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  “Not a'fore bears grow wings,” Klondike Pete Kandinsky hooted. “It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a pool table out thar this winter. Most like, we'll find them Martians all laid out next spring, thawing in some snowbank.”

  Klondike Pete was behind the times. Rumor said that he'd struck a rich vein in his gold mine, so he'd holed up in the shaft, working eighteen-hour days from August through Christmas, barely taking time to come out for supplies. He hadn't attended our previous conclaves.

  “Gads,” Doctor Weatherby said, “I say, where have you been? We believe that the Martians came here because their own world has been cooling for millennia. They're seeking our warmer climes. But just because they are looking for warmer weather, it doesn't mean they want to live on our equator! What seems monstrously cold to us—that biting winter that we've suffered through this past three months—is positively balmy on Mars! I'm sure they're much invigorated by it. Indeed, the reason we haven't seen more of the Martians here in the past weeks seems blatantly obvious: they're preparing to migrate north, to our polar cap!”

  “Ah, Gods, I swear!” Klondike Pete shook his head mournfully, realizing our predicament for the first time. “Why don't the Army do somethin? Teddy Roosevelt or the Mounties ought to do somethin.”

  “They're playing at waiting,” One-Eyed Kate grumbled. “You know what kinds of horrors they've been through down south. There's not much the armies of the world can do against the Martians. Even if they could send heavy artillery against the Martians in the winter, there's no sense in it—not when the varmints might die out this coming spring, anyhow.”

  “There's sense 'n it!” one old timer said. “Folks is dyin' up here! The Martians squeeze us for blood, then toss our carcasses 'way like grape skins!”

  “Yeah,” One-Eyed Kate said, “and so long as it's the likes of you and me that are doing the dying, Tom King, no one will do more than yawn about it!”

  The refugees in the room looked around gloomily at one another. Trappers, miners, Indians, crackpots who'd fled from the world. We were an unsavory lot, dressed in our hides, with sour bear grease rubbed in our skin to keep out the weather. One-Eyed Kate was right. No one would rescue us.

  “I just whist we 'ad word on them Martians,” old Tom King said, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his parka. He looked off into a corner with rheumy eyes. “No news is good news,” he intoned, the hollow-sounding supplication of an atheist.

  None of us believed the adage. The Martian vehicles that fell in the southern climes were filled only with a few armies and scouts. Thirty or forty troops per vehicle, if we judged right. But now we saw that these were only the advance forces, hardly more than scouts who were meant, perhaps, to decimate our armies and harass the greater population of the world in preparation for the most massive vehicle, the one that fell two months later than the rest, just south of Juneau. The mother ship had carried two thousand Martians, some guessed, along with their weird herds of humanoid bipeds that the Martians harvested for blood. The mother vehicle had hardly settled when thousands of their slaves swarmed out of the ships and began planting crops, scattering otherwordly seeds that sprouted nearly overnight into grotesque forests of twisted growths that looked like coral or cactuses, but which Doctor Weatherby assured us were more likely some type of fungus. Certain of the plants grew two hundred yards high in the ensuing month, so that it was said that now, one could hardly travel south of Juneau in most places. The “Great Northern Martian Jungle” formed a virtually impenetrable barrier to the southlands, a barrier reputed to harbor Martian bipeds who hunted humans so that their masters might feast on our blood.

  “If no news is good news, then let us toast good news,” Klondike Pete said, hoisting his mug.

  “Ah've seen dem Marshawns,” Pierre said at last. “En Anchorawge. Dey burned de ceety, by Gar, and dey are building, building—making new ceety dat is strange and wondrous!”

  There were cries of horror and astonishment, people crying out queries. “When, when did you see them?” Doctor Weatherby asked, shouting to be heard above the others.

  “Twelve days now,” Pierre said. “Dere is a jungle growing around Anchorawge now—very thick—and de Marshawns live dere, smelting de ore day and night to build dere machine ceety. Dere ceety—how shall I say?—is magnificent, by Gar! Eet stands five hundred feet tall, and can walk about on eets three legs like a walking stool. But is not a small stool—is huge, by Gar, a mile across!

  “On de top of de table, is huge glass bowl, alive with shimmering work-lights, more varied and magnificent dan de lights of Paris! And under dis dome, de Marshawns building dere home.”

  Doctor Weatherby's eyes opened wide in astonishment. “A dome, you say? Fantastic! Are they sealing themselves in? Could it keep out bacteria?”

  Pierre shrugged. “Ah 'uz too far away to see dis taim. Some taim, maybe, Ah go back—look more closer. Eh?”

  “Horse feathers!” Klondike Pete said. “Them Martians couldn't raise such a huge city in two months. Frenchie, I don't like it when some pimple like you pulls my legs!”

  There was an expectant hush around the room, and none dared intervene between the two men. I think that most of us at least half believed Pierre. No one knew what the Martians were capable of. They flew between worlds and built killing death rays. They switched mechanical bodies as easily as we changed clothes. We could not guess their limitations.

  Only Klondike Pete here was ignorant enough to doubt the Frenchman. Pierre scowled up at Pete. The little Frenchman was not used to having someone call him a liar, and many honest men so accused would have pulled a knife to defend their honor. A fight was almost expected, but in any physical contest, Pierre would not equal Klondike Pete.

  But Pierre obviously had another plan in mind. A secretive smile stole across his face, and I imagined how he might be plotting to ambush the bigger man on some dark night, steal his gold. So many men had been taken by the Martians, that in such a scenario, we would likely never learn the truth of it.

  But that was not Pierre's plan. He downed another mug of hootch, banged his empty mug on the lid of the cold iron stove at his side. Almost as if magically summoned, a blast of wind struck the lodge, whistling through the eaves of the log cabin. I'd been vaguely aware of the rising wind for the past few minutes, but only then did I recognize that the full storm had just hit.

  By custom, when a storm hit we would set a roaring blaze and lavish upon ourselves one or two hours of warmth before trudging back to our own cabins or mine shafts. If we timed it properly, the last of the storm would blanket our trail, concealing our passage from any Martians that might fly over, hunting us.

  Still, some of us were clumsy. Over the past three months, our numbers had been steadily diminishing, our people disappearing as the Martians harvested us.

  My thoughts turned homeward, to my own wife Bessie who was huddled in our cabin, sick and weakened by the interminable cold.

  “Storm's here, stoke up the fire!” someone shouted, and One-Eyed Kate opened the iron door to the old stove and struck a match. The tinder had already been set, perhaps for days, in anticipation of this moment.

  Soon a roaring blaze crackled in the old iron stove. We huddled in a circle, each of us silent and grateful, grunting with satisfaction. During the storms, the Martian flying machines were forced to seek shelter in secluded valleys, it was said, and so we did not fear that the Martians would attack. The bipeds that the Martians used for food and as slaves might attack, I suspected, if they saw our smoke, but this was unlikely. We were far from the Martian Jungles, and it was rumored that the bipeds held forth only in their own familiar domain.

  After the past two weeks of damnable cold, we needed some warmth, and as I basked in the roaring heat of the stove, the others began to sigh in contentment. I hoped that Bessie had lit our own little stove back in the old mining shack we called home.

  Pierre put his gloves back on, and the little man was beginning to feel the effects of his drink
s. He weaved a little as he stood, and growled, “By Gar, your dogs weel fait mah beast tonait!”

  “You're down to only two dogs,” I reminded Pierre. He wasn't a careless sort, unless he got drunk. I knew he wasn't thinking clearly. He couldn't afford to lose another dog in a senseless fight.

  “Damn you, Jacques! Your dogs weel fait mah beast tonait!” He pounded the red-hot stove with a gloved fist, staggered toward me with a crazed gleam in his eyes.

  I wanted to protect him from himself. “No one wants to fight your dogs tonight,” I said.

  Pierre staggered to me, grabbed my shoulder with both hands, and looked up. His face was seamed and scarred by the cold, and though he was drunk, there was a cunning glint in his eyes. “Your dogs, weel fait, my beast, tonait!”

  The room went silent. “What beast are you talking about?” One-Eyed Kate said.

  “You looking for Marshawns, no?” he turned to her and waved expansively. “You want see a Marshawn? Your dogs keeled mah dogs. Now your dogs weel fait mah Marshawn!”

  My heart began pounding, and my thoughts raced. We had not seen Pierre in weeks, and it was said that he was one of the finest trappers in the Yukon. As my mind registered what he'd brought back from Anchorage, as I realized what he'd trapped there, I recalled the heavy bundle tied to his sled. Could he really have secured a live Martian?

  Suddenly there was shouting in the room from a dozen voices. Several men grabbed a lantern and dashed out the front door, the dancing light throwing grotesque images on the wall. Klondike Pete was shouting, “How much? How much do you want to fight your beast?”

  “I say, heaven forbid! Let's not have a fight!” Doctor Weatherby began saying. “I want to study the creature!”

  But the sudden fury with which the others met the doctor's plea was overwhelming.

  We were outraged by the Martians for our burnt cities, for the poisoned crops, for the soldiers who died under Martian heat beams or choked to death in the vile Black Fog that emanated from their guns. More than all of this, we raged against the Martians for our fair daughters and children who had gone to feed these vile beasts, these Martians who drank our blood as we drain water.

  So great was this primal rage, that someone struck the doctor—more in some mindless animal instinct, some basic need to see the Martian dead, than out of anger at the good man who had worked so hard to keep us alive through this hellish winter.

  The doctor crumpled under the weight of the blow and knelt on the floor for a moment, staring down at the dirty wood planks, trying to regain his senses.

  Meanwhile, others took up the shout, “There's a game for you!” “How much to fight it? What do you want?”

  Pierre stood in a swirling, writhing, shouting maelstrom. I know logically that there could not have been two dozen people in the room, yet it seemed like vastly more. Indeed, it seemed to my mind that all of troubled humanity crowded the room at that moment, hurling fists in the air, cursing, threatening, mindlessly crying for blood.

  I found myself screaming to be heard, “How much? How much?” And though I have never been one to engage in the savage sport of dogfighting, I thought of my own sled dogs out in front of the lodge, and I considered how much I'd be willing to pay to watch them tear apart a Martian. The answer was simple:

  I'd pay everything I owned.

  Pierre raised his hands in the air for silence, and named his price, and if you think it unfairly high, then remember this: we all secretly believed that we would die before spring. Money meant almost nothing to us. Most of us had been unable to get adequately outfitted for winter, and had hoped that a moose or a caribou would get us through the lean months. But Martians harvested the caribou and moose just as they harvested us. Many a man in that room knew that he'd be down to eating his sled dogs by spring. Money means nothing to those who wish only to survive.

  Yet we knew that many would profit from the Martian invasion. In the south, insurance hucksters were selling policies against future invasions, the loggers and financiers were making fortunes, and every man who'd ever handled a hammer suddenly called himself a master carpenter and sought to hire himself out at inflated prices.

  We in this room did not resent Pierre's desire to recoup his losses after the most horrible of winters.

  “De beast has sixteen tentacles,” he said, “so All weel let you fight heem with eight dogs—at five t'ousand doughlars a dog. Two t'ousand doughlars for me, and de rest, goes for de winner, or de winners, of the fait!”

  The accounts we'd read about Martians suggested that without their metallic bodies, they moved ponderously slow here on Earth. The increased gravity of our world, where everything is three times heavier than on Mars, weighed them down greatly. I'd never seen a bear pitted against more than eight dogs, so it seemed unlikely that the Martian could win. But with each contestant putting in two thousand dollars just for the right to fight, Pierre would go home with at least $16,000—five times what he'd make in a good year. All he had to do was let people pay for the right to kill a Martian.

  Klondike Pete didn't even blink. “I'll put in two huskies!” he roared.

  “Grip can take him!” One-Eyed Kate said. “You'll let a pit bull fight?”

  Pierre nodded, and I began calculating. If you counted most of my supplies, I had barely enough for a stake in the fight, and I had a dog I thought could win—half husky, half wolfhound. He'd outweigh any of the other mutts in the pit, and he pulled the sled with great heart. He was a natural leader.

  But I caught that sly gleam in Pierre's dark eyes. I knew that this fight would be more than any of us were bargaining for. I hesitated.

  “By Gol', I'll put in my fighter,” old Tom King offered with evident bloodlust, and in half a moment four other men signed their notes to Pierre. The fight was set.

  The storm raged. Snow pounded in the unbounded avarice, skiding across the frozen crust of the winter's buildup. One-Eyed Kate lugged a pair of lanterns into the blizzard, held them over the fighting pit. At the north end, a bear cage could be lowered into the pit by means of a winch. At the south end, a dog run led down.

  Klondike Pete leapt in and flattened the snow, then climbed back up through the dog run. Everyone unhitched and brought their dogs from the sleds, then herded them down the run. The dogs smelled the excitement, yapped and growled, stalking through the pit and sniffing uneasily.

  Someone began winching the big cage up, and the dogs settled down. Some of the dogs had battled bears, and so knew the sound of the winch. One-Eyed Kate's pit bull emitted a coughing bark and began leaping in excitement, wanting to draw first blood from whatever we loosed into the pit.

  It was a ghoulish mob that stood around that dark pit, pale faces lit dimly by the oily lanterns that flickered and guttered with every gust of wind.

  Four men had already lugged Pierre's bundle around to the back of the lodge. The bundle was wrapped in heavy canvas and tied solidly with five or six hide ropes of Eskimo make. A couple of men worried at the knots, trying to untie the frozen leather, while two others stood nearby with rifles cocked, aimed at the bundle.

  Pierre swore softly, drew his Bowie knife and sliced through the ropes, then rolled the canvas over several times. The canvas was wound tight around the Martian six turns, so that one moment I was peering through the driving snow while trying to make out the form that would emerge from the gray bundle, and the next moment, the Martian fell on the ground before us.

  It burst out from the tarpaulin. It backed away from Pierre and from the light, a creature frightened and alone, and for several moments it made a metallic hissing noise as it slithered over the snow, searching for escape. At first, the hissing sounded like a rattlesnake's warning, and several of us leapt back. But the creature before us was no snake.

  For those who have never seen a Martian, it can be difficult to describe such a monstrosity. I have read descriptions, but none succeed. My recollections of this monster are imprinted as solidly as if they were etched on a lithographic plate
, for this creature was both more than, and less than, the sum of all our nightmares.

  Others have described a fungal green-gray hue of the creature's bulbous head, fully five times larger than a human head, and they have told of the wet leathery skin that encases the Martian's enormous brain. Others have described the peculiar slavering, sucking sounds that the creatures made as they gasped for breath, heaving convulsively as they groped about in our heavy atmosphere.

  Others have described the two clumps of tentacles—eight in each clump, just below the lipless V-shaped beak, and they have told how the Gorgon tentacles coiled almost languidly as the creature slithered about.

  The Martian invites comparison to the octopus or squid, for like these creatures it seems little more than a head with tentacles. Yet it is so much more than that!

  No one has described how the Martian was so exquisitely, so gloriously alive. The one Pierre had captured swayed back and forth, pulsing across the ice-crusted snow with an ease that suggested that it was acclimated to polar conditions. While others have said that the creature seemed to them to be ponderously slow, I wonder if their specimens were not somehow hampered by warmer conditions—for this beast wriggled viciously, and its tentacles slithered over the snow like living whips, writhing not in agony—but in desperation, in a curious hunger.