“Now listen to me,” and Ann. “I came all this way and I’m not turning back. If you won’t take me, I’ll go alone. I’ll make it somehow—only you could make it so much easier for me. You know all the trails. You could get me there quicker. I’m prepared to pay you for it—pay you well.”
“Lady,” said Charley slowly, “we ain’t guides. You couldn’t give us money enough to make us go where we didn’t want to go.”
She pounded one small clenched fist on the table. “But I want to pay you,” she said. “I’ll insist on it.”
Charley made a motion of his hand, as if sweeping away her words. “Not one cent,” he said. “You can’t buy our services. But we might do it anyhow. Just because I like your spunk.”
She gasped. “You would?” she asked.
Neither one of them replied.
“Just take me to Mad-Man’s,” she pleaded. “I won’t ask you to take me down into the canal. Just point out the best way and then wait for me. I’ll make it myself. All I want to know is how to get there.”
Charley lifted the coffee pot, filled the cups again.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I reckon we can go where you can go. I reckon we ain’t allowin’ you to go down into Mad-Man’s all by yourself.”
Dawn roared over the canal rim and flooded the land with sudden light and life. The blanket plants unfolded their broad furry leaves, spreading them in the sunshine. The traveller plants, lightly anchored to boulders and outcroppings, scurried frantically for places in the Sun. The canal suddenly became a mad flurry of plant life as the travellers, true plants but forced by environment to acquire the power of locomotion, quit the eastern wall, where they had travelled during the preceding day to keep pace with the sunlight, and rushed pell-mell for the western slope.
Kent tumbled out of the canal-car, rifle gripped in his hand. He blinked at the pale Sun that hung over the canal rim. His eyes swept the castellated horizon that closed in about them, took in the old familiar terrain typical of the Martian canals.
The canal was red—blood red shading to softest pink with the purple of early-morning shadow still hugging the eastern rim. A riot of red—the rusted bones of a dead planet. Tons of oxygen locked in those ramparts of bright red stone. Oxygen enough to make Mars livable—but locked forever in red oxide of iron.
Chimney and dome formations rose in tangled confusion with weathered pyramids and slender needles. A wild scene. Wild and lonesome and forbidding.
Kent swept the western horizon with his eyes. It was thirty miles or more to the rim, but in the thin atmosphere he could see with almost telescopic clearness the details of the scarp where the plateau broke and the land swung down in wild gyrations, frozen in red rock, to the floor of the canal where he stood.
Under the eastern rim, where the purple shadows still clung, flickered the watch-fires of the Ghosts, dim shapes from that distance. He shook his fist at them. Damn the Ghosts!
The slinking form of a Hound skulked down a ravine and disappeared. A beaver scuttled along a winding trail and popped into a burrow.
Slowly the night cold was rising from the land, dissipated by the rising Sun. The temperature would rise now until mid-afternoon, when it would stand at 15 or 20 below zero, Centigrade.
From a tangled confusion of red boulders leaped a silica-armored Eater. Like an avenging rocket he bore down on Kent. Almost wearily the trapper lifted his rifle, blasted the Eater with one fierce burst of blue energy.
Kent cursed under his breath.
“Can’t waste power,” he muttered. “Energy almost gone.”
He tucked the rifle under his arm and glared at the tumbled Eater. The huge beast, falling in mid-leap, had plowed a deep furrow in the hard red soil.
Kent walked around the bulk of the car, stood looking at the uptilted second car that lay wedged between the huge boulders.
Charley climbed out through the open air lock and walked toward his partner. Inside his helmet he shook his head. “No good,” he said. “She’ll never run again.”
Kent said nothing and Charley went on: “Whole side staved in. All of the quartz knocked off. Ozone’s already got in its work. Plates softening.”
“I suppose the mechanism is shot, too,” said Kent.
“All shot to hell,” said Charley.
They stood side by side, staring mournfully at the shattered machine.
“She was a good car, too,” Charley pronounced, sadly.
“This,” declared Kent, “is what comes of escorting a crazy dame all over the country.”
Charley dismissed the matter. “I’m going to walk down the canal a ways. See what the going is like from here on,” he told Kent.
“Be careful,” the younger man warned him. “There’s Eaters around. I just shot one.”
The old man moved rapidly down the canal floor, picking his way between the scattered boulders and jagged outcroppings. In a moment he was out of sight. Kent walked around the corner of the undamaged car, saw Ann Smith just as she stepped from the airlock.
“Good morning,” she said.
He did not return the greeting. “Our car is a wreck,” he said. “We’ll have to use yours from here on. It’ll be a little cramped.”
“A wreck?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “That crash last night. When the bank caved under the treads, it smashed the quartz, let the ozone at the plates.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “Of course, it’s my fault. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”
Kent was merciless. “I hope,” he sighed, “that this proves to you travel in the canals is no pleasure jaunt.”
She looked about them, shivered at the desolation.
“The Ghosts are the worst,” she said. “Watching, always watching—”
Before them, not more than a hundred feet away, one of the Ghosts appeared, apparently writhing up out of a pile of jumbled rocks. It twisted and reared upward, tenuous, unguessable, now one shape, now another. For a moment it seemed to be a benign old grandfather, with long sweeping beard, and then it turned into something that was utterly and unnamably obscene and then, as suddenly as it had come, it disappeared.
Ann shuddered. “Always watching,” she said again. “Waiting around corners. Ready to rise up and mock you.”
“They get on your nerves,” Kent agreed, “but there’s no reason to be afraid of them. They couldn’t touch you. They may be nothing more than mirage—figments of the imagination, like your Harry, the Hermit.”
She swung about to face him. “How far are we from Mad-Man’s?” she demanded.
Kent shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a few miles, maybe a hundred. We should be near, though.”
From down the canal came Charley’s halloo. “Mad-Man’s,” he shouted back to them. “Mad-Man’s! Come and look at it!”
Mad-Man’s Canal was a continuation of the canal the three had been travelling—but it was utterly different.
Suddenly the canal floor broke, dipped down sharply and plummeted into a deep blue pit of shadows. For miles the great depression extended, and on all sides the ground sloped steeply into the seemingly bottomless depths of the canyon.
“What is it, Charley?” asked Kent, and Charley waggled his beard behind the space-helmet.
“Can’t say, lad,” he declared, “but it sure is an awe-inspirin’ sight. For twenty Martian years I’ve tramped these canals and I never seen the like of it.”
“A volcanic crater?” suggested Ann.
“Maybe,” agreed Charley, “but it don’t look exactly like that either. Something happened here, though. Floor fell out of the bottom of the canal or somethin’.”
“You can’t see the bottom,” said Ann. “Looks like a blue haze down there. Not exactly like shadows. More like fog or water.”
“Ain’t water,” declared Charley. “You can bet your bottom dollar on that. If anyone ever found that much water on Mars they’d stake out a claim and make a fortune.”
“Did you ever know anyone who tried to go down there, Charley?” asked Kent. “Ever talk to anyone who tried it?”
“No, lad, I never did. But I heard tell of some who tried. And they never were the same again. Somethin’ happened to them down there. Somethin’ that turned their minds.”
Kent felt icy fingers on his spine. He stared down into the deep blue of Mad-Man’s and strained his eyeballs, trying to pierce the veil that hid the bottom. But that was useless. If one wanted to find out what was down there, he’d have to travel down those steeply sloping walls, would have to take his courage in hand and essay what other men had tried and gone crazy for their pains.
“We can’t use the car,” he said suddenly and was surprised at his words.
Kent walked backward from the edge of the pit. What was happening to them? Why this calm acceptance of the fact they were going to go down into Mad-Man’s? They didn’t have to go. It wasn’t too late yet to turn around and travel back the way they came. With only one car now, and many miles to travel, they would have to take it slow and easy, but they could make it. It was the sensible thing to do, held none of the rash foolhardiness involved in a descent into those blue depths before them.
He heard Charley’s words, as if from a great distance.
“Sure, we’ll have to walk. But we ought to be able to make it. Maybe we’ll find air down there, air dense enough to breathe and not plumb full of ozone. Maybe there’ll be some water, too.”
“Charley,” Kent shouted, “you don’t know what you’re saying! We can’t—”
He stopped in mid-sentence and listened. Even as he talked, he had heard that first weird note from up the canal, a sound that he had heard many times before, the far-away rumble of running hoofs, the grating clash of stonelike body on stonelike body.
“The Eaters!” he shouted. “The Eaters are migrating.”
He glanced swiftly about him. There was no way of escape. The walls of the canal had narrowed and closed in, rising sheer from the floor on either side of them, only a few miles away. There was no point of vantage where they could make a stand and hold off the horde that was thundering toward them. And even if there were, they had but little power left for their guns. In the long trek down the canal they had been forced to shoot time after time to protect their lives, and their energy supply for the weapons was running low.
“Let’s get back to the car!” screamed Ann. She started to run. Kent sprinted after her, grabbed her and pulled her around.
“We’d never make it,” he yelled at her. “Hear those hoofs! They’re stampeding! They’ll be here in a minute!”
Charley was yelling at them, pointing down into Mad-Man’s. Kent nodded, agreeing. It was the only way to go. The only way left open for them. There was no place to hide, no place to stand and fight. Flight was the only answer—and flight took them straight into the jaws of Mad-Man’s Canal.
Charley bellowed at them, his bright blue eyes gleaming with excitement. “Maybe we got a chance. If we can reach the shadows.”
They plunged down, going at a run, fighting to keep their balance. Soft, crumbly rock shifted and broke under the impact of their steel-shod feet. A shower of rubble accompanied them, chuckling and clinking down the slope. The sun blinked out and they plunged into the deep shadows, fought to reduce their speed, slowed to a walk.
Kent looked back. Above him, on the level of the canal floor, he saw a fighting mass of Eaters, indescribable confusion there on the rim of the skyline, as the great silica-armored beasts fought against plunging into Mad-Man’s. Those in front were rearing, shoving, striking savagely, battling against being shoved over the edge as those behind plowed into them. Some of them had toppled onto the slope, were sliding and clawing, striving to regain their feet. Others were doggedly crawling back up the slope.
The three below watched the struggle above them.
“Even them cussed Eaters are afraid to go into Mad-Man’s,” said Charley.
They were surrounded by Ghosts. Hundreds of them, wavering and floating, appearing and disappearing. In the blue shadows of the sunken world they seemed like wind-blown flames that rocked back and forth, flickering, glimmering, guttering. Assuming all kinds of forms, forms beautiful in their intricacy of design, forms angularly flat and ugly, gruesome and obscene and terrible.
And always there was that terrible sense of watching—of ghostly eyes watching and waiting—of hidden laughter and ghoulish design.
“Damn them,” said Kent. He stubbed his toe and stumbled, righted himself.
“Damn them,” he said again.
The air had become denser, with little ozone now. Half an hour before they had shut off their oxygen supply and snapped open the visors of their helmets. Still thin, pitifully thin by Earthly standards, the air was breathable and they needed to save what little oxygen might remain within their tanks.
Ann stumbled and fell against Kent. He steadied her until she regained her feet. He saw her shiver.
“If they only wouldn’t watch us,” she whispered to him. “They’ll drive me mad. Watching us—no indication of friendliness or unfriendliness, no emotion at all. Just watching. If only they would go away—do something even!” Her whisper broke on a hysterical note.
Kent didn’t answer. What was there to say? He felt a savage wave of anger at the Ghosts. If a man could only do something about them. You could shoot and kill the Eaters and the Hounds. But guns and hands meant nothing to these ghostly forms, these dancing, flickering things that seemed to have no being.
Charley, plodding ahead down the slope, suddenly stopped.
“There’s something just ahead,” he said. “I saw it move.”
Kent moved up beside him and held his rifle ready. They stared into the blue shadows. “What did it look like?” Kent asked.
“Can’t say, lad,” Charley told him. “Just got a glimpse of it.”
They waited. A rock loosened below them and they could hear it clatter down the slope.
“Funny lookin’ jigger,” Charley said.
Something was coming up the slope toward them, something that made a slithering sound as it came, and to their nostrils came a faint odor, a suggestion of a stench that made the hair crawl on the back of Kent’s neck.
The thing emerged from the gloom ahead and froze the three with horror as it came. A thing that was infinitely more horrible in form than any reptilian monster that had ever crawled through the primal ooze of the new-spawned Earth, a thing that seemed to personify all the hate and evil that had ever, through long milleniums, lived and found its being on the aged planet Mars. A grisly death-head leered at them and drooling jaws opened, displaying fangs that dripped with loathsomeness.
Kent brought his rifle up as Ann’s shriek rang in his ears, but Charley reached out and wrenched the weapon from his hand.
His voice came, cool and calm.
“It’s no time to be shootin’, lad,” he said. “There’s another one over there, just to our right and I think I see a couple more out just beyond.”
“Give me that gun!” yelled Kent, but as he lunged to jerk it from Charley’s grasp he saw, out of the tail of his eye, a dozen more of the things squatting just within the shadows.
“We better not rile them, son,” said Charley softly. “They’re a hell’s brood and that’s for sure.”
He handed the rifle back to Kent and started backing up the slope, slow step by slow step.
Together the three of them backed slowly away, guns held at ready. In front of them, between them and the squatting monstrosities, a single Ghost suddenly materialized. A Ghost that did not waver but held straight and true, like a candle flame burning in the stillness of the night. Another Ghost appeared bes
ide the first, and suddenly there were several more. The Ghosts floated slowly down the slope toward the death-head things, and as they moved they took on a deeper color, more substantiality, until they burned a deep and steady blue, solid columns of flame against the lighter blue of the eternal shadow.
Staring, scarcely believing, the three saw the gaping ghouls that had crept up the slope, turn and shuffle swiftly back, back into the mystery of the lower reaches of Mad-Man’s.
Kent laughed nervously. “Saved by a Ghost,” he said.
“Why, maybe they aren’t so bad after all,” said Ann and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “I wonder why they did it?”
“And how they did it,” said Kent.
“Principally,” said Charley, “why they did it. I never heard of any Ghost ever takin’ any interest in a man, and I have trod these canals for twenty Martian years.”
Kent expelled his breath. “And now,” he said, “for Lord’s sake, let’s turn back. We won’t find any hermit here. No man could live out a week here unless he had some specially trained Ghosts to guard him all the time. There isn’t any use of going on and asking for trouble.”
Charley looked at Ann. “It’s your expedition, ma’am,” he said.
She looked from one to the other and there was fear upon her face.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “No one could live here. We won’t find anyone here. I guess it must just have been a myth, after all.” Her shoulders seemed to sag.
“We’ll go on if you say the word,” said Charley.
“Hell, yes,” declared Kent, “but we’re crazy to do it. I understand now why men came out of here stark crazy. A few more things like these we just seen and I’ll be nuts myself.”
“Look!” cried Ann. “Look at the Ghosts. They are trying to tell us something!”
New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) Page 7