When the blue-eyed enforcer beside him stumbled, John said, “You’re new to Mars. It’s best to move deliberately until you find your Mars-feet, else you’ll spend a lot of time brushing dust from your knees.”
~ * ~
They took the long way back to town, riding along the dry gully until it merged with the high country beyond the mesa-land. If a man didn’t want to walk, he let his mount pick its own path. They moved more like dogs than horses, round shoulders and hips rising and falling with each loping stride. The early morning’s bite faded as the sun rose higher into a turquoise-blue sky.
As they approached the last mesa, they could see the vast hull of a Martian cargo-ship, destroyed in a war that burned out before men arrived. It was split open like a steel watermelon hit by a sledge-hammer, the cables and plating of its innards filling with dust and wind-blown brush. In their exploration of the planet, the Army Cavalry men had discovered that the cargo-ship the people of Mars now used to ferry people and materials back and forth to Earth was the only one of some dozen to have survived the Martian civil war. Three ruined vessels still held ten invasion-cylinders each, like huge rounds in a revolver, ready to fire their War-Tripods at Earth.
As they rounded the mesa, more of John’s Town became visible across the plains beyond. Some of the horrible Black Dust that the Martians had used in their invasion of England was still visible in the wind-lee between the buildings, like stubborn shadows. John couldn’t shake the memory of the first time he explored the town: desiccated Martians spilled out of buildings, some shuddering in the streets like terrible tumbleweed. He’d found a corral full of heaped bodies of those simple, man-like creatures, surely no smarter than monkeys, that looked to have starved when their masters died. Scientists back home had determined that the Martians kept them for food: They drank their blood—transfused it, actually. John was glad he never met a live Martian.
What the Martians had done to England was nothing compared to what they had done to themselves. The Black Dust had found its way into every crevice all across Mars. They had flooded their world with the stuff. John’s Martian room-mate had no answer for why they had done this. John wondered if they’d decided to invade Earth because they’d made Mars uninhabitable to their own people, to escape the war, or out of the same breed of self-hatred that makes men keep killing once they start along that path.
As they drew nearer, John was startled to see activity within John’s Town. A dozen or more men were using picks and pry-bars to find their way into the cluster of buildings that weren’t smashed like the rest of the town. Four large Martian horseless carriages waited near the edge of town, floating a few feet above the ground with the power of Mars-stone.
Company men, said brother Billy. Looting your property.
John watched the men carting off equipment that rightly belonged to him. His cheeks grew hot, even in the icy morning breeze.
“What are Company men doing in my town?” he asked.
“That ain’t nobody’s town no more,” said Gerry Ake, a few steps behind him. “New rule is that all Martian technology belongs to the Company.”
“John’s Town is on my homestead claim,” John said.
“Ha! ‘John’s Town,’ eh? Don’t make no difference where it is, that’s the new rules. Anyhow, you got no claim while you’re in custody of the law.”
John felt his heart pound in his throat.
This is what Company men do, said Billy. They grab until there ain’t nothing left, then make new laws so they can grab more. You gonna stand for this, John? Oh, right, you’re done with killing.
How did listening to Lucius and McCrady’s ideas work out for you? asked John. There are other ways to make things right.
Tell that to Gerry Ake, said Billy. Tell that to the nine men and three women he murdered in Oklahoma and Kansas. Tell that to the men he murdered here.
They rode on in silence. A horseless carriage—a big platform with a propeller mounted on the rear— whooshed past them, loaded down with all manner of Martian apparatus looted from his town.
John stared straight ahead for the rest of their journey to Acidalium Town.
~ * ~
“Talk to me about your friends and associates,” said Monty Cooper, Company Boss on Mars. He indicated a swivel chair situated in front of the wide oak desk. “And how you’re not part of their murderous gang.”
John didn’t want to sit. He wanted to face his ruin with as much dignity as he could manage. Gerry Ake and the two young enforcers leaned against the office paneling on the far side of the room, behind John, near the door to Main Street. All this wood— everything in the room, desk, chairs, lithographs on the walls—had been ferried to Mars.
John said nothing. Cooper waited a bit, eyes peering out from his soft face. A breeze rattled the single window-pane that provided a view across the Chinese and Irish laborer shacks surrounding Lowell Space-Port. A storm was brewing from the north, whipping up dust. The laborers pulled their wide-brimmed hats low over faces obscured with masks and bandanas against the weather. Finally Cooper sighed and looked outside.
“Make it easy on yourself, Surveyor,” Cooper said. “We’re planning a hanging tomorrow, and it might as well be McCrady or his whore wife than you. My boys took care of most of their gang, and several of my men were killed or wounded. I notice you bear no injuries. Fancy that.”
“I wasn’t involved in the gunfight,” John said.
“So you say,” said Cooper, nodding. He held John with a piercing stare, then leaned back in an overstuffed green leather chair that creaked beneath his mass. “Can you corroborate that claim?”
Again, John had no answer. He lived alone, as had always been his wont.
Cooper sighed. “Put him in the cell,” he said to Gerry Ake. “John Mulberry, you had better hope that Mr. Ake finds that damned Irishman and his murderous Mexican whore before tomorrow noon, else you’ll be dancing above Main Street.”
~ * ~
John sat on a cold stone slab in the town’s only jail cell. Steel bars separated the tiny space from a door that led to Cooper’s office. The cell smelled of mold and piss. Someone had scratched into the stone the image of a naked lady.
How’s pacifism working for you, brother? asked Billy.
Outside, the storm seemed to be growing fierce until John recognized the sound, not as blowing debris but the steady thumping of a Martian Tripod’s legs against the cobbled street. It grew louder and then stopped outside the building. Soon after, John heard the front door open and close, then voices. The voices grew loud enough for him to hear:
“This ain’t none of your business, nigger!” Gerry Ake’s voice.
John could hear Cooper’s low rumble, then another man’s booming voice: “Yes, it is my business. The U.S. Army is the law here, and that boy you arrested was not in town last night. I saw who was involved in the shootout, and John Mulberry was not.”
Footsteps, followed by the door to the cell opening. Captain George Hughes of the Army company stationed on Mars stood framed by the doorway, his dark blue uniform coat trimmed in gold. Slung over one shoulder was John’s gun-belt. The 10th Cavalry were the first men to Mars, sent back in the giant Martian ship that had landed near Wolf Point. The ship had been filled with dead Martians, dead Martian cattle, dead Martian man-like things, dead red creeper . . . everything homesteaders might need. Scientists determined that Earthly disease bacteria had destroyed what was meant to be a colonization crew before they had fully disembarked. After engineers deduced how to operate the vessel, the U.S. government shipped the 10th Cavalry back to scout the Martian homeworld, destroy any resistance, and report back on their adventures. Everyone was stunned to learn that all of the tentacled beasts had destroyed one another during their internal war.
In the two Mars years since—four Earth-years— the 10th had explored half of Mars. The Martians had gone extinct without humans needing to fire a single shot.
Captain Hughes stepped into the alcove on th
e other side of the bars. The young enforcer who had arrested John earlier in the morning followed him in, pulled out a set of keys, and unlocked the cage. John stood.
“Much obliged,” John said.
“Don’t thank me, Surveyor,” said Hughes. “You’re in my custody now.”
As they walked out through Cooper’s office, the Boss worked hard to look busy with papers on his desk. Gerry Ake still leaned against the wood paneling by the open front door and made his left hand look like a pistol, pointing it at John first and then Captain Hughes. He laughed and sauntered outside before them.
Hughes led John across the paved Martian sidewalk onto the cobblestone street where the huge Tripod stood. Articulated steel tentacles swayed around its disc-shaped body. Huge blue lettering on the underside proclaimed, “ARMY 1.” A crossed pair of swords in gold scabbards supporting a huge “10” also adorned the machine, as did a pair of bison, which framed the other markings. High above, the Tripod’s top lid was hinged open, the leather-capped head of the driver just visible from within.
The driver lowered a rope-ladder, which, upon Hughes’s urging, John proceeded to climb. When he and Captain Hughes stood inside the narrow confines of the Tripod, the driver rolled up the ladder and stowed it beneath the steel control console that ringed the compartment. Dials bore alien markings and boxes displayed moving-pictures of squiggly lines; people had affixed paper notes indicating what each device monitored: POWER, PRESSURE, HEAT-RAY, and dozens more. The driver sat upon a wide, flat stool and began manipulating the many levers that surrounded him, clearly designed for the multitudinous limbs of the Martians rather than two human hands.
The machine lurched off, and they proceeded across town in silence except for the clanging of metal feet against stone and the whirr and creak of machinery. They left the lid open, probably because the Tripod’s interior stank of hot metal and rot. A little round glass in the front served as the driver’s portal to the world, though John could see outside just fine while standing and clinging to hand-holds. This was his first ride in a Martian war-machine, and it made him feel simultaneously giddy and sick to his stomach.
They passed the long row of Martian buildings that comprised the town, ornate stone spaces that had been converted from mysterious purposes into a general store, a trading-post, a combination post office and barber shop, a schoolhouse, both Episcopal and Catholic churches, a bank, Nolan Hersh’s mechanic shop where he purported to fix Martian machines, the Dakota Sioux gathering hall, all manner of other little shops run mostly by settlers deterred by the unforgiving nature of trying to homestead on Mars, and of course a saloon. Many of the town’s buildings had been converted into homes, but most of the teapot-shaped structures sat empty. Their deceased original inhabitants had been removed nearly two Martian years ago when the first wave of immigrants, the Chinese and Irish laborers and Company looters, arrived, yet explorers still found one of the desiccated bodies every once in a while.
At the edge of town they passed the expanse of Lowell Space-Port, busy with activity and dominated by the massive cargo-ship, their only passage to Earth. A few miles north of Acidalia Town, John could just make out the ruined Martian village that sat on Joe Running Bear’s homestead claim, which John had surveyed summer of last year, after the U.S. government had begun shipping the Dakota Sioux to Mars. They seemed polite enough people, kept mostly to themselves—not unlike the other immigrant groups.
At last they passed through the open barbed-wire gate of the Army camp, situated just on the other side of town from the space-port. The Tripod staggered to a halt outside a long, shabby barracks constructed from sheets of some light, flexible material. Captain Hughes turned to John and handed him his gun belt. John strapped it on.
“Your daddy was a good man. I knew him when I served at Fort Assinniboine out of Havre in Montana, where he was doing surveys for the Land Office in Indian country. I knew Captain Grunwold, too, the son of a bitch what killed him.” Hughes turned to face John, his dark features nearly unreadable in the shade of his wide cap. “That one wasn’t a good man.”
John felt his heart race: at last, someone who had witnessed the event. His father had never talked about it before he died of his wound.
“What happened? Why did Grunwold shoot my father?”
“I was a lieutenant then,” said Hughes, “and they were both captains. Grunwold, he figured the best way to demoralize the Indians into quitting the war was to just kill everyone, wives and children and braves alike. When your daddy got attached to our unit to survey the lands in Northeast Montana, he got to feeling responsible for how the soldiers behaved, like any good officer should. So when Grunwold sent my platoon to ‘pacify’ this little Assiniboine village near the Martian cargo-ship, your daddy figured what that meant and joined us.
“Right after sunset we arrived at this little huddle of tents in the badlands. It was clear there wasn’t any Indian braves here, but Grunwold ordered a full assault. Your daddy countermanded the order. The two argued in front of all the men, making Grunwold angrier than I’d ever seen, and he drew his sidearm and shot your daddy in the belly, right there. Army officer shooting Army officer in front of Army soldiers.” Hughes whistled.
“The men, they got all heated up—everyone liked your daddy—and it looked like Grunwold was about to face a mutiny. So he ordered the ride back to the Fort. Six of us carried your daddy on account of he couldn’t ride with his wound. Interfering with Grunwold’s order got him killed. It also stopped a massacre. As I was an officer in charge of one of those platoons, I would have been responsible for what happened. I owe him for that debt.”
John felt a rush of mixed pride and anger. Hughes broke his reverie.
“It’s not clear in my mind right now what to do about our current troubles. All I know is what I thought was good men and women are shooting each other.”
John looked out across the camp with its soldiers formed up in ranks in the dust, twenty-two men drilling before a pair of sergeants. Seeing all those Negro men in uniform didn’t feel strange on Mars where everything was different than on Earth. Just past camp rose the steel whale that was the cargo-ship, swallowing not just piles of Mars-stone dug up by miners working the great Valles Marineris, but irreproducible Martian artifacts that rightly belonged to John’s Town and Perry’s Town and any number of other towns.
“I didn’t ask to be any part of this,” John said. He felt as if a cold stone had sunk in his belly.
“Life has a way of throwing things at you that you never asked for,” said Hughes. “Sometimes it’s good, like when I got promoted to captain so the Army could ship me here to command this little outfit. I bear no illusion that my promotion or these men,” he pointed to the soldiers, “getting put in charge of pacifying an entire planet was intended to be an honor.” His smile looked more like a grimace. “But once we got here and didn’t have to fight, I’d got to thinking that things had worked out for the best . . .” His voice trailed off. He nodded to the driver.
“Follow me, I want you to meet those at the heart of last night’s troubles.”
The driver unfurled the rope-ladder, and John and Captain Hughes climbed down. Hughes led him to the stone Martian shack that served as Army command headquarters and opened the door. Inside, by the blue light of Martian light-fixtures overhead, John could see two cots along a wall and several busy medical officers attending to their occupants.
“Lucius! Martina!” John said. He felt light-headed when he saw a broad, blood-stained bandage across Lucius’s left shoulder, and Martina’s black hair half-hidden in white gauze. She was unconscious.
Lucius waved away a medic fiddling with his bandage and sat up on the cot. He regarded John for a moment, then spoke to Captain Hughes. “George, what’s this all about? Are we under arrest?”
“Well, you ain’t leaving until I decide. You in such a hurry to get shot again?”
“You know what they’re doing to us out there, George,” said Lucius. “They’re
taking away everything we own, killing us slowly. Last night they murdered nine good men who wanted nothing more than the freedom to make their own way on this world fair and square! John here might have saved some of them if he’d been with us.”
John had to look away. That cold stone was starting to grow hot.
“Seems to me that those ‘nine good men’ did some killing of their own,” said Captain Hughes. “You put me in a tough spot, Lucius. I don’t appreciate what the Company’s doing any more than you do, breaking U.S. law by claiming what rightly belongs to people. But killing is against the law, too, and if we don’t obey law we’re no better than them. I won’t countenance any massacres, no matter who’s behind it.”
A commotion outside got everyone’s attention. Hughes and John walked to the front door while Lucius swung his feet to the floor and pulled on his boots. Martina began to stir on her cot, her dark eyelids fluttering open. John heard many voices outside, angry shouts.
Hughes opened the door to reveal what appeared to be all the townspeople of Acidalium plus many of the homesteaders and miners and even a few of the Sioux: dozens of men and women milling about within the wire confines of camp. They carried a variety of guns—mostly stolen, John figured—and many more held dangerous-looking farming or mining tools. The ghosts of those who died last night stood among them. This would be over if you’d helped us, one of the dead said to John.
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