"I'd forgotten them," said Vanya, "I'd been so torn and so upset that I forgot them. That's been a miserable time —these last several days."
She was silent, leaning back against his shoulder with her black hair glistening in the moon. Mark let her rest, seeing in the brilliance of the equatorial night that her face was still pale, and her mouth still weary; she had closed her eyes, and lay as passive now as when she had been in the depths of unconsciousness. The prau swept silently ahead; no light showed anywhere save the natural radiance of the heavens; they might have been alone, the only created beings on the bosom of the gigantic Sea. For a long time they moved in silence; Mark was wondering whether Vanya had fallen asleep when she moved her head a trifle, and spoke without opening her eyes.
"Shene and Loring and the Cove seem so remote that they might hardly exist. Shene's voice comes to me like a rumble that used to sound in the mountains, that sometimes frightened me in childhood. The roar of the avalanche, they'd tell me."
"Shene's more remote than that," said Mark gloomily. He had remembered, after an interval of forgetfulness, the disastrous outcome of the battle in the bar-room.
"Why? What does that mean, Mark?"
"Shene's dead!" said Mark.
"Dead! Mark—you didn't—you didn't do it! It wasn't you, was it?"
"No," he responded gloomily. "It should have been, but it wasn't. It was a better man; it was Loring."
"Loring!" Vanya's exclamation was one of relief. "Only Loring! It doesn't matter about him; he's only—"
"Hush!" said Mark. "Loring'a dead too. Shene killed him as he was fighting, Vanya. He was fighting to protect you."
"No! He couldn't—not Loring! He hated me! He wouldn't have tried!"
"He didn't hate you, Vanya. He didn't hate you; he loved you." Mark's voice was somber.
"Mark, you're mad! He hated me!"
"He didn't, Vanya. I know—though he never said a single word. I read it in the song he sang; he was singing while I, who should have been there in his place, was rushing like a fool to arrive too late."
"Mark! You don't mean that!"
"I heard him!" he answered. "I heard his song; it was joyous, almost ecstatic. I'd never known him happy before; he was glad to die for you, Vanya."
"I'm sorry," said the girl in a low voice. She paused, then continued. "I'm bitterly sorry. Perhaps I was wrong about him."
"You were wrong. The man was fine, somehow. He was good material ruined by—by something. He said it was the War; I never even learned his story."
"It must be terrible to die alone," said Vanya. "His family, if he had any, or his friends—they'll never know what happened."
"I was there," said Mark. "He was happy, I tell you. And I'm going to do something—a sentimental sort of thing, but I'll feel the better for doing it."
"What can you do?"
"I'm going to send these black boys back to Tongatabu, when whatever official is necessary goes over, with instructions as to how to dispose of his—remains."
"But how, Mark? You don't know his family."
"I'm going to tell them to bury him under his tree!" said Mark. Vanya gave a half-suppressed sob, and turned her face to his shoulder. For a while there was silence between them.
"Mark," she said finally, "won't we have to appear, or testify or something? Won't we be involved as witnesses?"
"What could you tell?" queried Mark. "You were passed out when things happened. Hong was the only witness, and I'm sure he won't drag your name into it. He won't want any additional trouble; he'll probably say, which is true, that Loring and Shene killed each other in a quarrel. They were always quarreling, anyway, and the circumstances will bear out Hong's story. And we, of course, will say nothing."
Vanya was again silent for a long interval, while the prau slid silently across the surface of the Pacific. At length she spoke again.
"Mark, dear," she said, "what is to happen to us now?"
"What should happen, dear?"
"You have the habit of success, haven't you?"
"Why, Vanya?"
"Look how you've beaten me—in everything. At first, on the Orient, I didn't even want to know you, and yet you won that battle. And then, on Tongatabu, I didn't want to love you, and you triumphed there too. And even in such little things as the night I tried to insist on dancing, you always ruled me. And now—"
"Now what, dear?"
"Now our last argument—this battle over our bargain. I refused to go through with it, even preferred to—to do what I did rather than yield, and yet—here I am in your arms, bound for Taulanga, loving you, and, I'm afraid, going through with that unholy bargain of ours! I seem to be utterly ineffectual against you, Mark."
He laughed, gazing down at her serious, pallid features.
"It's true," she said. "There's nothing left for me but complete and inglorious surrender. You've won, Mark!"
"Do you think so, Vanya?" he asked with an unaccustomed note of tenderness in his voice. "Dear, have I ever told you that I loved you?"
"No, Mark. And the one time I ventured to ask you, you told me you couldn't love me."
"When was that?"
"It was—why, night before last. You answered that with love on both sides our bargain would be no longer an unholy one. You must remember."
"And Loring, as always, was right in the surmise too," mused Mark. "Vanya," he continued suddenly, "I do love you! I've loved you since—why, since the passage on the Orient, I believe!"
He drew her to him, smothering with his kisses whatever exclamation she was trying to utter; she yielded with a willingness and a thrilling response that was new to Mark, new and ecstatic.
"Dear," he said finally, drawing a folded paper from his pocket, "do you recognize this?"
"Of course! It's Shene's marriage papers—the one we got on the Porpoise."
"Then let it go back to the porpoises," said Mark. He tore the document deliberately into tiny fragments that fluttered white in the darkness, and left a little trail of light patches behind the prau.
"Mark," said Vanya. "What arc we to do now?"
"We'll get a better one at Taulanga," he said. "A real one!"
THE END
THE LAST MARTIAN
A Poem
PASS, hours and vanish. When I die, you die —
All hours and years for these are fantasy
Lacking the Mind that ticks them as they fly
To unreal past from vain futility.
All knowledge, Space and Time exist for me,
Born in my mind, my Slaves, my instruments,
Tools of my thought, and somewhat more sublime
In that it soon must perish and go hence
Taking all concepts with it. Ages ago
When our young race knew hate, and love and lust,
This brain of mine should flow away to dust
A grey streak on the ruddy sands of Mars,
A broken flash of knowledge, contents spilled
Beyond recovery.
Going from tree to seed and seed to tree.
Unthinking plants surviving in my place,
Not individual mortality
Lives on, but immortality of race.
The Lotus Eaters
"WHEW!" WHISTLED "Ham" Hammond, staring through the right forward observation port. "What a place for a honeymoon!"
"Then you shouldn't have married a biologist," remarked Mrs. Hammond over his shoulder, but he could see her grey eyes dancing in the glass of the port. "Nor an explorer's daughter," she added. For Pat Hammond, until her marriage to Ham a scant four weeks ago, had been Patricia Burlingame, daughter of the great Englishman who had won so much of the twilight zone of Venus for Britain, exactly as Crowly had done for the United States.
"I didn't," observed Ham, "marry a biologist. I married a girl who happened to be interested in biology; that's all. It's one of her few drawbacks."
He cut the blast to the underjets, and the rocket settled down gently on a cushion of flame toward the
black landscape below. Slowly, carefully, he dropped the unwieldly mechanism until there was the faintest perceptible jar; then he killed the blast suddenly, the floor beneath them tilted slightly, and a strange silence fell like a blanket after the cessation of the roaring blast.
"We're here," he announced.
"So we are," agreed Pat. "Where's here?"
"It's a point exactly seventy-five miles east of the Barrier opposite Venoble, in the British Cool Country. To the north is, I suppose, the continuation of the Mountains of Eternity, and to the south is Heaven knows what. And this last applies to the east."
"Which is a good technical description of nowhere." Pat laughed. "Let's turn off the lights and look at nowhere."
She did, and in the darkness the ports showed as faintly luminous circles.
"I suggest," she proceeded, "that the Joint Expedition ascend to the dome for a less restricted view. We're here to investigate; let's do a little investigating."
"This joint of the expedition agrees," chuckled Ham.
He grinned in the darkness at the flippancy with which Pat approached the serious business of exploration. Here they were, the Joint Expedition of the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute for the Investigation of Conditions on the Dark Side of Venus, to use the full official title.
Of course Ham himself, while technically the American half of the project, was in reality a member only because Pat wouldn't consider anything else; but she was the one to whom the bearded society and institute members addressed their questions, their terms, and their instructions.
And this was no more than fair, for Pat, after all, was the leading authority on Hotland flora and fauna, and, moreover, the first human child born on Venus, while Ham was only an engineer lured originally to the Venusian frontier by a dream of quick wealth in xixtchil trading in the Hotlands.
It was there he had met Patricia Burlingame, and there, after an adventurous journey to the foothills of the Mountains of Eternity, that he had won her. They had been married in Erotia, the American settlement, less than a month ago, and then had come the offer of the expedition to the dark side.
Ham had argued against it. He had wanted a good terrestrial honeymoon in New York or London, but there were difficulties. Primarily there was the astronomical one; Venus was past perigee, and it would be eight long months before its slow swing around the Sun brought it back to a point where a rocket could overtake the Earth.
Eight months in primitive, frontier-built Erotia, or in equally primitive Venoble, if they chose the British settlement, with no amusement save hunting, no radio, no plays, even very few books. And if they must hunt, Pat argued, why not add the thrill and danger of the unknown?
No one knew what life, if any, lurked on the dark side of the planet; very few had even seen it, and those few from rockets speeding over vast mountain ranges or infinite frozen oceans. Here was a chance to explain the mystery, and explore it, expenses paid.
It took a multimillionaire to build and equip a private rocket, but the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute, spending government money, were above such considerations.
There'd be danger, perhaps, and breath-taking thrills, but—they could be alone.
The last point had won Ham. So they had spent two busy weeks provisioning and equipping the rocket, had ridden high above the ice barrier that bounds the twilight zone, and dashed frantically through the storm line, where the cold underwind from the sunless side meets the hot upper winds that sweep from the desert face of the planet.
For Venus, of course, has no rotation, and hence no alternate days and nights. One face is forever sunlit, and one forever dark, and only the planet's slow libration gives the twilight zone a semblance of seasons. And this twilight zone, the only habitable part of the planet, merges through the Hotlands on one side to the blazing desert, and on the other side ends abruptly in the ice barrier where the upper winds yield their moisture to the chilling breaths of the underwind.
So here they were, crowded into the tiny glass dome above the navigation panel, standing close together on the top rung of the ladder, and with just room in the dome for both their heads. Ham slipped his arm around the girl as they stared at the scene outside.
Away off to the west was the eternal dawn—or sunset, perhaps—where the light glistened on the ice barrier. Like vast columns, the Mountains of Eternity thrust themselves against the light, with their mighty peaks lost in the lower clouds twenty-five miles above. There, a little south, were the ramparts of the Lesser Eternities, bounding American Venus, and between the two ranges were the perpetual lightnings of the storm line.
But around them, illuminated dimly by the refraction of the sunlight, was a scene of dark and wild splendor. Everywhere was ice—hills of it, spires, plains, boulders, and cliffs of it, all glowing a pallid green in the trickle of light from beyond the barrier. A world without motion, frozen and sterile, save for the moaning of the underwind outside, not hindered here as the barrier shielded it from the Cool Country.
"It's—glorious!" Pat murmured.
"Yes," he agreed, "but cold, lifeless, yet menacing. Pat, do you think there is life here?"
"I should judge so. If life can exist on such worlds as Titan and Iapetus, it should exist here. How cold is it?" She glanced at the thermometer outside the dome, its column and figures self-luminous. "Only thirty below zero, Fahrenheit. Life exists on Earth at that temperature."
"Exists, yes. But it couldn't have developed at a temperature below freezing. Life has to be lived in liquid water."
She laughed softly. "You're talking to a biologist, Ham. No; life couldn't have evolved at thirty below zero, but suppose it originated back in the twilight zone and migrated here? Or suppose it was pushed here by the terrific competition of the warmer regions? You know what conditions are in the Hotlands, with the molds and doughpots and Jack Ketch trees, and the millions of little parasitic things, all eating each other."
He considered this. "What sort of life should you expect?"
She chuckled. "Do you want a prediction? Very well. I'd guess, first of all, some sort of vegetation as a base, for animal life can't keep eating itself without some added fuel, It's like the story of the man with the cat farm, who raised rats to feed the cats, and then when he skinned the cats, be fed the bodies to the rats, and then fed more rats to the cats. It sounds good, but it won't work."
"So there ought to be vegetation. Then what?"
"Then? Heaven knows. Presumably the dark-side life, if it exists, came originally from the weaker strains of twilight-zone life, but what it might have become—well, I can't guess. Of course, there's the triops noctivivans that I discovered in the Mountains of Eternity—"
"You discovered!" He grinned. "You were out as cold as ice when I carried you away from the nest of devils. You never even saw one!"
"I examined the dead one brought into Venoble by the hunters," she returned imperturbably. "And don't forget that the society wanted to name it after me—the triops Patricice." Involuntarily a shudder shook her at the memory of those satanic creatures that had all but destroyed the two of them. "But I chose the other name —triops noctivivans, the three-eyed dweller in the dark."
"Romantic name for a devilish beast!"
"Yes; but what I was getting at is this—that it's probable that triops—or triopses— Say, what is the plural of triops?" "Trioptes," he grunted. "Latin root."
"Well, it's probable that trioptes, then, are among the creatures to be found here on the night side, and that those fierce devils who attacked us in that shadowed canyon in the Mountains of Eternity are an outpost, creeping into the twilight zone through the dark and sunless passes in the mountains. They can't stand light; you saw that yourself."
"So what?"
Pat laughed at the Americanism. "So this: From their form and structure—six limbs, three eyes, and all—it's plain that the trioptes are related to ordinary native Hotlanders. Therefore I conclude that they're recent arrivals on the dark side; t
hat they didn't evolve here, but were driven here quite lately, geologically speaking. Or geologically isn't quite the word, because geo means earth. Venusologically speaking, I should say."
"You shouldn't say. You're substituting a Latin root for a Greek one. What you mean is aphrodisiologically speaking."
She chuckled again. "What I mean, and should have said right away to avoid argument, is paleaeontologically speaking, which is better English. Anyway, I mean that trioptes haven't existed on the dark side for more than twenty to fifty thousand Earth years, or maybe less, because what do we know about the speed of evolution on Venus? Perhaps it's faster than on the Earth; maybe a triops could adapt itself to night life in five thousand."
"I've seen college students adapt themselves to night life in one semester!" He grinned.
She ignored this. "And therefore," she proceeded, "I argue that there must have been life here before triops arrived, since it must have found something to eat when it got here or it couldn't have survived. And since my examination showed that it's partly a carnivorous feeder, there must have been not only life here, but animal life. And that's as far as pure reason can carry the argument."
"So you can't guess what sort of animal life. Intelligent, perhaps?'
"I don't know. It might be. But in spite of the way you Yankees worship intelligence, biologically it's unimportant. It hasn't even much survival value."
"What? How can you say that, Pat? What except human intelligence has given man the supremacy of the Earth—and of Venus, too, for that matter?"
"But has man the supremacy of the Earth? Look here, Ham, here's what I mean about intelligence. A gorilla has a far better brain than a turtle, hasn't it? And yet which is the more successful—the gorilla, which is rare and confined only to a small region in Africa, or the turtle, which is common everywhere from the arctic to the antarctic? And as for man —well, if you had microscopic eyes, and could see every living thing on the Earth, you'd decide that man was just a rare specimen, and that the planet was really a nematode world—that is, a worm world—because the nematodes far outnumber all the other forms of life put together."
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 106
