The newspaperman felt as if he was attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle with the outside pieces missing.
With that, the expedition party was escorted from the strange chamber. Rosemary hung close to Captain Carter and Lamont tagged behind, pausing to snap a few final photos of the ancient Martian device with his recorder. He frowned at the indicator in the eyepiece that spoke to the poor lighting.
“What’s the big hurry?” He asked Francis, catching up with them as they followed the ribbed corridor upward. “Do you think the lift will leave without us?”
The captain shook his head slightly. “I doubt it, though I can’t be entirely sure what orders Miss Santana will give in my absence. No, it’s Estevez that worries me.”
“Rico?” Rosemary asked. “Why?”
Carter took a deep breath. “I hope it’s nothing. But he seemed reluctant to follow my orders after we received the radio signal from Rex. I’m concerned that in prolonged silence, he may take matters into his own hands.”
“Create an incident with the natives?” Lamont asked.
Francis merely shrugged, his eyebrows lifting as if to say, Who knows?
Some time passed and they walked in silence, listening to the rhythmic ticking of their guide and the scraping of their boots on hard stone. Lamont was troubled, tempted to verbally process everything they had encountered so far on this planet, but somehow thinking the better of it. Primitive humans, or human-like people, who used bits of highly radioactive refined metal as weapons, but who took refuge from a radioactive storm. Nonhuman creatures who seemed to take care to avoid the pygmy humans, but who went out of their way to help the crew of Westward—only to ask them to leave. To ask them using that dreadfully ancient technology of the Martians, the presence of which seemed to catch Captain Carter by surprise, despite the fact that it was Martian charts that had guided them across the light-years to this planet in the first place. Were the centipidal creatures present in eons past, when Martians had roamed the expanse of space? Did their memory stretch back that far? Had the pygmies evolved independently in the meantime? Had they crowded the nonhuman creatures out—forced them underground? What about the metal? What about the dome full of pygmy bones, which was apparently camouflaged from aerial observation? The newspaperman felt as if he was attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle with the outside pieces missing. He couldn’t find a frame in which to contain his questions, and something nagged at his subconscious that made him hesitate to share his thoughts with the others.
He emerged from his revery to see that they had ascended from the catacombs and were once again in the vast open space of the ‘city’ in which they had found Rosemary. Here, two of the creatures scuttled unceremoniously into the shadows along another pathway, while the third continued its clock-like ticking, beckoning the humans to follow. It was leading them back toward the surface.
Next: Emerging Panic
Tasty mysteries