So unpredictable, these dead-world Tower Dwellers!
Take old Tydore who placed such an inestimably
valuable gift in the greed-hands of one he hated.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories September 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sun was a shrunken red disk against the starfields, a distantpale luminosity surrendering to the encroachment of the falling night.Hoarfrost crunched under Marley's feet as he walked by the still blackwaters of the canal, and then thin wind whispered over the sand andacross the breasts of the ancient hills. Starlight gleamed in the darkwater as the day faded. Earth hung low in the sky, like an emeraldpendant over the bosom of a sleeping woman.
Marley pulled his silks and furs closer about his shoulders. The airwas sharp and cold. His breath froze wraithlike in the icy evening ashe hurried down the path toward Tydore's tower.
The green planet shone like a beacon in his eyes. Home. The thoughtbrought impatience and a longing to walk again under a pale sky and awarm sun. He looked about him with faint distaste. This peace—thissolitude of low red hills and blue-black nights—was alien to Marley.It was unreal. Mars was a dream. An ancient wasted slumbering dream.
Marley's lips compressed as he thought of Tydore and their lastmeeting. It seemed that Tydore laughed at him. Tydore withheld toomuch, and there was so little time left. There was an acrid coreof decadence in the old Martian, Marley thought. A consciousnessof too many millenia of civilization and decay. Devious was theword, perhaps, though it seemed a pallid one for the reality of theMartian's intricate mind. It was always impossible to know what he wasthinking—how much he knew. About Marley being a spy. About the war onEarth. In spite of himself, Marley smiled. It sounded so melodramaticthat way, but it was the way it really was. The Martians held theperfect weapon. Marley needed that weapon, and his nation had put fortha gigantic effort to get him to Mars so that he might steal it.
Tydore's tower loomed up before him in the fading light, a feyfilligree of minarettes and graceful flying buttresses too delicatefor a grosser world than Mars. The tower's reflection shimmered in thestill dark waters of the canal like an alter ego extending deep intothe liquid depths.
Marley descended the steps of delicately wrought stone that led to thetower's underground entrance with care, for the drifted ferric sandmade them treacherous. How like the Martians, he thought with someirritation, to make it necessary to travel down in order to enter atower. Everything the long way, the hard and devious way.
The outer doorway was shaped like a fleur-de-lis and it opened from thetop down, sliding into a recess of ancient, oily machinery. It wouldbe far too simple to make a door that looked and worked like a door.Everything Marley had seen during his months on Mars served only toincrease his sense of alienage. He had seen only Tydore, of course, ofthe living Martians. There were only a handful left and they livedin their isolated towers along the still canals surrounded by theirtissue-thin manuscripts and ancient, reedlike music spools that filledthe air of their retreats with skeins of weird and enharmonic melody.
The weapon was Tydore's. He had rebuilt it from plans drawn by someensorcelled armorer dead over five thousand years. Rebuilt it in theparadoxical way that Martians seemed to do everything, for if there wasone thing that no Martian needed it was a weapon. No strife had marredthe planet's peace for millenia. But build it he had, and Marley'shands itched for