Gaunt giant and passionate beauty, they dragged
their thirst-crazed way across the endless
crimson sands in a terrible test of endurance.
For one of them knew where cool life-giving
water lapped old stones smooth--a place of
secret horror that it was death to reveal!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
For hours the hard-pressed beast had fled across the Martian desert
with its dark rider. Now it was spent. It faltered and broke stride,
and when the rider cursed and dug his heels into the scaly sides, the
brute only turned its head and hissed at him. It stumbled on a few more
paces into the lee of a sandhill, and there it stopped, crouching down
in the dust.
The man dismounted. The creature's eyes burned like green lamps in the
light of the little moons, and he knew that it was no use trying to
urge it on. He looked back, the way he had come.
In the distance there were four black shadows grouped together in the
barren emptiness. They were running fast. In a few minutes they would
be upon him.
He stood still, thinking what he should do next. Ahead, far ahead, was
a low ridge, and beyond the ridge lay Valkis and safety, but he could
never make it now. Off to his right, a lonely tor stood up out of the
blowing sand. There were tumbled rocks at its foot.
"They tried to run me down in the open," he thought. "But here, by the
Nine Hells, they'll have to work for it!"
He moved then, running toward the tor with a lightness and speed
incredible in anything but an animal or a savage. He was of Earth
stock, built tall, and more massive than he looked by reason of his
leanness. The desert wind was bitter cold, but he did not seem to
notice it, though he wore only a ragged shirt of Venusian spider silk,
open to the waist. His skin was almost as dark as his black hair,
burned indelibly by years of exposure to some terrible sun. His eyes
were startlingly light in colour, reflecting back the pale glow of the
moons.
With the practised ease of a lizard he slid in among the loose and
treacherous rocks. Finding a vantage point, where his back was
protected by the tor itself, he crouched down.
After that he did not move, except to draw his gun. There was something
eerie about his utter stillness, a quality of patience as unhuman as
the patience of the rock that sheltered him.
The four black shadows came closer, resolved themselves into mounted
men.
They found the beast, where it lay panting, and stopped. The line of
the man's footprints, already blurred by the wind but still plain
enough, showed where he had gone.
The leader motioned. The others dismounted. Working with the swift
precision of soldiers, they removed equipment from their saddle-packs
and began to assemble it.
The man crouching under the tor saw the thing that took shape. It was a
Banning shocker, and he knew that he was not going to fight his way out
of this trap. His pursuers were out of range of his own weapon. They
would remain so. The Banning, with its powerful electric beam, would
take him--dead or senseless, as they wished.
He thrust the useless gun back into his belt. He knew who these
men were, and what they wanted with him. They were officers of the
Earth Police Control, bringing him a gift--twenty years in the Luna
cell-blocks.
Twenty years in the grey catacombs, buried in the silence and the
eternal dark.
He recognized the inevitable. He was used to inevitables--hunger,
pain, loneliness, the emptiness of dreams. He had accepted a lot of
them in his time. Yet he made no move to surrender. He looked out at
the desert and the night sky, and his eyes blazed, the desperate,
strangely beautiful eyes of a creature very close to the roots of
life, something less and more than man. His hands found a shard of rock
and broke it.
The leader of the four men rode slowly toward the tor, his right arm
raised.
His voice carried clearly on the wind. "Eric John Stark!" he called,
and the dark man tensed in the shadows.
The rider stopped. He spoke again, but this time in a different tongue.
It was no dialect of Earth, Mars or Venus, but a strange speech, as
harsh and vital as the blazing Mercurian valleys that bred it.
"_Oh N'Chaka, oh Man-without-a-tribe, I call you!_"
There was a long silence. The rider and his mount were motionless under
the low moons, waiting.
Eric John Stark stepped slowly out from the pool of blackness under the
tor.
"Who calls me N'Chaka?"
The rider relaxed somewhat. He answered in English, "You know perfectly
well who I am, Eric. May we meet in peace?"