Down to a Sunless Sea

28 The Return

The way back up the great stair was harder than before, but, then, this is always the case. It is more difficult to climb a stair than it is to go down one, simply because of gravity.

They carried with them that of their gear and clothing they had abandoned on the indigo moss-slopes. And they climbed— and climbed—with the stronger assisting the weaker of them. From time to time, as before, they paused to rest and refresh themselves on the stone platforms.

It had occurred to them, of course, to take precautions against thirst and hunger. So the outlaws, with their long knives, had carved off slabs of mushroom-meat, and had filled their canteens with sweet fluid from those growths in the fungus-forest which bore the honey-hearted meadlike liquor.

They yearned for fresh water and for cooked meat. But these were not to be had on the stair, and there was naught else for them to do but try to ignore those yearnings which could not then be appeased.

They continued the ascent. After a time, weary, they slept. Only to wake and climb again.

Presently, they began to notice a reversal of the conditions they had observed during their descent of the stair. That is, the wan and pearly luminance slowly ebbed; the humidity seeped from the air and it became dry; the warmth faded, and when, despite the heat of their exertions, it became unpleasantly chill, they paused during one rest-period to don again their garments.

Brant and Will Harbin climbed into their protective, heated suits of nioflex. The natives, including Zuarra, resumed their long, loose robes. And they climbed up and up, while the air became more like the atmosphere they had known on the surface—cruelly dry, bitterly cold, depleted of all but vestiges of life-giving oxygen.

It was as difficult for their bodies and respiratory systems to readjust to these conditions as it had been earlier. They must pause to rest themselves many times, panting, starved for air, their flesh slick with greasy perspiration as their body-chemistry reverted to the conditions they had known before, on the surface.

In time, they returned to normal.

They spoke little between themselves, saving their breath for the ascent of the stone stair. But during the breaks between the intervals of the ascent, when they rested, drank frugally, ate sparingly of their scant supplies, a few words were exchanged.

Will Harbin’s face was screwed into a doleful expression during one such rest period. Brant asked if he was feeling all right; it had occurred to him that the strain on the older man’s heart, caused by the long and painful ascent of the stair, might very well prove injurious.

The other shook his head. “My ticker’s strong as ever,” he declared. “No, I was just mourning the loss to science of the information, the knowledge, the data we could have brought back from Zhah. If only I had brought along a camera! Or specimen-bottles. Incredible or not, my colleagues would have to pay some attention to tissue-samples from the mushroom-trees, or a segment of a dragonfly wing. …”

He cast Brant a sour glance, and the big man grinned ruefully, knowing what was in Will Harbin’s mind at that moment. He had mightily wished to fill his canteen with water from the luminous sea, but Brant had refused to permit this, on the grounds that they would become mighty thirsty on the stair, and every canteen was needed for nourishing fungus juices.

And, of course, he was quite right. Long before they reached the top of the stair, their supplies of drinkables gave out and their mouths and throats became parched with thirst. But knowing that Brant had been right in refusing him permission made it no easier for the scientist to do without the single water sample which would, if not exactly have proven beyond all doubt or question the existence of the subterranean world beneath the dunes of Mars, at least have surprised and interested the world of science.

He heaved a heavy sigh, and stopped thinking about the loss to human knowledge. Many and strange were the mysteries of Mars, and in all the generations since first the Earthsiders came hither to explore, to colonize, to exploit, few had been uncovered, and multitudes more remained hidden in the hostile wastes of the Red Planet.

Brant’s physical powers were amazing to the outlaws, and won him their admiration and respect as nothing had before.

The fact of the matter was very simple. Mars has a gravity far less than that of Earth, where Brant was born and bred. His muscles were shaped to battle against a stronger pull of gravitation, whereas those of the Martian natives were adapted to the lighter gravity of their world.

Nevertheless, his stamina and endurance, his sheer strength alone, made him the object of their admiration. Fighting men from whatever world admire in others the same abilities which they respect in themselves. They found nothing to marvel at in his physical courage, his fighting skills, or his instinct for survival. But his strength and endurance were so far greater than their own—even those lean, tough, rangy desert hawks—that they strove, however in vain, to emulate him.

The grueling toil of the ascent, the bone-deep exhaustion they endured, the oppressive darkness and silence of the stair, was not alleviated by the monotony of the climb.

For there were no surprises on the way back to the surface, only a reversal of the strange—but by now, quite familiar— phenomena they had observed on the earlier journey down.

When there is nothing at all to look at, and even less to think about, boredom can become as wearisome to the mind as hard physical toil is to the body.

They were by now too parched to talk, or even to sing. There was nothing at all to do but to climb, and climb, and climb, until every muscle and nerve and sinew in their bodies ached beyond that caused by any exertion they had ever known before; and there was nothing to look forward to in hope and anticipation except the next rest stop, and the next morsel of food from their dwindling store.

They all knew that it would eventually end, of course, but when it did, it quite took them by surprise and for a few moments their benumbed minds could not quite register the fact.

Tuan uttered a harsh croaking cry, pointing ahead. They looked, to see the light of Will Harbin’s fluoro mirrored in the dull reflective sheen of a huge rectangle of metal.

It was the door that had barred this passageway between two worlds for uncountable hundreds of millennia.

And they had come to the top of the stair at last.

“Thank God,” groaned Harbin wearily.

Tuan and his outlaws muttered a ritual phrase in honor of the Timeless Ones—the strange, shadowy gods of the little-known native religion.

Brant said nothing, but relief was visible in his tired, sagging face. He put one arm about Zuarra, whom he had been helping for most of the last hundred steps, and she lay her head against his chest, and her arm crept about his waist.

The wan light of open day glimmered through the rectangle cut from blackness that was the door to the surface world.