The walls were not of rock, it seemed, but of slabs of liquid fire—liquid fire which, their stunned eyes soon saw, was a natural inlay of incredible winking gems.
Opulence was the rule of this drusy cave. Not even so base a metal as silver could be seen here; gold was the basest available. Platinum, iridium, little pools of shimmering mercury dotted the jewel-studded floor of the place. Stalactites and stalagmites were purest rock-crystal.
Flames seemed to glow from behind the walls colored by the emerald, ruby, diamond, and topaz. "How can such a formation occur in nature?" Annamarie whispered. No one answered.
" 'There are more things in heaven and under it —' " raptly misquoted Josey. Then, with a start, "What act's that from?"
It seemed to bring the others to. "Dunno," chorused the archaeologist and the girl. Then, the glaze slowly vanishing from their eyes, they looked at each other.
"Well," breathed the girl.
In an abstracted voice, as though the vision of the jewels had never been seen, the girl asked, "How do you suppose the place is lighted?"
"Radioactivity," said Josey tersely. There seemed to be a tacit agreement—if one did not mention the gems neither would the others. "Radioactive minerals and maybe plants. All this is natural formation. Weird, of course, but here it is." There was a feeble, piping sound in the cavern.
"Can this place harbor life?" asked Stanton in academic tones.
"Of course," said Josey, "any place can." The thin, shrill piping was a little louder, strangely distorted by echoes.
"Listen," said the girl urgently. "Do you hear what I hear?"
"Of course not," cried Stanton worriedly. "It's just my—I mean our imagination. I can't be hearing what I think I'm hearing."
Josey had pricked his ears up. "Calm down, both of you," he whispered. "If you two are crazy—so am I. That noise is something—somebody—singing Gilbert and Sullivan. "A Wand'ring Minstrel, I", I believe the tune is."
"Yes," said Annamarie hysterically. "I always liked that number." Then she reeled back into Stanton's arms, sobbing hysterically.
"Slap her," said Josey, and Stanton did, her head rolling loosely under the blows. She looked up at him.
"I'm sorry," she said, the tears still on her cheeks.
"I'm sorry, too," echoed a voice, thin, reedy, and old; "and I suppose you're sorry. Put down your guns. Drop them. Put up your hands. Raise them. I really am sorry. After all, I don't want to kill you."
IV
Marshall Ellenbogan
They turned and dropped their guns almost immediately, Stanton shrugging off the heavy power-pack harness of his blaster as Josey cast down his useless heat-pistol. The creature before them was what one would expect as a natural complement to this cavern. He was weird, pixyish, dressed in fantastic points and tatters, stooped, wrinkled, whiskered, and palely luminous. Induced radioactivity, Stanton thought.
"Hee," he giggled. "Things!"
"We're men," said Josey soberly. "Men like – like you." He shuddered.
"Lord," marvelled the pixy to himself, his gun not swerving an inch. "What won't they think of next! Now, now, you efts –you're addressing no puling creature of the deep. I'm a man and proud of it. Don't palter with me. You shall die and be reborn again – eventually, no doubt. I'm no agnostic, efts. Here in this cavern I have seen – oh the things I have seen." His face was rapturous with holy bliss.
"Who are you?" asked Annamarie.
The pixy started at her, then turned to Josey with a questioning look. "Is your friend all right?" the pixy whispered confidentially. "Seems rather effeminate to me."
"Never mind," the girl said hastily. "What's your name?"
"Marshall Ellenbogan," said the pixy surprisingly. "Second Lieutenant in the United States Navy. But," he snickered, "I suspect my commission's expired."
"If you're Ellenbogan," said Stanton, "then you must be a survivor from the first Mars expedition. The one that started the war."
"Exactly," said the creature. He straightened himself with a sort of somber dignity. "You can't know," he groaned, you never could know what we went through. Landed in a desert. Then we trekked for civilization – all of us, except three kids that we left in the ship. I've often wondered what happened to them." He laughed. "Civilization! Cold-blooded killers who tracked us down like vermin. Killed Kelly, Keogh. Moley. Jumped on us and killed us – like that." He made a futile attempt to snap his fingers. "But not me – not Ellenbogan – I ducked behind a rock and they fired on the rock and rock and me both fell into a cavern. I've wandered – Lord! how I've wandered. How long ago was it, efts?"
The lucid interval heartened the explorers. "Fifty years, Ellenbogan," said Josey. "What did you live on all that time?"
"Moss-fruits from the big white trees. Meat now and then, eft, when I could shoot one of your light-headed brothers." He leered. "But I won't eat you. I haven't tasted meat for so long now ... Fifty years. That makes me seventy years old. You efts never live for more than three or four years, you don't know how long seventy years can be."
"We aren't efts," snapped Stanton. "We're human beings same as you. I swear we are! And we want to take you back to Earth where you can get rid of that poison you've been soaking into your system! Nobody can live in a radium-impregnated cave for fifty years and still be healthy. Ellenbogan, for God's sake be reasonable!"
The gun did not fall nor waver. The ancient creature regarded them shrewdly, his head cocked to one side. "Tell me what happened," he said at length.
"There was a war," said the girl. "It was about you and the rest of the expedition that had been killed. When you didn't come back, the Earth governments sent another expedition – armed this time, because the kids you left in the ship managed to raise Earth for a short time when they were attacked, and they told the whole story. The second expedition landed, and well, it's not very clear. We only have the ship's log to go by, but it seems to have been about the same with them. Then the Earth governments raised a whole fleet of rocket-ships, with everything in the way of guns and ray-projectors they could hold installed. And the Martians broke down the atomic-power process from one of the Earth ships they'd captured, and they built a fleet. And there was a war, the first interplanetary war in history. For neither side ever took prisoners. There's some evidence that the Martians realized they'd made a mistake at the beginning after the war had been going only about three years, but by that time it was too late to stop. And it went on for fifty years, with rocket-ships getting bigger and faster and better, and new weapons being developed ... Until finally we developed a mind-disease that wiped out the entire Martian race in half a year. They were telepathic, you know, and that helped spread the disease."
"Good for them," snarled the elder. "Good for the treacherous, devilish, double-dealing rats ... And what are you people doing here now?"
"We're an exploring party, sent by the new all-Earth confederation to examine the ruins and salvage what we can of their knowledge. We came on you here quite by accident. We haven't got any evil intentions. We just want to take you back to your own world. You'll be a hero there. Thousands will cheer you – millions. Ellenbogan, put down your gun. Look –we put ours down!"
"Hah!" snarled the pixy, retreating a pace. "You had me going for a minute. But not any more!" With a loud click, the pixy thumbed the safety catch of his decades-old blaster. He reached back to the power-pack he wore across his back, which supplied energy for the weapon, and spun the wheel to maximum output. The power-pack was studded with rubies which, evidently, he had hacked with diamonds into something resembling finished, faceted stones.