by Chad Oliver
“Maybe they were shipwrecked,” Ralph suggested. “Maybe one man was left behind, thrown on his own resources.”
“Can’t see it,” Ben Cooper objected. “What’s he supposed to scrape with that thing—sand pies? We didn’t spot any animal life to speak of, except for those little things that looked like moles.”
“Still, we can’t rule it out,” Sanders said. “Try this: there has been some contact between Earth and Mars we don’t know anything about. A ship came here maybe half a million years ago, dropped the scraper for some reason, and hightailed it back home.”
“This space travel does great things for the imagination,” Ralph said sourly.
“I’m trying to name possibilities, no matter how far-fetched. I’m aware, I think, of the mythological nature of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, and the Lost Continent of Lake Erie. Remember the old dictum of Mr. Holmes: eliminate the impossible, then hang onto what’s left.”
“What is left?”
“Number four: just like the last one, but the ship came from Mars, picked up the scraper on Earth, came back home and dropped it. Maybe it happened a million years ago. Since that time, Mars has lost her civilization and her cities are covered with sand. And don’t tell me civilizations can’t disappear.”
“Sounds pretty gassy to me.”
“They had to dig to find Troy. They had to dig to find some Biblical towns. You already have to dig to find some of the army forts on the American frontier—and they’re only a few hundred years old.”
“It’s your theory, friend.”
“Number five,” Sanders continued, running a hand through his sandy hair. “Man evolved on Mars and then migrated to Earth, maybe half a million years ago when water got scarce. In other words, the primate evolution evidence on Earth is misleading.”
Ralph Charteris bit down hard on his pipe stem, and then remembered to relax. “You’re kidding. How about the South African stuff—Australopithecus and all that? How about Pithecanthropus? Sinanthropus? Neanderthal? Swanscombe? How come when they got to Earth they went back to living in caves and rock shelters? Dammit, Sanders, you’re trying to make me sore.”
“Not at all. Here’s my parting shot: that artifact was left on Mars by some representatives of a galactic civilization. It was left there on purpose, for us to find, as a kind of I.Q. test. They want to see how we handle the situation. How’s that?”
“You’re a wild man with a theory, Sanders.”
“Listen, Doc,” Ben Cooper said slowly. “What do you really think?” Sanders looked at him and shook his head. “I don’t know, Ben,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
They didn’t have much to say after that.
They started up a poker game with magnetized cards.
They waited.
Seventeen days later, the ship landed.
They put on their airsuits and stepped outside.
There was no wind and they stood in utter silence. The ship had come down on the flat top of a mesa. Small, thorny plants with tiny green flowers were scattered loosely between worn outcroppings of reddish brown rock. The mesa was not high, and at its base was the desert, a motionless sea of gently rolling sand, so light brown that it almost appeared white.
The sky was a deep blue, very close to a cold black directly overhead but somewhat lighter near the close horizon. There was one large dirty yellow cloud hanging just over the desert floor to the south.
Sanders shivered, although it was not yet cold. He blinked his eyes, grateful for the filter lenses in his airsuit. The sun was brighter than he had ever seen it on Earth, and it was a fierce, naked brightness that pelted the low hills and deserts with shattering attacks of light.
Here, in the lost immensities of a strange and silent world, his glib theories of a few days ago could find no expression. Here were fundamentals, and the raw truths of simplicity.
Quite casually, as though unimpressed by the enormity of the moment, a creature that looked too much like a gopher for comfort stuck his head out from behind a rock and surveyed them with decided suspicion.
Sanders eyed the gopher the same way.
“Well,” Ralph said into his suit mike, staring out at the glaring wastelands, “I’d settle for a needle in a haystack any day.”
A planet is huge, Sanders thought. You cannot imagine how great it is. Suppose some creature came to Earth searching for artifacts, and all the people were gone. Where would he look? How long would it take? How many undiscovered sites are there on Earth, even today?
“Ben,” he said, “can you see where the scraper was found from here?”
Ben Cooper shook his head. “I set her down as close as I could figure to where we landed before, but it’s hard to get your bearings here. We’re close, I’d say—maybe fifty miles. We could get the copter out and spot it—we left a big circle of rocks on the sand.”
Sanders looked out. It was like standing on the beach of an ocean. There were winds on Mars, and dust storms. When the winds blew, the sands shifted. It was a lousy spot to do archeology.
“What do you think, Ralph?”
Ralph put his hands on his hips. Even he was dwarfed by the vastness around him. “No point in digging up the Sahara, I guess. The scraper was a surface find, and Schlicter said he couldn’t find a site under it. If there’s one artifact, and this deal is on the level, there must be more.”
“I’ll buy that. How about this mesa?”
Ralph shrugged. “We don’t know what we’re doing. How do we know where they lived? One place is as good as another.”
Sanders examined the ground. “Lots of erosion. But those rocks and plants have held the soil down pretty well. Probably phenomenal root systems on those plants—no water that I can see. It beats the desert. It feels like the kind of a place …”
The excitement grew in him.
“Let’s have a look,” Ralph said.
The three men split up and started to search the mesa, moving in the peculiar bent shuffle of a man trying to spot flaked stones on the ground.
The ship stood quietly behind them; it rested on the thorny plants and was nothing against a backdrop of emptiness.
The sun was white and cast sharp black shadows. The temperature was a comfortable fifty degrees Fahrenheit. There was no breeze, and not a sound.
Sanders wanted a cigarette, but couldn’t figure out how to light one in his airsuit. He moved rapidly, his eyes on the ground, looking for rock concentrations, or fired rocks, or bones, or flake chips. He found that the slight gravity affected him hardly at all, except that he felt stronger than usual.
He was content.
This was the part of archeology he liked best: you were alone, far from the cities, and the next hill was never too far away.
It took him three hours to find what he was looking for. By then the sun was lower, and it was growing cold.
“Over here,” he said into his suit mike.
He didn’t touch anything. Ralph and Ben came over in great leaping bounds, and the three of them got down on their knees and stared.
It wasn’t anything much. The soil looked a little darker than the surrounding area, and there was some cracked rock. The darker soil made an irregular circle about four feet in diameter. There was a green flower growing in the middle of it.
There were flint chips.
There was one core, with long flake scars on it.
“Get the camera,” Sanders said.
The night was very cold and filled with stars. Phobos was visible, but unimpressive. The men slept restlessly.
Next day, they went to work.
They mapped the site and plotted a north-south line and used string to lay out the area in two-foot squares. They got their notebooks and centimeter sticks ready.
Sanders and Ralph got out their small triangular trowels and began to scrape the surface of the site, very gently. Ben Cooper watched. At first, he almost held his breath.
After six hours without results, it was less exciting.
&n
bsp; They took it down in two-inch levels and filtered all the dirt through a fine mesh screen. They worked all day and found one flint chip.
The next day they found nothing at all.
Late in the afternoon of the third day, when they were ten inches down, Ralph’s trowel scraped something hard. He stuck his trowel in the hip pocket of his airsuit and took out a small whisk broom. Very carefully, he brushed the dirt away.
Sanders came over and watched.
The uncanny thing was the complete familiarity of the scene. They had both dug sites like this a hundred times, and with the same results. Ralph uncovered a broken projectile point.
They measured its exact position in the site and photographed it in place. Then Ralph lifted it out and handed it to Sanders. The base of the point was intact, with two neatly chipped shoulders. Both sides of the thin point were nicely flaked. The tip was broken. The whole thing, without the tip, was a little over three inches long and an inch wide.
“Arrowhead?” asked Ben.
“Probably not,” Ralph said. “Too big for that.”
“Unless,” Sanders smiled, “whoever made it was a giant.”
“Cut that out, Sanders.”
“Okay. Provisionally, it’s a spear point or a knife. That’s what it looks like to me.”
“Bag it.”
Sanders placed the point in a cloth bag and labeled it. Then he took up his trowel and went back to work in his own square.
When night fell, they had found nothing else.
They stuck with the site for ten days. Before they were through, the gophers had gotten used to them and came over to watch them dig. The site played out at the four foot level. They had found two scrapers, one more broken point, and a piece of charred bone. The bone was not human; it was quite small and seemed to be a femur of some sort. There was no pottery.
“Well,” Sanders said, “we may be able to get a radiocarbon date on that bone when we get back, but I don’t know how good it’ll be. Otherwise, we don’t know beans about the geology—if that’s the word I want—and there’s no telling how old the stuff is. It wasn’t left here yesterday, though.”
“We do know something now.”
“Yes. These artifacts are indigenous; nobody brought ’em here. It looks like we’ve got the remains of an old hunting and gathering culture, but we can’t very well generalize from one site.”
“In other words,” Ben Cooper said, “there were Martians.”
Sanders walked over to the edge of the low mesa and looked out across the desert sands, his mind filled with questions.
The silence came in from a long way off.
The desolation was old and patient and overwhelming.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Sites were not difficult to find.
The land had evidently been abandoned for a long time, and had been undisturbed. They spent a month sinking test pits and making surface collections, and then took the big-bladed copter from the ship and made two long flights in opposite directions.
Wherever they went, the story was the same.
Widely scattered artifacts, all of which could have been fitted into the Paleolithic of Earth without too much difficulty. Nothing that could be classed as Neolithic. No pottery, no traces of agriculture.
No skeletons.
No cities, no towns, no villages.
The land, Sanders thought, must always have been desperately poor. The food supply was uncertain, the water scarce. People must have lived in small, widely separated bands, spending every minute trying to stay alive. It would have been tough.
The lack of skeletons was not particularly surprising; old skeletal remains were always rare, and a man dropped more artifacts than bones in a lifetime.
They saw one large snake that vanished into the rocks before they could catch him.
“There’s just one question left,” Sanders said slowly, “and that’s the big one. Are we dealing with an extinct form of life, or aren’t we?”
“I was wondering myself,” Ben said. “You take back in New Mexico and Arizona, now. You find lots of old places like the ones we’ve been digging up—some of ’em go back maybe ten thousand years, they tell me. Just the same, the Indians are still there.”
The silence of centuries covered the land.
“The country seems abandoned,” Ralph said, sitting on a rock. “These people weren’t far enough along for space travel. So where could they have gone?”
“Let me ask you a question, Ralph,” Sanders said. “If you’re in a strange country and you’re looking for a place where people have lived, what would be the quickest way to find it on Earth?”
“Go where the water is,” Ralph answered without hesitating.
“Next question: where is the water?”
“Around the poles is the only place,” Ben said. “We flew over all that country last time and mapped the ice fields. There’s no water at all anywhere else.”
Sanders looked away, across the deserts, beyond the horizons. He felt small and lost and old.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They left Ben Cooper with the spaceship, not entirely against his will. There was a strong two-way radio in the copter, and they all felt that it would only be sensible to hold one man in reserve.
The copter took off, a glittering bird under the morning sun.
The flight lasted three days. It was monotonous for the most part, an endless waste of silent sand, broken occasionally by low and rocky hills. They saw no animals from the air, and only a few cactus-like plants rooted in the shifting sands. There was one bad dust storm that boiled across the desert floor, but they got above it without difficulty.
There were no canals. There were not even streaks that might have resembled canals. The canals, Sanders thought, were like the Western Sea, the Northwest Passage, the Seven Cities of Cibola. Like all dreams, they were seen best from far away.
As they drew near the polar ice, even the days were bitterly cold. The sky was almost black and there were thin blue mists of ice crystals in the air. The desert sand below them became splotched with a dark, cold, swampy green. The hard snowdrifts were violet in the light of the frozen sun.
The copter landed near the edge of the polar ice on a narrow ridge of slick, mossy rock. The land closely resembled some parts of Earth, where you get up above the timberline in cold mountain air and water from glacial lakes trickles down across the gray wet rocks.
They got out.
They heard the frozen silence, and that was all.
Sanders looked around slowly, feeling the cold eat through his clothing and chill his feet. There was a lake of white-violet ice to his left, like glass in the snow and the rocks. He stared at it for a long time.
“Ralph, have we got any line in the copter?” he said into his suit mike. It seemed odd not to see his frozen breath before him. “Anything we could use for a hook?”
“We might be able to rig up something.”
They found some wire and torched a hook out of a spare copter ring. Sanders walked over to the lake, his feet coming down uncertainly on the light, crisp surfaces. He took the torch and carved out a small, neat circle in the ice.
There was deep black water beneath the ice.
He put a chunk of canned meat on the hook and lowered it into the hole.
“Here goes nothing,” he said.
They waited, stirring the water occasionally to keep the ice from forming. They got good and cold. The silence was absolute.
An hour passed.
Another hour.
Something bit the hook. The wire jerked in Sanders’ gloved hand and he would have lost it if it had not been wound around his wrist.
The wire cut through the black water with a sssss.
“Can you hold him?” Ralph whispered.
“I think so.”
It was strong and heavy and full of fight. Sanders played it tautly, feeling it jerk against his wrist. He was sure he
had it hooked. He began pulling the wire in, a loop at a time. His heart hammered in his chest and he was short of breath. If he could keep it from darting under the ice, snagging the line—
He saw it: a flash of gold in the cold black water.
He pulled, not too fast.
It flopped out on the ice and both men dived for it.
They held him as he squirmed under their gloves. They laughed and hollered unreasonably. They had him!
They ran a wire through his gills and held him up, still wiggling heavily.
He was a beauty: a slim firm five-pounder, sleek and solid gold with jet black fins. He looked more like a golden mountain trout than anything else, and he was the most beautiful fish Sanders had ever seen.
“Get him in the water. We don’t want to kill him.”
They lowered him into the icy water on the stringer and then anchored the line to a stub of mossy rock. They looked at each other, grinning happily.
“There’s a food supply here,” Sanders said.
“Look!”
He followed Ralph’s pointing finger and saw a small black shape on the ice. It slithered away as he watched, moving toward the swampy country beyond. It looked like a cross between an otter and a seal.
“This is where the life is, Ralph. This is where he’s got to be.”
The emptiness and the silence closed in around them, but the wire into the water was taut and moved as they watched, back and forth across the hole in the ice.
Three days later, they found him.
He was not three hundred yards from the copter.
He stood quietly on the violet ice, watching them.
He could not have been mistaken for a human being of the type that they had known. But he was a man, and could have been nothing less.
“Don’t scare him.”
The man was not frightened. He was small, only slightly over four feet tall, and warmly dressed in black skins. He held a spear balanced in his right hand, and Sanders could see that he had an atlatl to throw it with. His face was very white with a high flush of red around the nose and on both cheeks. His eyes were narrow and there was no hair on his face. He wore a skin hood that covered his head, neck, and ears.