“But I know,” protested Ann. “I know there is such a man. I have to see him. I know he lives in Mad-Man’s Canal.”
“Listen,” snapped Kent and the quiet casualness was gone from his words. “Harry, the Hermit, is everywhere. Go a few hundred miles from here and men will tell you he lives here in Skeleton Canal. Or he is down in the Big Eater system or he’s up north in the Icy Hills. He is just an imaginary person, I tell you. Like the Paul Bunyan of the old lumberjacks back on Earth. Like Pecos Pete of the old American southwest. Like the fairies of the old Irish stories. Some trapper thought him up one lonely night and another trapper improved on him and a fellow dealing a stud poker hand in some little town improved a little more until today he is almost a real personage. Maybe he is real—real as a symbol of a certain group of men—but for all practical purposes, he is just a story, a fabrication of imagination.”
The girl, he saw, was angry. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a flat case. Her hands trembled as she opened it and took out a cigarette. She closed the case and tapped the cigarette against her thumbnail. A pencil of metal, pulled from the case, flared into flame.
She thrust the white cylinder between her lips and Kent reached down and took it away.
“Not here,” he said and smiled.
She flared at him. “Why not?” she asked.
“Atmosphere,” he said. “Neither Charley nor I smoke. Can’t afford to. The condensers are small. We don’t have too much current to run them. Two persons is the capacity of this igloo. Everything has to be figured down to scratch in this business. We need all the air we get, without fouling it with tobacco smoke.” He handed her the cigarette.
In silence she put it back in the case, returned the case to her pocket. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“Sorry I had to stop you,” Kent told her.
She rose. “Perhaps I had better go,” she said.
Charley’s jaw went slack. “Go where?” he asked.
“My canal car,” she said. “I left it about a mile from here. Went past your place before I saw the light.”
“But you can’t spend the night in a car,” protested Kent. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here.”
“Sure,” urged Charley, “we can’t let you go. Sleeping in a car is no picnic.”
“We’re harmless,” Kent assured her.
She flushed. “I wasn’t thinking of that,” she said. “But you said two persons was the capacity of the igloo.”
“It is,” Kent agreed, “but we can manage. We’ll cut down the heater current a little and step up the condensers. It may get a little chilly, but we can manage with air.”
He turned to Charley. “How about a pot of coffee,” he suggested.
Charley grinned, waggled his chin whiskers like a frolicsome billy goat. “I was just thinkin’ about that myself,” he said.
Ann set down the coffee cup and looked at them. “You see,” she explained, “it’s not just something I want to do myself. Not just some foolish whim of mine. It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that may help someone else—someone who is very dear to me. I won’t be able to sleep or eat or live, if I fail at least to try. You have to understand that I simply must go to Mad-Man’s Canal and try to find Harry, the Hermit.”
“But there ain’t no Harry, the Hermit,” protested Charley. He wiped the coffee off his beard and sighed. “Goodness knows, I wished there was, since you’re so set on findin’ him.”
“But even if there isn’t,” said Ann, “I’d at least have to go and look. I couldn’t go through life wondering if you might have been mistaken. Wondering if I should have given up so easily. If I go and try to find him and fail—why, then I’ve done everything I can, everything I could have expected myself to do. But if I don’t I’ll always wonder … there’ll always be that doubt to torment me.”
She looked from one face to the other.
“You surely understand,” she pleaded.
Charley regarded her steadily, his blue eyes shining. “This thing kind of means a lot to you, don’t it?” he said.
She nodded.
Kent’s voice broke the spell. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “You flew down from Landing City to Red Rock in a nice comfortable rocket ship, and now because you covered the hundred miles between here and Red Rock in a canal car, you think you’re an old-timer.”
He stared back at her hurt eyes.
“Well, you aren’t,” he declared.
“Now, lad,” said Charley, “you needn’t get so rough.”
“Rough!” said Kent. “I’m not getting rough. I’m just telling her a few of the things she has to know. She came across the desert in the car and everything went swell. Now she thinks it’s just as easy to travel the canals.”
“No, I don’t,” she flared at him, but he went on mercilessly.
“The canal country is dangerous. There’s all sorts of chances for crack-ups. There are all sorts of dangers. Every discomfort you can imagine. Crack your car against a boulder—and you peel off the quartz. Then the ozone gets in its work. It eats through the metal. Put a crack in your suit and the same thing happens. This atmosphere is poisonous to metal. So full of ozone that if you breathe much of it it starts to work on your lung tissues. Not so much danger of that up on the plateaus, where the air is thinner, but down here where there’s more air, there’s more ozone and it works just that much faster.”
She tried to stop him, but he waved her into silence and went on:
“There are the Eaters. Hundreds of them. All with an insane appetite for human bones. They love the phosphate. Every one of them figuring how to get through a car or a spacesuit and at the food inside. You’ve never seen more than a couple of Eaters together at a time. But Charley and I have seen them by the thousands—great herds of them on their periodic migrations up and down the canyons. They’ve kept us penned in our igloo for days while they milled around outside, trying to reach us. And the Hounds, too, although they aren’t so dangerous. And in the deeper places you find swarms of Ghosts. Funny things, the Ghosts. No physical harm from them. Maybe they don’t even exist. Nobody knows what they are. But they are apt to drive you mad. Just looking at them, knowing they are watching all the time.”
Impressive silence fell.
Charley wagged his beard.
“No place for a woman,” he declared. “The canal ain’t.”
“I don’t care,” said Ann. “You’re trying to frighten me, and I won’t be frightened. I have to go to Mad-Man’s Canal.”
“Listen, lady,” said Charley, “pick any other place—any other place at all—and I will take you there. But don’t ask me to go into Mad-Man’s.”
“Why not?” she cried. “Why are you so afraid of Mad-Man’s?”
She tried to find the answer in their faces but there was none.
Charley spoke slowly, apparently trying to choose his words with care. “Because,” he said, “Mad-Man’s is the deepest canal in this whole country. Far as I know, no man has ever been to the bottom of it and come out alive. Some have gone down part way and came back—mad and frothin’ at the mouth, their eyes all glazed, babblin’ crazy things. That’s why they call it Mad-Man’s.”