“Naw!” said Jarvis disgustedly. “I wouldn’t try that, of course–not
more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and
busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working–what then?
Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I’d have
melted the floor from under me!” He rubbed his nose again. “Lucky for me
a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I’d have been mashed flat!”

“I could have fixed!” ejaculated the engineer. “I bet it vas not
serious.”

“Probably not,” agreed Jarvis sarcastically. “Only it wouldn’t fly.
Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or
trying to walk back–eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before
we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,” he concluded, “I chose to
walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy.”

“We’d have found you,” said Harrison.

“No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put
the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some
iron rations, and started out.”

“Water tank!” exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. “She weigh
one-quarter ton!”

“Wasn’t full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight,
which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred
and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a
hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday
earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily
stroll. Oh–of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry
Martian nights.

“Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight
meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course–plugging along
over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy’s crawling
biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal–just a dry ditch
about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own
company map.

“There’d been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with
what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn
moved out of my way!”

“Eh?” said Leroy.

“Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one–a little
grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy
legs.”

“He is where?” Leroy was eager.

“He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass
opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange
desert of Thyle again.

“I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome,
and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just
before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over
the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of
_that_ to be walked over, and then a couple of hundred miles of that
Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I
started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!”

“We were trying, you sap!” said Harrison.

“That didn’t help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of
daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy
place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as
this–crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance
and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn’t seen
anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world–nothing
dangerous, that is.”

“Did you?” queried Harrison.

“_Did I!_ You’ll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about
to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!”

“Vot iss shenanigans?” inquired Putz.

“He says, ‘Je ne sais quoi,'” explained Leroy. “It is to say, ‘I don’t
know what.'”

“That’s right,” agreed Jarvis. “I didn’t know what, so I sneaked over to
find out. There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of
canaries–whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded
a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel!”

“Tweel?” said Harrison, and “Tveel?” said Leroy and Putz.

“That freak ostrich,” explained the narrator. “At least, Tweel is as
near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something
like ‘Trrrweerrlll.'”

“What was he doing?” asked the Captain.

“He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one would.”

“Eaten! By what?”

“I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms
tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an
ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were
dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.

“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious
blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I
caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis
shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or
case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or
tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my
automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.

“There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and
then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its
arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks,
staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned
suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at
each other.

“The Martian wasn’t a bird, really. It wasn’t even bird-like, except
just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery
appendages, but the beak wasn’t really a beak. It was somewhat flexible;
I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a
cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four
fingered things–hands, you’d have to call them, and a little roundish
body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head–and that beak. It stood an
inch or so taller than I, and–well, Putz saw it!”

The engineer nodded. “_Ja!_ I saw!”