“I never had a thing to do with it,” yelled Slemp. “It was Owen thought it up …”
The line at the bar exploded. A gun roared and a bullet thudded into the door post behind Jeff’s head.
Owen was charging and Jeff brought up a gun, pressed the trigger. But the big man came on.
Shots were hammering and a lamp crashed, spraying oil across the floor.
Jeff leaped to meet Owen’s charge, but his foot slipped in the pool of oil and his hands slid off Owen’s body. The batwings flapped as if hit by a sudden wind and the man was gone.
A bullet thudded into the floor and flying splinters stabbed at Jeff’s face. A gun crashed directly above him. One of his own guns was lost, but he still had the other. With a heave he gained his feet and plunged for the door.
Owen was on his hands and knees in the dust of the street, like a trapped animal, with one foot fast in the broken bottom step.
With a yell, Jeff launched himself in a flying tackle even as Owen’s foot came free.
Warned by the yell, Owen twisted to meet him, flung up an arm that broke the swing of Jeff’s gun. Thudding into the man, Jeff felt his arm go numb, felt the gun fly from suddenly limp fingers.
A fist caught him in the jaw, rocked him back against the porch. In front of him, Owen was scrambling to his feet, hands reaching for the guns that dangled from his hips.
Desperately, Jeff leaped, good arm swinging. The blow caught Owen in the side of the head and staggered him. Jeff followed, left fist punching as Owen clawed for steel.
One of Owen’s guns was out and coming up. Jeff swung again, stepping in fast, putting every ounce of power into the blow. It connected with a thud that snapped Owen’s head back between his shoulders, sent him rocking on his heels against the hitching rail. A gun blasted and Jeff felt a sharp snarl of pain slash across his leg.
Owen was against the rail, groggy, weaving. Jeff stepped forward and his leg screamed with agony. The gun came up again, shaky, uncertain.
Jeff’s fist lashed out, straight to the chin. Owen slumped like a sack, gun tumbling from his hand.
Hanging onto the railing, Jeff stooped and picked it up, straightened up again, still clutching the rail. He couldn’t move, he knew. He had to hang to that rail.
He lifted his head, stared dully at the Silver Dollar. The place was a hum of voices, but there was no shooting. Light still spilled from the windows.
His head spun and he fought to keep his grip. But the railing seemed to writhe and twist and his hand slipped off. He knew that he was plunging to the street, flat on his face.
He awoke choking and coughing, clawing at his throat. Through bleary eyes he saw a glass half full of whisky in a fist before his face.
He fought his way to a sitting posture and looked around. Men were standing in a circle, among them a man with a bearded face.
“How about it, Dan?” he asked, his voice raspy.
“It’s all right, kid,” said Dan. “Slemp coughed up his guts. We got enough evidence to hang them all.”
“But you,” asked Jeff. “How did you get away with it?”
Dan laughed. “Slemp was the only one that ever saw me close. I was too busy on the ranch to spend much time in town. And then the beard fooled them, would have fooled even Slemp. And no one pays much attention to a floating drunk. I figured what the setup was and I meant to get the evidence. But you almost upset my plans. When you came barging in this afternoon, I nearly came dealing myself a hand when Churchill jumped you …”
“Lucky thing for me,” said Churchill, “that you didn’t.”
“Only thing,” said Dan, “I wasn’t even sure, myself. That scar of yours.”
Jeff’s hand went to his cheek, “Got it the week after you left home,” he said. “Bronc bucked me off into a barbed wire fence.”
Message from Mars
Originally named “Martian Lilies,” this story, which was apparently written in late 1939 or early 1940, was rejected by Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and another magazine not named in Cliff’s journals before being accepted by Planet Stories late in 1942. The magazine paid Cliff a hundred dollars, and the story appeared its fall 1943 issue. In a way, readers can view this story as a reversal of the plot of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, as well as an extension of the idea underlying the Superman comic books (I know Cliff read Wells, but there’s no evidence that he ever read the Superman comics). But the most important thing about “Message from Mars” is that it contains, appropriately, the seeds of the later Simak novel All Flesh Is Grass.
“You’re crazy, man,” snapped Steven Alexander, “you can’t take off for Mars alone!”
Scott Nixon thumped the desk in sudden irritation.
“Why not?” he shouted. “One man can run a rocket. Jack Riley’s sick and there are no other pilots here. The rocket blasts in fifteen minutes and we can’t wait. This is the last chance. The only chance we’ll have for months.”
Jerry Palmer, sitting in front of the massive radio, reached for a bottle of Scotch and slopped a drink into the tumbler at his elbow.
“Hell, Doc,” he said, “let him go. It won’t make any difference. He won’t reach Mars. He’s just going out in space to die like all the rest of them.”
Alexander snapped savagely at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You drink too much.”
“Forget it, Doc,” said Scott. “He’s telling the truth. I won’t get to Mars, of course. You know what they’re saying down in the base camp, don’t you? About the bridge of bones. Walking to Mars over a bridge of bones.”
The old man stared at him. “You have lost faith? You don’t think you’ll go to Mars?”
Scott shook his head. “I haven’t lost my faith. Someone will get there … sometime. But it’s too soon yet. Look at that tablet, will you!”
He waved his hand at a bronze plate set into the wall.
“The roll of honor,” said Scott, bitterly. “Look at the names. You’ll have to buy another soon. There won’t be room enough.”
One Nixon already was on that scroll of bronze. Hugh Nixon, fifty-fourth from the top. And under that the name of Harry Decker, the man who had gone out with him.
The radio blurted suddenly at them, jabbering, squealing, howling in anguish.
Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.
“No. No. No come. Danger.”
Scott turned toward the window, stared up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.
What was the use of keeping hope alive? Hope that Hugh might have reached Mars, that someday the Martian code would bring some word of him.
Hugh had died … like all the rest of them. Like those whose names were graven in the bronze there on the wall. The maw of space had swallowed him. He had flown into the face of silence and the silence was unbroken.
The door of the office creaked open, letting in a gust of chilly air. Jimmy Baldwin shut the door behind him and looked at them vacantly.
“Nice night to go to Mars,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be up here, Jimmy,” said Alexander gently. “You should be down at the base, tending to your flowers.”