Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Ice tinkled in his glass as he drank and then twirled the goblet in his hand.

  We were sitting on the terrace of the Terrestrial Club and far in the distance, on the Mount of Athelum, we could see the lights of the Temple of Saldebar, where reposed the famous bones that were worshipped by the entire Martian nation. In the shallow valley at our feet flowed the multi-colored lights of Dantan, the great Martian city, second to the largest on the planet and first in importance in interplanetary trade.

  Several miles to the north the huge, revolving beacons of the space port, one of the largest in the universe, flashed, cutting great swaths in the murky night, great pencils of light that could be seen hundreds of miles above the face of the planet, a lamp set in the window to guide home the navigators of icy space.

  It was a beautiful and breathtaking scene, but I was not properly impressed. There were others on the terrace, talking and smoking, drinking and enjoying the pure beauty of the scene stretched out before them. Try as hard as I might, however, to keep from doing so, my eyes would stray from the lighted city and the lights of the port to the faint glimmer that came like a feeble candle beam from the Temple of Saldebar, set on the top of the highest, and one of the few remaining mountains of the Red Planet.

  I was thinking dangerous thoughts. I knew they were dangerous. It is always dangerous for an outlander to become too interested in the sacred things of an alien race.

  “Yes,” continued my friend slowly, “you would give more than a left eye. If you went monkeying around up there you would probably lose both of your eyes, one at a time in the most painful manner possible. Probably they’d put salt in where your eyes had been. Probably you’d lose your tongue too and they’d probably carve you up considerable and try a little fire and some acid. By the time they got ready to kill you, which they would do artistically, you’d be glad for death.”

  “I gather,” I retorted, “that it would be dangerous to try for a look at Kell-Rabin’s skeleton, then.”

  “Dangerous! Say, it would be plain suicide. You don’t know these Martians as I do. You have studied them and pried into their history, but I have been high-balling around from space port to space port for a dozen years or more and I have come to know them differently. A fine people to trade with and as courteous and polite as you would want, but they have tabus and Kell-Rabin is their biggest. You know that as well as I. They’re a funny people to look at. It takes some time to get acquainted with them, but they aren’t a bad lot. Get their dander up, though, and look out! Why, it isn’t safe to speak the name of Kell-Rabin. I, for one, wouldn’t think of uttering it where a Martian could hear me.”

  “We’ll grant all that,” I replied, “but will you stop to consider for an instant what it would mean to me, who have spent my life studying the Martian race, to know what sort of a man or thing this Kell-Rabin may have been. One glimpse of those bones might serve to settle once for all the origin of the present Martian race; it might serve to determine whether or not the race descended along practically the same lines as we of the Earth; it might even open new angles of thought to the entire situation.”

  “And,” grumbled Ken, “have you ever stopped to consider that the bones of Kell-Rabin are to the Martians what a bit of wood from the true cross would be to a Christian or a hair from the beard of the Prophet would mean to a Moslem? Did you ever consider that every man with a drop of Martian blood in his veins would fight to the death to protect the relic against foreign hands?”

  “You’re too serious about it,” I told him, “I know how much chance I’ll ever have of seeing them.”

  “Well,” replied my friend, “someday I may knock off for a while and try my hand at rifling the tomb.”

  “If you do,” I said, “let me know. I’ll be anxious to have a look.”

  He laughed and rose to his feet. I heard his footsteps go ringing across the floor of the terrace.

  I sat in my chair and gazed out at the feeble gleam of the Martian temple, set there on its mountain, towering above the weird landscape of the fourth planet. I thought upon the temple and the bones of Kell-Rabin.

  In the mighty temple of Saldebar, the revered skeleton has lain for ages, from time that had long since been forgotten. Through all of recorded Martian history, a history many thousands of years older than that of the Earth, the bones had lain there, guarded by the priests and worshipped by an entire planet. In the mass of legend and religion that had become attached to the Most Holy Relic, the true identity of Kell-Rabin had been lost. The only persons who might have any idea of what that mythical thing had been were the priests and perhaps even they did not know.

  “Quit thinking about it,” I told myself fiercely, but I could not.

  Exactly three weeks later I was served with deportation papers because I had attempted, in a perfectly legitimate manner through the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, to obtain permission to study the Temple of Saldebar under the supervision of the Priestly Council.

  I had shown, the deportation papers stated, “an unusual and disconcerting curiosity in the Martian religion.” The papers also specifically stated that I was not to return to Mars under the pain of death.

  It was a terrible blow to me. For years I had worked on Mars. I was recognized as one of the greatest living authorities on modern Martian civilization and in the course of my work, I had gathered a great deal of information concerning the ancient history of the planet.

  I had Martian friends in high offices, but I found they were no longer my friends when I attempted to approach them, hoping they might intercede with a word in my favor. All but one absolutely refused to see me and that one openly insulted me, with a dirty smirk on his face as he did it, almost as if he was glad misfortune had fallen my way.

  The Earth ambassador shook his head when I talked with him.

  “There’s nothing I can do for you, Mr. Ashby,” he said. “I regret deeply my inability. You know the Martians, however. No one should know them better than you. You have committed a mistake. To them it was the greatest breach of faith possible. There is nothing I can do.”

  As I stood upon the deck of the liner, whirling rapidly away from the planet I had devoted my life to, I silently, and unconsciously, shook a fist at its receding bulk.

  “Someday—sometime—,” I muttered, but that was merely to soothe my tortured pride. I never really meant to do anything.

  I saw the familiar, sun-tanned face of Kenneth Smith in the visor of the visaphone.

  “Well,” he said, “I have them!”

  “Have what, Ken?” I asked.

  “I have,” he said slowly, “the bones of Kell-Rabin!”

  My heart seemed to rise up in my throat and choke me. My face must have gone the shade of cold ashes and my mouth was suddenly so dust-dry that I could not speak.

  A great fear, mingled with an equally great elation, rose in me and seemed to overwhelm me. I stared, open mouthed, gasping, into the visor. My hand trembled and I think that my entire body shook like a leaf in a gale.

  “You look as if you had seen a ghost,” jeered Ken on the other end of the connection.

  I gulped and attempted to speak. At last I succeeded. My voice was hardly more than a whisper.

  “I have,” I said, “I have seen the ghosts of legions of Martians rising from their graves in protest.”

  “Let them rise,” snarled the man in the visor, “we have the damned bones, haven’t we. We’ll make them squeal plenty to get them back.”

  There was a hardness, a grimness, a death-head quality in his voice that had never been there before.

  “Why, what is the matter, Ken?” I asked, “Where have you been?”

  “I have been in the Grondas Desert in Mars,” he said. “Prospecting. Found a deposit of pitchblende that was simply lousy with radium. It would have made me one of the richest men in the universe.”

  “Wh
y, that’s good news …”

  “It isn’t good news,” replied Ken and the hardness was in his voice again. “The Martian government took it from me and I only got out by the skin of my teeth. Some damn clause or other in an old treaty about foreigners not being allowed any radium rights on the planet.”

  “That’s too bad,” I comforted.

  “Too bad,” he grinned like a foul monster of the pit. “It is not too bad. The Martians will pay ten times what that pitchblende deposit was worth to get these blessed bones back. The laugh is on the other horse now. In the meantime come over and have a look. I am staying at the Washington. The box is still shut. I thought you would enjoy opening it.”

  I snapped off the connection and clutched at the edge of the desk. I was alternately hot and cold. This meant … what did it mean? Kenneth Smith had robbed the Martian nation of the thing that was most highly prized on the entire planet. Not only Kenneth Smith but myself. Not for a moment did I doubt but our short talk on the terrace of the Terrestrial Club three years before had prompted my friend’s mad theft. My words had suggested to him the supreme revenge which he had taken on the crooked little men of Mars, our neighbors in space and our friends by treaty.

  I felt little remorse. Given the chance I would probably have done the same thing, not merely because of my desire to inspect those famous bones, but for much the same reason as had prompted Ken. My summary dismissal from Mars and the closing of its hospitality to me forever had been a great blow to my pride and the hurt still rankled deeply. The Martians had played rotten tricks on both myself and my friend. I did not think of any possible wrong that we may have done the Martians. In fact, from that angle of it, I felt a satisfaction that became keener every moment. This, in a way, was my revenge as much as Ken’s.

  I felt, however, an inexplicable terror, a dreadful foreboding. The fountain-head of the Martian religion had been profaned and I could imagine what would be the fate of those who had stolen the Holy Remains, if captured by the Martians. That they immediately had discovered the theft and were even now on the trail, I did not doubt. I shivered in sheer physical horror at thinking of the sinister little crooked folks seeking me out.

  They would demand that the Terrestrial authorities deliver us to their courts as a last resort, but only as a last resort. The Martians are a proud people and would not readily disclose a tale that would make them the laughing stock of the universe. It was with the priests of Mars themselves that my friend and I would be concerned.

  I laughed and jerked open a drawer in the desk. My hand reached in and closed about something that was metallic and cold. I drew it out and slipped it into one of my pockets. There might be need of a weapon and the little electro-gun that hurled living thunderbolts was the most effective weapon the worlds had developed. Not even the Martians, for all their centuries of a wonderful mechanical civilization, had anything that would compare with it. The gun was an Earth secret and only Earthmen carried it.

  I rose to my feet and laughed again, the bitter laugh of a conqueror who knows that his victory is empty, that he may, before the next dawn, face a firing squad. It was a great victory, a supreme insult to the Martians. Neither my friend nor I had any cause to love the people of the ruddy planet and both of us had ample for which to hate them. It had been foolish of Ken to steal the bones of Kell-Rabin, but it had been a master stroke…if one did not count the consequences.

  I let myself out and rode to the ground floor. From there I took an aero-taxi straight to the Washington.

  Ken let me in and bolted the door behind me. Then we grasped hands and stood for a long time looking into one another’s eyes.

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Ken,” I said.

  “Don’t worry so much about it,” he replied, “I would have done it anyhow. I just remembered what you had said, how anxious you were to see those bones. I would have thought of it, anyhow, for after that radium affair, I sat down and tried hard to think of how I could best humiliate the whole nation that had palmed that sort of deal off on me. Only, if it hadn’t been for you, I would have dropped the cursed box out in space somewhere. If they could find it out there, say, half way between Earth and Mars, I wouldn’t have begrudged it to them. As it is, I have brought it here. You can study those damned bones to your heart’s content.”

  He turned to lead the way to an inner room of the suite.

  “It was the rottenest thing imaginable,” he was telling me. “They let me find that deposit and then took it away from me. Confiscated it…threatened me with death if I made a fuss about it. Said they were letting me off easy, because there is a ten-year imprisonment clause in that old treaty to deal with any foreigner who does not immediately report such a discovery to the proper officials. They knew I was working on it all the time and never a word did they say.”

  He halted and wheeled to face me.

  “For two years I worked there in that blazing hell of a desert. I went hungry and thirsty part of the time and went through the sieges of desert fever. I fought heat and red dust, poisonous reptiles and insects, loneliness and near-insanity. I lost three fingers on my left hand when I poisoned them on some sort of a damn desert weed. I found it, tons upon tons of it. I have no idea how many and fairly rotten with radium. One cargo alone would have put me at the top of the world.

  “All I would have had to do was snap my fingers and the solar system would bow its knee. I worked, went through two years of Martian desert; I lost my youth, three fingers, and two years of living…for what? For what, I ask you? So that some bloated Martian official might glut his hideous belly, so that he might weigh down some simpering female with precious stones, and give great gifts to the priests who guarded the skeleton of a thing that should have been dust long ago!”

  His face was livid with rage. The man was insane! This was not the Ken Smith I had last seen only a few years before. It was another man, a man crazed by the horrible heat and the ghastly loneliness of the red reaches of Mars, a man embittered beyond human endurance by the scurvy injustice of an alien people who never had and never could understand the people of the Earth.

  He jerked his arm above his head and pointed at the ceiling, and through the ceiling, out into the blind darkness of space where among the swarms of celestial lights a red star glowed.

  “When they find out,” he shouted, “they’ll fear! Damn them, their stinking little souls will shrivel up inside of them. They will know the blasted hope and the terror that I have known. They are a religious people and I have taken their religion! I, the man they ruined, have taken the thing that is most precious to them. Someday, if they don’t find out, I’ll let them know, let them know that I rattled the musty bones of Kell-Rabin in their holy box and laughed at the sound they made!”

  There was no doubt of it. The man was mad, a raving lunatic.

  “And if they want them badly, as badly as I think they do,” he said in a whisper, “perhaps I’ll return them…at ten times the worth of my radium mine. I’ll bankrupt them. I’ll make them grub in their dirty soil for the next hundred years to pay the price I’ll ask. And always they will know that a man of the Earth has rattled the bones of Kell-Rabin! That will hurt!”

  “Man,” I shouted at him, “are you entirely insane? They know now, they must know. Why, the box is gone. Even now they must be searching throughout the whole solar system for it.”

  “They do not know,” replied my friend, “I took steps. I knew I would have no chance, even in my own ship, to make a getaway if they found out at once. There is another box, exactly like the one that holds the bones of Kell-Rabin, in the Temple of Saldebar, but it is an empty box…a box that I made and put there. I secreted myself in the temple and took photographs with an electrocamera and with those photos as my guide, I worked for weeks to make another box just like it, except for one thing. On one corner of that other box there is carved a message, a message to the priests of Mars, and when one
of them finds that message, they will know that the bones of Kell-Rabin are gone.”

  A sonorous voice filled the room.

  “We have found the message, Kenneth Smith,” it said, “and we are here to take the Holy Relic and you.”

  We whirled about and there, standing just within the room, was a priest of Mars, dressed in all his picturesque habiliments. In his hand he held a vicious little heat weapon.

  Looking beyond him I saw that the lock of the door had been melted away. Funny how a man will notice a little thing like that even in the most exciting moments.

  The priest was slow with his gun. I believe that, even with my gun in my pocket, I could have beaten him to it. Priests are not supposed to be compelled to use a gun.

  I knew, as I faced him, that quick death from his weapon was preferable to capture, and my hand went to my pocket. It was not more than half way out when a thunderous crash split the air.

  Kenneth Smith held his gun in his hand. It was as if it had been there all the time. He was fast with his weapon, too fast for the Martian priest.

  The priest was crumpled on the floor, a charred mass of flesh. The odor of burned hair and skin mingled with the sharp tang of ionized air.

  There was a scurry in the other room and through the doorway we saw another priest bounding toward the hall. We fired simultaneously and the figure collapsed in mid-air to lie smoking on the floor.

  “That’s frying them!” I gasped, the words jerked out of my mouth by the suddenness of the events.

  “We have to get out of here,” snapped Ken. “Quick, up to the roof. It’s only two stories up. I have a small flier there.”

  Chapter II

  Fugitives

  Dropping his gun in his pocket, he raced into the adjoining room. While I stood, stunned and hardly knowing where to go, he re-appeared and under his arm was tucked a box about three feet in length.

  He grasped me by the arm and we hurdled the two smoking bodies to gain the corridor. Doors were opening and heads were popping out of the rooms. Below us we heard the hurried tramp of feet and one of the elevator dials showed that a cage was rapidly ascending.