From the bottom he stood long minutes surveying the hill. Nothing moved. There was no telltale fleck of color.
Slowly, he started up, digging his feet into the shifting talus of the slope, fighting his way up foot by foot, stopping for long minutes to regain his breath and to survey the slope ahead.
Gaining the ledge, he moved cautiously toward the cave, gun leveled, for there was no telling what might come out of it.
He debated on his next move.
Flash his light inside to see what was there?
Or simply thrust his gun into the opening and spray the inside with its lethal charge?
There could be no squeamishness, he told himself. Better to kill a harmless thing than to run the chance of passing up a danger.
He heard no sound until the claws of the thing were scrabbling on the ledge behind him. He shot one quick glance over his shoulder and saw the beast almost on top of him, got the impression of gaping mouth and murderous fangs and tiny eyes that glinted with a stony cruelty.
There was no time to turn and fire. There was time for just one thing.
His legs moved like driving pistons, hurling his body at the cave. The stone lip of it caught his shoulder and ripped through his clothing, gashing his arm, but he was through, through and rolling free. Something brushed his face and he rolled over something that protested in a squeaking voice and off in one corner there was a thing that mewed quietly to itself.
On his knees, Webb swung his gun around to face the opening of the cave, saw the great bulk of the beast that had charged him trying to squeeze its way inside.
It backed away and then a great paw came in, feeling this way and that, hunting for the food that crouched inside the cave.
Mouths jabbered at Webb, a dozen voices speaking in the lingo of the desert and he heard them say:
“Human, human, kill, kill, kill.”
Webb’s gun spat and the paw went limp and was pulled slowly from the cave. The great grey body toppled and they heard it strike the slope below the ledge and go slithering away down the talus slope.
“Thanks, human,” said the voices. “Thanks, human.”
Slowly Webb sat down, cradling the gun in his lap.
All around him he heard the stir of life.
Sweat broke out on his forehead and he felt moisture running from his armpits down his sides.
What was in the cave? What was in here with him?
That they had talked to him didn’t mean a thing. Half the so-called animals of Mars could talk the desert lingo…a vocabulary of a few hundred words, part of them Earthian, part of them Martian, part of them God-knew-what.
For here on Mars many of the animals were not animals at all, but simply degenerating forms of life that at one time must have formed a complex civilization. The Venerables, who still retained some of the shape of bipeds, would have reached the highest culture, but there must have been many varying degrees of culture, living by compromise or by tolerance.
“Safe,” a voice told him. “Trust. Cave law.”
“Cave law?”
“Kill in cave…no. Kill outside cave…yes. Safe in cave.”
“I no kill,” said Webb. “Cave law good.”
“Human know cave law?”
Webb said: “Human keep cave law.”
“Good,” the voice told him. “All safe now.”
Webb relaxed. He slipped his gun into his holster and took off his pack, laid it down alongside and rubbed his raw and blistered shoulders.
He could believe these things, he told himself. A thing so elemental and so simple as cave law was a thing that could be understood and trusted. It arose from a basic need, the need of the weaker life forms to forget their mutual differences and their mutual preying upon one another at the fall of night…the need to find a common sanctuary against the bigger and the more vicious and the lonely killers who took over with the going of the sun.
A voice said: “Come light. Human kill.”
Another voice said: “Human keep cave law in dark. No cave law in light. Human kill come light.”
“Human no kill come light,” said Webb.
“All human kill,” said one of the things. “Human kill for fur. Human kill for food. We fur. We food.”
“This human never kill,” said Webb. “This human friend.”
“Friend?” one of them asked. “We not know friend. Explain friend.”
Webb didn’t try. There was no use, he knew. They could not understand the word. It was foreign to this wilderness.
At last he asked: “Rocks here?”
One of the voices answered: “Rocks in cave. Human want rocks?”
“Pile in cave mouth,” said Webb. “No killer get in.”
They digested that for a while. Finally one of them spoke up: “Rock good.”
They brought rocks and stones and, with Webb helping them, wedged the cave mouth tight.
It was too dark to see the things, but they brushed against him as they worked and some of them were soft and furry and others had hides like crocodiles, that tore his skin as he brushed against them. And there was one that was soft and pulpy and gave him the creeps.
He settled down in one corner of the cave with his sleeping bag between his body and the wall. He would have liked to crawl into it, but that would have meant unpacking and if he unpacked his supplies, he knew, there’d be none come morning.
Perhaps, he reasoned, the body heat of all the things in here will keep the cave from getting too cold. Cold, yes, but not too cold for human life. It was, he knew, a gamble at best.
Sleep at night in friendship, kill one another and flee from one another with the coming of the dawn. Law, they called it. Cave law. Here was one for the books, here was something that was not even hinted at in all the archaeological tomes that he had ever read.
And he had read them all. There was something here on Mars that fascinated him. A mystery and a loneliness, an emptiness and a retrogression that haunted him and finally sent him out to try to pierce some of that mystery, to try to hunt for the reason for that retrogression, to essay to measure the greatness of the culture that in some far dim period had come tumbling down.
There had been some great work done along that line. Axelson with his scholarly investigation of the symbolic water jugs and Mason’s sometimes fumbling attempt to trace the great migrations. Then there was Smith, who had traveled the barren world for years jotting down the windblown stories whispered by the little degenerating things about an ancient greatness and a golden past. Myths, most of them, of course, but some place, somewhere lay the answer to the origin of the myths. Folklore does not leap full-blown from the mind; it starts with a fact and that fact is added to and the two facts are distorted and you have a myth. But at the bottom, back of all of it, is the starting point of fact.
So it was, so it must be with the myth that told about the great and glowing city that had stood above all other things of Mars…a city that was known to the far ends of the planet.
A place of culture, Webb told himself, a place where all the achievements and all the dreams and every aspiration of the once-great planet would have come together.
And yet, in more than a hundred years of hunting and of digging, Earth’s archaeologists had found no trace of any city, let alone that city of all cities. Kitchen middens and burial places and wretched huddling places where broken remnants of the great people had lived for a time…there were plenty of these. But no great city.
It must be somewhere, Webb was convinced. That myth could not lie, for it was told too often at too many different places by too many different animals that had once been people.
Mars fascinated me, he thought, and it still fascinates me, but now it will be the death of me…for there’s death in its fascination. Death in the lonely stretches and death waiting on the buttes. Death in this cave
, too, for they may kill me come the morning to prevent me killing them; they may keep their truce of the night just long enough to make an end of me.
The law of the cave? Some holdover from the ancient day, some memory of a now forgotten brotherhood? Or a device necessitated by the evil days that had come when the brotherhood had broken?
He laid his head back against the rock and closed his eyes and thought…if they kill me, they kill me, but I will not kill them. For there has been too much human killing on the planet Mars. I will repay part of the debt at least. I will not kill the ones who took me in.
He remembered himself creeping along the ledge outside the cave, debating whether he should have a look first or stick in the muzzle of his gun and sweep the cave as a simple way of being sure there would be nothing there to harm him.
I did not know, he said. I did not know.
A soft furry body brushed against him and a voice spoke to him.
“Friend means no hurt? Friend means no kill?”
“No hurt,” said Webb. “No kill.”
“You saw six?” the voice asked.
Webb jerked from the wall and sat very still.
“You saw six?” the voice was insistent.
“I saw six,” said Webb.
“When?”
“One sun.”
“Where six?”
“Canyon mouth,” said Webb. “Wait at canyon mouth.”
“You hunt Seven?”
“No,” said Webb. “I go home.”
“Other humans?”
“They north,” said Webb. “They hunt Seven north.”
“They kill Seven?”
“Catch Seven,” said Webb. “Take Seven to six. See city.”
“Six promise?”
“Six promise,” said Webb.
“You good human. You friend human. You no kill Seven.”
“No kill,” insisted Webb.
“All humans kill. Kill Seven sure. Seven good fur. Much pay. Many Sevens die for human.”
“Law says no kill,” declared Webb. “Human law says Seven friend. No kill friend.”
“Law? Like cave law?”
“Like cave law,” said Webb.
“You good friend of Seven?”
“Good friend of all,” said Webb.
“I Seven,” said the voice.
Webb sat quietly and let the numbness clear out of his brain.
“Seven,” he finally said. “You go canyon mouth. Find six. They wait. Human friend glad.”
“Human friend want city,” said the creature. “Seven friend to human. Human find Seven. Human see city. Six promise.”
Webb almost laughed aloud in bitterness. Here, at last, the chance that he had hoped might come. Here, at last, the thing that he had wanted, the thing he had come to Mars to do. And he couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t do it.
“Human no go,” he said. “Human die. No food. No water. Human die.”
“We care for human,” Seven told him. “No friend human before. All kill humans. Friend human come. We care for it.”
Webb was silent for a while, thinking.
Then he asked: “You give human food? You find human water?”
“Take care,” said Seven.
“How Seven know I saw six?”
“Human tell. Human think. Seven know.”
So that was it…telepathy. Some vestige of a former power, some attribute of a magnificent culture, not quite forgotten yet. How many of the other creatures in this cave would have it, too?
“Human go with Seven?” Seven asked.
“Human go,” said Webb.
He might as well, he told himself. Going east, back toward the settlements, was no solution to his problem. He knew he’d never reach the settlements. His food would run out. His water would run out. Some beast would catch him and make a meal of him. He didn’t have a chance.
Going with the little creature that stood beside him in the darkness of the cave, he might have a chance. Not too good a chance, perhaps, but at least a chance. There would be food and water…or at least a chance of food and water. There would be another helping him to watch for the sudden death that roamed the wilderness. Another one to warn him, to help him recognize the danger.
“Human cold,” said Seven.
“Cold,” admitted Webb.
“One cold,” said Seven. “Two warm.”
The furry thing crawled into his arms, put its arms around his body. After a moment, he put his arms around it.
“Sleep,” said Seven. “Warm. Sleep.”
Webb ate the last of his food and the Seven Venerables told him: “We care.”
“Human die,” Webb insisted. “No food. Human die.”
“We take care,” the seven little creatures told him, standing in a row. “Later we take care.”
So he took it to mean that there was no food for him now, but later there would be.
They took up the march again.
It was an interminable thing, that march. A thing to make a man cry out in his sleep. A thing to shiver over when they had been lucky enough to find wood and sat hunched around the fire. Day after endless day of sand and rock, of crawling up to a high ridge and plunging down the other side, of slogging through the heat across the level land that had been sea bottom in the days long gone.
It became a song, a drum beat, a three-note marching cadence that rang through the human’s head, an endless thing that hammered in his brain through the day and stayed with him hours after they had stopped for night. Until he was dizzy with it, until his brain was drugged with the hammer of it, so that his eyes refused to focus and the gun bead was a fuzzy globe when he had to use the weapon against the crawling things and charging things and flying things that came at them out of nowhere.
Always there were the mirages, the everlasting mirages of Mars that seemed to lie just beneath the surface of reality. Flickering pictures painted in the sky the water and the trees and the long green sweep of grass that Mars had not known for countless centuries. As if, Webb told himself, the past were very close behind them, as if the past might still exist and was trying to catch up, reluctant to be left behind in the march of time.
He lost count of the days and steeled himself against the speculation of how much longer it might be, until it seemed that it would go on forever, that they would never stop, that they would face each morning the barren wilderness they must stagger through until the fall of night.
He drank the last of the water and reminded them he could not live without it.
“Later,” they told him. “Water later.”
That was the day they came to the city and there, deep in a tunnel far beneath the topmost ruins there was water, water dripping, drop by slow and tantalizing drop from a broken pipe. Dripping water and that was a wondrous thing on Mars.
The seven drank sparingly since they had been steeled for century upon century to get along with little water, until they had adapted themselves to get along with little water and it was no hardship for them. But Webb lay for hours beside the broken pipe, holding cupped hands for a little to collect before he lapped it down, lying there in the coolness that was a blessed thing.
He slept and awoke and drank again and he was rested and was no longer thirsty, but his body cried for food. And there was no food nor none to get him food. For the little ones were gone.
They will come back, he said. They are gone for just a little while and will be back again. They have gone to get me food and they will bring it to me. And he thought very kindly of them.
He picked his way upward through the tunnel down which they’d come and so at last came to the ruins that lay on the hill that thrust upward from the surrounding country so that when one stood on the hill’s top, there was miles of distance, dropping away on every side.
; There wasn’t much that one could see of the ruined city. It would have been entirely possible to have walked past the hill and not have known the city was there. During thousands of years it had crumbled and fallen in upon itself and some of it had dissolved to dust and the sand had crept in and covered it and sifted among its fragments until it simply was a part of the hill.
Here and there Webb found broken fragments of chiseled masonry and here and there a shard of pottery, but a man could have walked past these, if he had not been looking, and taken them for no more than another rock scattered among the trillions of other fragmentary rocks littered on the surface of the planet.
The tunnel, he found, led down into the bowels of the fallen city, into the burial mound of the fallen greatness and the vanished glory of a proud people whose descendants now scuttled animal-like in the ancient deserts and talked in an idiom that was no more than a memory of the literacy that must have flourished once in the city on the hill.
In the tunnel Webb found evidence of solid blocks of carven stone, broken columns, paving blocks and something that seemed at one time to have been a beautifully executed statue.
At the end of the tunnel, he cupped his hands at the pipe and drank again, then went back to the surface and sat on the ground beside the tunnel mouth and stared out across the emptiness of Mars.
It would take power and tools and many men to uncover and sift the evidence of the city. It would take years of painstaking, scholarly work…and he didn’t even have a shovel. And worst of all, he had no time. For if the seven did not show up with food he would one day go down into the darkness of the tunnel and there eventually join his human dust with the ancient dust of this alien world.
There had been a shovel, he remembered, and Wampus and Lars, when they deserted him, had left it with him. A rare consideration, surely, he told himself. But of the supplies which he had carried away from the campfire that long gone morning there were just two things left, his sleeping bag and the pistol at his belt. All else he could get along without, those two were things that he had to have.
An archaeologist, he thought. An archaeologist sitting on top of the greatest find that any archaeologist had ever made and not able to do a single thing about it.