“Venerables,” Nelson said to Richard Webb across the fire.
Webb’s breath caught in his throat. Here was a thing he had never hoped to see. A thing that no human being could ever hope to see.
Six of the Venerables of Mars walking in out of the desert and the darkness, standing in the firelight. There were many men, he knew, who would claim that the race was now extinct, hunted down, trapped out, hounded to extinction by the greed of the human sand men.
The six had seemed the same at first, six beings without a difference; but now, as Webb looked at them, he saw those minor points of bodily variation which marked each one of them as a separate individual. Six of them, Webb thought, and there should be seven.
Slowly they came forward, walking deeper into the campfire’s circle. One by one they sat down on the sand facing the three men. No one said a word and the tension built up in the circle of the fire while far toward the north the thing kept up its keening, like a sharp, thin blade cutting through the night.
“Human glad,” Wampus Smith said finally, talking in the patois of the desert. “He waited long.”
One of the creatures spoke, its words half English, half Martian, all of it pure gibberish to the ear that did not know.
“We die,” it said. “Human hurt for long. Human help some now. Now we die, human help?”
“Human sad,” said Wampus and even while he tried to make his voice sad, there was elation in it, a trembling eagerness, a quivering as a hound will quiver when the scent is hot.
“We are six,” the creature said. “Six not enough. We need another one. We do not find the seven, we die. Race die forever now.”
“Not forever,” Smith told them.
The Venerable insisted on it. “Forever. There other sixes. No other seven.”
“How can human help?”
“Human know. Human have Seven somewhere?”
Wampus shook his head.
“Where we have Seven?”
“In cage. On Earth. For human to see.”
Wampus shook his head again.
“No Seven on Earth.”
“There was one,” Webb said softly. “In a zoo.”
“Zoo,” said the creature, tonguing the unfamiliar word. “We mean that. In cage.”
“It died,” said Webb. “Many years ago.”
“Human have one,” the creature insisted. “Here on planet. Hid out. To trade.”
“No understand,” said Wampus but Webb knew from the way he said it that he understood.
“Find Seven. Do not kill it. Hide it. Knowing we come. Knowing we pay.”
“Pay? What pay?”
“City,” said the creature. “Old city.”
“That’s your city,” Nelson said to Webb. “The ruins you are hunting.”
“Too bad we haven’t got a Seven,” Wampus said. “We could hand it over and they’d lead us to the ruins.”
“Human hurt for long,” the creature said. “Human kill all Sevens. Have good fur. Women human wear it. High pay for Seven fur.”
“Lord, yes,” said Nelson. “Fifty thousand for one at the trading post. A cool half million for a four-skin cape made up in New York.”
Webb sickened at the thought of it, at the casual way in which Nelson mentioned it. It was illegal now, of course, but the law had come too late to save the Venerables. Although a law, come to think of it, should not have been necessary. A human being, in all rightness…an intelligent form of life, in all rightness, should not hunt down and kill another intelligent being to strip off its pelt and sell it for fifty thousand dollars.
“No Seven hid,” Wampus was saying. “Law says friends. No dare hurt Seven. No dare hide Seven.”
“Law far off,” said the creature. “Human his own law.”
“Not us,” said Wampus. “We don’t monkey with the law.”
And that’s a laugh, thought Webb.
“You help?” asked the creature.
“Try, maybe,” Wampus told them cagily. “No good, though. You can’t find. Human can’t find.”
“You find. We show city.”
“We watch,” said Wampus. “Close watch. See Seven, bring it. Where you be?”
“Canyon mouth.”
“Good,” said Wampus. “Deal?”
“Deal,” said the creature.
Slowly the six of them got to their feet and turned back to the night again.
At the edge of the firelit circle they stopped. The spokesman turned back to the three men.
“By,” he said.
“Good-by,” said Wampus.
Then they were gone, back into the desert.
The three men sat and listened for a long time, not knowing what they listened for, but with ears taut to hear the slightest sound, trying to read out of sound some of the movement of life that surged all around the fire.
On Mars, thought Webb, one always listens. That is the survival price. To watch and listen and be still and quiet. And ruthless, too. To strike before another thing can strike. To see or hear a danger and be ready for it, be half a second quicker than it is quick. And to recognize that danger once you see or hear it.
Finally Nelson took up again the thing he had been doing when the six arrived, whetting his belt knife to a razor sharpness on a pocket whetstone.
The soft, sleek whirr of metal traveling over stone sounded like a heartbeat, a pulse that did not originate within the fire-light circle, but something that came out of the darkness, the pulse and beat of the wilderness itself.
Wampus said: “It’s too bad, Lars, that we don’t know where to pick us up a Seven.”
“Yeah,” said Lars.
“Might turn a good deal,” Wampus said. “Likely to be treasure in that old city. All the stories say so.”
Nelson grunted. “Just stories.”
“Stones,” said Wampus. “Stones so bright and polished they could put your eyes out. Sacks of them. Tire a man out just packing them away.”
“Wouldn’t need more than one load,” Nelson declared. “Just one load would set you up for life.”
Webb saw that both of them were looking at him, squinting their eyes against the firelight.
He said, almost angrily: “I don’t know about the treasure.”
“You heard the stories,” Wampus said.
Webb nodded. “Let’s say it this way. I’m not interested in the treasure. I don’t expect to find any.”
“Wouldn’t mind if you did, would you?” Lars asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Webb told him. “One way or the other.”
“What do you know about this city?” Wampus demanded and it wasn’t just conversation, it was a question asked with an answer expected, for a special purpose. “You been muttering around and dropping hints here and there but you never came cold out and told us.”
For a moment, Webb stared at the man. Then he spoke slowly. “Just this. I figured out where it might be. From a knowledge of geography and geology and some understanding of the rise of cultures. I figured where the grass and wood and water would have been when Mars was new and young. I tried to locate, theoretically, the likeliest place for a civilization to arise. That’s all there’s to it.”
“And you never thought of treasure?”
“I thought of finding out something about the Martian culture,” Webb said. “How it rose and why it fell and what it might be like.”
Wampus spat. “You aren’t even sure there is a city,” he said disgustedly.
“Not until just now,” said Webb. “Now I know there is.”
“From what them little critters said?”
Webb nodded. “From what they said. That’s right.”
Wampus grunted and was silent.
Webb watched the two across the campfire from him.
The
y think I’m soft, he thought. They despise me because I’m soft. They would leave me in a minute if it served their purpose or they’d put a knife into me without a second thought if that should serve their purpose…if there was something that I had they wanted.
There had been no choice, he realized. He could not have gone alone into this wilderness, for if he’d tried he probably wouldn’t have lived beyond the second day. It took special knowledge to live here and a special technique and a certain kind of mind. A man had to develop a high survival factor to walk into Mars behind the settlements.
And the settlements now were very far away. Somewhere to the east.
“Tomorrow,” Wampus said, “we change directions. We go north instead of west.”
Webb said nothing. His hand slid around cautiously and touched the gun at his belt, to make sure that it was there.
It had been a mistake to hire these two, he knew. But probably none of the others would have been better. They were all of a breed, a toughened, vicious band of men who roamed the wilderness, hunting, trapping, mining, taking what they found. Wampus and Nelson had been the only two at the post when he had arrived. All the other sand men had gone a week before, back to their hunting grounds.
At first they had been respectful, almost fawning. But as the days went on they felt surer of their ground and had grown insolent. Now Webb knew that he’d been taken for a sucker. The two stayed at the post, he knew now, for no other reason than that they were without a grubstake. He was that grubstake. He supplied them with the trappings they needed to get back into the wilderness. Once he had been a grubstake, now he was a burden.
“I said,” declared Wampus, “that tomorrow we go north.”
Webb still said nothing.
“You heard me, didn’t you?” asked Wampus.
“The first time,” Webb said.
“We go north,” said Wampus, “and we travel fast.”
“You got a Seven staked out somewhere?”
Lars snickered. “Ain’t that the damnedest thing you ever heard of? Takes seven of them. Now with us, it just takes a man and woman.”
“I asked you,” said Webb to Wampus, “if you have a Seven caged up somewhere?”
“No,” said Wampus. “We just go north, that’s all.”
“I hired you to take me west.”
Wampus snarled at him. “I thought you’d say that, Webb. I just wanted to know exactly how you felt about it.”
“You want to leave me stranded here,” said Webb. “You took my money and agreed to guide me. Now you have something else to do. You either have a Seven or you think you know where you can find one. And if I knew and talked, you would be in danger. So there’s only one of two things that you can do with me. You can kill me or you can leave me and let something else do the job for you.”
Lars said: “We’re giving you a choice, ain’t we?”
Webb looked at Wampus and the man nodded. “You got your choice, Webb.”
He could go for his gun, of course. He could get one of them, most likely, before the other one got him. But there would be nothing gained. He would be just as dead as if they shot him out of hand. As far as that went he was as good as dead anyhow, for hundreds of miles stretched between him and the settlements and even if he were able to cross those many miles there was no guarantee that he could find the settlements.
“We’re moving out right now,” said Wampus. “Ain’t smart to travel in the dark, but ain’t the first time that we had to do it. We’ll be up north in a day or two.”
Lars nodded. “Once we get back to the settlements, Webb, we’ll h’ist a drink to you.”
Wampus joined in the spirit of the moment. “Good likker, Webb. We can afford good likker then.”
Webb said nothing, did not move. He sat on the ground, relaxed.
And that, he told himself, was the thing that scared him. That he could sit and know what was about to happen and be so unconcerned about it.
Perhaps it had been the miles of wilderness that made it possible, the harsh, raw land and the vicious life that moved across the land…the ever-hungering, ever-hunting life that prowled and stalked and killed. Here life was stripped to its essentials and one learned that the line between life and death was a thin line at best.
“Well,” said Wampus finally, “what will it be, Webb.”
“I think,” said Webb, gravely, “I think I’ll take my chance on living.”
Lars clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Too bad,” he said. “We was hoping it’d be the other way around. Then we could take all the stuff. As it is, we got to leave you some.”
“You can always sneak back,” said Webb, “and shoot me as I sit here. It would be an easy thing.”
“That,” said Wampus, “is not a bad idea.”
Lars said: “Give me your gun, Webb. I’ll throw it back to you when we leave. But we ain’t taking a chance of you plugging us while we’re getting ready.”
Webb lifted his gun out of its holster and handed it over. Still sitting where he was, he watched them pack and stow the supplies into the wilderness wagon.
Finally it was done.
“We’re leaving you plenty to last,” Wampus told him. “More than enough.”
“Probably,” said Webb. “You figure I can’t last very long.”
“If it was me,” said Wampus, “I’d take it quick and easy.”
Webb sat for a long time, listening to the motor of the wagon until it was out of hearing, then waiting for the gun blast that would send him toppling face forward into the flaming campfire.
But finally he knew that it would not come. He piled more fuel on the fire and crawled into his sleeping bag.
In the morning he headed east, following backward along the tracks of the wilderness wagon. They’d guide him, he knew, for a week or so, but finally they would disappear, brushed out by drifting sand and by the action of the weak and whining wind that sometimes blew across the bleakness of the wilderness.
Anyhow, while he followed them he would know at least he was going in the right direction. Although more than likely he would be dead before they faded out, for the wilderness crawled with too much sudden death to be sure of living from one moment to the next.
He walked with the gun hanging in his hand, watching every side, stopping at the top of the ridges to study the terrain in front of him before he moved down into it.
The unaccustomed pack which he had fashioned inexpertly out of his sleeping bag grew heavier as the day progressed and chafed his shoulders raw. The sun was warm…as warm as the night would be cold…and thirst mounted in his throat to choke him. Carefully he doled out sips of water from the scanty supply the two had left him.
He knew he would not get back. Somewhere between where he stood and the settlements he would die of lack of water or of an insect bite or beneath the jaws and fangs of some charging beast or from sheer exhaustion.
There was, once you thought it out, no reason why a man should try to get back…since there was utterly no chance that he would get back. But Webb didn’t stop to reason it out; he set his face toward the east and followed the wagon tracks.
For there was a humanness in him that said he must try at least…that he must go as far as he could go, that he must avoid death as long as he could. So on he went, going as far as he could go and avoiding death.
He spotted the ant colony in time to circle it, but he circled it too closely and the insects, catching scent of food within their grasp, streamed out after him. It took a mile of running before he outdistanced them.
He saw the crouching beast camouflaged against the sand, where it was waiting for him, and shot it where it lay. Later in the day, when another monstrosity came tearing out from behind a rock outcropping, his bullet caught it between the eyes before it had covered half the distance.
For an hour he squatted, u
nmoving, on the sand, while a huge insect that looked like a bumblebee, but wasn’t, hunted for the thing that it had sighted only a moment before. But since it could recognize a thing through motion only, it finally gave up and went away. Webb stayed squatting for another half hour against the chance that it had not gone away, but was lurking somewhere watching for the motion it had sighted to take up again.
These times he avoided death, but he knew that the hour would come when he would not see a danger, or having seen it, would not move fast enough to stop it.
The mirages came to haunt him, to steal his eyes from the things that he should be watching. Mirages that flickered in the sky, with their feet upon the ground. Tantalizing pictures of things that could not be on Mars, of places that might have been at one time…but that very long ago.
Mirages of broad, slow rivers with the slant of sail upon them. Mirages of green forests that stretched across the hills and so clear, so close that one could see the little clumps of wild flowers that grew among the trees. And in some of them the hint of snow-capped mountains, in a world that knew no mountains.
He kept a watch for fuel as he went along, hoping to find a cache of “embalmed” wood cropping out of the sand…wood left over from that dim age when these hills and valleys had been forest covered, wood that had escaped the ravages of time and now lay like the dried mummies of trees in the aridness of the desert.
But there was none to be found and he knew that more than likely he would have to spend a fireless night. He could not spend a night in the open without fire. If he tried it, he would be gobbled up an hour after twilight had set in.
He must somehow find shelter in one of the many caves of the weird rock formations that sprang out of the desert. Find a cave and clean out whatever might be in it, block its entrance with stones and boulders and sleep with gun in hand.
It had sounded easy when he thought of it, but while there were many caves, he was forced to reject them one by one since each of them had too large an opening to be closed against attack. A cave, he knew, with an unclosed mouth, would be no better than a trap.
The sun was less than an hour high when he finally spotted a cave that would serve the purpose, located on a ledge of stone jutting out of a steep hill.
The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories Page 20