The Middle of Nowhere

By Frederick Pohl

Just ahead of us we saw a cluster of smoke trees suddenly quiver, though there wasn’t a whisper of a breeze, and begin to emit their clouds of dense yellow vapour from their branch-tips.

‘Let’s get a move on, Will,’ said Jack Demaree. His voice was thin and piercing, like the thin air all about us. ‘It’s going to get really hot here in the next twenty minutes.’

The steel and glass town of Niobe was in sight, a quarter mile ahead, ‘Sure,’ I said, and changed pace. We had been shambling along, as lazily as we could, in the effort-saving walk you learn in your first week on Mars. I stepped it up to the distance-devouring loose run that is only possible on a light-gravity planet like Mars.

It is tough to have to run in a thin atmosphere. Your lungs work too hard; you feel as though every step is going to be your last. Hillary and Tensing found no harder going on Everest than the friendliest spot on the surface of Mars - except, of course, that by day the temperature is high, and the light gravity lets you stand effort that would otherwise kill you. But we hadn’t much choice but to run. The smoke trees had passed their critical point, and the curious gelatinous sulphur compounds that served them for sap had passed into gas with the heat. When that happened, it meant that the sun was nearly overhead; and with only Mars’s thin blanket of air to shield you, you do not stay out in the open at high noon.

Not that we needed to see the smoke trees to know it was getting hot. A hundred and twenty in the shade it was, at least If there had been any shade.

Demaree passed me with a spurt just as we reached the outskirts of Niobe, and I followed him into the pressure chamber of the General Mercantile office. We use helium in our synthetic atmosphere instead of Earth’s nitrogen. So they gave us the pressure in one big ear-popping dose, without any danger of the bends we might have got from nitrogen. I swallowed and rubbed my ears; then we shed our sandcapes and respirators and walked into the anteroom.

Keever looked out of his private office, his lean horse face sagging with curiosity.

‘Demaree and Wilson reporting,’ I said. ‘No sign of natives. No hostile action. No anything, in fact, except it’s hot.’

Keever nodded and pulled his head back in. ‘Make out a slip,’ his voice floated out. ‘And you go out again in two hours. Better eat.’

Demaree finished shaking the loose sand out of his cape into a refuse shaft and made a face. ‘Two hours. Oh, lord.’ But he followed me to the Company cafeteria without argument.

The first thing we both did was make a dash for the drinking fountain. I won, and sopped up my fill while Demaree’s dry and covetous breath seared the back of my neck. Sand patrol can dehydrate a man to the point of shock in three hours; we had been out for four. You see why we were taking it easy?

We sat down in the little booth where we had put aside our card game with Bolt and Farragut a few hours before, and Marianna, without waiting for our order, brought coffee and sandwiches. Her eyes were hooded and unhappy; nerves, I thought, and tried to catch Demaree’s eye. But it didn’t work. He said in his customary slow and biting drawl, ‘Why, Mary, you’re getting stupider than ever. You took away our cards. I swear, girl, I don’t know why the Company keeps you -’

He trailed off, as she looked straight at him, and then away.

‘You won’t need them,’ she said after a moment. ‘Farragut’s patrol got it this morning,’

Farragut and Bolt, Cortland and VanCaster. Four good men, and it was the same old story. They were a four man patrol, ranging far beyond the defence perimeter of Niobe; they had got caught too far from town before it got really hot, and it was a choice between using their cached sand cars or getting stuck in the noonday sun. They had elected to try the sand car; and something bright and hot had come flashing over a sand dune and incinerated men and car alike.

The hell of it all was we never saw the Martians.

The earliest expeditions had reported that there wasn’t any life on Mars at all, barring the tiny ratlike forms that haunted the sparse forests of the North. Then air reconnaissance had reported what turned out to be the Martians - creatures about the size of a man, more or less, that stood up like a man, that built villages of shacks like men. But air reconnaissance was severely limited by the thinness of Mars’ air; helicopters and winged aircraft simply did not work, except at speeds so high that it was nearly impossible to make out details. It wasn’t until one of the orbiting mother spacecraft, after launching its space-to-ground shuttle rockets and standing by for the return, spent a dozen revolutions mapping Mars’ surface that the first really good look at Martians and their works was available. Really good? Well, let’s say as good as you could expect, considering the mother ship was five hundred miles up.

It was easy enough to send a surface party to investigate the Martian villages; but they were empty by the time Earthmen got there. Our sand cars could move faster than a Martian afoot, but it wasn’t healthy to use a sand car. Somehow, what weapons the Martians found to use against us (and nothing resembling a weapon had ever been found in the deserted villages) seemed most effective against machines. It was flatly impossible that they should have electronic aimers to zero in on the radio-static from the machines; but if it had been possible, it would have been certain - for that was the effect

I had plenty of time to think about all this as Demaree and I ate our glum and silent meal. There just wasn’t anything much for us to say. Farragut and Bolt had been friends of ours.

Demaree sighed and put down his coffee. Without looking at me he said, ‘Maybe I ought to quit this job, Will.’

I didn’t answer, and he let it go. I didn’t think he meant it but I knew how he felt.

General Mercantile was a good enough outfit to work for, and its minerals franchise on Mars meant a terrific future for any young fellow who got in on the ground floor. That’s what everybody said, back on earth, and that’s what kept us all there: the brilliant future.

That - and the adventure of developing a whole new world. Suppose those old Englishmen who went out for the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and the other Middle Ages monopolies must have had the same feeling.

And the same dangers. Except that they dealt with an enemy they could see and understand; an enemy that, regardless of skin colour or tongue, was human. And we were fighting shadows.

I tasted my coffee, and it was terrible. ‘Hey, Mary -’ I started, but I never finished.

The alarm klaxon squawked horrifyingly in the cafeteria; we could hear it bellowing all over the GM building. We didn’t wait to ask questions; we jumped up and raced for the door, Demaree colliding with me as we tried to beat each other through. He clutched at me and looked at me blankly, then elbowed me aside. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Hey, Will - I don’t really want to quit….’

The news was: Kelcy.

Kelcy was our nearest village, and the Martians had schlagged it. Demaree and I were the first in the Ready Room, and Keever snapped that much information at us while we were waiting the few seconds for the rest of the patrols to come racing in. They had been in other buildings and came leaping in still wearing their sand capes; they had had to race across the blindingly hot streets in the midday Martian glare. There were twelve of us altogether - the whole station complement, less the four who had been lost that morning. We were on the books as ‘personnel assistants’; but what we really were was guards, the entire trouble-shooting force and peace-and-order officers for the town of Niobe.

Keever repeated it for the others: ‘They attacked Kelcy thirty minutes ago. It was a hit-and-run raid; they fired on all but one of the buildings, and every building was demolished. So far, they report twenty-six survivors. There might be a couple more - out in the open - that’s all that are in the one building.’ Out in the open - that meant no other survivors at all; it was just past high noon.

Big, fair-haired Tom van der Gelt unsteadily shredded the plastic from a fresh pack of cigarettes and lit one. ‘I had a brother in Kelcy,’ he remarked to no one.

‘We don’t have a list of survivors yet,’ Keever said quickly. ‘Maybe your brother’s all right. But we’ll find out before anybody else, because we’re going to send a relief expedition.’

We all sat up at that. Relief expedition? But Kelcy was forty miles away. We could never hope to walk it, or even run it, between the end of the hot-period and dark; and it made no sense for us to be out in the open at the dusk sandstorm. But Keever was saying:

‘This is the first time they’ve attacked a town. I don’t have to tell you how serious it is. Niobe may be next. So - we’re going to go there, and get the survivors back here; and see if we can find out anything from them. And because we won’t have much time, we’re going to travel by sand car.’

There was a thoroughgoing silence in that room for a moment after that, while the echoes of the words ‘sand car’ bounced around. Only the echoes made it sound like ‘suicide’.

Keever coughed. ‘It’s a calculated risk,’ he went on doggedly. ‘I’ve gone over every skirmish report since the first landings, and never - well, almost never - have the Martians done more than hit and run. Now, it’s true that once they hit a settlement the usual custom is to lay low for a while; and it’s true that this is the first time they’ve come out against a town, and maybe they’re changing their tactics. I won’t try to tell you that this is safe. It isn’t. But there’s at least a chance that we’ll get through - more of a chance, say, than the twenty-six survivors in Kelcy have if we don’t try it.’ He hesitated for a second. Then, slowly: ‘I won’t order any man to do it. But I’ll call for volunteers. Anybody who wants to give it a try, front and centre.’

Nobody made a mad rush to get up there - it still sounded like suicide to all of us.

But nobody stayed behind. In under a minute, we were all standing huddled around Keever, listening to orders.

We had to wait another forty minutes - it took time for the maintenance crew to get the sand cars out of their hideaway, where they’d been silently standing, not even rusting in the dry Martian air, since the first Earthman drew the connection between sand cars and Martian attack. Besides, it was still hot; and even in the sand cars it would help for the sun to be a few degrees past the meridian.

There were fourteen of us in three cars - the patrols, Keever and Dr. Solveig. Solveig’s the only doctor in Niobe, but Keever requisitioned him - we didn’t know what we might find in Kelcy. Keever’s car led the party; Demaree, Solveig and I were in the last, the smallest of the lot and the slowest.

Still, we clipped off fifteen miles of the forty-mile trip in eight minutes by the clock. The cats were flapping until I was sure they would fly off the drive wheels, but somehow they held on as we roared over the rolling sand. It sounded as though the car was coming to pieces at every bump - a worrisome sound but not, I think, the sound that any of us was really worrying about. That sound was the rushing, roaring thunder of a Martian missile leaping at us over a dune; and none of us expected to hear it more than once….

The way to Kelcy skirts what we call the ‘Split Cliffs’, which all of us regarded as a prime suspect for a Martian hangout. There had been expeditions into the Split Cliffs because of that suspicion; but most of them came back empty-handed, having found nothing but an incredible tangle. However, the ones that didn’t come back empty-handed didn’t come back at all; it was, as I say, a prime suspect. And so we watched it warily until it was almost out of sight behind us.

Martians or no, the Split Cliffs is a treacherous place, with nothing worth an Earthman’s time inside. Before Mars’s internal fires died completely,’ there were centuries of fierce earthquakes. The sections we called the Split Cliffs must have been right over a major fault. The place is cataclysmic; it looks as though some artist from the Crazy Years, Dali or Archipenko, had designed it, in a rage. Sharp upcroppings of naked, metallic rock; deep gashes with perfectly straight hundred-foot sides. And because there happens to be a certain amount of poisonously foul water deep underground there, the place is as heavily vegetated as anything on Mars. Some of the twisted trees reach as high as thirty feet above the ground - by Martian standards, huge!

Even Demaree, at the wheel of the sand car, kept glancing over his shoulder at the Split Cliffs until we were well past them. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said half-apologetically to me, catching my eyes on him. ‘Those lousy trees could hide anything.’

‘Sure,’ I said shortly. ‘Watch what you’re doing.’ I wasn’t in a mood for conversation - not only because of the circumstances, but because my nose was getting sore. Even in the car we wore respirators, on Keever’s orders - I think he had an idea that a Martian attack might blow out our pressure before we could put them on. And three hours that morning, plus five hours each of the several days before, had left my nose pretty tender where the respirator plugs fit in.

Dr. Solveig said worriedly, ‘I agree with William, please. You have come very close to the other cars many times. If we should hit-’

‘We won’t hit,’ said Demaree. But he did concentrate on his driving; he maintained his forty metres behind the second car, following their lead as they sought the path of least ups-and-downs through the sand dunes towards Kelcy. It began to look, I thought as I watched the reddish sand streaming by, as though Keever’s ‘calculated risk’ was paying off. Certainly we had come nearly twenty miles without trouble, and past the worst spot on the trip, the Split Cliffs. If our luck held for ten minutes more -

It didn’t.

‘God almighty!’ yelled Demaree, jolting me out of my thoughts. I looked where he was looking, just in time to see flame coursing flat along the ground. It snaked in a quivering course right at the middle sand car of our three; and when the snaking light and the jolting car intersected -

Catastrophe. Even in the thin air, the sound was like an atomic bomb. The spurt of flame leaped forty yards into the air.

We were out of the car in seconds, and the men from Keever’s car joined us. But there was nothing to do for the seven men in the second car.

‘They went after the biggest,’ Keever said bitterly. ‘Now -’ He shrugged. One thing was sure, and he didn’t have to say it. None of us wanted to be in a sand car with the motor going right there and then.

There was no sign of the enemy. Around us were empty sand dunes - but not empty, because out of them had come the missile. The only break was the fringe of the Split Cliffs behind us.

Keever methodically zipped up his sand cape and went through the routine of tucking in flaps at the neck and arms without speaking. None of us had anything to say either. Demaree, with a stronger stomach than mine, took another look inside the blackened frame of the second sand car, and came back looking as though his stomach wasn’t so strong after all.

We scattered away from the parked sand cars and the wreck of the one that would never move again, and held a council of war. By Keever’s watch, we had time to get to Kelcy or go back to Niobe - at a half trot in either case. We were exactly at midpoint between the two towns. No one even suggested using the sand cars again, though there wasn’t a flicker of a threat from the dunes.

But we knew by experience how abruptly they could explode.

The decision was for Kelcy.

But the Martians took the decision out of our hands.

We trotted along for nearly an hour, on the move for twenty minutes, resting for five, and it began to look as if we’d make it to Kelcy without any more trouble - though, in truth, we had had trouble enough; because it would be enough of a job to try to get ourselves back to Niobe without the strong probability of carrying injured survivors from Kelcy. The remorseless noonday deadline would apply the next day; and travel on Mars by night was nearly out of the question. It is a thin-aired planet, so the sun beats down fiercely; it is a thin-aired planet, so the heat is gone minutes after sundown. I suppose all of us were thinking those thoughts, though we hadn’t the breath to speak them, when the Martians struck again, this time with something new. There was a golden glow from a sand dune ahead of us to the right, and one from a dune ahead of us to the left. Keever, in the lead, hesitated for a second; but he didn’t hesitate enough. He plunged on, and when he and two of the others were between the two dunes, golden lightning flashed. It was like the spray of a fiery hose, from one dune top to the other; and where it passed, three man lay dead.

It wasn’t fire; there wasn’t a mark on the bodies; but they were dead. We instinctively all of us blasted the tops of the glowing dunes with our flame rifles, but of course it was a little late for that. Demaree and I broke for the dune to the right, rifles at the ready. We scrambled up the sides and spread out halfway up to circle it - it was slagged from our own rifles at the top, and certainly nothing could be alive up there. But nothing was alive behind it, either - nothing we could see. The sands were empty.

Demaree swore lividly all the way back to where the bodies of the three men lay. Dr. Solveig, bending over them, said sharply, ‘That is enough, Demaree! Think what we must do!’

‘But those filthy-’

‘Demaree!’ Solveig stood up straight and beckoned to the only other survivor - who had raced to explore the dune to the left, with the same results. He was a man named Garcia; he and I had come out together, but I didn’t know him very well. ‘Have you seen anything?’ Solveig demanded.

Garcia said bitterly, ‘More of that fire, Doc! From that hill I could see two or three others shining, down along the way to Kelcy.’

‘I had thought so,’ Solveig said somberly. ‘The Martians were of course aware of what we proposed. Kelcy is booby-trapped; we cannot expect to get there.’

‘So where does that leave us?’ demanded Demaree. ‘We can’t stay here! We can’t even make it back to Niobe - we’ll get caught in the sandstorm. Maybe you’d like that. Doc - but I saw a man after the sandstorm got him a year ago!’ And so had I; patrolman like ourselves, who incautiously found himself out in the middle of nowhere at dusk, when the twilight sandstorm rages from East to West and no human can live for an hour, until the gale passes and the tiny, lethal sand grains subside to the surface of the planet-wide desert again. His own respirators had killed him; the tiny whirl-pumps were clogged solid with sand grains packed against the filters, and he had died of suffocation.

Solveig said, ‘We go back. Believe me, it is the only way.’

‘Back where? It’s twenty-five miles to -’

‘To Niobe, yes. But we shall not go that far. I have two proposals. One, the sand cars; at least inside them you will not suffocate. Two - the Split cliffs.’

We all looked at him as though he had gone insane. But in the end he talked us around - all but Garcia, who clung obstinately to the cars.

We got back to the Split Cliffs, leaving Garcia huddled inside the first car with something of the feelings of the worshippers leaving Andromeda chained to the rock. Not that we were much better off - but at least there were three of us.

Solveig had pointed out, persuasively, that inside the growth of the Split Cliffs the sandstorm couldn’t touch us; that there were caves and tunnels where the three of us, huddled together, might keep each other alive till morning. He admitted that the probability that we would find Martians there before us was high - but we knew the Martians had spotted the cars. And at least inside the jungle-like Split Cliffs, they would be at as grave a disadvantage as we; unless they could overpower us by numbers, we should be able to fight them off if they discovered us. And even if they did outnumber us, we might be able to kill a few - and on the sand dunes, as we had discovered, they would strike and be gone.

Dr. Solveig, in the lead, hesitated and then slipped into the dense yellowish vegetation. Demaree looked at me, and we followed.

There were no trails inside, nothing but a mad tangle of twisty, feather-leaved vines. I heard dry vine-pods rattling ahead as Solveig spearheaded our group, and in a moment we saw him again.

The ground was covered with the fine red sand that overlies all of Mars, but it was only an inch or two deep. Beneath was raw rock, split and fissured with hairline cracks into which the water-seeking tendrils of the vegetation disappeared.

Demaree said softly, ‘Dr. Solveig. Up ahead there, by the little yellow bush. Doesn’t that look like a path?’

It wasn’t much, just a few branches bent back and a couple broken off; a certain amount of extra bare rock showing where feet might have scuffed the surface sand off.

‘Perhaps so,’ said Solveig. ‘Let us look.’

We bent under the long, sweeping branches of a smoke tree -too cool now to give off its misty yellow gases. We found ourselves looking down an almost straight lane, too straight to be natural.

‘It is a path,’ said Dr. Solveig. ‘Ah, so. Let us investigate it.’

I started to follow him, but Demaree’s hand was on my shoulder, his other hand pointing. I looked, off to one side, and saw nothing but the tangle of growth.

Solveig turned inquiringly. Demaree frowned. ‘I thought I heard something.’

‘Oh,’ said Solveig, and unlimbered his flame rifle. All three of us stood frozen for a moment, listening and watching; but if there had been anything, it was quiet and invisible now.

Demaree said, ‘Let me go first, Doc. I’m a little younger than you.’ And faster on the draw, he meant. Solveig nodded.

‘Of course.’ He stepped aside, and Demaree moved silently along the trail, looking into the underbrush from side to side. Solveig waited a moment, then followed; and a few yards behind I brought up the rear. I could just see Demaree’s body flickering between the gnarled tree trunks and vines up ahead. He hesitated, then stepped over something, a vine or dead tree, that lay snaked across the path. He half turned as if to gesture -

Snap!

The vine whipped up and twisted about his leg, clung and dragged him ten feet into the air, hanging head down, as a long straight tree beside the path snapped erect.

A deadfall - the oldest snare in the book!

‘Jack!’ I yelled, forgetting about being quiet - and half-forgetting, too, that I was on Mars. I leaped towards him, and blundered against the trees as my legs carried me farther than I thought. Solveig and I scrambled to him, rifles ready, staring around for a sight of whatever it was that had set the trap. But again - nothing.

Demaree wasn’t hurt, just tangled and helpless. A flood of livid curses floated down from him as he got his wind back and began struggling against the vine loop around his legs. ‘Take it easy!’ I called. ‘I’ll get you down!’ And while Solveig stood guard I scrambled up the tree and cut him loose. I tried to hold the vine but I slipped, and he plunged sprawling to the ground - still unhurt, but angry.

And the three of us stood there for a moment, waiting for the attack. And it didn’t come.

For a moment the Martians had had us; while Demaree was in the tree and Solveig and I racing towards him, they could have cut us down. And they hadn’t. They had set the trap - and passed up its fruits.

We looked at each other wonderingly.

We found a cave just off the trail, narrow and high, but the best protection in sight against the dusk sandstorm and the night’s cold. The three of us huddled inside - and waited. Demaree suggested making a fire; but, although the wood on the ground was dry enough to burn even in Mars’s thin air, we decided against it. Maybe, later on, if we couldn’t stand the cold, we’d have no choice; but meanwhile there was no sense attracting attention.

We asked Solveig, who seemed to be in command of our party, if he thought there was any objection to talking, and he shrugged. ‘How can one tell? Perhaps they hear, perhaps they do not. Air is thin and sounds do not carry far - to our ears. To Martian ears? I don’t know.’

So we talked - not loud, and not much, because there wasn’t, after all, much to say. We were preoccupied with the contradictions and puzzlements the Martians presented. Fantastic weapons that struck from nowhere or shimmered into being between sand dunes - and a culture little beyond the neolithic. Even Earth’s best guided missiles could have been no more accurate and little more deadly, considering the nature of the target, than the one that obliterated car number two. And the golden glow that killed Keever was out of our experience altogether. And yet - villages of sticks! There had been no trace in any Martian dwelling of anything so complicated as a flame-rifle, much less these others….

It grew very slightly darker, bit by bit; and then it was black. Even in our cave we could hear the screaming of the twilight wind. We were in a little slit in the raw rock, halfway down one of the crevasses that gave the Split Cliffs area its name. Craggy, tumbled, bare rocks a hundred feet below us, and the other wall of the crevasse barely jumping distance away. We had come to it along an irregular sloping ledge, and to reach us at all the wind had to pass through a series of natural baffles. And even so, we saw the scant shrubbery at the cave mouth whipped and scoured by the dusk-wind.

Demaree shivered and attempted to light a cigarette. On the fourth try he got it burning, but it went out almost at once - it is possible to smoke in Mars’s air, but not easy, because of the pressure. The tobacco burns poorly, and tastes worse. He grunted, ‘Damn the stuff. You think we’ll be all right here?’

‘From the wind?’ asked Solveig. ‘Oh, certainly. You have seen how little sand was carried in here. It is the cold that follows that I am thinking of…’

We could feel the cold settling in the air, even while the twilight wind was blowing. In half an hour the wind was gone, but the cold remained, deeper and more intense than anything I had ever felt before. Our sand capes were a help, almost thermally non-conducting in either direction j we carefully tucked under all the vents designed to let perspiration escape, we folded them around us meticulously, we kept close together - and still the cold was almost unbearable. And it would grow steadily worse for hours….

‘We’ll have to build a fire,’ said Solveig reluctantly. ‘Come and gather wood.’ The three of us went scouring up the ledge for what we could find. We had to go all the way back to the top of the crevasse to find enough to bother carrying; we brought it back, and while Demaree and I worked to set it afire Solveig went back for more. It wasn’t easy, trying to make that thin and brittle stuff burn. Demaree’s pocket lighter wore itself out without success. Then he swore and motioned me back, levelling his flame rifle at the sticks. That worked beautifully - every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them over yards, half of them going over the side of the ledge; and we charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we’d started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It helped - helped very much. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle as long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine-leaves.

‘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.)

Overconfident? No - any Earthman, of course, could have worked out a variation which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour’s leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not. Because the Martians were not-the Martians.

That is, they were not the Martians.

‘Successors,’ Solveig explained to all of us, back in Niobe. ‘Heirs, if you like. But not the inventors. Compared with whoever built those machines, the Martians we’ve been up against are nothing but animals - or children. Like children, they can pull a trigger or strike a match. But they can’t design a gun - or even build one by copying another.’

Keever shook his long, lean head. ‘And the original Martians?’

Solveig said, ‘That’s a separate question. Perhaps they’re hiding out somewhere we haven’t reached - underground or at the poles. But they’re master builders, whoever and wherever they are.’ He made a wry face. ‘There I was,’ he said, ‘hiding out in a cleft in the rock when the dawn wind came. I thought I’d dodged the Martians, but they knew I was there. As soon as the sun came up I saw them dragging that thing towards me.’ He jerked a thumb at the weapon, already being checked over by our maintenance crews. ‘I thought that was the end, especially when they pulled the trigger.’

‘And it didn’t go off,’ said Demaree.

‘It couldn’t go off! I wasn’t a machine. So I took it away from them - they aren’t any stronger than kittens - and I went back to look for you two. And there was that Martian waiting for you. I guess he didn’t have a real gun, so he was making one - like a kid’ll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won’t shoot. Neither did the Martians, as you will note.’

We all sat back and relaxed. ‘Well,’ said Keever, ‘that’s our task for this week. I guess you’ve shown us how to clean up what the Earthside papers call the Martian Menace, Doc. Provided, of course, that we don’t run across any of the grownup Martians; or the real Martians, or whatever it was that designed those things.’

Solveig grinned. ‘They’re either dead or hiding, Keever,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about them.’

And unfortunately, he didn’t worry about them, and neither did any of the rest of us.

Not for nearly five years…

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