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

Sleep at night in friendship, kill one another and flee from one another with the coming of the dawn. Law, they called it. Cave law. Here was one for the books, here was something that was not even hinted at in all the archaeological tomes that he had ever read.

And he had read them all. There was something here on Mars that fascinated him. A mystery and a loneliness, an emptiness and a retrogression that haunted him and finally sent him out to try to pierce some of that mystery, to try to hunt for the reason for that retrogression, to essay to measure the greatness of the culture that in some far dim period had come tumbling down.

There had been some great work done along that line. Axelson with his scholarly investigation of the symbolic water jugs and Mason’s sometimes fumbling attempt to trace the great migrations. Then there was Smith, who had traveled the barren world for years jotting down the windblown stories whispered by the little degenerating things about an ancient greatness and a golden past. Myths, most of them, of course, but some place, somewhere lay the answer to the origin of the myths. Folklore does not leap full-blown from the mind; it starts with a fact and that fact is added to and the two facts are distorted and you have a myth. But at the bottom, back of all of it, is the starting point of fact.

So it was, so it must be with the myth that told about the great and glowing city that had stood above all other things of Mars…a city that was known to the far ends of the planet.

A place of culture, Webb told himself, a place where all the achievements and all the dreams and every aspiration of the once-great planet would have come together.

And yet, in more than a hundred years of hunting and of digging, Earth’s archaeologists had found no trace of any city, let alone that city of all cities. Kitchen middens and burial places and wretched huddling places where broken remnants of the great people had lived for a time…there were plenty of these. But no great city.

It must be somewhere, Webb was convinced. That myth could not lie, for it was told too often at too many different places by too many different animals that had once been people.

Mars fascinated me, he thought, and it still fascinates me, but now it will be the death of me…for there’s death in its fascination. Death in the lonely stretches and death waiting on the buttes. Death in this cave, too, for they may kill me come the morning to prevent me killing them; they may keep their truce of the night just long enough to make an end of me.

The law of the cave? Some holdover from the ancient day, some memory of a now forgotten brotherhood? Or a device necessitated by the evil days that had come when the brotherhood had broken?

He laid his head back against the rock and closed his eyes and thought…if they kill me, they kill me, but I will not kill them. For there has been too much human killing on the planet Mars. I will repay part of the debt at least. I will not kill the ones who took me in.

He remembered himself creeping along the ledge outside the cave, debating whether he should have a look first or stick in the muzzle of his gun and sweep the cave as a simple way of being sure there would be nothing there to harm him.

I did not know, he said. I did not know.

A soft furry body brushed against him and a voice spoke to him.

“Friend means no hurt? Friend means no kill?”

“No hurt,” said Webb. “No kill.”

“You saw six?” the voice asked.

Webb jerked from the wall and sat very still.

“You saw six?” the voice was insistent.

“I saw six,” said Webb.

“When?”

“One sun.”

“Where six?”

“Canyon mouth,” said Webb. “Wait at canyon mouth.”

“You hunt Seven?”

“No,” said Webb. “I go home.”

“Other humans?”

“They north,” said Webb. “They hunt Seven north.”

“They kill Seven?”

“Catch Seven,” said Webb. “Take Seven to six. See city.”

“Six promise?”

“Six promise,” said Webb.

“You good human. You friend human. You no kill Seven.”

“No kill,” insisted Webb.

“All humans kill. Kill Seven sure. Seven good fur. Much pay. Many Sevens die for human.”

“Law says no kill,” declared Webb. “Human law says Seven friend. No kill friend.”

“Law? Like cave law?”

“Like cave law,” said Webb.

“You good friend of Seven?”

“Good friend of all,” said Webb.

“I Seven,” said the voice.

Webb sat quietly and let the numbness clear out of his brain.

“Seven,” he finally said. “You go canyon mouth. Find six. They wait. Human friend glad.”

“Human friend want city,” said the creature. “Seven friend to human. Human find Seven. Human see city. Six promise.”

Webb almost laughed aloud in bitterness. Here, at last, the chance that he had hoped might come. Here, at last, the thing that he had wanted, the thing he had come to Mars to do. And he couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t do it.

“Human no go,” he said. “Human die. No food. No water. Human die.”

“We care for human,” Seven told him. “No friend human before. All kill humans. Friend human come. We care for it.”

Webb was silent for a while, thinking.

Then he asked: “You give human food? You find human water?”

“Take care,” said Seven.

“How Seven know I saw six?”

“Human tell. Human think. Seven know.”

So that was it…telepathy. Some vestige of a former power, some attribute of a magnificent culture, not quite forgotten yet. How many of the other creatures in this cave would have it, too?

“Human go with Seven?” Seven asked.

“Human go,” said Webb.

He might as well, he told himself. Going east, back toward the settlements, was no solution to his problem. He knew he’d never reach the settlements. His food would run out. His water would run out. Some beast would catch him and make a meal of him. He didn’t have a chance.

Going with the little creature that stood beside him in the darkness of the cave, he might have a chance. Not too good a chance, perhaps, but at least a chance. There would be food and water…or at least a chance of food and water. There would be another helping him to watch for the sudden death that roamed the wilderness. Another one to warn him, to help him recognize the danger.

“Human cold,” said Seven.

“Cold,” admitted Webb.

“One cold,” said Seven. “Two warm.”

The furry thing crawled into his arms, put its arms around his body. After a moment, he put his arms around it.

“Sleep,” said Seven. “Warm. Sleep.”

Webb ate the last of his food and the Seven Venerables told him: “We care.”

“Human die,” Webb insisted. “No food. Human die.”

“We take care,” the seven little creatures told him, standing in a row. “Later we take care.”

So he took it to mean that there was no food for him now, but later there would be.

They took up the march again.

It was an interminable thing, that march. A thing to make a man cry out in his sleep. A thing to shiver over when they had been lucky enough to find wood and sat hunched around the fire. Day after endless day of sand and rock, of crawling up to a high ridge and plunging down the other side, of slogging through the heat across the level land that had been sea bottom in the days long gone.

It became a song, a drum beat, a three-note marching cadence that rang through the human’s head, an endless thing that hammered in his brain through the day and stayed with him hours after they had stopped for night. Until he was dizzy with it, until his brain was drugged with the hammer of it, so that his eyes refused to focus and the gun bead was a fuzzy globe when he had to use the weapon against the crawling things and charging things and flying things that came at them out of nowhere.