by Larry Niven
Chris Luden, sitting on the steep side of the dune, thoughtfully scratched the side of his helmet. “Why not? We haven’t seen any live Martians, and it’s for sure that nobody else has a claim. Sure, we’ll file our claim; the worst they can do is disallow it.”
“One thing. I didn’t mention it before because I wanted you to see for yourself, but the heck with it. One of those blocks is covered solid with deep scratches.”
“They all are.”
“Not like these. These are deep, and they’re all at forty-five degree angles, unless my imagination is fooling me. They’re too fine to be sure, but I think it’s some kind of writing.”
And without waiting for an answer, Henry took off on the air jets. He was good at it. He was like a ballet dancer. You could see Henry shifting weight, but the scooter never seemed to move.
Something was emerging from the sand. Something not a rock.
Something like a piece of modern metal sculpture, with no use and no meaning but with a weird beauty nonetheless. Something that had been a machine and was now—nothing.
Henry Bedrosian balanced above the conical pit his jets had dug. The artifact was almost clear now. Something else showed beside it.
A mummy.
The Marsmobile settled on the last of its air. Chris plunged down the side of the pit as Henry climbed off.
The mummy was humanoid, about four feet long, with long arms, enormous fragile tapered fingers, and a traditionally oversized skull. No fine detail was visible; it had all been worn away. Chris couldn’t even be sure how many fingers the—hominid—had had. One hand still held two; the other only one, plus a flattened opposable thumb. No toes showed on the feet. The thing lay face down.
The artifact now uncovered, showed more detail. Yet the detail had no meaning. Thick bent metal bars, thin twisted wires, two enormous crumpled circles with something rotted clinging to what had been their rims —and then Henry’s imagination clicked, the same visual knack that had gotten him A’s in topology, and he said, “It’s a bicycle.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“No, look. The wheels are too big, and—"
It was a fantastically distorted bicycle, with wheels eight feet across, a low, dwarf-sized saddle, and a system of gears to replace the chain. The gear ratio was very low. The saddle was almost against the rear wheel, and a tiller bar, now bent to scrap, had been fixed to the hub of the front wheel. Something had crumpled the bicycle like a crush-proof cigarette pack in a strong man’s hand, and then nitric acid rust had done its worst to the metal.
“Okay, it’s a bicycle,” said Chris. “It’s a Salvador Dali bicycle, but still a bicycle. They must have been a lot like us, hmmm? Bicycles, stone wells, writing —”
“Clothing.”
“Where?”
“It must have been there. He’s less worn around the torso, see? You can see the wrinkles in his skin. He must have been protected until his clothes rotted away.”
“Maybe. He kind of ruins our lost race theory, doesn’t he? He couldn’t possibly be more than a couple of thousand years old. Hundreds would be more like it.”
“Then he drank nitric acid after all. Well, that blows our diamond mine, partner. He’s got to have living relatives.”
“We can’t count on their being too much like us. These things we’ve found—clothing, writing, wells—they’re all things any intelligent being might be forced to invent. And parallel evolution might explain the biped shape.”
“Parallel evolution?” Henry repeated.
“Like the eye of an octopus. It's nearly identical in structure to a human eye. Yet an octopus isn’t remotely human. Most marsupials, you can’t tell them from their mammal counterparts. Well, let’s try to pick him up.”
Any archaeologist would have shot them down in cold blood.
The mummy was as light and dry as cork, and showed no tendency to come apart in their hands. They strapped him gently over the luggage box and climbed on themselves. Chris drove back slowly and carefully.
Chris stood on the first rung of the ladder, adjusting the mummy’s balance on his left shoulder. “We’ll have to spray him with plastic before takeoff,” he said. “Do we have any plastic spray?”
“I don’t remember any. We’d better take lots of pictures in case it does come apart.”
“Right. There’s a camera in the cabin.” Chris started up, and Henry followed. They got the relic to the airlock without mishap.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Henry. “That nitric acid wasn’t dilute, exactly, but there was water in it. Maybe this guy’s chemistry can extract the water from nitric acid.”
“Good thought.”
They put the mummy gently on a pile of blankets and began searching for the camera. After five frustrating minutes Chris deliberately banged his head against wall. “I took it out to catch the sunset last night. It’s in the cargo hold.”
“Go get it.”
Henry stood in the airlock, watching as Chris went down the ladder. After a moment in the cargo space Chris started up with the camera strap over his shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking too,” said Chris, his voice seemingly dissociated from his climbing figure. “Diamond can’t be that plentiful here, and carving it into blocks must have been real hard labor. Why diamond? And why write on a well?”
“Religious reasons? Maybe they worship water.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Of course you were. That plot’s as old as Lowell."
Chris had reached the top. They squeezed into airlock and waited for it to cycle.
The door opened. Both men had their helmets off this time, and they both smelled it at once. Something chemical, something strong —
Thick, greasy smoke was pouring up from the ancient corpse.
Henry reacted first. He sprang for the double boiler in the small kitchen corner. The bottom half was still full of water; he snatched it up and threw the water over the smoldering Martian mummy while with his other hand he turned on the water faucet to get more.
The mummy went off like a napalm bomb.
Henry leaped away from the exploding flames and head rammed something flat and very hard. He went down with his eyes full of leaping light.
Immediately he sat up, knowing that something urgently needed doing but unable to remember what. He saw Chris, still in vacuum suit except for the helmet, run through the colored flames, pick the mummy up by the ankles and throw it into the airlock. Chris hit the “Cycle” button. The inner door swung shut.
Then Chris was bending over him. “Where does it hurt, Harry? Can you talk? Can you move?”
Henry sat up again. “I’m okay.”
Chris expelled a gusty breath. Then he began to laugh.
Henry stood up a little shakily. His head ached. The flames in the cabin weren’t intolerable, and already the air plant was whining its eagerness to make the air pure and scentless. Red smoke from the open outer airlock door blew past a porthole, dying away.
“What made him explode?” he wondered.
“The water,” said Chris Luden. “What a wild chemistry he must have! I want to be there when we meet a live one.”
“But what about the well? We know he used water.”
“Yes he did. He sure as hell did. And did you know that an octopus eye is identical to a human eye?”
“Sure. But a well is a well, isn’t it?”
“Not when it’s a crematorium, Harry. What else could it be? There’s no fire on Mars, but water must dissolve a body completely. And wouldn’t I like to know what the morticians charge their customers for those cut diamond building blocks! The hardest substance known to Man or Martian! An everlasting monument to the dear departed!”
How the Heroes Die
Only sheer ruthlessness could have taken him out of town alive. The mob behind Carter hadn’t tried to guard the Marsbuggies, since Carter would have needed too much time to take a buggy through the vehicular airlock. They could h
ave caught him there, and they knew it. Some were guarding the personnel lock, hoping he’d try for that. He might have; for if he could have closed the one door in their faces and opened the next, the safeties would have protected him while he went through the third and fourth and outside. On the Marsbuggy he was trapped in the bubble.
There was room to drive around in. Less than half the prefab houses had been erected so far. The rest of the bubbletown’s floor was flat fused sand, empty but for scattered piles of foam-plastic walls and ceilings and floors. But they’d get him eventually. Already they were starting up another buggy.
They never expected him to run his vehicle through the bubble wall.
The Marsbuggy tilted, then righted itself. A blast of breathing-air roared out around him, picked up a cloud of fine sand, and hurled it explosively away into the thin, poisoned atmosphere. Carter grinned as he looked behind him. They would die now, all of them. He was the only one wearing a pressure suit. In an hour he could come back and repair the rip in the bubble. He’d have to dream up a fancy story to tell when the next ship came…
Carter frowned. What were they —
At least ten wind-harried men were wrestling with the wall of a prefab house. As Carter watched, they picked the wall up off the fused sand, balanced it almost upright, and let go. The foam-plastic wall rose in the wind and slapped hard against the bubble, over the tenfoot rip.
Carter stopped his buggy to see what would happen.
Nobody was dead. The air was not shrieking away but leaking away. Slowly, methodically, a line of men climbed into their suits and filed through the personnel lock to repair the bubble.
A buggy entered the vehicular lock. The third and last was starting to life. Carter turned his buggy and was off.
Top speed for a Marsbuggy is about twenty-five miles per hour. The buggy rides on three wide balloon-tired wheels, each mounted at the end of a five-foot arm. What those wheels can’t go over, the buggy can generally hop over on the compressed-air jet mounted underneath. The motor and the compressor are both powered by a Litton battery holding a tenth as much energy as the original Hiroshima bomb.
Carter had been careful, as careful as he had had time for. He was carrying a full load of oxygen, twelve four-hour tanks in the air bin behind him, and an extra tank rested against his knees. His batteries were nearly full; he would be out of air long before his power ran low. When the other buggies gave up he could circle round and return to the bubble, in the time his extra tank would give him.
His own buggy and the two behind him were the only such vehicles on Mars. At twenty-five miles per hour he fled, and at twenty-five miles per hour they followed. The closest was half a mile behind.
Carter turned on his radio. He found the middle of a conversation. “—Can’t afford it. One of you will have to come back. We could lose two of the buggies, but not all three.”
That was Shute, the bubbletown’s research director and sole military man. The next voice, deep and sarcastic, belonged to Rufus Doolittle, the biochemist. “What’ll we do, flip a coin?”
“Let me go,” the third voice said tightly. “I’ve got a stake in this.”
Carter felt apprehension touch the nape of his neck.
“Okay, Alf. Good luck,” said Rufus. “Good hunting,” he added maliciously, as if he knew Carter were listening.
“You concentrate on getting the bubble fixed. I”ll see that Carter doesn’t come back.”
Behind Carter, the rearmost buggy swung in a wide loop toward town. The other came on. And it was driven by the linguist, Alf Harness.
Most of the bubble’s dozen men were busy repairing the ten-foot rip with heaters and plastic sheeting. It would be a long job but an easy one, for by Shute’s orders the bubble had been deflated. The trasparent plastic had fallen in folds across the prefab houses, forming a series of interconnected tents. One could move about underneath with little difficulty.
Lieutenant-Major Acchael Shute watched the men at work and decided they had things under control. He walked away like a soldier on parade, stooping as little as possible as he moved beneath the dropping folds.
He stopped and watched Gondot operating the airmaker Gondot noticed him and spoke without looking up.
“Mayor, why’d you let Alf chase Carter alone?”
Shute accepted his nickname. “We couldn’t lose both tractors.”
“Why not just post them on guard duty for two days?”
“And what if Carter got through the guard? He must be determined to wreck the dome. He’d catch us with out pants down. Even if some of us got into suits, could we stand another rip in the bubble?”
Gondot reached to scratch his short beard. His fingertips rapped helmet plastic and he looked annoyed. “Maybe not. I can fill the bubble anytime you’re ready, but then the airmaker’ll be empty. We'll be almost out of tanked air by the time they finish mending that rip. Another’d finish us."
Shute nodded and turned away. All the air anyone could use—tons of nitrogen and oxygen—was right outside; but it was in the form of nitrogen dioxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could use it. But if Carter tore the dome again that would be too slow.
But Carter wouldn’t. Alf would see to that. The emergency was over—this time.
And so Lieutenant-Major Shute could go back to worrying about the emergency’s underlying causes.
His report on those causes had been finished a month ago. He had reread it several times since, and always it had seemed complete and to the point. Yet he had the feeling it could be written better. He ought to make it as effective as possible. What he had to say could only be said once, and then his career would be over and voice silenced.
Cousins had sold some fiction once, writing as a hobby. Perhaps he would help. But Shute was reluctant to involve anyone else in what amounted to his own rebellion.
Yet—he’d have to rewrite that report now, or at least add to it. Lew Harness was dead, murdered. John Carter would be dead within two days. All Shute’s responsibility. All pertinent.
The decision wasn’t urgent. It would be a month before Earth was in reach of the bubbletown’s sending station.
Most of the asteroids spend most of their time between Mars and Jupiter, and it often happens that one of them crosses a planet where theretofore it had crossed only an orbit. There are asteroid craters all over Mars—old eroded ones, sharp new ones, big ones, little ones, ragged and smooth ones. The bubbletown was at the center of a large, fairly recent crater four miles across: an enormous, poorly cast ashtray discarded on the reddish sand.
The buggies ran over cracked glass, avoiding the occasional tilted blocks, running uphill toward the broken rim. A sky the color of blood surrounded a tiny, brilliant sun set precisely at the zenith.
Inevitably Alf was getting closer. When they crossed the rim and started downhill they would pull apart. It was going to be a long chase.
Now was the time for regrets, if there ever was such a time. But Carter wasn’t the type, and he had nothing to be ashamed of anyway. Lew Harness had needed to die; had as much as asked to die. Carter was only puzzled that his death should have provoked so violent a reaction. Could they all be—the way Lew had been? Unlikely. If he’d stayed and explained—
They’d have torn him apart. Those vulpine faces, with the distended nostrils and the bared teeth!
And now he was being chased by one man. But that man was Lew’s brother.
Here was the rim, and Alf was still well behind. Carter slowed as he went over, knowing that the way down would be rougher. He was just going over the edge when a rock ten yards away exploded in white fire.
Alf had a flare pistol.
Carter just stopped himself from scrambling out of the buggy to hide in the rocks. The buggy lurched downward and, like it or not, Carter had to forget his terror to keep the vehicle upright.
The rubble around the crater’s rim slowed him still further. Carter angled the buggy for the nearest rise of s
loping sand. As he reached it, Alf came over the rim, a quarter-mile behind. His silhouette hesitated there against the bloody sky, and another flare exploded, blinding bright and terrifingly close.
Then Carter was on the straightaway, rolling down sloping sand to a perfectly flat horizon.
The radio said, “Gonna be a long one, Jack.”
Carter pushed to transmit. “Right. How many flares do you have left?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t. Not the way you’re throwing them away.”
Alf didn’t answer. Carter left the radio band open, knowing that ultimately Alf must talk to the man he needed to kill.
The crater which was home dropped behind and was gone. Endless flat desert rose before the buggies, flowed under the oversized wheels and dropped behind. Gentle crescent dunes patterned the sand, but they were no barrier to a buggy. Once there was a Martian well. It stood all alone on the sand, a weathered cylindrical wall seven feet high and ten in circumference, made of cut diamond blocks. The wells, and the slanting script written deep into their "dedication blocks" were responsible for the town’s presence on Mars. Since the only Martian ever found—a mummy centuries dead, at least—had exploded at the first contact with water, it was generally assumed that the wells were crematoriums. But it wasn’t certain. Nothing was certain about Mars.
The radio maintained an eerie silence. Hours rolled past; the sun slid toward the deep red horizon, and still Alf did not speak. It was as if Alf had said everything there was to say to Jack Carter. And that was wrong! Alf should have needed to justify himself!
It was Carter who sighed and gave up. “You can’t catch me, Alf.”
“No, but I can stay behind you as long as I need to.”
“You can stay behind me just twenty-four hours. You’ve got forty-eight hours of air. I don’t believe you’ll kill yourself just to kill me.”