I slid into the kitchen and from there into the dining-room and the moaning began low and soared into a whimper, then rose to what would have been a scream if the creature that voiced it had had the strength to scream.
In the parlor I saw something on the floor and moved cautiously toward it. The thing upon the floor writhed and cowered and moaned and when it became aware of me it dragged itself toward me and I knew that it was begging, although it made no words, but begged with the heart-rending sounds that emanated from its mouth.
I backed against the wall, trying to get away, but it reached me and lifted up hooked claws and wrapped its arms around my knees. Its head tilted back to look at me and I saw the face of Foster Adams. The room was dark, for the blinds were tightly pulled as always and the first faint grey of dawn was just beginning to paint the dining-room windows.
I could not see the face too well and for that I always have been thankful. For the eyes were wider and whiter than I remembered them and the lips were pulled back in a frozen snarl of fear. There were flecks of foam upon the beard.
“Adams,” I shouted at him. “Adams, what has happened?”
But there was no need to ask. I knew. Not what Adams knew—not the mind-shattering hell-raw facts that Adams knew—only that he had found the thing he sought. By reversed crucifix, by nails clawing at the door, by goat-tracks in the yard he had found the answer.
Nor did he answer me. His arms slipped from my legs and he fell upon the floor and lay very still and I knew that Foster Adams was beyond all answering.
Then, for the first time, I became aware of another in the room, a motionless blackness that stood in the deepest shadow.
For a moment I stood there above the sprawled body of Foster Adams and looked at the other in the room, not seeing him too well, for it was still quite dark. And he looked back at me. Still silent, I put the gun back into my pocket and turned around and left.
Behind me I heard the other walking across the floor. Hoofs crackled and hocks snapped and the rhythm of the footsteps told me that he walked not on four legs but on two.
Hermit of Mars
Clifford D. Simak received $125 for this story, and it was published in the June 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It has features that lead one to think of “Masquerade” and “Madness from Mars,” but I am always going to wonder if it was mere coincidence that led Cliff to use the names Kent Clark and Howard Carter in this story. …
The sun plunged over the western rim of Skeleton Canal and instantly it was night. There was no twilight. Twilight was an impossible thing in the atmosphere of Mars, and the Martian night clamped down with frigid breath, and the stars danced out in the near-black sky, twinkling, dazzling stars that jigged a weird rigadoon in space.
Despite five years in the wilderness stretches of the Red Planet, Kent Clark still was fascinated by this sudden change from day to night. One minute sunlight—next minute starlight, the stars blazing out as if they were electric lights and someone had snapped the switch. Stars that were larger and more brilliant and gave more light than the stars seen from the planet Earth. Stars that seemed to swim in the swiftly cooling atmosphere. By midnight the atmosphere would be cooled to almost its minimum temperature, and then the stars would grow still and even more brilliant, like hard diamonds shining in the blackness of the sky, but they would be picturesque, showing their own natural colors, blue and white and red.
Outside the tiny quartz “igloo” the night wind keened among the pinnacles and buttresses and wind-eroded formations of the canal. On the wings of the wind, almost indistinguishable from the wind’s own moaning, came the mournful howling of the Hounds, the great gaunt, shaggy beasts that haunted the deep canals and preyed on all living things except the Eaters.
Charley Wallace, squatting on the floor of the igloo, was scraping the last trace of flesh from the pelt of a Martian beaver. Kent watched the deft twist of his wrist, the flashing of the knife blade in the single tiny radium bulb which illuminated the igloo’s interior.
Charley was an old-timer. Long ago the sudden goings and comings of Martian daylight and night had ceased to hold definite wonder for him. For twenty Martian years he had followed the trail of the Martian beaver, going farther and farther afield, penetrating deeper and deeper into the mazes of the even farther canals that spread like a network over the face of the planet.
His face was like old leather, wrinkled and brown above the white sweep of his long white beard. His body was pure steel and whang-hide. He knew all the turns and tricks, all the trails and paths. He was one of the old-time canal-men.
The heater grids glowed redly, utilizing the power stored in the seleno cells during the hours of daylight by the great sun-mirrors set outside the igloo. The atmosphere condensers chuckled softly. The electrolysis plant, used for the manufacture of water, squatted in its corner, silent now.
Charley carefully laid the pelt across his knees, stroked the deep brown fur with a wrinkled hand.
“Six of ‘em,” he said. His old eyes, blue as the sheen of ice, sparkled as he looked at Kent. “We’ll make a haul this time, boy,” he said. “Best huntin’ I’ve seen in five years or more.”
Kent nodded. “Sure will,” he agreed.
The hunting had been good. Out only a month now and they had six pelts, more than many trappers and hunters were able to get during an entire year. The pelts would bring a thousand apiece—perhaps more—back at the Red Rock trading post. Most valuable fur in the entire Solar System, they would sell at three times that amount back in the London or New York fur marts. A wrap of them would cost a cool one hundred thousand.
Deep, rich, heavy fur. Kent shivered as he thought about it. The fur had to be heavy. Otherwise the beaver would never be able to exist. At night, the temperature plunged to 40 and 50 below, Centigrade, seldom reached above 20 below at high noon. Mars was cold! Here on the equator the temperature varied little, unlike the poles, where it might rise to 20 above during the summer when, for ten long months, the Sun never set, dropped to 100 or more below in the winter, when the Sun was unseen for equally as long.
He leaned back in his chair and gazed out through the quartz walls of the igloo. Far down the slope of the canal wall he saw the flickering lights of the Ghosts, those tenuous, wraith-like forms whose origin, true nature, and purpose were still the bone of bitter scientific contention.
The starlight threw strange lights and shadows on the twisted terrain of the canal. The naturally weird surface formations became a nightmare of strange, awe-impelling shapes, like pages snatched from the portfolio of a mad artist.
A black shape crossed a lighted ravine, slunk into the shadows.
“A Hound,” said Kent.
Charley cursed in his whiskers.
“If them lopers keep hangin’ around,” he prophesied savagely, “we’ll have some of their pelts to take out to Red Rock.”
“They’re mighty gun-shy,” declared Kent. “Can’t get near one of them.”
“Yeah,” said Charley, “but just try goin’ out without a gun and see what happens. ‘Most as bad as the Eaters. Only difference is that the Hounds would just as soon eat a man, an’ the Eaters would rather eat a man. They sure hanker after human flesh.”
Another of the black shapes, slinking low, belly close to the ground, crossed the ravine.