Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (36 page)

"Don't
you
?" Boule asked suddenly. "I've been snapping flash shots of this jovial character in all his phases, and I like him less all the time. I don't know why ancient Mars tabooed him, but he sure radiates the impression of happy executioner. Frankly, I'm sorry I came on this jaunt. I don't relish wandering around in the place where the Martian devil was worshipped, and I still haven't accepted those trapdoors on the roof of the temple—as if the inhabitants knew it would be buried by the desert one day."

Hartwick paused in the middle of an impatient gesture at the five tunnels ahead of them and swept his helmet light through the gloom until it came to rest on Boule's visored face. Back in Bubbleburg, when he'd been commissioned to lead an expedition to the fabled temple of Priipiirii, the Martian Archaeological Foundation had assured him that the scientists of the party would all be picked, psycho-certified men.

But they'd said nothing about guaranteeing the photographer's stability, the desert guide remembered uncomfortably. Boule was one of the few lens-hounds in the archaeological paradise that the dead planet had become: he'd taken pictures of the early excavations at Gulthum and Yeyarneh when the first mumbling hints of the Priipiirii cult had been noticed; he was a logical choice.

"Very possibly, they suspected the end of their canal civilization would invite the desert to creep forward again," Punnello suggested. "I'll admit it is rare to the point of nonexistence for a race to build with a view to its own extinction, but remember what a highly intellectualized—rather than mechanicalized—culture the Martians enjoyed. They were definitely telepathic, probably prescient, too. And the reason why Priipiirii frightens you so, seems so alive—"

"If you don't also feel he's alive, why use the present tense?"

"Hah?" The archaeologist's jaw sagged against his facepiece.

"All right!" Hartwick's voice interrupted brusquely. "The big question right now has nothing to do with whether this purple crayfish has horns or a forked tail. Down which of these five holes do you professors want to be led? The slope is getting sharper all the time, so we have to be twice as careful as a trip to Mercury. And if we meet any reincarnations, Boule, don't forget that you, Lutzman, and Punnello each have deadly little kazoos in your mitts, and I'm carrying a bazooka."

I only wish you weren't holding
any
sort of rocket weapon, Boule,
he added to himself.
Talk like that in a place like this!

The archaeologist turned to Lutzman. "Considering the one-sided sensory orientation of the architects, I think we might as well continue bearing hard to the left. Seems correct, up to now."

"Left?" Lutzman turned from a frowning examination of a mural depicting Priipiirii swimming twistedly in a canal—the back of his thorax and the front of his abdomen submerged. "Not necessarily if—"

They all spun round as the hideous clatter began in their rear. The bioareologist stepped forward and squinted up the incline that slanted past multitudinous passageways to the desert surface.

"It's Bhishani!" he shouted. "Must have fallen through the trapdoor and couldn't get to his feet in time!"

Hartwick wasted a quick glance for the sake of certainty at the limb-threshing figure rolling toward them like a compact avalanche. "Get over to the wall!" he yelled. "If he hits us—"

He ran to his right, dragging Boule with him, while Lutzman and Punnello scrambled to the opposite side. Before either pair could correct their error, the Hindu archaeologist bounded into the taut cable connecting them across the tunnel and snapped them around him in a churning conglomeration of bodies.

They bounced hurtfully through the center corridor, ricocheted against a slanting wall, and crashed agonizingly to rest upon four red idols on the floor of a spherical room.

Hartwick was on his feet first, testing his suit for leaks and using muscle-flexes to determine if any of his bones were broken. Finding nothing, he reached down and angrily turned Bhishani on his back. "Do you realize what you've done?"

The assistant archaeologist's face sickened to blue under its smashed visor. "Felt a tug on the line," he gasped thinly into his headset. "Lifted trapdoor—leaned over—slipped—not my fault—why did you tug on—" His throat rattled in the almost airless cold.

"Hey, Lutzman!" the guide snapped at the Martian biologist, who was groaning himself into an upright position. "Fast! Help me work his headscreen over the crack in the visor."

Together, they tugged at the round piece of metal at the top of the helmet. The headscreen, too, had been bent by the fall. It was stuck tight. Hartwick abruptly stopped working on its broken hinges and tore it out of place. He fitted it rapidly around the visor and snapped the emergency clips into position. But by the time he saw the rip in Bhishani's oxygen tank, the man's body had relaxed out of life.

"Poor guy," Boule muttered. "Gone just like that."

Punnello was also on his feet. "Perhaps—some of our oxygen—"

"Not a chance," the guide told him. "Mars is too fast for you."

"I can't understand how he felt a tug on the line. If any of us pulled at it, the others would have noticed."

"Work it out tomorrow," Hartwick invited. "Meanwhile, the only way we can be sure of getting out of this lunatic maze is by following the cable while it still reaches to the surface. Let's go!"

He started for the tunnel opening where the wire lay slack, his companions following.

The line was piled inside the tunnel mouth, coil upon scrambled coil!

"Bhishani must have torn it loose when he fell in," Lutzman almost squeaked. He regained control of his voice. "And the desert wind blew it down."

Hartwick nodded and kept going. "It's still roaring. You can feel the rattle of sand on your visor. We can find the trapdoor that way."

He stopped a moment later as the wind disappeared. "Trapdoor must have been blown shut. But the sand makes a track."

The winding path of sand drifted down casually, lazily—but completely. It went past them into the room of four idols and collected in little piles upon the harsh stone floor. Ahead of them, they could see that the tunnels were perfectly clean under the glare of their helmet beams.

"You can't call this an accident," Boule began in a high voice.

"Shut up! I think I can remember the turns we took. We simply reverse them going back. Let's keep moving before it gets hazy."

With Hartwick leading, they raced up the weirdly offshooting corridors in their ungainly spacesuits. Their helmet lights made the rapidly successive friezes of the temple's god seem like a jerky motion picture. Suddenly, the guide slowed to a walk.

"What's the matter?" Punnello gasped from the rear.

"No slope. It's gone level, and we should still be climbing."

They came round a curve in the tunnel—and into the spherical room. Bhishani's body lay near one of the idols. Piles of sand...

One by one, they filed in. Boule said huskily, "A circle."

Hartwick rang a fist against his open metal palm. "Look," he said at last. "Maybe I'm hearing the flutter of bat wings in my bell tower, but I have the odd idea that the maze was rearranged."

"Obviously," Punnello nodded. "The gradient which was present everywhere when we came down has disappeared. But I suggest—and for other reasons than because that way madness lies—that we temporarily gloss over that explanation of our failure to escape—er, to reach the trapdoor. I suggest we concentrate on things like routes."

"It does seem—" the bioareologist cleared his throat. "No."

Boule walked over to the four idols and examined the table at which they sat. "Saea! They're playing a game of saea.
Saea!
"

Hartwick, having observed him remove his kazoo from its holster, unslung his bazooka cautiously. "Know anything about saea, docs?" he asked, his eyes on the photographer. "Does it help?"

"Not very much," Punnello said slowly as he too looked down at the odd altar. "Directions for play have been deciphered in every Martian ruin, but it's a little too rich for our cerebral blood. The rules are a cross between chess and the Japanese game of Go, with the addition of crevices where pieces can be held out of play for a varying number of moves. Why a sculptured problem in saea, now?"

Lutzman moved up. "And do you notice who the players are? Our old friend Priipiirii—all four of him!" He swept an arm around at each enormous scarlet idol. "Masculine, feminine, hermaphrodite, neuter."

"Red's the Martian color of death, isn't it?" the guide inquired.

Punnello nodded abstractedly. "And life. In fact, the combination of the two expresses it better. Here, perhaps—Suppose we work on less metaphysical subjects. Much safer, at the moment."

They agreed rather hastily. Hartwick drew a stylus and a sheet of recordio film from his flank canister; the four of them squatted on the floor near the body of the assistant archaeologist and discussed the matter of routes. They argued about each turn they had taken until they were all convinced of each one. The guide copied the list backwards, in the order which they would come across the intersections while returning. Then, they left the room again, carefully reversing each change of direction.

Fifteen minutes later they were back. They discussed the list, made a few alterations and once more left through the tunnel in which the cable was piled.

The sixth time they came back, Hartwick scaled the sheet of recordio out into one of the tunnels. It spun away, drifted easily back, and floated to the floor.

"One last idea," he said. "This
has
to work."

"What's the use?" Boule demanded. "Let's admit what we're all thinking and really get someplace."

Hartwick tightened his grip on the bazooka. "I don't know," he said with a grim attempt at humor. "Are we all thinking?"

The archaeologist shrugged. "We start with the premise that we are the first humans in this temple, and that no humans on Mars have any desire to do us harm."

"Check," the guide told him softly. "Just carry that ball, doc."

"We accept, though on less evidence, that there are no extrasolar creatures operating here, since there was no indication of this site being disturbed and no one has previously observed such creatures in the system. Furthermore, there is no race in the system, other than humanity, which possesses intelligence. Finally, for almost a hundred thousand years, the only animal life which has existed on Mars is the extremely primitive polar beetle. Therefore, the tugging at the line, the death of Bhishani, the loss of the wire path to the surface, all of our difficulties—including the apparent rearrangement of the labyrinth—may be laid to mechanical contrivances which the temple's builders left behind them out of viciousness or religion.

"Such contrivances are not rare in Terrestrial temples, especially of this type. However, we have the fact that Martians tended more to things intellectual—the esthetic and philosophical, say—than to material enterprise. All that we have seen on Mars supports this view: it would seem to be accentuated among this particular people, where, with the exception of the trapdoors, not one remotely mechanical device has been observed. And if you add the almost sentient malevolence with which we have been frustrated,
logic
leaves only—"

"Only what?"

"Priipiirii," Lutzman finished very gently for the archaeologist. "Priipiirii, an evil deity."

"Well, I'll be—I've been sitting on that notion like crazy, but I never thought a bunch of scientists could swallow it!"

"Reject the implausible," Punnello intoned as if the words were a hymn, "and what is left is the plausible."

"It's true, isn't it?" the photographer demanded. "You feel he's alive, he's near us, don't you?"

Hartwick looked from one helmeted face to the other, his beam stabbing three separate times around their heads to the curved walls. Then he sat down.

"All right. I'll admit I believe it. But why should I?"

"Well," the archaeologist sank his head on his chest and minced a tiny, meditative circle. "It has been suggested that the powers ascribed to some of the Terrestrial deities really existed, at one time or another, in some form or another; that the very act of widespread belief in a particular god called forth
something
like that god with
some
of his powers on a
temporary
basis. Now, generally, this theory may well be grit for the herds; but here, where you have a race intellectualized out of all human conception, that had achieved a philosophical level higher than the scientific one we may reach in a thousand years, a race that had telepathy, possibly prescience of a sort, and various mental facets outside the scope of our imagination—such a race might well create a living god from its collective mind. A sort of racial super-
id
."

"But why would they need a god? With all that mental equipment, I just can't see them praying exactly."

"Prayer and sacrifice, and the granting of favors thereby, is only one of the uses of a divinity. He can fill certain psychological needs which the race may even recognize as such. For example, the warlike inhabitants of Asgard rarely gave boons to suffering Norsemen; they carried on a constant heaven-shattering warfare, however, in the last great battle of which humanity was merely an inconsequential ally. They typified the precarious, bloody existence of the race which had conceived them: they were satisfactory."

"I see that. But how did we get Priipiirii into the psychic flesh again?"

"By thinking about him, by believing in him. Those wall friezes were probably not designed for that purpose, but seeing them helped solidify our mental pictures of the god. I think Boule was the first affected, since it was his job to take photos of the most significant sculptures. All of us were slightly, as these people knew how to pack an esthetic wallop—but Boule most of all. When he came to believe that Priipiirii was alive—well, Bhishani felt a tug on the line."

Hartwick exhaled against his visor. "Okay, I'll ride along. But we have a little problem of diminishing oxygen. We do what?"