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A Martian Odyssey:
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A Martian Odyssey
by
Stanley G. Weinbaum
First published in Wonder Stories, July 1934
Reprinted in Startling Stories, November 1939
Collected in
A Martian Odyssey and Others,
Fantasy Press, Pennsylvania, 1949
This e-book edition: Project Gutenberg Australia, 2023
Wonder Stories, July 1934, with "A Martian Odyssey"
Startling Stories, November 1939, with "A Martian Odyssey"
Announcement in Startling Stories, November 1939
It is a most curious thing, and no doubt one at
the greatest wonders of our wonder stories, that practically all
authors have an idea that future explorers will step into another
world and find conditions like the are on earth. They picture
human beings with two feet and two legs, two eyes, etc., just as
we have them here, although the chances are not one in a million
that such conditions will even remotely prevail. Biologists are
pretty much unanimous on this point, and feel that if there is
such a thing as intelligent life on Mars or Venus, it certainly
will be radically different from the human life that we know
here.
On our own earth, we find the most grotesque
animals and the most grotesque insects, some of which, like the
ants, are endowed with extraordinary intelligence. Imagine a
human being, reduced to the size of an ant, being brought into an
ant-hill and what his chances would he to really understand what
waa going on. It might take him years before, he would even get
an inkling as to what it waa all about.
Our present author, fully conscious of this
thought, has written a science-fiction tale so new, so breezy,
that it stands out head and shoulder over similar
interplanetarian stories. The mere fact that he keeps you
guessing is the main charm of the story, and this, coupled with
the lighter vein in which it is written, makes it all the more
charming.
We are prevailing upon the author to let us have
a sequel, which we hope to present soon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
●Chapter I. [Untitled]
●Chapter II. Tweel of Mars
●Chapter III. The Pyramid Being
●Chapter IV. The Dream-Beasr
●Chapter V. The Barrel-People
CHAPTER I
JARVIS stretched himself as luxuriously as he
could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.
"Air you can breathe!" he exulted.﹃It feels as thick as soup
after the thin stuff out there!﹄He nodded at the Martian
landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer
moon, beyond the glass of the port.
The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the
engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and
captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous
crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot
on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This,
of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the
mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his
life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it
to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the
Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the
ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus,
they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth's, and
certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon
system. And they deserved that success when one considers the
difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in
acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the
air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in
the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the
twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely
unknown world.
Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his
frostbitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.
"Well," exploded Harrison abruptly, "are we going to hear what
happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we
don't get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you
out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill
it, man!"
"Speel?" queried Leroy perplexedly. "Speel what?"
"He means 'spiel'," explained Putz soberly. "It iss to
tell."
Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a
smile. "That's right, Karl," he said in grave agreement with
Putz. "Ich spiel' es!" He grunted comfortably and
began.
"According to orders," he said, "I watched Karl here take off
toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and
headed south. You'll remember, Cap—we had orders not to
land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two
cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about
two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave
the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so
far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust
if you move low."
"We know all that from Putz," grunted Harrison. "I wish you'd
saved the films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this
junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon
pictures?"
"The films are safe," retorted Jarvis. "Well," he resumed, "as
I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured,
the wings haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred
miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.
"So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused
by the under-jets, the seeing wasn't any too good. I could see
enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just
more of this gray plain that we'd been examining the whole week
since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal
carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy
calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every
hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me."
"I did!" snapped Harrison.
"A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis
imperturbably, "the surface changed to a sort of low plateau,
nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were
right in our guess, then, and this gray plain we dropped on was
really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the
region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another
gray plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles,
and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did."
"Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!" grumbled
the captain. "Let's get to the point."
"Coming!" remarked Jarvis. "Twenty miles into
Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!"
"Putz photographed a hundred! Let's hear something new!"
"And did he also see a city?"
"Twenty of 'em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!"
"Well," observed Jarvis,﹃from here on I'll be telling a few
things Putz didn't see!﹄He rubbed his tingling nose, and
continued. "I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this
season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here,
I decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II
I'm not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right
there, Putz's pet motor quit!"
"Quit? How?" Putz was solicitous.
"The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right
away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle
of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!" He rubbed the
injured member ruefully.
"Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid
sulphuric?" inquired Putz. "Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary
radiation—"
"Naw!" said Jarvis disgustedly.﹃I wouldn't try that, of
course—not more than ten times! Besides, the bump
flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose
I got the thing working—what then? Ten miles with the blast
coming right out of the bottom and I'd have melted the floor from
under me!﹄He rubbed his nose again. "Lucky for me a pound only
weighs seven ounces here, or I'd have been mashed flat!"
"I could have fixed!" ejaculated the engineer. "I bet it vas
not serious."
"Probably not," agreed Jarvis sarcastically.﹃Only it wouldn't
fly. Nothing serious, but I had the choice of waiting to be
picked up or trying to walk back—eight hundred miles, and
perhaps twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day!
Well,﹄he concluded, "I chose to walk. Just as much chance of
being picked up, and it kept me busy."
"We'd have found you," said Harrison.
"No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat
straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt
and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out."
"Water tank!" exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. "She
weigh one-quarter ton!"
"Wasn't full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds
earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own
personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so,
tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five
pounds less than my everyday earth-weight. I figured on that when
I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh—of course I
took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry Martian
nights.
"Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of
daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of
course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing
to see, not even Leroy's crawling biopods. But an hour or so
brought me to the canal—just a dry ditch about four hundred
feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map.
"There'd been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was
covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I
approached, the lawn moved out of my way!"
"Eh?" said Leroy.
"Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one, a
little grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two
thin, stemmy legs."
"He is where?" Leroy was eager.
"He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the
walking grass opening in front and closing behind. And then I was
out on the orange desert of Thyle again.
"I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so
tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours,
Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of
Thyle, and looked down over the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew
there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over,
and then a couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and
about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I started
cussing you fellows for not picking me up!"
"We were trying, you sap!" said Harrison.
"That didn't help. Well, I figured I might as well use what
was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded
Thyle. I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was
just the same sort of place as this—crazy leafless plants
and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my
sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen anything
worth worrying about on this half-dead world—nothing
dangerous, that is."
"Did you?" queried Harrison.
"Did I! You'll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I
was just about to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort
of shenanigans!"
"Vot iss shenanigans?" inquired Putz.
"He says, 'Je ne sais quoi,'" explained Leroy. "It is
to say, 'I don't know what.'"
"That's right," agreed Jarvis. "I didn't know what, so I
sneaked over to find out. There was a racket like a flock of
crows eating a bunch of canaries—whistles, cackles, caws,
trills, and what have you. I rounded a clump of stumps, and there
was Tweel!"
"Tweel?" said Harrison, and "Tveel?" said Leroy and Putz.
"That freak ostrich," explained the narrator. "At least, Tweel
is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it
something like 'Trrrweerrll!'."
"What was he doing?" asked the Captain.
"He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one
would."
"Eaten! By what?"
"I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black
ropy arms tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it
to you, an ostrich. I wasn't going to interfere, naturally; if
both creatures were dangerous, I'd have one less to worry
about.
"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing
vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And
besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of
those arms!" Jarvis shuddered. "But the clincher was when I
noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the
bird-thing! It was intelligent. That or tame, I assumed. Anyway,
it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into
what I could see of its antagonist.
"There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black
corruption, and then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise,
pulled itself and its arms into a hole in the ground. The other
let out a series of clacks, staggered around on legs about as
thick as golf sticks, and turned suddenly to face me. I held my
weapon ready, and the two of us stared at each other.
"The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like,
except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few
feathery appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was
somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to
side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It
had four-toed feet, and four-fingered things—hands, you'd
have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck
ending in a tiny head—and that beak. It stood an inch or so
taller than I, and—well, Putz saw it!"
The engineer nodded. "Ja! I saw!"
CHAPTER II
Tweel of Mars
JARVIS continued. "So—we stared at each other. Finally
the creature went into a series of clackings and twitterings and
held out its hands toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of
friendship."
"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of
yours and thought you were its brother!"
"Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my
gun and said 'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort,
and the thing came over and we were pals.
"By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I'd
better build a fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the
fire. I picked a spot at the base of the Thyle cliff where the
rock could reflect a little heat on my back. I started breaking
off chunks of this desiccated Martian vegetation, and my
companion caught the idea and brought in an armful. I reached for
a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and brought out
something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it, and
the fire was blazing—and you all know what a job we have
starting a fire in this atmosphere!
"And that bag of his!" continued the narrator. "That was a
manufactured article, my friends; press an end and she popped
open—press the middle and she sealed so perfectly you
couldn't see the line. Better than zippers.
"Well, we stared at the fire for a while and I decided to
attempt some sort of communication with the Martian. I pointed at
myself and said 'Dick'; he caught the drift immediately,
stretched a bony claw at me and repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed
at him, and he gave that whistle I called Tweel; I can't imitate
his accent. Things were going smoothly; to emphasize the names, I
repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him, 'Tweel.'
"There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative,
and said something like 'P-p-p-root.' And that was just the
beginning; I was always 'Tick,' but as for him—part of the
time he was 'Tweel,' and part of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,'
and part of the time he was sixteen other noises!
"We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried 'star,'
and 'tree,' and 'fire.' and Lord knows what else, and try as I
would, I couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two
successive minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist.
Finally I gave it up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to
do.
"But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple
of them, which I suppose is a great achievement if you're used to
a language you have to make up as you go along. But I couldn't
get the hang of his talk; either I missed some subtle point or we
just didn't think alike—and I rather believe the
latter view.
"I've other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave
up the language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two
plus two equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with
pebbles. Again Tweel caught the idea, and informed me that three
plus three equals six. Once more we seemed to be getting
somewhere.
"So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school
education, I drew a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and
then at the last glow of the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and
Venus, and Mother Earth, and Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars,
I swept my hand around in a sort of inclusive gesture to indicate
that Mars was our current environment. I was working up to
putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.
"Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at
it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added
Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's
moon!
"Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses
telescopes—that they're civilized!"
"Does not!" snapped Harrison. "The moon is visible from here
as a fifth magnitude star. They could see its revolution with the
naked eye."
"The moon, yes!" said Jarvis. "You've missed my point. Mercury
isn't visible! And Tweel knew of Mercury because he placed the
Moon at the third planet, not the second. If he didn't
know Mercury, he'd put the earth second, and Mars third, instead
of fourth! See?"
"Humph!" said Harrison.
"Anyway," proceeded Jarvis, "I went on with my lesson. Things
were going smoothly, and it looked as if I could put the idea
over. I pointed at the earth on my diagram, and then at myself,
and then, to clinch it, I pointed to myself and then to the earth
itself shining bright green almost at the zenith.
"Tweel set up such an excited clacking that I was certain he
understood. He jumped up and down, and suddenly he pointed at
himself and then at the sky, and then at himself and at the sky
again. He pointed at his middle and then at Arcturus, at his head
and then at Spica, at his feet and then at half a dozen stars,
while I just gaped at him. Then, all of a sudden, he gave a
tremendous leap. Man, what a hop! He shot straight up into the
starlight, seventy-five feet if an inch! I saw him silhouetted
against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head first, and
land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square in
the center of my sun-circle in the sand—a bull's eye!"
"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"
"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed
while he pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I
figured he'd missed my point, and I went through the whole blamed
rigmarole again, and it ended the same way, with Tweel on his
nose in the middle of my picture!"
"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.
"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We could
exchange ideas up to a certain point, and then—blooey!
Something in us was different, unrelated; I don't doubt that
Tweel thought me just as screwy as I thought him. Our minds
simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps
his viewpoint is as true as ours. But—we couldn't get
together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I
liked Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked
me."
"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"
"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that
perhaps we—" He paused, and then resumed his narrative.
"Anyway, I finally gave it up, and got into my thermo-skin to
sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any too warm, but that damned
sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes after I closed myself
in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some eighty-below-zero air
hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant little frostbite
to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my rocket.
"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around,
but when I woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag,
though, when I heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing
down from that three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak
beside me. I pointed to myself and toward the north, and he
pointed at himself and toward the south, and when I loaded up and
started away, he came along.
"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump,
sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing
on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few
moments he fell in beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into
one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block ahead
of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at
first to see that beak of his coming at me like a spear, but he
always ended in the sand at my side.
"So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same
sort of place as this—same crazy plants and same little
green biopods growing in the sand, or crawling out of your way.
We talked—not that we understood each other, you know, but
just for company. I sang songs, and I suspected Tweel did too; at
least, some of his trillings and twitterings had a subtle sort of
rhythm.
"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of
English words. He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and
point to a pebble and say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say
'Tick,' and then repeat it. He seemed terrifically amused that
the same word meant the same thing twice in succession, or that
the same word could apply to two different objects. It set me
wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the primitive
speech of some earth people—you know, Captain, like the
Negritos, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word
for food or water or man—words for good food and bad food,
or rainwater and seawater, or strong man and weak man—but
no names for general classes. They're too primitive to understand
that rain water and sea water are just different aspects of the
same thing. But that wasn't the case with Tweel; it was just that
we were somehow mysteriously different—our minds were alien
to each other. And yet—weliked each other!"
"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two
were so fond of each other."
"Well, I like you!" countered Jarvis wickedly.
"Anyway," he resumed, "don't get the idea that there was anything
screwy about Tweel. In fact, I'm not so sure but that he couldn't
teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two. Oh,
he wasn't an intellectual superman, I guess; but don't overlook
the point that he managed to understand a little of my mental
workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."
"Because he didn't have any!" suggested the captain, while
Putz and Leroy blinked attentively.
"You can judge of that when I'm through," said Jarvis. "Well,
we plugged along across the Mare Chronium all that day, and all
the next. Mare Chronium—Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to
agree with Schiaparelli's name by the end of that march! Just
that gray, endless plain of weird plants, and never a sign of any
other life. It was so monotonous that I was even glad to see the
desert of Xanthus toward the evening of the second day.
"I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for
all I never saw him drink or eat. I think he could have crossed
the Mare Chronium in a couple of hours with those block-long nose
dives of his, but he stuck along with me. I offered him some
water once or twice; he took the cup from me and sucked the
liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted it all back
into the cup and gravely returned it.
"Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it,
one of those nasty sand clouds blew along, not as bad as the one
we had here, but mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent
flap of my thermo-skin bag across my face and managed pretty
well, and I noticed that Tweel used some feathery appendages
growing like a mustache at the base of his beak to cover his
nostrils, and some similar fuzz to shield his eyes."
"He is a desert creature!" ejaculated the little biologist,
Leroy.
"Huh? Why?"
"He drink no water—he is adapt' for sand
storm—"
"Proves nothing! There's not enough water to waste anywhere on
this desiccated pill called Mars. We'd call all of it desert on
earth, you know." He paused. "Anyway, after the sand storm blew
over, a little wind kept blowing in our faces, not strong enough
to stir the sand. But suddenly things came drifting along from
the Xanthus cliffs—small, transparent spheres, for all the
world like glass tennis balls! But light—they were almost
light enough to float even in this thin air—empty, too; at
least, I cracked open a couple and nothing came out but a bad
smell. I asked Tweel about them, but all he said was 'No, no,
no,' which I took to mean that he knew nothing about them. So
they went bouncing by like tumbleweeds, or like soap bubbles, and
we plugged on toward Xanthus. Tweel pointed at one of the crystal
balls once and said 'rock,' but I was too tired to argue with
him. Later I discovered what he meant.
But suddenly things came drifting along—small, trans-
parent spheres, for all the world like glass tennis-balls.
"We came to the bottom of the Xanthus cliffs finally, when
there wasn't much daylight left. I decided to sleep on the
plateau if possible; anything dangerous, I reasoned, would be
more likely to prowl through the vegetation of the Mare Chronium
than the sand of Xanthus. Not that I'd seen a single sign of
menace, except the rope-armed black thing that had trapped Tweel,
and apparently that didn't prowl at all, but lured its victims
within reach. It couldn't lure me while I slept, especially as
Tweel didn't seem to sleep at all, but simply sat patiently
around all night. I wondered how the creature had managed to trap
Tweel, but there wasn't any way of asking him. I found that out
too, later; it's devilish!
"However, we were ambling around the base of the Xanthus
barrier looking for an easy spot to climb. At least, I was. Tweel
could have leaped it easily, for the cliffs were lower than
Thyle—perhaps sixty feet. I found a place and started up,
swearing at the water tank strapped to my back—it didn't
bother me except when climbing—and suddenly I heard a sound
that I thought I recognized!
"You know how deceptive sounds are in this thin air. A shot
sounds like the pop of a cork. But this sound was the drone of a
rocket, and sure enough, there went our second auxiliary about
ten miles to westward, between me and the sunset!"
"Vas me!" said Putz. "I hunt for you."
"Yeah; I knew that, but what good did it do me? I hung on to
the cliff and yelled and waved with one hand. Tweel saw it too,
and set up a trilling and twittering, leaping to the top of the
barrier and then high into the air. And while I watched, the
machine droned on into the shadows to the south.
"I scrambled to the top of the cliff. Tweel was still pointing
and trilling excitedly, shooting up toward the sky and coming
down head-on to stick upside down on his back in the sand. I
pointed toward the south, and at myself, and he said,
'Yes—Yes—Yes'; but somehow I gathered that he thought
the flying thing was a relative of mine, probably a parent.
Perhaps I did his intellect an injustice; I think now that I
did.
"I was bitterly disappointed by the failure to attract
attention. I pulled out my thermo-skin and crawled into it, as
the night chill was already apparent. Tweel stuck his beak into
the sand and drew up his legs and arms and looked for all the
world like one of those leafless shrubs out there. I think he
stayed that way all night."
"Protective mimicry!" ejaculated Leroy. "See? He is desert
creature!"
CHAPTER III
The Pyramid Being
"IN the morning," resumed Jarvis, "we started off again. We
hadn't gone a hundred yards into Xanthus when I saw something
queer! This is one thing Putz didn't photograph, I'll wager!
"There was a line of little pyramids—tiny ones, not more
than six inches high, stretching across Xanthus as far as I could
see! Little buildings made of pygmy bricks, they were, hollow
inside and truncated, or at least broken at the top and empty. I
pointed at them and said 'What?' to Tweel, but he gave some
negative twitters to indicate, I suppose, that he didn't know. So
off we went, following the row of pyramids because they ran
north, and I was going north.
"Man, we trailed that line for hours! After a while, I noticed
another queer thing: they were getting larger. Same number of
bricks in each one, but the bricks were larger.
"By noon they were shoulder high. I looked into a
couple—all just the same, broken at the top and empty. I
examined a brick or two as well; they were silica, and old as
creation itself!"
"How do you know?" asked Leroy.
"They were weathered—edges rounded. Silica doesn't
weather easily even on earth, and in this climate—!"
"How old you think?"
"Fifty thousand—a hundred thousand years. How can I
tell? The little ones we saw in the morning were
older—perhaps ten times as old. Crumbling. How old would
that make them? Half a million years? Who knows?" Jarvis
paused a moment. "Well," he resumed, "we followed the line. Tweel
pointed at them and said 'rock' once or twice, but he'd done that
many times before. Besides, he was more or less right about
these.
"I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked
'People?' and indicated the two of us. He set up a negative sort
of clucking and said, 'No, no, no. No one—one—two. No
two—two—four,' meanwhile rubbing his stomach. I just
stared at him and he went through the business again. 'No
one—one—two. No two—two—four.' I just
gaped at him."
"That proves it!" exclaimed Harrison. "Nuts!"
"You think so?" queried Jarvis sardonically. "Well, I figured
it out different! 'No one—one—two!' You don't get it,
of course, do you?"
"Nope—nor do you!"
"I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew
to put over a very complex idea. What, let me ask, does
mathematics make you think of?"
"Why—of astronomy. Or—or logic!"
"That's it! 'No one—one—two!' Tweel was telling me
that the builders of the pyramids weren't people—or that
they weren't intelligent, that they weren't reasoning creatures!
Get it?"
"Huh! I'll be damned!"
"You probably will."
"Why," put in Leroy, "he rub his belly?"
"Why? Because, my dear biologist, that's where his brains are!
Not in his tiny head—in his middle!"
"C'est impossible!"
"Not on Mars, it isn't! This flora and fauna aren't earthly;
your biopods prove that!" Jarvis grinned and took up his
narrative. "Anyway, we plugged along across Xanthus and in about
the middle of the afternoon, something else queer happened. The
pyramids ended."
"Ended!"
"Yeah; the queer part was that the last one—and now they
were ten-footers—was capped! See? Whatever built it was
still inside; we'd trailed 'em from their half-million-year-old
origin to the present.
"Tweel and I noticed it about the same time. I yanked out my
automatic (I had a clip of Boland explosive bullets in it) and
Tweel, quick as a sleight-of-hand trick, snapped a queer little
glass revolver out of his bag. It was much like our weapons,
except that the grip was larger to accommodate his four-taloned
hand. And we held our weapons ready while we sneaked up along the
lines of empty pyramids.
"Tweel saw the movement first. The top tiers of bricks were
heaving, shaking, and suddenly slid down the sides with a thin
crash. And then—something—something was coming
out!
"A long, silvery-gray arm appeared, dragging after it an
armored body. Armored, I mean, with scales, silver-gray and
dull-shining. The arm heaved the body out of the hole; the beast
crashed to the sand.
"It was a nondescript creature—body like a big gray
cask, arm and a sort of mouth-hole at one end; stiff, pointed
tail at the other—and that's all. No other limbs, no eyes,
ears, nose—nothing! The thing dragged itself a few yards,
inserted its pointed tail in the sand, pushed itself upright, and
just sat.
"Tweel and I watched it for ten minutes before it moved. Then,
with a creaking and rustling like—oh, like crumpling stiff
paper—its arm moved to the mouth-hole and out came a brick!
The arm placed the brick carefully on the ground, and the thing
was still again.
"Another ten minutes—another brick. Just one of Nature's
bricklayers. I was about to slip away and move on when Tweel
pointed at the thing and said 'rock'! I went 'huh?' and he said
it again. Then, to the accompaniment of some of his trilling, he
said, 'No—no—' and gave two or three whistling
breaths.
"Well, I got his meaning, for a wonder! I said, 'No breathe!'
and demonstrated the word. Tweel was ecstatic; he said, 'Yes,
yes, yes! No, no, no breet!' Then he gave a leap and sailed out
to land on his nose about one pace from the monster!
"I was startled, you can imagine! The arm was going up for a
brick, and I expected to see Tweel caught and mangled,
but—nothing happened! Tweel pounded on the creature, and
the arm took the brick and placed it neatly beside the first.
Tweel rapped on its body again, and said 'rock,' and I got up
nerve enough to take a look myself.
"Tweel was right again. The creature was rock, and it
didn't breathe!"
"How you know?" snapped Leroy, his black eyes blazing
interest.
"Because I'm a chemist. The beast was made of silica! There
must have been pure silicon in the sand, and it lived on that.
Get it? We, and Tweel, and those plants out there, and even the
biopods are carbon life; this thing lived by a different
set of chemical reactions. It was silicon life!"
"La vie silicieuse!" shouted Leroy. "I have suspect,
and now it is proof! I must go see! Il faut que je—"
"All right! All right!" said Jarvis. "You can go see. Anyhow,
there the thing was, alive and yet not alive, moving every ten
minutes, and then only to remove a brick. Those bricks were its
waste matter. See, Frenchy? We're carbon, and our waste is carbon
dioxide, and this thing is silicon and its waste is
silicon dioxide—silica. But silica is a solid, hence the
bricks. And it builds itself in, and when it is covered, it moves
over to a fresh place to start over. No wonder it creaked! A
living creature a half a million years old!"
"How you know how old?" Leroy was frantic.
"We trailed its pyramids from the beginning, didn't we? If
this weren't the original pyramid builder, the series would have
ended somewhere before we found him, wouldn't it?—ended and
started over with the small ones. That's simple enough, isn't
it?
"But he reproduces, or tries to. Before the third brick came
out, there was a little rustle and out popped a whole stream of
those little crystal balls. They're his spores, or
seeds—call 'em what you want. They went bouncing by across
Xanthus just as they'd bounced by us back in the Mare Chronium.
I've a hunch how they work, too—this is for your
information, Leroy. I think the crystal shell of silica is no
more than protective covering, like an eggshell, and that the
active principle is the smell inside. It's some sort of gas that
attacks silicon, and if the shell is broken near a supply of that
element, some reaction starts that ultimately develops into a
beast like that one."
"You should try!" exclaimed the little Frenchman. "We must
break one to see!"
"Yeah? Well, I did. I smashed a couple against the sand. Would
you like to come back in about ten thousand years to see if I
planted some pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell
by that time!" Jarvis paused and drew a deep breath. "Lord! That
queer creature Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless,
brainless—just a mechanism, and yet—immortal! Bound
to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and
oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be
dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food
again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and
civilizations are part of the past. A queer beast—yet I met
a stranger one!"
"If you did, it must have been in your dreams!" growled
Harrison.
"You're right!" said Jarvis soberly. "In a way, you're right.
The dream-beast! That's the best name for it—and it's the
most fiendish, terrifying creation one could imagine! More
dangerous than a lion, more insidious than a snake!"
"Tell me!" begged Leroy. "I must go see!"
"Not this devil!" He paused again. "Well," he resumed,
"Tweel and I left the pyramid creature and plowed along through
Xanthus. I was tired and a little disheartened by Putz's failure
to pick me up, and Tweel's trilling got on my nerves, as did his
flying nosedives. So I just strode along without a word, hour
after hour across that monotonous desert.
"Toward mid-afternoon we came in sight of a low dark line on
the horizon. I knew what it was. It was a canal; I'd crossed it
in the rocket and it meant that we were just one-third of the way
across Xanthus. Pleasant thought, wasn't it? And still, I was
keeping up to schedule.
"We approached the canal slowly; I remembered that this one
was bordered by a wide fringe of vegetation and that Mudheap City
was on it.
CHAPTER IV
The Dream-Beasr
"I WAS tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal,
and then from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and
home-like even Borneo would seem after this crazy planet, and
from that, to thoughts of little old New York, and then to
thinking about a girl I know there, Fancy Long. Know her?"
"Vision entertainer," said Harrison. "I've tuned her in. Nice
blonde—dances and sings on the Yerba Mate
hour."
"That's her," said Jarvis ungrammatically. "I know her pretty
well—just friends, get me?—though she came down to
see us off in the Ares. Well, I was thinking about her,
feeling pretty lonesome, and all the time we were approaching
that line of rubbery plants.
"And then—I said, 'What 'n Hell!' and stared. And there
she was—Fancy Long, standing plain as day under one of
those crack-brained trees, and smiling and waving just the way I
remembered her when we left!"
"Now you're nuts, too!" observed the captain.
"Boy, I almost agreed with you! I stared and pinched myself
and closed my eyes and then stared again—and every time,
there was Fancy Long smiling and waving! Tweel saw something,
too; he was trilling and clucking away, but I scarcely heard him.
I was bounding toward her over the sand, too amazed even to ask
myself questions.
"I wasn't twenty feet from her when Tweel caught me with one
of his flying leaps. He grabbed my arm, yelling,
'No—no—no!' in his squeaky voice. I tried to shake
him off—he was as light as if he were built of
bamboo—but he dug his claws in and yelled. And finally some
sort of sanity returned to me and I stopped less than ten feet
from her. There she stood, looking as solid as Putz's head!"
"Vot?" said the engineer.
"She smiled and waved, and waved and smiled, and I stood there
dumb as Leroy, while Tweel squeaked and chattered. I knew
it couldn't be real, yet—there she was!
"Finally I said, 'Fancy! Fancy Long!' She just kept on smiling
and waving, but looking as real as if I hadn't left her
thirty-seven million miles away.
"Tweel had his glass pistol out, pointing it at her. I grabbed
his arm, but he tried to push me away. He pointed at her and
said, 'No breet! No breet!' and I understood that he meant that
the Fancy Long thing wasn't alive.
"Man, my head was whirling!
"Still, it gave me the jitters to see him pointing his weapon
at her. I don't know why I stood there watching him take careful
aim, but I did. Then he squeezed the handle of his weapon; there
was a little puff of steam, and Fancy Long was gone! And in her
place was one of those writhing, black rope-armed horrors like
the one I'd saved Tweel from!
"The dream-beast! I stood there dizzy, watching it die while
Tweel trilled and whistled. Finally he touched my arm, pointed at
the twisting thing, and said, 'You one—one—two, he
one—one—two.' After he'd repeated it eight or ten
times, I got it. Do any of you?"
"Oui," shrilled Leroy. "Moi—je le
comprends! He mean you think of something, the beast he know,
and you see it! Un chien—a hungry dog, he would
see the big bone with meat! Or smell it—not?"
"Right!" said Jarvis. "The dream-beast uses its victim's
longings and desires to trap its prey. The bird at nesting season
would see its mate, the fox, prowling for its own prey, would see
a helpless rabbit!"
"How he do?" queried Leroy.
"How do I know? How does a snake back on earth charm a bird
into its very jaws? And aren't there deep-sea fish that lure
their victims into their mouths? Lord!" Jarvis shuddered. "Do you
see how insidious the monster is? We're warned now—but
henceforth we can't trust even our eyes. You might see me
—I might see one of you—and back of it may be nothing
but another of those black horrors!"
"How'd your friend know?" asked the captain abruptly.
"Tweel? I wonder! Perhaps he was thinking of something that
couldn't possibly have interested me, and when I started to run,
he realized that I saw something different and was warned. Or
perhaps the dream-beast can only project a single vision, and
Tweel saw what I saw—or nothing. I couldn't ask him. But
it's just another proof that his intelligence is equal to ours or
greater."
"He's daffy, I tell you!" said Harrison. "What makes you think
his intellect ranks with the human?"
"Plenty of things! First the pyramid-beast. He hadn't seen one
before; he said as much. Yet he recognized it as a dead-alive
automaton of silicon."
"He could have heard of it," objected Harrison. "He lives
around here, you know."
"Well, how about the language? I couldn't pick up a single idea
of his and he learned six or seven words of mine. And do you
realize what complex ideas he put over with no more than those
six or seven words? The pyramid monster—the dream-beast!
In a single phrase he told me that one was a harmless automaton
and the other a deadly hypnotist. What about that?"
"Huh!" said the captain.
"Huh if you wish! Could you have done it knowing only
six words of English? Could you go even further, as Tweel did,
and tell me that another creature was of a sort of intelligence
so different from ours that understanding was
impossible—even more impossible than that between Tweel and
me?"
"Eh? What was that?"
"Later. The point I'm making is that Tweel and his race are
worthy of our friendship. Somewhere on Mars—and you'll find
I'm right—is a civilization and culture equal to ours, and
maybe more than equal. And communication is possible between them
and us; Tweel proves that. It may take years of patient trial,
for their minds are alien, but less alien than the next minds we
encountered—if they are minds."
"The next ones? What next ones?"
"The people of the mud cities along the canals." Jarvis
frowned, then resumed his narrative. "I thought the dream-beast
and the silicon-monster were the strangest beings conceivable,
but I was wrong. These creatures are still more alien, less
understandable than either and far less comprehensible than
Tweel, with whom friendship is possible, and even, by patience
and concentration, the exchange of ideas.
"Well," he continued, "we left the dream-beast dying, dragging
itself back into its hole, and we moved toward the canal. There
was a carpet of that queer walking-grass scampering out of our
way, and when we reached the bank, there was a yellow trickle of
water flowing. The mound city I'd noticed from the rocket was a
mile or so to the right and I was curious enough to want to take
a look at it.
"It had seemed deserted from my previous glimpse of its and if
any creatures were lurking in it—well, Tweel and I were
both armed. And by the way, that crystal weapon of Tweel's was an
interesting device; I took a look at it after the dream-beast
episode. It fired a little glass splinter, poisoned, I suppose,
and I guess it held at least a hundred of 'em to a load. The
propellant was steam—just plain steam!"
"Shteam!" echoed Putz. "From vot come, shteam?"
"From water, of course! You could see the water through the
transparent handle and about a gill of another liquid, thick and
yellowish. When Tweel squeezed the handle—there was no
trigger—a drop of water and a drop of the yellow stuff
squirted into the firing chamber, and the water
vaporized—pop!—like that. It's not so difficult; I
think we could develop the same principle. Concentrated sulfuric
acid will heat water almost to boiling, and so will quicklime,
and there's potassium and sodium—
"Of course, his weapon hadn't the range of mine, but it wasn't
so bad in this thin air, and it did hold as many shots as
a cowboy's gun in a Western movie. It was effective, too, at
least against Martian life; I tried it out, aiming at one of the
crazy plants, and darned if the plant didn't wither up and fall
apart! That's why I think the glass splinters were poisoned.
"Anyway, we trudged along toward the mud-heap city and I began
to wonder whether the city builders dug the canals. I pointed to
the city and then at the canal, and Tweel said
'No—no—no!' and gestured toward the south. I took it
to mean that some other race had created the canal system,
perhaps Tweel's people. I don't know; maybe there's still another
intelligent race on the planet, or a dozen others. Mars is a
queer little world.
CHAPTER V
The Barrel-People
"A HUNDRED yards from the city we crossed a sort of
road—just a hard-packed mud trail, and then, all of a
sudden, along came one of the mound builders!
"Man, talk about fantastic beings! It looked rather like a
barrel trotting along on four legs with four other arms or
tentacles. It had no head, just body and members and a row of
eyes completely around it. The top end of the barrel-body was a
diaphragm stretched as tight as a drumhead, and that was all. It
was pushing a little coppery cart and tore right past us like the
proverbial bat out of Hell. It didn't even notice us, although I
thought the eyes on my side shifted a little as it passed.
"A moment later another came along, pushing another empty
cart. Same thing—it just scooted past us. Well, I wasn't
going to be ignored by a bunch of barrels playing train, so when
the third one approached, I planted myself in the way—ready
to jump, of course, if the thing didn't stop.
"But it did. It stopped and set up a sort of drumming from the
diaphragm on top. And I held out both hands and said, 'We are
friends!' And what do you suppose the thing did?"
"Said, 'Pleased to meet you,' I'll bet!" suggested
Harrison.
"I couldn't have been more surprised if it had! It drummed on
its diaphragm, and then suddenly boomed out, 'We are
v-r-r-riends' and gave its pushcart a vicious poke at me! I
jumped aside, and away it went while I stared dumbly after
it.
"A minute later another one came hurrying along. This one
didn't pause, but simply drummed out, 'We are v-r-r-riends!' and
scurried by. How did it learn the phrase? Were all of the
creatures in some sort of communication with each other? Were
they all parts of some central organism? I don't know, though I
think Tweel does.
"Anyway, the creatures went sailing past us, every one
greeting us with the same statement. It got to be funny; I never
thought to find so many friends on this God-forsaken ball!
Finally I made a puzzled gesture to Tweel; I guess he understood,
for he said, 'One-one-two—yes!—Two-two-four
—no!' Get it?"
"Sure," said Harrison. "It's a Martian nursery rhyme."
"Yeah! Well, I was getting used to Tweel's symbolism, and I
figured it out this way. 'One-one-two—yes!' The creatures
were intelligent. 'Two-two-four—no!' Their intelligence was
not of our order, but something different and beyond the logic of
two and two is four. Maybe I missed his meaning. Perhaps he meant
that their minds were of low degree, able to figure out the
simple things. 'One-one-two—yes!—but not more
difficult things—Two-two-four—no!' But I think from
what we saw later that he meant the other.
"After a few moments, the creatures came rushing
back—first one, then another. Their pushcarts were full of
stones, sand, chunks of rubbery plants, and such rubbish as that.
They droned out their friendly greeting, which didn't really
sound so friendly, and dashed on. The third one I assumed to be
my first acquaintance and I decided to have another chat with
him. I stepped into his path again and waited.
"Up he came, booming out his 'We are v-r-r-riends' and
stopped. I looked at him; four or five of his eyes looked at me.
He tried his password again and gave a shove on his cart, but I
stood firm. And then the—the dashed creature reached out
one of his arms, and two finger-like nippers tweaked my
nose!"
"Haw!" roared Harrison. "Maybe the things have a sense of
beauty!"
"Laugh!" grumbled Jarvis. "I'd already had a nasty bump and a
mean frostbite on that nose. Anyway, I yelled 'Ouch!' and jumped
aside and the creature dashed away; but from then on, their
greeting was 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' Queer beasts!
"Tweel and I followed the road squarely up to the nearest
mound. The creatures were coming and going, paying us not the
slightest attention, fetching their loads of rubbish. The road
simply dived into an opening, and slanted down like an old mine,
and in and out darted the barrel-people, greeting us with their
eternal phrase.
"I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was
curious to see it. It didn't look like a flame or torch, you
understand, but more like a civilized light, and I thought that I
might get some clue as to the creatures' development. So in I
went and Tweel tagged along, not without a few trills and
twitters, however.
"The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old
arc light, but came from a single black rod set in the wall of
the corridor. It was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were
fairly civilized, apparently.
"Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered
and I went on to look at that, but it was only a heap of shiny
sand. I turned toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take
me if it wasn't gone!
"I supposed the corridor had curved, or I'd stepped into a
side passage. Anyway, I walked back in that direction I thought
we'd come, and all I saw was more dim-lit corridor. The place was
a labyrinth! There was nothing but twisting passages running
every way, lit by occasional lights, and now and then a creature
running by, sometimes with a pushcart, sometimes without.
"Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only
come a few steps from the entrance. But every move we made after
that seemed to get us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of
the creatures with an empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out
for his rubbish, but he ran around aimlessly, into one passage
and out another. When he started dashing around a pillar like one
of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave up, dumped my water tank
on the floor, and sat down.
"Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said
'No—no—no!' in a sort of helpless trill. And we
couldn't get any help from the natives. They paid no attention at
all, except to assure us they were friends—ouch!
"Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around
there! I slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to
need sleep. We tried following only the upward corridors, but
they'd run uphill a ways and then curve downwards. The
temperature in that damned ant hill was constant; you couldn't
tell night from day and after my first sleep I didn't know
whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn't tell from
my watch whether it was midnight or noon.
"We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running
in some of the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing
anything—just wheels turning. And several times I saw two
barrel-beasts with a little one growing between them, joined to
both."
"Parthenogenesis!" exulted Leroy. "Parthenogenesis by budding
like les tulipes!"
"If you say so, Frenchy," agreed Jarvis. "The things never
noticed us at all, except, as I say, to greet us with 'We are
v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' They seemed to have no home-life of any
sort, but just scurried around with their pushcarts, bringing in
rubbish. And finally I discovered what they did with it.
"We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted
upwards for a great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be
close to the surface when suddenly the passage debouched into a
domed chamber, the only one we'd seen. And man!—I felt like
dancing when I saw what looked like daylight through a crevice in
the roof.
"There was a—a sort of machine in the chamber, just an
enormous wheel that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was
in the act of dumping his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it
with a crunch—sand, stones, plants, all into powder that
sifted away somewhere. While we watched, others filed in,
repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No rhyme nor
reason to the whole thing—but that's characteristic of this
crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too
bizarre to believe.
"One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart
aside with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I
watched him being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a
moment later, another followed him! They were perfectly
methodical about it, too; one of the cartless creatures took the
abandoned pushcart.
"Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide
to him, and he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as
much as to say, 'What can I do about it?' He must have known more
or less about these creatures.
"Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the
wheel, something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked
over; there was a little crystal, about the size of an egg,
fluorescing to beat Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and
face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed another
funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my left thumb? Look!"
Jarvis extended his hand. "It dried up and fell off—just
like that! And my abused nose—say, the pain went out of it
like magic! The thing had the property of hard ex-rays or gamma
radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left
healthy tissue unharmed!
"I was thinking what a present that'd be to take back
to Mother Earth when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back
to the other side of the wheel in time to see one of the
pushcarts ground up. Some suicide had been careless, it
seems.
"Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all
around us and their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them
advanced toward us; we backed out of what I thought was the
passage we'd entered by, and they came rumbling after us, some
pushing carts and some not. Crazy brutes! There was a whole
chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I didn't like the 'ouch';
it was rather suggestive.
"Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for
greater freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the
barrel-beasts following—about twenty of them. Queer
thing—the ones coming in with loaded carts moved past us
inches away without a sign.
"Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that
glowing coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cartload of plant
limbs. Puff! The whole load was burning—and the crazy beast
pushing it went right along without a change of pace. It created
some disturbance among our 'v-v-r-riends,' however—and then
I noticed the smoke eddying and swirling past us, and sure
enough, there was the entrance!
"I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty
pursuers. The daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first
glance that the sun was all but set, and that was bad, since I
couldn't live outside my thermo-skin bag in a Martian
night—at least, without a fire.
"And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle
between two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn't fired nor had
Tweel; there wasn't any use in irritating the brutes. They
stopped a little distance away and began their booming about
friendship and ouches.
"Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a
pushcart and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls
of foot-long copper darts—sharp-looking ones—and all
of a sudden one sailed past my ear—zing! And it was shoot
or die then.
"We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones
next to the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum,
but suddenly there was a thunderous booming of 'v-v-r-riends' and
'ouches,' and a whole army of 'em came out of their hole.
"Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that
Tweel wasn't. He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily
as not. He was staying for me!
"Say, I could have cried if there'd been time! I'd liked Tweel
from the first, but whether I'd have had gratitude to do what he
was doing—suppose I had saved him from the first
dream-beast—he'd done as much for me, hadn't he? I grabbed
his arm, and said 'Tweel,' and pointed up, and he understood. He
said, 'No—no—no, Tick!' and popped away with his
glass pistol.
"What could I do? I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but
I couldn't explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a
man!' and felt that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A
man! There are mighty few men who'd do that.
"So I went 'bang' with my gun and Tweel went 'puff' with his,
and the barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us,
and booming about being friends. I had given up hope. Then
suddenly an angel dropped right down from Heaven in the shape of
Putz, with his under-jets blasting the barrels into very small
pieces!
"Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened
the door and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was
a moment or so before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time
to see him rising in one of his nosedives over the mound and
away.
"I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the
time we got the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it
comes here—like turning off a light. We sailed out over the
desert and put down once or twice. I yelled 'Tweel!' and yelled
it a hundred times, I guess. We couldn't find him; he could
travel like the wind and all I got—or else I imagined it
—was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the
south. He'd gone, and damn it! I wish—I wish he
hadn't!"
The four men of the Ares were silent—even the
sardonic Harrison. At last little Leroy broke the stillness.
"I should like to see," he murmured.
"Yeah," said Harrison. "And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed
that; it might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a
century and a half."
"Oh, that!" muttered Jarvis gloomily.﹃That's what started the
fight!﹄He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
"Here it is."
THE END
"A Martian Odyssee and Others," Fantasy Press, Pennsylvania, 1949
THE END
Project Gutenberg Australia