Produced by Greg Weeks, Joel Schlosberg and the Online

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Transcriber's Note:



This eBook was produced from the 1949 book _A Martian Odyssey and

Others_ by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not

uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was

renewed.









A MARTIAN ODYSSEY





Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped

general quarters of the _Ares_.



"Air you can breathe!" he exulted. "It feels as thick as soup after the

thin stuff out there!" He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching

flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of

the port.



The other three stared at him sympathetically--Putz, the engineer,

Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the

expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the _Ares_

expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of

the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less

than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic

blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad

Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of

the _Ares_. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated

de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the

first men to feel other gravity than earth's, and certainly the first

successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that

success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts--the months

spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the

air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny

rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century,

and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.



Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his

frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.



"Well," exploded Harrison abruptly, "are we going to hear what happened?

You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep

for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap

with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!"



"Speel?" queried Leroy perplexedly. "Speel what?"



"He means '_spiel_'," explained Putz soberly. "It iss to tell."



Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a smile.

"That's right, Karl," he said in grave agreement with Putz. "_Ich spiel

es!_" He grunted comfortably and began.



"According to orders," he said, "I watched Karl here take off toward the

North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You'll

remember, Cap--we had orders not to land, but just scout about for

points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along,

riding pretty high--about two thousand feet--for a couple of reasons.

First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets

travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up

dust if you move low."



"We know all that from Putz," grunted Harrison. "I wish you'd saved the

films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this junket; remember how

the public mobbed the first moon pictures?"



"The films are safe," retorted Jarvis. "Well," he resumed, "as I said, I

buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings

haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and

even then I had to use the under-jets.



"So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the

under-jets, the seeing wasn't any too good. I could see enough, though,

to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain

that we'd been examining the whole week since our landing--same blobby

growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or

biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my

position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard

me."



"I did!" snapped Harrison.



"A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis imperturbably, "the

surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and

orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then,

and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which

would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right,

I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple

of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so

I did."



"Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!" grumbled the

captain. "Let's get to the point."



"Coming!" remarked Jarvis. "Twenty miles into Thyle--believe it or

not--I crossed a canal!"



"Putz photographed a hundred! Let's hear something new!"



"And did he also see a city?"



"Twenty of 'em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!"



"Well," observed Jarvis, "from here on I'll be telling a few things Putz

didn't see!" He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. "I knew that I

had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours--eight

hundred miles--from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over

Thyle, whether I or II I'm not sure, not more than twenty-five miles

into it. And right there, Putz's pet motor quit!"



"Quit? How?" Putz was solicitous.



"The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and

suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed

my nose on the window, too!" He rubbed the injured member ruefully.



"Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?"

inquired Putz. "Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation--"



"Naw!" said Jarvis disgustedly. "I wouldn't try that, of course--not

more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and

busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working--what then?

Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I'd have

melted the floor from under me!" He rubbed his nose again. "Lucky for me

a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I'd have been mashed flat!"



"I could have fixed!" ejaculated the engineer. "I bet it vas not

serious."



"Probably not," agreed Jarvis sarcastically. "Only it wouldn't fly.

Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or

trying to walk back--eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before

we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well," he concluded, "I chose to

walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy."



"We'd have found you," said Harrison.



"No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put

the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some

iron rations, and started out."



"Water tank!" exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. "She weigh

one-quarter ton!"



"Wasn't full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight,

which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred

and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a

hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday

earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily

stroll. Oh--of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry

Martian nights.



"Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight

meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course--plugging along

over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy's crawling

biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal--just a dry ditch

about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own

company map.



"There'd been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with

what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn

moved out of my way!"



"Eh?" said Leroy.



"Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one--a little

grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy

legs."



"He is where?" Leroy was eager.



"He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass

opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange

desert of Thyle again.



"I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome,

and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just

before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over

the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of

_that_ to be walked over, and then a couple of hundred miles of that

Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I

started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!"



"We were trying, you sap!" said Harrison.



"That didn't help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of

daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy

place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as

this--crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance

and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen

anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world--nothing

dangerous, that is."



"Did you?" queried Harrison.



"_Did I!_ You'll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about

to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!"



"Vot iss shenanigans?" inquired Putz.



"He says, 'Je ne sais quoi,'" explained Leroy. "It is to say, 'I don't

know what.'"



"That's right," agreed Jarvis. "I didn't know what, so I sneaked over to

find out. There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of

canaries--whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded

a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel!"



"Tweel?" said Harrison, and "Tveel?" said Leroy and Putz.



"That freak ostrich," explained the narrator. "At least, Tweel is as

near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something

like 'Trrrweerrlll.'"



"What was he doing?" asked the Captain.



"He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one would."



"Eaten! By what?"



"I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms

tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an

ostrich. I wasn't going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were

dangerous, I'd have one less to worry about.



"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious

blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I

caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!" Jarvis

shuddered. "But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or

case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or

tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my

automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.



"There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and

then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its

arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks,

staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned

suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at

each other.



"The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like, except

just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery

appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was somewhat flexible;

I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a

cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four

fingered things--hands, you'd have to call them, and a little roundish

body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head--and that beak. It stood an

inch or so taller than I, and--well, Putz saw it!"



The engineer nodded. "_Ja!_ I saw!"



Jarvis continued. "So--we stared at each other. Finally the creature

went into a series of clackings and twitterings and held out its hands

toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship."



"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of yours and

thought you were its brother!"



"Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my gun and said

'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort, and the thing came

over and we were pals.



"By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I'd better build a

fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the fire. I picked a spot

at the base of the Thyle cliff, where the rock could reflect a little

heat on my back. I started breaking off chunks of this desiccated

Martian vegetation, and my companion caught the idea and brought in an

armful. I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and

brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it,

and the fire was blazing--and you all know what a job we have starting a

fire in this atmosphere!



"And that bag of his!" continued the narrator. "That was a manufactured

article, my friends; press an end and she popped open--press the middle

and she sealed so perfectly you couldn't see the line. Better than

zippers.



"Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort

of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick';

he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and

repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I

called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to

emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him,

'Tweel.'



"There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said

something like 'P-p-p-proot.' And that was just the beginning; I was

always 'Tick,' but as for him--part of the time he was 'Tweel,' and part

of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,' and part of the time he was sixteen

other noises!



"We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried 'star,' and

'tree,' and 'fire,' and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I

couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive

minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist! Finally I gave it

up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.



"But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple of them,

which I suppose is a great achievement if you're used to a language you

have to make up as you go along. But I couldn't get the hang of his

talk; either I missed some subtle point or we just didn't _think_

alike--and I rather believe the latter view.



"I've other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave up the

language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two plus two

equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles. Again Tweel

caught the idea, and informed me that three plus three equals six. Once

more we seemed to be getting somewhere.



"So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school education, I drew

a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and then at the last glow of

the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and Venus, and Mother Earth, and

Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars, I swept my hand around in a sort of

inclusive gesture to indicate that Mars was our current environment. I

was working up to putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.



"Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and

with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos

to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!



"Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses

telescopes--that they're civilized!"



"Does not!" snapped Harrison. "The moon is visible from here as a fifth

magnitude star. They could see its revolution with the naked eye."



"The moon, yes!" said Jarvis. "You've missed my point. Mercury isn't

visible! And Tweel knew of Mercury because he placed the Moon at the

_third_ planet, not the second. If he didn't know Mercury, he'd put the

earth second, and Mars third, instead of fourth! See?"



"Humph!" said Harrison.



"Anyway," proceeded Jarvis, "I went on with my lesson. Things were going

smoothly, and it looked as if I could put the idea over. I pointed at

the earth on my diagram, and then at myself, and then, to clinch it, I

pointed to myself and then to the earth itself shining bright green

almost at the zenith.



"Tweel set up such an excited clacking that I was certain he understood.

He jumped up and down, and suddenly he pointed at himself and then at

the sky, and then at himself and at the sky again. He pointed at his

middle and then at Arcturus, at his head and then at Spica, at his feet

and then at half a dozen stars, while I just gaped at him. Then, all of

a sudden, he gave a tremendous leap. Man, what a hop! He shot straight

up into the starlight, seventy-five feet if an inch! I saw him

silhouetted against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head

first, and land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square

in the center of my sun-circle in the sand--a bull's eye!"



"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"



"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed while he

pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I figured he'd missed

my point, and I went through the whole blamed rigamarole again, and it

ended the same way, with Tweel on his nose in the middle of my picture!"



"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.



"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We could exchange

ideas up to a certain point, and then--blooey! Something in us was

different, unrelated; I don't doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy

as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different

viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours. But--we

couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I

_liked_ Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."



"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"



"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we--"

He paused, and then resumed his narrative. "Anyway, I finally gave it

up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any

too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes

after I closed myself in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some

eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant

little frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my

rocket.



"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I

woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I

heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that

three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to

myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the

south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.



"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing

through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He

seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in

beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and

stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come

shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his

coming at me like a spear, but he always ended in the sand at my side.



"So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same sort of

place as this--same crazy plants and same little green biopods growing

in the sand, or crawling out of your way. We talked--not that we

understood each other, you know, but just for company. I sang songs, and

I suspect Tweel did too; at least, some of his trillings and twitterings

had a subtle sort of rhythm.



"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words.

He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and point to a pebble and

say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then repeat it.

He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing

twice in succession, or that the same word could apply to two different

objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the

primitive speech of some earth people--you know, Captain, like the

Negritoes, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food

or water or man--words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea

water, or strong man and weak man--but no names for general classes.

They're too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are

just different aspects of the same thing. But that wasn't the case with

Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different--our

minds were alien to each other. And yet--we _liked_ each other!"



"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two were so

fond of each other."



"Well, I like _you_!" countered Jarvis wickedly. "Anyway," he resumed,

"don't get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact,

I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human

intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I

guess; but don't overlook the point that he managed to understand a

little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."



"Because he didn't have any!" suggested the captain, while Putz and

Leroy blinked attentively.



"You can judge of that when I'm through," said Jarvis. "Well, we plugged

along across the Mare Chronium all that day, and all the next. Mare

Chronium--Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to agree with Schiaparelli's

name by the end of that march! Just that grey, endless plain of weird

plants, and never a sign of any other life. It was so monotonous that I

was even glad to see the desert of Xanthus toward the evening of the

second day.



"I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for all I never

saw him drink or eat. I think he could have crossed the Mare Chronium in

a couple of hours with those block-long nose dives of his, but he stuck

along with me. I offered him some water once or twice; he took the cup

from me and sucked the liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted

it all back into the cup and gravely returned it.



"Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it, one of those

nasty sand clouds blew along, not as bad as the one we had here, but

mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent flap of my thermo-skin

bag across my face and managed pretty well, and I noticed that Tweel

used some feathery appendages growing like a mustache at the base of his

beak to cover his nostrils, and some similar fuzz to shield his eyes."



"He is a desert creature!" ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.



"Huh? Why?"



"He drink no water--he is adapt' for sand storm--"



"Proves nothing! There's not enough water to waste any where on this

desiccated pill called Mars. We'd call all of it desert on earth, you

know." He paused. "Anyway, after the sand storm blew over, a little wind

kept blowing in our faces, not strong enough to stir the sand. But

suddenly things came drifting along from the Xanthus cliffs--small,

transparent spheres, for all the world like glass tennis balls! But

light--they were almost light enough to float even in this thin

air--empty, too; at least, I cracked open a couple and nothing came out

but a bad smell. I asked Tweel about them, but all he said was 'No, no,

no,' which I took to mean that he knew nothing about them. So they went

bouncing by like tumbleweeds, or like soap bubbles, and we plugged on

toward Xanthus. Tweel pointed at one of the crystal balls once and said

'rock,' but I was too tired to argue with him. Later I discovered what

he meant.



"We came to the bottom of the Xanthus cliffs finally, when there wasn't

much daylight left. I decided to sleep on the plateau if possible;

anything dangerous, I reasoned, would be more likely to prowl through

the vegetation of the Mare Chronium than the sand of Xanthus. Not that

I'd seen a single sign of menace, except the rope-armed black thing that

had trapped Tweel, and apparently that didn't prowl at all, but lured

its victims within reach. It couldn't lure me while I slept, especially

as Tweel didn't seem to sleep at all, but simply sat patiently around

all night. I wondered how the creature had managed to trap Tweel, but

there wasn't any way of asking him. I found that out too, later; it's

devilish!



"However, we were ambling around the base of the Xanthus barrier looking

for an easy spot to climb. At least, I was. Tweel could have leaped it

easily, for the cliffs were lower than Thyle--perhaps sixty feet. I

found a place and started up, swearing at the water tank strapped to my

back--it didn't bother me except when climbing--and suddenly I heard a

sound that I thought I recognized!



"You know how deceptive sounds are in this thin air. A shot sounds like

the pop of a cork. But this sound was the drone of a rocket, and sure

enough, there went our second auxiliary about ten miles to westward,

between me and the sunset!"



"Vas me!" said Putz. "I hunt for you."



"Yeah; I knew that, but what good did it do me? I hung on to the cliff

and yelled and waved with one hand. Tweel saw it too, and set up a

trilling and twittering, leaping to the top of the barrier and then high

into the air. And while I watched, the machine droned on into the

shadows to the south.



"I scrambled to the top of the cliff. Tweel was still pointing and

trilling excitedly, shooting up toward the sky and coming down head-on

to stick upside down on his beak in the sand. I pointed toward the south

and at myself, and he said, 'Yes--Yes--Yes'; but somehow I gathered that

he thought the flying thing was a relative of mine, probably a parent.

Perhaps I did his intellect an injustice; I think now that I did.



"I was bitterly disappointed by the failure to attract attention. I

pulled out my thermo-skin bag and crawled into it, as the night chill

was already apparent. Tweel stuck his beak into the sand and drew up his

legs and arms and looked for all the world like one of those leafless

shrubs out there. I think he stayed that way all night."



"Protective mimicry!" ejaculated Leroy. "See? He is desert creature!"



"In the morning," resumed Jarvis, "we started off again. We hadn't gone

a hundred yards into Xanthus when I saw something queer! This is one

thing Putz didn't photograph, I'll wager!



"There was a line of little pyramids--tiny ones, not more than six

inches high, stretching across Xanthus as far as I could see! Little

buildings made of pygmy bricks, they were, hollow inside and truncated,

or at least broken at the top and empty. I pointed at them and said

'What?' to Tweel, but he gave some negative twitters to indicate, I

suppose, that he didn't know. So off we went, following the row of

pyramids because they ran north, and I was going north.



"Man, we trailed that line for hours! After a while, I noticed another

queer thing: they were getting larger. Same number of bricks in each

one, but the bricks were larger.



"By noon they were shoulder high. I looked into a couple--all just the

same, broken at the top and empty. I examined a brick or two as well;

they were silica, and old as creation itself!"



"How you know?" asked Leroy.



"They were weathered--edges rounded. Silica doesn't weather easily even

on earth, and in this climate--!"



"How old you think?"



"Fifty thousand--a hundred thousand years. How can I tell? The little

ones we saw in the morning were older--perhaps ten times as old.

Crumbling. How old would that make _them_? Half a million years? Who

knows?" Jarvis paused a moment. "Well," he resumed, "we followed the

line. Tweel pointed at them and said 'rock' once or twice, but he'd done

that many times before. Besides, he was more or less right about these.



"I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked 'People?' and

indicated the two of us. He set up a negative sort of clucking and said,

'No, no, no. No one-one-two. No two-two-four,' meanwhile rubbing his

stomach. I just stared at him and he went through the business again.

'No one-one-two. No two-two-four.' I just gaped at him."



"That proves it!" exclaimed Harrison. "Nuts!"



"You think so?" queried Jarvis sardonically. "Well, I figured it out

different! 'No one-one-two!' You don't get it, of course, do you?"



"Nope--nor do you!"



"I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew to put over

a very complex idea. What, let me ask, does mathematics make you think

of?"



"Why--of astronomy. Or--or logic!"



"That's it! 'No one-one-two!' Tweel was telling me that the builders of

the pyramids weren't people--or that they weren't intelligent, that they

weren't reasoning creatures! Get it?"



"Huh! I'll be damned!"



"You probably will."



"Why," put in Leroy, "he rub his belly?"



"Why? Because, my dear biologist, that's where his brains are! Not in

his tiny head--in his middle!"



"_C'est_ impossible!"



"Not on Mars, it isn't! This flora and fauna aren't earthly; your

biopods prove that!" Jarvis grinned and took up his narrative. "Anyway,

we plugged along across Xanthus and in about the middle of the

afternoon, something else queer happened. The pyramids ended."



"Ended!"



"Yeah; the queer part was that the last one--and now they were

ten-footers--was capped! See? Whatever built it was still inside; we'd

trailed 'em from their half-million-year-old origin to the present.



"Tweel and I noticed it about the same time. I yanked out my automatic

(I had a clip of Boland explosive bullets in it) and Tweel, quick as a

sleight-of-hand trick, snapped a queer little glass revolver out of his

bag. It was much like our weapons, except that the grip was larger to

accommodate his four-taloned hand. And we held our weapons ready while

we sneaked up along the lines of empty pyramids.



"Tweel saw the movement first. The top tiers of bricks were heaving,

shaking, and suddenly slid down the sides with a thin crash. And

then--something--something was coming out!



"A long, silvery-grey arm appeared, dragging after it an armored body.

Armored, I mean, with scales, silver-grey and dull-shining. The arm

heaved the body out of the hole; the beast crashed to the sand.



"It was a nondescript creature--body like a big grey cask, arm and a

sort of mouth-hole at one end; stiff, pointed tail at the other--and

that's all. No other limbs, no eyes, ears, nose--nothing! The thing

dragged itself a few yards, inserted its pointed tail in the sand,

pushed itself upright, and just sat.



"Tweel and I watched it for ten minutes before it moved. Then, with a

creaking and rustling like--oh, like crumpling stiff paper--its arm

moved to the mouth-hole and out came a brick! The arm placed the brick

carefully on the ground, and the thing was still again.



"Another ten minutes--another brick. Just one of Nature's bricklayers.

I was about to slip away and move on when Tweel pointed at the thing and

said 'rock'! I went 'huh?' and he said it again. Then, to the

accompaniment of some of his trilling, he said, 'No--no--,' and gave two

or three whistling breaths.



"Well, I got his meaning, for a wonder! I said, 'No breath?' and

demonstrated the word. Tweel was ecstatic; he said, 'Yes, yes, yes! No,

no, no breet!' Then he gave a leap and sailed out to land on his nose

about one pace from the monster!



"I was startled, you can imagine! The arm was going up for a brick, and

I expected to see Tweel caught and mangled, but--nothing happened! Tweel

pounded on the creature, and the arm took the brick and placed it neatly

beside the first. Tweel rapped on its body again, and said 'rock,' and I

got up nerve enough to take a look myself.



"Tweel was right again. The creature was rock, and it didn't breathe!"



"How you know?" snapped Leroy, his black eyes blazing interest.



"Because I'm a chemist. The beast was made of silica! There must have

been pure silicon in the sand, and it lived on that. Get it? We, and

Tweel, and those plants out there, and even the biopods are _carbon_

life; this thing lived by a different set of chemical reactions. It was

silicon life!"



"_La vie silicieuse!_" shouted Leroy. "I have suspect, and now it is

proof! I must go see! _Il 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 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 eggs, 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 a 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 Mud-heap 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 it, 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 propellent 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 sulphuric 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 apart! 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 trail, 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 drum

head, 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-riends!' and gave

its pushcart a vicious poke at me! 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-riends!' 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 God-forsaken 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 gone!



"I suppose 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 dimlit 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 home-life 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.



"There was a--a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel

that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping

his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch--sand, stones,

plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched,

others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No

rhyme nor reason to the whole thing--but that's characteristic of this

crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to

believe.



"One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside

with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him

being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later,

another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one

of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.



"Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and

he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say,

'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or less about these

creatures.



"Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel,

something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a

little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The

light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge,

and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my

left thumb? Look!" Jarvis extended his hand. "It dried up and fell

off--just like that! And my abused nose--say, the pain went out of it

like magic! The thing had the property of hard x-rays or gamma

radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy

tissue unharmed!



"I was thinking what a present _that'd_ be to take back to Mother Earth

when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of

the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide

had been careless, it seems.



"Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and

their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us;

we backed out of what I thought was the passage we'd entered by, and

they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy

brutes! There was a whole chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I

didn't like the 'ouch'; it was rather suggestive.



"Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater

freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts

following--about twenty of them. Queer thing--the ones coming in with

loaded carts moved past us inches away without a sign.



"Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that glowing

coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cart-load of plant limbs. Puff!

The whole load was burning--and the crazy beast pushing it went right

along without a change of pace! It created some disturbance among our

'V-r-r-riends,' however--and then I noticed the smoke eddying and

swirling past us, and sure enough, there was the entrance!



"I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty pursuers. The

daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first glance that the sun was

all but set, and that was bad, since I couldn't live outside my

thermo-skin bag in a Martian night--at least, without a fire.



"And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle between

two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn't fired nor had Tweel; there

wasn't any use in irritating the brutes. They stopped a little distance

away and began their booming about friendship and ouches.



"Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a pushcart

and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls of foot-long

copper darts--sharp-looking ones--and all of a sudden one sailed past my

ear--zing! And it was shoot or die then.



"We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones next to

the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum, but suddenly

there was a thunderous booming of 'v-r-r-riends' and 'ouches,' and a

whole army of 'em came out of their hole.



"Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that Tweel wasn't.

He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily as not. He was

staying for me!



"Say, I could have cried if there'd been time! I'd liked Tweel from the

first, but whether I'd have had gratitude to do what he was

doing--suppose I _had_ saved him from the first dream-beast--he'd done

as much for me, hadn't he? I grabbed his arm, and said 'Tweel,' and

pointed up, and he understood. He said, 'No--no--no, Tick!' and popped

away with his glass pistol.



"What could I do? I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn't

explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a man!' and felt

that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty

few men who'd do that.



"So I went 'bang' with my gun and Tweel went 'puff' with his, and the

barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming

about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped

right down from Heaven in the shape of Putz, with his under-jets

blasting the barrels into very small pieces!



"Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door

and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so

before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in

one of his nosedives over the mound and away.



"I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the time we got

the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here--like

turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or

twice. I yelled 'Tweel!' and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We

couldn't find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got--or else

I imagined it--was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the

south. He'd gone, and damn it! I wish--I wish he hadn't!"



The four men of the _Ares_ were silent--even the sardonic Harrison. At

last little Leroy broke the stillness.



"I should like to see," he murmured.



"Yeah," said Harrison. "And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it

might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a century and a half."



"Oh, that!" muttered Jarvis gloomily. "That's what started the fight!"

He drew a glistening object from his pocket.



"Here it is."











End of Project Gutenberg's A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum