CHAPTER III
I stood by the yawning mouth of the newly exhumed grave and swore. I had only been on duty two hours, but I had lost a Cadillac-corpse already.
I shifted the beam of my pocket torch from the deep impressions made by the 'copter feet to the tumbled earth around the huge grave mouth, then into the empty grave itself. The gun metal casket had left a neat rectangle in the blue clay when the cargo winch had yanked it loose. Staring down at the smooth, mute subsoil, I felt like Christian wallowing in the Slough of Despond.
I had lied to Julia. Things were not under control at Cadillac. This was the fourth car-corpse I had lost during the past month, and I shuddered when I thought of what the Cadillac Sexton would probably say to me in the morning.
The fact that I'd lost no time in notifying the Air Police was small consolation. The half dozen decrepit 'copters they had at their disposal were no match for the streamlined jobs of the ghouls. The ghouls would get away just as they always did and one more car-corpse would be dismembered and sold on the black market—or contribute its vital steel, copper and aluminum to the clandestine manufacture of newer and swifter 'copters.
I kicked a lump of loose dirt. I felt sick. Around me, tall lombardies formed a palisade so dense that the light of the gibbous moon couldn't penetrate it. Above me, Mars shone like an inflamed red eye. For a moment I wished I were up there, a member of the abandoned colony in Deucalionis Regio.
But only for a moment. The ordinary rigors of colonial life were as nothing compared to the rigors that must have faced the Martian colonists when the metal crisis terminated the building of spaceships and brought about the colony's isolation. Perhaps those rigors had eased by now, and then again, perhaps Deucalionis Regio had turned into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I turned and began walking back to the ganglion tower whence Betz's alarm had summoned me. Betz hailed me when I approached tower 6, and I paused. I could see his round youthful face in the moonlight. The silvery albedo made it seem like a small moon itself as he peered down at me from his eyrie. I had never thought much of him—probably because he had applied for a wife nine years before he needed to and was already a married man. I thought even less of him now.
"I can't understand how they got down without my seeing them," he said.
"I can't understand either," I said.