Opening the armor fully, they began to remove the dead Martian, puffed up like a kernel of pop-corn by the sudden loss of its air pressure.
Having cleared the armor, Bormon climbed inside—space suit and all—folding up like a pocket knife so as to resemble somewhat the alien shape it was intended to hold, and tested the semi-automatic controls. Everything appeared to be in working order. Assuring himself of this as well as his knowledge of Martian mechanics would permit, he crawled out again to help Calbur.
Calbur was scrambling to collect ore. And under their combined efforts one of the baskets was presently filled—for the last time, Bormon fervently hoped!
Again he entered that strange conveyance, the Martian's armor, and after some experimental manipulation of the push-button controls, managed to get the thing upright on its jointed, metal legs and start it moving awkwardly in the direction of the chasm.
Behind him came Calbur, dragging the basket of ore—for lacking a disguise such as Bormon's, he must have some excuse for returning to the cabin, and he had wrapped the chain around his wrist to conceal the fact that it had been severed.
Bormon, in the narrow confines of his armor, disconnected the mechanical voder used by its deposed owner, for all Martians are voiceless.
His greatest fear was that one of the Martian guards would attempt to communicate with him. This would disclose the imposture immediately, since he would be unable to reply. For all Martian communication, even by ether-wave, is visual—the medium being a complicated series of symbols based on their ancient sign language, the waving of tentacles, which no human brain has ever fully understood. The means of producing these conventionalized symbols was a tiny keyboard, just below an oval, silvery screen, and as Bormon sent his odd conveyance stalking down the side of the chasm, toward that sweeping disk which he now knew to be formed by the ends of two cyclotronic D-chambers facing each other, he kept one eye on this silvery screen, but it remained blank.
He moved on down past the catwalk to the lower ramp. Here he must pass close to a Martian guard.
But this Martian seemed to give him no attention whatever.
Reaching a point opposite the ship, Bormon stepped from the ramp. Still that oval screen remained blank. No Martian was apparently paying enough attention to him to question his movements.