The Moons of Mars

He seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying him.

He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two things peculiar, but each was related to the other.

The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys do not--and he most certainly didn't.

The second was the tune he whistled--a somehow familiar tune, but one which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.

"Hi, there," I said when he came near enough. "What's that you're whistling?"

He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.

"'The Calm'," he said in a sober, little-boy voice.

"The what?" I asked.

"From the William Tell Overture," he explained, still looking up at me. He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted.

"Oh," I said. "And where did you learn that?"

"My mother taught me."

I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the title of the tune he whistled.

"You whistle very well," I told him.

That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the corners of his small mouth.

He nodded grave agreement.

"Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is the wrong season."

The light in his eyes snapped off. "Well, good-by," he said abruptly and very relevantly.

"Good-by," I said.

His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him. I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely mechanical little boy.

When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering.

The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure--pure, mind you--gold.

Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual. And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.

There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just disappeared.

So his mother had taught him the William Tell Overture, had she? That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think, instead, of something quite astonishing: