Slowly Thorne walked up to the bush. There were many, growing in strange luxuriance along the dust-worn flanks of an ugly wreck half-buried in the sand. Other wrecks flanked it, three of them, lean, wicked skeletons of ancient Martian fighting ships, one with her broken prow yet buried in the freighter's bulging side. He touched the nearest plank and it drifted into powdered dust beneath his fingers, leaving a round hole in the grey wall. Again he put his hand through the ship's side. Another hole was puffed out as cleanly as by a dis-ray.
Curiosity stirred in him once more. Picking up a stone, he broke open the wreck's side, bring down the entire flank in an almost soundless crash of powdering timbers and dissolving decks. The hold, pierced upon the farther side by the ram of the dead warship which had undoubtedly sunk the two of them, lay open to the sunlight, barred by the ragged shadows of the broken stern works.
"Jars," muttered Thorne. The hold had been packed to the deck with fat, yet not ungraceful clay jars eight feet high and three wide. He lurched through the opening he had made.
"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," he mumbled. Maxfield Parrish jars, Oriental and sinister enough to have held a pair of the ancient robber band. He patted one, and weak though the blow was, the jar dissolved into drifting mist.
Thorne stared.
Preserving the graceful shape of the vanished jar, a beautiful block of some golden amber substance stood twinkling among its fellows. He pounded another jar. It, too, shuddered into misty dust, leaving its petrified contents, blazing like tawny fire in the Martian sun. Down the long row Thorne went, poking and kicking. Jar after jar dissolved, leaving a shimmering stack of solid amber blocks shaped with inhuman perfection to the mound of the clay in which for countless forgotten centuries they had been petrifying beneath the dying seas and deserts. Incredibly hard and smoother than glass, their sleek flanks ripped and gleamed, shimmering in the bars of sunlight slanting down through the rotted deck. But other than these, the ship lay bare and lifeless.
"Frozen oil," mumbled Thorne, turning away at last. Even had he been able to melt and eat the stuff, the thought of prolonging life had become insupportable. Weakly he stumbled toward the broken wall he had pushed in to enter. Here there was naught for him, but beyond, in the shadows, lay the deadly t'ang and its berries. Well, it had begun this ghastly Odyssey and it was fitting it should end it in the only way it could be ended.
He groped in the shadows for his spear. Lifting it, he thrust a plank into drifting dissolution, clearing a way out. For a moment, staring at the sunlight beyond the opening, he did not see. Then his eyes were drawn to the blade of his spear as it sagged in his lax grasp, for, resting on the sand within the ship's overcast, it gleamed with a strange radiance. White fire blazed intermittently along its wide, polished blade.
Thorne frowned. He lifted the blade. In the sunlight the light dancing on his spear became white-hot, intolerable. He thrust it back into the shadows where a broken bit of deck overhung the ruined hold. A shattering blaze of cold, blue-white light blasted along the hammered steel, casting its eery radiance upon Thorne's bearded, dusty face in a wild dance of light and dark. It gleamed madly in his mad, staring eyes. It shook like flame in his trembling hands, then fell like a shooting star upon the dusty sands as the weapon sagged from his relaxing grip. Slowly Thorne pivoted, his wild eyes fixed in awed amaze upon the rows and heaps of amber jars lying in such glowing luster among the fallen wreckage of the deck he had shattered. Sunlight ran and danced mockingly along their smooth flanks, sparkled and blazed with a fierce glow upon curve and highlight. He dropped his eyes to the fallen spear, blazing like a meteor in the dusk, half-buried in the sand, then lifted them again to the fabulous wealth lying before him.