Part 2

Electrical impulses touched the desert outside and rebounded to register on a dial the information that his distance from the ground was two thousand feet. He consulted another dial and found that the rocket was traveling a little more than eighteen hundred feet a second. Too fast. He cut it down to a thousand feet. Instruments were checked.

The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone chose this part of the planet to live on.

It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm, close companionship of their fellows.

He reached over and flicked the switch of the visor set in the nose of the ship for observation purposes. The scene revealed was as disappointingly prosaic to him now, as it had been when he had first seen it. It looked just as the mid-western deserts used to look before the Consul had turned them into fertile agricultural grounds, with one exception: the ground was as red as blood, even in the feeble light of the Martian moons.

There was a wind blowing, carrying the sand and the half-vegetable, half-animal "tumblies" along with it. But the wind always blew on Mars at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to the pole.

The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down, aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the engines.

The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect is as though something very vital had died.

Lawrence stood there trying to accustom his ears to the silence that claimed the ship, saving only the weep of the wind outside. And the wind became, in that moment, as all-pervading, as much a part of things as the rockets had been. The difference was that the rocket noise existed for only a brief while, and the wind had moaned out on those somber plains for--how many millions of years had it been?

He shook off the mood, drew on a light, electrically-heated suit with an oxygen container on the back. It completely covered every part of his body, and was especially designed for Mars, having two metaglass openings for his eyes and a voice amplifier just below it.

After that, he stepped out into the air-lock, the sound detectors catching the _whoosh_ of exhausted air, and the faint crunch of his weighted boots in the Martian sand.

The shack was of metal, neat and compact. One side of it bulged like a tin can in which a firecracker has exploded. He stumbled over something in the sand--but he did not look down. The ground was covered in spots with strange relics of a Martian civilization here in this desert.

In the early twenty-first century, during the rush of excitement over interplanetary travel, there had been many expeditions to this part of the planet. In fact, the shack in front of him was probably one of the Smithsonian's archaeological stations. It had been supposedly long-deserted, though he had evidence that it wasn't now.

The expeditions had accumulated enough evidence from the desert to prove conclusively that the Martians had been a highly civilized and advanced people; more advanced, probably, than Earth. There were ruins of great cities in the south of the planet that must have been there for over two million years. The Martians had built well. As to what had happened to them--that was a mystery that remained unsolved. There had been no evidence of warfare of any sort, and a few rare translations of even rarer books, indicated that the Martians had eliminated diseases and had, in their time, colonized the entire solar system with their people. But now there was only the weeping wind and the barren sand--nothing more.

He reached the door, twisted the handle on it. Having suspected that someone was inside, Lawrence was not surprised when it came open easily with a sharp creaking sound. It had been recently used, of course, since otherwise the years would have rusted it to the extent that the first man to open it again would have had to exert a great deal of strength. It was monometal, but everything except lead and a few beryllium alloys rusted in the Martian air.

He took a torch from his utility bag, and the soft but brilliant green of the portable Howard-Brazier fluorescent stabbed into the darkness and tore away the shadows. There was nothing in the path of the beam that he could see. Only the red dust on the wings of the restless wind.

He went in.

The door creaked shut behind him. A tiny air purifier made sighings somewhere like a big dog with asthma. There was a bare metal table. And that was all. A door led into another room. He walked into it. Silence, save for the moan of the deathless wind, crying outside.

It was dark in the room, with only the light of Deimos and Phobos shining into the glassite windows. He could just make out the darkness-shrouded bulks of shattered machinery in the corner. He pressed the button on his torch and the darkness fled in panic from the brightness of the light.

The whisper in his brain came then. "_Don't_...."

* * * * *

His flashlight clattered to the metal floor, and his hand was on his blaster. Then he cursed himself for a fool and retrieved his torch. He did not, however, turn it on again.

To be startled like that by mental telepathy was childish. It was something that every member of the Space Patrol had to master, and was an ability fairly common among intelligent people--many of whom practiced the art as something of a hobby. The only element of surprise was the fact that it was a strain on any ordinary man to project his thoughts that way, and speech was preferable when practicable. Still, there was no reason why anyone should not use telepathy if he wished.

"Who--" he began aloud, then shrugged and concentrated on thinking: "Who are you?"

"Speak aloud," came the thought. "It is easier for you, and makes your mental impulses clearer."

There is an individuality in thoughts, as well as in voices and faces. It occurred to Lawrence that the thought waves of this person were the clearest, the gentlest and the saddest of any he had ever encountered.

There was a clarity about them that was superhuman, that is associated with genius. And they were filled with a sorrow that transcended all human understanding. The sorrow of a dying race, of the shattered dreams of a billion years, the sorrow of the Wandering Jew alone on another planet and watching his own dissolve into cosmic dust--a sorrow beyond expression.

He found it dominating his soul, drowning him in a bitterness such as he had never dreamed possible.

Lawrence explained, "My instruments detected a steady stream of free gamma rays out in space, such as could only come from a ruptured atomic power source of some sort, and I flew down to ascertain if there had been an accident." He raised his voice a trifle over the wail of the desert wind. "Who are you?"

The brooding thought crept slowly into his mind, infinitely sad, infinitely weary.

"I am one who saw too far. It is no good for any being to go ahead of his fellows; to dream a greater dream and to find no reality in it. I had a machine, and it should have carried me outside, should have taken me above our lost visions to finer things. It did not. I thought I would climb to heaven. I descended to hell. How they have reversed our ancestors' prophecies, these metal masters of ours." His thoughts washed away in a tide of ultimate despair.

Lawrence's eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out the hammock in the corner of the room with the small form upon it. "You're hurt!"

He came forward, his bewilderment becoming concern. "Here, I'm one of the few men who still know something of medicine. Space Patrol men have to know in case the machines break down. Which," he grimaced, "happens about once in every four hundred years."

"_No!_"

The thought stopped Lawrence on the verge of tearing the threadbare cover off the figure on the cot and turning on his flash to examine it.

"Please," it came again, more gently, "I am dying. Believe me, there is nothing you or any other man or machine could do. And I do not care to live any more now; there is nothing to live for--now or for the rest of time."

Pieces of what seemed to be a pattern exploded in Lawrence's brain, and he turned white. Had this man used the disassembler, obtaining it by bribing some minor member of the little man's crew, and had he visited that far-off star and found that which doomed mankind's new hopes? The thought stunned him beyond thinking. That couldn't be true; it couldn't. This was man's last hope, his last stand, it was unthinkable that--

He felt within his brain, currents that were at first puzzled and then cleared.

"No--" and there was a smile in Lawrence's mind, a heartbroken, whimsical thing. "No, I have not been to that system you are thinking of; my journey has been elsewhere. And what I have seen has led me to destroy both my machine and myself." He was silent a moment, overwhelmed by disappointment.

Then, "Let me explain, please.

"In our world we know not happiness, have not known it for such a long, long time. The machines have taken over and there is no longer anything left--only the bare drabness of day after futile, empty day for all our lives. Some feel these things more than others, and the idealist, the dreamer, have suffered in this age more than any other person can conceive. We feel so much, so very, very much, and we long so hard for the little, insignificant things that make up beauty--for beauty is our life."

* * * * *

The wind outside sang a song of other days, of laughter and beauty, and the glorious fortress of mental and physical perfection that had been here. It spoke of the shining towers, and glistening ships that thundered above them.

Then it remembered and died slowly away, taking with it the red dust that drifted across the barren plains.

"Yes," said Lawrence, very softly. "Yes, I understand."

"Not quite," came the whisper in his brain. "You do not, cannot, quite understand. There are things you do not know."

Silence then. Except for the eternal wind and its companion, the dust.

"I disassembled my atoms," the explanation echoed unexpectedly in Lawrence's mind, "and selected a lonely place on another world where they were reassembled. I watched from afar, and there, too, it was the same. The machines. The uncertain, hurt look in people's eyes, and--their lack of purpose.

"I destroyed my machine and myself with it. That was best. There was nothing left for me, you see."

Lawrence stood up by the dusty televisor against the wall. There was infinite compassion and understanding in his voice. He said, "If only you had waited! If only you had known that another planet in another system had a place for us, instead of going elsewhere as you did--without thought or direction."

"There was thought and direction," said the mental voice. "It availed me nothing. Bury me, please, out there on the desert with the wind and sand. I would be with seekers like myself, knowing that their search is impotent, as was mine. Thank you for your good intentions and your kindness. Good-by, my friend."

The sense of rapport faded from Lawrence's brain, and he knew he was in the presence of death. The requiem of the wind sang for another lost thing now, and that was queerly fitting, somehow.

Then he knew! Knew that the being had indeed traveled to other than the little man's star system, and his heart cried out within him unbearably, though he stood still and numb. Knew it when he had picked up the other's hand to place it beneath the covering and had felt--three slender fingers.

The quest was ended.