New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (7 page)

The girl, he saw, was angry. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a flat case. Her hands trembled as she opened it and took out a cigarette. She closed the case and tapped the cigarette against her thumbnail. A pencil of metal, pulled from the case, flared into flame.

She thrust the white cylinder between her lips and Kent reached down and took it away.

“Not here,” he said and smiled.

She flared at him. “Why not?” she asked.

“Atmosphere,” he said. “Neither Charley nor I smoke. Can’t afford to. The condensers are small. We don’t have too much current to run them. Two persons is the capacity of this igloo. Everything has to be figured down to scratch in this business. We need all the air we get, without fouling it with tobacco smoke.” He handed her the cigarette.

In silence she put it back in the case, returned the case to her pocket. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“Sorry I had to stop you,” Kent told her.

She rose. “Perhaps I had better go,” she said.

Charley’s jaw went slack. “Go where?” he asked.

“My canal car,” she said. “I left it about a mile from here. Went past your place before I saw the light.”

“But you can’t spend the night in a car,” protested Kent. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here.”

“Sure,” urged Charley, “we can’t let you go. Sleeping in a car is no picnic.”

“We’re harmless,” Kent assured her.

She flushed. “I wasn’t thinking of that,” she said. “But you said two persons was the capacity of the igloo.”

“It is,” Kent agreed, “but we can manage. We’ll cut down the heater current a little and step up the condensers. It may get a little chilly, but we can manage with air.”

He turned to Charley. “How about a pot of coffee,” he suggested.

Charley grinned, waggled his chin whiskers like a frolicsome billy goat. “I was just thinkin’ about that myself,” he said.

Ann set down the coffee cup and looked at them. “You see,” she explained, “it’s not just something I want to do myself. Not just some foolish whim of mine. It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that may help someone else—someone who is very dear to me. I won’t be able to sleep or eat or live, if I fail at least to try. You have to understand that I simply must go to Mad-Man’s Canal and try to find Harry, the Hermit.”

“But there ain’t no Harry, the Hermit,” protested Charley. He wiped the coffee off his beard and sighed. “Goodness knows, I wished there was, since you’re so set on findin’ him.”

“But even if there isn’t,” said Ann, “I’d at least have to go and look. I couldn’t go through life wondering if you might have been mistaken. Wondering if I should have given up so easily. If I go and try to find him and fail—why, then I’ve done everything I can, everything I could have expected myself to do. But if I don’t I’ll always wonder … there’ll always be that doubt to torment me.”

She looked from one face to the other.

“You surely understand,” she pleaded.

Charley regarded her steadily, his blue eyes shining. “This thing kind of means a lot to you, don’t it?” he said.

She nodded.

Kent’s voice broke the spell. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “You flew down from Landing City to Red Rock in a nice comfortable rocket ship, and now because you covered the hundred miles between here and Red Rock in a canal car, you think you’re an old-timer.”

He stared back at her hurt eyes.

“Well, you aren’t,” he declared.

“Now, lad,” said Charley, “you needn’t get so rough.”

“Rough!” said Kent. “I’m not getting rough. I’m just telling her a few of the things she has to know. She came across the desert in the car and everything went swell. Now she thinks it’s just as easy to travel the canals.”

“No, I don’t,” she flared at him, but he went on mercilessly.

“The canal country is dangerous. There’s all sorts of chances for crack-ups. There are all sorts of dangers. Every discomfort you can imagine. Crack your car against a boulder—and you peel off the quartz. Then the ozone gets in its work. It eats through the metal. Put a crack in your suit and the same thing happens. This atmosphere is poisonous to metal. So full of ozone that if you breathe much of it it starts to work on your lung tissues. Not so much danger of that up on the plateaus, where the air is thinner, but down here where there’s more air, there’s more ozone and it works just that much faster.”

She tried to stop him, but he waved her into silence and went on:

“There are the Eaters. Hundreds of them. All with an insane appetite for human bones. They love the phosphate. Every one of them figuring how to get through a car or a spacesuit and at the food inside. You’ve never seen more than a couple of Eaters together at a time. But Charley and I have seen them by the thousands—great herds of them on their periodic migrations up and down the canyons. They’ve kept us penned in our igloo for days while they milled around outside, trying to reach us. And the Hounds, too, although they aren’t so dangerous. And in the deeper places you find swarms of Ghosts. Funny things, the Ghosts. No physical harm from them. Maybe they don’t even exist. Nobody knows what they are. But they are apt to drive you mad. Just looking at them, knowing they are watching all the time.”

Impressive silence fell.

Charley wagged his beard.

“No place for a woman,” he declared. “The canal ain’t.”

“I don’t care,” said Ann. “You’re trying to frighten me, and I won’t be frightened. I have to go to Mad-Man’s Canal.”

“Listen, lady,” said Charley, “pick any other place—any other place at all—and I will take you there. But don’t ask me to go into Mad-Man’s.”

“Why not?” she cried. “Why are you so afraid of Mad-Man’s?”

She tried to find the answer in their faces but there was none.

Charley spoke slowly, apparently trying to choose his words with care. “Because,” he said, “Mad-Man’s is the deepest canal in this whole country. Far as I know, no man has ever been to the bottom of it and come out alive. Some have gone down part way and came back—mad and frothin’ at the mouth, their eyes all glazed, babblin’ crazy things. That’s why they call it Mad-Man’s.”

“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.

“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.”