Clifford Simak - The Ghost of a Model T - And Other Stories

The six stood just at the firelight’s edge. The reflection of the flames touched their fur with highlights of red and blue and their bodies seemed to shimmer against the backdrop of the darkness on the desert.

“Venerables,” Nelson said to Richard Webb across the fire.

Webb’s breath caught in his throat. Here was a thing he had never hoped to see. A thing that no human being could ever hope to see.

Six of the Venerables of Mars walking in out of the desert and the darkness, standing in the firelight. There were many men, he knew, who would claim that the race was now extinct, hunted down, trapped out, hounded to extinction by the greed of the human sand men.

The six had seemed the same at first, six beings without a difference; but now, as Webb looked at them, he saw those minor points of bodily variation which marked each one of them as a separate individual. Six of them, Webb thought, and there should be seven.

Slowly they came forward, walking deeper into the campfire’s circle. One by one they sat down on the sand facing the three men. No one said a word and the tension built up in the circle of the fire while far toward the north the thing kept up its keening, like a sharp, thin blade cutting through the night.

“Human glad,” Wampus Smith said finally, talking in the patois of the desert. “He waited long.”

One of the creatures spoke, its words half English, half Martian, all of it pure gibberish to the ear that did not know.

“We die,” it said. “Human hurt for long. Human help some now. Now we die, human help?”

“Human sad,” said Wampus and even while he tried to make his voice sad, there was elation in it, a trembling eagerness, a quivering as a hound will quiver when the scent is hot.

“We are six,” the creature said. “Six not enough. We need another one. We do not find the seven, we die. Race die forever now.”

“Not forever,” Smith told them.

The Venerable insisted on it. “Forever. There other sixes. No other seven.”

“How can human help?”

“Human know. Human have Seven somewhere?”

Wampus shook his head.

“Where we have Seven?”

“In cage. On Earth. For human to see.”

Wampus shook his head again.

“No Seven on Earth.”

“There was one,” Webb said softly. “In a zoo.”

“Zoo,” said the creature, tonguing the unfamiliar word. “We mean that. In cage.”

“It died,” said Webb. “Many years ago.”

“Human have one,” the creature insisted. “Here on planet. Hid out. To trade.”

“No understand,” said Wampus but Webb knew from the way he said it that he understood.

“Find Seven. Do not kill it. Hide it. Knowing we come. Knowing we pay.”

“Pay? What pay?”

“City,” said the creature. “Old city.”

“That’s your city,” Nelson said to Webb. “The ruins you are hunting.”

“Too bad we haven’t got a Seven,” Wampus said. “We could hand it over and they’d lead us to the ruins.”

“Human hurt for long,” the creature said. “Human kill all Sevens. Have good fur. Women human wear it. High pay for Seven fur.”

“Lord, yes,” said Nelson. “Fifty thousand for one at the trading post. A cool half million for a four-skin cape made up in New York.”

Webb sickened at the thought of it, at the casual way in which Nelson mentioned it. It was illegal now, of course, but the law had come too late to save the Venerables. Although a law, come to think of it, should not have been necessary. A human being, in all rightness…an intelligent form of life, in all rightness, should not hunt down and kill another intelligent being to strip off its pelt and sell it for fifty thousand dollars.

“No Seven hid,” Wampus was saying. “Law says friends. No dare hurt Seven. No dare hide Seven.”

“Law far off,” said the creature. “Human his own law.”

“Not us,” said Wampus. “We don’t monkey with the law.”

And that’s a laugh, thought Webb.

“You help?” asked the creature.

“Try, maybe,” Wampus told them cagily. “No good, though. You can’t find. Human can’t find.”

“You find. We show city.”

“We watch,” said Wampus. “Close watch. See Seven, bring it. Where you be?”

“Canyon mouth.”

“Good,” said Wampus. “Deal?”

“Deal,” said the creature.

Slowly the six of them got to their feet and turned back to the night again.

At the edge of the firelit circle they stopped. The spokesman turned back to the three men.

“By,” he said.

“Good-by,” said Wampus.

Then they were gone, back into the desert.

The three men sat and listened for a long time, not knowing what they listened for, but with ears taut to hear the slightest sound, trying to read out of sound some of the movement of life that surged all around the fire.

On Mars, thought Webb, one always listens. That is the survival price. To watch and listen and be still and quiet. And ruthless, too. To strike before another thing can strike. To see or hear a danger and be ready for it, be half a second quicker than it is quick. And to recognize that danger once you see or hear it.

Finally Nelson took up again the thing he had been doing when the six arrived, whetting his belt knife to a razor sharpness on a pocket whetstone.

The soft, sleek whirr of metal traveling over stone sounded like a heartbeat, a pulse that did not originate within the fire-light circle, but something that came out of the darkness, the pulse and beat of the wilderness itself.

Wampus said: “It’s too bad, Lars, that we don’t know where to pick us up a Seven.”

“Yeah,” said Lars.

“Might turn a good deal,” Wampus said. “Likely to be treasure in that old city. All the stories say so.”

Nelson grunted. “Just stories.”

“Stones,” said Wampus. “Stones so bright and polished they could put your eyes out. Sacks of them. Tire a man out just packing them away.”

“Wouldn’t need more than one load,” Nelson declared. “Just one load would set you up for life.”

Webb saw that both of them were looking at him, squinting their eyes against the firelight.

He said, almost angrily: “I don’t know about the treasure.”

“You heard the stories,” Wampus said.

Webb nodded. “Let’s say it this way. I’m not interested in the treasure. I don’t expect to find any.”

“Wouldn’t mind if you did, would you?” Lars asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Webb told him. “One way or the other.”

“What do you know about this city?” Wampus demanded and it wasn’t just conversation, it was a question asked with an answer expected, for a special purpose. “You been muttering around and dropping hints here and there but you never came cold out and told us.”

For a moment, Webb stared at the man. Then he spoke slowly. “Just this. I figured out where it might be. From a knowledge of geography and geology and some understanding of the rise of cultures. I figured where the grass and wood and water would have been when Mars was new and young. I tried to locate, theoretically, the likeliest place for a civilization to arise. That’s all there’s to it.”

“And you never thought of treasure?”

“I thought of finding out something about the Martian culture,” Webb said. “How it rose and why it fell and what it might be like.”

Wampus spat. “You aren’t even sure there is a city,” he said disgustedly.

“Not until just now,” said Webb. “Now I know there is.”

“From what them little critters said?”

Webb nodded. “From what they said. That’s right.”

Wampus grunted and was silent.

Webb watched the two across the campfire from him.