Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/12

 slowly circled the object, scrutinizing it intently. He saw that, except for a short stubby rod protruding from its pear-shaped nose, it was utterly without external moving parts of any kind. But the rod looked like a control of some sort. Thvall first rotated the rod; then, when nothing happened, he tugged on it, and finally pressed on it. That brought results. The rod moved inward easily, and instantly four small valves opened in the cylinder's circumference and a thick gray gas poured forth and mingled with the atmosphere.

For an instant Thvall hunched there motionless, watching the gas ooze viscidly from the metal cylinder and vanish in the clean, still air. Then, in a lightning-flash of utter comprehension, he understood the whole cryptic pattern—the silent city, the dead everywhere, the significance of the gas-bomb that was now pouring its lethal fumes into the surrounding atmosphere. Instantly he darted for the open door and the elevator shaft

He never reached that gaping well. He detected no odor; there was no warning pain, but abruptly the flat roof was heaving and billowing like a swirling sea.

Vertigo danced in his alien brain, an intense blackness deepened before his single, thousand-faceted eye, and strength and life went swiftly together from his boneless tentacles.

Thus Thvall the Seeker died, and the knowledge that on Earth — the third planet of a minor sun deep sunk in the thinning haze of stars twenty thousand light-years beyond the galaxy's axis — were the environmental conditions and the water his people required so desperately, died with him. And on Earth the frogs and fishes were now the highest remaining forms of sentient life.

But Mars, the Red God, laughed—for though on Earth the men who had deified him and honored him with a name no longer lived to speak that name, he had just claimed his last and perhaps his most significant, sacrifice.