George Martin - Old Mars

It was a tall and narrow cave mouth, where the ground had parted a million years ago. But such was the lay of the land that the crevice was almost invisible unless viewed from a precise angle. The four men knew that angle, knew the chamber that widened behind the slit of the opening. In there, the birds would be sleeping, huddled together on the ground like a pool of banked embers, rustling and breathing together.

The four hunters crept to the mouth of the cleft, wire nets ready. Still in single file, they scraped backs and chests against the rough rock—it had been easier when they were boys—and eased into the cavern. Silently, breath abated, they ranged themselves around the sleeping quarry. Then, at a signal from the eldest, they cast their nets in a prearranged sequence.

The birds awoke as the first net fell, and rose up as one, swiftly bearing the wire mesh aloft. But the second net fell, its edges weighted, and the birds’ upward motion slowed. Then came the third net, and the fourth. Weighed down, the overlapping meshes too dense to escape through, the creatures settled back to the floor with a mournful sound.

Elated, the hunters carefully brought the borders of the nets together, made a bundle whose gathered mouth they briskly tied with metal cords.

The birds, pressed into a sphere, flowed rustling over one another, like a boiling sun of gold and red. The men used their weapons to widen the crevice, then gently bore the captive birds out into the sunlight. The creatures voiced their displeasure, but the hunters struck up the traditional hymn of consolation with its promises of respect and good treatment.

The birds quieted, whether soothed by the blandishments or lulled by the sonorous rhythm of the song. Where the white road left the hills and ran down to the town, the men stopped to order their garments and brush off any dust or detritus. Then they hoisted the netted birds over their heads like a collective halo, and, at a measured pace, made their triumphant return.

Before they were halfway to the spiral-pillared gate, the people were coming out to sing them home.

The song was still echoing in Mather’s mind when he came back to the here and now. He was not surprised to find himself outside the gate at the landward end of town. The shrunken sun was graying the Martian sky from somewhere behind the rumpled silhouette of the hills, making the road of crushed stone to shine ghostly at his feet.

This time, he did not even think to write any notes. He turned and walked slowly—he was unaccountably tired—through the dead town, back to the harbor plaza. Although he had not eaten or drunk in quite some time, he passed by the sandwiches and water can in the jeep without noticing them.

“He’s mostly just dehydrated,” said the roughneck who’d had first-aid training. “The air’s so dry here, if you forget to keep drinking, you can start to get woozy pretty fast.”

“Pour another cup into him,” said Bowman, “then put him in the shade.”

They’d found Mather facedown on the tiles of the harbor plaza when the truck carrying the mining machine arrived in the late afternoon of the second day. Now, as Bowman leafed through the notebook he’d found not far from the collapsed man, he knew why Mather hadn’t been answering his radio calls since the day before.

Most of it was illegible scribbles, but a few words stood out— communal, ritual, bonding —enough to confirm the crew chief’s long-held suspicion that Mather was another one of those longhaired intellectuals who got all Mars-struck and came out here thinking they’d find … What? Bowman had no idea what kind of foolishness filled a mind like Mather’s. And he didn’t want to.

He went to the top of the harbor steps and threw the notebook down toward where the mechanical behemoth’s front tracks were already finding purchase on the bottom riser. Black smoke belched from the machine’s exhaust as the operator goosed the throttle, and it began to climb, the bone steps cracking and powdering beneath grinding metal. The right-side track reached Mather’s book and shredded it.

Bowman watched to make sure the miner was coming on in the way it was designed to. When it reached the top, and its front end crashed down onto the tiles, shattering them, he ordered the operator out and climbed into the control compartment. The machine’s screen lit up, green on black, showing a gridwork based on bright points: the transponders Mather had placed, thankfully before he went outbacky-wacky, as Bowman had once heard an Australian desert prospector describe it.

The radio signals were all five-by-five. Bowman set the controls, stepped down from the cab, and watched as the great machine oriented itself and set to work. It labored over to the building nearest the harbor steps, deployed its heavy chain-link thrashers, and began to demolish the front wall in a spray of bone dust and chips.

“Looks good,” the crew chief said, shouting to his men over the noise of the automated miner. “Let’s get the jeep down here. I want to get back to base before it’s too dark. First drink’s on me.”

When they were all loaded and ready to go, he sent a man to fetch Fred Mather. But Mather was gone.

The silvery-paged books were not really books, Mather now knew. The raised hieroglyphic squiggles weren’t meant for the Martian eye but for Martian fingers. You ran the pads of the fingertips over the sinuous forms and out came, not text, but music. The songs formed in your head and played themselves out as you stroked the pages: all kinds of songs—from dancing tunes to soft ballads, from hymns to anthems, but each one tinged with a melancholic sweetness that he had come to associate with Martianness.

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.