ing tracks.

There is something in the human mind which recoils from too outrageous a
deception. How wonderful it would have been to say, "Larsen was here
again last night. He found a little guy who had never harmed anyone
standing by a well in the moonlight. Just for sheer delight he decided
to kill the little guy right then and there." Just to add luster to the
legend, just to send a thrill of excitement about the camp.

No, that would have been the lie colossal which no sane man could have
quite believed.

Something happened then to further unnerve us.

The most disturbing sound you can hear on Mars is the whispering.
Usually it begins as a barely audible murmur and swells in volume with
every shift of the wind. But now it started off high pitched and
insistent and did not stop.

It was the whispering of a dying race. The Martians are as elusive as
elves and all the pitiless logic of science had failed to draw them
forth into the sunlight to stand before men in uncompromising arrogance
as peers of the human race.

That failure was a tragedy in itself. If man's supremacy is to be
challenged at all let it be by a creature of flesh-and-blood, a
big-brained biped who must kill to live. Better that by far than a
ghostly flickering in the deepening dusk, a whispering and a flapping
and a long-drawn sighing prophesying death.

Oh, the Martians were real enough. A flitting vampire bat is real, or a
stinging ray in the depths of a blue lagoon. But who could point to a
Martian and say, "I have seen you plain, in broad daylight. I have
looked into your owlish eyes and watched you go flitting over the sand
on your thin, stalklike legs? I know there is nothing mysterious about
you. You are like a water insect skimming the surface of a pond in a
familiar meadow on Earth. You are quick and alert, but no match for a
man. You are no more than an interesting insect."

Who could say that, when there were ruins buried deep beneath the sand
to give the lie to any such idea. First the ruins, and then the Martians
themselves, always elusive, gnomelike, goblinlike, flitting away into
the dissolving dusk.

You're a comparative archaeologist and you're on Mars with the first
batch of rugged youngsters to come tumbling out of a spaceship with
stardust in their eyes. You see those youngsters digging wells and
sweating in the desert. You see the prefabricated housing units go up,
the tangle of machinery, the camp sites growing lusty w