Spade Hansen flung down his cards, with a gesture of annoyance. “That’s nothing to joke about, Kater.” He lowered his gruff voice. “Find anything in the logs, Andy?”
Andrew squatted, elbows on thighs, beside the big foreman. “Nothing but what we know already, Spade. It beats me. As near as I can figure out, Jack Norton’s expedition—he only had ten men—was washed up inside a week. Their rations are still cached over there. And, according to Kings-lander’s notebook, his outfit went the same way. They reached here safely, made camp, did a little exploring—they found the bodies of Norton’s men and buried them—then, one by one, they all went insane and shot each other. Twenty men—and within ten days, they were just twenty-corpses.”
“Pleasant prospect,” Kater glowered, slapping down his cards on the improvised table and scowling as Rick Webber raked in the pot. “What about us?”
Rick Webber meticulously stacked his winnings and scaled his cards at Hensen. “Quit your worrying. Third time lucky— maybe we’ll get through, all right.”
“And maybe we won’t,” Fairbanks grunted, raking the cards together and shuffling them with huge fists, “You know what they call this outfit back in Mount Denver? Reade’s Folly.”
“I’d hate to tell you what they called the first men who actually tried living on Mars,” said a sleepy, pleasant voice from the corner, and John Reade thrust up his shock of white hair. “But we’re here.” The old man turned to Andrew. “Wasn’t there even a clue in the logs, some notion of what might have happened to them?”
Andrew swivelled to face him. “Not a word, sir. Kings-lander kept the log himself until he was shot, then one of his men—Ford Benton—kept it. The last couple of pages are the most awful gibberish—not even in English. Look for yourself—he was obviously but of his head for days.” Andrew unfolded his long legs, hauled up a corner of the tent flap, and stood, staring morosely across the dark wasteland of rocks and bare bushes, toward the looming mass of Xanadu.
Xanadu. Not the Xanadu of Coleridge’s poem, but—to the half-forgotten space drifter who discovered the place thirty years ago—a reasonable facsimile. It was a cloistered nun of a city, hidden behind a wide skirt of the most impassable mountains on Mars. And the city was more impassable than the mountains. No human being had ever entered it—yet.
They’d tried. Two expeditions, twelve years apart, had vanished without trace, without explanation other than the dusty notebook Andrew had unearthed, today, from the rotted shreds of a skeleton’s clothing.
Archaeological expeditions., on Mars, all start the same way. You argue, wheedle, beg, borrow and steal until you have the necessary authority and a little less than the necessary funds. Earth, torn with internecine wars and slammed down under currency restrictions, does not send much money to Mars at any time. All but the barest lifeline of supplies was choked off when it was finally verified that Mars had no heavy metals, very little worth mining. The chronically-bankrupt Geographical Society had abandoned Mars even before Xanadu was discovered. The thronging ruins of Venus, the strange surviving culture of subterranean men on Titan, the odd temples of the inner moons of Jupiter, are more rewarding than the desert barrens of Mars and its inaccessible Xanadu—the solitary remnant of a Martian society which must have vanished before mankind, on Earth, had discovered fire.
For all practical purposes, Mars is a military frontier, patrolled by the U.N. to keep any one country from using it as a base for developing secret weapons. It’s also a good place to test new atomic engines, since there isn’t much of a fallout problem and no worry about a large population getting fallout jitters. John Reade, retired Major in the Space Service, had good military contacts, and had managed to get a clearance for the third—only the third—attempt to conquer Xanadu.
Private expeditions on Mars are simple to the point of being primitive. No private citizen or foundation could possibly pay freight charges for machinery to Mars. Private citizens travel on foot, taking with them only what they can carry on their backs. Besides, no one could take a car, a plane or a rocketship over the mountains and still find a safe place to land. Pack animals are out of the question; horses and burros cannot adapt to the thin air—thicker than pre-space theorists had dared to hope, but still pretty thin—and dogs and chimpanzees, which can, aren’t—much good for pack-work. The Geographic Society is still debating about importing yaks and llamas from high-altitude Peru and Tibet; meanwhile, it’s a good thing that gravity on Mars is low enough to permit tremendous packloads of necessities.
The prime necessity is good lungs and a sackful of guts, while you scramble, scratch and curse your way over the mountains. Then a long, open valley, treacherously lined with needles of rock, and Xanadu lying—the bait in the mouth of the trap—at the top.
And then—what?
Kater and Hansen and the rest were grumbling over the cards again. “This place is jinxed,” Mike complained, turning up a deuce. “We’ll be lucky if we get a cent out of it Now if we were working on Venus—but Mars, nyaahl Even if we find something, which I doubt, and live to tell about it—who cares?”
“Yeah,” Spade muttered. “Reade, how much did you spend for dynamite to blast the walls?”
“You didn’t pay for it,” Reade said cheerfully.
Andrew stooped, shrugging on his leather jacket; thumbed the inside heating-units. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Alone?” Reade asked sharply.
“Sure, unless someone wants to come along,” Andrew said, then suddenly understood. He pulled his pistol from his pocket, and handed it, butt-first, to Reade. “Sorry, I should have remembered. This is about where the shooting started, with the others.”
Reade laughed, but he didn’t return the gun.
“Don’t go too far.”
It was one of the rare, clear nights which sometimes did penance for the usual sandstorms. Andrew drew down the tent flap behind him, walked away into the darkness. At his foot he felt a little scurrying, stooped and caught up one of the blunt-nosed sand-mice. It squirmed on his palm, kicking hard with all six puny legs; then felt the comforting heat of his hand and yeep-yeeped with pleasure; he walked on, idly scratching the scaly little beast.
The two small moons were high overhead, and there was a purplish, shimmery light over the valley, with its grotesque floor of rock spires, fuzzed between with blackish patches of prickle-bushes—spinosa martts—matted in a close tangle between each little peak.
Downwind he heard the long screaming of a banshee; then he saw it, running blindly, a huge bird with its head down between trailing, functionless wings. Andrew held his breath and stood still. The banshees had no intelligence to speak of, but by some peculiar tropism, they would rush toward anything that moved; the very heat of his body might attract them, and their huge clawed feet could disembowel a man at one stroke. And he had no pistol!
This one failed to sense him; it ran, trailing its wings and screaming eerily, like a cloaked girl, blindly into the dusk. Andrew let out his breath violently in relief. Suddenly he realized that he was not sure just which way the tent lay. He turned, crowding against “one of the rockspires. A little hollow gleamed pallidly in the moonlight. He remembered climbing a rise; he must have come this way—
He slid down roughly, a trailing pricker raking his hand. The sand-mouse leaped from his palm with a squeal and scuffled away. Andrew, sucking his bleeding palm, looked up and saw the walls of Xanadu lifting serried edges just over his head. How could he possibly have come so near in just a few minutes? Everything looked different—
He spun around, trying to scramble up the way he had come. He fell. His head struck rock, and the universe went dark.
“Take it easy.” John Reade’s voice sounded disembodied over his head, “Just lie still. You’ve got a bad bump, Andy.”
He opened his eyes to the glare of stars and a bitter wind on his face. Reade caught at his