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EYES THAT WATCH
by RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
He, Sam Conway, was back from Mars now. Back from red, ferric deserts no Earthly boot had ever touched before. Back from bitter cold and aching dryness. Back from dazzling yellow hazes of dust and suspended ice crystals. No more need to wear oxygen armor in a thin, ozone-tainted atmosphere now. Back from solitude, and the endless fight to keep alive out there. Back from the enigma of Martian civilization's extinction, uncounted ages ago.... Back, back, back....
Home, now! From the window Sam Conway could see a row of maples, orange and golden in the autumn warmth. Kids were playing football in the street. Sam's oxy-hydrogen rocket ship, blued and battered and burnt, was suspended for all time from massive girders in the Smithsonian Institution. But even that was far away from Bryton, here. It should have been finished, now--the adventure. Sam Conway should have relaxed. Even Ellen Varney was beside him now. That should have helped. It did, a little. Yet only for moments at a time.
Those twenty months of exploration on another world, had become like a phantom in Sam's thoughts. Faded, distant, contrasting; yet starkly vivid too. Every hour had been a struggle. Extracting food substances from the tissues and juices of strange plants. Roasting native potassium chlorate in a small sun-furnace to extract oxygen from it, and compressing the precious gas into steel flasks. All this had been necessary, the dying Martian atmosphere contained only a low percentage of oxygen.
It had been a strange hand-to-mouth existence out there--a kind of game in which a fellow tried always to keep one small jump ahead of Death.
And there was more. Climbing the steep wall of an ancient artificial gorge not far from the south polar cap; gripping at odd prickly vines to keep from falling into the hardy thickets below, where tough-shelled worms crawled sluggishly, he had found something in a small, sand-drifted cell that was part of a ruin. Something that meant power.
What kind of power? All kinds, perhaps. Scientific learning greater than that of Earth. Power like that of gold and jewels, but far exceeding it. Power to wreck and to create, power to destroy worlds. Power, maybe, to sway minds. Sam still could not guess how far it might extend, or how deep--
No the adventure was not over, yet. It was just beginning. It wasn't just nostalgia that tied the consciousness of Sam Conway to a planet, millions of miles away, whose people had perished in a strange travail ages ago--a catastrophe whose marks lay in fused, glassy ruins, and in machines melted and rusted beyond recognition.
Sam had that secret of power hidden away now in a little aluminum box that had once contained concentrated food rations. And having that secret--though it thrilled him--still made him wish nervously that he also had eyes in the back of his head....
Ellen Varney's slim fingers tightened on his arm.
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