would find.
It was a sixty-foot walk from the fire to the well. A walk in the sun--awalk in the bright hot sun of Mars, with utter horror perhaps at the endof it.
The horror was there. Harry made a little choking noise deep in histhroat, and my heart started pounding like a bass drum.
II
The man on the sand had no top to his head. His skull had been crushedand flattened so hideously that he seemed like a wooden figure restingthere--an anatomical dummy with its skull-case lifted off.
We looked around for the skull-case, hoping we'd find it, hoping we'dmade a mistake and stumbled by accident into an open-air dissectinglaboratory and were looking at ghastly props made of plastic andglittering metal instead of bone and muscle and flesh.
But the man on the sand had a name. We'd known him for weeks and talkedto him. He wasn't a medical dummy, but a corpse. His limbs werehideously convulsed, his eyes wide and staring. The sand beneath hishead was clotted with dried blood. We looked for the weapon which hadcrushed his skull but couldn't find it.
We looked for the weapon before we saw the footprints in the sand. Bigthey were--incredibly large and massive. A man with a size-twelve shoemight have left such prints if the leather had become a little soggy andspread out around the soles.
"The poor guy," Harry whispered.
I knew how he felt. We had all liked Ned. A harmless little guy with agreat love of solitude, a guy who hadn't a malicious hair in his head. Ahappy little guy who liked to sing and dance in the light of ahigh-leaping fire. He had a banjo and was good at music making. Whocould have hated Ned with a rage so primitive and savage? I looked atHarry and saw that he was wondering the same thing.
Harry looked pretty bad, about ready to cave in. He was leaning againstthe well, a tormented fury in his eyes.
"The murderous bastard," he muttered. "I'd like to get him by the throatand choke the breath out of him. Who'd want to do a thing like that toNed."
"I can't figure it either," I said.
Then I remembered. I don't think Molly Egan really could have loved Ned.The curious thing about it was that Ned didn't even need the kind oflove she could have given him. He was a self-sufficient little guydespite his frailness and didn't really need a woman to look after him.But Molly must have seen something pathetic in him.
Molly was a beautiful woman in her own right, and there wasn't a man inthe camp who hadn't envied Ned. It was puzzling, but it could haveexplained why Ned was lying slumped on the sand with a bashed-in skull.It could have explained why someone had hated him enough to kill him.
Without lifting a finger Ned had won Molly's love. That could make someother guy as mad as a caged hyena--the wrong sort of other guy. Even asmall man could have shattered Ned's skull, but the prints on the sandwere big.
How many men in the camp wore size-twelve shoes? That was the sixty-fourdollar question, and it hung in the shimmering air between Harry andmyself like an unspoken challenge. We could almost see the curve of thebig question mark suspended in the dazzle.
I thought awhile, looking at Harry. Then I took a long, deep breath andsaid, "We'd better talk it over with Bill Seaton first. If it getsaround too fast those footprints will be trampled flat. And if tempersstart rising anything could happen."
Harry nodded. Bill was the kind of guy you could depend on in anemergency. Cool, poised, efficient, with an air of authority thatcommanded respect. He could be pigheaded at times, but his sense ofjustice was as keen as a whip.
Harry and I walked very quietly across a stretch of tumbled sand andhalted at the door to Bill's shack. Bill was a bachelor and we knewthere'd be no woman inside to put her foot down and tell him he'd be afool to act as a lawman. Or would there be? We had to chance it.
Law-enforcement is a thankless job whether on Earth or on Mars. That'swhy it attracts the worst--and the best. If you're a power-drunk sadistyou'll take the job just for the pleasure it gives you. But if you'rereally interested in keeping violence within bounds so that fairlydecent lads get a fighting chance to build for the future, you'll takethe job with no thought of reward beyond the simple satisfaction oflending a helping hand.
Bill Seaton was such a man, even if he did enjoy the limelight and likedto be in a position of command.
"Come on, Harry," I said. "We may as well wake him up and get it overwith."
We went into the shack. Bill was sleeping on the floor with his longlegs drawn up. His mouth was open and he was snoring lustily. I couldn'thelp thinking how much he looked like an overgrown grasshopper. But thatwas just a first impression springing from overwrought nerves.
I bent down and shook Bill awake. I grabbed his arm and shook him untilhis jaw snapped shut and he shot up straight, suddenly galvanized.Instantly the grotesque aspect fell from him. Dignity came upon him andenveloped him like a cloak.
"Ned, you say? The poor little cuss! So help me--if I get my hands onthe rat who did it I'll roast him over a slow fire!"
He got up, staggered to an equipment locker, and took out a sun helmetand a pair of shorts. He dressed quickly, swearing constantly andstaring out the door at the bright dawn glow as if he wanted to sendboth of his fists crashing into the first suspicious guy to cross hispath.
"We can't have those footprints trampled," he muttered. "There are a lotof dumb bastards here who don't know the first thing about keepingpointers intact. Those prints may be the only thing we'll have to goon."
"Just the three of us can handle it, Bill," I said. "When you decidewhat should be done we can wake the others."
Bill nodded. "Keeping it quiet is the important thing. We'll carry himback here. When we break the news I want that body out of sight."
Harry and Bill and I--we took another walk in the sun. I looked atHarry, and the greenish tinge which had crept into his face gave me ajolt. He's taking this pretty hard, I thought. If I hadn't known him sowell I might have jumped to an ugly conclusion. But I just couldn'timagine Harry quarreling with Ned over Molly.
How was I taking it myself? I raised my hand and looked at it. There wasno tremor. Nerves steady, brain clear. No pleasure in enforcing thelaw--pass that buck to Bill. But there was a gruesome job ahead, and Iwas standing up to it as well as could be expected.
Ever try lifting a corpse? The corpse of a stranger is easier to liftthan the corpse of a man you've known and liked. Harry and I lifted himtogether. Between us the dead weight didn't seem too intolerable--not atfirst. But it quickly became a terrible, heavy limpness that dragged atour arms like some soggy log dredged up from the dark waters of thecanal.
We carried him into the shack and eased him down on the floor. His headfell back and his eyes lolled.
Death is always shameful. It strips away all human reticences and makesa mockery of human dignity and man's rebellion against the cruelty offate.
For a moment we stood staring down at all that was left of Ned. I lookedat Bill. "How many men in the camp wear number-twelve shoes?"
"We'll find out soon enough."
All this time we hadn't mentioned Larsen. Not one word about Larsen, notone spoken word. Cheating, yes. Lying, and treacherous disloyalty, andviciousness, and spite. Fights around the campfires at midnight,battered faces and broken wrists and a cursing that never ceased. Allthat we could blame on Larsen. But a harmless little guy lying dead by awell in a spreading pool of blood--that was an outrage that stopped usdead in our legend-making tracks.
There is something in the human mind which recoils from too outrageous adeception. How wonderful it would have been to say, "Larsen was hereagain last night. He found a little guy who had never harmed anyonestanding by a well in the moonlight. Just for sheer delight he decidedto kill the little guy right then and there." Just to add luster to thelegend, just to send a thrill of excitement about the camp.
No, that would have been the lie colossal which no sane man could havequite believed.
Something happened then to further unnerve us.
The most disturbing sound you can hear on Mars is the
whispering.Usually it begins as a barely audible murmur and swells in volume withevery shift of the wind. But now it started off high pitched andinsistent and did not stop.
It was the whispering of a dying race. The Martians are as elusive aselves and all the pitiless logic of science had failed to draw themforth into the sunlight to stand before men in uncompromising arroganceas peers of the human race.
That failure was a tragedy in itself. If man's supremacy is to bechallenged at all let it be by a creature of flesh-and-blood, abig-brained biped who must kill to live. Better that by far than aghostly flickering in the deepening dusk, a whispering and a flappingand a long-drawn sighing prophesying death.
Oh, the Martians were real enough. A flitting vampire bat is real, or astinging ray in the depths of a blue lagoon. But who could