into the desert about twenty miles, which put the city below the horizon in case we overslept, and there we spent the night.

'You're right about the length of it. We had about four hours of darkness which left us fairly rested.

We ate breakfast, called our location to you, and started over to have a look at the city.

'We sailed toward it from the east and it loomed up ahead of us like a range of mountains. Lord, what a city! Not that New York mightn't have higher buildings, or Chicago cover more ground, but for sheer ma.s.s, those structures were in a cla.s.s by themselves. Gargantuan!

'There was a queer look about the place, though. You know how a terrestrial city sprawls out, a nimbus of suburbs, a ring of residential sections, factory districts, parks, highways, There was none of that here; the city rose out of the desert as abruptly as a cliff. Only a few little sand mounds marked the division, and then the walls of those gigantic structures.

'The architecture was strange, too. There were lots of devices that are impossible back home, such as set-backs in reverse, so that a building with a small base could spread out as it rose. That would be a valuable trick in New York, where land is almost priceless, but to do it, you'd have to transfer Martian gravitation there!

'Well, since you can't very well land a rocket in a city street, we put down right next to the ca.n.a.l side of the city, took our small cameras and revolvers, and started for a gap in the wall of masonry. We weren't ten feet from the rocket when we both saw the explanation for a lot of the queerness.

'The city was in ruin! Abandoned, deserted, dead as Babylon! Or at least, so it looked to us then, with its empty streets which, if they had been paved, were now deep under sand.'

'A ruin, eh?' commented Harrison. 'How old?'

'How could we tell?' countered Jarvis. 'The next expedition to this golf ball ought to carry an archeologist - and a philologist, too, as we found out later. But it's a devil of a job to estimate the age of anything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might have been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation is here to spread cracks with its roots - nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind - and that's negligible in this atmosphere - and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent - meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground right here near the Ares.'

'Seven,' corrected the captain. 'Three dropped while you were gone.'

'Well, damage by meteorites must be slow, anyway. Big ones would be as rare here as on earth, because big ones get through in spite of the atmosphere, and those buildings could sustain a lot of little ones. My guess at the city's age - and it may be wrong by a big percentage - would be fifteen thousand years. Even that's thousands of years older than any human civilization; fifteen thousand years ago wasthe Late Stone Age in the history of mankind.

'So Leroy and I crept up to those tremendous buildings feeling like pygmies, sort of awe-struck, and talking in whispers. I tell you, it was ghostly walking down that dead and deserted street, and every time we pa.s.sed through a shadow, we s.h.i.+vered, and not just because shadows are cold on Mars. We felt like intruders, as if the great race that had built the place might resent our presence even across a hundred and fifty centuries. The place was as quiet as a grave, but we kept imagining things and peeping down the dark lanes between buildings and looking over our shoulders. Most of the structures were windowless, but when we did see an opening in those vast walls, we couldn't look away, expecting to see some horror peering out of it.

'Then we pa.s.sed an edifice with an open arch; the doors were there, but blocked open by sand. I got up nerve enough to take a look inside, and then, of course, we discovered we'd forgotten to take our flashes. But we eased a few feet into the darkness and the pa.s.sage debauched into a colossal hall. Far above us a little crack let in a pallid ray of daylight, not nearly enough to light the place; I couldn't even see if the hall rose clear to the distant roof. But I know the place was enormous; I said something to Leroy and a million thin echoes came clipping back to us out of the darkness. And after that, we began to hear other sounds - slithering rustling noises, and whispers, and sounds like suppressed breathing - and something black and silent pa.s.sed between us and that far-away crevice of light.

'Then we saw three little greenish spots of luminosity in the dusk to our left. We stood staring at them, and suddenly they all s.h.i.+fted at once. Leroy yelled 'Ce sont des yeux!' and they were! They were eyes!

Well, we stood frozen for a moment, while Leroy's yell reverberated back and forth between the distant walls, and the echoes repeated the words in queer, thin voices. There were mumblings and mutterings and whisperings and sounds like strange soft laughter, and then the three-eyed thing moved again. Then we broke for the door!

'We felt better out in the sunlight; we looked at each other sheepishly, but neither of us suggested another look at the buildings inside - though we did see the place later, and that was queer, too - but you'll hear about it when I come to it. We just loosened our revolvers and crept on along that ghostly street.

'The street curved and twisted and subdivided. I kept careful note of our directions, since we couldn't risk getting lost in that gigantic maze. Without our thermo-skin bags, night would finish us, even if what lurked in the ruins didn't. By and by, I noticed that we were veering back toward the ca.n.a.l, the buildings ended and there were only a few dozen ragged stone huts which looked as though they might have been built of debris from the city. I was just beginning to feel a bit disappointed at finding no trace of Tweel's people here when we rounded a corner and there he was!

'I yelled 'Tweel!' but he just stared, and then I realized that he wasn't Tweel, but another Martian of his sort. Tweel's feathery appendages were more orange hued and he stood several inches taller than this one. Leroy was sputtering in excitement, and the Martian kept his vicious beak directed at us, so I stepped forward as peace-maker. 'I said 'Tweel?' very questioningly, but there was no result. I tried it a dozen times, and we finally had to give it up; we couldn't connect.

'Leroy and I walked toward the huts, and the Martian followed us. Twice he was joined by others, and each time I tried yelling 'Tweel' at them but they just stared at us. So we ambled on with the three trailing us, and then it suddenly occurred to me that my Martian accent might be at fault. I faced the group and tried trilling it out the way Tweel himself did: 'T-r-r-rweee-r-rl! Like that.

'And that worked! One of them spun his head around a full ninety degrees, and screeched 'T-r-r-rweee-r-rl!' and a moment later, like an arrow from a bow, Tweel came sailing over the nearer huts to land on his beak in front of me!

'Man, we were glad to see each other! Tweel set up a twittering and chirping like a farm in summer and went sailing up and coming down on his beak, and I would have grabbed his hands, only he wouldn't keep still long enough.

'The other Martians and Leroy just stared, and after a while, Tweel stopped bouncing, and there we were. We couldn't talk to each other any more than we could before, so after I'd said 'Tweel' a couple of times and he'd said 'Tick,' we were more or less helpless. However, it was only midmorning, and itseemed important to learn all we could about Tweel and the city, so I suggested that he guide us around the place if he weren't busy. I put over the idea by pointing back at the buildings and then at him and us.

'Well, apparently he wasn't too busy, for he set off with us, leading the way with one of his hundred and fifty-foot nosedives that set Leroy gasping. When we caught up, he said something like 'one, one, two - two, two, four - no, no - yes, yes - rock - no breet!' That didn't seem to mean anything; perhaps he was just letting Leroy know that he could speak English, or perhaps he was merely running over his vocabulary to refresh his memory.

'Anyway, he showed us around. He had a light of sorts in his black pouch, good enough for small rooms, but simply lost in some of the colossal caverns we went through. Nine out of ten buildings meant absolutely nothing to us - just vast empty chambers, full of shadows and rustlings and echoes. I couldn't imagine their use; they didn't seem suitable for living quarters, or even for commercial purposes - trade and so forth; they might have been all right as power-houses, but what could have been the purpose of a whole city full? And where were the remains of the machinery?

'The place was a mystery. Sometimes Tweel would show us through a hall that would have housed an ocean-liner, and he'd seem to swell with pride - and we couldn't make a d.a.m.n thing of it! As a display of architectural power, the city was colossal; as anything else it was just nutty!

'But we did see one thing that registered. We came to that same building Leroy and I had entered earlier - the one with the three eyes in it. Well, we were a little shaky about going in there, but Tweel twittered and trilled and kept saying, 'Yes, yes, yes!' so we followed him, staring nervously about for the thing that had watched us. However, that hall was just like the others, full of murmurs and slithering noises and shadowy things slipping away into corners. If the three-eyed creature were still there, it must have slunk away with the others.

'Tweel led us along the wall; his light showed a series of little alcoves, and in the first of these we ran into a puzzling thing - a very weird thing. As the light flashed into the alcove, I saw first just an empty s.p.a.ce, and then, squatting on the floor, I saw - it! A little creature about as big as a large rat, it was, gray and huddled and evidently startled by our appearance. It had the queerest, most devilish little face! - pointed ears or horns and satanic eyes that seemed to sparkle with a sort of fiendish intelligence.

'Tweel saw it, too, and let out a screech of anger, and the creature rose on two pencil-thin legs and scuttled off with a half-terrified, half-defiant squeak. It darted past us into the darkness too quickly even for Tweel, and as it ran, something waved on its body like the fluttering of a cape. Tweel screeched angrily at it and set up a shrill hullabaloo that sounded like genuine rage.

'But the thing was gone, and then I noticed the weirdest of imaginable details. Where it had squatted on the floor was - a book! It had been hunched over a book!

'I took a step forward; sure enough, there was some sort of inscription on the pages - wavy white lines like a seismograph record on black sheets like the material of Tweel's pouch. Tweel fumed and whistled in wrath, picked up the volume and slammed it into place on a shelf full of others. Leroy and I stared dumbfounded at each other.

'Had the little thing with the fiendish face been reading? Or was it simply eating the pages, getting physical nourishment rather than mental? Or had the whole thing been accidental?

'If the creature were some rat-like pest that destroyed books, Tweel's rage was understandable, but why should he try to prevent an intelligent being, even though of an alien race, from reading - if it was reading. I don't know; I did notice that the book was entirely undamaged, nor did I see a damaged book among any that we handled. But I have an odd hunch that if we knew the secret of the little cape-clothed imp, we'd know the mystery of the vast abandoned city and of the decay of Martian culture.

'Well, Tweel quieted down after a while and led us completely around that tremendous hall. It had been a library, I think; at least, there were thousands upon thousands of those queer black-paged volumes printed in wavy lines of white. There were pictures, too, in some; and some of these showed Tweel's people. That's a point, of course; it indicated that his race built the city and printed the books. I don't think the greatest philologist on earth will ever translate one line of those records; they were made by minds too different from ours.

'Tweel could read them, naturally. He twittered off a few lines, and then I took a few of the books,with his permission; he said 'no, no!' to some and 'yes, yes!' to others. Perhaps he kept back the ones his people needed, or perhaps he let me take the ones he thought we'd understand most easily. I don't know; the books are outside there in the rocket.

'Then he held that dim torch of his toward the walls, and they were pictured. Lord, what pictures!