Dr. Solveig, in the lead, hesitated and then slipped into the dense yellowish vegetation. Demaree looked at me, and we followed.
There were no trails inside, nothing but a mad tangle of twisty, feather-leaved vines. I heard dry vine-pods rattling ahead as Solveig spearheaded our group, and in a moment we saw him again.
The ground was covered with the fine red sand that overlies all of Mars, but it was only an inch or two deep. Beneath was raw rock, split and fissured with hairline cracks into which the water-seeking tendrils of the vegetation disappeared.
Demaree said softly, ‘Dr. Solveig. Up ahead there, by the little yellow bush. Doesn’t that look like a path?’
It wasn’t much, just a few branches bent back and a couple broken off; a certain amount of extra bare rock showing where feet might have scuffed the surface sand off.
‘Perhaps so,’ said Solveig. ‘Let us look.’
We bent under the long, sweeping branches of a smoke tree -too cool now to give off its misty yellow gases. We found ourselves looking down an almost straight lane, too straight to be natural.
‘It is a path,’ said Dr. Solveig. ‘Ah, so. Let us investigate it.’
I started to follow him, but Demaree’s hand was on my shoulder, his other hand pointing. I looked, off to one side, and saw nothing but the tangle of growth.
Solveig turned inquiringly. Demaree frowned. ‘I thought I heard something.’
‘Oh,’ said Solveig, and unlimbered his flame rifle. All three of us stood frozen for a moment, listening and watching; but if there had been anything, it was quiet and invisible now.
Demaree said, ‘Let me go first, Doc. I’m a little younger than you.’ And faster on the draw, he meant. Solveig nodded.
‘Of course.’ He stepped aside, and Demaree moved silently along the trail, looking into the underbrush from side to side. Solveig waited a moment, then followed; and a few yards behind I brought up the rear. I could just see Demaree’s body flickering between the gnarled tree trunks and vines up ahead. He hesitated, then stepped over something, a vine or dead tree, that lay snaked across the path. He half turned as if to gesture -
Snap!
The vine whipped up and twisted about his leg, clung and dragged him ten feet into the air, hanging head down, as a long straight tree beside the path snapped erect.
A deadfall - the oldest snare in the book!
‘Jack!’ I yelled, forgetting about being quiet - and half-forgetting, too, that I was on Mars. I leaped towards him, and blundered against the trees as my legs carried me farther than I thought. Solveig and I scrambled to him, rifles ready, staring around for a sight of whatever it was that had set the trap. But again - nothing.
Demaree wasn’t hurt, just tangled and helpless. A flood of livid curses floated down from him as he got his wind back and began struggling against the vine loop around his legs. ‘Take it easy!’ I called. ‘I’ll get you down!’ And while Solveig stood guard I scrambled up the tree and cut him loose. I tried to hold the vine but I slipped, and he plunged sprawling to the ground - still unhurt, but angry.
And the three of us stood there for a moment, waiting for the attack. And it didn’t come.
For a moment the Martians had had us; while Demaree was in the tree and Solveig and I racing towards him, they could have cut us down. And they hadn’t. They had set the trap - and passed up its fruits.
We looked at each other wonderingly.
We found a cave just off the trail, narrow and high, but the best protection in sight against the dusk sandstorm and the night’s cold. The three of us huddled inside - and waited. Demaree suggested making a fire; but, although the wood on the ground was dry enough to burn even in Mars’s thin air, we decided against it. Maybe, later on, if we couldn’t stand the cold, we’d have no choice; but meanwhile there was no sense attracting attention.
We asked Solveig, who seemed to be in command of our party, if he thought there was any objection to talking, and he shrugged. ‘How can one tell? Perhaps they hear, perhaps they do not. Air is thin and sounds do not carry far - to our ears. To Martian ears? I don’t know.’
So we talked - not loud, and not much, because there wasn’t, after all, much to say. We were preoccupied with the contradictions and puzzlements the Martians presented. Fantastic weapons that struck from nowhere or shimmered into being between sand dunes - and a culture little beyond the neolithic. Even Earth’s best guided missiles could have been no more accurate and little more deadly, considering the nature of the target, than the one that obliterated car number two. And the golden glow that killed Keever was out of our experience altogether. And yet - villages of sticks! There had been no trace in any Martian dwelling of anything so complicated as a flame-rifle, much less these others....
It grew very slightly darker, bit by bit; and then it was black. Even in our cave we could hear the screaming of the twilight wind. We were in a little slit in the raw rock, halfway down one of the crevasses that gave the Split Cliffs area its name. Craggy, tumbled, bare rocks a hundred feet below us, and the other wall of the crevasse barely jumping distance away. We had come to it along an irregular sloping ledge, and to reach us at all the wind had to pass through a series of natural baffles. And even so, we saw the scant shrubbery at the cave mouth whipped and scoured by the dusk-wind.
Demaree shivered and attempted to light a cigarette. On the fourth try he got it burning, but it went out almost at once - it is possible to smoke in Mars’s air, but not easy, because of the pressure. The tobacco burns poorly, and tastes worse. He grunted, ‘Damn the stuff. You think we’ll be all right here?’
‘From the wind?’ asked Solveig. ‘Oh, certainly. You have seen how little sand was carried in here. It is the cold that follows that I am thinking of...’
We could feel the cold settling in the air, even while the twilight wind was blowing. In half an hour the wind was gone, but the cold remained, deeper and more intense than anything I had ever felt before. Our sand capes were a help, almost thermally non-conducting in either direction j we carefully tucked under all the vents designed to let perspiration escape, we folded them around us meticulously, we kept close together - and still the cold was almost unbearable. And it would grow steadily worse for hours....
‘We’ll have to build a fire,’ said Solveig reluctantly. ‘Come and gather wood.’ The three of us went scouring up the ledge for what we could find. We had to go all the way back to the top of the crevasse to find enough to bother carrying; we brought it back, and while Demaree and I worked to set it afire Solveig went back for more. It wasn’t easy, trying to make that thin and brittle stuff burn. Demaree’s pocket lighter wore itself out without success. Then he swore and motioned me back, levelling his flame rifle at the sticks. That worked beautifully - every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them over yards, half of them going over the side of the ledge; and we charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we’d started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It helped - helped very much. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle as long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine-leaves.