The Nobles Are Coming

_When science fiction clasps hands with the horror story, pure and unadulterated, it's well to make certain you're being guided toward the abyss by competent hands. Gene Cross has the rare gift of lighting up his somber, ghoul-haunted woodlands by flashes of chilling lightning. By suggesting more than he tells he evokes the absolute ultimate in shuddery terror without venturing for a single moment beyond the rust-red hills of Mars._

I rested on reaching what seemed to be the top of the incline, and leaned back against the wall of the cave. For a moment the silence was unbroken. And then in the darkness there was a whisper of movement, an unseen stirring that was stilled by my involuntary, voiceless cry, "What's there!"

With only a blurred memory of having reached for it, I found my gun in my hand.

"Don't shoot!" said a burry voice. "Allow me to introduce myself: Mister J. J. Abrogado, A-b-r-o-g-a-d-o, Serbo-Croat prospector, at your service!"

I lowered the gun hesitantly, letting it waver in the general direction from which the voice came. It was a strange introduction, but the possessor of the voice must have been as frightened by my bursting suddenly into the cave as I had been on finding it already occupied.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"That's supposed to be my question," said Mister J. J. Abrogado. "Who are you? And what was it that frightened you?"

"Sorry," I apologized. "My name's Ross. I'm an archeologist. I was on a trip alone in my ground car when it broke down. Being no mechanic, I couldn't fix it. I decided to walk back to Marsport. I walked all day and most of this night, when--Well, listen!"

I bent my head to one side. Through the earphones of my headwarmer I could hear from far away a vague presentiment of movement, a dim blur upon the horizon of sound.

"The nightrunners," said Abrogado in recognition. "I thought it might have been something else that frightened you." There was an unspoken question in his silence.

"What?" I asked, wondering.

The cave was like a bottle of blackness. I could see nothing of my companion, not even his head and shoulders which must have been thrust rather sharply forward.

"The Nobles," said the prospector. "I thought perhaps you had seen a Noble."

The presentiment of movement had become a distant murmur, and my hand against the cave wall could detect a soft, smooth trembling.

"No, I didn't see a Noble," I answered. "In fact, I've never seen a Noble."

"Nor I," said J. J. Abrogado.

There was silence again. It lasted for long minutes. There was nothing in my universe but the solidity of cave wall and floor; and--in the background--the growing murmur of the nightrunners.

"I've seen a man who saw a Noble, though," I said at last. "What was left of him they brought into the base hospital at Marsport on a rubber blanket, and placed in a tub. Nothing was missing, but he was peeled."

I might just as well have said 'shelled' or 'husked', as if something had tried to turn him inside out.

The murmur was now the sound of a rising tide.

The man I had seen in the tub had been one of the few "missing men" who had been found. The others had never been seen again. They had been archeologists, exploring isolated Martian ruins or prospectors, seeking precious metals....

As if aware of my thoughts, Abrogado said: "Most of the missing were prospectors. I'm a prospector."

Instantly I regretted having contributed anything about Nobles to the conversation. I remembered all the stories I had ever heard about Martian prospectors gone mad. And here was one seemingly obsessed with the fear of falling into the two-fingered hands of the strange creatures from outer space.