He opened a case and hefted a weapon constructed like a spider's antennae.
It hummed, and a flight of metal bees sizzled out the rifle bore, flew away, and stung a target-mannequin some fifty yards away, then fell lifeless, clattering to the floor.
The hunter nodded with admiration, and put the rifle back in the case.
He prowled on, curious as a child, testing yet other weapons here and there which dissolved glass or caused metal to run in bright yellow pools of molten lava.
"Excellent!" "Fine!" "Absolutely great!"
His cry rang out again and again as he slammed cases open and shut, and finally chose the gun.
It was a gun that, without fuss or fury, did away with matter. You pressed the button, there was a brief discharge of blue light, and the target simply vanished. No blood. No bright lava. No trace.
"All right," he announced, leaving the Place of Guns, "we have the weapon. How about the Game, the Grandest Beast ever in the Long Hunt?"
He leapt onto the moving sidewalk.
An hour later he had passed a thousand buildings and scanned a thousand open parks without itching his finger.
He moved uneasily from treadway to treadway, shifting speeds now in this direction, now in that.
Until at last he saw a river of metal that sped underground.
Instinctively, he jumped toward that.
The metal stream carried him down into the secret gut of the City.
Here all was warm blood darkness. Here strange pumps moved the pulse of the City. Here were distilled the sweats that lubricated the roadways and lifted the elevators and swarmed the offices and stores with motion.
The hunter half crouched on the roadway. His eyes squinted. Perspiration gathered in his palms. His trigger finger greased the metal gun, sliding.
"Yes," he whispered. "By God, now. This is it. The City itself...the Great Beast. Why didn't I think of that? The Animal City, the terrible prey. It has men for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It kills them with machines. It munches their bones like breadsticks. It spits them out like toothpicks. It lives long after they die. The City, by God, the City. Well now..."
He glided through dark grottoes of television eyes which showed him remote parkways and high towers.
Deeper within the belly of the underground world he sank as the river lowered itself. He passed a school of computers that chattered in maniac chorus. He shuddered as a cloud of paper confetti from one titian machine, holes punched out to perhaps record his passing, fell upon him in a whispered snow.
He raised his gun. He fired.
The machine disappeared.
He fired again. A skeleton strutwork under yet another machine vanished.
The City screamed.
At first very low and then very high, then, rising, falling, like a siren. Lights flashed. Bells began to ricochet alarums. The metal river shuddered under his feet, slowed. He fired at television screens which glared all white upon him. They blinked out and did not exist.
The City screamed higher until he raved against it, himself, and the marrow of his bones shook out an insanity of black dust.
He did not see, until it was too late, that the road on which he sped fell into the gnashing maw of a machine that was used for some purpose long forgotten centuries before.
He thought that by pressing the trigger he would make the terrible mouth disappear. It did indeed vanish. But as the roadway sped on and he whirled and fell as it picked up speed, he realized at last that his weapon did not truly destroy, it merely made invisible what was there and what still remained though unseen.
He gave a terrible cry to match the cry of the City. He flung out the gun in a last blow. The gun went into cogs and wheels and teeth and was twisted down.
The last thing he saw was a deep elevator shaft that fell away for perhaps a mile into the earth.
He knew that it might take him two minutes to hit the bottom. He shrieked.
The worst thing was, he would be conscious ... all the way down...
The rivers shook. The silver rivers trembled. The pathways, shocked, convulsed the metal shores through which they sped.
Wilder, traveling, was almost knocked flat by the concussion.
What had caused the concussion, he could not see. Perhaps, far off, there was a cry, a murmur of dreadful sound, which swiftly faded.
Wilder moved on. The silver track threaded on. But the City seemed poised, agape. The City seemed tensed. Its huge and various muscles were cramped, alert.
Feeling this, Wilder began to walk as well as be moved by the swift path.
"Thank God. There's the Gate. The sooner I'm out of this place the happier I'll--"
The Gate was indeed there, not a hundred yards away. But, on the instant, as if hearing his declaration, the river stopped. It shivered. Then it started to move back, taking him where he did not wish to go.
Incredulous, Wilder spun about, and, in spinning, fell. He clutched at the stuffs of the rushing sidewalk.
His face, pressed to the vibrant grillework of the river-rushing pavement, heart the machineries mesh and mill beneath, humming and agroan, forever sluicing, forever feverish for journeys and mindless excursions. Beneath the calm metal, embattlements of hornets stung and buzzed, lost bees bumbled and subsided. Collapsed, he saw the Gate lost away behind. Burdened, he remembered at last the extra weight upon his back, the jet-power equipment which might give him wings.
He jammed his hand to the switch on his belt. And in the instant before the sidewalk might have pulsed him off among sheds and museum walls, he was airborne.
Flying, he hovered, then swam the air back to hang above a casual Parkhill gazing up, all covered with grease and smiling from a dirty face. Beyond Parkhill, at the Gate, stood the frightened maid. Beyond even further, near the yacht at the landing, stood Aaronson, back turned to the City, nervous to be moving on.
"Where are the others?" cried Wilder.
"Oh, they won't be back," said Parkhill, easily. "It figures, doesn't it? I mean, it's quite a place."
"Place!" said Wilder, hovered now up, now down, turning slowly, apprehensive. "We've got to get them out! It's not safe."
"It's safe if you like it. I like it," said Parkhill.
And all the while there was a gathering of earthquake in the ground and in the air, which Parkhill chose to ignore.
"You're leaving, of course," he said, as if nothing were wrong. "I knew you would. Why?"
"Why?" Wilder wheeled like a dragonfly before a trembling of storm wind. Buffeted up, buffeted down, he flung his words at Parkhill, who didn't bother to duck but smiled up and accepted. "Good God, Sam, the place is Hell. The Martians had enough sense to get out. They saw they had overbuilt themselves. The damn City does everything, which is too much! Sam!"
But at that instant, they both looked round and up. For the sky was shelling over. Great lids were vising in the ceiling. Like an immense flower, the tops of buildings were petalling out to cover themselves. Windows were shutting down. Doors were slamming. A sound of fired cannons echoed through the streets.
The Gate was thundering shut.
The twin jaws of the Gate, shuddering, were in motion.
Wilder cried out, spun round, and dived.
He heard the maid below him. He saw her reach up. Then, swooping, he gathered her in. He kicked the air. The jet lifted them both.
Like a bullet to a target he rammed for the Gate. But an instant before, burdened, he reached it, the Gates banged together. He was barely able to veer course and soar upward along the raw metal as the entire City shook with the roar of the steel.
Parkhill shouted below. And Wilder was flying up, up along the wall, looking this way and that.
Everywhere, the sky was closing in. The petals were coming down, coming down. There was only a last small patch of stone sky to his right. He blasted for that. And kicking, made it through, flying, as the final flange of steel clipped into place, and the City was closed to itself.
He h
ung for a moment, suspended, and then flew down along the outer wall to the dock where Aaronson stood by the yacht staring at the huge shut Gates.
"Parkhill," whispered Wilder, looking at the City, the walls, the Gates. "You fool. You damned fool."
"Fools, all of them," said Aaronson, and turned away. "Fools. Fools."
They waited a moment longer and listened to the City, humming, alive, kept to itself, its great mouth filled with a few bits of warmth, a few lost people somewhere hid away in there. The Gates would stay shut now, forever. The City had what it needed to go on a long while.
Wilder looked back at the place, as the yacht took them back out of the mountain and away up the canal.
They passed the poet a mile further on, walking along the rim of the canal. He waved them on. "No. No, thanks. I feel like walking. It's a fine day. Good-bye. Go on."
The towns lay ahead. Small towns. Small enough to be run by men instead of running them. He heard the brass music. He saw the neon lights at dusk. He made out the junkyards in the fresh night under the stars.
Beyond the towns stood the silver rockets, tall, waiting to be fired off and away toward the wilderness of stars.
"Real," whispered the rockets, "real stuff. Real travel. Real time. Real space. No gifts. Nothing free. Just a lot of good hard work."
The yacht touched into its home dock.
"Rockets, by God," he murmured. "Wait till I get my hands on you."
He ran away in the night, to do just that.
The Blue Bottle
The sundials were tumbled into white pebbles. The birds of the air now flew in ancient skies of rock and sand, buried, their songs stopped. The dead sea bottoms were currented with dust which flooded the land when the wind bade it reenact an old tale of engulfment. The cities were deep laid with granaries of silence, time stored and kept, pools and fountains of quietude and memory.
Mars was dead.
Then, out of the large stillness, from a great distance, there was an insect sound which grew large among the cinnamon hills and moved in the sun-blazed air until the highway trembled and dust was shook whispering down in the old cities.
The sound ceased.
In the shimmering silence of midday, Albert Beck and Leonard Craig sat in an ancient landcar, eyeing a dead city which did not move under their gaze but waited for their shout:
"Hello!"
A crystal tower dropped into soft dusting rain.
"You there!"
And another tumbled down.
And another and another fell as Beck called, summoning them to death. In shattering flights, stone animals with vast granite wings dived to strike the courtyards and fountains. His cry summoned them like living beasts and the beasts gave answer, groaned, cracked, leaned up, tilted over, trembling, hesitant, then split the air and swept down with grimaced mouths and empty eyes, with sharp, eternally hungry teeth suddenly seized out and strewn like shrapnel on the tiles.
Beck waited. No more towers fell.
"It's safe to go in now."
Craig didn't move. "For the same reason?"
Beck nodded.
"For a damned bottle! I don't understand. Why does everyone want it?"
Beck got out of the car. "Those that found it, they never told, they never explained. But--it's old. Old as the desert, as the dead seas--and it might contain anything. That's what the legend says. And because it could hold anything--well, that stirs a man's hunger."
"Yours, not mine," said Craig. His mouth barely moved; his eyes were half-shut, faintly amused. He stretched lazily. "I'm just along for the ride. Better watching you than sitting in the heat."
Beck had stumbled upon the old landcar a month back, before Craig had joined him. It was part of the flotsam of the First Industrial Invasion of Mars that had ended when the race moved on toward the stars. He had worked on the motor and run it from city to dead city, through the lands of the idlers and roustabouts, the dreamers and lazers, men caught in the backwash of space, men like himself and Craig who had never wanted to do much of anything and had found Mars a fine place to do it in.
"Five thousand, ten thousand years back the Martians made the Blue Bottle," said Beck. "Blown from Martian glass--and lost and found and lost and found again and again."
He stared into the wavering heat shimmer of the dead city. All my life, thought Beck, I've done nothing and nothing inside the nothing. Others, better men, have done big things, gone off to Mercury, or Venus, or out beyond the System. Except me. Not me. But the Blue Bottle can change all that.
He turned and walked away from the silent car.
Craig was out and after him, moving easily along. "What is it now, ten years you've hunted? You twitch when you sleep, wake up in fits, sweat through the days. You want the damn bottle that bad, and don't know what's in it. You're a fool, Beck."
"Shut up, shut up," said Beck, kicking a slide of pebbles out of his way.
They walked together into the ruined city, over a mosaic of cracked tiles shaped into a stone tapestry of fragile Martian creatures, long-dead beasts which appeared and disappeared as a slight breath of wind stirred the silent dust.
"Wait," said Beck. He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a great shout. "You there!"
"...there," said an echo, and towers fell. Fountains and stone pillars folded into themselves. That was the way of these cities. Sometimes towers as beautiful as a symphony would fall at a spoken word. It was like watching a Bach cantata disintegrate before your eyes.
A moment later: bones buried in bones. The dust settled. Two structures remained intact.
Beck stepped forward, nodding to his friend.
They moved in search.
And, searching, Craig paused, a faint smile on his lips. "In that bottle," he said, "is there a little accordion woman, all folded up like one of those tin cups, or like one of those Japanese flowers you put in water and it opens out?"
"I don't need a woman."
"Maybe you do. Maybe you never had a real woman, a woman who loved you, so, secretly, that's what you hope is in it." Craig pursed his mouth. "Or maybe, in that bottle, something from your childhood. All in a tiny bundle--a lake, a tree you climbed, green grass, some crayfish. How's that sound?"
Beck's eyes focused on a distant point. "Sometimes--that's almost it. The past--Earth. I don't know."
Craig nodded. "What's in the bottle would depend, maybe, on who's looking. Now, if there was a shot of whiskey in it..."
"Keep looking," said Beck.
There were seven rooms filled with glitter and shine; from floor to tiered ceiling there were casks, crocks, magnums, urns, vases--fashioned of red, pink, yellow, violet, and black glass. Beck shattered them, one by one, to eliminate them, to get them out of the way so he would never have to go through them again.
Beck finished his room, stood ready to invade the next. He was almost afraid to go on. Afraid that this time he would find it; that the search would be over and the meaning would go out of his life. Only after he had heard of the Blue Bottle from fire-travelers all the way from Venus to Jupiter, ten years ago, had life begun to take on a purpose. The fever had lit him and he had burned steadily ever since. If he worked it properly, the prospect of finding the bottle might fill his entire life to the brim. Another thirty years, if he was careful and not too diligent, of search, never admitting aloud that it wasn't the bottle that counted at all, but the search, the running and the hunting, the dust and the cities and the going-on.
Beck heard a muffled sound. He turned and walked to a window looking out into the courtyard. A small gray sand cycle had purred up almost noiselessly at the end of the street. A plump man with blond hair eased himself off the spring seat and stood looking into the city. Another searcher. Beck sighed. Thousands of them, searching and searching. But there were thousands of brittle cities and towns and villages and it would take a millennium to sift them all.
"How you doing?" Craig appeared in a doorway.
"No luck." Beck sniffed the air.
"Do you smell anything?"
"What?" Craig looked about.
"Smells like--bourbon."
"Ho!" Craig laughed. "That's me!"
"You?"
"I just took a drink. Found it in the other room. Shoved some stuff around, a mess of bottles, like always, and one of them had some bourbon in it, so I had myself a drink."
Beck was staring at him, beginning to tremble. "What--what would bourbon be doing here, in a Martian bottle?" His hands were cold. He took a slow step forward. "Show me!"
"I'm sure that..."
"Show me, damn you!"
It was there, in one corner of the room, a container of Martian glass as blue as the sky, the size of a small fruit, light and airy in Beck's hand as he set it down upon a table.
"It's half-full of bourbon," said Craig.
"I don't see anything inside," said Beck.
"Then shake it."
Beck picked it up, gingerly shook it.
"Hear it gurgle?"
"No."
"I can hear it plain."
Beck replaced it on the table. Sunlight spearing through a side window struck blue flashes off the slender container. It was the blue of a star held in the hand. It was the blue of a shallow ocean bay at noon. It was the blue of a diamond at morning.
"This is it," said Beck quietly. "I know it is. We don't have to look anymore. We've found the Blue Bottle."
Craig looked skeptical. "Sure you don't see anything in it?"
"Nothing ... But--" Beck bent close and peered deeply into the blue universe of glass. "Maybe if I open it up and let it out, whatever it is, I'll know."
"I put the stopper in tight. Here." Craig reached out.
"If you gentlemen will excuse me," said a voice in the door behind them.
The plump man with blond hair walked into their line of vision with a gun. He did not look at their faces, he looked only at the blue glass bottle. He began to smile. "I hate very much to handle guns," he said, "but it is a matter of necessity, as I simply must have that work of art. I suggest that you allow me to take it without trouble."
Beck was almost pleased. It had a certain beauty of timing, this incident; it was the sort of thing he might have wished for, to have the treasure stolen before it was opened. Now there was the good prospect of a chase, a fight, a series of gains and losses, and, before they were done, perhaps another four or five years spent upon a new search.
"Come along now," said the stranger. "Give it up." He raised the gun warningly.