"That bloody wench we spoke about yesterday. You know, out in front of
that shack? Well, just a thought, of course, but if you pull me in and
if I get _it_, what'll become of her, do you suppose? Mean to say, I
couldn't support her when I was dead, could I?"
"Support her?" Surprise jumped into my voice.
"What I said. She's my wife, you know. Back on Earth, I mean. I skipped
out on her a few years back, but yesterday I was on my way to looking
her up when you--"
"She didn't recognize the name Harry Smythe," I said coldly. "I'm
afraid you'll have to think a little faster."
"Of course she didn't! How could she? That ain't my name. What made you
think it was?"
Bright beads of sweat sparkled on his forehead, and his lips had that
frantic looseness of lips not entirely under control.
"You left her," I grunted. "But you followed her across space anyway.
Just to tell her you were sorry and you wanted to come back. Is that
it?"
"Well--" His eyes were calculating. "Not the God's honest, mate, no.
I didn't know she was here. Not at first. But there was this Spider,
see? This Martian. His name was Tahily and he used to hang around the
saloons and he talked a lot, see? Then's when I knew...."
"So it was you who killed him," I said. "One murder wasn't enough
back on Earth; you had to pile them up on the planets." I could feel
something begin to churn inside of me.
"Wait! Sure, I knocked off the Martian. But a fair fight, see? That
Spider jumped my claim. A fair fight it was, and anybody'd done the
same. But even without that, he had it coming anyway, wouldn't you
say? Bigamist and all that, you know? I mean marrying a woman already
married."
His lips were beginning to slobber. I watched them with revulsion in my
stomach.
"Wouldn't you say, mate? Just a lousy, stinking Martian, I mean!"
I swallowed. I turned away and went around the rock and looked down.
One look was enough. Blood was running down the cheek of the prone
little Martian boy, and it was coming from his mouth. Then I turned
back to the shaking man.
"Like I say, mate! I mean, what would you've done in my place?
Whistling always did drive me crazy. I can't stand it. A phobia, you
know. People _suffer_ from phobias!"
"What did you do?" I took three steps toward him. I felt my lips
straining back from my teeth.
"Wait now, mate! Like I say, it's a phobia. I can't stand whistling. It
makes me suffer--"
"So you cut out his tongue?"
I didn't wait for his answer. I couldn't wait. While I was still calm,
I raised my gun on his trembling figure. I didn't put the gun up again
until his body stopped twitching and his fingers stopped clawing in the
sands.
* * * * *
From the desk to the outside door, the hospital corridor runs just a
few feet. But I'd have known her at any distance. I sighed, got to my
feet and met her halfway.
She stopped before me and stared up into my eyes. She must have run all
the way when she got my message, for although she was standing as rigid
as a pole in concrete, something of her exhaustion showed in her eyes.
"Tell me," she said in a panting whisper.
"Your boy is going to be okay." I put my arm around her. "Everything's
under control. The doctors say he's going to live and pull through
and...."
I stopped. I wondered what words I was going to use when no words that
I had ever heard in my life would be the right ones.
"Tell me." She pulled from my grasp and tilted her head so that she
could look up into my eyes and read them like a printed page. "_Tell
me!_"
"He cut out the boy's--he said he couldn't stand whistling. It was a
phobia, he claimed. Eight bullets cured his phobia, if any."
"He cut out what?"
"Your son's tongue."
I put my arm around her again, but it wasn't necessary. She didn't cry
out, she didn't slump. Her head did go down and her eyes did blink once
or twice, but that was all.
"He was the only little boy on Mars who could whistle," she said.
All of the emotion within her was somehow squeezed into those few words.
* * * * *
I couldn't get it out of my mind for a long while. I used to lie in bed
and think of it somewhat like this:
There was this man, with his feet planted in the purple sands, and
he looked up into the night sky when the moon called Deimos was in
perigee, and he studied it. And he said to himself, "Well, I shall
write a book and I shall say in this book that the moon of Mars is thus
and so. And I will be accurately describing it, for in truth the moon
_is_ thus and so."
And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too,
looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called
_Phobos_. And he, too, decided to write a book. And he knew he could
accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it
looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie.
I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman
that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed
Tahily, the Martian she loved. I could tell her Smythe had killed him
in a fair fight because the Martian had tried to jump a claim. And her
heart would be set to rest, for she would know that the whole thing was
erased and done with, at last.
Or, on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could
tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would
at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself
through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this
man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the
day--maybe not tomorrow, but some day--when, like the dream of finding
gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him.
I couldn't leave her without a reason for living. Her man was dead and
her son would never whistle again. She had to have something to live
for, didn't she?