"It is settled, then," Gonzales said, a little sarcastically. "Your
discussion, gentlemen, has established that the long, horizontal holes
we have found were caused by glacial action."
"Oh, no," Janus argued seriously. "I once read that Mars never had any
glaciers."
All of us shuddered.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, we spotted more holes, about a mile down the
'canal,' still on a line, marching along the desert, through cacti,
rocks, hills, even through one edge of the low vegetation of the 'canal'
for thirty feet or so. It was the damnedest thing to bend down and look
straight through all that curling, twisting growth ... a round tunnel
from either end.
We followed the holes for about a mile, to the rim of an enormous
saucerlike valley that sank gradually before us until, miles away, it
was thousands of feet deep. We stared out across it, wondering about the
other side.
Allenby said determinedly, "We'll burrow to the _bottom_ of these holes,
once and for all. Back to the ship, men!"
We hiked back, climbed in and took off.
At an altitude of fifty feet, Burton lined the nose of the ship on the
most recent line of holes and we flew out over the valley.
On the other side was a range of hefty hills. The holes went through
them. Straight through. We would approach one hill--Burton would
manipulate the front viewscreen until we spotted the hole--we would pass
over the hill and spot the other end of the hole in the rear screen.
One hole was two hundred and eighty miles long.
Four hours later, we were halfway around Mars.
Randolph was sitting by a side port, chin on one hand, his eyes
unbelieving. "All around the planet," he kept repeating. "All around the
planet...."
"Halfway at least," Allenby mused. "And we can assume that it continues
in a straight line, through anything and everything that gets in its
way...." He gazed out the front port at the uneven blue-green haze of a
'canal' off to our left. "For the love of Heaven, why?"
Then Allenby fell down. We all did.
Burton had suddenly slapped at the control board, and the ship braked
and sank like a plugged duck. At the last second, Burton propped up the
nose with a short burst, the ten-foot wheels hit desert sand and in five
hundred yards we had jounced to a stop.
Allenby got up from the floor. "Why did you do that?" he asked Burton
politely, nursing a bruised elbow.
Burton's nose was almost touching the front port. "Look!" he said, and
pointed.
About two miles away, the Martian village looked like a handful of
yellow marbles flung on the desert.
* * * * *
We checked our guns. We put on our oxygen-masks. We checked our guns
again. We got out of the ship and made damned sure the airlock was
locked.
An hour later, we crawled inch by painstaking inch up a high sand dune
and poked our heads over the top.
The Martians were runts--the tallest of them less than five feet
tall--and skinny as a pencil. Dried-up and brown, they wore loincloths
of woven fiber.
They stood among the dusty-looking inverted-bowl buildings of their
village, and every one of them was looking straight up at us with
unblinking brown eyes.
The six safeties of our six guns clicked off like a rattle of dice. The
Martians stood there and gawped.
"Probably a highly developed sense of hearing in this thin atmosphere,"
Allenby murmured. "Heard us coming."
"They thought that landing of Burton's was an earthquake," Randolph
grumbled sourly.
"Marsquake," corrected Janus. One look at the village's scrawny
occupants seemed to have convinced him that his life was in no danger.
Holding the Martians covered, we examined the village from atop the
thirty-foot dune.
The domelike buildings were constructed of something that looked like
adobe. No windows--probably built with sandstorms in mind. The doors
were about halfway up the sloping sides, and from each door a stone ramp
wound down around the house to the ground--again with sandstorms in
mind, no doubt, so drifting dunes wouldn't block the entrances.
The center of the village was a wide street, a long sandy area some
thirty feet wide. On either side of it, the houses were scattered at
random, as if each Martian had simply hunted for a comfortable place to
sit and then built a house around it.
"Look," whispered Randolph.
One Martian had stepped from a group situated on the far side of the
street from us. He started to cross the street, his round brown eyes on
us, his small bare feet plodding sand, and we saw that in addition to a
loincloth he wore jewelry--a hammered metal ring, a bracelet on one
skinny ankle. The Sun caught a copperish gleam on his bald narrow head,
and we saw a band of metal there, just above where his eyebrows should
have been.
"The super-chief," Allenby murmured. "Oh, _shaman_ me!"
As the bejeweled Martian approached the center of the street, he glanced
briefly at the ground at his feet. Then he raised his head, stepped with
dignity across the exact center of the street and came on toward us,
passing the dusty-looking buildings of his realm and the dusty-looking
groups of his subjects.
He reached the slope of the dune we lay on, paused--and raised small
hands over his head, palms toward us.
"I think," Allenby said, "that an anthropologist would give odds on that
gesture meaning peace."
He stood up, holstered his gun--without buttoning the flap--and raised
his own hands over his head. We all did.
* * * * *
The Martian language consisted of squeaks.
We made friendly noises, the chief squeaked and pretty soon we were the
center of a group of wide-eyed Martians, none of whom made a sound.
Evidently no one dared peep while the chief spoke--very likely the most
articulate Martians simply squeaked themselves into the job. Allenby,
of course, said they just _squeaked by_.
He was going through the business of drawing concentric circles in the
sand, pointing at the third orbit away from the Sun and thumping his
chest. The crowd around us kept growing as more Martians emerged from
the dome buildings to see what was going on. Down the winding ramps of
the buildings on our side of the wide, sandy street they came--and from
the buildings on the other side of the street, plodding through the
sand, blinking brown eyes at us, not making a sound.
Allenby pointed at the third orbit and thumped his chest. The chief
squeaked and thumped his own chest and pointed at the copperish band
around his head. Then he pointed at Allenby.
"I seem to have conveyed to him," Allenby said dryly, "the fact that I'm
chief of our party. Well, let's try again."
He started over on the orbits. He didn't seem to be getting anyplace, so
the rest of us watched the Martians instead. A last handful was
straggling across the wide street.
"Curious," said Gonzales. "Note what happens when they reach the center
of the street."
Each Martian, upon reaching the center of the street, glanced at his
feet--just for a moment--without even breaking stride. And then came on.
"What can they be looking at?" Gonzales wondered.
"The chief did it too," Burton mused. "Remember when he first came
toward us?"
We all stared intently at the middle of the street. We saw absolutely
nothing but sand.
The Martians milled around us and watched Allenby and his orbits. A
Martian child appeared from between two buildings across the street. On
six-inch legs, it started across, got halfway, glanced downward--and
came on.
"I don't get it," Burton said. "What in hell are they _looking_ at?"
The child reached the crowd and squeaked a thin, high note.
A number of things happened at once.
* * * * *
Several members of the group around us glanced down, and along the edge
of the crowd nearest the center of the street there was a mild stir as
individuals drifted off to either side. Quite casually--nothing at all
urgent about it. They just moved concertedly to get farther away from
the center of the street, not taking their interested gaze off us for
one second in the process.
Even the chief glanced up from Allenby's concentric circles at the
child's squeak. And Randolph, who had been fidgeting uncomfortably and
paying very little attention to our conversation, decided that he must
answer Nature's call. He moved off into the dunes surrounding the
village. Or rather, he started to move.
The moment he set off across the wide street, the little Martian chief
was in front of him, brown eyes wide, hands out before him as if to
thrust Randolph back.
Again six safeties clicked. The Martians didn't even blink at the sudden
appearance of our guns. Probably the only weapon they recognized was a
club, or maybe a rock.
"What can the matter be?" Randolph said.
He took another step forward. The chief squeaked and stood his ground.
Randolph had to stop or bump into him. Randolph stopped.
The chief squeaked, looking right into the bore of Randolph's gun.
"Hold still," Allenby told Randolph, "till we know what's up."
Allenby made an interrogative sound at the chief. The chief squeaked and
pointed at the ground. We looked. He was pointing at his shadow.
Randolph stirred uncomfortably.
"Hold still," Allenby warned him, and again he made the questioning
sound.
The chief pointed up the street. Then he pointed down the street. He
bent to touch his shadow, thumping it with thin fingers. Then he pointed
at the wall of a house nearby.
We all looked.
Straight lines had been painted on the curved brick-colored wall, up and
down and across, to form many small squares about four inches across. In
each square was a bit of squiggly writing, in blackish paint, and a
small wooden peg jutting out from the wall.