A purse of gold had changed hands, but Ryker depended on more than gold to seal the lips of Yammak. For the fat, beardless, voluble little man had recognized the three who accompanied the Earthling. He had sucked in his breath between discolored teeth at his first good look at them, and his eyes had gone round and frightened.
Oh, he would keep his mouth shut, would Yammak the slidar trader! For if he dared so much as to hint that it had been he who had helped the three zhaggua to elude their hunters and to escape into the Dustlands, those who hunted them would close the mouth of Yammak forever.
Among the many things he hated about Mars, Ryker most of all hated slidars.
The rangy, splay-footed, ungainly beasts were four footed, but there all resemblance to horses ended. They were reptilian, of course—Mars has hardly any mammals and no birds or insects, other than lice—and the crimson, snake-tailed creatures move with a shambling, splayfooted, loose-jointed stride that is peculiarly uncomfortable.
It is not for nothing that the gaunt, big-shouldered, ill-tempered brutes are named slidars. The word means “lopers” in the Tongue; and lope they do, with an ambling, jolting rhythm more like that of a fat, stumbling hound dog than anything else on four feet.
Ryker, however, gritted his teeth and clung to the saddle horn and gave the brute its head, allowing it to make all possible speed. He did not begin to breathe easily, or rein the beast in to a more comfortable trot until the last lights of Yeolarn had died behind them in the dark.
Then, and only then, did he slow their advance and begin to consider where they might go.
Yeolarn is the northernmost of the Earth colonies, and sits smack on the 250th Meridian in the center of the Thoana Palus. It is at least eleven hundred miles from Syrtis Port, which is the nearest colony to it, and to the north illimitable empty wastes of Dustland and dead rocky plateaux stretch to the Pole itself.
When they rode out of the Dragon Gate, they had headed due north, Ryker knew. They were now in one of the talcum-soft desert regions called “Dustlands,” an empty space on the map which the old Earth astronomers had filled in with the name Aetheria. Due east was an even broader expanse of powdery desert called Cebrenia, which stretched on for twelve hundred miles or so before the mesalike bulk of Propontis rose to block the way.
West, however, they would only have to ride three hundred miles or less to reach the low, rocky hills of Alcyonius Nodus. There, at least, they could find shelter in the caves which the tides of ancient oceans had cut into the cliffs which had once been the coastline of an old continent. And, perhaps, they could find food as well.
He turned to his companions to suggest this, but decided to delay the question until morning, now not long away. For the night had been long and busy. None of them had enjoyed any sleep, and precious little rest, and they were all wearied from their exertions. Indeed, the old man swayed weakly in the saddle, and the girl sat her mount with head low, shoulders bent, slumped dispiritedly.
“Let’s dismount here, have something to eat, and snatch a few hours sleep,” he suggested.
The girl looked up quickly, her golden eyes filled with fear.
“Is it safe? Perhaps we are pursued—”
Ryker shook his head.
“They’ll have found where we entered the sewers, having broken down the cellar door by now, surely,” he grunted. “But there’s no way they can tell which way we went, or where we came up to the street. Those sewers run for miles and miles, and I replaced the plate that sealed the street exit. And Yammak will not talk.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
He grinned, wolfishly, and explained. The girl nodded wearily, satisfied, and got down from her slidar.
Wrapped in the warm cloaks supplied by Yammak’s woman, they hungrily devoured cold sliced meat, dry bread and preserved jellies, washed down by a frugal swallow of red wine.
They slept that night like the dead, huddled together for warmth.
The air of Mars is thin, and cold, and dry. So dry that it sucks the moisture from your tissues, and so cold that it makes the air atop Everest humid by comparison. And so thin, so oxygen starved, that it is—hardly enough to sustain life.
Indeed, when the first Earthsider colonists and explorers came they muffled themselves within airsuits and wore pressure masks, and domed their towns with plastic bubbles. But soon the men of science set to work upon the problem. Earthsiders would never have more than a toehold on this world if they must wear suits and masks in order to live. Since Mars was too vast by far to be terraformed, men themselves were forced to become acclimated.
The first clue came from the Martians themselves. They were warm-blooded hominids of obvious mammalian descent—human to a dozen decimal places—and, somehow or other, they managed to survive.
Biochemists, studying the natives, found out how nature had adapted them to survival under these conditions, and, in time, learned how to modify the body chemistry of the colonists to conform to this harsh environment. The series of operations was expensive, and permanent, but Ryker was damn glad he had bought them. Otherwise, he could not have lasted long in the Dustlands, away from the domed cities of his kind.
But even with his body chemistry adapted to Mars, some precautions were necessary. The thermals he wore were of tough, wear-resistant synthetic, and helped retain his body heat. The pressure still he should have brought with him, and would have, had he known in advance he was in for some overland travel, would have squeezed enough moisture from the rubbery plants that carpeted the so-called “canals” to sustain him without dangerous dehydration.
Lacking it, he was in trouble.
This did not become evident until morning, when he woke to find his throat and the inside of his mouth as dry as blotting paper, and an ache in his sinuses that presaged difficulties to come. A swig or two from his canteen helped, but the water it held would not last for long.
They mounted and rode out.
Valarda and her companions, being natives, did not feel the lack of water as badly as Ryker did. Over the millions of years since Mars first lost her oceans and began to dry up, evolution had adapted the Martians to a lesser need for moisture and an ability to retain moisture superior to that of Earthsider bodies. For instance, Martians do not perspire Also, their glands produce epidermal oils which tend to seal body moisture within, preventing its evaporation.
Still, in time they would all need fresh water, or they would begin to die that most horrible of all deaths—death through dehydration.
All that day they rode on, heading almost due northwest, for in the Dustlands it is usually possible to travel in straight lines—“as the crow flies,” an Earthsider might have put it—but the People have another expression which states the identical notion.
Alcyonius Nodus would afford them shelter and, probably, food, as the crumbling ancient cliffs of the mesa provide shelter for other life forms beside man.
Whether they could find water there, though, that was another question.
Had they dared ride due south, they could have found water at Nodus Laocontis, the old canal which once served to irrigate the gardens of Yeolarn.
Or they could have ridden southwest, into Nilosyrtis, an even greater canal which had similarly served the old, abandoned city near whose ruins the modern colony of Syrtis Port was built.
But these routes were too dangerous, as either would bring them within dangerous proximity to Yeolarn. And the two canals were more than twice as far away as Alcyonius.