“Yes, Dad!” Alice broke in eagerly. "I hardly supposed that a rough spaceman like you ever thought along such lines! But you’ve got it pretty well stated! They have some of the charm of the Lorelei, and of fairy princesses and ruined castles and immortal woodland sprites and lost treasures—maybe even of Santa Claus! And they’re real! They’re a thing that our hard civilization wants and needs to rest itself—a little of special poetry, music, and magic! They’re a very unique blend!”
Well, that night a dozen would-be sponsors discovered that possible remarks like “We’re from Mars” could be made to rhyme with something about stars, and—just for example—some manufacturer’s candy bars. The idea, of course, was to make up commercial jingles, and have Marty and Martia vibrate them out in words and tinkles. I guess it could have been done without much difficulty. But I felt very sour to the idea right away, as did Terry and Alice.
“We know that what we’ve got is good,” I told these gentlemen. “We don’t mean ever to corn it up.”
No, I don’t think we lost a thing, here, by taking a firm stand. In fact I believe we gained in quality and respect.
From Phoenix we swung west, performing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Then we moved east again, to Minneapolis, and south to St. Louis and New Orleans, and up to Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, and on to New York. By then the names of Marty and Martia were up in lighted letters so big that you could have flown our old freighter, the Searcher, right through them. Three brief weeks of this kind of glory we had in all. For the time being, we were cleaning up in a very practical manner. But in the long run the pair that were our bonanza turned out to be fool’s gold. From the beginning, my memory and a hunch kept informing me that even those three weeks were borrowed time. Something bad just had to happen.
It was I who suggested a vacation up on the Maine coast. It was hot July, then. Terry and Alice agreed quickly. But I think that what we all wanted was not so much a rest, but, subconsciously, a place to entrench for trouble. Of course the subconscious mind isn’t always very logical. The Maine coast was no shelter against the legal suit which was what I expected mostly—not that any of us minded paying off. But trouble, when you feel sure that it is on the way, but can’t tell at what moment, or just how it will make itself known, can be magnified into a nebulous phantom which frightens the deep, primitive part of a person. A legal contact could be one approach. But there could be others. Someone at night, for instance. With this in mind, we had hired two armed guards.
As matters turned out, we were taken by surprise for one vital instant. It was summer dusk, soft and rich. The day before, we had made an interesting discovery—final proof of Martia’s femininity. Visible within her small, semi-transparent body, were a dozen tiny and incomplete duplicates of Marty and herself.
Alice was still smiling over this fact, there in the kitchen. Terry and I were also present, enjoying a pair of beers. The door to the garden was open. Fifty yards away a brook babbled. The Atlantic was half a mile distant. Right behind my chair, on another small table, was Marty’s and Martia’s plastic tank.
We heard footsteps grinding on pebbles. I turned, seeing dimly someone approaching from the garden—a man in slacks and checkered shirt and a hat. It could have been Mills, one of the guards, or a farmer neighbor . . . I know now, that, back among the trees, he must have been waiting for a moment when neither Mills nor Davis, the other guard, were in front of our kitchen door. He came right on into the kitchen without a greeting, and in a startling instant, until he stood as close as I was to Marty’s and Martia’s tank, and in a better position to take hold of it.
Not till then did we realize who he was. I guess we were too used to seeing him in the coverall of a spaceman. Besides, his scraggy whiskers were shaved off.
While Terry and I were scrambling furiously and defensively to our feet, he grinned kind of self-consciously, and said, “Hello, Durbin and Miklas. Weren’t you expecting me—sometime? I guess I have certain rights of discovery, concerning these sensational beings, too. Financial ones, anyway.’’
Brunder’s big hairy mitt was curved around that transparent tank. That was a bad circumstance, all around. My thought, then, was that he was talking about money, for which I acknowledge respect; though, where Marty and Martia were concerned, I realized more fully now that it wasn’t the main thing with me. When we had returned to White Sands from space, after performing a rescue, I hadn’t worried too much about Brunder, feeling that his own nefarious attempt to grab the Pisces Martis for himself alone was too dangerously fresh for him to try legal action against us. But now that incident was a fading memory, and we had begun to look rich, and hence possibly guilty in the eyes of the world. So I was more wary, now. Maybe I misjudged him, but my further thought was still that Brunder just wasn’t the kind to have any control over our small friends, whatsoever.
So I was all swift and perhaps ill-advised defensive action. I grabbed that tank, and he took hold of it tighter, and Terry leapt close to help me. For a second we all tussled; then all three of us went down on the floor. The tank, which we all still clutched, was overturned; its wire top came off, and its contents sloshed violently . . .
Alice gave an almost agonized cry. Terry said “Damn!” I used stronger language than that as I picked myself up for further action. But the last that any of us saw of Marty and Martia, they were scrambling away like mice into the thickening shadows of the garden.
“You numbskulls!” Brunder yelled sheepishly. “What in hell did you start messing with me for! All I wanted was to talk about my just rights, privately, letting bygones be bygones. Now look what happened!”
Our worthy ex-captain had a point there, I had to admit to myself—withal a doubtful one. But I had plenty of counterpoints of my own.
“Why didn’t you announce yourself like a man, instead of sneaking around and barging in like a cockroach, Brunder!” I hollered back at him. “You could have had your stinking share of the money we got from the programs! For all I mind, you can still have it, and be damned!”
He looked glumly furious, but said no more just then. He and I followed Terry and Alice out into the garden, where they were calling “Marty!” and “Martia!” But the only answer in the young night was the sleepy and lonely chirp of the crickets, and—the babble of the brook nearby.
“That’s it!” Brunder grumbled. “They would naturally have aimed for the water, wouldn’t they?”
“Bright man, ain’t you?” I snapped at him sarcastically.
“Knot-head, yourself, Durbin!” he snarled.
“I’ve a hunch that they’d make right for the ocean, via the creek,” Terry Miklas said musingly. “Hey—let’s all get in the car—drive down there right away! . . .”
So that was what we did, leaving the guards at the house. What practical good the excursion was supposed to accomplish, I don’t know. At the abrupt rocky shore, the brook became narrow and deep and gushing—no place to look for two small fishlike creatures, though we tried that futilely with flashlights. A big white moon was rising out over the Atlantic, its light making a twinkling path on the waves. Millions of years ago the ocean must have been dreamy and enigmatic like this, as no doubt it still would be, for millions of years to come.
We all walked along the shore, looking out at the water helplessly. At last Terry Miklas started one of his absentminded soliloquies:
“Maybe the sea was what they wanted, what they came with us for. On Mars there haven’t been any real seas for much longer than you can imagine. Trans-spatial migrants searching for a thing only dimly left in their race-memories—was that what they were? . . . We wanted to take care of you, Marty and Martia. But I guess you didn’t feel free. Well, good luck. But the Atlantic is awfully big and dark and deep. I hope you don’t get into trouble in it. . . .”
After a minute, Alice asked sadly: “Well— what do we do now?”
“One thing we can do,” I growled, “is get back to the house and figure up what
old Stinker Brunder, here, thinks we owe him, and pay him off so he'll go away where we won’t have to look at him any more. It’s worth the price.”
Mr. Brunder looked furious again, but maybe sort of hurt, too.
“Don't worry, Durbin,” he snarled in return. “I wouldn’t want anything that you thought was yours around me to make me itch. So you’ll get a deduction of a few thousand from your check to me—to cover yours and Miklas’ share of that load of algae brought from Mars in the Searcher.”
“Ah—now it’s Mr. Generosity, huh?" I sneered at him. “Listen, Brunder—I wouldn’t let you forget that algae, or our share, or who did most of the work. . .” It’s funny how people are. I hated Brunder less now than I used to; yet I was riding him harder.
At the house I made out his check. He said “Thanks,” and stalked away with awkward pride, which somehow made me recall how he used to scratch the back of Toby, that old tomcat of his, and of how once—have I even mentioned that before this?—I thought I’d heard him croon to Marty and Martia, when he had them behind the locked doors of his cabin aboard the Searcher. But we sure had gotten on each other’s nerves during that trip!
When he was gone I said to my daughter and son-in-law: “So is this the end of our strangest adventure?”
“I don’t know, Popeye,” Terry answered. “But I don’t see how it could be. Because we don’t know just what happened, or will happen, to our star performers. The adventure will go on, incomplete, until we find out. Or until somebody else finds out. And if nobody does, it’ll go on forever.”
The newscast people were out at dawn, and the news was given to the world. I guess most people remember. Right then some big commercial enterprises were exploring the cold moons of Jupiter, and beginning the hard-headed job of exploiting the mineral deposits there; but folks forgot all that for a little while. For their whimsical interests were drawn to a half-legend that had vanished again into the unknown, or had slipped into a new phase, leaving behind the memory of its reality, A million things were said by millions of people, and though the words might be different, the message was usually about the same. Here, a realistic, sometimes cruel populace, charmed by something little and different, paused to be kind:
“Good luck, Marty and Martia, wherever you’ve gone. And may we meet again. . . .”
Oh, there was some fear, too—perhaps not entirely unreasonable. One newspaper headline went something like this:
“SUPER FISH FROM MARS INVADE OCEANS. WITH INTELLIGENCE OF HUMAN LEVEL, WILL THEY MULTIPLY, MAKE PLANS? WHAT UNKNOWN DANGERS LIE AHEAD?”
These were thoughts which subsided as months passed, and the Atlantic remained unchanged, and the story of a brief visitation dimmed somewhat in most minds—Terry’s and Alice’s and mine not included.
Terry Miklas had early offers to go on making music for the public. He turned them all down.
“What they remember of me, Popeye,” he said later, “is that I was one of those who introduced Marty and Martia. People want to hear and see me for that reason—which doesn’t make my music worth listening to, in its own right—at least not yet. Besides, I’ve got to keep watch along the shore, here. Because you-know-who may want to come back. . . .”
When I thought about it, Terry’s purpose applied as well to Alice and me. Because Marty and Martia had been just about the biggest event in our lives.
We had expected to have a lot of money. When our debts were paid we were quite a ways from being broke, but we were down to an economy level. We kept the house we had rented there on the Maine coast. Now our watch began. Fishermen were keeping their eyes open, too, thinking that their nets might bring up one or both of the runaways, or maybe some of their progeny. But nothing like that ever happened, as far as we know. Though of course here was something to add to the numerous and ancient legends of the sea.
During those autumn days and evenings, Terry would walk alone along the rocky shore, or with Alice, or with both Alice and me; and he’d play on his harmonica—capturing some of the mood of the eerie music that we had all heard. He got better at it, as time went on; but improvement wasn’t his first motive.
“Maybe my tooting will draw those darn fools back!” he'd growl.
The vigil went on into the winter, when the Atlantic was often really something to watch—huge white breakers swirling and thundering in, and roaring like devils. I suppose that Terry Miklas’ patrolling of the shore, blowing weird tunes on his mouth organ, in weather like that, will make another yarn of the sea—a folktale of peculiar devotion—that will last for centuries along that coast.
But there were occasions, too, of quiet and fog, like that one evening in January. In this mild weather, all three of us were out there along the shore again. Far out, we heard the bell of a buoy clanking sleepily. And Terry tooted on his mouth organ again—little dreamy, coaxing bursts and trills, that no human besides himself could have produced.
Suddenly he stopped, and cocked his head to one side eagerly listening. Alice and I did the same.
“Hear that?” Terry whispered at last, tensely.
"Yes, Terry—yes!” Alice answered.
“I think so,” I put in. "Wait! Shhh!"
Just for a second the slurring, questioning notes were there, dim but unmistakable—coming from among the nearby rocks.
But when we had scrambled to the water's edge, there just wasn’t any more music, though Terry Miklas blew and blew on his harmonica. The sounds, as of a miniature xylophone, had faded for good. Our flashlights, boring through the fog, revealed only many seashells among the rocks.
"A shell,” Alice mused.
“They’re alive, anyway—at least one of them is—the perverse ingrates!” Terry growled, but his face looked pleased. “They could have returned to us, but they didn’t . . . Well, we all love freedom, so I suppose that any inspirational thing of legend has to be free.”
Again I felt chilly, yet pleasantly haunted. How many charming myths have been pursued, during the course of history? The Grail of the Knights. The Fairy Morgana. The Fountain of Youth. And now something else that we remembered as real.
Our watch continued there beside the Atlantic, which often is magnificent enough to thrill even a professional spaceman. Winter ended and Spring began; still there were no new signs of those we sought.
But in mid-May events took some fresh turns. The first of these was sour. While we wandered along the shore, we saw a hulking figure scanning the rocks, some hundreds of yards farther along the water’s edge.
I nodded toward the man and remarked, “So we’ve got company, once more. Brunder has been drawn back here, too."
He waved at us mockingly, and then moved off at his leisure in the opposite direction.
The next incident was much more of a romantic order. Terry and I were on that rough beach again, early one morning. We must have known every pebble and shell for miles each way, by now. But suddenly there was a glint at our feet; in the sunrise it shone yellow and metallic. I was sure that it hadn’t been there the evening before.
Terry picked it up, and held it in his hand. It was a tiny golden brooch with antique griffons on it, eroded by the sea. There was no doubt that the thing was centuries old.
Terry looked speculative, and something greedy and ancient ached in my nerves. “Once there were pirates,” Terry said. “Is that the answer for this—or part of it?”
Neither of us craved Brunder’s company, just then. But suddenly there he was, smirking at us.
“I’ve got as much right to be here as anybody, Durbin," he pointed out to me. “You found something, you two, didn’t you?”
“What’s it to you if we did, Brunder?” I snapped at him.
“Nothin’,” he replied with forced mildness and a shrug. “Except that so did I find something.”
He opened his paw, and a compelling curiosity made me look inside it. He had a tiny lump of yellow metal, which showed signs of having been stamped with a numeral or something once, though this was too wo
rn to decipher, now.
“It’s heavy, Durbin,” Brunder said. “I went down there by those rocks, and there it was.”
Terry and I were stuck with a swapping of courtesies, so to speak. So Terry opened his palm, too.
Brunder looked. Then he looked at me. “Gold ain’t worth what it used to be in the old days, Durbin,” he said. “There are too many sources of it now, in space. But it’s still worth quite a bit. And there are other more valuable things on the sea floor. I wonder if you are thinking of the same thing that I am, Durbin? That if a man had a small friend with special skills . . . Well, skip it, Durbin. See you around . . . Come on, Toby . . .”
Yes—there on a rock was that big tomcat of Brunder’s, glaring expectantly at the water, his tail lashing. Brunder had to call again to make him come away.
Now, and for weeks to come, Terry and Alice and I practically lived on the beach, for we had seen what might be a further sign. Terry blew on his mouth organ intermittently, hour after hour. Alice threw bits of bread on the ocean—it was something that Marty and Martia had liked. But the crying seagulls grabbed most of it. And the pair from Mars who had left us made no attempt to see their old friends.
But every morning, when we pulled ourselves out of our sleeping bags on the shore—every morning for ten days—we always found something that hadn't been on the beach the night previous. Always the objects were in the same little, less rocky stretch of shore, fifty yards long—as if to make them easier to find.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 35
