Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 11 (1949).pdf/71

 "What is it?" He came back under the towering mushroom, holding the flashlamp up to her helmet so that he could see her face.

"John—please be careful."

For a moment they gazed into each other's eyes, unspeaking.

"Rest well, Martha," he said simply as he turned away. The moon was sinking out of sight as he patrolled the sleeping figures, peering anxiously into the helmets of each one at regular intervals, checking, checking, checking.

Day after unvarying day punctuated by the black throat of night. Days spent tramping wearily along the fog-shrouded terrain, devoid of anything resembling life save the clusters of mushrooms, and other bits of fungi. And occasionally a pool of foul water surrounded by mold-growths. They came up fragments of metal and stone at times and upon crumbling bones, lost beneath fungus-like growths. The endless plain now and then gave way to slight upcroppings of blasted rock, rock strangely cleft as if by strokes of a titan's sword. One or two of the more curious in the party wanted to stop and examine these clefts, but Stilson urged them on. They could not afford to linger.

Onward, endlessly onward. They came to a large expanse of desert dotted with great patches of sheer glass where heat-bombs had fallen and fused the sand in solid masses. One man died here when his helmet burst open as he fell against the unyielding surface and the poisonous atmosphere filled his lungs. The glassy tracts too, were cleft in the same mysterious manner.

Day and night. Night and day. They marched on wordlessly, halting only to rest or to take nourishment, sleeping under the protection of mushrooms, or, if none were available, on the ground or sand itself. And the silent hand of the Enemy touched one here and one there so that they found the grim remains when they arose to go on. It seemed useless to keep watches at night, for never could they see what it was that menaced them, and never were they able to ward it off.

Stilson checked the chart and compass for the fifth time that day and turned to Sellers.

"We should be near, now. We'll try a message."

The older man nodded, understandingly, and withdrew the apparatus from his pack, assembling it quickly. He attached the batteries, then nodded to the leader who picked up the microphone and spoke into it slowly.

"Attention! Attention! We come in peace. We are unarmed and are proceeding to your fortress to make a treaty. Send a party out to guide us. We cannot find your fortress."

He repeated the message several times, then turned the power off. "If we are as near as we think we are, they probably heard us."

It did not occur to him that he could not expect his signals to be picked up in so short a broadcasting period, or that the Enemy might not be able to understand his spoken language. These, and other commonplace pointers had long been lost. The people of the City had long been in a state of thinking to be described only as naive. 107