"Oh, my God!" said Allenby. "Another one."
The pulp of the cactus in and around the U-hole was dried and
dead-looking.
Silently Burton used his tape-measure. The hole measured four and
three-eighths inches across. It was eleven inches deep. The semicircular
bottom was about a foot above the ground.
"This ridge," I said, "is about three feet higher than where we landed
the ship. I bet the hole in the rock and the hole in this cactus are on
the same level."
* * * * *
Gonzales said slowly, "This was not done all at once. It is a result of
periodic attacks. Look here and here. These overlapping depressions
along the outer edges of the hole--" he pointed--"on this side of the
cactus. They are the signs of repeated impact. And the scallop effect on
_this_ side, where whatever made the hole emerged. There are juices
still oozing--not at the point of impact, where the plant is desiccated,
but below, where the shock was transmitted--"
A distant shout turned us around. Burton was at the rock, beside the
ship. He was bending down, his eye to the far side of the mysterious
hole.
He looked for another second, then straightened and came toward us at a
lope.
"They line up," he said when he reached us. "The bottom of the hole in
the cactus is right in the middle when you sight through the hole in the
rock."
"As if somebody came around and whacked the cactus regularly," Janus
said, looking around warily.
[Illustration]
"To keep the line of sight through the holes clear?" I wondered. "Why
not just remove the cactus?"
"Religious," Janus explained.
The gauntlet he had discarded lay ignored on the ground, in the shadow
of the cactus. We went on past the ridge toward an outcropping of rock
about a hundred yards farther on. We walked silently, each of us
wondering if what we half-expected would really be there.
It was. In one of the tall, weathered spires in the outcropping, some
ten feet below its peak and four feet above the ground, was a round
four-inch hole.
Allenby sat down on a rock, nursing his ankle, and remarked that anybody
who believed this crazy business was really happening must have holes in
the rocks in his head.
[Illustration]
Burton put his eye to the hole and whistled. "Sixty feet long if it's
an inch," he said. "The other end's just a pinpoint. But you can see it.
The damn thing's perfectly straight."
I looked back the way we had come. The cactus stood on the ridge, with
its U-shaped bite, and beyond was the ship, and beside it the perforated
rock.
"If we surveyed," I said, "I bet the holes would all line up right to
the last millimeter."
"But," Randolph complained, "why would anybody go out and bore holes in
things all along a line through the desert?"
"Religious," Janus muttered. "It doesn't _have_ to make sense."
* * * * *
We stood there by the outcropping and looked out along the wide, red
desert beyond. It stretched flatly for miles from this point, south
toward Mars' equator--dead sandy wastes, crisscrossed by the "canals,"
which we had observed while landing to be great straggly patches of
vegetation, probably strung along underground waterflows.
_BLONG-G-G-G- ... st-st-st- ..._
We jumped half out of our skins. Ozone bit at our nostrils. Our hair
stirred in the electrical uproar.
"L-look," Janus chattered, lowering his smoking gun.
About forty feet to our left, a small rabbity creature poked its head
from behind a rock and stared at us in utter horror.
Janus raised his gun again.
"Don't bother," said Allenby tiredly. "I don't think it intends to
attack."
"But--"
"I'm sure it isn't a Martian with religious convictions."
Janus wet his lips and looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I'm kind of
taut."
"That's what I _taut_," said Allenby.
The creature darted from behind its rock and, looking at us over its
shoulder, employed six legs to make small but very fast tracks.
We turned our attention again to the desert. Far out, black against
Mars' azure horizon, was a line of low hills.
"Shall we go look?" asked Burton, eyes gleaming at the mystery.
Janus hefted his gun nervously. It was still crackling faintly from the
discharge. "I say let's get back to the ship!"
Allenby sighed. "My leg hurts." He studied the hills. "Give me the
field-glasses."
Randolph handed them over. Allenby put them to the shield of his mask
and adjusted them.
After a moment he sighed again. "There's a hole. On a plane surface
that catches the Sun. A lousy damned round little impossible hole."
"Those hills," Burton observed, "must be thousands of feet thick."
* * * * *
The argument lasted all the way back to the ship.
Janus, holding out for his belief that the whole thing was of religious
origin, kept looking around for Martians as if he expected them to pour
screaming from the hills.
Burton came up with the suggestion that perhaps the holes had been made
by a disintegrator-ray.
"It's possible," Allenby admitted. "This might have been the scene of
some great battle--"
"With only one such weapon?" I objected.