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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Martian Odyssey
+
+Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
+
+Release Date: December 4, 2007 [EBook #23731]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MARTIAN ODYSSEY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Joel Schlosberg and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+This eBook was produced from the 1949 book _A Martian Odyssey and
+Others_ by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not
+uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
+renewed.
+
+
+
+
+A MARTIAN ODYSSEY
+
+
+Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped
+general quarters of the _Ares_.
+
+"Air you can breathe!" he exulted. "It feels as thick as soup after the
+thin stuff out there!" He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching
+flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of
+the port.
+
+The other three stared at him sympathetically--Putz, the engineer,
+Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the
+expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the _Ares_
+expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of
+the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less
+than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic
+blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad
+Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of
+the _Ares_. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated
+de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the
+first men to feel other gravity than earth's, and certainly the first
+successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that
+success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts--the months
+spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the
+air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny
+rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century,
+and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.
+
+Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his
+frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.
+
+"Well," exploded Harrison abruptly, "are we going to hear what happened?
+You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep
+for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap
+with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!"
+
+"Speel?" queried Leroy perplexedly. "Speel what?"
+
+"He means '_spiel_'," explained Putz soberly. "It iss to tell."
+
+Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a smile.
+"That's right, Karl," he said in grave agreement with Putz. "_Ich spiel
+es!_" He grunted comfortably and began.
+
+"According to orders," he said, "I watched Karl here take off toward the
+North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You'll
+remember, Cap--we had orders not to land, but just scout about for
+points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along,
+riding pretty high--about two thousand feet--for a couple of reasons.
+First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets
+travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up
+dust if you move low."
+
+"We know all that from Putz," grunted Harrison. "I wish you'd saved the
+films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this junket; remember how
+the public mobbed the first moon pictures?"
+
+"The films are safe," retorted Jarvis. "Well," he resumed, "as I said, I
+buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings
+haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and
+even then I had to use the under-jets.
+
+"So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the
+under-jets, the seeing wasn't any too good. I could see enough, though,
+to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain
+that we'd been examining the whole week since our landing--same blobby
+growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or
+biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my
+position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard
+me."
+
+"I did!" snapped Harrison.
+
+"A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis imperturbably, "the
+surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and
+orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then,
+and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which
+would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right,
+I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple
+of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so
+I did."
+
+"Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!" grumbled the
+captain. "Let's get to the point."
+
+"Coming!" remarked Jarvis. "Twenty miles into Thyle--believe it or
+not--I crossed a canal!"
+
+"Putz photographed a hundred! Let's hear something new!"
+
+"And did he also see a city?"
+
+"Twenty of 'em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!"
+
+"Well," observed Jarvis, "from here on I'll be telling a few things Putz
+didn't see!" He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. "I knew that I
+had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours--eight
+hundred miles--from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over
+Thyle, whether I or II I'm not sure, not more than twenty-five miles
+into it. And right there, Putz's pet motor quit!"
+
+"Quit? How?" Putz was solicitous.
+
+"The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and
+suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed
+my nose on the window, too!" He rubbed the injured member ruefully.
+
+"Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?"
+inquired Putz. "Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation--"
+
+"Naw!" said Jarvis disgustedly. "I wouldn't try that, of course--not
+more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and
+busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working--what then?
+Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I'd have
+melted the floor from under me!" He rubbed his nose again. "Lucky for me
+a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I'd have been mashed flat!"
+
+"I could have fixed!" ejaculated the engineer. "I bet it vas not
+serious."
+
+"Probably not," agreed Jarvis sarcastically. "Only it wouldn't fly.
+Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or
+trying to walk back--eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before
+we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well," he concluded, "I chose to
+walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy."
+
+"We'd have found you," said Harrison.
+
+"No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put
+the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some
+iron rations, and started out."
+
+"Water tank!" exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. "She weigh
+one-quarter ton!"
+
+"Wasn't full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight,
+which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred
+and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a
+hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday
+earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily
+stroll. Oh--of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry
+Martian nights.
+
+"Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight
+meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course--plugging along
+over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy's crawling
+biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal--just a dry ditch
+about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own
+company map.
+
+"There'd been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with
+what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn
+moved out of my way!"
+
+"Eh?" said Leroy.
+
+"Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one--a little
+grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy
+legs."
+
+"He is where?" Leroy was eager.
+
+"He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass
+opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange
+desert of Thyle again.
+
+"I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome,
+and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just
+before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over
+the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of
+_that_ to be walked over, and then a couple of hundred miles of that
+Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I
+started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!"
+
+"We were trying, you sap!" said Harrison.
+
+"That didn't help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of
+daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy
+place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as
+this--crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance
+and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen
+anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world--nothing
+dangerous, that is."
+
+"Did you?" queried Harrison.
+
+"_Did I!_ You'll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about
+to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!"
+
+"Vot iss shenanigans?" inquired Putz.
+
+"He says, 'Je ne sais quoi,'" explained Leroy. "It is to say, 'I don't
+know what.'"
+
+"That's right," agreed Jarvis. "I didn't know what, so I sneaked over to
+find out. There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of
+canaries--whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded
+a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel!"
+
+"Tweel?" said Harrison, and "Tveel?" said Leroy and Putz.
+
+"That freak ostrich," explained the narrator. "At least, Tweel is as
+near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something
+like 'Trrrweerrlll.'"
+
+"What was he doing?" asked the Captain.
+
+"He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one would."
+
+"Eaten! By what?"
+
+"I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms
+tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an
+ostrich. I wasn't going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were
+dangerous, I'd have one less to worry about.
+
+"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious
+blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I
+caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!" Jarvis
+shuddered. "But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or
+case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or
+tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my
+automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.
+
+"There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and
+then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its
+arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks,
+staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned
+suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at
+each other.
+
+"The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like, except
+just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery
+appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was somewhat flexible;
+I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a
+cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four
+fingered things--hands, you'd have to call them, and a little roundish
+body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head--and that beak. It stood an
+inch or so taller than I, and--well, Putz saw it!"
+
+The engineer nodded. "_Ja!_ I saw!"
+
+Jarvis continued. "So--we stared at each other. Finally the creature
+went into a series of clackings and twitterings and held out its hands
+toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of yours and
+thought you were its brother!"
+
+"Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my gun and said
+'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort, and the thing came
+over and we were pals.
+
+"By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I'd better build a
+fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the fire. I picked a spot
+at the base of the Thyle cliff, where the rock could reflect a little
+heat on my back. I started breaking off chunks of this desiccated
+Martian vegetation, and my companion caught the idea and brought in an
+armful. I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and
+brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it,
+and the fire was blazing--and you all know what a job we have starting a
+fire in this atmosphere!
+
+"And that bag of his!" continued the narrator. "That was a manufactured
+article, my friends; press an end and she popped open--press the middle
+and she sealed so perfectly you couldn't see the line. Better than
+zippers.
+
+"Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort
+of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick';
+he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and
+repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I
+called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to
+emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him,
+'Tweel.'
+
+"There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said
+something like 'P-p-p-proot.' And that was just the beginning; I was
+always 'Tick,' but as for him--part of the time he was 'Tweel,' and part
+of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,' and part of the time he was sixteen
+other noises!
+
+"We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried 'star,' and
+'tree,' and 'fire,' and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I
+couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive
+minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist! Finally I gave it
+up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.
+
+"But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple of them,
+which I suppose is a great achievement if you're used to a language you
+have to make up as you go along. But I couldn't get the hang of his
+talk; either I missed some subtle point or we just didn't _think_
+alike--and I rather believe the latter view.
+
+"I've other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave up the
+language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two plus two
+equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles. Again Tweel
+caught the idea, and informed me that three plus three equals six. Once
+more we seemed to be getting somewhere.
+
+"So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school education, I drew
+a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and then at the last glow of
+the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and Venus, and Mother Earth, and
+Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars, I swept my hand around in a sort of
+inclusive gesture to indicate that Mars was our current environment. I
+was working up to putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.
+
+"Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and
+with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos
+to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!
+
+"Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses
+telescopes--that they're civilized!"
+
+"Does not!" snapped Harrison. "The moon is visible from here as a fifth
+magnitude star. They could see its revolution with the naked eye."
+
+"The moon, yes!" said Jarvis. "You've missed my point. Mercury isn't
+visible! And Tweel knew of Mercury because he placed the Moon at the
+_third_ planet, not the second. If he didn't know Mercury, he'd put the
+earth second, and Mars third, instead of fourth! See?"
+
+"Humph!" said Harrison.
+
+"Anyway," proceeded Jarvis, "I went on with my lesson. Things were going
+smoothly, and it looked as if I could put the idea over. I pointed at
+the earth on my diagram, and then at myself, and then, to clinch it, I
+pointed to myself and then to the earth itself shining bright green
+almost at the zenith.
+
+"Tweel set up such an excited clacking that I was certain he understood.
+He jumped up and down, and suddenly he pointed at himself and then at
+the sky, and then at himself and at the sky again. He pointed at his
+middle and then at Arcturus, at his head and then at Spica, at his feet
+and then at half a dozen stars, while I just gaped at him. Then, all of
+a sudden, he gave a tremendous leap. Man, what a hop! He shot straight
+up into the starlight, seventy-five feet if an inch! I saw him
+silhouetted against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head
+first, and land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square
+in the center of my sun-circle in the sand--a bull's eye!"
+
+"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"
+
+"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed while he
+pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I figured he'd missed
+my point, and I went through the whole blamed rigamarole again, and it
+ended the same way, with Tweel on his nose in the middle of my picture!"
+
+"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.
+
+"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We could exchange
+ideas up to a certain point, and then--blooey! Something in us was
+different, unrelated; I don't doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy
+as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different
+viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours. But--we
+couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I
+_liked_ Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."
+
+"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"
+
+"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we--"
+He paused, and then resumed his narrative. "Anyway, I finally gave it
+up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any
+too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes
+after I closed myself in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some
+eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant
+little frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my
+rocket.
+
+"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I
+woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I
+heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that
+three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to
+myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the
+south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.
+
+"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing
+through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He
+seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in
+beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and
+stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come
+shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his
+coming at me like a spear, but he always ended in the sand at my side.
+
+"So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same sort of
+place as this--same crazy plants and same little green biopods growing
+in the sand, or crawling out of your way. We talked--not that we
+understood each other, you know, but just for company. I sang songs, and
+I suspect Tweel did too; at least, some of his trillings and twitterings
+had a subtle sort of rhythm.
+
+"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words.
+He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and point to a pebble and
+say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then repeat it.
+He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing
+twice in succession, or that the same word could apply to two different
+objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the
+primitive speech of some earth people--you know, Captain, like the
+Negritoes, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food
+or water or man--words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea
+water, or strong man and weak man--but no names for general classes.
+They're too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are
+just different aspects of the same thing. But that wasn't the case with
+Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different--our
+minds were alien to each other. And yet--we _liked_ each other!"
+
+"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two were so
+fond of each other."
+
+"Well, I like _you_!" countered Jarvis wickedly. "Anyway," he resumed,
+"don't get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact,
+I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human
+intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I
+guess; but don't overlook the point that he managed to understand a
+little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."
+
+"Because he didn't have any!" suggested the captain, while Putz and
+Leroy blinked attentively.
+
+"You can judge of that when I'm through," said Jarvis. "Well, we plugged
+along across the Mare Chronium all that day, and all the next. Mare
+Chronium--Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to agree with Schiaparelli's
+name by the end of that march! Just that grey, endless plain of weird
+plants, and never a sign of any other life. It was so monotonous that I
+was even glad to see the desert of Xanthus toward the evening of the
+second day.
+
+"I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for all I never
+saw him drink or eat. I think he could have crossed the Mare Chronium in
+a couple of hours with those block-long nose dives of his, but he stuck
+along with me. I offered him some water once or twice; he took the cup
+from me and sucked the liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted
+it all back into the cup and gravely returned it.
+
+"Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it, one of those
+nasty sand clouds blew along, not as bad as the one we had here, but
+mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent flap of my thermo-skin
+bag across my face and managed pretty well, and I noticed that Tweel
+used some feathery appendages growing like a mustache at the base of his
+beak to cover his nostrils, and some similar fuzz to shield his eyes."
+
+"He is a desert creature!" ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.
+
+"Huh? Why?"
+
+"He drink no water--he is adapt' for sand storm--"
+
+"Proves nothing! There's not enough water to waste any where on this
+desiccated pill called Mars. We'd call all of it desert on earth, you
+know." He paused. "Anyway, after the sand storm blew over, a little wind
+kept blowing in our faces, not strong enough to stir the sand. But
+suddenly things came drifting along from the Xanthus cliffs--small,
+transparent spheres, for all the world like glass tennis balls! But
+light--they were almost light enough to float even in this thin
+air--empty, too; at least, I cracked open a couple and nothing came out
+but a bad smell. I asked Tweel about them, but all he said was 'No, no,
+no,' which I took to mean that he knew nothing about them. So they went
+bouncing by like tumbleweeds, or like soap bubbles, and we plugged on
+toward Xanthus. Tweel pointed at one of the crystal balls once and said
+'rock,' but I was too tired to argue with him. Later I discovered what
+he meant.
+
+"We came to the bottom of the Xanthus cliffs finally, when there wasn't
+much daylight left. I decided to sleep on the plateau if possible;
+anything dangerous, I reasoned, would be more likely to prowl through
+the vegetation of the Mare Chronium than the sand of Xanthus. Not that
+I'd seen a single sign of menace, except the rope-armed black thing that
+had trapped Tweel, and apparently that didn't prowl at all, but lured
+its victims within reach. It couldn't lure me while I slept, especially
+as Tweel didn't seem to sleep at all, but simply sat patiently around
+all night. I wondered how the creature had managed to trap Tweel, but
+there wasn't any way of asking him. I found that out too, later; it's
+devilish!
+
+"However, we were ambling around the base of the Xanthus barrier looking
+for an easy spot to climb. At least, I was. Tweel could have leaped it
+easily, for the cliffs were lower than Thyle--perhaps sixty feet. I
+found a place and started up, swearing at the water tank strapped to my
+back--it didn't bother me except when climbing--and suddenly I heard a
+sound that I thought I recognized!
+
+"You know how deceptive sounds are in this thin air. A shot sounds like
+the pop of a cork. But this sound was the drone of a rocket, and sure
+enough, there went our second auxiliary about ten miles to westward,
+between me and the sunset!"
+
+"Vas me!" said Putz. "I hunt for you."
+
+"Yeah; I knew that, but what good did it do me? I hung on to the cliff
+and yelled and waved with one hand. Tweel saw it too, and set up a
+trilling and twittering, leaping to the top of the barrier and then high
+into the air. And while I watched, the machine droned on into the
+shadows to the south.
+
+"I scrambled to the top of the cliff. Tweel was still pointing and
+trilling excitedly, shooting up toward the sky and coming down head-on
+to stick upside down on his beak in the sand. I pointed toward the south
+and at myself, and he said, 'Yes--Yes--Yes'; but somehow I gathered that
+he thought the flying thing was a relative of mine, probably a parent.
+Perhaps I did his intellect an injustice; I think now that I did.
+
+"I was bitterly disappointed by the failure to attract attention. I
+pulled out my thermo-skin bag and crawled into it, as the night chill
+was already apparent. Tweel stuck his beak into the sand and drew up his
+legs and arms and looked for all the world like one of those leafless
+shrubs out there. I think he stayed that way all night."
+
+"Protective mimicry!" ejaculated Leroy. "See? He is desert creature!"
+
+"In the morning," resumed Jarvis, "we started off again. We hadn't gone
+a hundred yards into Xanthus when I saw something queer! This is one
+thing Putz didn't photograph, I'll wager!
+
+"There was a line of little pyramids--tiny ones, not more than six
+inches high, stretching across Xanthus as far as I could see! Little
+buildings made of pygmy bricks, they were, hollow inside and truncated,
+or at least broken at the top and empty. I pointed at them and said
+'What?' to Tweel, but he gave some negative twitters to indicate, I
+suppose, that he didn't know. So off we went, following the row of
+pyramids because they ran north, and I was going north.
+
+"Man, we trailed that line for hours! After a while, I noticed another
+queer thing: they were getting larger. Same number of bricks in each
+one, but the bricks were larger.
+
+"By noon they were shoulder high. I looked into a couple--all just the
+same, broken at the top and empty. I examined a brick or two as well;
+they were silica, and old as creation itself!"
+
+"How you know?" asked Leroy.
+
+"They were weathered--edges rounded. Silica doesn't weather easily even
+on earth, and in this climate--!"
+
+"How old you think?"
+
+"Fifty thousand--a hundred thousand years. How can I tell? The little
+ones we saw in the morning were older--perhaps ten times as old.
+Crumbling. How old would that make _them_? Half a million years? Who
+knows?" Jarvis paused a moment. "Well," he resumed, "we followed the
+line. Tweel pointed at them and said 'rock' once or twice, but he'd done
+that many times before. Besides, he was more or less right about these.
+
+"I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked 'People?' and
+indicated the two of us. He set up a negative sort of clucking and said,
+'No, no, no. No one-one-two. No two-two-four,' meanwhile rubbing his
+stomach. I just stared at him and he went through the business again.
+'No one-one-two. No two-two-four.' I just gaped at him."
+
+"That proves it!" exclaimed Harrison. "Nuts!"
+
+"You think so?" queried Jarvis sardonically. "Well, I figured it out
+different! 'No one-one-two!' You don't get it, of course, do you?"
+
+"Nope--nor do you!"
+
+"I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew to put over
+a very complex idea. What, let me ask, does mathematics make you think
+of?"
+
+"Why--of astronomy. Or--or logic!"
+
+"That's it! 'No one-one-two!' Tweel was telling me that the builders of
+the pyramids weren't people--or that they weren't intelligent, that they
+weren't reasoning creatures! Get it?"
+
+"Huh! I'll be damned!"
+
+"You probably will."
+
+"Why," put in Leroy, "he rub his belly?"
+
+"Why? Because, my dear biologist, that's where his brains are! Not in
+his tiny head--in his middle!"
+
+"_C'est_ impossible!"
+
+"Not on Mars, it isn't! This flora and fauna aren't earthly; your
+biopods prove that!" Jarvis grinned and took up his narrative. "Anyway,
+we plugged along across Xanthus and in about the middle of the
+afternoon, something else queer happened. The pyramids ended."
+
+"Ended!"
+
+"Yeah; the queer part was that the last one--and now they were
+ten-footers--was capped! See? Whatever built it was still inside; we'd
+trailed 'em from their half-million-year-old origin to the present.
+
+"Tweel and I noticed it about the same time. I yanked out my automatic
+(I had a clip of Boland explosive bullets in it) and Tweel, quick as a
+sleight-of-hand trick, snapped a queer little glass revolver out of his
+bag. It was much like our weapons, except that the grip was larger to
+accommodate his four-taloned hand. And we held our weapons ready while
+we sneaked up along the lines of empty pyramids.
+
+"Tweel saw the movement first. The top tiers of bricks were heaving,
+shaking, and suddenly slid down the sides with a thin crash. And
+then--something--something was coming out!
+
+"A long, silvery-grey arm appeared, dragging after it an armored body.
+Armored, I mean, with scales, silver-grey and dull-shining. The arm
+heaved the body out of the hole; the beast crashed to the sand.
+
+"It was a nondescript creature--body like a big grey cask, arm and a
+sort of mouth-hole at one end; stiff, pointed tail at the other--and
+that's all. No other limbs, no eyes, ears, nose--nothing! The thing
+dragged itself a few yards, inserted its pointed tail in the sand,
+pushed itself upright, and just sat.
+
+"Tweel and I watched it for ten minutes before it moved. Then, with a
+creaking and rustling like--oh, like crumpling stiff paper--its arm
+moved to the mouth-hole and out came a brick! The arm placed the brick
+carefully on the ground, and the thing was still again.
+
+"Another ten minutes--another brick. Just one of Nature's bricklayers.
+I was about to slip away and move on when Tweel pointed at the thing and
+said 'rock'! I went 'huh?' and he said it again. Then, to the
+accompaniment of some of his trilling, he said, 'No--no--,' and gave two
+or three whistling breaths.
+
+"Well, I got his meaning, for a wonder! I said, 'No breath?' and
+demonstrated the word. Tweel was ecstatic; he said, 'Yes, yes, yes! No,
+no, no breet!' Then he gave a leap and sailed out to land on his nose
+about one pace from the monster!
+
+"I was startled, you can imagine! The arm was going up for a brick, and
+I expected to see Tweel caught and mangled, but--nothing happened! Tweel
+pounded on the creature, and the arm took the brick and placed it neatly
+beside the first. Tweel rapped on its body again, and said 'rock,' and I
+got up nerve enough to take a look myself.
+
+"Tweel was right again. The creature was rock, and it didn't breathe!"
+
+"How you know?" snapped Leroy, his black eyes blazing interest.
+
+"Because I'm a chemist. The beast was made of silica! There must have
+been pure silicon in the sand, and it lived on that. Get it? We, and
+Tweel, and those plants out there, and even the biopods are _carbon_
+life; this thing lived by a different set of chemical reactions. It was
+silicon life!"
+
+"_La vie silicieuse!_" shouted Leroy. "I have suspect, and now it is
+proof! I must go see! _Il faut que je--_"
+
+"All right! All right!" said Jarvis. "You can go see. Anyhow, there the
+thing was, alive and yet not alive, moving every ten minutes, and then
+only to remove a brick. Those bricks were its waste matter. See,
+Frenchy? We're carbon, and our waste is carbon dioxide, and this thing
+is silicon, and _its_ waste is silicon dioxide--silica. But silica is a
+solid, hence the bricks. And it builds itself in, and when it is
+covered, it moves over to a fresh place to start over. No wonder it
+creaked! A living creature half a million years old!"
+
+"How you know how old?" Leroy was frantic.
+
+"We trailed its pyramids from the beginning, didn't we? If this weren't
+the original pyramid builder, the series would have ended somewhere
+before we found him, wouldn't it?--ended and started over with the small
+ones. That's simple enough, isn't it?
+
+"But he reproduces, or tries to. Before the third brick came out, there
+was a little rustle and out popped a whole stream of those little
+crystal balls. They're his spores, or eggs, or seeds--call 'em what you
+want. They went bouncing by across Xanthus just as they'd bounced by us
+back in the Mare Chronium. I've a hunch how they work, too--this is for
+your information, Leroy. I think the crystal shell of silica is no more
+than a protective covering, like an eggshell, and that the active
+principle is the smell inside. It's some sort of gas that attacks
+silicon, and if the shell is broken near a supply of that element, some
+reaction starts that ultimately develops into a beast like that one."
+
+"You should try!" exclaimed the little Frenchman. "We must break one to
+see!"
+
+"Yeah? Well, I did. I smashed a couple against the sand. Would you like
+to come back in about ten thousand years to see if I planted some
+pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell by that time!"
+Jarvis paused and drew a deep breath. "Lord! That queer creature! Do you
+picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless--just a mechanism, and
+yet--immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long
+as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It
+won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food
+again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and
+civilizations are part of the past. A queer beast--yet I met a stranger
+one!"
+
+"If you did, it must have been in your dreams!" growled Harrison.
+
+"You're right!" said Jarvis soberly. "In a way, you're right. The
+dream-beast! That's the best name for it--and it's the most fiendish,
+terrifying creation one could imagine! More dangerous than a lion, more
+insidious than a snake!"
+
+"Tell me!" begged Leroy. "I must go see!"
+
+"Not _this_ devil!" He paused again. "Well," he resumed, "Tweel and I
+left the pyramid creature and plowed along through Xanthus. I was tired
+and a little disheartened by Putz's failure to pick me up, and Tweel's
+trilling got on my nerves, as did his flying nosedives. So I just strode
+along without a word, hour after hour across that monotonous desert.
+
+"Toward mid-afternoon we came in sight of a low dark line on the
+horizon. I knew what it was. It was a canal; I'd crossed it in the
+rocket and it meant that we were just one-third of the way across
+Xanthus. Pleasant thought, wasn't it? And still, I was keeping up to
+schedule.
+
+"We approached the canal slowly; I remembered that this one was bordered
+by a wide fringe of vegetation and that Mud-heap City was on it.
+
+"I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then
+from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home-like even Borneo
+would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little
+old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there--Fancy
+Long. Know her?"
+
+"Vision entertainer," said Harrison. "I've tuned her in. Nice
+blonde--dances and sings on the _Yerba Mate_ hour."
+
+"That's her," said Jarvis ungrammatically. "I know her pretty well--just
+friends, get me?--though she came down to see us off in the _Ares_.
+Well, I was thinking about her, feeling pretty lonesome, and all the
+time we were approaching that line of rubbery plants.
+
+"And then--I said, 'What 'n Hell!' and stared. And there she was--Fancy
+Long, standing plain as day under one of those crack-brained trees, and
+smiling and waving just the way I remembered her when we left!"
+
+"Now you're nuts, too!" observed the captain.
+
+"Boy, I almost agreed with you! I stared and pinched myself and closed
+my eyes and then stared again--and every time, there was Fancy Long
+smiling and waving! Tweel saw something, too; he was trilling and
+clucking away, but I scarcely heard him. I was bounding toward her over
+the sand, too amazed even to ask myself questions.
+
+"I wasn't twenty feet from her when Tweel caught me with one of his
+flying leaps. He grabbed my arm, yelling, 'No--no--no!' in his squeaky
+voice. I tried to shake him off--he was as light as if he were built of
+bamboo--but he dug his claws in and yelled. And finally some sort of
+sanity returned to me and I stopped less than ten feet from her. There
+she stood, looking as solid as Putz's head!"
+
+"Vot?" said the engineer.
+
+"She smiled and waved, and waved and smiled, and I stood there dumb as
+Leroy, while Tweel squeaked and chattered. I _knew_ it couldn't be real,
+yet--there she was!
+
+"Finally I said, 'Fancy! Fancy Long!' She just kept on smiling and
+waving, but looking as real as if I hadn't left her thirty-seven million
+miles away.
+
+"Tweel had his glass pistol out, pointing it at her. I grabbed his arm,
+but he tried to push me away. He pointed at her and said, 'No breet! No
+breet!' and I understood that he meant that the Fancy Long thing wasn't
+alive. Man, my head was whirling!
+
+"Still, it gave me the jitters to see him pointing his weapon at her. I
+don't know why I stood there watching him take careful aim, but I did.
+Then he squeezed the handle of his weapon; there was a little puff of
+steam, and Fancy Long was gone! And in her place was one of those
+writhing, black, rope-armed horrors like the one I'd saved Tweel from!
+
+"The dream-beast! I stood there dizzy, watching it die while Tweel
+trilled and whistled. Finally he touched my arm, pointed at the twisting
+thing, and said, 'You one-one-two, he one-one-two.' After he'd repeated
+it eight or ten times, I got it. Do any of you?"
+
+"_Oui!_" shrilled Leroy. "_Moi--je le comprends!_ He mean you think of
+something, the beast he know, and you see it! _Un chien_--a hungry dog,
+he would see the big bone with meat! Or smell it--not?"
+
+"Right!" said Jarvis. "The dream-beast uses its victim's longings and
+desires to trap its prey. The bird at nesting season would see its mate,
+the fox, prowling for its own prey, would see a helpless rabbit!"
+
+"How he do?" queried Leroy.
+
+"How do I know? How does a snake back on earth charm a bird into its
+very jaws? And aren't there deep-sea fish that lure their victims into
+their mouths? Lord!" Jarvis shuddered. "Do you see how insidious the
+monster is? We're warned now--but henceforth we can't trust even our
+eyes. You might see me--I might see one of you--and back of it may be
+nothing but another of those black horrors!"
+
+"How'd your friend know?" asked the captain abruptly.
+
+"Tweel? I wonder! Perhaps he was thinking of something that couldn't
+possibly have interested me, and when I started to run, he realized
+that I saw something different and was warned. Or perhaps the
+dream-beast can only project a single vision, and Tweel saw what I
+saw--or nothing. I couldn't ask him. But it's just another proof that
+his intelligence is equal to ours or greater."
+
+"He's daffy, I tell you!" said Harrison. "What makes you think his
+intellect ranks with the human?"
+
+"Plenty of things! First, the pyramid-beast. He hadn't seen one before;
+he said as much. Yet he recognized it as a dead-alive automaton of
+silicon."
+
+"He could have heard of it," objected Harrison. "He lives around here,
+you know."
+
+"Well how about the language? I couldn't pick up a single idea of his
+and he learned six or seven words of mine. And do you realize what
+complex ideas he put over with no more than those six or seven words?
+The pyramid-monster--the dream-beast! In a single phrase he told me that
+one was a harmless automaton and the other a deadly hypnotist. What
+about that?"
+
+"Huh!" said the captain.
+
+"_Huh_ if you wish! Could you have done it knowing only six words of
+English? Could you go even further, as Tweel did, and tell me that
+another creature was of a sort of intelligence so different from ours
+that understanding was impossible--even more impossible than that
+between Tweel and me?"
+
+"Eh? What was that?"
+
+"Later. The point I'm making is that Tweel and his race are worthy of
+our friendship. Somewhere on Mars--and you'll find I'm right--is a
+civilization and culture equal to ours, and maybe more than equal. And
+communication is possible between them and us; Tweel proves that. It may
+take years of patient trial, for their minds are alien, but less alien
+than the next minds we encountered--if they _are_ minds."
+
+"The next ones? What next ones?"
+
+"The people of the mud cities along the canals." Jarvis frowned, then
+resumed his narrative. "I thought the dream-beast and the
+silicon-monster were the strangest beings conceivable, but I was wrong.
+These creatures are still more alien, less understandable than either
+and far less comprehensible than Tweel, with whom friendship is
+possible, and even, by patience and concentration, the exchange of
+ideas.
+
+"Well," he continued, "we left the dream-beast dying, dragging itself
+back into its hole, and we moved toward the canal. There was a carpet of
+that queer walking-grass scampering out of our way, and when we reached
+the bank, there was a yellow trickle of water flowing. The mound city
+I'd noticed from the rocket was a mile or so to the right and I was
+curious enough to want to take a look at it.
+
+"It had seemed deserted from my previous glimpse of it, and if any
+creatures were lurking in it--well, Tweel and I were both armed. And by
+the way, that crystal weapon of Tweel's was an interesting device; I
+took a look at it after the dream-beast episode. It fired a little glass
+splinter, poisoned, I suppose, and I guess it held at least a hundred of
+'em to a load. The propellent was steam--just plain steam!"
+
+"Shteam!" echoed Putz. "From vot come, shteam?"
+
+"From water, of course! You could see the water through the transparent
+handle and about a gill of another liquid, thick and yellowish. When
+Tweel squeezed the handle--there was no trigger--a drop of water and a
+drop of the yellow stuff squirted into the firing chamber, and the water
+vaporized--pop!--like that. It's not so difficult; I think we could
+develop the same principle. Concentrated sulphuric acid will heat water
+almost to boiling, and so will quicklime, and there's potassium and
+sodium--
+
+"Of course, his weapon hadn't the range of mine, but it wasn't so bad in
+this thin air, and it _did_ hold as many shots as a cowboy's gun in a
+Western movie. It was effective, too, at least against Martian life; I
+tried it out, aiming at one of the crazy plants, and darned if the plant
+didn't wither up and fall apart! That's why I think the glass splinters
+were poisoned.
+
+"Anyway, we trudged along toward the mud-heap city and I began to wonder
+whether the city builders dug the canals. I pointed to the city and then
+at the canal, and Tweel said 'No--no--no!' and gestured toward the
+south. I took it to mean that some other race had created the canal
+system, perhaps Tweel's people. I don't know; maybe there's still
+another intelligent race on the planet, or a dozen others. Mars is a
+queer little world.
+
+"A hundred yards from the city we crossed a sort of road--just a
+hard-packed mud trail, and then, all of a sudden, along came one of the
+mound builders!
+
+"Man, talk about fantastic beings! It looked rather like a barrel
+trotting along on four legs with four other arms or tentacles. It had no
+head, just body and members and a row of eyes completely around it. The
+top end of the barrel-body was a diaphragm stretched as tight as a drum
+head, and that was all. It was pushing a little coppery cart and tore
+right past us like the proverbial bat out of Hell. It didn't even notice
+us, although I thought the eyes on my side shifted a little as it
+passed.
+
+"A moment later another came along, pushing another empty cart. Same
+thing--it just scooted past us. Well, I wasn't going to be ignored by a
+bunch of barrels playing train, so when the third one approached, I
+planted myself in the way--ready to jump, of course, if the thing didn't
+stop.
+
+"But it did. It stopped and set up a sort of drumming from the diaphragm
+on top. And I held out both hands and said, 'We are friends!' And what
+do you suppose the thing did?"
+
+"Said, 'Pleased to meet you,' I'll bet!" suggested Harrison.
+
+"I couldn't have been more surprised if it had! It drummed on its
+diaphragm, and then suddenly boomed out, 'We are v-r-r-riends!' and gave
+its pushcart a vicious poke at me! I jumped aside, and away it went
+while I stared dumbly after it.
+
+"A minute later another one came hurrying along. This one didn't pause,
+but simply drummed out, 'We are v-r-r-riends!' and scurried by. How did
+it learn the phrase? Were all of the creatures in some sort of
+communication with each other? Were they all parts of some central
+organism? I don't know, though I think Tweel does.
+
+"Anyway, the creatures went sailing past us, every one greeting
+us with the same statement. It got to be funny; I never thought to
+find so many friends on this God-forsaken ball! Finally I made a
+puzzled gesture to Tweel; I guess he understood, for he said,
+'One-one-two--yes!--two-two-four--no!' Get it?"
+
+"Sure," said Harrison, "It's a Martian nursery rhyme."
+
+"Yeah! Well, I was getting used to Tweel's symbolism, and I figured it
+out this way. 'One-one-two--yes!' The creatures were intelligent.
+'Two-two-four--no!' Their intelligence was not of our order, but
+something different and beyond the logic of two and two is four. Maybe I
+missed his meaning. Perhaps he meant that their minds were of low
+degree, able to figure out the simple things--'One-one-two--yes!'--but
+not more difficult things--'Two-two-four--no!' But I think from what we
+saw later that he meant the other.
+
+"After a few moments, the creatures came rushing back--first one, then
+another. Their pushcarts were full of stones, sand, chunks of rubbery
+plants, and such rubbish as that. They droned out their friendly
+greeting, which didn't really sound so friendly, and dashed on. The
+third one I assumed to be my first acquaintance and I decided to have
+another chat with him. I stepped into his path again and waited.
+
+"Up he came, booming out his 'We are v-r-r-riends' and stopped. I looked
+at him; four or five of his eyes looked at me. He tried his password
+again and gave a shove on his cart, but I stood firm. And then the--the
+dashed creature reached out one of his arms, and two finger-like nippers
+tweaked my nose!"
+
+"Haw!" roared Harrison. "Maybe the things have a sense of beauty!"
+
+"Laugh!" grumbled Jarvis. "I'd already had a nasty bump and a mean
+frostbite on that nose. Anyway, I yelled 'Ouch!' and jumped aside and
+the creature dashed away; but from then on, their greeting was 'We are
+v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' Queer beasts!
+
+"Tweel and I followed the road squarely up to the nearest mound. The
+creatures were coming and going, paying us not the slightest attention,
+fetching their loads of rubbish. The road simply dived into an opening,
+and slanted down like an old mine, and in and out darted the
+barrel-people, greeting us with their eternal phrase.
+
+"I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was curious to
+see it. It didn't look like a flame or torch, you understand, but more
+like a civilized light, and I thought that I might get some clue as to
+the creatures' development. So in I went and Tweel tagged along, not
+without a few trills and twitters, however.
+
+"The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old arc light,
+but came from a single black rod set in the wall of the corridor. It
+was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were fairly civilized,
+apparently.
+
+"Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered and I went
+on to look at that, but it was only a heap of shiny sand. I turned
+toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take me if it wasn't gone!
+
+"I suppose the corridor had curved, or I'd stepped into a side passage.
+Anyway, I walked back in that direction I thought we'd come, and all I
+saw was more dimlit corridor. The place was a labyrinth! There was
+nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional
+lights, and now and then a creature running by, sometimes with a
+pushcart, sometimes without.
+
+"Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few
+steps from the entrance. But every move we made after that seemed to get
+us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures with an
+empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out for his rubbish, but he ran
+around aimlessly, into one passage and out another. When he started
+dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave
+up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.
+
+"Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said 'No--no--no!' in a
+sort of helpless trill. And we couldn't get any help from the natives.
+They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were
+friends--ouch!
+
+"Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I
+slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We
+tried following only the upward corridors, but they'd run uphill a ways
+and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was
+constant; you couldn't tell night from day and after my first sleep I
+didn't know whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn't tell
+from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.
+
+"We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of
+the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing anything--just wheels
+turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a little one
+growing between them, joined to both."
+
+"Parthenogenesis!" exulted Leroy. "Parthenogenesis by budding like _les
+tulipes_!"
+
+"If you say so, Frenchy," agreed Jarvis. "The things never noticed us at
+all, except, as I say, to greet us with 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!'
+They seemed to have no home-life of any sort, but just scurried around
+with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what
+they did with it.
+
+"We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a
+great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be close to the surface
+when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber, the only one
+we'd seen. And man!--I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like
+daylight through a crevice in the roof.
+
+"There was a--a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel
+that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping
+his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch--sand, stones,
+plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched,
+others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No
+rhyme nor reason to the whole thing--but that's characteristic of this
+crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to
+believe.
+
+"One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside
+with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him
+being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later,
+another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one
+of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.
+
+"Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and
+he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say,
+'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or less about these
+creatures.
+
+"Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel,
+something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a
+little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The
+light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge,
+and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my
+left thumb? Look!" Jarvis extended his hand. "It dried up and fell
+off--just like that! And my abused nose--say, the pain went out of it
+like magic! The thing had the property of hard x-rays or gamma
+radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy
+tissue unharmed!
+
+"I was thinking what a present _that'd_ be to take back to Mother Earth
+when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of
+the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide
+had been careless, it seems.
+
+"Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and
+their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us;
+we backed out of what I thought was the passage we'd entered by, and
+they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy
+brutes! There was a whole chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I
+didn't like the 'ouch'; it was rather suggestive.
+
+"Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater
+freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts
+following--about twenty of them. Queer thing--the ones coming in with
+loaded carts moved past us inches away without a sign.
+
+"Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that glowing
+coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cart-load of plant limbs. Puff!
+The whole load was burning--and the crazy beast pushing it went right
+along without a change of pace! It created some disturbance among our
+'V-r-r-riends,' however--and then I noticed the smoke eddying and
+swirling past us, and sure enough, there was the entrance!
+
+"I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty pursuers. The
+daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first glance that the sun was
+all but set, and that was bad, since I couldn't live outside my
+thermo-skin bag in a Martian night--at least, without a fire.
+
+"And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle between
+two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn't fired nor had Tweel; there
+wasn't any use in irritating the brutes. They stopped a little distance
+away and began their booming about friendship and ouches.
+
+"Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a pushcart
+and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls of foot-long
+copper darts--sharp-looking ones--and all of a sudden one sailed past my
+ear--zing! And it was shoot or die then.
+
+"We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones next to
+the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum, but suddenly
+there was a thunderous booming of 'v-r-r-riends' and 'ouches,' and a
+whole army of 'em came out of their hole.
+
+"Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that Tweel wasn't.
+He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily as not. He was
+staying for me!
+
+"Say, I could have cried if there'd been time! I'd liked Tweel from the
+first, but whether I'd have had gratitude to do what he was
+doing--suppose I _had_ saved him from the first dream-beast--he'd done
+as much for me, hadn't he? I grabbed his arm, and said 'Tweel,' and
+pointed up, and he understood. He said, 'No--no--no, Tick!' and popped
+away with his glass pistol.
+
+"What could I do? I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn't
+explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a man!' and felt
+that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty
+few men who'd do that.
+
+"So I went 'bang' with my gun and Tweel went 'puff' with his, and the
+barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming
+about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped
+right down from Heaven in the shape of Putz, with his under-jets
+blasting the barrels into very small pieces!
+
+"Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door
+and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so
+before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in
+one of his nosedives over the mound and away.
+
+"I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the time we got
+the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here--like
+turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or
+twice. I yelled 'Tweel!' and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We
+couldn't find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got--or else
+I imagined it--was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the
+south. He'd gone, and damn it! I wish--I wish he hadn't!"
+
+The four men of the _Ares_ were silent--even the sardonic Harrison. At
+last little Leroy broke the stillness.
+
+"I should like to see," he murmured.
+
+"Yeah," said Harrison. "And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it
+might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a century and a half."
+
+"Oh, that!" muttered Jarvis gloomily. "That's what started the fight!"
+He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
+
+"Here it is."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
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