II

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_If Frank Belknap Long is not one of the deans of science fiction

writers, there can certainly be no dispute that he is high on the

faculty board. His pen is indefatigable, it seems, and his

characters come alive as with few other writers. We're sure you'll

like this new suspenseful tale of his._

the

man

the

martians

made

_by ... Frank Belknap Long_

No mortal had ever seen the Martians, but they had heard their

whisperings--without knowing the terrible secret they kept hidden.

There was death in the camp.

I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and

was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light.

There was a prickling at the base of my scalp and I was drenched with

cold sweat.

I had an impulse to leap up and go stumbling about in the darkness. But

I disciplined myself. I crossed my arms and waited for the sky to grow

bright.

Daybreak on Mars is like nothing you've ever dreamed about. You wake up

in the morning, and there it is--bright and clear and shining. You pinch

yourself, you sit up straight, but it doesn't vanish.

Then you stare at your hands with the big callouses. You reach for a

mirror to take a look at your face. That's not so good. That's where

ugliness enters the picture. You look around and you see Ralph. You see

Harry. You see the women.

On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of

early dawn, but if she's really beautiful she doesn't look too bad. On

Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary

and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack

and turn it into a real home for a man.

You have to make allowances for a lot of things on Mars. You have to

start right off by accepting hardship and privation as your daily lot.

You have to get accustomed to living in construction camps in the

desert, with the red dust making you feel all hollow and dried up

inside. Making you feel like a drum, a shriveled pea pod, a salted fish

hung up to dry. Dust inside of you, rattling around, canal water seepage

rotting the soles of your boots.

So you wake up and you stare. The night before you'd collected driftwood

and stacked it by the fire. The driftwood has disappeared. Someone has

stolen your very precious driftwood. The Martians? Guess again.

You get up and you walk straight up to Ralph with your shoulders

squared. You say, "Ralph, why in hell did you have to steal my

driftwood?"

In your mind you say that. You say it to Dick, you say it to Harry. But

what you really say is, "Larsen was here again last night!"

You say, I put a fish on to boil and Larsen ate it. I had a nice deck of

cards, all shiny and new, and Larsen marked them up. It wasn't me

cheating. It was Larsen hoping I'd win so that he could waylay me in the

desert and get all of the money away from me.

You have a girl. There aren't too many girls in the camps with laughter

and light and fire in them. But there are a few, and if you're lucky you

take a fancy to one particular girl--her full red lips and her spun gold

hair. All of a sudden she disappears. Somebody runs off with her. It's

Larsen.

In every man there is a slumbering giant. When life roars about you on a

world that's rugged and new you've got to go on respecting the lads who

have thrown in their lot with you, even when their impulses are as harsh

as the glint of sunlight on a desert-polished tombstone.

You think of a name--Larsen. You start from scratch and you build Larsen

up until you have a clear picture of him in your mind. You build him up

until he's a great shouting, brawling, golden man like Paul Bunyon.

Even a wicked legend can seem golden on Mars. Larsen wasn't just my

slumbering giant--or Dick's, or Harry's. He was the slumbering giant in

all of us, and that's what made him so tremendous. Anything gigantic has

beauty and power and drive to it.

Alone we couldn't do anything with Larsen's gusto, so when some great

act of wickedness was done with gusto how could it be us? Here comes

Larsen! He'll shoulder all the guilt, but he won't feel guilty because

he's the first man in Eden, the child who never grew up, the laughing

boy, Hercules balancing the world on his shoulders and looking for a

woman with long shining tresses and eyes like the stars of heaven to

bend to his will.

If such a woman came to life in Hercules' arms would you like the job of

stopping him from sending the world crashing? Would you care to try?

Don't you see? Larsen was closer to us than breathing and as necessary

as food and drink and our dreams of a brighter tomorrow. Don't think we

didn't hate him at times. Don't think we didn't curse and revile him.

You may glorify a legend from here to eternity, but the luster never

remains completely untarnished.

Larsen wouldn't have seemed completely real to us if we hadn't given him

muscles that could tire and eyes that could blink shut in weariness.

Larsen had to sleep, just as we did. He'd disappear for days.

We'd wink and say, "Larsen's getting a good long rest this time. But

he'll be back with something new up his sleeve, don't you worry!"

We could joke about it, sure. When Larsen stole or cheated we could

pretend we were playing a game with loaded dice--not really a deadly

game, but a game full of sound and fury with a great rousing outburst of

merriment at the end of it.

But there are deadlier games by far. I lay motionless, my arms locked

across my chest, sweating from every pore. I stared at Harry. We'd been

working all night digging a well, and in a few days water would be

bubbling up sweet and cool and we wouldn't have to go to the canal to

fill our cooking utensils. Harry was blinking and stirring and I could

tell just by looking at him that he was uneasy too. I looked beyond him

at the circle of shacks.

Most of us were sleeping in the open, but there were a few youngsters in

the shacks and women too worn out with drudgery to care much whether

they slept in smothering darkness or under the clear cold light of the

stars.

I got slowly to my knees, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it

dribble slowly through my fingers. Harry looked straight at me and his

eyes widened in alarm. It must have been the look on my face. He arose

and crossed to where I was sitting, his mouth twitching slightly. There

was nothing very reassuring about Harry. Life had not been kind to him

and he had resigned himself to accepting the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune without protest. He had one of those emaciated,

almost skull-like faces which terrify children, and make women want to

cry.

"You don't look well, Tom," he said. "You've been driving yourself too

hard."

I looked away quickly. I had to tell him, but anything terrifying could

demoralize Harry and make him throw his arm before his face in blind

panic. But I couldn't keep it locked up inside me an instant longer.

"Sit down, Harry," I whispered. "I want to talk to you. No sense in

waking the others."

"Oh," he said.

He squatted beside me on the sand, his eyes searching my face. "What is

it, Tom?"

"I heard a scream," I said. "It was pretty awful. Somebody has been

hurt--bad. It woke me up, and that takes some doing."

Harry nodded. "You sleep like a log," he said.

"I just lay still and listened," I said, "with my eyes wide open.

Something moved out from the well--a two-legged something. It didn't

make a sound. It was big, Harry, and it seemed to melt into the shadows.

I don't know what kept me from leaping up and going after it. It had

something to do with the way I felt. All frozen up inside."

Harry appeared to understand. He nodded, his eyes darting toward the

well. "How long ago was that?"

"Ten--fifteen minutes."

"You just waited for me to wake up?"

"That's right," I said. "There was something about the scream that made

me want to put off finding out. Two's company--and when you're alone

with something like that it's best to talk it over before you act."

I could see that Harry was pleased. Unnerved too, and horribly shaken.

But he was pleased that I had turned to him as a friend I could trust.

When you can't depend on life for anything else it's good to know you

have a friend.

I brushed sand from my trousers and got up. "Come on," I said. "We'll

take a look."

It was an ordeal for him. His face twitched and his eyes wavered. He

knew I hadn't lied about the scream. If a single scream could unnerve me

that much it had to be bad.

We walked to the well in complete silence. There were shadows

everywhere, chill and forbidding. Almost like people they seemed,

whispering together, huddling close in ominous gossipy silence, aware of

what we would find.

It was a sixty-foot walk from the fire to the well. A walk in the sun--a

walk in the bright hot sun of Mars, with utter horror perhaps at the end

of it.

The horror was there. Harry made a little choking noise deep in his

throat, 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 crushed

and flattened so hideously that he seemed like a wooden figure resting

there--an anatomical dummy with its skull-case lifted off.

We looked around for the skull-case, hoping we'd find it, hoping we'd

made a mistake and stumbled by accident into an open-air dissecting

laboratory and were looking at ghastly props made of plastic and

glittering metal instead of bone and muscle and flesh.

But the man on the sand had a name. We'd known him for weeks and talked

to him. He wasn't a medical dummy, but a corpse. His limbs were

hideously convulsed, his eyes wide and staring. The sand beneath his

head was clotted with dried blood. We looked for the weapon which had

crushed his skull but couldn't find it.

We looked for the weapon before we saw the footprints in the sand. Big

they were--incredibly large and massive. A man with a size-twelve shoe

might have left such prints if the leather had become a little soggy and

spread out around the soles.

"The poor guy," Harry whispered.

I knew how he felt. We had all liked Ned. A harmless little guy with a

great love of solitude, a guy who hadn't a malicious hair in his head. A

happy little guy who liked to sing and dance in the light of a

high-leaping fire. He had a banjo and was good at music making. Who

could have hated Ned with a rage so primitive and savage? I looked at

Harry and saw that he was wondering the same thing.

Harry looked pretty bad, about ready to cave in. He was leaning against

the well, a tormented fury in his eyes.

"The murderous bastard," he muttered. "I'd like to get him by the throat

and choke the breath out of him. Who'd want to do a thing like that to

Ned."

"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 of

love she could have given him. He was a self-sufficient little guy

despite 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 in

the camp who hadn't envied Ned. It was puzzling, but it could have

explained 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 some

other guy as mad as a caged hyena--the wrong sort of other guy. Even a

small man could have shattered Ned's skull, but the prints on the sand

were big.

How many men in the camp wore size-twelve shoes? That was the sixty-four

dollar question, and it hung in the shimmering air between Harry and

myself like an unspoken challenge. We could almost see the curve of the

big question mark suspended in the dazzle.

I thought awhile, looking at Harry. Then I took a long, deep breath and

said, "We'd better talk it over with Bill Seaton first. If it gets

around too fast those footprints will be trampled flat. And if tempers

start rising anything could happen."

Harry nodded. Bill was the kind of guy you could depend on in an

emergency. Cool, poised, efficient, with an air of authority that

commanded respect. He could be pigheaded at times, but his sense of

justice was as keen as a whip.

Harry and I walked very quietly across a stretch of tumbled sand and

halted at the door to Bill's shack. Bill was a bachelor and we knew

there'd be no woman inside to put her foot down and tell him he'd be a

fool 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's

why it attracts the worst--and the best. If you're a power-drunk sadist

you'll take the job just for the pleasure it gives you. But if you're

really interested in keeping violence within bounds so that fairly

decent lads get a fighting chance to build for the future, you'll take

the job with no thought of reward beyond the simple satisfaction of

lending a helping hand.

Bill Seaton was such a man, even if he did enjoy the limelight and liked

to be in a position of command.

"Come on, Harry," I said. "We may as well wake him up and get it over

with."

We went into the shack. Bill was sleeping on the floor with his long

legs drawn up. His mouth was open and he was snoring lustily. I couldn't

help thinking how much he looked like an overgrown grasshopper. But that

was just a first impression springing from overwrought nerves.

I bent down and shook Bill awake. I grabbed his arm and shook him until

his jaw snapped shut and he shot up straight, suddenly galvanized.

Instantly the grotesque aspect fell from him. Dignity came upon him and

enveloped him like a cloak.

"Ned, you say? The poor little cuss! So help me--if I get my hands on

the 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 helmet

and a pair of shorts. He dressed quickly, swearing constantly and

staring out the door at the bright dawn glow as if he wanted to send

both of his fists crashing into the first suspicious guy to cross his

path.

"We can't have those footprints trampled," he muttered. "There are a lot

of dumb bastards here who don't know the first thing about keeping

pointers intact. Those prints may be the only thing we'll have to go

on."

"Just the three of us can handle it, Bill," I said. "When you decide

what should be done we can wake the others."

Bill nodded. "Keeping it quiet is the important thing. We'll carry him

back 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 at

Harry, and the greenish tinge which had crept into his face gave me a

jolt. He's taking this pretty hard, I thought. If I hadn't known him so

well I might have jumped to an ugly conclusion. But I just couldn't

imagine Harry quarreling with Ned over Molly.

How was I taking it myself? I raised my hand and looked at it. There was

no tremor. Nerves steady, brain clear. No pleasure in enforcing the

law--pass that buck to Bill. But there was a gruesome job ahead, and I

was standing up to it as well as could be expected.

Ever try lifting a corpse? The corpse of a stranger is easier to lift

than the corpse of a man you've known and liked. Harry and I lifted him

together. Between us the dead weight didn't seem too intolerable--not at

first. But it quickly became a terrible, heavy limpness that dragged at

our arms like some soggy log dredged up from the dark waters of the

canal.

We carried him into the shack and eased him down on the floor. His head

fell back and his eyes lolled.

Death is always shameful. It strips away all human reticences and makes

a mockery of human dignity and man's rebellion against the cruelty of

fate.

For a moment we stood staring down at all that was left of Ned. I looked

at 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, not

one spoken word. Cheating, yes. Lying, and treacherous disloyalty, and

viciousness, and spite. Fights around the campfires at midnight,

battered faces and broken wrists and a cursing that never ceased. All

that we could blame on Larsen. But a harmless little guy lying dead by a

well in a spreading pool of blood--that was an outrage that stopped us

dead in our legend-making tracks.

There is something in the human mind which recoils from too outrageous a

deception. How wonderful it would have been to say, "Larsen was here

again last night. He found a little guy who had never harmed anyone

standing by a well in the moonlight. Just for sheer delight he decided

to kill the little guy right then and there." Just to add luster to the

legend, just to send a thrill of excitement about the camp.

No, that would have been the lie colossal which no sane man could have

quite 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 with

every shift of the wind. But now it started off high pitched and

insistent and did not stop.

It was the whispering of a dying race. The Martians are as elusive as

elves and all the pitiless logic of science had failed to draw them

forth into the sunlight to stand before men in uncompromising arrogance

as peers of the human race.

That failure was a tragedy in itself. If man's supremacy is to be

challenged at all let it be by a creature of flesh-and-blood, a

big-brained biped who must kill to live. Better that by far than a

ghostly flickering in the deepening dusk, a whispering and a flapping

and a long-drawn sighing prophesying death.

Oh, the Martians were real enough. A flitting vampire bat is real, or a

stinging ray in the depths of a blue lagoon. But who could point to a

Martian and say, "I have seen you plain, in broad daylight. I have

looked into your owlish eyes and watched you go flitting over the sand

on your thin, stalklike legs? I know there is nothing mysterious about

you. You are like a water insect skimming the surface of a pond in a

familiar meadow on Earth. You are quick and alert, but no match for a

man. You are no more than an interesting insect."

Who could say that, when there were ruins buried deep beneath the sand

to give the lie to any such idea. First the ruins, and then the Martians

themselves, always elusive, gnomelike, goblinlike, flitting away into

the dissolving dusk.

You're a comparative archaeologist and you're on Mars with the first

batch of rugged youngsters to come tumbling out of a spaceship with

stardust in their eyes. You see those youngsters digging wells and

sweating in the desert. You see the prefabricated housing units go up,

the tangle of machinery, the camp sites growing lusty with midnight

brawls and skull-cracking escapades. You see the towns in the desert,

the law-enforcement committees, the camp followers, the reform fanatics.

You're a sober-minded scholar, so you start digging in the ruins. You

bring up odd-looking cylinders, rolls of threaded film, instruments of

science so complex they make you giddy.

You wonder about the Martians--what they were like when they were a

young and proud race. If you're an archaeologist you wonder. But Bill

and I--we were youngsters still. Oh, sure, we were in our thirties, but

who would have suspected that? Bill looked twenty-seven and I hadn't a

gray hair in my head.