Part 2

When he tripped upon a rotted balk of timber and pitched headlong to the sand he did not know. For a moment he lay there, unmoving. Then, with a sigh, he attempted to rise, but exhaustion swept over his relaxed body in a shuddering flood and he sank back, asleep almost before he touched the sand.

It was the growing heat of the sun that awakened him, well past mid-day. Dull, lack-lustre eyes opened and stared unseeingly upward. Grimy, wasted hands twitched weakly upon the sand. A faint breath like a sigh crept between the cracked and swollen lips.

* * * * *

It was minutes later, as he instinctively groped for his friend's spear to lay across his chest as had those others ere they died, that Thorne came to realize he could not see the sun. Hot, dusty radiations danced about over his head, and glimmering motes hung in the shadowy depths beyond his weakened vision, but somehow, faintly, the realization of shadow crept over his worn-out consciousness. With the realization came a slowly growing perception of light as he focused his eyes upon the tapering, unbelievable mass of the gigantic monolith looming over him.

Three thousand feet it leaped into the Martian sky, a ragged, broken tower of grey-white stone, turreted with fantastic decay, eroded and pitted by the storms and dust of twice ten thousand years.

He turned his head. Beyond it loomed another, only slightly less massive, but far more eroded. Here and there, standing in a rough semi-circle, other towers reared their broken heads into the brassy bowl of the sky, mere shattered heaps of dusty rubble.

Slowly Thorne sat up. He was huddled at the base of the tallest monument atop a sloping pile of broken sand and shards drifting down from the decaying walls. Beneath him long gray shadows of what had once been piers crept out into a low, extensive basin of sand, broken here and there by heaped mounds jagged with age-greyed timber.

"Ships!" he whispered. "By all the Krue of Mars, ships!"

He dragged himself upright. A glance behind him showed him the futility of hope. The tremendous edifice at whose base he had fallen had ages since crumbled within itself until, collapsing inward, it had fused into one solid pillar of worn masonry and powdered sand. The others were even less preserved, but wrecked, shattered, decaying as they were, there remained about their hoary turrets a splendor so great he instinctively straightened his weary form. In the presence of so magnificent a declaration by man, he took on a new dignity worthy of their unyielding might.

* * * * *

Here, then, lay one of those ancient citadels of a long-gone race, the ancestors of the silent, peaceful Martians of today. A teeming metropolis of the North, it had shrunk and perished with the death of the drying seas whose disappearance had all but ruined the once-green planet, leaving up the blowing sands its gigantic bones in grisly memory of what once had been. And here, among these empty monoliths, Thorne knew at last he had come to the end of the spaceman's trail. He would go no farther.

Well, for such as he it should not be unwelcome. He took his hand from the powdery wall and weakly shook his head. It was a tedious business, this dying.

What it was that drew him out of the shadow and down the slope he never knew. Perhaps it was the numb indifference of despair, perhaps only the last, momentary flicker of that indomitable curiosity which had drawn the Earthman adventuring across the world and now flings it light-years wide over the Solar System. It served, nevertheless, to draw him wearily down from the rubble beneath the gigantic tower into the low basin which had been the tight harbor of this long-gone city of Mars. Automatically he trudged onward, to bring up presently before one of the low mounds dotting the harbor floor.

It had been a ship, he knew. What forgotten wood made up its mouldering bones to outlast the crumbling stone of its home port he did not know, nor greatly care. There had been so many great and wonderful things on Mars forgotten long since by the sad, wistful remnants of her dying peoples.

Lean, broken ribs thrust upward rudely through the golden sands, wooden-pegged planks still clinging forlornly to their splintered shafts. There had been metal, too ... copper, bronze, iron bolts, and silver trim on the poop. All had long since been looted by the wandering desert tribes who wandered furtively through these tremendous monuments of their forgotten past.

From mound to mound Thorne trudged with a weary indifference. As well to die thus on his feet as face up in the sun. For die he must. Water there was none, and the only vegetation an occasional low death-bush with utter agony buried in its flat, leprous leaf-pads. A cluster of brilliant t'ang sprays glittered savagely in the shady lee of a shattered wreck, and Thorne shuddered.

Here, too, death crept in wait, a death already fastened fang-deep in his sodden, pain-wracked body from a score of dingy Vulhan t'ang-hells. But what odds? The death from those dark and crimson fruits was quick and terrible, perhaps, but only quicker than the fate already lying in his veins. Let there be an end, even to this aimless wandering.

Slowly Thorne walked up to the bush. There were many, growing in strange luxuriance along the dust-worn flanks of an ugly wreck half-buried in the sand. Other wrecks flanked it, three of them, lean, wicked skeletons of ancient Martian fighting ships, one with her broken prow yet buried in the freighter's bulging side. He touched the nearest plank and it drifted into powdered dust beneath his fingers, leaving a round hole in the grey wall. Again he put his hand through the ship's side. Another hole was puffed out as cleanly as by a dis-ray.

Curiosity stirred in him once more. Picking up a stone, he broke open the wreck's side, bring down the entire flank in an almost soundless crash of powdering timbers and dissolving decks. The hold, pierced upon the farther side by the ram of the dead warship which had undoubtedly sunk the two of them, lay open to the sunlight, barred by the ragged shadows of the broken stern works.

"Jars," muttered Thorne. The hold had been packed to the deck with fat, yet not ungraceful clay jars eight feet high and three wide. He lurched through the opening he had made.

"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," he mumbled. Maxfield Parrish jars, Oriental and sinister enough to have held a pair of the ancient robber band. He patted one, and weak though the blow was, the jar dissolved into drifting mist.

Thorne stared.

Preserving the graceful shape of the vanished jar, a beautiful block of some golden amber substance stood twinkling among its fellows. He pounded another jar. It, too, shuddered into misty dust, leaving its petrified contents, blazing like tawny fire in the Martian sun. Down the long row Thorne went, poking and kicking. Jar after jar dissolved, leaving a shimmering stack of solid amber blocks shaped with inhuman perfection to the mound of the clay in which for countless forgotten centuries they had been petrifying beneath the dying seas and deserts. Incredibly hard and smoother than glass, their sleek flanks ripped and gleamed, shimmering in the bars of sunlight slanting down through the rotted deck. But other than these, the ship lay bare and lifeless.

"Frozen oil," mumbled Thorne, turning away at last. Even had he been able to melt and eat the stuff, the thought of prolonging life had become insupportable. Weakly he stumbled toward the broken wall he had pushed in to enter. Here there was naught for him, but beyond, in the shadows, lay the deadly t'ang and its berries. Well, it had begun this ghastly Odyssey and it was fitting it should end it in the only way it could be ended.

He groped in the shadows for his spear. Lifting it, he thrust a plank into drifting dissolution, clearing a way out. For a moment, staring at the sunlight beyond the opening, he did not see. Then his eyes were drawn to the blade of his spear as it sagged in his lax grasp, for, resting on the sand within the ship's overcast, it gleamed with a strange radiance. White fire blazed intermittently along its wide, polished blade.

* * * * *

Thorne frowned. He lifted the blade. In the sunlight the light dancing on his spear became white-hot, intolerable. He thrust it back into the shadows where a broken bit of deck overhung the ruined hold. A shattering blaze of cold, blue-white light blasted along the hammered steel, casting its eery radiance upon Thorne's bearded, dusty face in a wild dance of light and dark. It gleamed madly in his mad, staring eyes. It shook like flame in his trembling hands, then fell like a shooting star upon the dusty sands as the weapon sagged from his relaxing grip. Slowly Thorne pivoted, his wild eyes fixed in awed amaze upon the rows and heaps of amber jars lying in such glowing luster among the fallen wreckage of the deck he had shattered. Sunlight ran and danced mockingly along their smooth flanks, sparkled and blazed with a fierce glow upon curve and highlight. He dropped his eyes to the fallen spear, blazing like a meteor in the dusk, half-buried in the sand, then lifted them again to the fabulous wealth lying before him.

"Vadirrian oil!" he whispered, choking.

Steel-hard, imperishable, the few fragments of the ancient oil of the Vadirrian tree which had been such a common article of commerce in the olden days commanded today a price so astronomical men were made wealthy for life through the discovery of a mere pinhead scrap or drifting grain. Radio-activated through the ages by the action of Mar's inner core, it had come to mean salvation in scores of the terrible new plagues introduced among the planets by the advent of space-travel. There were perhaps no more than six to eight ounces in the hospitals of the entire Universe at the present time, worth over three hundred and sixty billion credits. Here, in perfect condition, lay sixty tons.

He had come into the desert seeking death and the release it brought; he had found fortune inestimable. The irony of his plight brought a wry, bitter smile to his cracked lips, for, after all, he could hardly be said to have been cheated of his earlier aim. Fortune or none, death sat grinning at him from the broken timbers of the ancient ship, gleaming from the petrified oil still in its original shape from jars now dust and less than dust. Without food or water, he stood already dead and nothing here in the shadows could save him from the inexorable end he had so persistently sought.

Thorne stumbled from the freighter and stood once more in the hot, bright Martian sunlight. The giant tower of the deserted city loomed behind him, but he did not look that way. He stared a moment at the blade of his spear, faintly gleaming even in this bright glare, then all around him at the rolling desolation which had once been the proud, rich harbor of the great city now mouldering in silence along the powdered quays behind him. There was no life.

Blindly he moved away, scuffing through the sand. The excitement of his find wore down and the griping pangs of torment again seized and wrenched at him. Yet it was not with the same aimless shamble with which he had entered the sunken harbor bowl that he left it, but, instinctively, he found himself trying to follow his own plainly marked trail across the shallow sand hills. He might make it.

He did not, of course. Weakened and broken by his long, waterless march into the desert, sapped by his own excesses, he followed his trail for mile after mile until it blurred and spun before his eyes and melted at last into one blinding haze of flaming Martian heat. The trail vanished, though he did not know he had wandered from it. Presently he knew nothing but that, somehow, he must keep going on and on. Why, he could no longer remember, but the dim, instinctive urge was there and served to motivate him when he would have fallen to die with the others over whose mummies he more than once stumbled.

The hunger was the worst. The terrible ravages of t'ang had somewhat blunted his need for liquids, but he still could starve. Yet here and there upon his way he chanced on little bushes and clumps of plants, thick-leaved, leprous, yellow and blue and horrid purple, essence of poisonous death to all things Terrestrial or Martian.

Here and there, also, he encountered dried mummies or the skeletons of such weird Martian life as had succumbed to hunger and tasted the spiny death blooming across the desert sands. And there were t'ang bushes, heavy with the bright red and purple berries whose fermented juice had wrought him such deadly havoc. Thorne stared dully, conscious of the fitness of things which set these horrors blooming only in such fatal wastelands.

He moved on and on, his eyes aching to the ceaseless play and counterplay of mirages and kindred phantoms that swept the changing landscapes like magic lanterns. Again and again he found himself walking into the streets of a dead city, or perhaps one peopled by living beings. But even as his feet touched the cobbled walks the phantom dissolved and he plunged into a marsh that vanished as quickly when he bent to taste the water splashing about his torn feet. It was the final blow and he went down heavily and lay sprawled there on the powdery, dusty slope where no marsh had lain for ten thousand years.

* * * * *

An hour later he wearily opened his eyes. The sun was lower, but the heat and pain had not lessened perceptibly. A hundred feet away a little copse of t'ang bushes flowered gracefully in thin sprays of twig and serried little fruit arching up and out like frozen fountains of death. Thick-leaved, monstrous cactus plants crouched in the scanty shade flung by the taller t'angs. Cruel rows of gleaming spines thrust outward belligerently, as though there were creatures even on waterless Mars mad enough to rend and tear their poisonous flesh for the pitiful moisture distilled from her lean breast. He grinned weakly and began crawling forward. Mirages, at least, need no longer haunt his wheeling brain.

He ate the plants. Stripping the t'ang bushes of their scarlet, bursting rows, he gobbled down the berries like peanuts. It no longer mattered that death salted the repast. But here, deep in the desert, the berries were dry and flat, insufficient for his need. Recklessly he tore open the broad-leaved plants at his feet, slicing and ripping their hideous flesh with his spear, and gulping great chunks of the dripping pulp as avidly as though he ate in silken Kyra, the pleasure dome on Io. No plant escaped him.

He destroyed them all, eating what he would of their softer hearts. When he had wiped out the little group, he lurched onward to another, and another, sampling each and devouring many to their very roots. Although he had eaten enough pulped death to destroy a city, the counter-action of varying poisons neutralized each other for a while, but he could not go on forever.

Within an hour, as he stumbled on, revived for the moment by this foul repast, the pains struck him down as though by lightning, stiffening his weakened body from head to toe in a fiery spasm. A great ball of flame burst in his belly and spread scintillating all through his frame until he screamed aloud and made no sound in the doing, until he twitched and writhed no more, until he lay at last in the cooler shades of night ... a limp, white thing across an ancient dune of Martian sand, one more thing for the quiet, dreaming desert to claim and softly fold away in her drifting dust with other remnants of the past.

* * * * *

But Geoffrey Thorne was not of the past. That he was of the present, and not good, he became painfully aware some time later. There was a low humming, drumming roar in his ears, and the bed on which he lay vibrated softly. He did not open his eyes. Here was another mirage, and a cruel one. He had not thought to die dreaming of the old days when Geoffrey Thorne was among the great ones of the space-world. He lay in a rocket bunk--and the ship was in motion.

A hard, rough hand shook his shoulder. "Ye're awake, lad." The voice, like the hand, was hard, yet not unkind. It was strangely familiar and he opened his eyes. The grizzled face staring down at him broke into a short, choppy smile. "Easy lad, easy. Just lie still."

"Captain Fraser!" Thorne mumbled. "Joy Fraser ... how ... am I on your ship?"

"Sure, sure, Thorne." Fraser patted his shoulder. "Ye're on the _Moonfire_, an hour out of Vulhan City. I'll get ye to a hospital quick as I can."

"Hospital? What hospital? I feel--ghaaaa!" Thorne fell back heavily, gagging, as he remembered the incredible miscellany he had been gnawing just before it had struck him down in agony. Death-agony, he had thought, but yet--apparently....

"Ye're ghostly, lad," rumbled the long-faced Scotchman, pushing down the impatient derelict. "Were ye lost long in the sand?"

"I don't know. A long time ... a long ... time...." Thorne lay still for a while, his hand over his eyes.

There was a strange, puzzled look in Fraser's eyes as he watched the man who had once been his friend. Jeff Thorne had been among the best of five worlds, and now....

"Could I get ye anything, lad?" he asked, gently. The other shook his head.

"I feel all right," he said, finally. "Dead-tired, but all right."

"Pumped water into ye," Fraser grinned. "Soaked ye in it. Ye lay in ma bath near five hours, out and all. Does wonders up here."

"You must have worked miracles, Joy," acknowledged Thorne, wonderingly. "What did you do? I know I was dying."

The rocket captain looked down, flushing miserably. He picked at a fleck on his purple tunic.

"Well, lad, you know ... we hear things in the trade. I knew ... you drank t'ang. So I remembered I had a bottle. Stuff in the armory for trading, ye remember. You had half a glass."

Thorne smiled wryly. "Yes? Thanks, Fraser. You took a risk, dispensing the stuff without a permit, but the patient--" His eyes widened and he came suddenly to his elbow, disregarding Fraser's attempt to thrust him down in the bunk again. "Half a glass, you said?"

"Sure, lad. That's all." He looked anxiously at the bearded derelict. "Ye don't mean it was too much?"

"No, no, nothing like that," Thorne waved aside the other's troubled protest, his brows knitting. He had had more than that before, but even to stronger men than himself such a dose meant stunned, broken stupor that might well last from two to four days. Yet he felt nothing.

"Fraser, when you found me, where was I?"

"Out cold on a sand-hill, lad. O'Leary spotted you from the engine room as we sailed by. Ye had a Martian spear ... and something else I want to talk to you about later."

Thorne did not catch the other's meaning, but pressed on. "There was no city near?"

"City!" Fraser stared. "Ye mean ... oh, ye mean a deserted city, eh? No, there was no city. No cities in those parts to my knowledge. Mirage country, ye know, lad. One o' them?"

"Could you remember--were there plants near me--Martian desert plants like cactus--maybe t'ang bushes?"

"Can't say, Thorne. None right near ye, anyhow. Just clear sand. Why?"

"Could you find the spot again?"

"Sure. Right in the log. Aimin' to go back?"

"Perhaps ... some day. But you don't understand, Joy. Those plants ... I had been eating them."

Fraser started back in horror, coming to his feet as his stool clattered across the smooth steel floor. "But my Lord, man ... them things is fatal! One nibble and ye're a cooked goose!"

"I know. I've seen men who died that way, and I wanted to go out as quickly. I couldn't take it any more. But I ate everything--all colors and all the tastes you could find in your foulest nightmares. I even ate the t'ang berries. Am _I_ dead?"

"Lord knows why you ain't, lad!"

"I know I ate the things, Joy. But that's not what I meant. Perhaps the things counteracted themselves in me, I ate so many. I meant the t'ang."

"You--it didn't affect you!" Fraser eyed his patient in growing astonishment. There were no indications Thorne had sopped up a heavy dose of the lethal drug.

"No. I feel nothing. Just like I'd had a good sleep, though I'm still worn out and weak. Dead tired and hungry, but I have no thirst. And my craving for the stuff is classic, Joy."

"I've heard that, lad." Fraser shook his head, remembering the wild tales.

"I don't _want_ a drink, Joy!"

* * * * *

Thorne struggled to a seat on the edge of the bunk, unshaven, his hair brush-wild, his eyes red and rheumy, a derelict to the soles of his torn boots. Yet he did not want a drink, he whose passion had been drink, whose only joy and only thought had been drink until it had swept him from the heights to such depths that even a Martian refused longer to shelter him and sent him forth into the desert to find death.

"Maybe ye've just been numbed," suggested Fraser. "I gave ye half a glass, I told ye."

"It should have laid me out cold."

"Anyone else it would," returned Fraser, somewhat brutally. "You been lapping it up so thick you might be a little immune, ye know. I took the chance."

"It wouldn't have made any difference if I had been laid out another day or two, anyhow," Thorne returned, as brutally. "I might be getting a little thick. I could take more than I could at first. But I wanted it just as bad, or worse. Now I don't want it. Have you any left?"

"Most of the bottle."

"May I have a glass?"

Fraser snorted, his Scotch coming through almost visibly. "Don't want it, eh?" He pulled a squat, green bottle from the wall cabinet beside the bunk. "Just how big a glass, Mr. Thorne?"

"Full."

He filled the glass and handed it in stony silence to the ex-pilot. Thorne took it and looked into the turgid green depths. He smelled the sweet, cidery odor. He passed it to and fro under his nose. No reaction. Nothing.

"It's just water, Joy." He looked up at Fraser, wide-eyed, grinning.

"It's high-test Royal Seal," retorted the freighter captain. "It cost me plenty and you know it."

"Yes, but--to me--me, the biggest sot on Mars--it's just water! No taste, no smell, no nothing." He lifted the glass to his lips. There was a short pause. Slowly he lowered his hand, a glare of madness in his eyes. Fraser drew back, but, fascinated, made no effect to interfere.

"It's still ... water, Joy. Water. Tastes like water, smells like water. The stuff doesn't affect me at all." He flung up his hand, gulping down the terrible t'ang like mad, spilling it down his stubby chin and staining his rags a dirtier color than before. Only when the last drop had vanished did he lower the glass, and Fraser, watching in amazement, saw that no tinge of exhilaration swayed his patient. A thimblefull of the stuff would set off a jag in an ordinary man that made a whiskey-drunk look like an ice-cream festival. Thorne, saturated with the wicked juice, sat in quiet, deliberate possession of his every sense and faculty.

"I've had my drink, Joy. I didn't want it, except as I would want any drink when thirsty. I didn't taste a thing. I feel nothing." He stumbled erect, holding onto the upright of the bunk. "I'm tired, dead-tired. I could sleep a week. But I'm not drunk, Joy. I'm not drunk. I can't get drunk. Never again. I can't be poisoned. I'm saturated with poison. You'll have to shoot me to get rid of me, Joy."

"We don't want to get rid of you, Jeff." There were unaccustomed lines in the freighter captain's face and a softness which had not been there since he bade goodby to his children back on Earth five months ago. "We've hated to lose you. And now you're back again, you want us to shoot you!"

Their hands met and wrung hard together. "Welcome back!" It was a pleasant thing for the derelict Thorne to hear once more. But he knew.