Valley of Dreams Read online

when we both saw the explanation for a lot ofthe queerness.

  "The city was in ruin! Abandoned, deserted, dead as Babylon! Or atleast, so it looked to us then, with its empty streets which, if theyhad been paved, were now deep under sand."

  "A ruin, eh?" commented Harrison. "How old?"

  "How could we tell?" countered Jarvis. "The next expedition to this golfball ought to carry an archeologist--and a philologist, too, as wefound out later. But it's a devil of a job to estimate the age ofanything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings mighthave been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetationis here to spread cracks with its roots--nothing. The only aging factorshere are the erosion of the wind--and that's negligible in thisatmosphere--and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one otheragent--meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city,judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen fourstrike ground right here near the _Ares_."

  "Seven," corrected the captain. "Three dropped while you were gone."

  "Well, damage by meteorites must be slow, anyway. Big ones would be asrare here as on earth, because big ones get through in spite of theatmosphere, and those buildings could sustain a lot of little ones. Myguess at the city's age--and it may be wrong by a big percentage--wouldbe fifteen thousand years. Even that's thousands of years older than anyhuman civilization; fifteen thousand years ago was the Late Stone Age inthe history of mankind.

  "So Leroy and I crept up to those tremendous buildings feeling likepygmies, sort of awe-struck, and talking in whispers. I tell you, it wasghostly walking down that dead and deserted street, and every time wepassed through a shadow, we shivered, and not just because shadows arecold on Mars. We felt like intruders, as if the great race that hadbuilt the place might resent our presence even across a hundred andfifty centuries. The place was as quiet as a grave, but we keptimagining things and peeping down the dark lanes between buildings andlooking over our shoulders. Most of the structures were windowless, butwhen we did see an opening in those vast walls, we couldn't look away,expecting to see some horror peering out of it.

  "Then we passed an edifice with an open arch; the doors were there, butblocked open by sand. I got up nerve enough to take a look inside, andthen, of course, we discovered we'd forgotten to take our flashes. Butwe eased a few feet into the darkness and the passage debouched into acolossal hall. Far above us a little crack let in a pallid ray ofdaylight, not nearly enough to light the place; I couldn't even see ifthe hall rose clear to the distant roof. But I know the place wasenormous; I said something to Leroy and a million thin echoes cameslipping back to us out of the darkness. And after that, we began tohear other sounds--slithering rustling noises, and whispers, and soundslike suppressed breathing--and something black and silent passed betweenus and that far-away crevice of light.

  "Then we saw three little greenish spots of luminosity in the dusk toour left. We stood staring at them, and suddenly they all shifted atonce. Leroy yelled '_Ce sont des yeux!_' and they were! They were eyes!

  "Well, we stood frozen for a moment, while Leroy's yell reverberatedback and forth between the distant walls, and the echoes repeated thewords in queer, thin voices. There were mumblings and mutterings andwhisperings and sounds like strange soft laughter, and then thethree-eyed thing moved again. Then we broke for the door!

  "We felt better out in the sunlight; we looked at each other sheepishly,but neither of us suggested another look at the buildings inside--thoughwe _did_ see the place later, and that was queer, too--but you'll hearabout it when I come to it. We just loosened our revolvers and crept onalong that ghostly street.

  "The street curved and twisted and subdivided. I kept careful note ofour directions, since we couldn't risk getting lost in that giganticmaze. Without our thermo-skin bags, night would finish us, even if whatlurked in the ruins didn't. By and by, I noticed that we were veeringback toward the canal, the buildings ended and there were only a fewdozen ragged stone huts which looked as though they might have beenbuilt of debris from the city. I was just beginning to feel a bitdisappointed at finding no trace of Tweel's people here when we roundeda corner and there he was!

  "I yelled 'Tweel!' but he just stared, and then I realized that hewasn't Tweel, but another Martian of his sort. Tweel's featheryappendages were more orange hued and he stood several inches taller thanthis one. Leroy was sputtering in excitement, and the Martian kept hisvicious beak directed at us, so I stepped forward as peace-maker. I said'Tweel?' very questioningly, but there was no result. I tried it a dozentimes, and we finally had to give it up; we couldn't connect.

  "Leroy and I walked toward the huts, and the Martian followed us. Twicehe was joined by others, and each time I tried yelling 'Tweel' at thembut they just stared at us. So we ambled on with the three trailing us,and then it suddenly occurred to me that my Martian accent might be atfault. I faced the group and tried trilling it out the way Tweel himselfdid: 'T-r-r-rwee-r-rl!' Like that.

  "And that worked! One of them spun his head around a full ninetydegrees, and screeched 'T-r-r-rweee-r-rl!' and a moment later, like anarrow from a bow, Tweel came sailing over the nearer huts to land on hisbeak in front of me!

  "Man, we were glad to see each other! Tweel set up a twittering andchirping like a farm in summer and went sailing up and coming down onhis beak, and I would have grabbed his hands, only he wouldn't keepstill long enough.

  "The other Martians and Leroy just stared, and after a while, Tweelstopped bouncing, and there we were. We couldn't talk to each other anymore than we could before, so after I'd said 'Tweel' a couple of timesand he'd said 'Tick,' we were more or less helpless. However, it wasonly mid-morning, and it seemed important to learn all we could aboutTweel and the city, so I suggested that he guide us around the place ifhe weren't busy. I put over the idea by pointing back at the buildingsand then at him and us.

  "Well, apparently he wasn't too busy, for he set off with us, leadingthe way with one of his hundred and fifty-foot nosedives that set Leroygasping. When we caught up, he said something like 'one, one, two--two,two, four--no, no--yes, yes--rock--no breet!' That didn't seem to meananything; perhaps he was just letting Leroy know that he could speakEnglish, or perhaps he was merely running over his vocabulary to refreshhis memory.

  "Anyway, he showed us around. He had a light of sorts in his blackpouch, good enough for small rooms, but simply lost in some of thecolossal caverns we went through. Nine out of ten buildings meantabsolutely nothing to us--just vast empty chambers, full of shadows andrustlings and echoes. I couldn't imagine their use; they didn't seemsuitable for living quarters, or even for commercial purposes--trade andso forth; they might have been all right as power-houses, but what couldhave been the purpose of a whole city full? And where were the remainsof the machinery?

  "The place was a mystery. Sometimes Tweel would show us through a hallthat would have housed an ocean-liner, and he'd seem to swell withpride--and we couldn't make a damn thing of it! As a display ofarchitectural power, the city was colossal; as anything else it was justnutty!

  "But we did see one thing that registered. We came to that same buildingLeroy and I had entered earlier--the one with the three eyes in it.Well, we were a little shaky about going in there, but Tweel twitteredand trilled and kept saying, 'Yes, yes, yes!' so we followed him,staring nervously about for the thing that had watched us. However, thathall was just like the others, full of murmurs and slithering noises andshadowy things slipping away into corners. If the three-eyed creaturewere still there, it must have slunk away with the others.

  "Tweel led us along the wall; his light showed a series of littlealcoves, and in the first of these we ran into a puzzling thing--a veryweird thing. As the light flashed into the alcove, I saw first just anempty space, and then, squatting on the floor, I saw--it! A littlecreature about as big as a large rat, it was, gray and huddled andevidently startled by our appearance. It had the queerest, most devilishlittle face!--pointed ears or horns and satanic eyes that s
eemed tosparkle with a sort of fiendish intelligence.

  "Tweel saw it, too, and let out a screech of anger, and the creaturerose on two pencil-thin legs and scuttled off with a half-terrified,half defiant squeak. It darted past us into the darkness too quicklyeven for Tweel, and as it ran, something waved on its body like thefluttering of a cape. Tweel screeched angrily at it and set up a shrillhullabaloo that sounded like genuine rage.

  "But the thing was gone, and then I noticed the weirdest of imaginabledetails. Where it had squatted on the floor was--a book! It had beenhunched over a book!

  "I took a step forward; sure enough, there was some sort of inscriptionon the