Long After Midnight

The plump man with blond hair walked into their line of vision with a gun. He did not look at their faces, he looked only at the blue glass bottle. He began to smile. “I hate very much to handle guns,” he said, “but it is a matter of necessity, as I simply must have that work of art. I suggest that you allow me to take it without trouble.”

Beck was almost pleased. It had a certain beauty of timing, this incident; it was the sort of thing he might have wished for, to have the treasure stolen before it was opened. Now there was the good prospect of a chase, a fight, a series of gains and losses, and, before they were done, perhaps another four or five years spent upon a new search.

“Come along now,” said the stranger. “Give it up.” He raised the gun warningly.

Beck handed him the bottle.

“Amazing. Really amazing,” said the plump man. “I can’t believe it was as simple as this, to walk in, hear two men talking, and to have the Blue Bottle simply handed to me. Amazing!” And he wandered off down the hall, out into the daylight, chuckling to himself.

Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the paintings lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowered senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding. Silence opened to let the car pass, and closed swiftly in behind.

Craig said, “We’ll never find him. These damned roads. So old. Potholes, lumps, everything wrong. He’s got the advantage with the cycle; he can dodge and weave. Damn!”

They swerved abruptly, avoiding a bad stretch. The car moved over the old highway like an eraser, coming upon blind soil, passing over it, dusting it away to reveal the emerald and gold colors of ancient Martian mosaics worked into the road surface.

“Wait,” cried Beck. He throttled the car down. “I saw something back there.”

“Where?”

They drove back a hundred yards.

“There. You see. It’s him.”

In a ditch by the side of the road the plump man lay folded over his cycle. He did not move. His eyes were wide, and when Beck flashed a torch down, the eyes burned dully.

“Where’s the bottle?” asked Craig.

Beck jumped into the ditch and picked up the man’s gun. “I don’t know. Gone.”

“What killed him?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“The cycle looks okay. Not an accident.”

Beck rolled the body over. “No wounds. Looks like he just—stopped, of his own accord.”

“Heart attack, maybe,” said Craig. “Excited over the bottle. He gets down here to hide. Thought he’d be all right, but the attack finished him.”

“That doesn’t account for the Blue Bottle.”

“Someone came along. Lord, you know how many searchers there are….”

They scanned the darkness around them. Far off, in the starred blackness, on the blue hills, they saw a dim movement.

“Up there.” Beck pointed. “Three men on foot.”

“They must have …”

“My God, look!”

Below them, in the ditch, the figure of the plump man glowed, began to melt. The eyes took on the aspect of moonstones under a sudden rush of water. The face began to dissolve away into fire. The hair resembled small firecracker strings, lit and sputtering. The body fumed as they watched. The fingers jerked with flame. Then, as if a gigantic hammer had struck a glass statue, the body cracked upward and was gone in a blaze of pink shards, becoming mist as the night breeze carried it across the highway.

“They must have—done something to him,” said Craig. “Those three, with a new kind of weapon.”

“But it’s happened before,” said Beck. “Men I knew about who had the Blue Bottle. They vanished. And the bottle passed on to others who vanished.” He shook his head. “Looked like a million fireflies when he broke apart ….”

“You going after them?”

Beck returned to the car. He judged the desert mounds, the hills of bone-silt and silence. “It’ll be a tough job, but I think I can poke the car through after them. I have to, now.” He paused, not speaking to Craig. “I think I know what’s in the Blue Bottle…. Finally, I realize that what I want most of all is in there. Waiting for me.”

“I’m not going,” said Craig, coming up to the car where Beck sat in the dark, his hands on his knees. “I’m not going out there with you, chasing three armed men. I just want to live, Beck. That bottle means nothing to me. I won’t risk my skin for it. But I’ll wish you luck.”

“Thanks,” said Beck. And he drove away, into the dunes.

The night was as cool as water coming over the glass hood of the landcar.

Beck throttled hard over dead river washes and spills of chalked pebble, driving between great cliffs. Ribbons of double moonlight painted the bas-reliefs of gods and animals on the cliff sides all yellow gold: mile-high faces upon which Martian histories were etched and stamped in symbols, incredible faces with open cave eyes and gaping cave mouths.

The motor’s roar dislodged rocks, boulders. In a whole rushing downpour of stone, golden segments of ancient cliff sculpture slid out of the moons’ rays at the top of the cliff and vanished into blue cool-well darkness.

In the roar, as he drove, Beck cast his mind back—to all the nights in the last ten years, nights when he had built red fires on the sea bottoms, and cooked slow, thoughtful meals. And dreamed. Always those dreams of wanting. And not knowing what. Ever since he was a young man, the hard life on Earth, the great panic of 2130, the starvation, chaos, riot, want. Then bucking through the planets, the womanless, loveless years, the alone years. You come out of the dark into the light, out of the womb into the world, and what do you find that you really want?

What about that dead man back there in the ditch? Wasn’t he always looking for something extra? Something he didn’t have. What was there for men like himself? Or for anyone? Was there anything at all to look forward to?

The Blue Bottle.

He quickly braked the car, leaped out, gun ready. He ran, crouching, into the dunes. Ahead of him, the three men lay on the cold sand, neatly. They were Earthmen, with tan faces and rough clothes and gnarled hands. Starlight shone on the Blue Bottle, which lay among them.

As Beck watched, the bodies began to melt. They vanished away into rises of steam, into dewdrops and crystals. In a moment they were gone.

Beck felt the coldness in his body as the flakes rained across his eyes, flicking his lips and his cheeks.

He did not move.

The plump man. Dead and vanishing. Craig’s voice: “Some new weapon …”

No. Not a weapon at all.

The Blue Bottle.

They had opened it to find what they most desired. All of the unhappy, desiring men down the long and lonely years had opened it to find what they most wanted in the planets of the universe. And all had found it, even as had these three. Now it could be understood, why the bottle passed on so swiftly, from one to another, and the men vanishing behind it. Harvest chaff fluttering on the sand, along the dead sea rims. Turning to flame and fireflies. To mist.

Beck picked up the bottle and held it away from himself for a long moment. His eyes shone clearly. His hands trembled.

So this is what I’ve been looking for, he thought. He turned the bottle and it flashed blue starlight.

So this is what all men really want? The secret desire, deep inside, hidden all away where we never guess? The subliminal urge? So this is what each man seeks, through some private guilt, to find?