The fix was 6100 yards in and 150 yards right of course. About 428 straight-line yards to go. Course 18 to 19 degrees.
According to the compass-sighting, the channel ran at 21 degrees, shy. “Let’s follow it.” Dane said. “Pace it off. Maybe they planted another marker where they left it.”
It was almost time for the brief dawn that the attenuated atmosphere afforded the planet. For the first time Dane felt real fatigue as he realized that the sun would soon be daylight around them and over the weary miles back to the spacecraft. He slogged along. Successful or unsuccessful, it would be a long hard pull.
At the far edge of his light, he vaguely saw something. A bulk in the channel ahead.
“Hold it!” he sang out. “There’s something up there.”
They huddled, striving to pass the fuzzy limit of vision. There was something. Something that was not naked, ocher-colored dust.
“Dr. Pembroke!” Dane called. “Dr. Pembroke. John Dane calling. Can you hear me? Can you see our lights?”
He strained for acuity below the faint hum of the ear-phones, but there was only the silence of the Martian night. Nothing moved.
“It’s not big enough to be a man,” McDonald said.
“Anyway, why doesn’t it move?” Wertz said. “Our lights are plain to see.”
“This is my play,” McDonald decided. “I’ll go have a look.”
Dane said, “This safari was my idea. Whatever is out there has something to do with Dr. Pembroke. I intend to go see. Get in contact with the spacecraft and wait for me here. We don’t know what it might be.”
Wertz said, “Why don’t we all go? Three are better than one.”
Dane felt the thing brush his scalp. He had not yet put it in words. Not even to himself. Now he had to. “You’re going to think I’m off my zip, but tonight, while I was plotting the spark fires, something made me think and I can’t forget it. Colonel Cragg would have laughed me out of his office if I had even mentioned it. But this is it. For a minute I began to think maybe there’s intelligence on Mars besides our own. I couldn’t help it. You have only to look at the chart I made to see it for yourself. Some something could actually be directing the patterns of the spark fires. Something very probably hostile.”
Their silence was heavy.
“I’m not cracking up. I just think you ought to know what I believe is very possible and you ought to be prepared to relay it to Colonel Cragg. If by any chance I could be right, whatever it is may have destroyed Dr. Pembroke, and it could very well be aware of our presence here now.”
Wertz swore. “You pick a hell of a time to bring up an idea like that! You want to give me the shouting creeps? You know there’s no life on this planet except this damn vegetation. How could there be? You going back to that idea about life based on something else than carbon? Like the silicon atom?”
“I don’t know,” Dane told him. “I haven’t any idea. Call it a hunch, if you like.”
“You bet I will,” Wertz snapped. “A damn poor one. Unless you believe in ghosts. And ghost mechanics and ghost architecture. Desert ghosts,” he laughed shortly.
“Nevertheless,” Dane went on, “there are patterns to the spark fires that seem to be associated with our presence and with our physical location. Colonel Cragg noticed a new one. That’s why he was hot to move up the take-off. Only what he was really afraid of was a step-up in the penetration rays.”
He saw Wertz turn his helmet ponderously at McDonald. “Kid,” he heard him say, “you’re official. You stay here and report. I don’t take in Dane’s ghost story, but if something does pop up out there, Cragg’ll believe you. He won’t think you’re off your base.”
“Dammit!” Dane said, in spite of himself. “The sun will be up in fifteen minutes. It’s getting lighter in the east now. I’m going ahead. Lieutenant McDonald is technically in command here, I suppose. Let him—”
“I’m coming with you,” McDonald said quietly. “Wertz, I have no real authority over you, but I’d like for you to stay and cover us.”
“With what?” Wertz said bitterly. “A comic-strip ray gun? You want me to shoot lichens with a six-gun? Or maybe Danes ghost men? You get up there, you’ll find exactly nothing.”
But when they went forward, he remained at his post. They heard him calling the spacecraft. “Wertz to Baker Home.”
5
ALMOST AT ONCE the feathery dust cloud of their advance obscured all sight of Wertz. A few more steps dimmed his powerful headlight to a haloed blotch of glowing red.
They stopped and told him to get out of the gully and up on the bank where he could see.
“I’m already up there,” Wertz came back. “The dust is higher than I am. If I go back any farther into the lichens, I won’t be able to see you over the tops anyway.”
Dane was impatient to move. “We can’t just stand here. Maybe it would be a good idea for him to back from the gully a couple of hundred yards and hide. We can keep in steady touch with him.”
“Huh-uh,” Wertz objected. “Not me. Not all alone out here I don’t play any hiding games!”
“It’d be a good idea,” McDonald said. “If we do come up against something, it’d be a good idea to have one of us back behind and out of range.”
“Nope!” Wertz said. “You think I’m sitting out here alone not knowing what’s happening, you’re crazy. So something gets you, then I wait all by myself while it comes for me. We all go ahead together, I say.”
His light glowed closer. Then he bulked up in the red mist and got beside them.
“We can’t put out a point and be able to see him,” McDonald said. “A point would kick up so much dust the rest of us would blunder into anything he ran into anyway. We go two and one,” he decided. “Dane and I go ahead and Wertz as far behind as he can still see us good in his light.”
“That’s about ten feet,” Wertz announced after they had taken a few steps. “Ready or not, here I come.”
It glared at them steadily. A few seconds ago they had the only light on a pitch-dark planet. Now it was there. Steady and menacing. A tiny point of light. Low down, if not actually at the bed of the gully, and about the length of a football field ahead, it had suddenly appeared at the side of the shape they stalked.
Dane realized they had halted. “You see what I see?” He forced his voice level. He sounded flat to himself rather than calm.
To escape the rising dust, they eased forward with elaborate care. A full minute after the question McDonald said, “Yeh. I see it all right. The next thing is, what is it?”
Wertz said, “A very good idea would be to wait right here for daylight. Another twenty minutes and we’ll have broad daylight.”
“We wait here for twenty minutes, that means we’re sitting ducks for anything that’s interested in us,” McDonald said.
Dane snapped off his handlight. “Cut your lights a second.”
“That’s a bright boy,” Wertz snarled. “You think darkness is going to hide you, you’d better hope your ghosts have got eyes like ours. What makes you think they see with light?”
“I don’t know,” Dane said. “Just cut all the lights for five seconds. While I count to five. I want to try something.”
Afterwards he wondered why he couldn’t have explained instead of arguing. With the first instant they stood unseen to each other in the crowding dark, relief flooded through him. “You see it now?” he urged them triumphantly. “You see it any more? Now let’s have the lights back on,” he said.
There it was again. The speck of light, but no longer so frightening.
Wertz swore. “A reflection! A damn reflection!”
McDonald said, “I don’t mind saying it scared me stiff.”