“Miss!” squawked the clerk, triggered alive by the noise. “Don’t....”
She was outside by then and running through the crazy half-light thrown by Mars’s nearer and farther moons. Wind howled and tugged at her. Cold turned the breath from her helmet vent into snow.
*
When no pursuit developed she stopped, gasping, before one of the open-air shops she had toured that afternoon. Five “Martians” bent stiffly over lathes and other machines, just where they had stopped after the last visitor departed. Hoarfrost mottled their leather harness, their downy red skins and the scars on their shoulders where atrophied wings had supposedly been amputated. No breath came from their nostrils. How cold and small they looked!
On impulse, she approached briskly.
“Yes, Miss?” The robot proprietor unkinked as its automatic relays turned it on. It came forward with a grimace meant to represent a smile. “You’re out very late. What may I show you?” Its voice was like a rusted bird song.
“Tell me,” said she, “what the Martians really made here.”
“Why, we design jewelry, Miss. I have some nice....”
“No, no!” she interrupted. “What did the real Martians make here? Surely not junk jewelry for tasteless tourists. Something beautiful, it must have been. Wind bells? Dreams? Snowflakes? Please tell me.”
The robot twittered and flinched like a badly made toy.
“I d-do not understand,” it ventured at last. “I am not programmed to answer such questions. Perhaps the guides can do so. Now may I show you....”
“Thank you, no.” She touched the thing’s cold, six-fingered hand with quick compassion. “But I’ll ask the guides. Good night.”
Back in the street, she began to retrace her tour of the afternoon. Here was what the guide had called a “typical home.” This time she did not disturb the mother, father and one furry child with budding wings who clustered about what experts thought must have been a telepathic amplifier. It did not work any longer—none but the coarsest Martian machines did—yet the frost-rimed robots sat stiffly enchanted before it, as they would do until the sun rose and tourists resumed their endless tramp. (The day’s last, she noted, had left an empty pop bottle in the mother’s lap.)
Farther on she met a “policeman”, resplendent in metal harness, leaning forlornly against an anachronistic lamppost. Some late-prowling jokester had stuck a cigarette between its still lips.
Surely not policemen here? She looked up at the fairy towers that laced the stars. Surely not in this grave place. It must be one of those human touches introduced by Trans-Planetary to make tourists smile and feel superior. Nevertheless, she removed the cigarette and ground it under her heel.
After walking half a mile through the sand-whipped night, Betsy paused before a structure of translucent spires and flying buttresses where a library had once been housed. No robots were on duty there and no serious attempt had been made at restoration. No Champollion had appeared in the early days of exploration to decipher some Martian Rosetta stone, and by now the historical record had been hopelessly scrambled by souvenir hunters.
But that didn’t matter really, they said. Outside of the tourist trade the only really valuable things on the dying planet were extensive deposits of orichalcum, an ore rich in pure radium. Thanks to the impartial mining monopoly established by Trans-Planetary twenty years ago, orichalcum supplied the nations of Earth with sinews of war which they had not yet dared use, and fuel for ships that were questing greedily farther and farther out into the darkness of space.
So metal-paged books had long vanished from the library’s stacks and its sand-strewn halls were littered with broken rolls of tape. How long would it be, she wondered as she passed on with a sigh, before the guides realized that even those mute tapes could be sold as souvenirs?
*
Phobos had set by now. She turned on the searchlight, checked her air tank—the gauge showed enough reserve for another hour—and defiantly opened the face plate of her helmet. The atmosphere was cold; cold as a naked blade. It had a heady tang and she stood taking in great gulps of it until a warning dizziness forced her to close the plate. The guides were wrong again! A human could learn to breathe this air!
Leaving the gutted library, Betsy breasted the wind as she ploughed through shifting dunes toward a structure shimmering on the other side of the plaza. This, the guides pattered, was a cathedral. When the place now called Dawningsburgh had been alive, they said, its inhabitants gathered at the shrine each evening to sip one ceremonial drink of precious water, shed two ceremonial tears for the days when Mars had been young and worship a flock of atavistic winged princesses who performed ceremonial flights under a pressurized, transparent dome in the rays of the setting sun.
This showplace had, of course, been restored right down to its last perch, and had been equipped with a full complement of “worshippers.” At the climax of each day’s final guided tour, visitors jammed themselves into the nave, sipped cocktails, “ohed”, “ahed” and even shed tears along with the robots as they gawked at mannequins flying above them on invisible wires in the best Peter Pan tradition.
Ducking under the electric eye that would have started a performance, Betsy tiptoed into the structure. It was quieter than any grave. Several hundred robots huddled there on their perches, drinks in hand, ready to go into their act. At the far end of the transept a soaring mural, gleaming phosphorescently, hinted at the lakes, seas and forests of Mars’s prehistory. Under the dome a single flyer dangled, its plumes trailing.
For long minutes Betsy stood in the dimness, seeking to capture the mystery and wonder of this place. In ruins, it would have swept her with ecstasy, as had her moonlit view of the Parthenon. Restored and “repopulated,” it made her sick and ashamed of her race ... no, not of her race, exactly, but of the few hucksters who debased its thirst for knowledge and beauty.
Then a bird started to sing!
A bird? On Mars? This must be a tape, triggered on somehow despite her care in avoiding the electric eye. Any moment now, the robots would begin their mindless worship.
She shuddered and turned to escape. But something held her. She crept instead, step by soundless step, toward the source of that exquisite music.
An almost naked male robot had materialized before the mural. It was singing, far better than any nightingale, its strange hands outstretched to the radiance.
Such notes could not ... should not ... spring from the throat of a machine. Heart in mouth, Betsy advanced with infinite care. By the mural’s light she saw that the newcomer had no hoarfrost coating. And the moisture of its breath condensed and fell to the floor like a blessing. She reached out a small hand to touch its scarred shoulder, then jerked back.
The shoulder was warm!
*
“Greetings, girl,” Betsy’s brain whispered to her. “You’re out late. Just let me finish this thing and we’ll have a chat.”
The music soared, uninterrupted, to a climax sparkling with grace notes and glittering with chromatic trills.
“Now,” fluted the creature, turning and fixing her with golden, freewheeling eyes, “what brings a tourist” (the word was a curse) “here at this hour?”
“L-love,” she gulped, hardly knowing what she said. “I-I mean, I wanted to find out if anything real was left. And, well, I ran away from the hotel. They’ll be coming after me, I suppose.”
“Don’t fret. Martians can play tricks with time. I’ll return you to your room well before they get here.”
“You—you’re not just another, fancier, robot?”
“I’m alive enough.” He bowed with a sweep that seemed to invest him with wings. “Pitaret Mura, at your