Free New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) by Clifford D. Simak Page B

And in the deeper places you find swarms of Ghosts. Funny things, the Ghosts. No physical harm from them. Maybe they don’t even exist. Nobody knows what they are. But they are apt to drive you mad. Just looking at them, knowing they are watching all the time.”
    Impressive silence fell.
    Charley wagged his beard.
    “No place for a woman,” he declared. “The canal ain’t.”
    “I don’t care,” said Ann. “You’re trying to frighten me, and I won’t be frightened. I have to go to Mad-Man’s Canal.”
    “Listen, lady,” said Charley, “pick any other place—any other place at all—and I will take you there. But don’t ask me to go into Mad-Man’s.”
    “Why not?” she cried. “Why are you so afraid of Mad-Man’s?”
    She tried to find the answer in their faces but there was none.
    Charley spoke slowly, apparently trying to choose his words with care. “Because,” he said, “Mad-Man’s is the deepest canal in this whole country. Far as I know, no man has ever been to the bottom of it and come out alive. Some have gone down part way and came back—mad and frothin’ at the mouth, their eyes all glazed, babblin’ crazy things. That’s why they call it Mad-Man’s.”
    “Now listen to me,” and Ann. “I came all this way and I’m not turning back. If you won’t take me, I’ll go alone. I’ll make it somehow—only you could make it so much easier for me. You know all the trails. You could get me there quicker. I’m prepared to pay you for it—pay you well.”
    “Lady,” said Charley slowly, “we ain’t guides. You couldn’t give us money enough to make us go where we didn’t want to go.”
    She pounded one small clenched fist on the table. “But I want to pay you,” she said. “I’ll insist on it.”
    Charley made a motion of his hand, as if sweeping away her words. “Not one cent,” he said. “You can’t buy our services. But we might do it anyhow. Just because I like your spunk.”
    She gasped. “You would?” she asked.
    Neither one of them replied.
    “Just take me to Mad-Man’s,” she pleaded. “I won’t ask you to take me down into the canal. Just point out the best way and then wait for me. I’ll make it myself. All I want to know is how to get there.”
    Charley lifted the coffee pot, filled the cups again.
    “Ma’am,” he said, “I reckon we can go where you can go. I reckon we ain’t allowin’ you to go down into Mad-Man’s all by yourself.”
    Dawn roared over the canal rim and flooded the land with sudden light and life. The blanket plants unfolded their broad furry leaves, spreading them in the sunshine. The traveller plants, lightly anchored to boulders and outcroppings, scurried frantically for places in the Sun. The canal suddenly became a mad flurry of plant life as the travellers, true plants but forced by environment to acquire the power of locomotion, quit the eastern wall, where they had travelled during the preceding day to keep pace with the sunlight, and rushed pell-mell for the western slope.
    Kent tumbled out of the canal-car, rifle gripped in his hand. He blinked at the pale Sun that hung over the canal rim. His eyes swept the castellated horizon that closed in about them, took in the old familiar terrain typical of the Martian canals.
    The canal was red—blood red shading to softest pink with the purple of early-morning shadow still hugging the eastern rim. A riot of red—the rusted bones of a dead planet. Tons of oxygen locked in those ramparts of bright red stone. Oxygen enough to make Mars livable—but locked forever in red oxide of iron.
    Chimney and dome formations rose in tangled confusion with weathered pyramids and slender needles. A wild scene. Wild and lonesome and forbidding.
    Kent swept the western horizon with his eyes. It was thirty miles or more to the rim, but in the thin atmosphere he could see with almost telescopic clearness the details of the scarp where the plateau broke and the land swung down in wild gyrations,