fear of punishment at the hands of a scolding woman. It could have explained why he trembled and turned pale, and went stumbling out of the shack without a backward glance.
It was of no great importance, and it would have been silly for Peter’s parents to waste any sympathy on him.
They didn’t.
Dr. Ashley went up to his son, and gripped him by the shoulder with all of the gentleness of a supremely wise parent with a bedrock of granite-like strength to draw upon.
“Never let malicious envy disturb you, son,” he said. “If anyone hates you enough to push you around you can rest assured there’s a secret envy gnawing away at him.”
Seeing the puzzlement in Peter’s eyes, Dr. Ashley smiled reassuringly. “Mr. Caxton has a complicated approach to everything. He’d like to see nature as you do, son—simply and clearly with a boy’s shining vision. He never could, and that shriveled him up tragically.”
“I really did see a bird, Pop. It stood in the doorway and—”
“We’ve neglected you shamefully, Tommy,” Mrs. Ashley said. “We’ve gone poking around in buried cities without realizing that the Martians never had it so good. A living son and daughter are worth all of the archeological treasures on Earth. Why shouldn’t they be worth even more on Mars?”
“Your mother’s right,” Dr. Ashley said. “It’s a brave, new world, and there are so many shining roads ahead we’d be crazy not to go jogging along them together.”
Mr. Caxton stood for a moment just outside the shack listening to the children’s excited voices rejoicing in a reunion he was powerless to spoil.
He stood swaying and cursing, telling himself that he had been quite mad to let the Ashleys make him look like a fool.
Peter had lied about the bird, hadn’t he? Deliberately made the whole thing up for the sole purpose of ruining his reputation as a kindly and tolerant man whose only fault was a certain severity of temper which he could not always control.
For a moment Mr. Caxton fingered his bruised jaw, and remembered with a shudder the look of quite unreasoning fury in Mrs. Ashley’s eyes. Then he straightened his shoulders, shook his fist at the empty air, and started back toward his own shack.
Mr. Caxton did not get far.
At first all he saw was a weaving blur in the darkness a few yards ahead of him, and all he felt was a chill wind blowing up his spine. He thought for a moment that the blur was casting an actual shadow, and that terrifyingly in the darkness there had appeared for the barest instant the glitter and gleam of claws.
But that, of course, was nonsense. Having quickly persuaded himself that he was in no danger Mr. Caxton confidently increased his stride, and did not realize that he was in the presence of Peter’s bird until it was breathing at his side.
Peter’s Martian bird! The instant Mr. Caxton felt its breath fanning his cheeks on both sides of his oxygen mask he leapt back with a wild, despairing cry.
In the darkness the creature appeared much bigger than it actually was, and it was easy to see how two startled and imaginative children might have magnified its outlines, and misjudged its bulk.
Mr. Caxton was deceived very much as Peter had been.
Actually it was an incredibly slender and graceful bird, a creature of air and fire with a razor-sharp bill three times the length of its long, tapering body.
Unfortunately Mr. Caxton could not see the bill straighten out in the darkness, and he had no way of knowing that a bill that could curve down to pick up lichenous food from the sparse Martian desert could straighten out in an instant to bayonet a man.
“If you saw what Peter saw you’d scream too, Mr. Caxton,” Susan had said.
Mr. Caxton saw what Peter saw, but when the bill pierced his chest and went plunging on through him he made no sound at all.
He did scream as he fell backwards—shrilly and horribly for an instant.
But there was no one to hear.
The Cottage
To Will Durkin it seemed to be the realization of a long-cherished dream—this return from town over a rutted dirt road, equipped and ready for a cruel duel with another man’s offspring. He raised his left hand as he drove, staring at his bony knuckles, and then slashing at the empty air with a whiplash ferocity of purpose.
Perhaps there had been a hard core of cruelty in Durkin at birth. Perhaps he had knotted up his fists, and cried out in resentment on first seeing the sunlight, eager to hurt and punish.
It was difficult to say, difficult to be sure. But certainly the stony soil which had nourished his childhood had helped to make him what he was—a gaunt, restless-eyed man so consumed by animosity he could find no pleasure in merriment of any kind.
In town he had stalked with fierce impatience from the general store to the post office, and then back down Cedar Street to his car, clutching his purchase with the greediness of a carrion crow eager to take flight. Now, beneath the leaden sky, in his asthmatic wreck of an automobile, he pictured himself as too shrewd and quick-witted to allow a woman’s simpering stupidity to weaken his attachment to the land.
A dust storm could stir a man to anger, and rob him of a night’s sleep. It could demolish his chicken cots, and embitter him in other ways. But it could also protect him by keeping him hard.
So certain was he of that hardness that the gathering clouds, the dust flurries, and the whistling wind gave him no concern. They seemed to be setting a seal on his purpose, and he was sure that if trouble descended from the sky he would know how to cope with it.
Unfortunately Durkin had no way of knowing that the desert was soon to blossom in ways that were strange. He heard the dull, occasional rumbling, and saw the sky light
