As that long second ended, Jayne turned her hooded head toward me. There was an anguish in her face, too, but there was no
longer any doubt. Her eyes were half closed, and the look that she gave me through her pain was one of such raw sexual complicity
that no other man could have failed to be aware of it.
But Geoffrey was not. He did not seem to be seeing anything. Jayne walked slowly to the four pieces of the Lump, swinging
her hips, and knelt deliberately, offering me her rear like a cat in heat. At that moment I wouldn’t have given a rouble and
a half for Geoffrey Farnsworth, or any other husband in the world.
It took her a while to get the first piece of rock loose from the ice. At last, however, it rumbled to the lip of the hole
and
dropped, with a noisy splash. Jayne began to chip at the base of the second chunk.
“Not that one,” Elvers said, gritting his teeth. “The other. With the fossils. You’re saving it till last. Do it now.”
I cleared my throat hoarsely, and his eyes darted briefly toward me. “I—I’d better help,” I said.
“No. Not you. You’re going home.”
Jayne dropped the chisel and pushed. The rock with the crinoids in it bumped away from her thrusting hands, hesitated at the
brink, and vanished into the black water. She straightened from her crouch, and, still kneeling, put her hands in the small
of her back.
“I can’t get the third piece through there,” she said. “All the spray from the first two closed up the hole. It was half frozen
already. You’ll have to cut another.”
Elvers craned his neck, but from where he was standing it was obviously impossible for him to see whether or not what Jayne
had said was true. It sounded very likely to me, and perhaps it did to him. To make sure of it, however, he would have had
to walk crabwise at least twenty paces, and risk losing his clear shots at one or another of us several times because of the
rig in the middle. His eyes still glued to the Commodore, he said: “Leave the other pieces there. Get up. All of you spread
out in front of me. Turn your backs.”
Jayne got to her feet. I managed to walk on my rubber legs until I was abreast of her.
“You too, Geoffrey. All three of you abreast. And stay that way If you break rank, I’ll shoot.”
“Where to?” I said around the block of ice in my throat.
“The dog igloo.”
I took a hesitant step forward and then stopped. I could still just barely see both the Farnsworths out of opposite corners
of my eyes. Neither of them had moved. Geoffrey seemed almost hypnotized.
“MUSH!” Elvers screamed.
We stepped out. Behind our naked backs, Elvers giggled with soft appreciation.
It was a long scramble, since it had to be done as a march, though singly any one of us could have done it in fifteen minutes.
I kept looking for a chance to throw myself down
the opposite side of a crest and roll out of the line of fire, or for Jayne or Geoffrey to try it; but each time I saw such
an opportunity, I realized that Elvers would shoot Geoffrey first in any case—and the moment’s hesitation was enough. Before
we had covered half the ground, I was praying that none of us should slip, let alone try to break free.
We were still three abreast when we came down the boundary ridge of the large floe where Elvers had built his kennels, and
began to sidle cautiously through a field of staked-out, snarling dogs.
Somehow I had not remembered that we had brought so many. Their shaggy heads began to strain up from the surface of the ice
as soon as we began to walk from the rim toward the kennel. Inside the walls of the floe, the whole ice-floor seemed evenly
dotted with those dishevelled, masked animal faces, rising from sprawled bodies so powdered over with snow as to look half
sunken in the ice itself. Those we passed closest-to burst up grinning and yelping at the ends of their short tethers, and
were answered by ragged cries from all through the eternally frozen, cobalt-domed hollow.
Even I could see without doubt that none of them had been fed in a long time, and had been brooding over their hunger in the
ice until they had forgotten everything else. One poor beast that I skirted did not get up to snarl at me; he had somehow
broken a hind leg, and was gnawing with horrible deliberation at his own gangrenous flank. The animals staked out nearest
him were watching him with jealous, straining earnestness, their muzzles half-buried between their buried paws, only their
black eyes and noses showing. When at Elvers’ order we filed one by one, on our hands and knees, into their igloo, the whole
floe behind us began to howl with their savage woe.
“This is our chance,” Jayne whispered under the howling. “He’s got to come down that tunnel himself. I’ll kick him in the
eyes from this side. You can kick the rifle out of his hands. Geoffrey, for God’s sake get your carcass out of line with the
tunnel. Julian?”
“Sure,” I said shakily. We waited.
But Elvers did not come for several minutes. Finally, after the muted howling had died back a little, we heard a scrambling
in the tunnel. I tried to lift my foot and keep my balance.
A dog came out of that tunnel as though it had been fired
from a circus cannon. Neither of us even came close to catching it with a kick. It was going straight for Geoffrey, but we
had no time to watch it. Another was already in the igloo, circling around the walls toward me; and another, and still another.
Jayne was screaming. She had never told me tint she was afraid of the dogs, and it was too late now. I went down, grabbing
blindly, and caught the one that had hit me by the ears. His breath stank of fish and desperation. Teeth came down on my boot
at the ankle, and ground the bones together——
A whip-end came out of the boiling air and took the dog whose head I was mauling off my chest, with a tremendous jerk. I grabbed
instinctively at my foot, but my aim was bad; while I was still trying to get my gloves around the oily neckfur, the whip sounded
in the igloo like the crack of judgment.
I still have no idea how Elvers managed to crack so long a lash inside that igloo, oversize though it was; you need lots of
room to bring the tip of a whip past the speed of sound. But at the crack, however he managed it, the dogs flinched and dodged
away from all of us. One of them the one Elvers had snatched free of my hands with the whip—was huddled halfway across the
floor, its back broken.
But the other three left it alone. They slunk on their bellies into a huddle, as close to the tunnel as they thought the whip
would allow them, and as far away from the corpse. There they crouched panting, flank to flank, their tongues out and dripping,
like a litter of pups in high July.
Farnsworth rolled over and sat up, blowing the snow out of his nose and mouth. In the dim light it was hard to tell whether
or not he had been hurt; he was breathing in convulsive snorts, but at least he seemed to be conscious. Jayne was leaning
against the wall and sobbing, with her hands pressed to her face. I prodded my ankle cautiously, trying to discover whether
or not my boot had been bitten through where the pain was. It had; there was blood leaking down inside it around my foot.
Elvers squatted down on his haunches beside the quivering dogs, holding his rifle more easily than he had before. He was still
aiming it squarely at Geoffrey.
“Be careful of the dogs,” he said. “They mind me. They won’t mind you. If you try to rush me, you might make it.
But none of us would live through it. These are close quarters —and you shouldn’t excite the dogs outside. They’re not securely
tethered.”
“You’re a crazy damned slob of a murderer,” Farnsworth whispered. “I’m going to kill you, Elvers.”
“No,” Elvers said, almost regretfully. “I’m not that crazy, Geoffrey. And I’m not a man at all, not in your sense. I’m a Martian.
I find it hard to remember sometimes. We’re all of us a little mad, but we’re not men. I mean all of the people like me—not
like you, Geoffrey. You’re not a mad Martian, you’re just a crazy man. I hope you see the difference.”
Geoffrey said nothing. After a moment’s wait, Elvers added:
“And that’s why you’re not going to kill me. No Earthman could. The Nferetetans tried hard while you were all still in caves,
and even then they were more powerful than you are now. But we killed them instead. Understand, I don’t want to have to kill
you. You forced it on me. It’s your own fault. I want you to understand that. We don’t like to kill people. We’re so tired
of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood “
His voice went scooping up into the falsetto. The dogs yelled and scrambled to their feet, but the whip-lash came flicking
out of his sleeve—I was now certain, even in this dim green-white light, that he really did keep it coiled up there—and they
cowered back again after a moment’s grim dance. The answering howl outside the igloo, however, rose and rose, like snowflakes
picked up by a twister, flowering into an echoing fountain of savage dolor and falling drop by drop, petal by petal, back
down on the whole Polar Basin. You have never known a countryside until you have heard it howl.
The dogs were sitting against him now, one on one side, two on the other, like broken wings in the dimness. I could think
of nothing but Elvers’ five words back beside the hole
Not you. You’re going home.
In the igloo they were not a promise, but a judgment and a sentence.
“I didn’t tell you the whole legend,” Elvers said, in a normal conversational tone. “Actually it’s history, but only oral
history. It may have been written down at one time, but of course all those records were destroyed. You see, not so long ago,
about fifteen thousand of your years, there were
two planets where the asteroid belt is now. One of them, Nferetet, was larger than the Earth, and had a moon nearly four hundred
and eighty miles in diameter. The other one, Infteret, was two thousand miles through, about the size of your Moon. There
was no life on Infteret; but on Nferetet we could see great seas, and vegetation. And in due course we could see lights at
night there.
“And on one night we also saw lights on Infteret, and we knew that the Nferetetans had crossed the distance between them.
This was something that we had known how to do long before, but we had found nothing interesting and the art had declined
from disuse. And so we asked ourselves questions, because we knew that the Nferetetans would soon be crossing to our world.
“It was known that Nferetet and Infteret were doomed, because their orbits were perturbed by Fgath—Jupiter. And so some among
us said, wait, and they will die by the hands of the gods. And others said, strike now, for the Nferetetans will seek to escape
destruction by overrunning us. So because it was a little thing to move Infteret a little out of the way in its orbit, and
a great thing to wait perhaps a million years more for Fgath to do it, we moved Infteret with an art we knew; and in a year
it collided with Nferetet, and the lights went out, and both were shattered. And through this feat we also threw great quantities
of our own air into space, and many of us died also.
“But we knew that there is life in many places, and that some day someone might come from some star who would be more powerful
than we; and so we took up crossing space again, and found a small colony of manlike beings under a dome on Nferetet’s moon,
which still survived; and we destroyed the dome; and also all other evidences. And some day the asteroids themselves will
be gone, and then the thing that we did will finally cease to exist, and we will never have done it at all.”
“And is this,” I said hoarsely, “all that you’ve been thinking about for fifteen thousand years? Just hiding a crime? What
else have you been doing?”
“Nothing,” Elvers said. “What else was there to do?”
“Bringing your own planet back to life. What are the canals for, if they’re not for that?”
“There are no canals,” Elvers said. “The marks you see
are volcanic faults, left behind by the catastrophe, when we used the great force against Nferetet. We could bring our world
back to life if we wanted to. But first there is the evidence.”
“How does this affect us?” Jayne said in a low voice.
“We thought we were in control,” Elvers said. “We knew. you were learning spaceflight, and we marked the day on our calendar.
We were ready to discourage you. We stole your satellite, as a beginning.
“But what Geoffrey has done was beyond all prediction. When I heard what he was looking for, my friends and I made every effort
to keep him from the Pole, but he was stubborn, and we could not show our hands too far. Very well, I said, he is a fool;
let him go. He will only fall over his own feet and kill himself. And if he somehow survives, he will find nothing under that
ocean but mud. Yet somehow he has survived, and he has found evidence of the crime. We had thought evidence of that kind existed
only in the asteroid belt, and we meant to prevent your ever getting there. But Geoffrey found otherwise, and so all must
die but Julian.”
“Why not me?”
“You will go back and tell everyone that the expedition found nothing.”
“And what about you?” I said.
“I will stay here,” Elvers said. “My friends will take me off. It is quite comfortable here—for me.”
H
OWEVER
I looked at it, I knew I had heard my own death-sentence as well. It did not really matter whether or not I believed a word
of what Elvers had said. He had a System. I might have raised all kinds of objections to it, but that would have been a sterile
exercise even had I had the time and the courage. Whether I believed it literally or not, it was logical and self-consistent
for Elvers, it fittted some of the facts, it provided some of the answers—and above all, he was committed to it. It would
have been impossible to talk to him on any other grounds, the objective truth of falsity of the System was almost wholly beside
the point.
In the world inside Elvers’ skull, then, it was obvious that his “Martians” had changed in fifteen thousand years. They were
not criminals now, though they still thought of themselves as criminals. They had become fanatical moralists. I didn’t think
it would be consistent with this character for them to compound their ancient crime by wiping out the life of still another
planet, even to conceal the murder of the first one. (People in the fantasies of madmen are always more self-consistent and
logical than real human beings; but then, if this was
not
just a fantasy, the people involved weren’t human beings, either.) But Elvers was perfectly capable of completing the slaughter
of the expedition, if he thought it would do any good. We had Fred Klein’s perfectly real corpse as evidence for that.