Dr. Gilmer rushed to him, lifted him in his arms.
Woods caught a glimpse of the man's face as his head lolled in Gilmer's arms. It was Jerry Cooper's face — but a face that was twisted and changed almost beyond recognition, a face that burned itself into Jack Wood's brain, indelibly etched there, something to be remembered with a shudder through the years. A haggard face with deeply sunken eyes, with hollow cheeks, with drooling lips that slobbered sounds that were not words.
A hand pushed at Woods.
'Get out of my way,' shrilled Andrews~ 'How do you expect me to take a picture?'
The newsman heard the camera whirr softly, heard the click of changing plates.
'Where are the others?' Gilmer was shouting at Cooper. The man looked up at him vacantly, his face twisting itself into a grimace of pain and fear.
'Where are the others?' Gilmer shouted again, his voice ringing over the suddenly hushed stillness of the crowd.
Cooper jerked his head toward the ship.
'In there,' he whispered and the whisper cut like a sharp-edged knife.
He mumbled drooling words, words that meant nothing. Then with an effort he answered.
'Dead,' he said.
And in the silence that followed, he said again:
'All dead!'
They found the others in the living quarters back of the locked control room. All four of them were dead — had been dead for days. Andy Smith's skull had been crushed by a mighty blow.
Jimmy Watson had been strangled, with the blue raised welts of blunt fingers still upon his throat. Elmer Paine's body was huddled in a corner, but upon him there were no marks of violence, although his face was contorted into a visage of revulsion, a mask of pain and fear and suffering. Thomas Delvaney's body sprawled beside a table. His throat had been opened with an old fashioned straight-edge razor. The razor, stained with blackened blood, was tightly clutched in the death grip of his right hand.
In one corner of the room stood a large wooden packing box. Across the smooth white boards of the box someone had written shakily, with black crayon, the single word 'Animal'. Plainly there had been an attempt to write something else — strange wandering crayon marks below the single word. Marks that scrawled and stopped and made no sense.
That night Jerry Cooper died, a raving maniac.
A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There were no heroes left to welcome back.
What was in the packing box?
'It's an animal,' Dr. Gilmer declared, 'and that's about as far as I would care to go. It seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast — fast, that is, for it — it probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison.'
Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found in the packing box marked 'Animal'.
It looked like a round ball of fur.
'It's all curled up, sleeping,' he said.
'Curled up, hell,' said Gilmer. 'That's the shape of the beast. It's spherical and it's covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the North Pole could offer. It's thick and it's warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold.'
'Maybe we'll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars,' Woods suggested. 'Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices.'
'They'd kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that,' declared Gilmer. 'A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn't afford to waste it by running around. He'd just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living.'
'It doesn't seem to have eyes or ears or anything you'd expect an animal to have,' Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.
'He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize,' declared Gilmer. 'You must remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment — perhaps he rose from an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There's no reason why we must believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and Mars.
'From what little we know of Mars,' he went on, rolling the black cigar between his lips, 'it's just about the kind of animal we'd expect to find there. Mars has little water — by Earth standards, practically none at all. A dehydrated world. There's oxygen there, but the air is so thin we'd call it a vacuum on Earth. A Martian animal would have to get on very little water, very little oxygen.
'And, when he got it, he'd want to keep it. The spherical shape gives him a minimum surface-per-volume ratio.
'This makes it easier for him to conserve water and oxygen. He probably is mostly lungs. The fur protects him from the cold. Mars must be devilish cold at times. Cold enough at night to free carbon dioxide. That's what they had him packed in on the ship.'
'No kidding,' said Woods.
'Sure,' said Gilmer. 'Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.
'Apparently he hadn't had much attention the last few days before they got here, for the oxygen was getting pretty thin, even for him, and the ice was almost gone. I don't imagine he felt any too good. Probably was just a bit sick. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature uncomfortably warm.'
Woods gestured at the glass cage.
'I suppose you got him all fixed up now,' he said. 'Air conditioned and everything.'
Gilmer chuckled.
'Must seem just like home to him.' he replied. 'In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don't know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference.'
He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.
'A little private Mars all his own,' he stated.
'You found no records at all on the ship?' asked Woods. 'Nothing telling anything at all about him?'
Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.
'We found the log book,' he said, 'but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it.'
The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.
'Now just why in hell would they want to do that?' he asked.
'Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?' Gilmer snarled. 'Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn't? What stopped him writing more?'
Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.
'I wonder how much our little friend had to do with it,' he speculated.
'You're crazier than a space-bug,' Gilmer snapped. 'What m blue hell could he have had to do with it? He's just an animal and probably of a pretty low order of intelligence. The way things are on Mars he'd be kept too damn busy just keeping alive to build much brain. Of course, I haven't had much chance to study it yet. Dr. Winters, of Washington, and Dr. Lathrop, of London, will be here next week. We'll try to find out something then.'