The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  1 faut que je-'

  'All right! All right!' said Jarvis. 'You can go see. Anyhow, there the thing was, alive and yet not alive, moving every ten minutes, and then only to remove a brick. Those bricks were its waste matter. See, Frenchy? We're carbon, and our waste is carbon dioxide, and this thing is silicon and its waste is silicon dioxide-silica. But silica is a solid, hence the bricks. And it builds itself in, and when it is covered, it moves over to a fresh place to start over. No wonder it creaked! A living creature a half a million years old!'

  'How you know how old?' Leroy was frantic.

  'We trailed its pyramids from the beginning, didn't we? If this weren't the original pyramid builder, the series would have ended somewhere before we found him, wouldn't it? - ended and started over with the small ones. That's simple enough, isn't it?

  'But he reproduces, or tries to. Before the third brick came out, there was a little rustle and out popped a whole stream of those little crystal balls. They're his spores, or seeds - call 'em what you want. They went bouncing by across Xanthus just as they'd bounced by us back in the Mare Chronium. I've a hunch how they work, too - this is for your information, Leroy. I think the crystal shell of silica is no more than protective covering, like an eggshell, and that the active principle is the smell inside. It's some sort of gas that attacks silicon, and if the shell is broken near a supply of that element, some reaction starts that ultimately develops into a beast like that one.'

  'You should try!' exclaimed the little Frenchman. 'We must break one to see!'

  'Yeah? Well, I did. I smashed a couple against the sand. Would you like to come back in about ten thousand years to see if I planted some pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell by that time!' Jarvis paused and drew a deep breath. 'Lord! That queer creature Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless - just a mechanism, and yet - immortal Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past. A queer beast - yet I met a stranger one!'

  'If you did, it must have been in your dreams!' growled Harrison.

  'You're right!' said Jarvis soberly. 'In a way, you're right. The dream-beast! That's the best name for it - and it's the most fiendish, terrifying creation one could imagine! More dangerous than a lion, more insidious than a snake!'

  'Tell me!' begged Leroy. 'I must go see!'

  'Not this devil!' He paused again. 'Well,' he resumed, 'Tweel and I left the pyramid creature and plowed along through Xanthus. I was tired and a little disheartened by Putz's failure to pick me up, and Tweel's trilling got on my nerves, as did his flying nosedives. So I just strode along without a word, hour after hour across that monotonous desert.

  'Toward mid-afternoon we came in sight of a low dark line on the horizon. I knew what it was. It was a canal; I'd crossed it in the rocket and it meant that we were just one-third of the way across Xanthus. Pleasant thought, wasn't it? And still, I was keeping up to schedule.

  'We approached the canal slowly; I remembered that this one was bordered by a wide fringe of vegetation and that Mudheap City was on it.

  'I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home-like even Borneo would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there, Fancy Long. Know her?'

  'Vision entertainer,' said Harrison. 'I've tuned her in. Nice blonde - dances and sings on the Yerba Mate hour.'

  'That's her,' said Jarvis ungrammatically. 'I know her pretty well - just friends, get me? - though she came down to see us off in the Ares. Well, I was thinking about her, feeling pretty lonesome, and all the time we were approaching that line of rubbery plants.

  'And then - I said, 'What 'n Hell!' and stared. And there she was - Fancy Long, standing plain as day under one of those crack-brained trees, and smiling and waving just the way I remembered her when we left!'

  'Now you're nuts, too!' observed the captain.

  'Boy, I almost agreed with you! I stared and pinched myself and closed my eyes and then stared again - and every time, there was Fancy Long smiling and waving! Tweel saw something, too; he was trilling and clucking away, but I scarcely heard him. I was bounding toward her over the sand, too amazed even to ask myself questions.

  'I wasn't twenty feet from her when Tweel caught me with one of his flying leaps. He grabbed my arm, yelling, 'No - no - no!' in his squeaky voice. I tried to shake him off - he was as light as if he were built of bamboo - but he dug his claws in and yelled. And finally some sort of sanity returned to me and I stopped less than ten feet from her. There she stood, looking as solid as Putz's head!'

  'Vot?' said the engineer.

  'She smiled and waved, and waved and smiled, and I stood there dumb as Leroy, while Tweel squeaked and chattered. I knew it couldn't be real, yet - there she was! 'Finally I said, 'Fancy! Fancy Long!' She just kept on smiling and waving, but looking as real as if I hadn't left her thirty-seven million miles away.

  'Tweel had his glass pistol out, pointing it at her. I grabbed his arm, but he tried to push me away. He pointed at her and said, 'No breet! No breet!' and I understood that he meant that the Fancy Long thing wasn't alive.

  'Man, my head was whirling!

  'Still, it gave me the jitters to see him pointing his weapon at her. I don't know why I stood there watching him take careful aim, but I did. Then he squeezed the handle of his weapon; there was a little puff of steam, and Fancy Long was gone! And in her place was one of those writhing, black rope-armed horrors like the one I'd saved Tweel from!

  'The dream-beast! I stood there dizzy, watching it die while Tweel trilled and whistled. Finally he touched my arm, pointed at the twisting thing, and said, 'You one - one - two, he one - one - two.' After he'd repeated it eight or ten times, I got it. Do any of you?'

  'Oui,' shrilled Leroy. 'Moi - je le comprends! He mean you think of something, the beast he know, and you see it! Un chien - a hungry dog, he would see the big bone with meat! Or smell it - not?'

  'Right!' said Jarvis. 'The dream-beast uses its victim's longings and desires to trap its prey. The bird at nesting season would see its mate, the fox, prowling for its own prey, would see a helpless rabbit!'

  'How he do?' queried Leroy.

  'How do I know? How does a snake back on earth charm a bird into its very jaws? And aren't there deep-sea fish that lure their victims into their mouths? Lord!' Jarvis shuddered. 'Do you see how insidious the monster is? We're warned now - but henceforth we can't trust even our eyes. You might see me - I might see one of you - and back of it may be nothing but another of those black horrors!'

  'How'd your friend know?' asked the captain abruptly.

  'Tweel? I wonder! Perhaps he was thinking of something that couldn't possibly have interested me, and when I started to run, he realized that I saw something different and was warned. Or perhaps the dream-beast can only project a single vision, and Tweel saw what I saw - or nothing. I couldn't ask him. But it's just another proof that his intelligence is equal to ours or greater.'

  'He's daffy, I tell you!' said Harrison. 'What makes you think his intellect ranks with the human?'

  'Plenty of things! First the pyramid-beast. He hadn't seen one before; he said as much. Yet he recognized it as a dead-alive automaton of silicon.'

  'He could have heard of it,' objected Harrison. 'He lives around here, you know.'

  'Well how about the language? I couldn't pick up a single idea of his and he learned six or seven words of mine. And do you realize what complex ideas he put over with no more than those six or seven words? The pyramid monster - the dream-beast! In a single phrase he told me that one was a harmless automaton and the other a deadly hypnotist. What about that?'

  'Huh!' said the captain.

 
'Huh if you wish! Could you have done it knowing only six words of English? Could you go even further, as Tweel did, and tell me that another creature was of a sort of intelligence so different from ours that understanding was impossible - even more impossible than that between Tweel and me?'

  'Eh? What was that?'

  'Later. The point I'm making is that Tweel and his race are worthy of our friendship. Somewhere on Mars - and you'll find I'm right - is a civilization and culture equal to ours, and maybe more than equal. And communication is possible between them and us; Tweel proves that. It may take years of patient trial, for their minds are alien, but less alien than the next minds we encountered - if they are minds.'

  'The next ones? What next ones?'

  'The people of the mud cities along the canals.' Jarvis frowned, then resumed his narrative. 'I thought the dream-beast and the silicon-monster were the strangest beings conceivable, but I was wrong. These creatures are still more alien, less understandable than either and far less comprehensible than Tweel, with whom friendship is possible, and even, by patience and concentration, the exchange of ideas.

  'Well,' he continued, 'we left the dream-beast dying, dragging itself back into its hole, and we moved toward the canal. There was a carpet of that queer walking-grass scampering out of our way, and when we reached the bank, there was a yellow trickle of water flowing. The mound city I'd noticed from the rocket was a mile or so to the right and I was curious enough to want to take a look at it.

  'It had seemed deserted from my previous glimpse of its and if any creatures were lurking in it - well, Tweel and I were both armed. And by the way, that crystal weapon of Tweel's was an interesting device; I took a look at it after the dream-beast episode. It fired a little glass splinter, poisoned, I suppose, and I guess it held at least a hundred of 'em to a load. The propellant was steam - just plain steam!'

  'Shteam!' echoed Putz. 'From vot come, shteam?'

  'From water, of course! You could see the water through the transparent handle and about a gill of another liquid, thick and yellowish. When Tweel squeezed the handle there was no trigger - a drop of water and a drop of the yellow stuff squirted into the firing chamber, and the water vaporized-POP! - like that. It's not so difficult; I think we could develop the same principle. Concentrated sulfuric acid will heat water almost to boiling, and so will quicklime, and there's potassium and sodium -

  'Of course, his weapon hadn't the range of mine, but it wasn't so bad in this thin air, and it did hold as many shots as a cowboy's gun in a Western movie. It was effective, too, at least against Martian life; I tried it out, aiming at one of the crazy plants, and darned if the plant didn't wither up and fall a part! That's why I think the glass splinters were poisoned.

  'Anyway, we trudged along toward the mud-heap city and I began to wonder whether the city builders dug the canals. I pointed to the city and then at the canal, and Tweel said 'No - no - no!' and gestured toward the south. I took it to mean that some other race had created the canal system, perhaps Tweel's people. I don't know; maybe there's still another intelligent race on the planet, or a dozen others. Mars is a queer little world.

  'A hundred yards from the city we crossed a sort of road - just a hard-packed mud trap, and then, all of a sudden, along came one of the mound builders!

  'Man, talk about fantastic beings! It looked rather like a barrel trotting along on four legs with four other arms or tentacles. It had no head, just body and members and a row of eyes completely around it. The top end of the barrel-body was a diaphragm stretched as tight as a drumhead, and that was all. It was pushing a little coppery cart and tore right past us like the proverbial bat out of Hell. It didn't even notice us, although I thought the eyes on my side shifted a little as it passed.

  'A moment later another came along, pushing another empty cart. Same thing - it just scooted past us. Well, I wasn't going to be ignored by a bunch of barrels playing train, so when the third one approached, I planted myself in the way - ready to jump, of course, if the thing didn't stop.

  'But it did. It stopped and set up a sort of drumming from the diaphragm on top. And I held out both hands and said, 'We are friends!' And what do you suppose the thing did?'

  'Said, 'Pleased to meet you,' I'll bet!' suggested Harrison.

  'I couldn't have been more surprised if it had! It drummed on its diaphragm, and then suddenly boomed out, 'We are v-r-r-iends' and gave its pushcart a vicious poke at met I jumped aside, and away it went while I stared dumbly after it.

  'A minute later another one came hurrying along. This one didn't pause, but simply drummed out, 'We are v-r-r-iends!' and scurried by. How did it learn the phrase? Were all of the creatures in some sort of communication with each other? Were they all parts of some central organism? I don't know, though I think Tweel does.

  'Anyway, the creatures went sailing past us, every one greeting us with the same statement. It got to be funny; I never thought to find so many friends on this Godforsaken ball! Finally I made a puzzled gesture to Tweel; I guess he understood, for he said, 'One - one - two - yes! Two - two - four - no!' Get it?'

  'Sure,' said Harrison. 'It's a Martian nursery rhyme.'

  'Yeah! Well, I was getting used to Tweel's symbolism, and I figured it out this way. 'One - one - two - yes!' The creatures were intelligent. 'Two - two - four - no!' Their intelligence was not of our order, but something different and beyond the logic of two and two is four. Maybe I missed his meaning. Perhaps he meant that their minds were of low degree, able to figure out the simple things. 'One - one - two - yes! - but not more difficult things - Two - two - four - no!' But I think from what we saw later that he meant the other.

  'After a few moments, the creatures came rushing back - first one, then another. Their pushcarts were full of stones, sand, chunks of rubbery plants, and such rubbish as that. They droned out their friendly greeting, which didn't really sound so friendly, and dashed on. The third one I assumed to be my first acquaintance and I decided to have another chat with him. I stepped into his path again and waited.

  'Up he came, booming out his 'We are v-r-r-riends' and stopped. I looked at him; four or five of his eyes looked at me. He tried his password again and gave a shove on his cart, but I stood firm. And then the - the dashed creature reached out one of his arms, and two finger-like nippers tweaked my nose!'

  'Haw!' roared Harrison. 'Maybe the things have a sense of beauty!'

  'Laugh!' grumbled Jarvis. 'I'd already had a nasty bump and a mean frostbite on that nose. Anyway, I yelled 'Ouch!' and jumped aside and the creature dashed away; but from then on, their greeting was 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' Queer beasts!

  'Tweel and I followed the road squarely up to the nearest mound. The creatures were coming and going, paying us not the slightest attention, fetching their loads of rubbish. The road simply dived into an opening, and slanted down like an old mine, and in and out darted the barrel-people, greeting us with their eternal phrase.

  'I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was curious to see it. It didn't look like a flame or torch, you understand, but more like a civilized light, and I thought that I might get some clue as to the creatures' development. So in I went and Tweel tagged along, not without a few trills and twitters, however.

  'The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old arc light, but came from a single black rod set in the wall of the corridor. It was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were fairly civilized, apparently.

  'Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered and I went on to look at that, but it was only a heap of shiny sand. I turned toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take, me if it wasn't goner.

  'I supposed the corridor had curved, or I'd stepped into a side passage. Anyway, I walked back in that direction I thought we'd come, and all I saw was more dim-lit corridor. The place was a labyrinth! There was nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional lights, and now and then a creature running by, sometimes with a pushcart
, sometimes without.

  'Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few steps from the entrance. But every move we made after that seemed to get us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures with an empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out for his rubbish, but he ran around aimlessly, into one passage and out another. When he started dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.

  'Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said 'No - no - no!' in a sort of helpless trill. And we couldn't get any help from the natives. They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were friends - ouch!

  'Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We tried following only the upward corridors, but they'd run uphill a ways and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was constant; you couldn't tell night from day and after my first sleep I didn't know whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn't tell from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.

  'We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing anything - just wheels turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a little one growing between them, joined to both.'

  'Parthenogenesis!' exulted Leroy. 'Parthenogenesis by budding like les tulipes!'

  'If you say so, Frenchy,' agreed Jarvis. 'The things never noticed us at all, except, as I say, to greet us with 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' They seemed to have no homelife of any sort, but just scurried around with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what they did with it.

  'We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be close to the surface when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber, the only one we'd seen. And man! - I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like daylight through a crevice in the roof.