Marooned on Mars Page 11

  Something rustled near him. He sat up and the sound went away, but when his helmet touched the sand again, the rustling sound was stronger. It sounded like footsteps—slow, careful steps—in the sand.

  He sat up, touching helmets with Sokolsky. “Doc—do you hear anything?”

  “Surely—the sand settling under our bodies!”

  Chuck remembered beds that had made regular noises until he found the springs jiggled with his breathing. It could be—but he didn’t believe it. He lay back, trying to hold his breath.

  This time, the sounds were nearer.

  He sat up again, and froze. Beyond Sokolsky, perhaps fifty feet away, two huge, luminous circles gleamed at him. This was no illusion. He’d seen cat’s eyes in the dark, and this was the same. Cautiously, he touched the doctor and tried to turn the man’s head toward the eyes.

  There were four of them now, two pairs well apart.

  Suddenly Sokolsky sat up with a jerk. The automatic came from his pouch, and the flash of a shot illuminated the night. It was a high, shrill explosion in Chuck’s ears.

  The eyes vanished, and Sokolsky reached for Chuck, touching helmets. “Quite right. Chuck. They were eyes. I fired into the air of course—it wouldn’t do to kill anything as rare as Martian animals must be. If it had been a natural phenomenon, it would have remained; it ran at the sound of the shot, proving it was alive. Maybe you’re right about the cries you’ve been hearing. Hm-m-m. Wonder if it’s stalking us, or just curious?”

  “What do you intend doing about it?” Chuck asked.

  Sokolsky shrugged. “Nothing. We’re wearing space suits. I intend to go to sleep.”

  A moment later, his regular breathing proved that he had lived up to his intentions. Chuck turned around carefully, to face three pairs of shining eyes.

  They vanished as he looked, but it didn’t make him feel much happier.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Mysterious Canals

  Sokolsky was as good as his word. At the first touch of the sun, he was up and waking Chuck. Even before the boy was fully awake, his eyes swung toward the place where the eyes had seemed to multiply during the night. But there was nothing there.

  Chuck searched the sand for a sign of tracks, but there was no evidence. If there had been tracks, either the wind had covered them or they had been carefully destroyed.

  Sokolsky was highly amused. “Of course I saw them. I agree that they were the eyes of some form of life. Fine. But we are not equipped to track them down, and all we can do is to report them. Of course, I’d like to study one— I wonder if they have three sexes, like the plants—but one must limit oneself to one’s abilities. Anyhow, as I said, they didn’t bother us. After they heard the shot from the automatic…”

  His hand had gone to the pouch and now it came away empty. He stared at it in puzzlement, began searching hastily through his pouch, and then around the ground where he had slept There was no sign of the missing gun.

  “But it’s impossible. I’m a light sleeper, Chuck. They couldn’t have sneaked it out of the pouch without my feeling it. Of course, if I dropped it on the ground…” ‘He nodded slowly. “That must be it. I dropped it. But why should an animal want a gun?”

  Chuck could offer no help on these animals, or the general psychology of Martian beasts. All he knew was that the gun was obviously missing. On the other hand, the beasts had seemed to be harmless. He’d watched until there were over twenty pairs of eyes; they’d avoided him and disappeared when he looked at them, but by watching from the comer of his eyes, he had seen them increase. A pack of that number could easily have overpowered the two of them.

  Yet there was no evidence of any attack. If Sokolsky was as light a sleeper as he claimed, any mouthing of their suits would have wakened him.

  Chuck shrugged and tried to forget it. He made an unsavory meal out of the cubed concentrates Sokolsky had put in the little hopper under his chin. At the press of a lever, one cube would be popped up where he could get it. The tube that supplied water was also within reach, but he used that sparingly since it had to moisten the desiccated Martian air as well as supply his thirst. A final check showed him that there was considerable life left in the batteries that powered the air compressor.

  Sokolsky was muttering unhappily to himself as they began the journey toward the mysterious canal. It still puzzled him that an animal should steal an automatic.

  Then he brightened. “But there is the example of the magpie. It steals for no good reason. Several other animals do. And there is no way of telling what might smell—if they do smell—good to a Martian animal. Of course.”

  Chuck smiled. Now that there was an example with which to compare it, Sokolsky was happy again. He was even whistling under his breath as they tramped along. Suddenly Chuck stopped, staring at the ground. “Doc!”

  “Eh? Oh, you’ve found something.”

  It was part of a footprint—or pawprint. There were four toelike members, the two outer ones smaller than the inner ones; behind that, there was part of the ball or heel of the foot. It looked about half the size of a human footprint.

  “At least four-toed—and from the symmetry, it must be four-footed. Wish the back weren’t hidden or obliterated.” Sokolsky studied it with rapt attention. “Very interesting, though it doesn’t really tell us anything. If there were several of them, we could estimate the number of feet, the weight of the animal, and a number of other details. But this is only one, and incomplete. Still, it’s interesting to note that nature has evolved the toed foot here on Mars.”

  There were a number of plant forms that neither had seen before, including one bigger one, something like a head of cauliflower, but with thicker leaves, and about the size of a large cabbage. This one was a dark purple color instead of the usual green. There were several others like it. Sokolsky inspected them carefully, and grinned with satisfaction. “Also three-sexed, though of a greatly different species. It would seemingly be safe to guess that all Martian plant life depends on two pollinators and a single incubator.”

  Two more hours went by, and Sokolsky began to fret and worry again. He seemed to be able to maintain his calm doctor’s role as long as he liked, but to go suddenly off on a wild emotional tear as soon as he decided he was a biologist.

  “The canals should be here. Rothman said it was about thirty miles north, didn’t he?”

  Chuck nodded. “We’ve come somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. We may be short of it by several miles.”

  Sokolsky agreed, but he didn’t look happy. He quickened the pace and went forward at almost a run. Chuck’s legs were still sore from the grueling week of work, but he had to stick with the doctor.

  They came to a slight rise in the ground and surveyed the country beyond them. There was certainly no sign of a deep trench of any kind, nor of an old river bed, etched out in the billion years ago when Mars might have had water.

  But Sokolsky’s eyes brightened. “See? There’s a darker streak. That must be it.”

  Again he quickened his pace, and Chuck had to force himself along. But they were less than two miles away, and the space was quickly covered. Sokolsky pointed suddenly, and ran forward while Chuck stared around in an attempt to see what had drawn his attention.

  He could see nothing except a great mass of plants with thick leaves about the size and shape of pumpkin leaves. But these were waxy and smooth instead -of rough, and they were of such a dark green color that they almost appeared black in the distance.

  “Where’s the canal?” Chuck asked.

  Sokolsky pointed to the plants. “Right here. Chuck. The best explanation I could ask to the old mystery, too. Look at them.”

  Chuck moved forward until he was standing among the plants. They were peculiar. Lying along the ground, and connecting each plant to the next in line was a grayish rootlike tube. Crosswise, there were smaller, dark green filaments. But the straightness of the tubes and the exactitude with which they spaced themselves out caught Chuck’s at
tention. They looked like little rows of laundry lines, with the leaves for laundry. Or perhaps they were like the rows of telegraph poles he had once seen.

  “Perfectly straight,” Sokolsky commented. “Look up there as far as your eye can see—no, get your head in line with one of the plants. Now look. What do you see?”

  “A practically perfect row of plants—and I suppose they’re all connected together this way.”

  “Apparently. Here, cut one of them.”

  Chuck bent down and pulled his knife from his pouch. The connecting tube was hard and tough, but he finally sawed through it. Three drops of thin liquid oozed out. “One of the first cases of a plant on Mars which secretes fluid,” Sokolsky told Chuck. “Now, watch what’s happening.”

  The tube had contracted, sending a ripple back from each cut toward the mother stem. It reached, and a second later the broken halves of the tubes fell off. There was a small bud on the northern plant where the tube had been; on the southern one, there was a faint indentation.

  “You see,” Sokolsky gloated. “They connect. Cut a tube, and it is drained, then discarded. And a new one will grow from this bud to the Opposite little socket. Chuck, what did Lowell think the canals were?”

  “Just that—canals, built to carry water from the icecaps at the poles to the rest of the planet when the caps melt in the spring.”

  “And here you have it—perhaps. See, they run in a straight line—I don’t know how wide, but it must be for miles here—as far as we can see. Each of those tubes-carries a bit of water one plant farther. It’s a regular canal system, Chuck—with a pumping station every two feet, wherever a plant stands. And notice how the foliage differs from other plants here—it would probably photograph enough differently to give just the effect the canals do give.”

  Chuck stared up the line, and down again. So far as he could see, the plants were in perfectly straight order.

  He turned away, disappointed. “I guess I’m a sucker, doctor, but I kind of hoped the canals might turn out to be the work of intelligence, after all.”

  “And how do you know they’re not? Is it impossible for these plants to have intelligence? Could men design a better and more efficient system to distribute the tiny amounts of liquid which accumulate at the poles—a snow-cap only an inch or so deep, which only wets the ground when it melts—and yet which these plants may spread to their own kind over the whole planet?” Sokolsky stood admiring them. “A perfect answer to a mystery, and a perfect example of either intelligence or adaptation. I don’t know which.”

  “But it isn’t the kind of intelligence I meant, and you know that,” Chuck protested.

  “You mean animal intelligence, preferably like humans, of course.” Sokolsky pondered it, turning to stare across the great “river” of plants, and back to the land around. “I don’t know. We may never know the answer to that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, look. Notice that the land is lower here—we came over a ridge, into a hollow to find these; across there, it seems to be the same way. And it’s the same as far as we can see. Maybe these are old river beds—though why they should be as straight as even the most crotchety astronomer admits, I don’t know. Maybe they are channels dug up by some race that lived here. Maybe the plants are something they grew to meet the dwindling water supply.”

  He shook his head. “This is summer on Mars. If these plants produce some fruit, it might not show up for months yet. After all, we’re dealing with a year of 687 days. Perhaps they are both food and drink to some race on Mars— or were. But this trip, we can’t even be sure of how straight they are. We can say we have solved the secret of the canals—but we haven’t. We’ve left from a thousand to a million questions.”

  Chuck was still disappointed, though his logic told him that this was a much more satisfactory answer than he had expected.

  They stopped to eat and rest. Chuck had expected that Sokolsky would want to follow the canals down as far as they could toward the ship, but the man shook his head. They couldn’t find much more than they already knew, and their best chance would be to take a series of pictures as they rocketed up, if they ever did leave.

  He leaned back, letting the feeble sun shine on him. “You like mysteries, don’t you? Well, consider this. We’ve found evidence that manlike things lived here once, and maybe a beast like our buffalo—both large animals, highly developed. Even those creatures we saw last night—or whose eyes we saw—were of considerable size and development. But there are no bugs, no small life forms, and so far as I can determine, no lower animal orders at all. Why should this be?”

  “Extermination,” Chuck guessed. “Hey, wait—that means a high level of intelligence—we haven’t exterminated all the pests yet.”

  “We haven’t had the reasons for it that Mars may have had. If they had no chance to live without getting rid of competition, even a fair level of intelligence might do a good job of elimination.”

  Chuck changed his batteries and stood up. He’d had his share of puzzles and half-answers for the day.

  They started back at a leisurely pace, returning over the same ground that they had covered before. Getting away from the drive and push around the ship had been the best possible answer. Chuck had to admit. He was beginning to feel like himself once more.

  “How about sleeping out again?” he suggested.

  Sokolsky considered it, and agreed readily. They had enough food concentrate if they were careful, and they might arrive thirsty, but no harm would be done. The batteries were lasting splendidly, and they had spares left. He seemed to feel like Chuck, that the longer they stayed away from Desperation Camp, as he called it, the better off they would be.

  They stopped again to rest in the sunlight and to watch the plants moving about, leaves searching for more sunlight, while other leaves tried to climb over them. It had started out as a grueling grind after information but was settling down to a comfortable and pleasant rest. He’d have to recommend it to others.

  Finally, Sokolsky stood up. “We’d better get within a mile or so of the camp,” he suggested. ‘Then we’ll have time to get in, eat a real breakfast, and still report for work.”

  It sounded sensible to Chuck. They ambled along, killing time, but doing comparatively little talking. Chuck had expected all naturalists to be busy collectors of specimens, but Sokolsky made it clear that it would be useless now. They couldn’t keep the plants properly, and later expeditions with well-equipped laboratories—or actual colonies here—might do a much better job than he ever could. Why start false theories? He could report on what he saw, with a few specimens and a few pictures. It would be enough.

  Chuck wondered about colonies. The plants would probably be the answer to that. Mars had little enough to offer, but Sokolsky had told him that the plants apparently contained all kinds of strange drugs; he’d tried one of them on a cut on his hand to see if it would attack flesh. Instead, the cut was already healed. He was taking specimens of that back. If it proved to be what it seemed, there could soon be a real trade between Earth and Mars.

  They crossed their previous camping place and went on. Sokolsky was all for sleeping in the ruins of the old city but Chuck would have none of that. If the noise came from there, he would feel a lot happier on any other spot of ground.

  Finally they compromised by finding a little section of sand a mile north of the ruins. The sun was just beginning to sink and the idea of sleep, was appealing after the short shift the night before and the long hike. Again Sokolsky turned off his radio and turned over, almost at once drifting off into the deep breathing of sleep. Chuck lay beside him, puzzling over all the doctor had told him. He couldn’t make up his mind as to whether Sokolsky had the best mind among them, or whether the man just loved to spout his own theories. But at least he was interesting.

  His own body cut off the thoughts by forcing him to sink into heavy sleep beside the doctor.

  Then he was suddenly sitting up, with a chill chasing up and d
own his back as the final notes of a weird cry rang in his ears. He shuddered and looked around.

  There was a circle of shining eyes all about, ringing the two men in completely. Chuck watched them. The eyes disappeared as he looked, but popped up again when he seemed to close his eyes. They could obviously see him easily enough.

  He dropped back, planning to wait for a while and surprise them. But something was singing in the darkness—a sound something like the cry of a cricket, but more regular, and somehow softer. He hadn’t heard crickets since he was a kid. It sounded good—sounded sleepy. He gave up trying to watch and lay back, letting his eyes fall shut.

  In the morning, Sokolsky wakened him, and immediately reached for his pouch. “Didn’t you have a knife yesterday, Chuck?”

  “Of course. I cut the tube of your plant with it.”

  “Exactly. And our animal friends must have seen you do it. They came for the knife last night—I figured they would, and sure enough, it’s missing.”

  Chuck searched for it, but without success. It had been in his pouch, and the pouch had been snapped shut. He hadn’t opened it since they left the “canal.” But the knife was gone.

  Clever, those Martians. Too clever.

  CHAPTER 13

  On Guard

  Breakfast was just being served as Sokolsky and Chuck

  walked into the mess hall. Vance glanced at them and nodded approval. “Good. You both look better too. Tell the next vacationers how you did it so quickly.”

  Then he swung back to the other men. “I don’t care what happened. If one of you lost it—though it seems a little crazy—or even if you found native girls and used it to bribe them into selling you coconuts, tell me what happened to it. A fully equipped welding torch and outfit just doesn’t vanish into the air. I’m puzzled.”

  There was a good deal of heat in his voice. Chuck looked at Sokolsky quickly, and met the other’s warning headshake. “What’s all this, anyway?” he asked.