Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  They checked and rechecked each gram of the rich ore with what seemed to Cramer childish exactness. As if in that huge fortune a gram or half a gram made any difference! They were dealing in millions—not tens and hundreds! After all, though, they were getting along in years and they’d led a pretty tough life. You had to make allowances.

  He stopped at the mouth of the shaft to squirm out of his suit. Instinctively he turned to where the locker should be, then laughed aloud. No more of that! This was just a hole in the rock now. The suit went into the ship and, in a few minutes, they’d be thundering across the desert to Lanak and the canals—and then home. Home! Ah! Earth would be good after six years in this barren hell!

  He stood looking out over the fantastic, tumbled badlands that reached away in red confusion to the horizon. Horizons were near on Mars, even in the great sea plains, and the clear air made them seem nearer. Without some kind of rocket-ship, no man could go into those eroded red wastes and live. None but a giant.

  There had been giants in the first days of men on Mars—men who had gone out into the desert and lived and, after years, had returned to die. They had made beasts of themselves—brutes living from hand to mouth, stalking the weird half-reptilian creatures that roamed the gorges, finding water in secret places and drinking blood when there was no water. It was a killing life, but they lived it.

  Thanks to the rockets that was all over. Even the poorest desert-rat could afford a tiny ship with water tanks and storage for a pay-load. Down there at the foot of the slope was the hut. Beyond, around the spur, would be the ship, hot silver in the sun, waiting for him. Gronfeld must have found the ’scope by now—probably Graham had remembered and told him. They’d be impatient, waiting for him to get back. Then up and away into the black skies, and all the misery of those six long years would be gone and forgotten. Forgotten! As if a man could ever forget in the desert!

  There was new life in his stride as he went up over the worn red rock of the hillside toward the place where the ship was. No need to go by way of the hut. Its rude walls of heaped talus were deserted and its smoke-hole gaped empty. He was done with that and all like it! Straight over the spur and down to the ship—that was the way. And then—home!

  His wiry arms drew him up to the knife-edge of broken strata that edged the cliff. Anticipation was tingling like fire in his veins. It was great to stand here alone, high above everything, and then to look up into the black sky and let your eyes drop slowly down—down to the horizon—down to the red desert—down to the sculptured hills with their spidery gullies—down at last to the silvery ship nestling under the cliff! He closed his eyes. Up now, and open them to the hard sky, and now down—down-down—

  The ship was gone!

  Forgotten. Oh, but it was bitter! It was an old story in the desert—one partner too many when there was a rich pay lode-one who could be conveniently “forgotten” until it no longer mattered. No one could prove anything when the desert was done with him. There was no one to care.

  He had the hut, and it was cold and empty, without fuel and without food. A few empty cans on the stone slab that had been their table, a shrinking stain of dirty water on the sanded floor—no more.

  He had the mine, and it was empty, a rifled seam in the cliffside with its pale glow of wealth fading away. A cluttered heap of rock from the last blast, after the electroscope had showed that the lode had petered out, a dribble of black ore-dust on the floor of the tunnel where a can had leaked, thin echoes clattering along the walls—no more.

  He had one feeble hope of life—no more.

  There was no water at the mine. While they were scraping feverishly at the side of the hill, wondering what they had found, what the ship carried was enough. When black millions stared at them from the red rock they knew that it would be but a drop in the gallons they must have. They had to find water and they must have food.

  They found water and food beyond the horizon—in the riddled, cavernous limestone that marks the buried streams and ice-caves of the Martian desert. They found the sprawling brown vines and fat pods of that nameless plant that has preserved the lives of more men than history can ever know. And for three long Martian years—years twice as long as those of Earth—they had lived on water and Martian peas.

  In an hour the ship had gone and returned with its tanks heavy with water. Half an hour to fill them—it meant at least a hundred earthly miles, doubled and trebled by the tortuous gorges that lay between. It meant ten days at the least.

  Most of those days would be waterless and all of them would be without food.

  There was water in the mine-shaft—a single can. They had forgotten that.

  Slinging it over his back in a twist of dried vine, Cramer went down past the squat red hut into the red desert. The sun was slanting down from the zenith and the long shadows were creeping out from beneath the rocks.

  Cramer lay flat on his blistered face in the red sand close under the edge of an angular spur of sandstone. Ten suns had climbed ponderously to the zenith and wavered down. Ten cruel nights had frozen the blood in his veins as ten burning days had boiled it. Ten days he remembered, five of them made horrible by the thirst that was drying up his skin, shriveling his flesh, clogging his mouth and throat with his blackened tongue and plugging his nostrils with caustic dust. Five days fusing together, merging into a red warped blur of pain and heat and thirst, riddled with crazy visions, wracked with cruel memories—five days of hell.

  Only God knew how many more there had been.

  It was day now. Cramer’s mind was very clear—crystal-clear and keen. Everything stood out in his brain sharp and distinct and hard, as though he were feeling them with his fingers or with his swollen tongue. Every little nerve in all his body vibrated with pain and every muscle was withered by his thirst.

  Thirst burned in him like a great never-ending fire licking up through his throat and mouth and nostrils into his brain. It was like a torrent of little ants, desert ants, sand-ants, swarming over his helpless body and tearing at it with venomed mandibles—a flood of many little units merging into one, yet all distinct. Every little pain in all his tortured body was a unit of the great red thirst-pain—every one distinct and clear in his brain. He could count them, if counting had not ceased to exist, if all meaning had not been swallowed up by the avid little pains that were part of the great pain that had become his body.

  There was a picture in the back of his eyes against the retinas. He could feel it there. It had lain there motionless, for as long as he could remember since his brain had become clear. He could not change it, for the muscles of his eyes were dry and paralyzed by the little pains.

  It was a picture of cliffs. Red cliffs rising up out of a tumble of broken rock into the black sky. Pink cliffs, cooler and whiter than the crimson sand that lapped hungrily at their base. Gray cliffs, dusted over with red dust and permeated with red. Limestone cliffs laid down in unremembered centuries in the depths of an unremembered sea. Bodies of sea-things, pulpy and white, showering down out of the cool green gloom and through the slow ages being pressed and twisted and broken into cliffs, high cliffs red with the red dust of sleeping iron—red marble cliffs cut into fantasy, hollowed with caves.

  He examined the part of the picture that had to do with caves. They were peppered all over the face of the rocks and crowded under its tilting time-eaten ledges. The cliff was rotten with them, big and little, black mottled against red, dark and cool and moist in the bright desert. They ran back and down into the rock and at the bottom there were slender rivers running in the dark, and long lakes arched over with shadows. In one of them stood dripping columns of sweet coolness—of ice—of life!

  He knew the caves. He had come before, in the ship, with Gronfeld or with Graham. He knew the caves. There was life there—the flowing life that had been in his veins, that the sun and red desert had sucked out—in the blurred, waterless days before his brain had become clear, and he was lying here. There was water there. There was
water!

  In the desert there was death.

  The hard, clear, bright picture in the back of his brain was blurring over with a sort of red-black veil, like clotting hot blood pouring down over his open eyes. The shadows of the caves were melting into the shadows of the cliffs. The cliffs were swimming in redness, melting into it, swirling fantastically in a vortex of swift, undulant motion. The desert and the cliffs and the cool caves of the cliffs and the hard black sky were all eddying into one, into a great red stain against his retinas, into a vast red madness in his brain—all swallowed up by the thirst—pain that had become a huge red Thing eating—eating—eating—

  The red swirl melted mercifully into darkness.

  There were dreams in the darkness. Not sight-dreams—not red visions—but sound-dreams. Little sibilant shufflings in the sands. Little clickings on the rock. Little excited whisperings and breath-hissings. And then there were touch-dreams. Little gentle fingers pushing through the pain. Little swinging motions, short and hurried and breathless. And then coolness. And then no dreams.

  Cramer woke to the cool vision of myriads of eyes. They were round eyes, big and phosphorescently green in the darkness. They had narrow pupils that pulsed and fluctuated as they stared at him, widening slits of black against milky yellow-green.

  The agony of thirst was fading. Moisture was in the air and in the cool stone on which he lay. Moisture was dripping musically on crystal, its sound singing in his ears. Moisture was trickling through his broken lips, over his swollen tongue, into his thirst-seared throat. Moisture was soaking into his parched skin and into the muscles under it, and into his hungering vitals. The eyes were giving him life.

  He moved, painfully. The eyes receded and their pupils became fine lines, fear-lines. The trickle of moisture through his lips slobbered and stopped. Eagerly he ran his tongue over the stain of water on his chin. Pain made him draw it back. A thin whimper whispered in his throat, and from the darkness a whisper answered, like the mewing of kittens very far away. The eyes came closer.

  Two of the eyes were just above him, very close. There was a grayness beyond the dark. Against it was the rounded silhouette behind the eyes—a small round head with great fan-like ears—a small, stout body—thin arms. There were hands and there was something in the hands. It approached him. The trickle of water began again and the other eyes came close to him, beside him. There were soft, deft touches of little fingers on his hot flesh. There was the caress of cool water. He raised his hand. His finger-tips touched fur, soft and warm, fur that flinched and then steadied. Sleek muscles moved under the fur. Blood pounded.

  Cramer drifted into sleep.

  Many times Cramer woke to the gray dark and the slow trickle of water on his burning body. Once he ate something soft and rather tasteless that woke a gnawing hunger in his vitals, but after a little that subsided into the dull throb of the thirst-pain that was being washed out of his soul. He slept again.

  When he woke the clearness had come back into his brain. It was a soft clearness, like deep water, not hard and brilliant as it had been in the desert. He saw things gently and his body responded drowsily to what he saw. He moved his hand, and it stirred lazily, as through water, with a sort of voluptuous dull ache throbbing through it as the muscles contracted. He let it fall again and rolled his head toward the grayness.

  The dark arched above him and the grayness was a soft blur against it. A thin column of water dropped down out of it to spatter on unseen ledges and spray his body with its delicious coolness. Far up where the gray began, as though at the end of a long shaft of pale mist, was a spot of bright white. There was a pink flush against it—a sort of glare reflected from some invisible source very far above. That white stain was digging into his memory. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back in the blackness. Then suddenly he knew.

  He was in the ice-caves.

  He had been here before. The picture came to him—the great cave above, opening under the overhang of the cliff, its mouth always in shadow—the green-white ice welling out of the crannies of the rock, glistening with moisture, reflecting the flush of the desert—the little rivulet of clear water dropping into blackness. He had gone down, far down, on a rope of twisted vines. He had seen the ice as a pale white blink at the end of a shaft of gray and felt the mist wafting up from far below. But he had not found the bottom.

  Now, as he opened his eyes again, it seemed to him that he could make out the shape of the cavern where he lay.

  It was a great hollow dome, sheer-walled, cut away by eddying water. There were dark spots along the base of its walls—tunnels, leading down. One of them was gray. And the eyes had disappeared.

  He rolled over on his face and drew his legs up under him, stiffening his arms. He rose on all fours, then tottered back on his knees, wavering dizzily. The nausea passed and he put out an exploring hand. There was a low rock quite close to him. With a heave he was on his feet.

  The cavern was suddenly much smaller than he remembered it. The roof swooped at him and the walls rushed in. Only the shaft of grayness stretched endlessly up, unchanged. It was as though he had been a little flat thing of two eyes and a brain, whereas now he was a six-foot mass of flesh and bone, a man.

  The idea started a little feathery tickling at the bottom of his brain. It was funny! He laughed a great roaring, echoing laugh that rocked thunderously about him.

  Abruptly there was a sudden wave of motion. The gray tunnel went flickeringly black. There was the click of tiny claws hurrying on stone. There were the kittenish mewings, alarmed and plaintive. There were the eyes again.

  They swirled about him in the dark. There were shapes that he could not make out, moving swiftly. The narrow pupils were dilated—questioning. The hurrying forms pressed close. Little hard hands pushed at his calves and knees. Clusters of paired eyes hovered about his thighs. Tottering precariously above them, he shuffled forward.

  There was a large tunnel that twisted steeply upward, too tortuous for any light to filter through to the inner cavern. When they saw that he went willingly, the little creatures ceased their pushing and pattered ahead through the dark, leading the way. At a fork in the passage they crowded into the false path, staring silently up at him. Then light came suddenly around a hairpin bend in the tunnel and he saw them.

  They were like rabbits. That was his first thought. They had small, blunt heads with huge round ears, and red-brown, furry bodies. Their hind legs were much like those of an earthly rabbit or squirrel, shaped for agility and speed, but their feet were like monkeys’ feet and their fore-limbs were to all intents and purposes arms—human arms—with tiny furry hands and blunt nails. They had no tails.

  If their hands were human, their faces were elfin. There were the great glowing eyes, slightly protruding, and there were stubby noses, soft and flat like rabbits’ noses. Their mouths were round and pursed with square white teeth. They seemed to wear a perpetual grimace of whimsical amazement. A “whimace,” Cramer called it, thinking smilingly of his Alice in Wonderland with its aptly coined words. The light-colored tufts of fur above the big round eyes helped to make their faces elfishly ridiculous. Cramer never forgot that first impression of scores of tiny furry fairies scuttling about on squattering legs, waving their furry hands in excited gesture.

  He looked down. At the base of the cliff, crowded into the narrow band of shadow that lay between the sheer rock and the desert, were hundreds of the little creatures, staring expectantly up. They were waiting for something—for someone. He wondered if it were he.

  Then he saw something that made him gape. The little beasts stood erect on their bent hind legs, like a rabbit or a squirrel on its haunches. That was a natural enough posture in animals of the type that they seemed to represent. But they were not animals!

  Slung over their shoulders were little fiber bags, woven out of the tough bark of the vines that swarmed over the bottom of the cliff!

  He stared down at those that surrounded him. They too had
bags—were shouldering them from a pile in a nearby cave-mouth. Five of them came struggling out of the depths of a crevice, dragging something huge and unwieldy. Then and there Cramer lost his last doubts as to the intelligence of these creatures of the desert.

  They had woven a bag for him!

  He examined it closely before he followed them down the sheer face of the rock to where the main group waited. It was like burlap, though coarser, woven crudely out of twisted strands of bark. It was crammed with fat pods of the big brown Martian desert-pea that grew so profusely under the cliffs, and in a sort of insulating blanket of heavy leaves was a spongy fungus-growth, its fine pores saturated with water. Cramer realized that his long trek through the red desert had not ended.

  The sun was low and they traveled in the shadows of the cliff until it merged with the red sands. Then strung out in a straggling caravan they headed out into the desert. From his place at the rear of the long line, Cramer watched their tiny rounded forms bobbing far ahead against the dunes. They moved with an elastic loping hop, very much like the rabbits they resembled, but with their sacks they seemed to him more like a caravan of gnomes, packing a fabulous treasure across a coral sea.

  With night they came together into a compact group with Cramer at the center. They could see in the dark as well or better than in the glare of day, but they realized that he must be guided and chose their pace accordingly. When day came and the sun glared at them over the edge of the desert, they turned aside into a labyrinth of gorges where there were crannies and burrows and a shadowed shelter large enough for him.

  They ate little and drank less. Cramer realized the necessity of that. Because of his stumbling presence the distance covered by their night-marches had been cut by more than half. They were on half-rations, yet they did not desert him or try to hurry him. These little beast-creatures showed more consideration than most men.