Old Mars

While he waited for the coal, Kidd arranged the roots in the fire pit, bemoaning his fate. But by the time he’d placed the last root, Sexton and the coal had still not appeared. “Damn you, man,” he called over his shoulder, “what’s the delay?”

But Sexton did not reply, and was nowhere to be seen.

Sighing with exasperation at the easily distracted philosopher, Kidd rose and stalked into the next room, where he found Sexton standing by the coal pile with the half-filled basket at his feet, staring with great intensity at a lump of coal. “Surely,” Kidd snapped, “you can leave off your studies for five minutes for the sake of our supper?”

In reply, Sexton thrust the filthy thing into Kidd’s hands. “What think you of this?”

The black lump was not coal at all but wood covered in coal dust. The Martians used small fragments of wood as kindling; this lump was much bigger than those, nearly as large as a fist, but apart from that it was not unusual. “It’s wood,” Kidd said with a shrug. “What of it?”

“The rings, man! Look at the rings!”

Kidd rolled his eyes, then peered closer … and his heart began to race. “From the curvature … this must have come from a tree at least three feet in diameter.”

“Exactly!” Sexton pointed to several similar lumps in the cloth basket. “And these are the same. Yet there’s not a tree to be seen anywhere near here.” He picked up a chunk of wood and held it up between them. “We must discover their source!”

Kidd slogged to the top of a dune, surveying the horizon ahead through his telescope. “Nothing!” he called to Sexton. “Not a damned thing.”

Not awaiting a response, he headed back down the dune, his feet sending cascades of the fine, cold sand sliding toward where Sexton sat rubbing his feet.

The natural philosopher’s face showed vexation and exhaustion both. “I would have sworn that adjective he used indicated a distance of between two and ten miles.” He took a drink from his waterskin. “My water’s over half-gone. Perhaps we should turn back.”

Kidd looked back along the well-trodden track they’d followed for the past four hours, then forward to where it vanished around a curve. “You’re certain he indicated this path? And that he understood what you were looking for?”

Sexton shrugged. “It’s a pox’d difficult language.”

Kidd took a sip of water, shielding his eyes against the sun, and considered their situation. It was nearly noon, and all they’d seen in four hours of walking was endless sand and mineral formations that had once seemed exotic. Though his own waterskin was not as depleted as Sexton’s, he too was tempted to abandon this snipe hunt. Yet it was the only hope they had.

He stared out across the desert. So much like an ocean, yet red and dry and motionless. And, unlike the sea, with its constant rush of wind and wave, oppressively silent.

No … not quite silent. Could that be …?

“My feet are—” Sexton began.

“Hush!” Kidd snapped, and cut him off with a gesture.

Kidd listened hard. And heard a sound he’d not heard in many months.

Axes. Axes chopping wood. The sound had been hidden from them before by the noise of their own feet on the sand.

They hurried forward, around the curve, and soon found themselves on the edge of a canyon perhaps two hundred feet deep. They’d been only a few hundred yards from it and had not even suspected its existence. A sandy track, apparently carved from the canyon wall by Martians, switchbacked down from the desert’s surface. And at the bottom …

“My God,” Kidd said.

The bottom of the canyon was thick with trees. Enormous trees, a hundred or even a hundred and fifty feet tall, each honey-blonde trunk rose straight and smooth from the dark loamy floor to a single great tuft of foliage just below the canyon’s lip. Groups of Martians moved among them, tiny at the feet of these towering giants.

As they watched, one of the trees fell gently, slowly, to the canyon floor. The Martians leapt upon the fallen giant and began hacking it into tiny pieces with their axes.

“What in God’s name are they doing?” Kidd cried.

“The growing conditions at the bottom of this canyon must be nearly unique,” Sexton mused. “But, as we’ve seen, coal is plentiful here. Perhaps they are so accustomed to burning coal that they must cut their wood into coal-sized chunks.”

Kidd shook his head. “Prisoners of habit.”

While Kidd stared down into the canyon, Sexton paced excitedly. “I must determine how these trees survive in the midst of a desert!” he muttered. “This could be my life’s work!”

At that statement, Kidd’s eyes went wide, and his already-dry mouth grew drier still. These trees were the final piece in the puzzle of how to return to Earth, but if he returned without Sexton, he’d face the noose anew.

Furthermore, he realized, he’d grown rather fond of the silly goose.

“But Sexton,” Kidd said, placing an arm around the philosopher’s shoulders, “if you make of these trees your life’s work, who will help us to rebuild the ship? Surely there are improvements to be made in the design.”