Old Mars

In his lucid moments, he contemplated the balance and the contrast that were inherent in the meeting of Martians and Earthmen: One race was fading into its purple twilight just as the other was setting out to see what the bright day would bring.

Over the music, he could hear Bowman and some other men calling his name. He was disappointed. He’d thought that when they set off back to camp, they’d report him as missing and forget about him. People did wander off on Mars, never to be seen again. And he had not made any friends among the miners. They’d all seen him for the ugly duckling he was.

But, as he sat in the birds’ cave and thought about it, he recognized that they’d have had to come back to restart the machine. The morning after they’d left, he’d climbed aboard and thrown the big main switch that stopped it. The machine paused in its digestion of a house that stood halfway between the harbor and the gate. The land leviathan had been making substantial progress. Earthmen knew how to build reliable machinery.

But there were books to be gathered, and a few other objects that the Martians had left behind: masks, some children’s toys, items of clothing, a cup that might have been carved from alabaster. He’d wanted to bring them to the cave. But when he’d gathered all that he could find and returned to restart the miner, he found that he did not know how to set its controls to follow the transponder grid. So he had left it with its engine idling in neutral, knowing that Red Bowman would come out in the jeep to get it running again.

He had hoped that they’d think the miner had malfunctioned on its own, but the calling voices from outside the cave told him that the crew chief was not given to innocent explanations. Mather crept to the narrow mouth, which he’d made even harder to see by dragging prickle bushes into the cleft. Through the thin branches, he could see Bowman and the others. They were standing on a ridgeline, cupping their callused hands around their mouths to call his name. They had binoculars. They also had guns.

The men looked for him all day, but Mather remembered the Martian hunting skills he’d acquired from the memory-visions—that’s what he had taken to calling the phenomena—and he had no trouble avoiding capture. In the evening, the searchers climbed into the jeep and drove off across the empty sea. From the hills, he watched their dust plume hang in the air almost motionless, so slowly did the fine particles sift down in the lesser gravity and the windless Martian air.

When full darkness fell, he went down to the town. He had discovered that the lines incised into the walls of the houses performed a similar function to those graven into the sides of the cube. But, whereas the latter were memory-visions of public events, the ones in the houses were of private occasions. They were the Martians’ family photo albums.

At first, he had thought he should disable the machine completely, to save these intimate records. But after sampling several, he realized that they were all much the same: memories of births and deaths and unions, naming-day ceremonies, and other mundane rites of passage. But each was imbued with the same soft sadness that permeated the communal gatherings. These were not records taken from the middle of a community’s life but from its end. They were memorials, left by the long-ago Martians when they packed up their possessions, and, leaving the doors of their houses open, went away forever.

Red Bowman was not happy. He had a production schedule to fulfill. Having the automated miner standing idle because crazy Mather had interfered with its controls threatened the crew chief’s chances of winning the substantial bonus that would be due him if he delivered truckloads of bone fertilizer before the specified date. So when the jeep had gone far enough out across the seabed, he stopped it and got off, sending it on to base with the other men while he walked back along its vague track, trudging through the fine dust to the bone town.

Night fell before he got there, but he could see the white towers glimmering before him, occasionally lit by sparks and flashes as the tireless machine that was grinding its way through the walls encountered metal. But even if he’d been blind, Bowman could have found his way just by going toward the sound of the diesel engines. Or by the stench of its exhaust.

He came up the harbor steps and crossed the plaza. The sea beast’s image was almost completely defaced by the miner’s tracks. The behemoth’s mechanical growls faded as it turned a far-off corner in its programmed course, putting walls between it and the Earthman. Bowman used the lull to listen for sounds of Mather’s moving about the town. In a few moments, he heard something.