The nightmare was over now. The new cage was of gold, pure, soft gold, obtained
from the ruined city which lay buried in the “spinage” of the Mare Icarium. How
he had longed to explore that incredibly ancient metropolis with the eyes of a
scientist, as the Society had intended he should! But he had no time for
anything but hasty pictures filmed as he passed by in his endless search for
malleable metal. That gold had come, ounce by precious ounce, from ornaments and
jewelry found in deserted chambers, dug with gasping breath from red sand or
found discarded carelessly in once-dark corridors. The Martians, dead untold
centuries before his birth, had used no gold in architectural decoration. Only
in those ornaments.
And he had passed great frescoes, still brightly colored in the unmoving air of
Mars; and strange, chilling statues; and buildings which were taller in the
slighter gravitation of the planet than any imaginable Earth building; and he
had made hurried films and gone on in despairing duplication of man’s endless
search for gold, now a symbol of life rather than mere greed.
And each month, if he was lucky, saw one more queerly wrought, alien gold
ornament added to the tiny pile in the cabin of the Icarus. The search never
ceased except from exhaustion. He had gasped, and lost precious perspiration in
the arid air, and been burned black and peeled acres of skin (which he ate, as
he ate his nail parings and anything else offering rare proteins), and grew a
little mad; and the stars looked down coldly, even in the vicious weak light of