Barry Williams' searching glance covered the terrain once more. Deimos, the smaller moon, was already high. The larger, swifter Phobos was rapidly overhauling its companion. Under their light, the scene was clear. But it was so every night on Mars, yet Earthmen who ventured into the desert at night died! Barry waited.
He waited as had the occupants of that Center for the man to come in and tell the story of that strange light patch against the red sand. In the morning a searching party brought in his body. The story would never be told by him.
Nor by any other Earthman, it seemed. Later, a spaceship again sighted the mist, and radioed that it was landing to investigate. Again, Earthmen, now frightened and grim, waited through the Martian night. Once more, a daylight searching party found only the dead.
"Ain't fer human understandin'," one superstitious miner whispered in awed tones. "Twenty year I bin on this cursed planet—nor ever heerd the like o' this."
"It's clear enough for me," answered a pink-cheeked youngster up to Mars to make a fortune in rich ore dust. "I stay off the desert at night. Only the miserable Martians can live out there then."
"Justice from the Crypt," a third muttered, quoting the threat of an old Martian, dying from wounds he'd received fighting Earthmen. "It's like from the grave—this mist, the way it creeps from the sand white and ghosty!"
That was the spirit Barry Williams, special investigator for the Terrestrial Bureau of Martian Affairs, found when he arrived. Behind the fear were rumors, dead bodies, nothing more. At first, he'd blamed superstition and the natural hazards of work in the desert. But now he was here in the desert at night, waiting.
It wasn't for this he'd been sent to Mars, Barry told himself half-angrily. His mission here was important. But this threat to all Terrestrials on Mars was ominous. There were no government agencies to deal with the threat here. Mars was just a frontier where untold riches lay for the taking beneath some of the red sand.
The sullen, cowed Martians, working at the bigger mines, or following their nomadic courses across the desert no longer attempted an organized government. Despite their great majority in numbers, the Martians played no part in running the planet. How they must be rejoicing now, Barry thought, as death stalked their conquerors, death striking from the desert in the night.