The Moons of Mars by Dean Evans (best free ereader .TXT) 📖

The little boy screamed. Just once.

I waited. There was a long silence after that. Then, finally, I took off my hat and threw it out into the valley. The gun roared once more. This time I placed it a little to the left below me. I took careful sighting on the hand that held that gun—and I didn't miss it.

It was Harry Smythe, of course. When I reached him, he had the injured hand tucked tightly in the pit of his other arm. There was a grim look in his eyes and he nodded as I approached him.

"Good shooting, mate. Should be a promotion in it for you. Shooting like that, I mean."

"That's nice to think about," I said. "Where's the boy? I owe him a little something. If he hadn't whistled a warning, you could have picked me off neat."

"I would." He nodded calmly.

"Where is he?"

"Behind the rock there. In that little alcove, sort of." He indicated with his chin.

I started forward. I watched him, but I went toward the rock.

"Just a minute, mate."

I stopped. I didn't lower my gun.

"That bloody wench we spoke about yesterday. You know, out in front of that shack? Well, just a thought, of course, but if you pull me in and if I get it, what'll become of her, do you suppose? Mean to say, I couldn't support her when I was dead, could I?"

"Support her?" Surprise jumped into my voice.

"What I said. She's my wife, you know. Back on Earth, I mean. I skipped out on her a few years back, but yesterday I was on my way to looking her up when you—"

"She didn't recognize the name Harry Smythe," I said coldly. "I'm afraid you'll have to think a little faster."

"Of course she didn't! How could she? That ain't my name. What made you think it was?"

Bright beads of sweat sparkled on his forehead, and his lips had that frantic looseness of lips not entirely under control.

"You left her," I grunted. "But you followed her across space anyway. Just to tell her you were sorry and you wanted to come back. Is that it?"

"Well—" His eyes were calculating. "Not the God's honest, mate, no. I didn't know she was here. Not at first. But there was this Spider, see? This Martian. His name was Tahily and he used to hang around the saloons and he talked a lot, see? Then's when I knew...."

"So it was you who killed him," I said. "One murder wasn't enough back on Earth; you had to pile them up on the planets." I could feel something begin to churn inside of me.

"Wait! Sure, I knocked off the Martian. But a fair fight, see? That Spider jumped my claim. A fair fight it was, and anybody'd done the same. But even without that, he had it coming anyway, wouldn't you say? Bigamist and all that, you know? I mean marrying a woman already married."

His lips were beginning to slobber. I watched them with revulsion in my stomach.

"Wouldn't you say, mate? Just a lousy, stinking Martian, I mean!"

I swallowed. I turned away and went around the rock and looked down. One look was enough. Blood was running down the cheek of the prone little Martian boy, and it was coming from his mouth. Then I turned back to the shaking man.

"Like I say, mate! I mean, what would you've done in my place? Whistling always did drive me crazy. I can't stand it. A phobia, you know. People suffer from phobias!"

"What did you do?" I took three steps toward him. I felt my lips straining back from my teeth.

"Wait now, mate! Like I say, it's a phobia. I can't stand whistling. It makes me suffer—"

"So you cut out his tongue?"

I didn't wait for his answer. I couldn't wait. While I was still calm, I raised my gun on his trembling figure. I didn't put the gun up again until his body stopped twitching and his fingers stopped clawing in the sands.

From the desk to the outside door, the hospital corridor runs just a few feet. But I'd have known her at any distance. I sighed, got to my feet and met her halfway.

She stopped before me and stared up into my eyes. She must have run all the way when she got my message, for although she was standing as rigid as a pole in concrete, something of her exhaustion showed in her eyes.

"Tell me," she said in a panting whisper.

"Your boy is going to be okay." I put my arm around her. "Everything's under control. The doctors say he's going to live and pull through and...."

I stopped. I wondered what words I was going to use when no words that I had ever heard in my life would be the right ones.

"Tell me." She pulled from my grasp and tilted her head so that she could look up into my eyes and read them like a printed page. "Tell me!"

"He cut out the boy's—he said he couldn't stand whistling. It was a phobia, he claimed. Eight bullets cured his phobia, if any."

"He cut out what?"

"Your son's tongue."

I put my arm around her again, but it wasn't necessary. She didn't cry out, she didn't slump. Her head did go down and her eyes did blink once or twice, but that was all.

"He was the only little boy on Mars who could whistle," she said.

All of the emotion within her was somehow squeezed into those few words.

I couldn't get it out of my mind for a long while. I used to lie in bed and think of it somewhat like this:

There was this man, with his feet planted in the purple sands, and he looked up into the night sky when the moon called Deimos was in perigee, and he studied it. And he said to himself, "Well, I shall write a book and I shall say in this book that the moon of Mars is thus and so. And I will be accurately describing it, for in truth the moon is thus and so."

And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too, looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called Phobos. And he, too, decided to write a book. And he knew he could accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie.

I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed Tahily, the Martian she loved. I could tell her Smythe had killed him in a fair fight because the Martian had tried to jump a claim. And her heart would be set to rest, for she would know that the whole thing was erased and done with, at last.

Or, on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the day—maybe not tomorrow, but some day—when, like the dream of finding gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him.

I couldn't leave her without a reason for living. Her man was dead and her son would never whistle again. She had to have something to live for, didn't she?