Free Under the Moons of Mars by John Joseph Adams Page B

learned that a Red Martian can indeed blush. One quick, shaky smile that the ape-man took with him to his grave; then Dejah Thoris, without speaking further, fled ahead of him toward the building where he and John Carter and she were to spend the night. Finding the quarters assigned to him, Tarzan dropped into the pile of furs and silks waiting there, and fell asleep with Princess Dejah Thoris’s cloak still around his shoulders.
In the morning, after an excellent breakfast of items that Tarzan was quite happy not to have identified, he helped John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and their several Red Martian servants pack their belongings onto borrowed thoats, and assumed that they would be setting out shortly for distant Helium. He was getting acquainted with his own thoat, practicing mounting and dismounting, when John Carter suddenly said, “Hear you had a tussle with a few maggots last night.” Tarzan blinked in puzzlement. “The white apes,” John Carter explained, “That’s what I call them, because they’re white like maggots, and because there’s not a thing to be done with them except kill them. Until there aren’t any more.” He was toying with a Thark pistol, a cut-down version of one of the rifles Tarzan had learned were powered by radium. “Show me where the struggle took place, Sir House-of-Lords.”
    “You won’t find them out in daylight,” Tarzan warned him. “And the Princess is clearly anxious to start home.” In fact, Dejah Thoris had hardly spoken all morning.
    “Sir Englishman,” John Carter said without expression, “don’t you ever presume to tell me whether or not my wife is anxious. . . .” He broke open his weapon, casually inspected the load, and snapped it shut again. “I told you, I want to see last night’s battlefield. No one’s going anywhere until I do.”
    If it is not this place, it will be some other. As well have it over with. The ape-man stood up. He said, “I will show you, and then we will get on our way.”
“Absolutely,” John Carter agreed. “Just indulge an old Johnny Reb, if you would.” Dejah Thoris said nothing, but the fear in her eyes angered Tarzan in a way that he had not thought possible. He strode ahead, and John Carter followed close on his heels.
    Nearing the deserted building where he had been attacked, Tarzan pointed ahead, saying, “There. One of them ambushed me, but I fought him off and he ran away. There was nothing more to it than that.”
    “Really?” John Carter was still toying with his pistol—then, to Tarzan’s alarm, he suddenly lifted it. “Would that be the fellow, do you suppose?”
    A moment of whiteness—a flash of a great hunched body trying to pass an empty window without being seen. John Carter’s finger was already squeezing the trigger when Tarzan struck his arm up, so that the strange bullet whined harmlessly off the wall of the building in a flurry of marble chips. And John Carter struck Tarzan in the face with the butt of the revolver, so that the ape-man reeled backward and sat down hard in the Martian street.
    “Been wanting to do that from the first sight,” John Carter said flatly. “I don’t like you, Sir House-of-Lords. You’re no better than a damn Yankee—worse, in some ways. And I don’t like the way you look at my wife. Not one whit.”
    The ape-man was on his feet now, smiling blood. He said simply, “Thank you for doing that.”
    “You’re the challenged party—the choice of weapons is up to you.” John Carter was smiling genially himself. “I’ve got a couple of Thark swords, or we can make it pistols. Up to you.”
    Tarzan shook his head. He said nothing, but simply beckoned John Carter in toward him. For the first time, the Virginian looked slightly uneasy, but he tossed the pistol aside, said, “Come and get it, then,” and contradicted himself by taking a fifteen-foot spring straight at the ape-man, knocking him down again. The battle was on.
As against the white ape, Tarzan realized