“Goodbye,” Anne said. “I’ll leave you alone; you can sit in the cab of that dredge and dig away to your heart’s content. Maybe when I next see you, there’ll be a completed water-system installed here.” She smiled once more at him, briefly, and then hiked off in the direction of her own hovel.
After a time he climbed the steps to the cab of the dredge which he had been using and started the creaky, sand-impregnated mechanism. It howled mournfully in protest. Happier, he decided, to remain asleep; this, for the machine, was the ear-splitting summons of the last trumpet, and the dredge was not yet ready.
He had scooped perhaps a half mile of irregular ditch, as yet void of water, when he discovered that an indigenous life form, a Martian something, was stalking him. At once he halted the dredge and peered into the glare of the cold Martian sun to make it out.
It looked a little like a lean, famished old grandmother on all fours and he realized that this was probably the jackal-creature which he had been warned repeatedly about. In any case, whatever it was, it obviously hadn’t fed in days; it eyed him ravenously, while keeping its distance—and then, projected telepathically, its thoughts reached him. So he was right. This was it.
“May I eat you?” it asked. And panted, avidly slackjawed.
“Christ no,” Barney said. He fumbled about in the cab of the dredge for something to use as a weapon; his hands closed over a heavy wrench and he displayed it to the Martian predator, letting it speak for him; there lay a great message in the wrench and the way he gripped it.
“Get down off that contraption,” the Martian predator thought, in a mixture of hope and need. “I can’t reach you up there.” The last was intended, certainly, to be a private thought, retained in camera, but somehow it had gotten projected, too. The creature had no finesse. “I’ll wait,” it decided. “He has to get down eventually.”
Barney swung the dredge around and started it back in the direction of Chicken Pox Prospects. Groaning, it clanked at a maddeningly slow rate; it appeared to be failing with each yard. He had the intuition that it was not going to make it. Maybe the creature’s right, he said to himself; it is possible I’ll have to step down and face it.
Spared, he thought bitterly, by the enormously higher life form that entered Palmer Eldritch that showed up in our system from out there—and then eaten by this stunted beast. The termination of a long flight, he thought. A final arrival that even five minutes ago, despite my precog talent, I didn’t anticipate. Maybe I didn’t want to… as Dr. Smile, if he were here, would triumphantly bleat.
The dredge wheezed, bucked violently, and then, painfully contracting itself, curled up; its life flickered a moment and then it died to a stop.
For a time Barney sat in silence. Placed directly ahead of him the old-grandmother jackal Martian flesh-eater watched, never taking its eyes from him.
“All right,” Barney said. “Here I come.” He hopped from the cab of the dredge, flailing with the wrench.
The creature dashed at him.
Almost to him, five feet away, it suddenly squealed, veered, and ran past, not touching him. He spun, and watched it go. “Unclean,” it thought to itself; it halted at a safe distance and fearfully regarded him, tongue lolling. “You’re an unclean thing,” it informed him dismally.
Unclean, Barney thought. How? Why?
“You just are,” the predator answered. “Look at yourself. I can’t eat you; I’d be sick.” It remained where it was, drooping with disappointment and—aversion. He had horrified it.
“Maybe we’re all unclean to you,” he said. “All of us from Earth, alien to this world. Unfamiliar.”
“Just you,” it told him flatly. “Look at—ugh!–your right arm, your hand. There’s something intolerably wrong with you. How can you live with yourself? Can’t you cleanse yourself some way?”
He did not bother to look at his arm and hand; it was unnecessary.
Calmly, with all the dignity that he could manage, he walked on, over the loosely packed sand, toward his hovel.
That night, as he prepared to go to bed in the cramped bunk provided by his compartment at Chicken Pox Prospects, someone rapped on his closed door. “Hey, Mayerson. Open up.”
Putting on his robe he opened the door.
“That trading ship is back,” Norm Schein, excited, grabbing him by the lapel of his robe, declared. “You know, from the Chew-Z people. You got any skins left? If so—”
“If they want to see me,” Barney said, disengaging Norm Schein’s grip from his robe, “they’ll have to come down here. You tell them that.” He shut the door, then.
Norm loudly departed.
He seated himself at the table on which he ate his meals, got a pack—his last—of Terran cigarettes from the drawer, and lit up; he sat smoking and meditating, hearing above and around his compartment the scampering noises of his fellow hovelists. Large-scale mice, he thought. Who have scented the bait.
The door to his compartment opened. He did not look up; he continued to stare down at the table surface, at the ashtray and matches and pack of Camels.
“Mr. Mayerson.”
Barney said, “I know what you’re going to say.”
Entering the compartment, Palmer Eldritch shut the door, seated himself across from Barney, and said, “Correct, my friend. I let you go just before it happened, before Leo fired the second time. It was my carefully considered decision. And I’ve had a long time to dwell on the matter; a little over three centuries. I won’t tell you why.”
“I don’t care why,” Barney said. He continued to stare down.
“Can’t you look at me?” Palmer Eldritch said.
“I’m unclean,” Barney informed him.
“WHO TOLD YOU THAT?”
“An animal out in the desert. And it had never seen me before; it knew it just by coming close to me.” While still five feet away, he thought to himself. Which is fairly far.
“Hmm. Maybe its motive—”
“It had no goddam motive. In fact just the opposite– it was half-dead from hunger and yearning to eat me. So it must be true.”
“To the primitive mind,” Eldritch said, “the unclean and the holy are confused. Merged merely as taboo. The ritual for them, the—”
“Aw hell,” he said bitterly. “It’s true and you know it. I’m alive, I won’t die on that ship, but I’m defiled.”
“By me?”
Barney said, “Make your own guess.”
After a pause Eldritch shrugged and said, “All right. I was cast out from a star system—I won’t identify it because to you it wouldn’t matter—and I took up residence where that wild, get-rich-quick operator from your system encountered me. And some of that has been passed on to you. But not much. You’ll gradually, over the years, recover; it’ll diminish until it’s gone. Your fellow colonists won’t notice because it’s touched them, too; it began as soon as they participated in the chewing of what we sold them.”
“I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”
“Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly.
He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”
“Yes, the only way I can.”
With overwhelming aversion Barney said, “My God. We would all have become your children.”
“Don’t fret about that now, Mr. Mayerson,” it said, and laughed in a humanlike, jovial way. “Just tend your little garden up top, get your water system going. Frankly I long for death; I’ll be glad when Leo Bulero does what he’s already contemplating… he’s begun to hatch it, now that you’ve refused to take the brain-metabolism toxin. Anyhow, I wish you luck here on Mars; I would have enjoyed it, myself, but things didn’t work out and that’s that.” Eldritch rose to his feet, then.
“You could revert,” Barney said. “Resume the form you were in when Palmer encountered you. You don’t have to be there, inhabiting that body, when Leo opens fire on your ship.”