“I have,” I said, “I have seen the ghosts of legions of Martians rising from their graves in protest.”
“Let them rise,” snarled the man in the visor, “we have the damned bones, haven’t we. We’ll make them squeal plenty to get them back.”
There was a hardness, a grimness, a death-head quality in his voice that had never been there before.
“Why, what is the matter, Ken?” I asked, “Where have you been?”
“I have been in the Grondas Desert in Mars,” he said. “Prospecting. Found a deposit of pitchblende that was simply lousy with radium. It would have made me one of the richest men in the universe.”
“Why, that’s good news …”
“It isn’t good news,” replied Ken and the hardness was in his voice again. “The Martian government took it from me and I only got out by the skin of my teeth. Some damn clause or other in an old treaty about foreigners not being allowed any radium rights on the planet.”
“That’s too bad,” I comforted.
“Too bad,” he grinned like a foul monster of the pit. “It is not too bad. The Martians will pay ten times what that pitchblende deposit was worth to get these blessed bones back. The laugh is on the other horse now. In the meantime come over and have a look. I am staying at the Washington. The box is still shut. I thought you would enjoy opening it.”
I snapped off the connection and clutched at the edge of the desk. I was alternately hot and cold. This meant … what did it mean? Kenneth Smith had robbed the Martian nation of the thing that was most highly prized on the entire planet. Not only Kenneth Smith but myself. Not for a moment did I doubt but our short talk on the terrace of the Terrestrial Club three years before had prompted my friend’s mad theft. My words had suggested to him the supreme revenge which he had taken on the crooked little men of Mars, our neighbors in space and our friends by treaty.
I felt little remorse. Given the chance I would probably have done the same thing, not merely because of my desire to inspect those famous bones, but for much the same reason as had prompted Ken. My summary dismissal from Mars and the closing of its hospitality to me forever had been a great blow to my pride and the hurt still rankled deeply. The Martians had played rotten tricks on both myself and my friend. I did not think of any possible wrong that we may have done the Martians. In fact, from that angle of it, I felt a satisfaction that became keener every moment. This, in a way, was my revenge as much as Ken’s.
I felt, however, an inexplicable terror, a dreadful foreboding. The fountain-head of the Martian religion had been profaned and I could imagine what would be the fate of those who had stolen the Holy Remains, if captured by the Martians. That they immediately had discovered the theft and were even now on the trail, I did not doubt. I shivered in sheer physical horror at thinking of the sinister little crooked folks seeking me out.
They would demand that the Terrestrial authorities deliver us to their courts as a last resort, but only as a last resort. The Martians are a proud people and would not readily disclose a tale that would make them the laughing stock of the universe. It was with the priests of Mars themselves that my friend and I would be concerned.
I laughed and jerked open a drawer in the desk. My hand reached in and closed about something that was metallic and cold. I drew it out and slipped it into one of my pockets. There might be need of a weapon and the little electro-gun that hurled living thunderbolts was the most effective weapon the worlds had developed. Not even the Martians, for all their centuries of a wonderful mechanical civilization, had anything that would compare with it. The gun was an Earth secret and only Earthmen carried it.
I rose to my feet and laughed again, the bitter laugh of a conqueror who knows that his victory is empty, that he may, before the next dawn, face a firing squad. It was a great victory, a supreme insult to the Martians. Neither my friend nor I had any cause to love the people of the ruddy planet and both of us had ample for which to hate them. It had been foolish of Ken to steal the bones of Kell-Rabin, but it had been a master stroke…if one did not count the consequences.
I let myself out and rode to the ground floor. From there I took an aero-taxi straight to the Washington.
Ken let me in and bolted the door behind me. Then we grasped hands and stood for a long time looking into one another’s eyes.
“You shouldn’t have done it, Ken,” I said.
“Don’t worry so much about it,” he replied, “I would have done it anyhow. I just remembered what you had said, how anxious you were to see those bones. I would have thought of it, anyhow, for after that radium affair, I sat down and tried hard to think of how I could best humiliate the whole nation that had palmed that sort of deal off on me. Only, if it hadn’t been for you, I would have dropped the cursed box out in space somewhere. If they could find it out there, say, half way between Earth and Mars, I wouldn’t have begrudged it to them. As it is, I have brought it here. You can study those damned bones to your heart’s content.”
He turned to lead the way to an inner room of the suite.
“It was the rottenest thing imaginable,” he was telling me. “They let me find that deposit and then took it away from me. Confiscated it…threatened me with death if I made a fuss about it. Said they were letting me off easy, because there is a ten-year imprisonment clause in that old treaty to deal with any foreigner who does not immediately report such a discovery to the proper officials. They knew I was working on it all the time and never a word did they say.”
He halted and wheeled to face me.
“For two years I worked there in that blazing hell of a desert. I went hungry and thirsty part of the time and went through the sieges of desert fever. I fought heat and red dust, poisonous reptiles and insects, loneliness and near-insanity. I lost three fingers on my left hand when I poisoned them on some sort of a damn desert weed. I found it, tons upon tons of it. I have no idea how many and fairly rotten with radium. One cargo alone would have put me at the top of the world.
“All I would have had to do was snap my fingers and the solar system would bow its knee. I worked, went through two years of Martian desert; I lost my youth, three fingers, and two years of living…for what? For what, I ask you? So that some bloated Martian official might glut his hideous belly, so that he might weigh down some simpering female with precious stones, and give great gifts to the priests who guarded the skeleton of a thing that should have been dust long ago!”
His face was livid with rage. The man was insane! This was not the Ken Smith I had last seen only a few years before. It was another man, a man crazed by the horrible heat and the ghastly loneliness of the red reaches of Mars, a man embittered beyond human endurance by the scurvy injustice of an alien people who never had and never could understand the people of the Earth.
He jerked his arm above his head and pointed at the ceiling, and through the ceiling, out into the blind darkness of space where among the swarms of celestial lights a red star glowed.
“When they find out,” he shouted, “they’ll fear! Damn them, their stinking little souls will shrivel up inside of them. They will know the blasted hope and the terror that I have known. They are a religious people and I have taken their religion! I, the man they ruined, have taken the thing that is most precious to them. Someday, if they don’t find out, I’ll let them know, let them know that I rattled the musty bones of Kell-Rabin in their holy box and laughed at the sound they made!”
There was no doubt of it. The man was mad, a raving lunatic.