“Now listen to me,” and Ann. “I came all this way and I’m not turning back. If you won’t take me, I’ll go alone. I’ll make it somehow—only you could make it so much easier for me. You know all the trails. You could get me there quicker. I’m prepared to pay you for it—pay you well.”
“Lady,” said Charley slowly, “we ain’t guides. You couldn’t give us money enough to make us go where we didn’t want to go.”
She pounded one small clenched fist on the table. “But I want to pay you,” she said. “I’ll insist on it.”
Charley made a motion of his hand, as if sweeping away her words. “Not one cent,” he said. “You can’t buy our services. But we might do it anyhow. Just because I like your spunk.”
She gasped. “You would?” she asked.
Neither one of them replied.
“Just take me to Mad-Man’s,” she pleaded. “I won’t ask you to take me down into the canal. Just point out the best way and then wait for me. I’ll make it myself. All I want to know is how to get there.”
Charley lifted the coffee pot, filled the cups again.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I reckon we can go where you can go. I reckon we ain’t allowin’ you to go down into Mad-Man’s all by yourself.”
Dawn roared over the canal rim and flooded the land with sudden light and life. The blanket plants unfolded their broad furry leaves, spreading them in the sunshine. The traveller plants, lightly anchored to boulders and outcroppings, scurried frantically for places in the Sun. The canal suddenly became a mad flurry of plant life as the travellers, true plants but forced by environment to acquire the power of locomotion, quit the eastern wall, where they had travelled during the preceding day to keep pace with the sunlight, and rushed pell-mell for the western slope.
Kent tumbled out of the canal-car, rifle gripped in his hand. He blinked at the pale Sun that hung over the canal rim. His eyes swept the castellated horizon that closed in about them, took in the old familiar terrain typical of the Martian canals.
The canal was red—blood red shading to softest pink with the purple of early-morning shadow still hugging the eastern rim. A riot of red—the rusted bones of a dead planet. Tons of oxygen locked in those ramparts of bright red stone. Oxygen enough to make Mars livable—but locked forever in red oxide of iron.
Chimney and dome formations rose in tangled confusion with weathered pyramids and slender needles. A wild scene. Wild and lonesome and forbidding.
Kent swept the western horizon with his eyes. It was thirty miles or more to the rim, but in the thin atmosphere he could see with almost telescopic clearness the details of the scarp where the plateau broke and the land swung down in wild gyrations, frozen in red rock, to the floor of the canal where he stood.
Under the eastern rim, where the purple shadows still clung, flickered the watch-fires of the Ghosts, dim shapes from that distance. He shook his fist at them. Damn the Ghosts!
The slinking form of a Hound skulked down a ravine and disappeared. A beaver scuttled along a winding trail and popped into a burrow.
Slowly the night cold was rising from the land, dissipated by the rising Sun. The temperature would rise now until mid-afternoon, when it would stand at 15 or 20 below zero, Centigrade.
From a tangled confusion of red boulders leaped a silica-armored Eater. Like an avenging rocket he bore down on Kent. Almost wearily the trapper lifted his rifle, blasted the Eater with one fierce burst of blue energy.
Kent cursed under his breath.
“Can’t waste power,” he muttered. “Energy almost gone.”
He tucked the rifle under his arm and glared at the tumbled Eater. The huge beast, falling in mid-leap, had plowed a deep furrow in the hard red soil.
Kent walked around the bulk of the car, stood looking at the uptilted second car that lay wedged between the huge boulders.
Charley climbed out through the open air lock and walked toward his partner. Inside his helmet he shook his head. “No good,” he said. “She’ll never run again.”
Kent said nothing and Charley went on: “Whole side staved in. All of the quartz knocked off. Ozone’s already got in its work. Plates softening.”
“I suppose the mechanism is shot, too,” said Kent.
“All shot to hell,” said Charley.
They stood side by side, staring mournfully at the shattered machine.
“She was a good car, too,” Charley pronounced, sadly.
“This,” declared Kent, “is what comes of escorting a crazy dame all over the country.”
Charley dismissed the matter. “I’m going to walk down the canal a ways. See what the going is like from here on,” he told Kent.
“Be careful,” the younger man warned him. “There’s Eaters around. I just shot one.”
The old man moved rapidly down the canal floor, picking his way between the scattered boulders and jagged outcroppings. In a moment he was out of sight. Kent walked around the corner of the undamaged car, saw Ann Smith just as she stepped from the airlock.
“Good morning,” she said.
He did not return the greeting. “Our car is a wreck,” he said. “We’ll have to use yours from here on. It’ll be a little cramped.”
“A wreck?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “That crash last night. When the bank caved under the treads, it smashed the quartz, let the ozone at the plates.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “Of course, it’s my fault. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”
Kent was merciless. “I hope,” he sighed, “that this proves to you travel in the canals is no pleasure jaunt.”
She looked about them, shivered at the desolation.
“The Ghosts are the worst,” she said. “Watching, always watching—”
Before them, not more than a hundred feet away, one of the Ghosts appeared, apparently writhing up out of a pile of jumbled rocks. It twisted and reared upward, tenuous, unguessable, now one shape, now another. For a moment it seemed to be a benign old grandfather, with long sweeping beard, and then it turned into something that was utterly and unnamably obscene and then, as suddenly as it had come, it disappeared.
Ann shuddered. “Always watching,” she said again. “Waiting around corners. Ready to rise up and mock you.”
“They get on your nerves,” Kent agreed, “but there’s no reason to be afraid of them. They couldn’t touch you. They may be nothing more than mirage—figments of the imagination, like your Harry, the Hermit.”
She swung about to face him. “How far are we from Mad-Man’s?” she demanded.
Kent shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a few miles, maybe a hundred. We should be near, though.”
From down the canal came Charley’s halloo. “Mad-Man’s,” he shouted back to them. “Mad-Man’s! Come and look at it!”
Mad-Man’s Canal was a continuation of the canal the three had been travelling—but it was utterly different.
Suddenly the canal floor broke, dipped down sharply and plummeted into a deep blue pit of shadows. For miles the great depression extended, and on all sides the ground sloped steeply into the seemingly bottomless depths of the canyon.
“What is it, Charley?” asked Kent, and Charley waggled his beard behind the space-helmet.
“Can’t say, lad,” he declared, “but it sure is an awe-inspirin’ sight. For twenty Martian years I’ve tramped these canals and I never seen the like of it.”
“A volcanic crater?” suggested Ann.