Dream thief

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  The thin air inside the cave convulsed as tremendous jets of water, rushing out of the sinkholes in the floor, erupted in gushers fifty meters high. The explosion knocked Spence sprawling as the floor rocked with the aftershock and tons of water rained down.

  Instantly he was swept into the narrow opening of the conduit, kicking feebly against the swirling flood and slamming full force into every curve of the pipeline until he learned to relax and let the water take him.

  On and on it carried him. Eventually it no longer filled the conduit; he could see a bubble forming on the roof of the tunnel. The bubble expanded until it covered a quarter of the pipe, and then half, and then it left him stranded on his stomach as it dwindled away.

  He slipped off his helmet and cupped his hands to get a decent drink, but succeeded only in wetting his gloves. That, he reasoned, was better than nothing, so he held up his hands and let the water drip off his fingers into his mouth. He repeated the process several times, managing only to arouse his thirst the more for whetting it.

  On hands and knees he continued his trek and arrived at the junction of a larger tunnel just as his muscles, every fiber screaming for relief, threatened to give out. This larger passageway stretched away on either hand into dark shadowy distance, slanting upward on the right and downward on the left.

  He tried the upward course, but it proved too Slippery, and each attempt brought him sliding unceremoniously down a before he got a dozen paces. He decided to stop before he lost his footing altogether and went skittering into the dark corridor behind him.

  He was just about to resign himself to having to take that course in any event when he spied, higher up in the tunnel wall, a small aperture he had not noticed I before. This opening suggested itself to him as an acceptable alternative and he decided to give it a try.

  The decision nearly killed him.

  Twice he reached the edge of the opening and failed to get a proper handhold, sliding back onto the floor both times. The third time he managed to tear away some of the algae around the rim of the opening for a better grip. He dug in and held on while he brought his feet beneath him, hoping to use them to drive himself up and into the opening. It nearly worked.

  He gathered himself for the push and then let fly. His head rose to the level of the bottom of the opening and he thrust an arm forward while his feet kicked against the smooth, slick stone wall. Then he brought his other hand arround and grasped the lip of stone. It was then he felt himself fallling backwards to the tunnel floor below.

  The fall progressed in slow motion. His hands raked the stone and then empty air as he twisted catlike in mid-fall, sank backward, and dropped in a heap to the floor.

  The impact knocked the wind out of him. For one horrible moment he could not breathe, and then air rushed in in great windy gasps. His ribs felt as if they had{been staved in, and his shoulder throbbed where he landed on it.

  What he failed to accomplish with strength and dexterity he achieved with patience and cunning.

  Using every inch of body surface to, increase the amount of available traction, he imagined himself a slug and oozed up the curving side of the tunnel toward the opening. He felt his hand hold and pulled himself up centimeter by painful centimeter until he could lean into the opening and squirm in on his belly.

  This new tubule also rose at a slight t upward grade which forced him to concentrate on every stele-one misstep would send him sliding out into the main tunnel like something expelled from a cannon. He doggedly placed one foot in front of the other and, arms outspread like a man walking a tightrope, labored up the passageway.

  This tedious method of locomotion wore on him, taxing already tired muscles to the limit. He longed to sit and rest, but the incline offered no advantage there. He lowered his head and pressed on, ignoring the pain shooting through his thighs like fire.

  A kind of benumbed melancholy overtook him, which he recognized as the sum of a number of factors-stress, fatigue, hunger, and pain not the least of them. Each step was a struggle against creeping despair; he longed to just sit down and let his fate roll over him like breakers upon a desolate shore. But he did not give in. …

  HE SLEPT AGAIN AND awoke, still exhausted but clearheaded and with a gnawing emptiness in his stomach. He was fiercely hungry, but the prospects of doing anything significant about it appeared depressingly slim. He resolved to push all thoughts of food and eating out of his mind.

  The attempt proved largely unsuccessful. Like the tongue that has just discovered the still tender gap where a tooth used to be, his mind returned again and again to probe the subject despite the pain it caused him.

  Under such extreme conditions hallucinations were perhaps to be expected. Still, despite this knowledge and his training in the ways of the human brain, the hallucination stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Unremarkable as hallucinations go, it nevertheless hit him with a wounding impact, as if the thing had exploded in his face. He tottered on his heels for a moment and then stepped backwards into the wall behind him where he slid slowly to the floor, eyes starting from his skull in shock and disbelief.

  There before him, glimmering faintly across the corridor, stood a door.

  No snarling, hydra-headed monster could have alarmed him more than this simple architectural object. At first he thought it must be an optical illusion, a trick played by overtired eyes. Then he knew he was experiencing a hallucination-seeing doors where he desperately wanted them to be.

  Following this observation, it dawned on him that persons undergoing hallucinations did not perceive them as such while in the very grip of them.

  A door! His mind reeled. What could it mean? Indeed, what else could it mean?

  Feverishly Spence began tearing away the algae by handfuls digging it out with his gloved fingers from around the imagined threshold. What emerged was an object of stone, cut from the stuff as the surrounding walls, with no external markings of any kind. He would have considered it a novelty of nature the except its smoothness, roundness, and perfect symmetry against a natural artifact. But he could not be sure. argued He lifted off his helmet and smacked it into the slab. He listened to the echo pinging away to the dim recess of the tunnel. He also heard a hollow sound beyond the b Overcome by a burning curiosity to see it lay beyond the supposed door, he leapt at the slab and began pushing with all his might, succeeding only in shoving his feet out from under him. Then he knelt before the door and tried to worm his fingers into the cracks at the sides. He arched his back and strained until he thought his heart would burst-and the slab began to move.

  It slid a few centimeters, and he felt a gush of warm air from behind the door. The algae on the floor around him flushed brightly. He smelled the stale dry air flowing out; it had an odd taste which he could not place-sweet, yet rancid. The air of a tomb.

  Once more he attacked the door with a fury. He was rewarded for his labors when at last the stone rolled back another few centimeters and he was able to squeeze his shoulders through.

  He forced himself through the narrow opening, dizzy from the lack of oxygen and gasping for breath. He collapsed on the floor and lay down, panting while waves of nausea from his overexertion slammed into him.

  A faint, reddish-gold radiance fell over him as he lay gazing upward, though where this might come from he could not readily tell. The walls around him were smooth stone and dull red in the ruddy twilight of the mysterious light.

  After a while the wracking nausea subsided and he was able to raise his head and look around. There was not much to see. The passage, bone dry and dusty, continued upward at a steep angle directly ahead of him. In order to find out more about his new surroundings, he would have to haul himself back onto his weary legs and climb that incline.

  Shaking with fatigue he squirmed onto his side and made to push himself up. His hand brushed something in the dust-a small ridge of stone. He looked down and saw between his hands the faintly outlined depression of a footprint.

  4

/>   … THE FOOTPRINT LAY SQUARELY in his path, outlined in the red dust thick upon the floor. A trick of the light, he thought; some odd stone formation. But he stared at it as if he expected it to disappear.

  Spence leaned down over the print and carefully, as any archeologist would, blew away the dust. Then, with the tips of his fingers, ever so lightly, he brushed away the thicker silt that had accumulated.

  The print remained, inexplicably pressed firmly into the stone-a print of an upright creature: quasi-human. Narrower and longer-it looked like someone had taken a man's foot and stretched it out of proportion. And it had only four small toes. On close inspection he decided that it was not missing any of its toes, as from an accident; it had been designed that way.

  He looked around to see if there were any other prints nearby, but there were none. He did discover that the print lay in the bottom of a slight depression boundaries by two smooth banks, as if at one time long ago an underground stream had trickled along this course.

  Spence sat in the dust, his mind reeling.

  This was the discovery of a lifetime-of several lifetimes. Probably the most important find in the last two hundred years. In the last thousand!

  Life on Mars! He, Dr. Spencer Reston, had discovered life on Mars. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Mars had once been home to something more significant than glowing algae. The thing that made that print walked upright like a man, perhaps thought as a man, was conscious of itself.

  The implications of his discovery sorted themselves out only gradually. Once the dimensions of his find emerged in their immensity, the finer details could be seen. The print very clearly had been made ages past counting, in order for it to have solidified into stone. If other articles of Martian civilization existed they would most likely be dust and ashes, unless fossilized.

  Of course, he argued, the print need not necessarily belong to an inhabitant of Mars at all. It could just as well belong to an intruder like himself. This did not diminish his enthusiasts in the least, nor belittle his discovery. The thing was extraordinary no matter how one viewed it, but it did cause Spence to slow somewhat and consider how little he knew about the print or how it had come to be there. Clearly, he had pushed speculation beyond reasonable limits for a scientist. He would have to have many more facts to substantiate his theories, to even begin to develop any theories.

  One print alone was not enough. He needed more to go on. One print alone was almost worthless. What he needed were bones, artifacts-any of the normal archaeological building blocks.

  Deathly tired, his mind beginning to wander, he crossed his arms on his chest and fell asleep beside the footprint with thoughts of red Martians crawling blithely over the landscape, besmeared with chalky red dust like pygmies, and himself towering over them saying something ridiculous like, "Take me to your leader." …

  THE ACHE IN HIs gut was back when he awoke, and his throat burned. A thick, gummy film had formed in his mouth, foul-tasting and nasty. His tongue felt large and uncooperative. He had heard stories of men dying of thirst in the desert, whose tongues had swelled, turning black in their mouths and choking them in the end. He wondered if this was how it started.

  Grimly he got to his feet, swaying dizzily. Black spots swam before his eyes. Hunger had become a demanding force, and thirst an ever-present fire. He knew that he had little time left before he collapsed in a faint. After several such collapses he would rise no more.

  He considered returning to the tunnel behind the door where the algae grew in such lush profusion. It occurred to him that he might be able to eat them and sustain himself.

  The only drawback to this plan was that the algae could well be poisonous. One mouthful could cause him to end his life retching out his entrails in a cold sweat, or send him screaming in agony to crush his head against the stones to stop the pain. These were the milder scenarios he imagined-less pleasant possibilities occurred to him which he did not care to entertain.

  Spence decided that if he had found no water by the time he slept once more he would return to the passage beyond the stone door-he now considered it a door in every sense of the word-and eat the algae, come what may. He would by that time be on his last strength and it would not matter which way his life finally ceased. At that point he would be willing to gamble, but not before.

  So, he lurched off once more, climbing up the passageway. Not more than a few meters up, the tunnel ended and he stepped into a vast underground cavity of enormous proportions. He began walking, head down, shoulders forward, arms swinging loosely at his sides.

  Soon he was pleased to discover that his gnawing hunger had eased. He felt clean, lean, purged of a heaviness that weighed on his body and spirit, electrically alive.

  Spence knew this to be the sensation associated with a fast. Medically, the effect was well recognized. Still, he could not help feeling the intense emotional impact of the phenomenon. He felt, for lack of a better word, spiritual.

  At intervals along the route-he decided to move directly ahead, keeping the tunnel at his back-thick columns of stone rose from the floor like the trunks of trees. He wondered at these but they, like the slab door, seemed to be natural formations such as one might find in any cave. There was no reason to believe they were not exotic forms of stalagmites peculiar to the Martian lithosphere.

  And yet the sprout of suspicion had already woven its snaking fibrils deep into his consciousness. What if they, like the footprint, were not natural?

  The implications were too extraordinary to entertain for any length of time. But increasingly the suggestion of trespassing occurred to him. How he had struck upon that particular word he could not say, but it seemed appropriate.

  He felt like one trespassing on private ground. A grave – robber desecrating a pharaoh's tomb. He imagined that at any moment a whole phalanx of spear-toting soldiers would come swinging into view from behind one of those strange columns. He had visions of plumed horses and chariots dragging him through the village square while the screaming alien populace jeered, "Thief! Grave-robber! Desecrater!"

  These daydreams he knew to be associated with his deprivation. He had begun to feel his thirst once more-the tiny amount of water he had scooped from the conduit floor was not enough to sustain him. He needed a real drink badly.

  He hoped that the flood which had washed him through the tunnel could be located again. There was water on Mars; maybe not much, but it existed. He had navigated it; finding it again was a project becoming uppermost in his mind.

  Gradually, as he walked along the dull red cavern floor, listening to his own footsteps pattering away into the darkness, the roof of the cave sloped away and with it the rust-colored lichen clinging to its surface. The lichen, he discovered, gave off a pale aura like the algae in the tunnels.

  He made his way along through a dim and hazy light of ruddy gold which reached him as sunlight through the flaming canopy of autumn trees. But here the trees were stone and no leaves scattered before his feet.

  He fell into an easy rhythm of walking, trying to maintain asteady course forward. The tempo of his steps carried him along.After a few hours of walking he slept again, and then oncemore after that-still unwilling to give in and return to the tunnel and the algae. Each time he slept less and woke less rested than before. He supposed this to be the effect of his fast. His body was beginning to turn on itself for nourishment. He felt lightheaded, airy, spiritlike, pure.

  In his journey through the Martian underground Spence's eyes turned inward and he gazed upon his life with the kind of aloof objectivity he usually reserved for his work, with the same meticulous scrutiny and the same relentless curiosity. Only this time the subject was himself.

  Though considered a fast-rising star by most, he nevertheless knew himself to have fallen far short of the mark. There were others he knew who had accomplished more, received higher praise, garnered more of the glittering prizes he sought, whose names were better known and respected more than his own. The resent ment he felt for thos
e fortunate others had hardened into a burning, almost ruthless ambition to surmount their achievements an ambition Spence had always prided himself on, thinking it a virtue and a means to his personal fulfillment.

  Now, considering his circumstances and the shallowness of his inner being, he viewed that ambition for what it was-a flame which had consumed nearly all his better qualities to fuel itself. Compassion, generosity, joy, even love-these had been given to the fire and it had all but consumed them. And now what had he to show for his pains?

  Nothing of lasting value. Nothing that would live after him. All had been directed inward, feeding the flame. That he had any redeeming qualities left at all seemed to him something of a miracle, so much had been given to the all-consuming fire.

  In this delicate, suggestible state he felt the loss of all those years of determined self-denial-the endless studying, working, striving. The waste appalled him.

  He had been convinced that the only success in life came through achievement. As a scientist he trusted only what he could see and examine. "If it cannot be measured," a professor had once told him, "it is not worth thinking about."

  He had laughed at the time, but now he saw clearly that the joke was on him. He blindly bought that empty philosophy, as did so many of his young colleagues, though they called it by different names and dressed it in altruistic rhetoric. Of course, he had told himself that his goals as a scientist were helpful to mankind and therefore worthy. But a real concern for his fellowman never entered into it. The goals were merely milestones on his private road to success.

  The question he kept coming back to, the one uppermost in his mind at the moment, was a question of ultimates. What, ultimately, had he done with his life? Had it been wisely spent?