A. E. Van Vogt - Enchanted Village

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2024-11-25 0 0 62.79KB 11 页 5.9玖币

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A. E. van Vogt

ENCHANTED VILLAGE

Explorers of a new frontier” they had been called before they left for Mars.

For a while, after the ship crashed into a Martian desert, killing all on board except—miraculously—this one man,

Bill Jenner spat the words occasionally into the constant, sand-laden wind. He despised himself for the pride he had

felt when he first heard them.

His fury faded with each mile that he walked, and his black grief for his friends became a gray ache. Slowly he

realized that he had made a ruinous misjudgment.

lie had underestimated the speed at which the rocketship had been traveling.

He’d guessed that he would have to walk three hundred miles to reach the shallow, polar sea be and the others had

observed as they glided in from outer space. Actually, the ship must have Bashed an immensely greater distance

before it hurtled down out of control.

The days stretched behind him, seemingly as numberless as the hot, red, alien sand that scorched through his

tattered clothes. A huge scarecrow of a man, he kept moving across the endless, arid waste—he would not give up.

By the time he came to the mountain, his food had long been gone. Of his four water bags, only one remained, and

that was so close to being empty that he merely wet his cracked lips and swollen tongue whenever his thirst became

unbearable.

Jenner climbed high before he realized that it was not just another dune that had barred his way. He paused, and as

he gazed up at the mountain that towered above him, he cringed a little. For an instant he felt the hopelessness of this

mad race he was making to nowhere—but he reached the top. He saw that below him was a depression surrounded by

hills as high as, or higher than, the one on which he stood. Nestled in the valley they made was a village.

He could see trees and the marble Boor of a courtyard. A score of buildings was clustered around what seemed to

be a central square. They were mostly low-constructed, but there were four towers pointing gracefully into the sky.

They shone in the sunlight with a marble luster.

Faintly, there came to Jenner’s cars a thin, high-pitched whistling sound. It rose, fell, faded completely, then came

up again clearly and unpleasantly. Fven as Jenner ran toward it, the noise grated on his ears, eerie and unnatural.

FIe kept slipping on smooth rock, and bruised himself when he fell. He rolled halfway down into the valley. The

buildings remained new and bright when seen from nearby. Their walls Bashed with reBeetions. On every side was

vegetation— reddish-green shrubbery, yellow-green trees laden with purple and red fruit.

With ravenous intent, Jenner headed for the nearest fruit tree. Close up, the tree looked dry and brittle. The large

red fruit he tore from the lowest branch, however, was plump and juicy.

As he lifted it to his mouth, he remembered that he had been warned during his training period to taste nothing on

Mars until it had been chemically ex-amined. But that was meaningless advice to a man whose only chemical

equip-ment was in his own body.

Nevertheless, the possibility of danger made him cautious. He took his first bite gingerly. It was bitter to his tongue,

and he spat it out hastily. Some of the juice which remained in his mouth seared his gums. He felt the fire on it, and he

reeled from nausea. His muscles began to jerk, and he lay down on the marble to keep himself from falling. After what

seemed like hours to Jenner, the awful trembling finally went out of his body and he could see again. He looked up

despisingly at the tree.

The pain finally left him, and slowly he relaxed. A soft breeze rustled the dry leaves. Nearby trees took up that

gentle clamor, and it struck Jenner that the wind here in the valley was only a whisper of what it had been on the Bat

desert beyond the mountain.

There was no other sound now. Jenner abruptly remembered the high-pitched, ever-changing whistle he had heard.

He lay very still, listening intently, but there was only the rustling of the leaves. The noisy shrilling had stopped. lie

wondered if it had been an alarm, to warn the villagers of his approach.

Anxiously he climbed to his feet and fumbled for his gun. A sense of disaster

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