“Just wait until papa gets back!” Susan whispered, stopping to loosen her oxygen mask at the door of the shack. “Papa doesn’t know how mean Mr. Caxton gets when he’s been drinking.”
“He doesn’t have to drink to be mean,” Peter reminded her. “Next time we go exploring I’ll play dumb.”
Peter’s voice came out thin, and muffled through his oxygen mask. But there was a ring of angry defiance in it. “He doesn’t know how an explorer feels anyway. He’s awfully educated, but Mr. Walgreen says you can’t just pop knowledge into your mouth like a pill, and swallow it.”
Self-portrait of Peter. A boy with shining eyes, and curly dark hair who loves knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge and a lot of other things, eh, Peter? The wind ruffling the tumbled dunes, the bone-white summits of the buried Martian cities, and, just for good measure, the dawn with its banners of fire.
Why shouldn’t an eager, inquiring boy of ten see a few strange clawmarks in the sand? What right had Mr. Caxton or anyone else to disillusion and shake the faith of a budding explorer in the strange, the incredible?
Without mystery adventuring would quickly lose its zest, and science would just as quickly lose its Peters. Could science afford such a loss?
Susan appeared to think so. She almost pulled Peter into the shack, and forced him to sit down in the middle of the floor.
“You talk too much, Peter,” she said.
Buried somewhere in the myths and legends of childhood there is reputed to be a magical box which at one time contained, incredibly folded and shrunken, all of the animals that ever were.
Small on the outside, large within. The shack wasn’t magical, but it did seem to swallow up and shrink the children in much the same fashion. Little white ghosts they might have seemed to a not too observant eavesdropper, sitting side by side in the middle of the floor.
Above them arched a shining roof of crystal clear quartz, and they had only to raise their eyes to see the Martian sky, cold, cloudless and eerily remote.
“I don’t hate Mr. Caxton,” Peter said. “I just feel sorry for him.”
“Mr. Caxton thinks I’m hungry, but I’m not,” Susan said. “I don’t want any supper. He’ll be madder than ever when he finds out we’ve gone to sleep without giving him a chance to punish us.”
Susan fell silent, leaning her head against her brother’s shoulder.
On Mars the night does not creep treacherously over the desert amidst clusters of lengthening shadows. It sweeps down on pinions of pulsating blackness, with hardly a glimmer of twilight to herald its coming.
Susan was the first to drowse off. Peter watched her for a moment, inwardly congratulating himself on his superior reserves of strength.
It seemed tragic to him that his sister had been born a girl. She was terribly clever, of course, even at play. But she never woke up planning a full day of exploring, never wanted to lie awake in the darkness dreaming of campfires in the desert, and the echoing tramp of strange beasts going on and on in the blackness like a peal of thunder, now loud and terrifying, and now muffled, but never quite dying out.
She was content to play hopscotch with the other children, build doll houses out of the soft red mud that lined the canal beds, and get sticky smears of jam on her cheeks.
It was perhaps fortunate for Peter that his sister could not tune in on his thoughts. Before falling asleep he sometimes experienced moments of twilight meditation when his mind became crystal clear, its memory-conjured visions flooded with the nightmare brilliance of an actual dream.
Now, suddenly, he saw the strange clawmarks again, four-toed, and pointing in the direction of the camp. Why hadn’t Mr. Caxton believed him? He asked the question without realizing that sleep was already hovering over him, with a black curtain of oblivion to impose silence on his thoughts.
Whether Peter slept five minutes or five hours would not have in any way altered the depth and completeness of that sudden falling away of consciousness. It was therefore of no importance.
Only Peter’s terror on awakening was important. It was a terror so cruelly sharp, sudden and overwhelming that it brought him to his knees with a scream. No sooner was he on his knees than he began to shake, to clutch at his sister’s arm in a sort of boyish agony, as if the panic he felt was being made worse by her refusal to awake, and share it with him.
It was not a brave way to act at all. Despite his terrible fear of being alone he should have controlled himself, he should have tried to protect and spare his sister. He realized that almost instantly, with the coldness still coursing up his spine.
But he was afraid to keep silent lest the thing he saw should come out of the night toward him.
He could see it very clearly. It was framed in the doorway, and it was staring straight at him, its owlish face half in shadows. He could see its narrowly slitted eyes burning brightly, and the wicked gleam of its teeth as its feathered jaws opened and closed.
It was watching him and listening, and he knew that at any moment it might decide to come into the shack, and kill him. It hates me, he thought. Hates me, hates me.
Yes, Peter, it’s bad. When people you don’t like come to visit you you can lock the door, and hide. But you can’t hide from a shadow on the floor, the dreadful rustle and flutter of dark wings unfolding.
Peter could have refused to believe that the thing was actually standing in the doorway—a tall, fearful, blood-taloned thing as real as the pounding of his heart. He could have fled into a hidden corner
