The Man the Martians Made
Page 3
point to aMartian and say, "I have seen you plain, in broad daylight. I havelooked into your owlish eyes and watched you go flitting over the sandon your thin, stalklike legs? I know there is nothing mysterious aboutyou. You are like a water insect skimming the surface of a pond in afamiliar meadow on Earth. You are quick and alert, but no match for aman. You are no more than an interesting insect."
Who could say that, when there were ruins buried deep beneath the sandto give the lie to any such idea. First the ruins, and then the Martiansthemselves, always elusive, gnomelike, goblinlike, flitting away intothe dissolving dusk.
You're a comparative archaeologist and you're on Mars with the firstbatch of rugged youngsters to come tumbling out of a spaceship withstardust in their eyes. You see those youngsters digging wells andsweating in the desert. You see the prefabricated housing units go up,the tangle of machinery, the camp sites growing lusty with midnightbrawls and skull-cracking escapades. You see the towns in the desert,the law-enforcement committees, the camp followers, the reform fanatics.
You're a sober-minded scholar, so you start digging in the ruins. Youbring up odd-looking cylinders, rolls of threaded film, instruments ofscience so complex they make you giddy.
You wonder about the Martians--what they were like when they were ayoung and proud race. If you're an archaeologist you wonder. But Billand I--we were youngsters still. Oh, sure, we were in our thirties, butwho would have suspected that? Bill looked twenty-seven and I hadn't agray hair in my head.
III
Bill nodded at Harry. "You'd better stay here. Tom and I will be askingsome pointed questions, and our first move will depend on the answers weget. Don't let anyone come snooping around this shack. If anyone stickshis head in and starts to turn ugly, warn him just once--then shoot tokill." He handed Harry a gun.
Harry nodded grimly and settled himself on the floor close to Ned. Forthe first time since I'd known him, Harry looked completely sure ofhimself.
As we emerged from the shack the whispering was so loud the entire camphad been placed on the alert. There would be no need for us to go intoshack after shack, watching surprise and shock come into their eyes.
A dozen or more men were between Bill's shack and the well. They werestaring grimly at the dawn, as if they could already see blood on thesky, spilling over on the sand and spreading out in a sinister pool attheir feet. A mirage-like pool mirroring their own hidden forebodings,mirroring a knotted rope and the straining shoulders of men too vengefulto know the meaning of restraint.
Jim Kenny stood apart and alone, about forty feet from the well, staringstraight at us. His shirt was open at the throat, exposing a patch ofhairy chest, and his big hands were wedged deeply into his belt. Hestood about six feet three, very powerful, and with large feet.
I nudged Bill's arm. "What do you think?" I asked.
Kenny did seem a likely suspect. Molly had caught his eye right from thestart, and he had lost no time in pursuing her. A guy like Kenny wouldhave felt that losing out to a man of his own breed would have been aterrible blow to his pride. But just imagine Kenny losing out to alittle guy like Ned. It would have infuriated him and glazed his eyeswith a red film of hate.
Bill answered my question slowly, his eyes on Kenny's cropped head. "Ithink we'd better take a look at his shoes," he said.
We edged up slowly, taking care not to disturb the others, pretending wewere sauntering toward the well on a before-breakfast stroll.
It was then that Molly came out of her shack. She stood blinking for aninstant in the dawn glare, her unbound hair falling in a tumbled darkmass to her shoulders, her eyes still drowsy with sleep. She worerust-colored slippers and a form-fitted yellow robe, belted in at thewaist.
Molly wasn't beautiful exactly. But there was something pulse-stirringabout her and it was easy to understand how a man like Kenny might findher difficult to resist.
Bill slanted a glance at Kenny, then shrugged and looked straight atMolly. He turned to me, his voice almost a whisper, "She's got to betold, Tom. You do it. She likes you a lot."
I'd been wondering about that myself--just how much she liked me. It washard to be sure.
Bill saw my hesitation, and frowned. "You can tell if she's covering up.Her reaction may give us a lead."
Molly looked startled when she saw me approaching without the mask Iusually wore when I waltzed her around and grinned and ruffled her hairand told her that she was the cutest kid imaginable and would make someman--not me--a fine wife.
That made telling her all the harder. The hardest part was at theend--when she stared at me dry-eyed and threw her arms around me as if Iwas the last support left to her on Earth.
For a moment I almost forgot we were not on Earth. On Earth I might havebeen able to comfort her in a completely sane way. But on Mars when awoman comes into your arms your emotions can turn molten in a matter ofseconds.
"Steady," I whispered. "We're just good friends, remember?"
"I'd be willing to forget, Tom," she said.
"You've had a terrible shock," I whispered. "You really loved thatlittle guy--more than you know. It's natural enough that you should feela certain warmth toward me. I just happened to be here--so you kissedme."
"No, Tom. It isn't that way at all--"
I might have let myself go a little then if Kenny hadn't seen us. Hestood very still for an instant, staring at Molly. Then his eyesnarrowed and he walked slowly toward us, his hands still wedged in hisbelt.
I looked quickly at Molly, and saw that her features had hardened. Therewas a look of dark suspicion in her eyes. Bill had been watching Kenny,too, waiting for him to move. He measured footsteps with Kenny,advancing in the same direction from a different angle at a pace socalculated that they seemed to meet by accident directly in front of us.
Bill didn't draw but his hand never left his hip. His voice came clearand sharp and edged with cold insistence. "Know anything about it,Kenny?"
Strain seemed to tighten Kenny's face, but there was no panic in hiseyes, no actual glint of fear. "What made you think I'd know?" he asked.
Bill didn't say a word. He just started staring at Kenny's shoes. Hestood back a bit and continued to stare as if something vitallyimportant had escaped him and taken refuge beneath the soggy leatheraround Kenny's feet.
"What size shoes do you wear, Jim?" he asked.
Kenny must have suspected that the question was charged with as muchexplosive risk as a detonating wire set to go off at the faintest jar.His eyes grew shrewd and mocking.
"So the guy who did it left prints in the sand?" he said. "Prints madeby big shoes?"
"That's right," Bill said. "You have a very active mind."
Kenny laughed then, the mockery deepening in his stare. "Well," he said,"suppose we have a look at those prints, and if it will ease your mindI'll take off my shoes and you can try them out for size."
Kenny and Bill and I walked slowly from Molly's shack to the well in thehot and blazing glare, and the whispering went right on, getting underour skin in a tormenting sort of way.
Kenny still wore that disturbing grin. He looked at the prints andgrunted. "Yeah," he said, "they sure are big. Biggest prints I've everseen."
He sat down and started unlacing his shoes. First the right shoe, thenthe left. He pulled off both shoes and handed them to Bill.
"Fit them in," he said. "Measure them for size. Measure _me_ for size,and to hell with you!"
Bill made a careful check. There were eight prints, and he fitted theshoes painstakingly into each of them. There was space to spare at eachtry.
It cleared Kenny completely. He wasn't a killer--this time. We mighthave roused the camp to a lynching fury and Kenny would have died for acrime another man had committed. I shut my eyes and saw Larsen swingingfrom a roof top, a black hood over his face. I saw Molly standing in thesunlight by my side, her face a stony mask.
I opened my eyes and there was Kenny, grinning contemptuously at us.He'd called our bluff and won out. Now the shoe was on the oth
er foot.
A cold chill ran up my spine. It was Kenny who was doing the staringnow, and he was looking directly at my shoes. He stood back a bit andcontinued to stare. He was dramatizing his sudden triumph in a way thatturned my blood to ice.
Then I saw that Bill was staring too--straight at the shoes of a man hehad known for three years and grown to like and trust. But underlyingthe warmth and friendliness in Bill was a granite-like integrity whichnothing could shake.
It was Bill who spoke first. "I guess you'd better take them off, Tom,"he said. "We may as well be thorough about this."
Sure, I was big. I grew up fast as a kid and at eighteen I weighed twohundred and thirty pounds, all lean flesh. If shoes ran large I couldsometimes cram my feet into