“Two days,” he sighed. “I wonder if I’ll see her during that time.”
[ 77 ]
Before lying down to sleep, Bixie Cottontree poured the brown, powdery contents of a small folded piece of paper into her drink and stirred it. She drank it all in one quaff and nearly choked on it. She could feel the drug moving through her blood, carried like quicksilver on rivulets of the strong Martian alcohol.
Her vision began to blur and so she lay down quickly. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she was asleep and snoring within seconds.
Bixie dreamed. It was a disturbing dream of the Golden Man.
She spun about in the air as a condor might ride the thermals coming up from the reddish desert. Below her there were legions of ranks of dim men. She squinted to make them out and saw that they were all one man—the same man. His name was Conklin. Each man wore a lilac-colored shirt, brown pants, and each held a knife.
Behind them came the Golden Man. He was very much like Guthrie, but at the same time he was completely unlike him. He was in the form of a man, but he glowed with a terrible inner light—the hellfire of the sun, perhaps. He was not awake, as Guthrie was. He was an automaton, a mechanism, a tool of a kind.
The legions marched along the edge of the Great Canal. As she watched from above, the Golden Man held up his left arm and the two columns split around an uptrust of blood red rock. They came on, as inevitable as the tide.
“Is this the future?” she asked herself, “or is it the present.”
She looked to see the sun sink perceptibly lower in the sky.
“It is the future,” she stated to herself. “It is the close of this day. But what of now?”
A gust of wind spun her away and toward the cliff at the edge of the canal. The sun backtracked across the sky and sunk from view.
“This is tonight,” she said. “This night. It is...now.”
A column of corts moved along the near wall of the canal in the night.
Her gaze was riveted on them. They moved silently, in earnest. Two in the center of the column carried heavy packs.
Bixie awoke with a start.
[ 78 ]
“I would listen to her,” Ekka told Dejah Thoris. “She seems to see things before they occur.”
Billy, Ekka and Bixie stood atop a high parapet in a tower above the canal. Below them the lands were dark.
Tardos Mors had brought the three strangers to his Princess at their urgent request.
“Even now,” Bixie said, “they be drawin’ nearer the entrance from dat canal below. They bring ‘splosives.”
“Tardos, take twenty men and behead them. Take the heads a league distant and bury them.” Tardos thumped his chest, turned and was gone.
“Pardon me, Billy, Ekka,” Guthrie said.
“Yes, Guthrie?” Billy asked.
“Dakota is not in the cavern. Nor is he within the walls of the Atmosphere Factory.”
[ 79 ]
“Do you have any notions of where he might have gone?” Billy asked.
“I do,” Guthrie stated. “I found a crawl space along one of the walls of the cavern. I believe that Dakota went in there. He is, as you say, the devil when it comes to small spaces in which to hide. I called out to him, but received no answer.”
They turned to Dejah Thoris.
“I know of that way. It runs along the canal’s edge for a mile before it turns southwestward again.”