“Maybe,” agreed Charley, “but it don’t look exactly like that either. Something happened here, though. Floor fell out of the bottom of the canal or somethin’.”
“You can’t see the bottom,” said Ann. “Looks like a blue haze down there. Not exactly like shadows. More like fog or water.”
“Ain’t water,” declared Charley. “You can bet your bottom dollar on that. If anyone ever found that much water on Mars they’d stake out a claim and make a fortune.”
“Did you ever know anyone who tried to go down there, Charley?” asked Kent. “Ever talk to anyone who tried it?”
“No, lad, I never did. But I heard tell of some who tried. And they never were the same again. Somethin’ happened to them down there. Somethin’ that turned their minds.”
Kent felt icy fingers on his spine. He stared down into the deep blue of Mad-Man’s and strained his eyeballs, trying to pierce the veil that hid the bottom. But that was useless. If one wanted to find out what was down there, he’d have to travel down those steeply sloping walls, would have to take his courage in hand and essay what other men had tried and gone crazy for their pains.
“We can’t use the car,” he said suddenly and was surprised at his words.
Kent walked backward from the edge of the pit. What was happening to them? Why this calm acceptance of the fact they were going to go down into Mad-Man’s? They didn’t have to go. It wasn’t too late yet to turn around and travel back the way they came. With only one car now, and many miles to travel, they would have to take it slow and easy, but they could make it. It was the sensible thing to do, held none of the rash foolhardiness involved in a descent into those blue depths before them.
He heard Charley’s words, as if from a great distance.
“Sure, we’ll have to walk. But we ought to be able to make it. Maybe we’ll find air down there, air dense enough to breathe and not plumb full of ozone. Maybe there’ll be some water, too.”
“Charley,” Kent shouted, “you don’t know what you’re saying! We can’t—”
He stopped in mid-sentence and listened. Even as he talked, he had heard that first weird note from up the canal, a sound that he had heard many times before, the far-away rumble of running hoofs, the grating clash of stonelike body on stonelike body.
“The Eaters!” he shouted. “The Eaters are migrating.”
He glanced swiftly about him. There was no way of escape. The walls of the canal had narrowed and closed in, rising sheer from the floor on either side of them, only a few miles away. There was no point of vantage where they could make a stand and hold off the horde that was thundering toward them. And even if there were, they had but little power left for their guns. In the long trek down the canal they had been forced to shoot time after time to protect their lives, and their energy supply for the weapons was running low.
“Let’s get back to the car!” screamed Ann. She started to run. Kent sprinted after her, grabbed her and pulled her around.
“We’d never make it,” he yelled at her. “Hear those hoofs! They’re stampeding! They’ll be here in a minute!”
Charley was yelling at them, pointing down into Mad-Man’s. Kent nodded, agreeing. It was the only way to go. The only way left open for them. There was no place to hide, no place to stand and fight. Flight was the only answer—and flight took them straight into the jaws of Mad-Man’s Canal.
Charley bellowed at them, his bright blue eyes gleaming with excitement. “Maybe we got a chance. If we can reach the shadows.”
They plunged down, going at a run, fighting to keep their balance. Soft, crumbly rock shifted and broke under the impact of their steel-shod feet. A shower of rubble accompanied them, chuckling and clinking down the slope. The sun blinked out and they plunged into the deep shadows, fought to reduce their speed, slowed to a walk.
Kent looked back. Above him, on the level of the canal floor, he saw a fighting mass of Eaters, indescribable confusion there on the rim of the skyline, as the great silica-armored beasts fought against plunging into Mad-Man’s. Those in front were rearing, shoving, striking savagely, battling against being shoved over the edge as those behind plowed into them. Some of them had toppled onto the slope, were sliding and clawing, striving to regain their feet. Others were doggedly crawling back up the slope.
The three below watched the struggle above them.
“Even them cussed Eaters are afraid to go into Mad-Man’s,” said Charley.
They were surrounded by Ghosts. Hundreds of them, wavering and floating, appearing and disappearing. In the blue shadows of the sunken world they seemed like wind-blown flames that rocked back and forth, flickering, glimmering, guttering. Assuming all kinds of forms, forms beautiful in their intricacy of design, forms angularly flat and ugly, gruesome and obscene and terrible.
And always there was that terrible sense of watching—of ghostly eyes watching and waiting—of hidden laughter and ghoulish design.
“Damn them,” said Kent. He stubbed his toe and stumbled, righted himself.
“Damn them,” he said again.
The air had become denser, with little ozone now. Half an hour before they had shut off their oxygen supply and snapped open the visors of their helmets. Still thin, pitifully thin by Earthly standards, the air was breathable and they needed to save what little oxygen might remain within their tanks.
Ann stumbled and fell against Kent. He steadied her until she regained her feet. He saw her shiver.
“If they only wouldn’t watch us,” she whispered to him. “They’ll drive me mad. Watching us—no indication of friendliness or unfriendliness, no emotion at all. Just watching. If only they would go away—do something even!” Her whisper broke on a hysterical note.
Kent didn’t answer. What was there to say? He felt a savage wave of anger at the Ghosts. If a man could only do something about them. You could shoot and kill the Eaters and the Hounds. But guns and hands meant nothing to these ghostly forms, these dancing, flickering things that seemed to have no being.
Charley, plodding ahead down the slope, suddenly stopped.
“There’s something just ahead,” he said. “I saw it move.”
Kent moved up beside him and held his rifle ready. They stared into the blue shadows. “What did it look like?” Kent asked.
“Can’t say, lad,” Charley told him. “Just got a glimpse of it.”
They waited. A rock loosened below them and they could hear it clatter down the slope.
“Funny lookin’ jigger,” Charley said.
Something was coming up the slope toward them, something that made a slithering sound as it came, and to their nostrils came a faint odor, a suggestion of a stench that made the hair crawl on the back of Kent’s neck.
The thing emerged from the gloom ahead and froze the three with horror as it came. A thing that was infinitely more horrible in form than any reptilian monster that had ever crawled through the primal ooze of the new-spawned Earth, a thing that seemed to personify all the hate and evil that had ever, through long milleniums, lived and found its being on the aged planet Mars. A grisly death-head leered at them and drooling jaws opened, displaying fangs that dripped with loathsomeness.
Kent brought his rifle up as Ann’s shriek rang in his ears, but Charley reached out and wrenched the weapon from his hand.
His voice came, cool and calm.
“It’s no time to be shootin’, lad,” he said. “There’s another one over there, just to our right and I think I see a couple more out just beyond.”
“Give me that gun!” yelled Kent, but as he lunged to jerk it from Charley’s grasp he saw, out of the tail of his eye, a dozen more of the things squatting just within the shadows.