Rigby roused again slightly on Swann and Mendez’s shoulders, but the sound that came out of his throat was a consonant-less moan, as if he’d lost the user’s manual for his vocal cords. Then his head snapped up again.
“It sees and eats,” he repeated.
“What does that mean?” Chu asked. “Who sees and eats?”
Rigby shook his head as if he was trying to clear it. “No... that’s a—a name? Is that right? They love it. No, not love... fear? Love? They’re slaves to it? They...”
“Worship?” suggested Swann.
“Worship!” repeated Rigby. He seemed more agitated, and they could all hear his shallow, quick breaths through the radio. “They worship It Sees And Eats!”
“Well, right now we’re worshiping They Get the Hell Out Of Here,” Mendez said, grunting as he struggled to help Rigby along. Rigby hadn’t moved his legs on his own since the initial shock, although Chu was certain he hadn’t injured his spine.
Saxon shone the light around the next right turn. It opened on a small chamber whose other opening was against the side wall where his beam couldn’t reach.
“We’re getting as far as we know,” he said. “Let’s hold up in here and suss something out.”
Swann turned his ankle just then, and Rigby’s weight dragged him and Mendez forward, pushing Chu and Saxon fully into the small chamber instead of letting them move with caution. Their lights shone into the next chamber beyond, and Saxon felt the bottom fall away from his mind.
The stone platform in front of them could have been called an altar, or maybe an operating table. Or both. Ishida was stretched out on it. His suit had been removed by something that neither understood nor cared how clothing worked. If it hadn’t been for Ishida’s hair and distinctive profile—and the fact that he was the only other human on Mars—Saxon wouldn’t have recognized him. His desiccated body was nothing but leather-colored sticks; the remains that lay on the altar couldn’t have weighed more than fifty or sixty pounds, even at Earth normal gravity. Ishida’s eyelids were open, but his shriveled eyes had sunken so far that his orbits were twin bottomless pits in a skin-wrapped skull.
Saxon kept staring at Ishida’s corpse because as long as he kept his eyes on the corpse, he didn’t have to look at and try to process what was behind it, a sculpted mass of green-hued metal that caught their light and twisted it violently. The frantic bits of his rational mind were screaming at him that, with as alien as these aliens were, there was no way he could be understanding the shape of the shining metal, there was no way he could comprehend instantly and wholly that it was a profusion of eyes and tongues that, even though it was motionless metal, was so full of purpose and potential energy that it seemed to waver in the flashlight beams like an anxious predator coiled to strike.
It Sees And Eats.
Saxon’s eyes were dry and stinging—he had forgotten to blink, so strongly were his eyes drawn by the thing that he was desperately trying not to see. He wanted to apologize to Ishida and Caldwell, to plead forgiveness for not moving the radio satellite; he wanted to shout loud enough that Kettrick could hear him even without the radio and tell her, Yes, I’ve changed my mind, contact Earth, tell them anything you want. He didn’t care who said what about Martians anymore—he wished that the mythical Martians had been what they had found.
Now something else impinged on his attention: movement, not the pseudo-motion of the awful idol that was the thing it represented, but actual kinetic movement. Two of the artificial things moved out of the shadows to the right of the idol, then another came from the left. Their beetle-like heads had no eyes. They paused, then two of them came around the altar, facing—as near as Saxon could judge—the group of Earthlings. The third went to the foot of the altar, where a basin in the stone was half-filled with something like dried weeds; it was only when a shining dome peeked out of the mass of fibers that he realized it was another of the things, the artificial bodies that these intelligences had brought to Mars. The one attending it rustled its leaf-like underbody, and from its mass it withdrew a cube, identical to the ones they had found, perhaps even one from that same room. It set the cube in the mass of inert tissue in the stone basin, and Saxon saw that the lifeless mass was moist, as if half-rehydrated.
Then he saw a cloudy liquid drip from the lip of the altar—from Ishida’s body—and he understood.
“It’s water!” he hissed, even though he didn’t know if the things in the chamber had any sense of hearing and if noise would agitate them. “The artificial bodies—they’re rehydrating them, with the water in Ishida’s body!”
“That’s why they’re becoming active now,” Mendez said. “We’ve put enough moisture into the atmosphere by melting the polar caps that it’s triggered them—”
They broke off as a noise broke from Rigby’s chest, something so unlike a voice that it was incredible to hear it from a human. Rigby’s eyes rolled back into his skull, and his entire body shuddered hard enough to throw Mendez and Swann off their balance.
The things hadn’t reacted to sound before, but they did now. Their bodies twisted, and they slid forward a yard toward the Earthmen.
“Rigby, what are you doing?” said Saxon, his eyes not leaving the inhuman beings in front of him. Rigby’s arms moved jerkily, as if trying to bend at other places than the elbow.
Chu stepped up to the spasming man. “Rigby!” he shouted, and slapped him hard enough to be felt through his face mask. The noise from Rigby’s chest ceased, and the man gasped and relaxed so suddenly in Swann and Mendez’s arms that they struggled to keep him from falling.
“I’m sorry,” Rigby gasped, “I’m sorry, it’s in here, it’s pushing me—pushing me out—it’s like wrestling with a sea of cockroaches...”
The two beings now slid forward another yard, close enough for Saxon to see the pattern of pits on the front of their black-shelled heads, like the sensory organs on the snout of an electric eel.
“They want your water.” The words struggled out of Rigby’s mouth; then he collapsed, senseless.
“Out!” shouted Saxon. “That way!” He and his men dived into the nearest exit to their right, their flashlight beams barely illuminating the way as they charged from the idol chamber. Saxon could feel—as irrational as he knew it was, he could feel—the thousand sensory organs watching and dissecting his back, the thousand tongues feeling after him hungrily, straining to wrap and devour him—
It Sees And Eats.
Saxon hoped that some unconscious sense of direction was guiding their mad dash, because otherwise they were utterly lost. The tunnels had become a labyrinth of irrational geometry, and as they rushed through passages and bare chambers—and then more chambers filled with the gleaming cubes, each containing a disembodied intelligence that had waited millions of years to be transplanted into a new body—he half-suspected that each turn would bring them back to the chamber where the incarnate idol of It Sees And Eats was waiting to transfix them with its all-seeing eyes, waiting to taste their pitiful fear and panic and consume them—
“No,” said Rigby in a thick voice. He cleared his throat and, as Swann and Mendez paused, stretched out his arm and laboriously pointed a finger.
Swann looked to Saxon.
“Couldn’t hurt,” Saxon said, and they turned in the direction Rigby pointed.
Three more turns, with Saxon completely bewildered, and then suddenly they could see a familiar chamber with fissures in the smooth stone wall. They scurried through the crevices into the natural cavern with their line still hanging from the opening above. Swann and Mendez set Rigby back against a rock and rolled their shoulders; then while Chu checked on his patient, Mendez tested the line and Swann kept watch at the fissure.
“The line’s good,” Mendez said.
Chu started unpacking the portable stretcher that had been brought for Ishida.
“No,” said Rigby in a voice without inflection. He motioned Saxon closer with an arm that had forgotten there was a hand at its e
nd.
Saxon crouched. Rigby dialed his radio off. His voice now came through the mask and the thin air to Saxon’s ears as if it were from a long distance, not ten inches in front of him.
“Give me... a saw,” Rigby said, pausing to rest between each phrase.
“What for?”
“Got to... stop them. Close it up.” He gestured to the fissures.
“We can do that from outside,” Saxon said.
Rigby’s hand hooked Saxon’s collar and pulled him closer until their masks almost touched. “They can see... through my eyes,” he gasped. “It can see. It sees. Every second, there’s... more and more... of It, and less of me.”
“We can help you!” Chu interrupted. “Once we get you back to Base—”
“I won’t get back to Base!” Rigby roared, some hidden reserve of personal energy fueling his words. “It won’t be me!” He slumped back against the rock. “You don’t know... how long... The mind in that cube—it’s been conscious all this time. All this time...”
Rigby suddenly retched again, faster than Chu or Saxon could react, but it was only dry heaves. When his shudders subsided, Rigby just looked up at Saxon, breathing hard.
Then Rigby said, almost in a whisper: “They’re coming.”
Saxon stood up. “Help him to his feet,” he said to Chu. “Swann—give me your saw.”
Dubiously, Swann backed up from the dark mouth of the fissure and unslung his plasma saw from his pack. Saxon flipped the safety cover and toggled the power. It arced blue and glimmered like starlight at the nose, and a red strip blinked down the side. He transferred it from his hand to Rigby’s, letting Rigby’s thumb settle on the dead-man power switch before he removed his own.
“You want the other one?” Saxon asked.
The other man’s mouth was hidden by the mask, but his unfocused eyes smiled. “One’ll do me fine,” Rigby said. With his free hand he clapped Saxon on the shoulder. “Now get outta here... and let me get to work.”
Saxon returned the gesture with his hand on Rigby’s shoulder, then turned to Mendez. “Don’t just stand there!” he barked. “Climb!”
Mendez placed his feet on the sloping stone and walked his way up the wall. Saxon motioned Chu to go next, then Swann. Swann had trouble climbing, his shoulders already tired from having carried Rigby so far.
“Coming,” Rigby hissed, and then that inhuman sound came out of him again, far more resonant than anything a human throat should be able to make.
Saxon got behind Swann and beneath him, letting Swann use his shoulder as a step. Mendez and Chu hauled upward on the line, dragging Swann’s weight up until he could get an arm over the lip.
And then they were there. Saxon was still looking up, waiting for the rope to fall back to him, but he could feel the presence of the inhuman minds in the small of his back and the back of his throat. Minds, or mind? It was like two audio speakers belching out the same dissonant white noise, garbling his balance and his reason.
He heard that grinding, echoing sound from Rigby again, and this time he could feel how well that sound meshed with the non-aural waves of mental noise the beings were putting off. No, not noise, it wasn’t at all random or accidental. It was a thick wall of thought, of mind, like ocean waves that threatened to swamp the small paper boat of his psyche.
He felt himself engulfed in wave after wave of emotion—if “emotion” could ever hope to indicate the non-human nature of what was beating his mind backward like a knee bent against the joint. But yes, it was emotion, it was feeling, and at its core was a malevolent rage he could taste, a consuming lust to absorb all that It hated, and what It hated was everything that was not Itself and everything that was Itself, it wanted to expand through the universe and see everything and eat everything and make everything hate as strongly as It did...
The line was looped around Saxon’s hand. He didn’t know how it had gotten there, unless he had done it unconsciously, while his conscious mind was being assaulted by that monolithic hatred. He felt the friction of his jumpsuit against the stone as the men hauled him upward, and he clutched at the sensation with his whole mind, using the simple tactile immediacy to anchor him in a sea of malevolence over which his consciousness threatened to spread like oil on water.
And then he was above ground, as if surfacing from a deep ocean into the air, and Chu grabbed his free hand while Swann and Mendez continued to pull on the rope. Saxon rediscovered that he had legs, and scrambled up the last few inches until he was crawling across the dusty soil. The other three men had their gazes locked on the hole to the catacombs, outlined by the idling discharges of Rigby’s plasma saw from below.
Saxon joined them. The couldn’t see Rigby from where they stood, but in the glow from the saw, his silhouette stood out against the surface they had just ascended. That grinding roar came again, surprisingly loud, as Rigby’s vocal cords tried to express themselves in some way that was unrelated to voice, unrelated to sound. And then there was an electric whine, and a sharp crack. The groan from Rigby’s chest was drowned out by the aching grind of stone on stone, and Saxon felt the impact beneath his feet as the sides of the cavern collapsed inward to fill the empty space.
The four men moved back a dozen paces, but no further tremors reached the surface. Dust jetted from the opening and quickly settled again in the thin atmosphere. Saxon approached the hole and shone his light. The beam was cut off by a chaotic mass of stone that completely filled the passage down.
Saxon stepped closer to the radio relay, which was blinking calmly. He flipped the switch over.
“Saxon to Sabaea Base,” he said, bemused by how normal his voice sounded.
He waited. Nothing answered him except the de minimus static of an open frequency. He repeated himself and waited again.
Kettrick knew the rules: Outside communications were always monitored whenever anyone was away from Base. Always. Even with six men absent from Base, there were still plenty to cover the radio.
Swann stepped closer and examined the relay in his flashlight beam, checking both the placid blinking light and the glowing dials inside the access panel that clicked open under his gloved fingers.
“The relay’s fine,” Swann said. He stepped back, as if he didn’t want to be within the radius of responsibility when Saxon came to the obvious conclusion.
“Back to Base,” Saxon said. The eastern horizon was just showing the dusty peach smears that heralded Mars’s unimpressive dawn; before the sky had lightened enough to read a newspaper unaided, the men had stowed their gear in the skimmer’s cargo area, and Saxon was well through his by-the-book pre-flight paragrav warm-up, conscious of the reason that Rigby had given for Caldwell’s crash-landing only the day before.
Like Caldwell had never flown a skimmer before...
The air in the skimmer’s canopy was silent and dense with anxious fatigue for the entire trip back, the kind of fatigue that chases off sleep rather than inviting it. Even if Saxon hadn’t been piloting, he was certain he wouldn’t have been enticed to close his eyes. Although the enormity of what they had discovered in Isidis Planitia and even the assault he had experienced at the end—and that’s what it was, he realized, a deliberate assault to break his will and volition by drowning him in sheer immensities that the human mind wasn’t designed to comprehend—were both retreating as normalcy reasserted itself in the familiar human design of the skimmer and its fittings, Saxon could still feel that metallic aftertaste that wasn’t in his throat at all, but in his mind.
It was late morning when Sabaea Base showed itself on the horizon. In the shotgun seat, Mendez had repeatedly broadcast hails during their return flight. It was almost the only words that any of them had spoken for the entire trip, and it was always answered by nothing more than inattentive silence.
Saxon’s brain felt glacially slow, and he piloted as much by reflex as by conscious skill. His higher brain functions wanted to hibernate, to enter a recuperative cocoon from which he could emerge divested of tha
t penetrative contact. But as much as he didn’t want to think, one fact—one name—was as omnipresent before him as if it were projected across the transparent canopy in neon red letters: Caldwell.
As the base changed from an angular smudge on the horizon to its component buildings and atria, Swann pointed with both hands—one through the canopy, the other at the scope on the dash. “Something...”
It was indeed something, a few hundred yards from the launch bay doors. Saxon eased off his forward momentum and looped into a wary circle around it, the shadow of the skimmer mimicking their path almost directly beneath them.
It was a rover jeep, occupied and immobile.
“Look alive, everyone,” Saxon said, and heard the two men in the back rouse themselves from their sleepless lethargy.
The skimmer circled again as Saxon descended cautiously. There were two human figures beneath them. One was slumped over the rover’s steering wheel; the other was splayed out from the passenger seat onto the ground, one foot still inside the rover’s open door.
Saxon brought the skimmer to land twenty yards from the rover. Gripping again the flashlights which were the nearest things they had to weapons—except for the other plasma saw, Saxon mused, although that wasn’t really useful hand to hand—the four men advanced, spreading out so that their approach fully covered their side of the wreck.
“Draney,” Saxon said, looking at the figure on the ground.
Mendez circled the rover and peered up into the face slumped on the steering wheel. “This is Rutter, here.”
Chu had his med kit over his shoulder. He raised it wordlessly, and Mendez shook his head.
“Was there some kind of crash?” Swann asked. He crouched in front of the rover and examined the wheels. “Doesn’t look like it,” he answered himself.
Saxon knelt by Draney’s body and pulled back the hood. The side of Draney’s head was crushed inward in a line from his left orbit to behind his left ear. The hair was matted and sticky with dried blood.
“Someone hit him,” Saxon said.
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