Eyes That Watch

Raymond Z. Gallun

The Guardians of Space Keep Constant Vigil.

He, Sam Conway, was back from Mars now. Back from red, ferric deserts no Earthly boot had ever touched before. Back from bitter cold and aching dryness. Back from dazzling yellow hazes of dust and suspended ice crystals. No more need to wear oxygen armor in a thin, ozone-tainted atmosphere now. Back from solitude, and the endless fight to keep alive out there. Back from the enigma of Martian civilization's extinction, uncounted ages ago.... Back, back, back....

Home, now! From the window Sam Conway could see a row of maples, orange and golden in the autumn warmth. Kids were playing football in the street. Sam's oxy-hydrogen rocket ship, blued and battered and burnt, was suspended for all time from massive girders in the Smithsonian Institution. But even that was far away from Bryton, here. It should have been finished, now-the adventure. Sam Conway should have relaxed. Even Ellen Varney was beside him now. That should have helped. It did, a little. Yet only for moments at a time.

Those twenty months of exploration on another world, had become like a phantom in Sam's thoughts. Faded, distant, contrasting; yet starkly vivid too. Every hour had been a struggle. Extracting food substances from the tissues and juices of strange plants. Roasting native potassium chlorate in a small sun-furnace to extract oxygen from it, and compressing the precious gas into steel flasks. All this had been necessary, the dying Martian atmosphere contained only a low percentage of oxygen.

It had been a strange hand-to-mouth existence out there-a kind of game in which a fellow tried always to keep one small jump ahead of Death.

Hauling a crude little metal wagon, in which his supplies were packed, across the sand for miles and miles at a time, until his brain had reeled. Sleeping in a tiny airtight tent, when afield from his rocket.... Sam had never expected to survive those experiences. But he had, somehow; and it had done something to his soul-hardened it, and maybe killed part of it; and maybe beautified another part. For in spite of everything, those vast, ghostly solitudes of Mars were beautiful-

And there was more. Climbing the steep wall of an ancient artificial gorge not far from the south polar cap; gripping at odd prickly vines to keep from falling into the hardy thickets below, where tough-shelled worms crawled sluggishly, he had found something in a small, sand-drifted cell that was part of a ruin. Something that meant power.

What kind of power? All kinds, perhaps. Scientific learning greater than that of Earth. Power like that of gold and jewels, but far exceeding it. Power to wreck and to create, power to destroy worlds. Power, maybe, to sway minds. Sam still could not guess how far it might extend, or how deep-

No the adventure was not over, yet. It was just beginning. It wasn't just nostalgia that tied the consciousness of Sam Conway to a planet, millions of miles away, whose people had perished in a strange travail ages ago-a catastrophe whose marks lay in fused, glassy ruins, and in machines melted and rusted beyond recognition.

Sam had that secret of power hidden away now in a little aluminum box that had once contained concentrated food rations. And having that secret-though it thrilled him-still made him wish nervously that he also had eyes in the back of his head....

Ellen Varney's slim fingers tightened on his arm.

"Sam!" she said almost sharply. "You're dreaming again. What is it?"

He looked at her almost furtively, conscious of the familiar room around him, the old bookcase, the piano with a shaft of sunlight touching it gently; the radio and television cabinet. The colonial rag rugs, bright colored and homey....

Sam wondered wistfully if sometime soon his power would enable him to preserve in timeless youth the fragile beauty of Ellen Varney. Dark wavy hair, and an earnest face whose wisdom one could never forget. Maybe now even immortality would be possible.

Sam was nervous. Haste and preoccupation pressed him. But he put on a good show for the girl's sake. The lines of worry dissolved around his grey, deep-set eyes. He ran stubby fingers through his stiff mop of ash-blond hair, and the tightness of his lips and jaw relaxed into a sheepish grin.

"Sure I'm dreamin', Honey," he chuckled. "What man in my shoes wouldn't? Three years back I was nobody, working my way as a student engineer. Then Joe Nichols and his experts found out that my reflexes were better than those of anybody they'd tested. And that my brains and my emotional stability were okay. So pretty soon I was flying out there toward Mars-all for the glory of giving the Joe Nichols Food Products a publicity splurge. And now-well don't get the wrong idea of how I feel about it, Ellen-they've made a big-shot out of me. The newspapers, the radio, the scientists. I've got a lot to do. I-you know!"

Ellen Varney was perhaps sure she did know. She smiled faintly, like the Mona Lisa smiling at the naïveté of men, and their little-boy vanities. But there was a shadow of worry in her eyes, too.

"You won't stay here for supper, then, with the folks and me, Sam," she said wistfully. "Like old times...."

Sam couldn't think of anything nicer. But the pull of something else was much more strong.

"No, Honey," he said. "I-"

"Don't stumble, Sam," the girl returned. "Tomorrow night, then?"

"Maybe. I hope...."

He kissed her. A moment later he was out in the golden afternoon. He avoided the kids playing football out there in the street just as he used to play. He would have liked to talk to them. But-not now.

He climbed into his car. There he sat quietly for a moment, thinking. The autumn shadows, cast by the houses and trees, were long and blue. They reminded him of the shadows on Mars; and he felt a slight, not unpleasant, chill of loneliness and mystery plucking at his nerves. The sound of the wind wasn't so very different here either! Only out there it was shriller and much fainter and more sad, in the thin air, and through the muffling fabric of his oxygen suit.

Not so long ago Sam had seen those Martian winds shredding plumes of rusty red dust from the desert. He'd seen them blow balled masses of dried, prickly vegetation, like tumbleweeds, across the undulating red plain, and into the deep machine-dug gorges, all but waterless now, that on Earth were called the "canals."

He'd seen those dried bundles of weeds collected in rows against the granite masonry of walls that were cold and crumbled in their ancientness but which looked fused along their low crests, like old lava, telling a story of violent and enigmatic calamity.

Thus Sam Conway's reveries became unpleasant once more. He wanted to hurry again. He started the car, and drove swiftly out of the village. The tires crunched in dead leaves as he swung into the driveway that led down by the lake. Premonition must have been working in him, accentuating his caution and his haste.

There was a fair-sized brick building there, an old garage. He unlocked the heavy door and went inside. The large main room of the structure was to be his laboratory; the office, his living quarters.

He surveyed the dingy interior critically. Everything, so far as he could see, was exactly as he had left it except for a small smear of ash on the floor in the office room. Driveway ash. Part of a man's footprint. His own? With the panic of a disturbed miser, Sam Conway thought back carefully. It could be his own footprint; but he couldn't remember-couldn't be sure!

His heart began to throb in mounting anxiety at the thought that the lair of his secret might have been entered during his absence. He pulled the shades carefully. Then he clawed his way through the clutter of paraphernalia in the little room-mostly boxes of new laboratory equipment, as yet unpacked. And a few glass jars containing plant samples, and specimens of odd Martian fauna-souvenirs he hadn't been required to turn over to the scientists.

He was sweating profusely from panic when he reached the carefully fitted mopboard in the corner after pulling aside a small desk. He pressed part of the wooden ornamentation, and a section of the mopboard turned on hinges. Feverishly he drew his precious aluminum box from the hiding place he had contrived, and unfastened its lid. From within came a reassuring, cryptic gleam; and Sam Conway almost wilted with relief.

But he wasn't satisfied yet. His fear of possible burglary wasn't the result of miserliness alone. He was afraid to have so gigantic a secret as he possessed get beyond himself-yet. And he was well aware that man would kill to own what he owned-and distrusted, withholding it from Nichols and his scientists.

Carefully he put the aluminum container back, and searched the premises. The windows. The doors. Everything. But he found no telltale marks of intrusion. The footprints, then, in the office room must have been his own. But he'd bar the windows tomorrow. He'd put alarms on the entrances, and he'd find a safer place for his aluminum box.

Now he prepared to work, getting his notebooks ready, putting a little collapsible table in the center of the office room, securing the heavy wood shutters of the windows, turning on the lights, and taking the aluminum box, which was his storehouse of miracles, once more from hiding.

As he sat down at the table, he placed a loaded pistol within easy reach at his elbow. Thus prepared, he lifted his treasure from its homely metal container, and set it lovingly before him. A cube, perhaps four inches square. Like glass. Almost crystal in its transparency, except for a dim misting of...