‘In case it goes out,’ he explained. ‘If there’s any life in the embers at all, it’ll set one of these off, and we won’t have to blow up the whole bed of ashes to get it started again.’
‘Fine;’ I said. ‘Now we’d better build up a woodpile -’
We looked at each other, suddenly brought back to reality.
Astonishing how the mind can put aside what it does not wish to consider; amazing how we could have forgotten what we didn’t want to know. Our woodpile reminded us both: Dr. Solveig had gone for more, nearly three quarters of an hour before.
And it was only a five-minute climb to the top of the crevasse.
The answer was obvious: The Martians. But, of course, we had to prove it for ourselves.
And prove it we did: at the expense of our weapons, our safe cave and fire, and very nearly our lives. We went plunging up the ledge like twin whirligigs, bouncing in the light Martian gravity and nearly tumbling into the chasm at every step. I suppose that if we thought at all, we were thinking that the more commotion we made the more likely we were to scare the Martians off before they killed Dr. Solveig. We were yelling and kicking stones into the gorge with a bounce and clatter; and we were up at the top of the crevasse in a matter of seconds, up at the top - and smack into a trap. For they were waiting for us up there, our first face-to-face Martians.
We could see them only as you might see ghosts in a sewer; the night was black, even the starlight half drowned by the branches overhead, but they seemed to gleam, phosphorescently, like decaying vegetation. And decay was a word that fitted the picture, for they looked like nothing so much as corpses. They had no hands or arms, but their faces were vaguely human - or so they seemed. What passed for ears were large and hung like a spaniel’s; but there were eyes, sunken but bright, and there was a mouth; and they were human in size, human in the way they came threateningly towards us, carrying what must have been weapons.
Demaree’s flame rifle flooded the woods with fire. He must have incinerated some of them, but the light was too blinding, we couldn’t see. I fired close on the heels of Demaree’s shot, and again the wood was swept with flame; and the two of us charged blindly into the dark. There was light now, from the blazes we had started, but the fires were Mars-fires, fitful and weak, and casting shadows that moved and disguised movement. We beat about the brush uselessly for a moment, then retreated and regrouped at the lip of the crevasse. And that was our mistake. ‘What about Solveig?’ Demaree demanded. ‘Did you see anything-’
But he never got a chance to finish the sentence. On a higher cliff than ours there were scrabblings of motion, and boulders fell around us. We dodged back down the ledge, but we couldn’t hope to get clear that way. Demaree bellowed:
‘Come on, Will!’ And he started up the ledge again; but the boulder shower doubled and redoubled. We had no choice. We trotted, gasping and frozen, back down to our cave, and ran in. And waited. It was not pleasant waiting; when the Martians showed up at the cave mouth, we were done. Because, you see, in our potshotting at the golden glow on the dunes and our starting a fire in the cave and salvoing the woods up above, we had been a little careless.
Our flame rifles were empty.
We kept warm and worried all of this night, and in the light from our dwindling fire, only a couple of branches at a time, we could see a figure across the crevasse from us.
It was doing something complex with objects we could not recognize. Demaree, over my objections, insisted we investigate; and so we parted with a hoarded brand. We threw the tiny piece of burning wood out across the crevasse, it struck over the figure in a shower of sparks and a pale blue flame, and in the momentary light we saw that it was, indeed, a Martian. But we still couldn’t see what he was doing.
The dawn wind came, but the Martian stayed at his post; and then, at once, it was daylight.
We crept to the lip of the cave and looked out, not more than a dozen yards from the busy watching figure.
The Martian looked up once, staring whitely across the ravine at us, as a busy cobbler might glance up from his last. And just as unemotionally, the Martian returned to what he was doing. He had a curious complex construction of sticks and bits of stone, or so it seemed from our distance. He was carefully weaving bits of shiny matter into it in a regular pattern.
Demaree looked at me, licking his lips. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Will?’ he asked.
I nodded. It was a weapon of some sort; it couldn’t be anything else. Perhaps it was a projector for the lightnings that blasted the sand cars or the golden glow that had struck down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was it was at point-blank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead.
Demaree said thinly, We’ve got to get out of here.’
The only question was, did we have enough time? We scrabbled together our flame rifles and packs from the back of the cave and, eyes fearfully on the busy Martian across the chasm, leaped for the cave mouth - just in time to see what seemed a procession coming down the other side. It was a scrambling, scratching tornado, and we couldn’t at first tell if it was a horde of Martians or a sand car with the treads flapping. But then we got a better look.
And it was neither. It was Dr. Solveig.
The Martian across the way saw him as soon as we, and it brought that strange complex of bits and pieces slowly around to bear on him. ‘Hey!’ bellowed Demaree, and my yell was as loud as his. We had to warn Solveig of what he was running into - death and destruction.
But Solveig knew more than we. He came careening down the ledge across the crevasse, paused only long enough to glance at us and at the Martian, and then came on again.
‘Rocks!’ bellowed Demaree in my ear. ‘Throw them!’ And the two of us searched feverishly in the debris for rocks to hurl at the Martian, to spoil his aim.
We needn’t have bothered. We could find nothing more deadly than pebbles, but we didn’t need even them. The Martian made a careful, last-minute adjustment on his gadget, and poked it once, squeezed it twice and pressed what was obviously its trigger.
And nothing happened. No spark, no flame, no shot. Solveig came casually down on the Martian, unharmed.
Demaree was astonished, and so was I; but the two of us together were hardly as astonished as the Martian. He flew at his gadget like a tailgunner clearing a breach jam over hostile interceptors. But that was as far as he got with it, because Solveig had reached him and in a methodical, almost a patronizing way he kicked the Martian’s gadget to pieces and called over to us:
‘Don’t worry, boys. They won’t hurt us here. Let’s get back up on top.’
It was a long walk back to Niobe, especially with the cumbersome gadgetry Solveig had found - a thing the size of a large machine gun, structurally like the bits and pieces the Martian had put together, but made of metal and crystal instead of bits of rubble.
But we made it, all four of us - we had picked up Garcia at the stalled cars, swearing lividly in relief but otherwise all right. Solveig wouldn’t tell us much. He was right, of course. The important thing was to get back to Niobe as soon as we could with his gimmick. Because the gimmick was the Martian weapon that zeroed in on sand cars, and the sooner our mechanics got it taken apart, the sooner we would know how to defend ourselves against it. We were breathless on the long run home, but we were exultant. And we had reason to be, because there was no doubt in any of our minds that a week after we turned the weapon over to the researchers we would be able to run sand cars safely across the Martian plains. (Actually it wasn’t a week; it was less. The aiming mechanism was nothing so complex as radio, it was a self-aiming thermocouple, homing on high temperatures. We licked it by shielding the engines and trailing smoke-pots to draw fire.)