Collected Short Fiction, page 324
My father nodded suddenly. “We can try. Let’s go.”
“First,” Trent said, “the others.”
Very hastily, panting with the effort, they covered Burgess and the German in shallow sand graves. A brief search of the vast shell hole where the rocket had fallen revealed no useful article intact. Empty-handed, clad in torn, scorched rags, they plodded southward across the dunes. My father was wearing a pair of inadequate soft slippers. They soon fell apart, and he went on barefoot.
“Hammond Power,” my father whispered, and coughed again. “Two queer beings on Earth would probably wind up in some zoo—unless some panicky citizen shot them first! Their chance to learn, say, the science of sub-electronics—” He shook his head. “Do you suppose they saw us?”
“Possible,” said Trent. And, within an hour, they knew that their arrival was known. For a small bright-red aircraft, which had a double streamlined shape, like two thick cigars fastened side by side, came silently over the dunes from the south.
The two men, in a sudden panic, tried to hide in the sand. The machine circled noiselessly above the wrecked rocket, and then flew back above them, without landing. They ran after it, at last, waving and shouting frantically, but it paid them no heed.
THEY STRUGGLED on. The rarefied air, Trent commented, and the lesser gravitation, tended toward a physiological balance. But both were coughing. Their lungs had begun to burn. Trent discovered that he had a rising fever.
Both were tormented by extreme thirst, as the dry atmosphere sucked moisture from their bodies. And there was no water.
The small Sun was low and red, and a thin, piercing, icy wind had sprung up out of the east before they saw the first actual Martians. It was Trent who looked back from the summit of a low dune, gulped voicelessly, and pointed.
The Martians came following the two sets of plodding prints in the sand. They rode yellow, ferocious-looking armored beasts that hopped like gigantic fleas. They wore bright leatherlike garments, and flourished gleaming weapons and rode astride and upright, like men.
Like men. That unexpected pursuit filled Trent and my father with a sudden blind fear. They fled uselessly across the dunes. But still, so strong is man’s anthropomorphism, they thought of those wild riders in essentially human terms.
Actually, perhaps, the dominant beings of Mars proved more manlike than the explorers had any right to expect. They were bipeds, walking upright. They had two-eyed faces of a sort. They communicated with a guttural, rasping speech.
For all that, however, the Martians have more in common with the arthropoda. Horny exoskeletons and fine-meshed scales instead of skin, with muscles and vital organs shielded in tubular armor. But in the chemistry of vital fluids and metabolic processes, in the subtler psychological reactions, they are like nothing on Earth.
This small mounted band had trailed Trent and my father from the wreck. One of the hopping beasts was laden with scraps of twisted metal, and some of the beings had bits of Burgess’ and Schlegel’s blood-soaked clothing.
The flight was soon ended. The Martians carried long red lances whose hollow metal shafts, it swiftly developed, served also as guns. Angry bullets kicked up rusty dust. The savage riders shrieked. The leaping beasts made a dismal and blood-chilling baying.
Trent stumbled, suddenly, and couldn’t rise. My father stopped beside him, breathless, with his lungs on fire. The gaunt, inhuman riders bore down upon them. They were an appalling lot, with their unfamiliar visages and their fine-scaled skins brightly hued in red, yellow, and purple. They surrounded the two men, and leapt down to rescue them from the fangs and talons of their beasts.
The men were hastily bound to a sort of packsaddle on one of the beasts, and the band turned northward again. The red double ship appeared again, before sunset, following from the south. The riders scattered, and began to fire at it with the long red tubes. It circled high above them, dropped a bomb that lifted an ineffectual pillar of dense, angry dust, and returned once more toward its unseen base.
EVENTS confirmed my father’s surmise that their captors were nomad enemies of the “canal” dwellers. That night, long after dark, the fugitive band took refuge in a labyrinth of burrows that must have been dug by the powerful claws of the hopping creatures. The captives were fed and allowed to sleep. Before dawn, the march was resumed. The respiratory trouble of the prisoners became more serious. Both sank into a fevered delirium. By the time they began to recover, the band had taken refuge in a hidden ravine where a tiny spring supplied water and grew a little forage for the beasts.
There they were held for several months, gradually learning a little of their captors’ language and a few facts about them. Leader of the band was a gnarled, haggard, long-limbed savage, of a rusty-red color, named Zynlid. He and his outlaw clan maintained themselves by raiding the fields and cities of the canal dwellers, keeping up an ancient and bitter feud with the rulers of civilized Mars.
When my father recovered from the pulmonary fever, he grasped again his original audacious object: to obtain the secret of the Martian power plants. That alone, he told Trent, would possibly enable their return to Earth.
Zynlid must have taken the two men partly out of mere curiosity, and partly from the hope of ransom. The canal dwellers, it seems, refused to bargain for the prisoners. But, out of their first efforts at communication, came a new and puzzling prestige.
The gaunt chieftain’s notions of astronomy, it developed, were rather vague. From Trent’s attempts—with drawings on the sand and gestures at the sky—to show that they had come from the third planet, Zynlid jumped to the idea that the two were natives of the Sun.
And his regard for beings of the Sun was considerable. He ordered their bonds removed, offered them choice food, drinks, and female companions, gave them liberty of the camp, and allowed my father to ride with him on future raids. Trent and my father made no attempt to disabuse him of the misunderstanding.
Their questions were now eagerly answered, but it was some time before they were able to make any intelligible query about power. Meantime, Trent was allowed to examine the few machines in the possession of the nomads. These included the long guns and the equipment that gave light and heat in the dwelling-burrows.
The savages, it seemed, had no comprehension of the operation of these machines. There was a taboo, moreover, associated with them, so that Zynlid was horrified when Trent first began to take a little heater-lamp apart, and permitted him to go ahead only on reflection that he was a solar being.
Trent himself made little of the investigation. The machines were electrical—even the rifles were fired by the sudden vaporization of water with electricity. The current came from little transparent tubes. These were hollow, with a metal electrode fused in one end, and a lump of a curious greenish crystal in the other. In the space between were a few tiny specks of dust, that had a silver-blue color and gave off a pale blue light when the tube was working.
“It’s that dust, Hammond,” Trent told my father. “A pinch of it will generate thousands of kilowatts, evidently. Lord knows what it is!”
The outlaw chieftain, when they had more of his confidence and his language, could only tell them that the fine blue grains were “dust of the Sun.” They came, he said, “from the place of the Sun.” And it was forbidden for others than the gorath-wein, the “blood of the Sun,” to touch them. He himself refused even to look at Trent’s dismantled mechanisms.
PRESSED by my father and excited by his own scientific enthusiasm, Trent continued his fumbling experiments until a day when he was almost killed by the terrific explosion of a grain of the blue dust. Fragments of a metal crucible drilled his body like rifle bullets. He was helpless for a month.
“It’s got me, Hammond,” he admitted hopelessly. “Atomic energy? I don’t know. There’s no key—unless we can get it from the civilized tribes.”
The accident lowered their prestige as beings of the Sun. Muttering of “the wrath of the Sun” and “the revenge of the holy stone,” Zynlid forbade Trent, on his recovery, to continue the experiments. And it might have gone much harder with the two men had not my father already become a trusted companion of Zynlid.
That lawless, marauding life seems to have appealed immensely to Garth Hammond. He flung himself into it with his old shrewd daring and all the strength of Earth-muscles. There was a duel with one of Zynlid’s chief lieutenants, who was jealous of the warrior of the Sun. My father killed the savage, and thereafter found himself in possession of the dead Martian’s weapons and mount.
Although excessive effort soon made him breathless, so that the band nicknamed him “the panting one,” he was able to outdo them all in wrestling and contests of strength. He took a keen delight in the strategy of raid, escape, and ambuscade. Zynlid began to rely on his cleverness. His belt was soon bright with the vivid-hued ear-appendages of the canal folk, taken as trophies.
He discovered, presently, that the band knew of the immense dark barrelshaped object that Trent had observed from the Moon. They regarded it with considerable awe. It was the Korduv, the “place of the Sun,” or sometimes “place of the holy stone.” And all save the gorath-wein were forbidden to approach it.
“There’s your key,” he told Trent. “There’s where the silver dust comes from.”
As soon as Trent had recovered sufficiently from the explosion, my father arranged an expedition to take them near the mysterious object. The Martians refused to go within a hundred miles of it, and allowed Trent and my father to approach it only on fresh assurance of their solar birth.
A vast excitement fevered them as their yellow-armored leaping dragons brought them in view of the dark mass looming above the flat and limitless red dunes. Was this the key to exhaustless power and the road back to. Earth?
For many miles they rode forward across the desert, and the red-black enigma loomed vaster and vaster before them. At last, riding through the cold black shadow of it, they came to its base.
Its stupendous mass was metal, they discovered, pitted with the acid of untold centuries, crusted with dark-red oxides. The dunes were drifted against it; westward the winds had cut out a vast curved hollow. Stunned with awe, they let the beasts carry them around its vast hexagon, and then withdrew to stare upward at it.
THERE WAS no possible opening in its base. Fifteen hundred feet upward, my father saw a square recess that looked like a portal. But that was in the overhanging, cylindrical middle section. There was no possibility of climbing to it. At last, no wiser, they turned back to their rendevous with Zynlid—to be greeted with an awed surprise that the Sun had permitted their escape.
“These gorath-wein have got the key, Trent,” my father concluded. “And we’ve got to have it.”
And he began to discuss with the somewhat horrified Zynlid plans for abducting Anak, who was “Lance of the Sun,” and priest-king of the civilized Martians, ruling from his Sun-temple in the city Ob.
“Anak knows secrets of peril,” warned Zynlid, apprehensively. “And he is guarded by the hosts of the Sun.”
“We know secrets also,” my father retorted. “And the Sun sent me to take the place of Anak, who is an impostor in the temple.”
Still seeking to convince the old nomad, he called on Trent for scientific miracles. All Trent’s equipment had been lost in the wreck. An effort to demonstrate gunpowder now failed for want of free sulphur. But at last the astronomer, if he still failed to grasp the mysterious principle of the blue dust of power, was able to repair and operate certain mechanisms that the outlaws had captured.
One that had lain a mystic but useless relic, gathering dust in a secret treasure-cavern for a full Martian century, now proved to be a weapon. A score of the enigmatic little tubes fed a Niagara of power to transformers and field coils. Its polar plates projected a tight beam of magnetic energy, whose terrific hysteresis effect could fuse metal at twenty miles distance.
The triumphant demonstration of this rusted war-engine restored all Trent’s shaken prestige, and secured full support of the nomads for my father’s daring plan—although most of them must have been secretly trembling with dread of Anak and his solar powers.
It was known that the priests of the Sun visited the inexplicable lonely mass of the Korduv at intervals, by air. My father packed the magnetic weapon on one of the hopping creatures, and carried it to a point fifty miles from the stupendous barrel-tiling.
There, braving the heat and the cold, the thirst and the dust of the open desert, he and Trent and a handful of the nomads waited for thirty-eight endless days. At last a double red ship came soaring over the dunes, toward the dark, far-off pillar of the Korduv. The outlaws were suddenly terrified.
“The gorath-wein!” came their hoarse, uncanny croaks of fear. “Flee! Or the Sun will slay us all!”
They scrambled to prod their beasts from the sand-burrows and mount them. But the invisible ray, with Trent and my father feverishly busy at the unfamiliar controls, brought down the red ship. The flight turned to a mad attack on the fallen machine.
Three priests and a priestess aboard were slaughtered. The only survivor was a young female child. Anak, whom my father had hoped to capture, had not been aboard. He soon discovered, however, that the Martian woman had been consort of the priest-king, and that the infant, Asthore, was his daughter.
Another red ship, sent no doubt to investigate the fate of the first, was also brought down. From the wreckage of the two, aided by two Martians captured in the second, Trent set out to put together one complete vessel. He worked day and night. The outlaws helped, and cheerfully tortured the two prisoners whenever they became reluctant.
BEFORE the ambitious task was done, however, a land force appeared, marching from the direction of Ob. There were two great machines like tanks, and a hundred lancers on foot. In the desperate battle that followed, Trent never left the ship and his reluctantly persuaded instructors. He was just learning the principle of the ship’s propulsion, by a system of gravity-shielding “spacial fields.”
For a time the situation looked very bad. My father was able to cripple both war machines with the magnetic ray. But then a similar ray from one of the tanks discovered and fused his own weapon. The bright-scaled lancers charged, howling triumphantly.
My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new ruler, sent from the Sun.
That halted proceedings for a ticklish half-hour—until Zynlid arrived with the balance of the bandit band. That was the signal for all hands to fall upon the lancers. They were cut down, to the last Martian. There were new weapons for every outlaw, and my father made himself a triumphant wreath of ear appendages.
Next day, as scouts brought word that all the eight surviving cities were sending contingents of warriors to Ob, Trent finished his repairs and safely flew the ship. The nomads triumphantly butchered the two captive priests, and ate their brains and livers in a ceremonial feast.
My father sent Trent aboard the ship with a crew of nomads and the little Martian girl, back into the northern desert. Zynlid, his hopping beasts laden with the spoils of victory, started back toward the hidden ravine. And my father rode alone toward the city of Ob.
After three lonely, grim days, parched and sunburned and chapped with alkali dust, he guided his beast into the “canal”—a belt of fertile, dark soil, irrigated from underground conduits and covered with low-lying, thick-leaved plants. He parleyed with the warriors who came to meet him, and they conducted him, half a prisoner, into the city.
Dark buildings sprawled flat and massive behind the walls and hedges that held back the seas of yellow sand. Although the city had several thousand inhabitants, and the central part about the towering conical Sun temple was now thronged with the lancers gathered to avenge the outrage against the sacred ship, by far the greater part of Ob was mere crumbling ruin. Its gaunt, bright-scaled people seemed to my father like lonely ghosts, trying to haunt a far-spreading necropolis. Mars was far gone in death.
Stating that he was an ambassador from the Sun, my father demanded audience with Anak. Suspiciously, yet with respect born of the unprecedented disaster to the sacred ship, the lancers took my father to the ancient, many-terraced pile of crumbling black masonry that was the temple. There Anak met him.
THE RULER was a tall, gaunt Martian, stiff with pride. Age had darkened his lustrous scales to a purple-black, and the horny carapace that crowned his egg-shaped head was crimson. His dark face was lean, hawklike, deeply wrinkled. Jet-black, yellow-rimmed, his eyes flamed with virulent hatred.
When my father advanced his old claim to being a dweller in the Sun, Anak shot him a look of startled incredulity that hinted of an astronomical lore greater than Zynlid’s. Ungraciously impatient, he listened. My father told him that his wife and baby daughter were prisoners, and that they would be released safely only in return for certain information.
What information?—Anak wanted to know. When my father began to hint that it dealt with the mysterious power tubes and the enigmatic mass of the Korduv, the priest-king burst into a savage rage. He snatched at a weapon, rasped and croaked and hissed like something reptilian.
Finally, menacing my father with a level lance, he champed out the gutturals: “Base and lying stranger, whencesoever you come, I, the true Lance of the Sun, know you never dwelt in his sacred fires. The foul dogs of the desert may believe your imposture, but not I. The holy flame of Life would consume you in an instant.”
The red shaft thrust viciously.
“I love my wife Wahneema,” grated Anak. “I love my child Asthore. But better that both should perish by your tortures than that I should desecrate the secrets of the Sun. Go back to the evil beasts that sent you, and die of the Sun’s flaming anger.”
