Six days of travel brought them out of the desert into rock country again. Their water was almost gone, but more than half of the food remained. What did it mean? Why had they started on this tedious trek across the desert face of Mars? Why did they carry a burden so much greater than they needed? It puzzled him.
He could see that they were growing uneasy. They were behind schedule, and it seemed to make a difference—a big difference. He sensed impatience and a shade of regret growing in the big round eyes that stared up at him in the dark. And he resolved to do something about it.
At evening of the sixth day they were assembling in the lee of a crumbling bluff, waiting to take up the night’s march. Cramer hauled himself out of the nook in which he had been sleeping and beckoned to his neighbor, a large male with a broad black line down his back.
With the little creature at his heels, he strode over to where the leader of the caravan was assembling his followers. Squatting in the sand before them, he pointed off in the direction in which they were going, then to the waiting throng. He moved aside, out of the line of march, taking his black-backed friend with him, and made an imperious gesture of dismissal. Then he waited.
He had to do it again before they realized what he meant. Then he saw understanding dawn on the little leader. A flurry of excited mewing ran over the crowd of watching creatures. The leader seemed to be conferring with those nearest him. Next two of the older males separated from the group and came over to where Cramer sat with the black-striped one. There was a piping whistle from the leader and the line got under way, loping over the loose sand at a speed at least twice as great as he could make. With his three guides, Cramer followed as fast as he could manage.
Three nights later they reached their goal. They had cut through a wilderness of rotted sandstone, its tortuous gorges heaped with sand and strewn with talus from the tottering crags that lined them. Cramer’s sense of direction long since had been lost, but the three who guided him seemed to be certain of the way. About midnight they reached a sheer wall of red-ribbed white rock—the only white rock Cramer had seen on Mars. A dark line split it from top to bottom, a great fault in the planet’s crust. A foot or less of space separated the sheer walls. Into it his little guides vanished. With a moment’s hesitation he followed.
He had to sidle along like a crab, dragging his pack after him. He had to twist his feet around and fit them into crevices that threatened to seize them and hold them forever. He had to inch his way up fifty feet and more to where the crevice widened enough to let him through, or squirm along on his side through a mere rabbit-hole with three pairs of eyes peering anxiously out of the dark. Finally, lame and sore in every muscle, he reached the end, and tumbled headlong out on the ledge that ended the fault.
Ages ago a meteor had crashed into the center of a limestone butte, throwing up a shattered, weirdly broken wall of rock-wreckage and filling the bowl of the resultant crater with rock-dust finer than fine sand. The force of the impact had split the plateau along an old fault-line, opening the crevice which was its single exit to the outer world. Here in the hidden crater was the secret sanctuary of the little red-brown rabbit-men.
They were busy now—furiously busy. The floor of the crater swarmed with them, crouching close over the arid soil, scratching and prodding, shuffling queerly. Cramer could not see what they were doing, but they reminded him of a flock of hens pecking and scratching for grain.
His simile was poor. They were sowing, not reaping. A sort of insane frenzy seemed to have possessed every individual of the tribe. Piled in confusion against the walls of the crater were the dry stalks of a previous harvest. They looked queer—blighted. They had lost the sere red-brownness of the normal vines. A black dry-rot stained them, a powdery dust was eating them away. Many were contorted by huge knots and boles. Something had gone very wrong with that last harvest. It was that something that had sent the males of the tribe hundreds of miles across the arid face of Mars to find new seed. It was that something that had brought them to him and saved him from the terrible hunger of the red sands.
From the vantage-point of a cave-mouth, high on the wall of the crater, Cramer watched the planting. With their strong, nailed feet the males threw out the powdery rock-dust in long straight furrows. Behind them came their mates, strewing the seed with skillful hands. A sudden thrust of their stubby thumbs shot the peas from their pods—a double shuffle of agile feet covered them. At intervals of a few inches were buried large chunks of the porous water-holding fungus. Water was the greatest problem of the little half-human people—was, in fact, the greatest problem of any thinking race that would try to conquer the dying planet—but they seemed to have solved it in a way all their own.
Cramer learned more of that fantastic, frenzied ceremony of planting in the years that followed—ten long Martian years in which he came more and more to be one of the desert folk—the Maee, as his rude tongue translated their mewing call. They had a language of a few simple words, supplemented by signs and shrill expletive cries and whistles—emotion-sounds. They had a rude social order with a chief-leader and a nobility of the older and wiser males. In a sense they were monogamists, although with each recurring spring there was a mating ceremony in which many of the younger creatures took new mates and discarded old ones. Few of the older members of the tribe participated, squatting in their dark cave-mouths beside the mates they had chosen for life and staring owlishly down at the weaving, darting shadows on the crater floor.
They had no fire—no tools—and so far as Cramer could discover, no religion or superstition. They were animal, and yet they were not animals. They twisted bark into cord and wove it into bags, but they knew nothing of cloth and wore no clothes or adornments. They planted the desert peas and, in the long dry fall, reaped their harvest, but there was no use of plow or spade. Their sole implements were their feet and their clever hands.
The peas were the only food they had. Each harvest was heaped high in the dry, cool cave they had allotted to Cramer. Here they came when they were hungry and took what they needed. Cramer could never discover their system of rationing, yet system there must have been. As if by instinct each creature took what was proper and no more. In the beginning Cramer had thought to make their life easier by applying his human intelligence to the apportionment of the food under his care. There was never any need for that intelligence.
They lived to eat and they ate to live. So it seemed to Cramer. Whatever pleasures they might have, besides the annual ceremony of mating, meant nothing to him. Their psychology was not his. Superficially he became one of them, sharing in their simple work and feeding from the common store, but never in all the years he was with them did he really see into their minds. He was never really sure that there were minds for him to see.
Always he returned to the puzzle of the planting. He learned other facts, saw other things that helped a little to interpret the meanings that he could not see, but the real problem never changed. It was not a question of water. He had soon realized that. In some of the deeper caverns there were springs with water enough to keep them alive but none to spare. Once a year, over a range of about ten days, the underground sources were replenished by the melting polar ice, thousands of miles away. In those ten days they must plant—must sow their seed with its accompanying sponges of water. What moisture it gave was enough to sprout the peas.
With uncanny speed the young plants thrust their rootlets deep into the powdery soil, far down to the buried watercourses. By the time the fungi had rotted away and given up the last of their absorbed moisture, the desert-bred peas had reached a supply of their own. By that time, too, a second planting had become impossible. There was no longer water to spare for it.
That explained much—the impatience of the little creatures as time passed, when their straggling caravan was still far from home, the extra seed that they had carried, the importance of the planting ceremony to their simple lives. It did not explain why they had trekked hundreds of miles acr
oss a waterless desert for that seed. It did not explain how they had come to find him.
As the barren seasons rolled past, Cramer lost all count of time. He was a machine—an automaton—feeding, watching, dully wondering. He saw that that first harvest was incredibly rich. The stout brown vines were covered with swollen, heavy pods. The thick leaves grew huge and had a metallic sheen. The ordinarily minute blossoms grew into gigantic purple blooms that flooded the crater and the caves with a cloying, suffocating perfume. At harvesting Cramer had to find another cave. The granary in which he had been living was filled to overflowing.
The second year the purple flowers were smaller and their perfume less powerful. Some of the vines died and on others the leaflets were stunted and withered. Most of the peas were still enormously larger than any Cramer had ever seen, but there were a few, commonest near the center of the crater where the land was lowest, in which the pods were small and many of the peas shriveled and were dwarfed.
Year by year he watched the blight spread and the harvest dwindle. There was still food enough for the little colony, for those rich, early harvests supplied food for more than tw7o years as well as seed for the planting. But there would not be enough for long. All the peas were dwarfed now, and most of them were black and glossy as the leaves had been. Then in the fifth year a black stain appeared on the vines nearest the center of the crater and spread swiftly.
A powdery black dust consumed leaves and stalks and withered the roots. The peas were small and hard and black, with a bitter metallic taste. They would not sprout. That year, when the floods came and the water rose in the deepest caverns, half the tribe gathered for the trek across the desert in search of new seed. Cramer went with them.
When there was water enough to saturate their sponges, they went. Cramer’s eyes had long since adapted themselves to the life of darkness that he led and there was no delay because of him. In three days they covered the distance to the water-caves where they had found him ten earthly years before. For a single day they rested, filling their sacks with seed and replenishing their water. In three more days they were back at the crater. The water had subsided, but the females and young had stored away great quantities of the spongy fungus, saturated with water, in readiness for the planting. It was cool in the lower caves, but the water evaporated rapidly into the thin air. The year when he had come the caravan had returned barely in time. Another day or two and there would not have been enough water. That year many would have died.
Ten Martian years! On Earth that time would be almost doubled. Cramer’s name had long since been forgotten in the homeworld that he had loved. Among the Maee he was taken for granted—was almost one of their own kind. Then for a second time he went with the seed-seekers.
They came up out of the desert to the long, low line of red cliffs, pale rose in the starlight. A great wave of heartsickness rose in Cramer’s throat as he stood there under the towering wall of rock, staring out across the sands to that horizon which hid the hillside where he had been “forgotten.” Above him a great star glowed softly white among the steel points of the constellations—Earth—his home.
Crouched there at the mouth of his cave, the horizon lightening with the sunrise, he remembered Earth and men.
The Maee were weirdly manlike, but they were not men. Every day he discovered new humanity with them, but he could not forget the animal beneath. He longed for the heave of sullen seas against granite cliffs with the wind swirling in his ears and the scent of the pines in his nostrils. He longed for the lingering, fading tints of evening and the slow flush of dawn. He longed for the beauty of the moon, cheese-white against a bowl of cobait, diamond-studded. He longed for blue days when the sky-lanes were strewn with cloud-castles and for the softness of a night in which the stars were not hard, bright, watching eyes. But most of all, he longed for men.
The Maee had a language, but he could not speak it or understand. They had a life of their own, a society, but he was alien to it. In the long red days when the Maee slept and the sun shimmered over the brown vines, he would sit and stare into emptiness, dreaming of the sound of a human voice, longing for human friendship, hungering for all the complex trivialities that go to make up human life. Men were somewhere there beyond the sands and the contorted crags. He was a man! But men never came.
He turned away from the sudden glare of the sunrise and went into the cave. Ice glimmered in the gloom. He went toward it, touched it. It was cool and soothing to his feverish skin. He could close his eyes and remember the coolness of Earth—cool moss under the green arch of the forest—cool shadows across the hillsides—cool streams among majestic peaks—cool flight in the spangled darkness above the clouds. He could still remember. It was all he had now.
He let his fingers trail along the smooth surface of the ice. A little thrill ran up through his arms, knotting the muscles. He stiffened. He felt the sharp edge of a fresh cut in the ice.
Men had been here!
By daylight it was plain. Men had come often, had come recently. They would come again. Or—would they?
All through the day he sat thinking. It was hard to think now, after all the years. He was old now. And there was no answer. The Maee could not help him—could not understand. He could stay, hoping against hope that men would come, living each endless day twice over, lying sleepless through the interminable night, wasting slowly away. He could go with them, and never know. In the end he decided to go.
But he must be sure! He must not let them come and go without him! There must be a way! Laboriously, wakening the long-buried memories of a discarded life, he scratched his message in the thin sand that formed the floor of the cave. Then he went with the Maee.
They camel Day after day he clambered to the top of the cliff to watch, and one day they camel They were a steel-bright speck over the desert, glittering against the sky. They were an oval gem, tailed with fire. They were a smooth-flanked craft of steel, hurtling through the skies. They checked the vessel, settled slowly to the plateau. The side of the little ship swung open.
Men camel
There were two, young prospectors as he had been. He was lean and dry and old, a withered skeleton with a grizzled beard. His voice was strange, even in his own ears. He had not heard it for very long. He saw them smiling, nudging each other as he babbled out his crazy, jumbled mass of words—all that had happened—all that he had seen—all that he had learned of the Maee—everything—anything—anything so long as it was speech, so long as they would listen. The old man was cracked—he knew—but they were men. They were men! Tears were in his old eyes after twenty earthly years.
They gave him men’s food and men’s drink—canned meat and cold coffee out of cans—but it was better than the tasteless peas and the metallic, glowing water of the Maee. They put clothes on him and listened when he told them about the crater and the caves and the planting. They asked questions—polite, kind questions. They were being kind—kind to a cracked old man—kind because they were men—his breed—men! After twenty years, there were other men!
He listened to what they told him, eagerly, hungrily. They told him about Earth—about wars—Europe all one nation—the yellow peoples growing strong and bold—they told him about Mars of the canals—Lanak—civilization—new laws and new governments, and the new ways they had of mining, getting every last milligram out of the rock. “Soaking up the glow” they called it.
He showed them the crater and the caves and the Maee. The Maee were strange—timid. They squatted in the cave-mouths, watching. Their eyes shone out of the deep darkness. They moved away when he approached even the old black-backed one—even his old friend. They were strange. But it didn’t matter! He didn’t care!
He showed them the things that he knew—the granary—the water-caves. He gave them food, peas from the granary—all they wanted. They filled their ship with food and took water, plenty of water from the caves.
They were interested in caves, especially in those that ran back under the
crater. He was glad. He showed them all he knew—the place where the fungus grew and the tunnels beyond where there was light—caves too small for any but the Maee to enter. He had wanted to go in and explore, many years ago when he was still young. The tunnels widened beyond. But he was too big. These were men—clever, intelligent men! Eagerly he watched them drill and set their explosives. The Maee watched too, from the dark—myriads of round eyes watching from the dark. He ran with the other men when it was time, but the Maee did not run. They sat and watched from the dark till the glare came, and the noise.
The black-striped one was killed. Others died too—others he had known for a very long time. The gases got some of them, and then there was the concussion and the falling rock. The fungus-beds were buried by the rock that fell. But the men took the dead Maee away to their little ship and came back with torches and instruments to explore the caves beneath the crater.
He did not go. Somehow, he did not want to go where the Maee had died. The years had made him different from other men, more like the beasts, like the Maee. He saw different things and thought differently. But they went, trampling over the fallen rock, and when they returned there was a queer hard luster in their eyes.
They were men. They took him with them—away from the crater and the caves—home! The Maee watched them go, silently, from the cave-mouths. Myriads of green eyes glowing in the dark. He lay far back in the tail of the little ship, near the rockets, among the great piles of pods. The men were talking, whispering together, up forward in the control-cubby. He lay and listened to their voices. A half glow of contentment enveloped him. He was a man again!
The big man was talking now. The big man was Barron and the young one was Galt. Barron had a harsh voice, slurred and coarse. It was like Graham’s voice, years ago. Cramer didn’t like it.
“It’s lousy with the stuff!” Barron grated.
“Yeah.” Galt agreed to everything Barron said.
Strange Ports of Call Page 37
