Dean Evans

“ His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.
"I'm looking for an Earthwoman," I said. "This particular Earthwoman took a Martian for a husband." ”

“ Or, on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the day—maybe not tomorrow, but some day—when, like the dream of finding gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him. ”

“ I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer named Harry Smythe.
Understandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented ”

“ Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.
It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically, spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of, compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around the house. ”

“ His eyes were calculating. "Not the God's honest, mate, no. I didn't know she was here. Not at first. But there was this Spider, see? This Martian. His name was Tahily and he used to hang around the saloons and he talked a lot, see? Then's when I knew...."
"So it was you who killed him," I said. "One murder wasn't enough back on Earth; you had to pile them up on the planets." I could feel something begin to churn inside of me.
"Wait! Sure, I knocked off the Martian. But a fair fight, see? That Spider jumped my claim. A fair fight it was, and anybody'd done the same. ”

“ I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't.
Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. ”

“ And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too, looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called Phobos. And he, too, decided to write a book. And he knew he could accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie.
I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed Tahily, the Martian she loved. ”

“ And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think, instead, of something quite astonishing:
How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?
All Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead. ”

“ He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two things peculiar, but each was related to the other.
The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys do not—and he most certainly didn't.
The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy. ”

“ Her words were flat.
"His name is Harry Smythe."
If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected.
"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the guts to marry her. Do you understand? ”

“ That shocked look, which comes with the first realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. ”

“ Just a lousy, stinking Martian, I mean!"
I swallowed. I turned away and went around the rock and looked down. One look was enough. Blood was running down the cheek of the prone little Martian boy, and it was coming from his mouth. Then I turned back to the shaking man.
"Like I say, mate! I mean, what would you've done in my place? Whistling always did drive me crazy. I can't stand it. A phobia, you know. People suffer from phobias!" ”

“ I looked up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.
I looked down again at the woman. "Your little boy and his butterfly net," I said softly. "In a season when no butterflies can be found. ”

“ It's something lacking in their sense of hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and when he told me his mother had taught him—" I shrugged and laughed a little. "Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy."
She nodded. "We agree on that last part."
Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.
"I would like to speak to the Martian lady," I said.
"There isn't any Martian lady." ”

“ He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie only bores a Martian.
I got up and went out of the tent.
The woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. ”

“ There was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the belu tree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums. ”

“ Thinking to be helpful with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she immediately puts it to use—on you.
I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something in his eyes which might have been a leer. ”