It was the whispering of a dying race. The Martians are as elusive as elves and all the pitiless logic of science had failed to draw them forth into the sunlight to stand before men in uncompromising arrogance as peers of the human race.
That failure was a tragedy in itself. If man’s supremacy is to be challenged at all let it be by a creature of flesh-and-blood, a big-brained biped who must kill to live. Better that by far than a ghostly flickering in the deepening dusk, a whispering and a flapping and a long-drawn sighing prophesying death.
Oh, the Martians were real enough. A flitting vampire bat is real, or a stinging ray in the depths of a blue lagoon. But who could point to a Martian and say, “I have seen you plain, in broad daylight. I have looked into your owlish eyes and watched you go flitting over the sand on your thin, stalklike legs? I know there is nothing mysterious about you. You are like a water insect skimming the surface of a pond in a familiar meadow on Earth. You are quick and alert, but no match for a man. You are no more than an interesting insect.”
Who could say that, when there were ruins buried deep beneath the sand to give the lie to any such idea. First the ruins, and then the Martians themselves, always elusive, gnomelike, goblinlike, flitting away into the dissolving dusk.
You’re a comparative archaeologist and you’re on Mars with the first batch of rugged youngsters to come tumbling out of a spaceship with stardust in their eyes. You see those youngsters digging wells and sweating in the desert. You see the prefabricated housing units go up, the tangle of machinery, the camp sites growing lusty with midnight brawls 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. You bring up odd-looking cylinders, rolls of threaded film, instruments of science so complex they make you giddy.
You wonder about the Martians—what they were like when they were a young and proud race. If you’re an archaeologist you wonder. But Bill and I—we were youngsters still. Oh, sure, we were in our thirties, but who would have suspected that? Bill looked twenty-seven and I hadn’t a gray hair in my head.
III
Bill nodded at Harry. “You’d better stay here. Tom and I will be asking some pointed questions, and our first move will depend on the answers we get. Don’t let anyone come snooping around this shack. If anyone sticks his head in and starts to turn ugly, warn him just once—then shoot to kill.” He handed Harry a gun.
Harry nodded grimly and settled himself on the floor close to Ned. For the first time since I’d known him, Harry looked completely sure of himself.
As we emerged from the shack the whispering was so loud the entire camp had been placed on the alert. There would be no need for us to go into shack after shack, watching surprise and shock come into their eyes.
A dozen or more men were between Bill’s shack and the well. They were staring grimly at the dawn, as if they could already see blood on the sky, spilling over on the sand and spreading out in a sinister pool at their feet. A mirage-like pool mirroring their own hidden forebodings, mirroring a knotted rope and the straining shoulders of men too vengeful to know the meaning of restraint.
Jim Kenny stood apart and alone, about forty feet from the well, staring straight at us. His shirt was open at the throat, exposing a patch of hairy chest, and his big hands were wedged deeply into his belt. He stood 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 the start, and he had lost no time in pursuing her. A guy like Kenny would have felt that losing out to a man of his own breed would have been a terrible blow to his pride. But just imagine Kenny losing out to a little guy like Ned. It would have infuriated him and glazed his eyes with a red film of hate.
Bill answered my question slowly, his eyes on Kenny’s cropped head. “I think we’d better take a look at his shoes,” he said.
We edged up slowly, taking care not to disturb the others, pretending we were sauntering toward the well on a before-breakfast stroll.
It was then that Molly came out of her shack. She stood blinking for an instant in the dawn glare, her unbound hair falling in a tumbled dark mass to her shoulders, her eyes still drowsy with sleep. She wore rust-colored slippers and a form-fitted yellow robe, belted in at the waist.
Molly wasn’t beautiful exactly. But there was something pulse-stirring about her and it was easy to understand how a man like Kenny might find her difficult to resist.
Bill slanted a glance at Kenny, then shrugged and looked straight at Molly. He turned to me, his voice almost a whisper, “She’s got to be told, Tom. You do it. She likes you a lot.”
I’d been wondering about that myself—just how much she liked me. It was hard 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 I usually wore when I waltzed her around and grinned and ruffled her hair and told her that she was the cutest kid imaginable and would make some man—not me—a fine wife.
That made telling her all the harder. The hardest part was at the end—when she stared at me dry-eyed and threw her arms around me as if I was the last support left to her on Earth.
For a moment I almost forgot we were not on Earth. On Earth I might have been able to comfort her in a completely sane way. But on Mars when a woman comes into your arms your emotions can turn molten in a matter of seconds.
“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 that little guy—more than you know. It’s natural enough that you should feel a certain warmth toward me. I just happened to be here—so you kissed me.”
“No, Tom. It isn’t that way at all—”
I might have let myself go a little then if Kenny hadn’t seen us. He stood very still for an instant, staring at Molly. Then his eyes narrowed and he walked slowly toward us, his hands still wedged in his belt.
I looked quickly at Molly, and saw that her features had hardened. There was 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 so calculated 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 clear and sharp and edged with cold insistence. “Know anything about it, Kenny?”
Strain seemed to tighten Kenny’s face, but there was no panic in his eyes, 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. He stood back a bit and continued to stare as if something vitally important had escaped him and taken refuge beneath the soggy leather around Kenny’s feet.
“What size shoes do you wear, Jim?” he asked.
Kenny must have suspected that the question was charged with as much explosive 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 made by 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 mind I’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 the hot and blazing glare, and the wh
ispering went right on, getting under our skin in a tormenting sort of way.
Kenny still wore that disturbing grin. He looked at the prints and grunted. “Yeah,” he said, “they sure are big. Biggest prints I’ve ever seen.”
He sat down and started unlacing his shoes. First the right shoe, then the 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 the shoes painstakingly into each of them. There was space to spare at each try.
It cleared Kenny completely. He wasn’t a killer—this time. We might have roused the camp to a lynching fury and Kenny would have died for a crime another man had committed. I shut my eyes and saw Larsen swinging from a roof top, a black hood over his face. I saw Molly standing in the sunlight 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 other foot.
A cold chill ran up my spine. It was Kenny who was doing the staring now, and he was looking directly at my shoes. He stood back a bit and continued to stare. He was dramatizing his sudden triumph in a way that turned my blood to ice.
Then I saw that Bill was staring too—straight at the shoes of a man he had known for three years and grown to like and trust. But underlying the warmth and friendliness in Bill was a granite-like integrity which nothing 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 two hundred and thirty pounds, all lean flesh. If shoes ran large I could sometimes cram my feet into size twelves, but I felt much more comfortable in a size or two larger than that.
What made it worse, Molly liked me. I was involved with her, but no one knew how much. No one knew whether we’d quarreled or not, or how insanely jealous I could be. No one knew whether Molly had only pretended to like Ned while carrying a torch for me, and how dangerously complex the situation might have become all along the line.
I stood very still, listening. The whispering was so loud now it drowned out the sighing of the wind. I looked down at my shoes. They were caked with mud and soggy and discolored. Day after day I’d trudge back and forth from the canal to the shacks in the blazing sunlight without giving my feet a thought until the ache in them had become intolerable, rest an absolute necessity.
There was only one thing to do—call Kenny’s bluff so fast he wouldn’t have time to hurl another accusation at me.
I handed Bill both of my shoes. He looked at me and nodded. I waited, listening to the whispering rise and fall, watching him stoop and fit the shoes into the prints on the sand.
He straightened suddenly. His face was expressionless, but I could see that he was waging a terrible inward struggle with himself.
“Your shoes come pretty close to filling out those prints, Tom,” he said. “I can’t be sure—but a wax impression test should pretty well clear this up.” He gripped my arm and nodded toward the shacks. “Better stick close to me.”
Kenny took a slow step backward, his jaw tightening, his eyes searching Bill’s face. “Wax impression test, hell!” he said. “You’ve got your murderer. I’m going to see he gets what’s coming to him—right now!”
Bill shook his head. “I’ll do this my way,” he said.
Kenny glared at him, then laughed harshly. “You won’t have a chance,” he said. “The boys won’t stand for it. I’m going to spread the word around, and you’d better not try to stop me.”
That did it. I’d been holding myself in, but I had a sudden, overpowering urge to send my fist crashing into Kenny’s face, to send him crashing to the sand. I started for him, but he jumped back and started shouting.
I can’t remember exactly what he shouted. But he said just enough to put a noose around my neck. Every man and woman between the shacks and the well swung about to stare at me. I saw shock and rage flare in the eyes of men who usually had steady nerves. They were not calm now—not one of them.
IV
It all happened so fast I was caught off balance. In the harsh Martian sunlight human emotions can be as unstable as a wind-lashed dune.
A crazy thought flashed through my mind: Will Molly believe this too? Will she join these madmen in their wild thirst for vengeance? My need for her was suddenly overwhelming. Just seeing her face would have helped, but now more men had emerged from the shacks and I couldn’t see beyond them. They were heading straight for me and I knew that even Bill would be powerless to stop them.
You can’t argue with an avalanche. It was rolling straight toward me, gathering momentum as it came—not one man or a dozen, but a solid wall of human hate and unreason.
Bill stood his ground. He had drawn his gun, and he started shouting that the prints couldn’t have been made by my shoes. I chalked that up to his credit and resolved never to forget it.
I knew I’d have to make a dash for it. I ran as fast as I could, keeping my eyes on the glimmer of sunlight on rising dunes, and deep hollows which a carefully placed bullet could have quickly changed into a burial mound.
A sudden crackling burst of gunfire ripped through the air. Directly in my path the sand geysered up as the bullets ripped and tore at it. Somebody wasn’t a good marksman, or had let blind rage unnerve him and spoil his aim. A lot of somebodies—for the firing increased and became almost continuous for an instant, a dull crackling which drowned out the whispering and the sighing of the wind.
Then abruptly all sound ceased. Utter stillness descended on the desert—an unnatural, terrifying stillness, as if nature herself had stopped breathing and was waiting for someone to scream.
I must have been mad to turn. A weaving target has a chance, but a target standing motionless is a sitting duck and his life hangs by a hair. But still I turned.
Something was happening between the well and the shacks which halted the pursuit dead in its tracks. One of the shacks was wrapped in darting tongues of flame, and a woman was screaming, and a man close to her was grappling with something huge and misshapen which loomed starkly against the dawn glow.
A human shape? I could not be sure. It seemed monstrous, with a bulge between its shoulders which gave a grotesque and distorted aspect to the shadow which its weaving bulk cast upon the sand. I could see the shadow clearly across three hundred feet of sand. It lengthened and shortened, as if an octopus-like ferocity had given it the power to distort itself at will, lengthening its tentacles and then whipping them back again.
But it was not an octopus. It had legs and arms, and it was crushing the man in a grip of steel. I could see that now. I stared as the others were staring, their backs turned to me, their blind hatred for me blotted out by that greater horror.
I suddenly realized that the shape was human. It had the head and shoulders of a man, and a torso that could twist with muscular purpose, and massive hands that could maul and maim. It threw the hapless man from it with a sudden convulsive contraction of its entire bulk. I had never seen a human being move in quite that way, but even as its violence flared its manlike aspect became more pronounced.
A frightful thing happened then. The woman screamed and rushed toward the brutish maniac with her fingers splayed. The swaying figure bent, grabbed her about the waist, and lifted her high into the air. I thought for a moment he was about to crush her as he had crushed the man. But I was wrong. She was hurled to the sand, but with a violence so brutal that she went instantly limp.
Then the brutal madman turned, and I saw his face. If ever monstrous cruelty and malign cunning looked out of a human countenance it looked out of the eyes that stared in my direction, remorsele
ss in their hate.
I could not tear my gaze from his face. The hate in it could be sensed, even across a blinding haze of sunlight that blotted out the sharp contours of physical things. But more than hate could be sensed. There was something tremendous about that face, as if the evil which had ravaged it had left the searing brand of Lucifer himself!
For an instant the madman stood motionless, his ghastly brutality unchallenged. Then Jeff Winters started for it. Jeff had come to Mars alone and grown more solitary with every passing day. He was a brooding, ingrown man, secretive and sullen, with a streak of wildness which he usually managed to control. He went for the madman like a gigantic terrier pup, shaggy and ferocious and contemptuous of death.
The big figure turned quickly, raised his arm, and brought his closed fist down on Jeff’s skull. Jeff collapsed like a shattered plaster cast. His body seemed to break and splinter, and he sprawled forward on the sand.
He did not get up.
Frank Anders had guns on both hips, and he drew them fast. No one knew what kind of man Anders was. He hardly ever complained or made a spectacle of himself. A little guy with sandy hair and cold blue eyes, he had an accuracy of aim that did his talking for him.
His guns suddenly roared. For an instant the air between his hands and the maniac was a crackling wall of flame. The brute swayed a little but did not turn aside. He went straight for Anders with both arms spread wide.
He caught Anders about the waist, lifted him up, and slammed his body down against the sand. A sickness came over me as I stared. The madman bashed Anders’ head against the ground again and again. Then suddenly the big arms relaxed and Anders sagged limply to the ground.
For an instant the madman swayed slowly back and forth, like a blood-stained marionette on a wire. Then he moved forward with a terrible, shambling gait, his head lowered, a dark, misshapen shadow seeming to lengthen before him on the sand like a spindle of flame.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 30
