Understandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever I showed it I got respect.
I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't.
Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying good-by.
That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.
It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.
The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress. Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the belu tree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums.
The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these purple sands.
I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had come.
"Wahanhk," I said. "The Chief. Take me to him."