It Takes a Thief
By Walter Miller, Jr.
Strange gods were worshipped on Mars.
But were they so clever? They'd lost their own world.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"The ancient gods, our Fathers, rode down from the heavens in theFirebirds of the Sun. Coming into the world, they found no air for thebreath of their souls. "How shall we breathe?" they asked of the Sun.And Sun gave them of His fire and beneath the earth they kindled theBlaze of the Great Wind. Good air roared from the womb of Mars ourMother, the ice burned with a great thunder, and there was air for thebreath of Man."
—FROM AN OLD MARTIAN LEGEND
A thief, he was about to die like a thief.
He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintlyon his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowlyas he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe torelieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, hehung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.
He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hairwas close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sireda pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quickknotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed andhungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face,though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup.
When he opened his eyes he could see the low hills of Mars, sun-washedand gray-green with trees, trees brought down from the heavens bythe Ancient Fathers. But he could also see the executioner in theforeground, sitting spraddle-legged and calm while he chewed a bladeof grass and waited. A squat man with a thick face, he occasionallypeered at the thief with empty blue eyes—while he casually playedmumblety-peg with the bleeding-blade. His stare was blank.
"Are you ready for me, Asir?"
"Ready for me yet, Asir?" he grumbled, not unpleasantly.
The knifeman sat beyond spitting range, but Asir spat, and tried towipe his chin on the post. "Your dirty mother!" he mumbled.
The executioner chuckled and played mumblety-peg.
After three hours of dangling from the spikes that pierced his arms,Asir was weakening, and the blood throbbed hard in his temples, witheach jolt of his heart a separate pulse of pain. The red stickiness hadstopped oozing down his arms; they knew how to drive the spike justright. But the heartbeats labored in his head like a hammer beating atred-hot iron.
How many heartbeats in a life-time—and how many left to him now?
He whimpered and writhed, beginning to lose all hope. Mara had gone tosee the Chief Commoner, to plead with him for the pilferer's life—butMara was about as trustworthy as a wild hüffen, and he had visions ofthem chuckling together in Tokra's villa over a glass of amber wine,while life drained slowly from a young thief.
Asir regretted nothing. His father had been a renegade before him, hadsquandered his last ritual formula to buy a wife, then impoverish