"We can't count on their being too much like us. These things we've found--clothing, writing, wells-they're all things any intelligent being might be forced to invent. And parallel evolution might explain the biped shape."
"Parallel evolution?" Henry repeated.
"Like the eye of an octopus. If s nearly identical in structure to a human eye. Yet an octopus isn't remotely human. Most marsupials, you can't tell them from their mammal counterparts. Well, let's try to pick him up."
Any archaeologist would have shot them down m cold blood.
The mummy was as light and dry as cork, and showed no tendency to come apart in their hands. They strapped him gently over the luggage box and climbed on themselves. Chris drove back slowly and carefully.
Chris stood on the first rung of the ladder, adjusting the mummy's balance on his left shoulder.
"We'll have to spray him with plastic before takeoff," he said.
"Do we have any plastic spray?"
"I don't remember any. We'd better take lots of pictures in case it does come apart."
"Right. There's a camera in the cabin." Chris started up, and Henry followed. They got the relic to the airlock without mishap.
"I've been thinking," said He@.
"That nitric acid wasn't dilute, exactly, but there was water in it. Maybe this guy's chemistry can extract the water from nitric acid."
"Good thought."
They put the mummy gently on a pile of blankets and began searching for the camera. After five frustrating minutes Chris deliberately banged his head against wall.
"I took it out to catch the sunset last night. It's in the cargo hold."
"Go get it."
Henry stood in the airlock, watching as Chris went down the ladder. After a moment in the cargo space Chris started up with the camera strap over his shoulder.
"I've been thinking too," said Chris, his voice seemingly dissociated from his climbing figure.
"Diamond can't be that plentiful here, and carving it into blocks must have been real hard labor. Why diamond? And why write on a well?"
"Religious reasons? Maybe they worship water."
"That's what I was thinking."
"Of course you were. That plot's as old as Lowell.
Chris had reached the top. They squeezed into airlock and waited for it to cycle.
The door opened. Both men had their helmets off this time, and they both smelled it at once. chemical, something strong--
Thick, greasy smoke was pouring up from the ancient corpse.
Henry reacted first. He sprang for the double boiler in the small kitchen corner. The bottom half was still full of water; he snatched it up and threw the water over the smoldering Martian mummy while with his other hand he turned on the water faucet to get more.
The mummy went off like a napalm bomb.
Henry leaped away from the exploding flames and head rammed something flat and very hard. He went down with his eyes full of leaping light. Immediately he sat up, knowing that something urgently needed doing but unable to remember what. He saw Chris, still in vacuum suit except for the helmet, run through the colored flames, pick the mummy up by the ankles and throw it into the airlock. Chris hit the "Cycle" button. The inner door swung shut.
Then Chris was bending over him.
"Where does it hurt, Harry? Can you talk? Can you move?"
Henry sat up again.
"I'm okay."
Chris expelled a gusty breath. Then he began to laugh.
Henry stood up a little shakily. His head ached. The flames in the cabin weren't intolerable, and already the air plant was whining its eagerness to make the air pure and scentless. Red smoke from the open outer airlock door blew past a porthole, dying away.
"What made him explode?" he wondered.
"The water," said Chris Luden.
"What a wild chemistry he must have! I want to be there when we meet a live one."
"But what about the well? We know he used water."
"Yes he did. He sure as hell did. And did you know that an octopus eye is identical to a human eye?"
"Sure. But a well is a well, isn't it?"
"Not when it's a crematorium, Harry. What else could it be? There's no fire on Mars, but water must dissolve a body completely. And wouldn't I like to know what the morticians charge their customers for those cut diamond building blocks! The hardest substance known to Man or Martian! An everlasting monument to the dear departed!"
How the Heroes Die
ONLY SHEER RUTHLESSNESS could have taken him out of town alive. The mob behind Carter hadn't tried to guard the Marsbuggies, since Carter would have needed too much time to take a buggy through the vehicular airlock. They could have caught him there, and they knew it. Some were guarding the personnel lock, hoping he'd try for that. He might have; for if he could have closed the one door in their faces and opened the next, the safeties would have protected him while he went through the third and fourth and outside. On the Marsbuggy he was trapped in the bubble.
There was room to drive around in. Less than half the prefab houses had been erected so far. The rest of the bubbletown's floor was flat fused sand, empty but for scattered piles of foam-plastic walls and ceilings and floors. But they'd get him eventually. Already they were starting up another buggy.
They never expected him to run his vehicle through the bubble wall.
The Marsbuggy tilted, then righted itself. A blast of breathing-air roared out around him, picked up a cloud of fine sand, and hurled it explosively away into the thin, poisoned atmosphere. Carter grinned as he looked behind him. They would die now, all of them. He was the only one wearing a pressure suit. In an hour he could come back and repair the rip in the bubble. He'd have to dream up a fancy story to tell when the next ship came...
Carter frowned. What were they--
At least ten wind-harried men were wrestling with the wall of a prefab house. As Carter watched, they picked the wall up off the fused sand, balanced it almost upright, and let go. The foam-plastic wall rose in the wind and slapped hard against the bubble, over the tenfoot rip.
