The Secret of the Martian Moons
By DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
Jacket and Endpaper Designs by Alex Schomburg
Ceci'fe Matschai, Editor Car/ Carmer,
Consulting Editor
THE JOHN C. WINSTON
COMPANY Philadelphia
• Toronto
Copyright, 1955 By Donald A. Wollheim
Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions
and Possessions
Copyright in the Republic
of the Philippines
FIRST EDITION
Made in the United
States of America l. C. Card #55-5741
To the memory of
PERCIVAL LOWELL
whose inspired vision of Mars will continue to haunt mens
minds until we go there.
Gulliver's Moons
When Lemuel
Gulliver, famous voyager of Gullivers Travels, visited the flying island of Laputa which was inhabited entirely by scientists, he was
told that:
"They
have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around
Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet
exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in
the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half . . *
Now
when Gullivers
Travels was
written it was 1726, and there was no telescope on Earth strong enough possibly
to see the two moons of Mars. It was not until one hundred and fifty years
later that these two satellites were finally seen and charted . . . and the
astonishing truth was so close to what Swift had written as to be almost
unbelievable!
Asaph Hall was the astronomer who finally located
Gulliver's moons and the place was the U.S. Naval Observatory near Washington,
D.C., the date August 1877. He found that Mars had two small satellites, one
revolving around the red planet in 7 hours and 39 minutes from a distance of
5,800 miles, and the other taking 30 hours and 18 minutes to circle Mars from a
distance of 14,600 miles. Now these are not quite the same figures given by the
stargazers of Laputa, but they are close enough to be
almost within a reasonable margin of errorl
As
Mars was named after the Roman god of war, Dr. Hall named the nearer satellite Phobos, meaning "fear," and the farther body Deimos, which means "panic."
The
question is how could Swift have known about them? Could it be that some
disguised visitor from space had let the information drop in his hearing? We'll
never know; it will always be a puzzle.
Whether
Mars and its two moons will also forever remain a puzzle, only the future years
will tell. Mars is one of the best mapped planets in the sky and yet the more
that men know about it the greater the mystery. Many believe it to be the home
of some sort of life. Its "canal" markings are a source of heated
argument. Its icecaps and changing colorings make for endless discussion and
speculation.
In this novel I have chosen to depict Mars as
presented by the late Professor Lowell, of Flagstaff Observatory, and his
followers. It has always been the view most exciting to men's minds and it is
still upheld by a substantial section of planetologists.
This is the theory of a world whereon a planetwide irrigation project is revealed to the eyes of
Earth by a spidery network of pole-to-pole canals! In connection with this the
question has always been raised as to why, if Mars is the abode of intelligent
beings, they have made no effort to contact us? In
this novel, I suggest one possible answer to this riddle.
But
whether it is the right one and whether Mars is as I have decribed
it, is something that cannot be answered until the day that either the Martians
land on Earth or we go there. And I believe one of these events will surely
come to pass within the next hundred years.
D.A.W.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Gullivers Moons.................................. ...... vii
1. The Hand
of the
Unknown ... 1
2. Farewell to
the Red
Planet. ... 11
3. The Last
Men on
Mars .... 21
4. Secret Meeting........................................... ...... 34
5. Phobos...................................................... 43
6. Beyond View
of Earth................................... 51
7. Deimos...................................................... ...... 62
8. Pursuit of
Shadows...................................... ...... 75
9. Face to
Face................................................ ...... 84
10. "The Fiends
Wear Stripes!" ... 95
11. The Secret
of the
Moons
. ... 103
12. The Vega
Gun.............................................. 117
13. Runaway Satellites........................................ ..... 127
14. In the
Cubeship ...... 136
15. The Long
Road Home.................................... ..... 145
16. One Against
the Marauders! . . . 157
17. Incredible Daybreak....................................... 167
18. The Star
Wanderers....................................... ..... 177
19. The Black
Cruiser.......................................... ..... 189
20. The Battle
of Earth........................................ 197
The
Secret of the Martian Moons
i
Chapter 1 The Hand of the
Unknown
ClF course Nelson
Parr had known about the widespread latest debate on what they called the
Martian Question. In fact, to him it seemed like old stuff. When he had first
arrived on Earth four years ago, the many wonders of the parent planet fully
occupied his inquiring twelve-year-old mind. Musty debates over obscure
questions, such as seemed to be always the feature of the official live-cast
band, hardly held interest for him—not with all the fascinating things there
were to learn.
Even
so, after Nelson had come to realize that what his father's friends on Mars had
called "Greenfaces" were so well in
evidence, it used to make him quite indignant. Had his very intensive courses
at the Institute for Interplanetary Exploration not taken up so much of his
time, he might even then, as a boy, taken to arguing
the matter. But he soon learned that as far as his classmates, born and raised
on Earth, were concerned, it was all a bore.
Evidently
the business of complaining about the high cost of keeping up their small Martian
colony
and its continual lack of any profitable return
was a sore spot to legislators. As he studied and advanced, Nelson found he
could understand why the old stuck-in-the-mud Greenface
thinkers thought that way. It was true that since people had learned how to make
any element or raw material out of synthetic atoms back in the last century,
the twenty-first, Martian mining had come to a halt. Now all that the Mars
colonists could hope to contribute was knowledge. And they had failed to do so.
In fact, their efforts were pretty well stumped.
But
the old debate about the Martian costs had cropped up again the very week that
Nelson had graduated and shipped back home aboard the passenger liner Congreve. He had been busy packing, saying good-by to
his friends, selling his books and storing away his mementos. Even in those
days of 2120,
a hundred and fifty years
after the invention of space rockets, room was still limited on the liners.
Nelson had ignored the news. With the excitement of the trip home, the bustle
and hustle of the takeoff at the spaceport, the acceleration bumps, the moon
landing and refueling, and then the jump into the big swim to the red planet,
he hadn't given the matter further thought.
When
things had leveled off afterward and he had overheard one of the crewmen, a
steward named Jack Santos, remarking that "it was about time they junked
this dusty old Mars drag," then Nelson got angry.
"That's
a lot of Greenface growlbait!"
Nelson burst out, putting down the micro-manual on which he was boning up.
"A lot of weak sisters who never had what it took to be pioneers ran back to Earth,
trying to put the blame on Mars. They try to cover up their own lack of guts by
claiming we'll never crack that old Martian science—but we will!"
Jack
Santos turned to Nelson. "What's a Green-face?" he asked.
"That's a new one on me."
Nelson
sat up in his seat, eased the straps that held him
down in the weightless cabin. "That's what we high-skyers
call the people who come out to the red planet and then want to run home as soon as they find it's no pleasure garden. My dad
says they used to sit outside and just stare up at Old Earth in the evening
sky. It's a green star, you know, so they got called Greenfaces."
Jack
shrugged. "Well, whatever you call 'em, I don't
blame 'em. There's no place like Earth. But I don't
think the argument is as simple as all that. The fact is that Mars hasn't paid,
that it's costing a fortune every minute the colony there is kept up and that
there isn't any sign it'll ever pay off."
"That's
right," another passenger chimed in, an astronomer en route to an asteroid
observatory. "Even if you people did crack the mystery of the Martian
machines, it'd probably not pay back half of what's been spent. I'm sure we can
invent anything they had long before you can figure it out."
Nelson
looked around. The living space of the liner was limited, a standard in all
such vessels. In this chamber, which did duty as a passenger lounge, there were
about a dozen hammock-slung seats, crowded closely on walls, floor, and
ceiling, racks of video screens, 3-D tape projectors, micro-readers, and so on.
About a half dozen passengers were present, all now listening to the
discussion. Nelson realized that he alone was in favor of the colony's
continuation. He rose to the odds.
"We'll
never invent what's on Mars for another ten thousand years!" he declared.
"Why, you can't imagine the things that are there, in the storerooms, in
the houses themselves, the constructions, the—oh, you can't just describe it
all. If it takes a couple more centuries, we still ought to stick it out and
work out the principles of those engines. Just one of them in working order
would boost our civilization on Earth tremendously!"
The
steward laughed. "But you've never cracked even one of them ... in fact I understand you can't even
open the clothes closets in Martian bedrooms! In a hundred years your father and his friends and
the ones who went before him never even made a dent in the problem!"
"Besides,
we've already taken samples of those machines back to Earth. We can work on
them at our leisure without going all the way to Mars to do it," said
another passenger.
"How
do you know they'd work at all back on Earth?" asked Nelson.
Jack
Santos had been fiddling around with a video and finally seemed to be getting
results. No one answered the last question as they watched the screen light up
and the tridimensional picture waver into reality. Jack worked the hand dials
carefully. "We're very nearly out at the limit of visible reception,"
he announced, "but sometimes we can get a period of good vision."
Sure
enough, the set which had faded out yesterday as the liner had passed the
five-million-mile mark came to life once more. For a few brief minutes the
illusion of looking from a balcony into a living scene came into being. They
were looking down on another session of the Earth experts. By a clever system
of montage both the audience in the seats of the great assembly and the pulsing
face of the speaker could be seen. He was talking rapidly and energetically.
With
a little start Nelson realized that the Martian colony's maintenance was still
being discussed. This debate had lasted much longer than in the years before.
Nelson felt a trifle uneasy as he wondered whether this time they might
actually vote to cut down or scrap the Martian settlement.
He
thought of his father, the renowned leader of the research base there, John
Carson Parr. He remembered how many times, as a boy at the dinner table in
their sealed-in home in the eerily empty Martian city, his father had explained
his hopes of what wonders they would uncover there.
The
video wavered, flickered, and went slowly out. Jack Santos flicked off the
power. "Out of range again."
Nelson
leaned back thoughtfully. He recalled how he had first felt when he landed on
Earth, the strangeness of it all. He knew he was unusual in being one of the
very few people actually to have been born on Mars. Colonists usually went back
home before they raised families, but John Parr and his wife were made of
sterner stuff. They wanted their children to be true Martians and so Nelson had
actually been born in the little hospital that serviced the entire small colony.
To him the lighter gravity was the normal one, and the day he landed on Earth
had been a very hard one.
Because he was used to weighing so little,
his muscles had never developed the normal strength of an Earth boy's. He had spent his first few weeks on Earth
simply learning all over again how to walk, how to
breathe, how to carry his weight around all day. But he had come through the
ordeal. His heritage as a human had proved capable, and before he was on Earth
six months Nelson had been able to hold his own with the best. As he had gone
on with his studies, as the first year went into the second and third, he had
even begun to acquire a high standing in sports. He had gained a place on the
Institute basketball team, had won track contests, and was a strong contender
in tennis and other games requiring bodily speed.
When,
at last, he had come to the spaceport to embark once again for home, he was a
bronzed, tall, muscular young man of sixteen, with an unruly shock of chestnut
hair, sharp green eyes, and a special zest for the part he planned to assume as
a true high-skyer.
As
Nelson mused about the takeoff day, he remembered that the famous scientist
Leroy Perrault had shown up unexpectedly to say good-by to him. Nelson had been
quite surprised, for he had met the savant only once during his entire stay on
Earth and certainly did not consider himself
important enough to warrant a personal farewell. He knew that Perrault was a
good friend of his father, a strong supporter of the colony, who held some sort
of position in the Interplanetary Bureau, exactly what he never quite ascertained.
Still. . . and then Nelson flushed inwardly as he
remembered that the keen-eyed old man had indeed had an ulterior motive. When
Perrault and young Nelson had momentarily been out of sight of others, the
scientist had hastily taken a letter from the inside pocket of his coat and
slipped it into Nelson s hands.
"Give
this to your father as soon as you land. Don't let it get out of your
possession until then. It's important!" Perrault had whispered this to
Nelson as he guided the letter out of sight in his clothes.
It
dawned on Nelson then that he had forgotten all about it in the excitement of
the takeoff. A chill ran up and down his back for a moment—where was the letter
now? It must still be in the pocket of the jacket he had been wearing at the
time. And that jacket was hanging right now in his little cabin locker,
unguarded and unwatched!
Nelson
unstrapped his seat belt, murmured an excuse to the others present, and kicked
himself away toward the corridor leading to the sleeping quarters.
Although
there were several theoretical ways of supplying an artificial gravity to a
spaceship, none had ever proved practical on a long-run ship. All interfered
with observation and direction, all compelled the ships to assume odd and
difficult shapes, all made it impossible to make landings and takeoff s in a
single vessel.
The
original dreamers who planned spaceships in the ancient days of the twentieth
century before even the moon had been reached had cooked up elaborate schemes
for planet ferries, subsatellite way stations, and
circular liners that would themselves never touch the surface of any world.
Like all such paper schemes, these had proved entirely impractical. The
practical spaceship had to be able to land and leave its destination in much
the same way that the practical airplane and boat had to. This, when space is
involved, meant no gravity when aloft.
So
Nelson Parr swam through the air of the corridor like a large ungainly fish
swimming through transparent water. Out of the circular
passenger room, past the bulge of the forward gyroscope compartment, and into
the short passageway lined with the doors of the tiny sleeping compartments.
To his surprise the little hallway was dark.
As
the lighting was from permanent atomic bulbs, this was entirely unexpected.
Somehow the bulbs must have been shielded, perhaps even broken. It was pitch dark. Nelson groped for the door to the gyro room behind
him, swung it open. The light from there cut into the
short hall, lit it dimly.
Nelson
pushed off toward his own compartment. He bumped against it as the door to the
gyro room swung shut on its automatic springs. Nelson groped for the handle to
his door, found it ajar. He pushed against it, floated into his quarters.
The
light was out here too, but the tiny space porthole was unshielded and the
sharp cold glow of the stars pierced the little chamber. For
an instant Nelson saw a dark bulk loom across the limited view. Then he
was thrown back as a heavy weight flung itself at him, shoved through the door
and hurled itself in the direction of the crew's quarters.
Nelson
yelled "Stop!" and threw himself off the far wall. He plunged through
the door into his own cubicle just as the flash of light in the hallway showed
that who ever it was who had been snooping had
escaped into the next section of the liner.
Regaining
his feet, Nelson reached for the ceiling light, flicked back the plastic hood
which was the only means of turning off its permanent glow. The soft atomic
whiteness illuminated the little compartment. Nelson squeezed himself down on
his bunk and looked around.
Clearly
the place had been the subject of search and clearly the probe had been
interrupted before it had been completed. His valise was open, its contents
scattered. A drawer in the wall was open and disarranged. The mirrored door to
his little washstand was ajar.
Nelson
stood up, opened his locker. His jacket, coat, and
spare clothing still hung there, apparently undisturbed. He reached into the
jacket pocket and to his relief his fingers touched the surface of the
envelope. He withdrew it, looked at it.
It
was just an ordinary mail envelope, thin opaque plastic. Across its face was
written his father's name and the word Urgent!
Undoubtedly
it would have been discovered had the searcher had but a few more minutes. What
that would have meant Nelson had no idea, but he made
sure the chance would not come so easily again.
He thrust the letter into concealment between his skin and the tight-fitting
space-flight coverall he was wearing. From now on, the letter would go with
him everywhere.
He
closed the locker door, glanced into the wash-stand cabinet to see if
everything there was accounted for, and then swung shut its mirrored door. For
a moment he glanced at his own reflection. As he did so, his eyes were drawn to
the surface of the mirror. He stared for a moment in disbelief at what he saw.
There was a handprint clearly visible on the bright unbreakable glassy surface.
A
perfectly made print of a strange right hand-one that had but three wide
unnatural fingers—fingers with fringed snaky fingertips!
Chapter 2
Farewell
to the Red Planet
I |
he handprint was freshly damp and evidently had been left
in haste by the unknown intruder. Even as Nelson watched, it was slowly
evaporating, for the air in a space liner is not high in humidity. The young
man strained his eyes until the print vanished entirely. By blowing gently
against the mirror he was able to make it come back into view briefly, enough
to confirm the strangeness of its form.
Nelson
Parr sat down on his narrow bunk perplexed. His original anger at the
discovery of someone searching his possessions was changing into a sort of
sudden tingling wonder. Who—or what—had been the prowler? Who, in the universe,
had a hand like that?
The
answer was simple, too simple, Nelson knew. It was nobody. Although men had
been exploring their own solar system for a century and a half, they had not
found any intelligent beings other than themselves. There were creatures in
the crystal jungles of Venus that were very bright—for animals. Nelson knew
that students of evolution considered that in another million years' time these
creatures would work
their way up to something like civilization. There
had been no evidences of intelligent life on the other worlds.
The pitifully narrow twilight belt of
Mercury, with its violent winds, now oven-hot and now icy-cold, harbored the
lowest type of rock-clinging moss and deep-rooted cactus only. The crater
bottoms of Luna, where a thin atmosphere sometimes gathered in the heat of the
sun, had fast-growing and fast-dying crops of green stuff, part vegetable, part
something else—but not animal. Two or three of the larger satellites of Jupiter
had tough hardy forms of plant life, and even a few very queer and sluggish
animal forms fighting for a foothold against the intolerable cold at that distance
from the sun. Farther out from Jupiter, the worlds wheeled cold and lifeless,
brilliant and changing perhaps in their chemical and crystalline reactions,
but sterile nonetheless.
There
was always Mars as the holdout. But the intelligent life of the Earth's
neighbor was a mystery—a dead mystery apparently. There had been intelligence
there, yes. A wonderful, tremendous, brilliantly skilled
intelligence. But it was gone totally, save for its works. And despite
all the decades that men like Nelson's father had spent exploring there, they
did not even know exactly what the Martians looked like.
Except
for one factor—they must have resembled men. Their homes and belongings seemed
designed for manlike beings—and Nelson remembered that the Martians had a hand
with five fingers, as the handgrips on certain instruments had proved beyond
doubt.
But that left no known race to account for
this print.
Nobody
on any world known to man had a three-fingered hand of such a curious pattern!
Perhaps, thought Nelson suddenly, the explorers had been mistaken about the
Martian hand? Perhaps this was the true appearance of a Martian's hand? Perhaps
then the Martians were not extinct . . . and one of them was here, on board the
Congreve, returning home.
That
raised another thought. Returning home from Earth? And
what had it been doing there?
Nelson
stood up, patting the place in his suit where he had hidden the envelope Dr.
Perrault had addressed to his father. This must have considerable importance
to attract the attention of such a spy? What was up? Well, he'd find out in
time. Meanwhile he would have to take great care not to be caught off guard.
He
went out of his compartment, closed the door and made his way back to the
passengers' chamber. He noticed as he did so that the lights were again
unshielded in the corridor. As he rejoined the company of his fellow passengers
he debated the course he should take. Should he tell people about it, ask for
help on a search? Would they believe him?
He
decided they probably wouldn't. Merely because he had seen what he thought was
something odd on his mirror, something that had since disappeared, they
wouldn't get excited. After all, nothing actually had been taken. A search
might simply cause the unknown to keep under cover.
What
he had to do was to keep an eye on everyone. Obviously whoever it was must be
wearing artificial flesh-simulated hands. It would be fairly easy to make a
pair of gloves designed to look and feel just like human flesh. A
three-fingered hand would fit into such a five-fingered glove so that none
might suspect the trick. Yet, Nelson supposed, it couldn't be quite as flexible
as a human hand—or could it? He would study everyone's
hands for signs of strangeness.
He
observed the passengers. He watched the crew, making special excuses to cover
even the men on duty in the atomically dangerous feeding-chamber room. But it
all proved futile.
Wait
as he did, there never seemed to have been another attempt on his room. Despite
careful arrangements of his drawer to show whether any disarrangement took
place in his absence, he found nothing. Watching hands for clumsiness proved
quite difficult when most people did very little save sit and read, watch
canned-shows, or stand duty.
Time
dragged on, as it does on even the speediest space flight. The flight to Mars
from Earth had once taken one and a quarter years each way. That was in the old
days of the chemical-type rockets fueled and launched from the Lunar base, after other big rockets had ferried the riders
to the moon. The time had been cut as the development of atomic fuels had been
perfected. It took longer than had been supposed, but with the perfection of
direct application of atomic reaction to space flight the ability to accelerate
for long periods of time was vastly increased.
The
speed of a spaceship depends entirely on how long a period
rocket acceleration can be kept up. As there is no friction in the empty voids
between the worlds, once a speed is reached, it remains the same unless
deliberately countered and slowed by an opposite rocket action. But the amount
of acceleration depended on how much fuel a ship could carry. Where chemical
fuel was concerned, the weights involved were so enormous and the results
actually so weak that, from a celestial viewpoint, the speeds were very, very
slow. But atomic power can produce tremendous volumes of energy from very
little bulk. All that had to be discovered was a means of liberating it which
did not involve massively heavy shielding and massively heavy piles. That
final discovery did not occur until space flight was already well under way.
The
trip to Mars now, while the planet was at its nearest orbital point to Earth,
was a matter of about three weeks. In that time one had to amuse oneself as
best one could. Space on a ship, even the largest finer, is limited. The grand
sight of interplanetary space as seen through the ship's thick but
crystal-clear portholes was always breathtaking, but essentially unchanging.
Nelson,
like the others aboard ship, made a point of looking toward Mars the first
thing on arising each ship's morning. The red dot grew slowly, taking on a disklike appearance that gradually became larger and began
to show surface markings. The orange-red "star" became a
russet-yellow disk with a visible white spot that was the icecap of the North
Pole, the frozen surface of the ancient world's last two large bodies of
water—the South Pole being the other.
In
time, faint bluish-green discolorations could be noted against the surface.
These were the fertile lands, the large oases where the land of Mars had not
yet dried and where grew the prairies and forests. The explorers of Mars had
come to consider these regions as the "continents" of the world,
separated from each other not by seas of water but by seas of desert. By far,
most of Mars was desert—endless reaches of rusty rock, barren waterless plains,
great stretches of slowly shifting yellow sand or reddish dry dust, and occasional
very low stumpy lines of mountains, worn down to be little more than ridges
above the general flatness, for there were no true mountains on Mars. No mountains,
no lakes, no rivers, no rains. Once in a very great while, so rarely that
Nelson had seen only two in his dozen years of life there, there were clouds,
white clouds moving slowly across the deep blue sky.
And
there were the Martian structures, the means by which the continents of
vegetation kept alive. But they could not be glimpsed from space, not until perhaps
the very last day.
The
ship decelerated and Nelson was no closer to the solution of his problem. There
were strange characters among the crew—but then there always were. The silence
and eeriness of space flight always produced quirks of character among the professional
sailors of space. Nelson could see nothing in this to arouse real suspicion.
On
the last day there was too much excitement to pay any further attention. The
ship was decelerating fast, under full engine power. Gravity was thus being
simulated and it was hard to get around, for the drive was often against the
normal setup of the compartments and rooms. Passengers were packing. The crew
was tightening up the ship for the landing. Then the order was boomed through
the liner to buckle into safety seats, the pressures grew, and the ship battled
its way down.
About
the hull arose a thin hissing and then a roaring as they tore into the Martian
atmosphere. The ship heeled and jerked as the pilot kept it steady. Finally
after an hour's breathless fall the ship eased to a complete stop and settled
softly to the surface of the Martian world.
Nelson
unstrapped himself from his seat. As he stood up, he suddenly felt a surge of
strength. The four years on Earth had built up his muscles to resist a far
heavier gravity. Yet something in his body reacted with pleasure. This he felt
was home. His body relaxed into the familiar patterns of his boyhood and he
knew what he had been missing for so long—the gravity of Mars was the pull of
his own world, the planet to which he had been born.
He
packed his possessions into his valise, left his compartment and made his way
to the exit lock, before which other passengers were waiting. As he caught
sight of them, his hand thrust once more underneath his shirt to pat the envelope
that was safely there.
The
exit opened at last and Nelson made his way through, down the metal ladder that
had been run up by the outer attendants and stood once more on the rocky
surface of the planet's sole operating spaceport. Someone in the crew called to
him but in his excitement he paid no attention.
He
looked around. The corrugated iron shacks beyond the area of landing looked as
old and ramshackle as ever. Great glassy areas marked where the atomic blasts
of liners had fused the desert surface. On three sides of the field stretched
only the great desert. On the fourth side a line of blue-green showed where the
edge of the Solis Lacus oasis started. Stretching toward it was a white
plastic road, one of the very few manmade structures on the planet, the road
that connected the central city of Solis Lacus with the spaceport.
Nelson
started toward the shack where visitors waited. He walked with an easy springy
step that carried him yards at a time. This was Mars, where he weighed only
forty-five pounds though muscled enough for a hundred and twenty. A small group
of colonists were waiting there patiently. Among them Nelson thought he
glimpsed his father's gray head.
But
as he went, he began to find himself gasping for breath, felt himself becoming dizzy and faint. He stopped, put down his
valise, squatted by it. He had forgotten his respirator!
If
his fellow high-skyers had seen him, they would have
really ridden him. For all his training, he had forgotten the one thing that
every colonist makes second nature. The air of Mars is thin and low in oxygen.
A man had to wear a mask and a little shoulder pack that would suck in the air
and pump it into him in greater quantities than his terrestrial lungs could do.
Otherwise he would blank out for lack of oxygen.
Nelson
opened his valise, fumbled in it, took out the little pack. Hastily he strapped
it on his back, high between his shoulder blades and adjusted the transparent
plastic mask over his nose and mouth. The little silent engine on, he felt a
rush of air to his nose and mouth, felt his senses clearing as his lungs received
the oxygen to which they were accustomed.
Nelson
stood up. Other passengers were beginning to overtake him. He picked up his bag
and again went on his way.
In
a few moments he was embracing the tall form of his father, exchanging fond
words. John Carson Parr smiled at his son from deep-set blue eyes. His bristly
shock of iron-gray hair, his dried long-boned face, his lank Lincolnian body, were all as Nelson had remembered them. Old
Parr slapped Nelson on the back. "Gosh, it's good to see you, son. Have a
clean trip?"
Nelson
was about to mention the incident of the intruder,
then decided to find a better time. "Sure, we made it all right, no
incidents, no meteors, no comets. And," he
continued, "I have a message for you from Dr. Perrault."
John
Parr's face became serious, his eyes flickered. Nelson took out the precious envelope, gave it to his father. Parr looked at the cover
with its Urgent
on it, then, instead of
opening it, slipped it into a pocket.
"Let's
wait until we get out of here. After all, your mother and sister are anxious to
see you."
They
slipped out of the small crowd and made their way behind the landing field
shack. There Parr's three-wheel jet car waited. They climbed into the little
bullet-shaped vehicle, and the elder Parr pushed the starter button.
The
little craft whizzed off down the thin white road toward the line of
vegetation. Its controls auto
matic, Parr turned away from them, took out the envelope
and slit it open. He unfolded the single sheet and read its closely typed
message, frowning as he did so. He slowly whistled and pursed his lips in
thought. Then he refolded the letter and put it back into his pocket.
Nelson
was bursting with curiosity but did not ask. He knew if it concerned him his
father would tell him.
John
Carson Parr looked out the windshield a moment. They were out of the desert,
speeding through flat fields of sparse stumpy plants growing not very tightly
in the loose sandy soil. The road was paralleling one of the enigmatic Martian
structures, the unbreakable tubes of the amazing planetwide irrigation system the vanished Martians had set
up designed to work automatically for the existence of the planet itself. The
system of viaducts, sewers, suction valves and pumping stations that made the
"canals" were known to astronomers as far
back as the nineteenth century.
Nelson Parr asked finally, "Something important there? Something you can tell me?"
His
father looked at him with grim eyes. "They have decided to evacuate Mars.
They are calling back every single colonist, man, woman, and child, to Earth.
They are going to abandon this world completely."
ChaptCt 3^ A4en on Mars
or a while they drove on in silence. Nelson s mind was a mass of confusion. In
spite of the talk on the ship, in spite of what he knew to be the opinions of
so many people back on Earth as to the costliness of the Mars colony, he had
never really believed that it could come to this. After all, there was so much
to be learned here!
What
of his own future then? As a boy playing amid the strange buildings of the vast
and empty Martian city, he had dreamed of being the man who would discover
their secrets. He had peeped into strange corners, snooped around the curiously
sealed closets in the empty houses hoping to find some unnoticed door, some
little clue that would bring him face to face with the Martians at last. Then
he had been sent by his father, the leading explorer of the whole Mars project,
to go back to Earth and be trained especially for that very work. To study and
learn so that someday he would aid his dad and perhaps take up his father's
work, with the end of making those so sought-after
discoveries. For the secrets of Mars would enrich mankind
a thousand times over!
"Surely,
Dad," Nelson finally broke the silence in the speeding car, "they
won't entirely empty the planet? They'll leave some explorers to keep up the
search. Surely you'll stay and . . . and Worden and maybe McQueen and others
like them; men who really know this world and can work on."
"You
would think so, son," said his father, his eyes staring straight ahead at
the thin white road. "But they've decided otherwise. As a matter of fact,
they've been preparing for this for several years now. They've been drawing in
the posts, calling back the explorer crews, sending people home steadily. When
you left for school there were about three thousand people here. You may be
surprised to learn there are only about three hundred here now. And in about
three months we'll all be gone. Every single one of us."
Nelson jerked his eyes away from the rolling fields, and the thin webwork of Martian pipelets that
covered them so exacdy and so unbreakably. He stared at his father. "You mean even
the South Polar diggings have been stopped? And the work in the Syrtis Major vaults . . . that too? Why, they'd been well
on their way to breaking through into the main chambers! That alone might have
solved everything."
"The
polar diggings were shut down over a year ago," his father replied.
"As for the Syrtis excavations— I'm afraid they
weren't panning out any better than all the rest of our operations since we
first landed here. They had gotten around to using atomic blasters on a small
scale and they couldn't budge the walls. No, I don't think they'd have gotten
through in any short time. But that's over and done with. Worden came back with
his crew a week ago."
The
young man pounded a hand into his fist angrily. "Can't we refuse to go home! Can't we just stay anyway!"
John
Parr smiled a little bit, glanced at his son.
"You know it would be impossible. With the winters here, with our need for
steady shipments of the vitamins and food products we can't seem to raise from
the Martian crops, we couldn't survive for more than a couple years. Not as a
colony. And as for leaving just a few men, why, we'd be so busy just keeping
ourselves alive we'd have no time for anything else."
The
two rode in silence again. The little tear-shaped car was approaching the city
and the sight was always one that made every Earthman silent with wonder. A
Martian city is something like an iceberg on a terrestrial sea . . . about
one-tenth aboveground and the rest below ground. But that one-tenth itself was
something. A vast area of low rounded domes of many colors,
rising from the ground like thousands of half-buried billiard balls.
Separating each a profusion of greenery, thicker than even in the fields, the
strange piny growths of Mars, thick like cactus,
curiously movable on their short chunky stalks, folding themselves into tight
variously colored balls at night like a forest of lollipops; unfolding in the
weak sunlight to reveal thirsty blue-green spiky and furry leaf interiors.
There was something about a Martian city that resembled nothing so much as
some of the pictures from quaint old folk tales of the homes of trolls and
pixies.
These
domes were homes, sealed homes. Beneath them extended a tremendous series of
catacombs, chambers, tunnels, going far down into the soil, sometimes a mile
down, and in these hidden works lay the heart of the city, the business, the
factories, the centers of the lighting, heating, watering, air conditioning.
There somewhere must be underground trains or their equivalents, connecting
links between all the hundreds of similar cities of Mars. There must be hidden
their museums, their records, their libraries. And in a dozen Earthly decades,
no human being had done more than walk the barren halls outside the doors of
these places. For Mars was a sealed world. And there was no visible key.
It
was lucky for the first men to reach Mars that the domes on the surface were
open. Their curiously rounded doors, set flush in the surface of the solid
seeming domes opened at a touch. Within these domes were the chambers and rooms
of habitations—the homes of the vanished Martian population. That they were
such was plainly to be seen. The Martians, whoever they were, had not been
very different from the men of Earth, for there was little to suggest that men
had not lived in those homes. They were the right size for men. They were
fitted out as men would fit out their homes, there were recognizable kitchens
and bedrooms, rooms that must have been for pleasure and living, rooms that
may have been for games, rooms that could have been nurseries.
From
within, the walls were invisible, like trick mirrors, those within could see
out, could see the light and the flowers. But from outside, the walls were
solid, did not transmit vision. There were floor coverings, as beautiful and
soft underfoot as the finest of rugs, and they could not be removed from the
floor. There were frames on the walls which held blank spaces that might have
once been pictures or television scenes or projections, but whatever activated
them could not be found. There were all the closets which could not be opened
and for which no key or opener could be found. There were cooking machines
which could not be made to function. There were air-conditioning, heating and
cooling units in each house, built in, which did not function. There were openings
which may have been faucets, but from which nothing could be induced to flow.
As
Nelson and his father stopped their car before the soft blue dome that had
become the Parr residence, the door flew open and a middle-aged lady popped
out with a little girl at her heels. Without their respirators, Nelson's mother
and sister could not wait to welcome him home. The two men jumped out, and,
after a few excited minutes, Nelson found himself back in the main room of the
dome in which he had spent his childhood. He looked about him, recognizing the
familiar scenes of his boyhood.
But
now he took notice as he had never before of the things which alone made this
place habitable. Though there were vents for air conditioning, there was an
atomic heater of Earthly make that kept the room warm. Though there were areas
in wall and ceiling which must have been sources of light, the only lighting
in the room was an openly visible system of wiring attaching to a normal
Earthly bulb. He knew in the kitchen the Martian stove still stood silently
mysterious while his mother cooked their meals over an imported and too-small
aluminum burner. He knew in their bathroom they would wash as always with a
limited quantity of chemically purified and constantly reused water from a small
tank clamped unbeautifully to the Martian wall.
Although
there was a closet in his bedroom, Nelson did not attempt to hang his clothes
in it after unpacking. For the closet door would not open and never had been
opened. Instead, he hung his clothes in the thin plastic-board folding closet
that had been brought from their home world several dozen years before.
He
returned to the main room, sat down to his first meal at home in four years.
The talk was about the evacuation of Mars. Suddenly Nelson realized that his
mother and sister had known about this for several days. A thought occurred to
him.
"If
this evacuation is actually old news to you, then what was it that Perrault had
to tell you?" he asked his father during a lull in the conversation.
John
Carson Parr looked at him sharply. "Why, that had to do with something
else. Nothing of importance," he said, glancing at his wife and daughter.
Silently he shook his head as if to warn Nelson to say nothing further on the
subject.
Nelson
wondered about that letter often in the days that followed. But the matter of
removing the Earth colony was not a simple one. Everyone's time was occupied.
During the next few days a great fleet of spaceships and liners and freighters
put down on the desert surrounding Solis Lacus. Besides the Congreve, the other liners of space, usually on duty
nearer the sun, came down from the deep blue sky and perched upright on the
sand. The Goddard,
the Pickering, the Valier, the
Ziolkovsky, the other liners of the type arrived. And the freighters came in, some
of them fresh from storage on Earth, as the mining developments had come to a
halt following the synthesis of elements on Earth. Nelson was amazed to see
ships bearing the colors and emblems of the long defunct trading companies that
had originally built up the once lucrative asteroid trade.
Then
there was the problem of assigning space to the three hundred remaining
colonists. Spaceships never had too much cargo room, and it would take just
about every inch to transport the men, women, and children safely. Very little
of their personal possessions could be taken. They would have to leave things
like furniture and excess clothing, books and radios, cars and planes behind.
But then, most of that material was made to suit the rigors of the Martian
climate, a world where in midsummer temperatures might reach the seventies and
yet plunge to thirty and forty below zero by midnight. Where in winter the
temperature at midday would never pass above zero and might drop to a hundred
or more below by nightfall. A world whose air was too thin to support planes
built to Earthly designs and yet would fly planes too wide-winged and weakly
powered to operate in the thicker air and heavier gravity of Earth.
Nelson
and his father and his father's associates in the leadership of the colony were
busy listing available spaces, assigning families, seeing that they were stowed
aboard and that the ships took off for the green-glowing evening star as fast
as they were completely booked. They had to settle arguments as to what could
go and what could be left behind. They had to arbitrate between people who
insisted they had not enough room or were separated from their friends. They
had to console weeping mothers who did not want to leave their homes, even on
this alien world, to make new starts on what would be to them a very strange
and hard planet. All had been promised good homes and jobs, but it was
nonetheless exile.
Through
all this, Nelson worked and watched with a heavy heart. As each man departed, as
each ship roared away into the sky never to return, he knew that mankind had
lost another chance to open up a treasure house that had no equal in history. For they left Mars almost as mysterious as they had found it.
Mars
was a complete world, a world which had known a tremendous and far-advanced
civilization. And it had been sealed up by its original people, sealed up and
abandoned with its basic organization still running.
An
old world, Mars could only keep its areas of plantation and vegetation going by
piping the waters from the poles as they melted during the summers. To do this,
the Martians had built up with heaven alone knows what tremendous effort and
ingenuity over what must have been tens of thousands of years a world-wide
system of irrigation. Webbing the planet from pole to pole were the great
viaducts and underground sealed currents. Pumping stations operating no one
knew on what power source kept the waters moving uphill against the gravital pull from the poles to the higher regions of the equators.
The vegetation growing in thin strips alongside these lines had allowed even
pre-rocket astronomers to see them, to map them, even to name them as the great
Percival Lowell had done as far back as 1895. In the great continents of
blue-green trees where the Martian cities had been found, these conduits alone
enabled the planet's plant life to continue on a world otherwise without rain,
river or well.
And
it was all sealed. The colonists had found Martian machines plainly designed
for land travel and air travel, but they could find no way of activating them.
The power source was a mystery. Theory said that somehow the Martians must have
broadcast their power from central stations, and these machines picked up their
energy like a radio picks up a program. But where the power-sending stations
were no Earth explorer had ever found out.
The
Martians had used their thousands of years advancement
to produce locks and metals that resisted all efforts to crack. A closed
Martian door, such as lined the endless underground corridors and halls, simply
could not be opened. Drills could not scratch their surfaces, explosives could
not mar them, atomic reactions could not shake them or
dent them. They had resisted successfully the best efforts of the best scientists
of Earth.
Nelson
knew that if they could but once get past these doors, could but once explore
the factories and machinery behind them, they would be able to make the planet
live again. They could make the dome houses naturally habitable. They could fly
the hundreds of thousands of Martian vehicles that were plainly available in
garage domes everywhere. They could get into the libraries of the vanished
Martians and enrich their knowledge of the universe a thousandfold.
They
had had over a century to do this—and they had failed. Mars was like the
legendary ship, the Marie
Celeste, the
ship that had been found in the Atlantic, sailing along, its table set for
lunch, its boilers still warm, the log open on the captain's desk awaiting a
note, its lifeboats still hanging, its crew's clothing still in place, and
entirely empty of crew. Without reason or cause, its crew had vanished into
thin air.
And
there was the case of the famous city of Angkor deep in the jungles of
Indo-China. A great city, the capital of what was once a great empire, simply
abandoned, its population departing en masse into the jungle, taking nothing
with them, not even their possessions.
And
that was Mars. Where its people had gone to, nobody could imagine. They had
simply vanished. They had taken nothing with them, except perhaps their
clothing, for their homes were untouched, their cities still intact, undamaged,
their agriculture still automatically functioning, probably their entire planet
ready to resume full life once someone could find the controls. They had left
no pictures of themselves, no statues, no inscriptions that could be read. They
had left no bodies, no skeletons, no cemeteries.
Possibly there were some somewhere, must be, Nelson had always thought, but to find them
in this world of desert would be sheer luck. And there had never been enough
explorers here to warrant such a stroke of luck yet.
Now
there never would be, probably. Nelson's thoughts were glum as he finished
packing the very valise with which he had arrived. Their day had come. Only one
ship waited for the last members of the colony. Out at the spaceport, it was
already two-thirds full, and now only the Parrs and
his father's immediate associates were awaited. After them, there would be
nobody else. The planet would be as empty of human life as it had been before
the first ship had made its wild rocket-driven landing so long ago.
Outside,
his mother was already in the little car. Nelson went through the dome house,
mentally saying good-by to the scenes. His little sister came out tearfully
from her room clutching her favorite doll. Tearfully she kissed it and set it
up in a sitting position on the floor of the living room. It, too, was excess
weight. Then with a sob she ran to join her mother. Nelson followed his father
through the door, adjusted his respirator mask, and swung the rounded door
shut. It clicked tight, adhering with that fine keenness of Martian
architecture to the surface of the blue dome. The two males piled into the car,
started the engine.
The
trip to the spaceport was made in silence, as each strove to imprint on his
memory their last glimpse of what they had regarded as their home world. At the
spaceport, they were checked off by the ship's captain, their baggage taken
from them and sent up to their space.
John Parr turned to his wife. "You and
Beth go aboard to our cabin. Nelse and I want to talk
a minute with Worden before we join you."
Nelson's
mother nodded and, casting her husband and son a strange long glance, took her
daughter's hand and went off to the ship. As they went, Nelson felt his father
s hand close on his arm. "Stay close to me," he heard his dad
whisper.
A
sudden thrill ran through the young man. He turned. In the little space of the
corrugated-roofed spaceport house, there were now only the captain, a crew
member of the liner, and his dad's assistant, Jim Worden, the thirty-year-old
explorer. John Parr waited until the women had vanished into the distant liner
and the captain and his crewman were starting to leave.
He
nodded to Worden, and started to walk slowly toward the ship, letting the two
crewmen get well ahead of them. The three Mars colonists walked slowly, as if
reluctant to leave.
Nelson
saw the captain reach the entry port with his man and look back. The Parrs were coming, he could see, for Nelson saw the captain
vanish into the space lock. Now his father began to rush, and Nelson and Jim
Worden followed him fast. At a point nearly below the ship, out of sight of
anyone in the ship, they dropped to the ground.
Nelson
watched Jim frantically searching for something. He touched a little
projecting knob in the blast-scarred surface of the field. A small circular
trap door opened.
"Quick!"
breathed the elder Parr, and Nelson needed no second word. Jim was scrambling
down
into the dark space beneath the desert surface.
Nelson climbed in on top of him, and his father came at his heels, and closed
the trap over their heads.
"Hurry,"
Worden said, "we've got to get as far down this passage as we can before
the ship takes off. Follow me!" He produced a flash from his pocket and
in its glow the three men raced, bent down in the low passage, as fast as they
could.
As
they ran, Nelson burst out, "Are we staying behind, Dad? Are we really
going to stay?"
Just
behind him, panting with the exertion of their cramped running, John Carson
Parr replied, "We've got a special mission to do here. We've got to do it
all alone, without Earth knowing. We're the last men on Mars—and no outside
observer must know it!"
CkaptCt 4Secret Meeting
I |
hey scurried along the tunnel like huge ungainly rabbits,
until they burst into a larger tunnel which Nelson recognized as one of the
innumerable underground hallways of the city. The three stopped with one
accord, out of breath, and waited.
In
a few minutes there was a distant rumble and a blast of heat down the tiny
tunnel from which they had emerged. "That's the blast-off," said
Worden. "The ship's gone."
John
Parr nodded. "The last ship to Earth. Certainly
for a long, long time, anyway."
Nelson
looked at the small tunnel. "How'd you find such a convenient escape
hole?" he asked.
Worden
glanced up at it. "Burned it out in the sand with an
atomic borer. I noticed this branch of the tunnels came close to our
spaceport field. Figured out the rest. Did it last week."
"Come
on," said Nelson's father, "we've got a lot to do yet." He led
the way down the corridor, lighting the way with his pocket flash. Silently the
other two followed.
Nelson
had been in the Martian tunnels before, many times in fact, and never found
them dull. They were always a mystery, always a source of intrigue as to what
lay behind the occasional dull metallic circular doors they passed. He knew
from his father's and everyone else's experience that these doors could not be
budged in any way. Even were they to blast the tunnel itself and the
surrounding countryside into dust, the doors would hold.
A
certain amount of vague knowledge had been gained by the use of radar and
electronic measurements of the space concealed by these doors. They had in
some instances gotten shadowy photographs of odd-shaped masses, sometimes of
what seemed like single pieces of equipment, sometimes of crates, rarely
anything that could be recognized. Worden, he knew, had produced a number of
radar photos from vaults near the polar seas that certainly looked like boats
of a sort.
The
three walked the dark hallways until Nelson had estimated that they must be
under the fertile region and nearing the great catacombs of the city. Finally
they came to a point where a chalked X marked
a particular side corridor. This they entered. In a few minutes they emerged
into a corner of two tunnels. Here Worden reached forward and snapped a switch.
An Earth-made bulb lit up, revealing a group of boxes, a table, some equipment,
several cots, and cases of food.
"Well,"
said John Parr, "here we are and here we stay for a couple days. Sit down,
make yourself at home," he added jocularly.
"How
about some lunch?" said Worden. "I'm hungry
after all that running." He went over to a portable stove, switched on a
burner, and set about opening a couple of cans.
Nelson,
by this time, was so bubbling over with excitement and curiosity that he just
didn't know where to begin. Finally he burst out, "For goodness sake, Dad,
will you tell me what this is all about? What are we doing here? Why are we
staying?"
Worden
looked up, looked at the stern-faced leader of the
Martian colony. "You mean to say, John, that you
never told him what was going on?"
John
Parr smiled a little shamefacedly. "I guess I knew Nelson would stick by
us and follow me without having to be told. We can tell him now."
They
sat down at the table, and, while Worden piled some warmed-up chow in paper
plates and put cups of hot vita-coff before them,
John Parr mused a moment and then said:
"You
remember that letter you gave me from Perrault. Wftiat we are doing now is according to his
instructions, in the event of evacuation orders going out."
Worden
nodded, and Parr continued, "In the course of exploration work on Mars,
from the very first days, certain obscure facts would turn up that seemed to
indicate some sort of activity here that could not be accounted for. These
items were extremely slight, so slight in fact that it was not practical to
make their existence public nor to attempt to draw any
conclusions. As the years passed, the compilation and classification of
knowledge about Mars caused these little
things to be placed in a special file of their own.
During the past few years, some attempts have been made to interpret their
meaning.
"As
a result of this study, it was found advisable to create a special committee to
check the whole problem. This committee had to remain extremely secret, a
small group of Mars specialists, reporting only to Perrault himself on Earth,
who is responsible directly to the President of the Interplanetary
Institute."
"Your
pop is the head of the committee, Nelse. And now that
he's told you I guess that makes you a member, the sixth member."
"Yes,"
broke in Nelson, impressed but still baffled, "but what exactly are we
looking for? What sort of things were discovered to
make all this necessary?"
Parr
pursed his lips, took a sip of his drink. "Actually,
it's hard to define them. If we had to write them up for the papers, probably
they'd be laughed at. At first we used to think they were just accidents or mistakes.
You see sometimes it would just be that things were displaced. A group of
Martian cars in their garage, for instance, might be lined up in a certain
way, just like the Martians left them. The next time an explorer happened on
that particular garage, it might turn out that the cars had shifted positions.
That maybe one was slightly out of line or reversed."
"You
could figure that some other explorer had come and shoved them around trying to
make one go, only the records showed unmistakably that nobody had been there
between the two visits," said Worden.
"That's
right. We'd check carefully and could prove that nobody, that is nobody known
to the colonists, had been there. Or we might find footprints in the soil
outside a dome house where no one was living. Never could trace the prints,
never could find anyone who'd admit having been there," said Parr.
"For
instance, once, about two, three years ago," said Worden, "while I
was flying over a polar icefield, I saw tracks in the
ice, newly made apparently. Looked just like landing skids for a small rocket
cruiser. Only there wasn't any such rocket around, and never
had been. That sort of thing makes up the bulk of the observations.
You'd find landing tracks in the desert while flying over it. Sometimes see
dust marks on the top of a main conduit far from any settlement."
Nelson
was beginning to feel little chills go up and down his back as he listened, and
then whispered his thoughts, "You mean, as if there were Martians still
around, hiding, peeking out, keeping out of our sight?"
His
father nodded. "It certainly seemed like that. And when the information
was all gathered together, it looked fairly certain. Something else was here. Something awfully careful to keep out of sight. Something sort of spying on us."
"But
that's terrific!" said Nelson. "That means that there's another intelligence other than men around!"
"That's
jumping to conclusions too soon," said his father, "but in view of
what happened to you on the Congreve coming
here, that might well be."
Worden looked up.
"What's that? What happened?"
Nelson
explained to him. He told him about the attempt to steal Perrault's letter and
about the mysterious three-fingered handprint he'd seen. His father had
expressed no opinion when he had heard of the affair, and Nelson had wondered
at that then. Now he understood.
Worden
leaned forward. "What did I tell you, John," he said. "Didn't I
say that whoever was spying on us would probably have snooped on Earth too? If
this three-fingered stranger was aboard the Congreve in a perfect disguise, then he had come from
Earth, didn't he? So they must have some agents there, too. In fact, I'd
sometimes wondered if some of the talk about how expensive it was to keep the
Mars colony going wasn't traceable to something like that. Suppose these really
are the Martians, a few of them hiding somewhere here. Naturally they'd want us
to leave. So after they manage to learn to disguise themselves well enough,
they could even try to do their share to boost any suggestion that we go home.
I don't suppose they could get into the government, but maybe they could pay
for a few magazine or newspaper articles here and there to keep the idea of
abandoning Mars in the public eye."
John
Carson Parr shook his head. "That's too much speculation. There isn't
really a shred of evidence that the leaders of the Greenface
movement are anything but honest in their views. Anyway, it's futile to discuss
it. The evacuation of Mars is complete. Now it's up to us.
Nelson
didn't know just what was up to them, but decided to wait and see. Meanwhile
they unpacked their equipment, stuff that Worden and Parr had moved there
during the last month in preparation for this. They spent the rest of the day
sorting it out, settling down to wait for the rest of the committee to come
out of hiding and join them.
By
the next morning, burly Bryan McQueen turned up, trudging along a corridor from
the city. A big man, he was an authority on the deserts of Mars and had spent
most of his living years traveling alone over their vast reaches in an enclosed
sand-walker or skimming their surfaces in a slow plane.
Two
days later, the remaining members of the committee turned up. These proved to
be Francisco Jose Gutman, the famous botanist, and
Karl Telders, the noted interplanetary engineer and
rocket expert. And then the waiting was over. They were all there, the last men
on Mars.
As
soon as these last two joined them, they packed their belongings again,
strapped what they could on their backs, and started off down the tunnels. Following
a path mapped out by Worden, who had thoroughly explored the regions beneath
Solis Lacus, they wandered in and out of the labyrinth, until, to Nelson's
surprise, just when he had thought they were surely lost, they climbed up an
incline, went up some metal steps and he poked his head out the round door into
the basement of his own blue-domed home in Solis Lacus.
During
all this trip none of them had been seen aboveground. Nelse knew that they were to keep their presence a secret.
Their game was to keep watch and tape that the mysterious strangers would
venture forth in plain
sight when they were convinced that the planet had been abandoned.
Once
in the comfort of the former Parr dome, they held a council of war. John Carson
Parr pulled a new surprise out of his pocket.
"Now that we are all here, it may have
occurred to you that it would be almost impossible for us to do any spying
ourselves and hope to see our quarry. After all, if we have to keep out of
sight, we too must remain out of the air and off the roads. If our Martians
chose to come out and set up shop in some oasis half the planet away, we might
never know it. We certainly couldn't observe it. Again, if we do spot them, and
they spot us, they would quickly realize how few we are. It would be very easy
for them to attack us and wipe the six of us out."
The
rest of the men nodded as the logic of this became clear to them. After a
pause, the gray-haired explorer continued, "So we are not going to stay on
Mars at all. We are going where we can watch the planet as much as we like and
yet not be seen. We are going where we can see all parts of this world regularly,
check and recheck, without danger to ourselves."
Gutman raised his eyebrows. "And where would
that be, John?"
Telders
spoke up. "I know. I can think of only one place—or rather two places—for
that."
"And
where would they be?" said McQueen, swivel-ing
in his chair.
Telders
merely smiled and gestured a thumb upward. McQueen followed his gesture,
puzzled. Nelson spoke up slowly, "Do you mean the moons? Phobos and Deimos?"
His
father nodded. "That's it. We're going to Phobos
and set up our observation post there."
"But
where's the ship for that?" asked McQueen, still perplexed.
"I've got it," said Telders. "I've got a
small space cruiser tucked away under the sands the other side of Solis Lacus.
Perrault ordered it some time ago. It's fueled and capable of making the trip. Phobos is only fifty-eight hundred miles up. Should be an easy trip. We've got the equipment for the
observation post also. Space tents, telescopes, telephotos, etc."
"And
enough food for a long stay," added Parr. "After which we'll have to
raid the storage here some night."
"That's
really neat," said Nelson. "When do we leave?"
"We
can take off any time. I suggest we rest the next few hours, and get ready to
take off sometime late tonight," was the reply. And so it was agreed.
Chapter Sphobos
W |
hen the colonists had abandoned their homes, they had
had to leave behind almost all of their property, and certainly all of their
furnishings. They had room enough only for part of their personal belongings,
such as could be carried in a couple of suitcases. So the Parr home was still
as fully equipped for human habitation as it had been.
Telders
and McQueen bunked on the soft ruglike floor of the
living room. Gutman curled up on the sofalike pallet which was a fixture in all Martian homes.
Worden and John Parr used the beds in Nelson's parents' room, and for the last
time, Nelson closed his eyes in brief sleep on his own bed in his own bedroom.
As
he lay there, with the permanently operating atomic clock set for alarm at
nightfall, he glanced around at his room. When he had left to embark on the
evacuation ship, he had never expected to see his room again. Now, here he was,
in his old familiar surroundings—yet how different the outside world was!
Over
his bureau he had stuck a paper-thin banner of the Institute for Space
Engineering, the univer-
sity to which his colonial training school back
on Earth had been affiliated. Stuck on the wall in other places were relics of
his Martian boyhood, a crudely hand-printed banner of the Solis Lacus General
School—the only grammar school on all of Mars. There was a telepaper
fix-photo of his father receiving an award for some special research on the
desert flora— those queer gray stumpy plants that popped up unexpectedly in
odd places of the iron-red barrens. There was a Martian root crawler,
one of the few native "bugs," which Nelse
had caught and mounted himself in permanent stasis by means of perfect
sterilization of its body cells under a light atomic beam such as was used for
preserving meat. Other objects, such as his jumping rod; his spare respirator, too
small for him now; his lacrosse stick; and so forth, all of which had been dear
to him.
Nelson turned over, closed his eyes.
Before
he knew it, the whistling of his alarm brought him to his feet. Outside, the
sky had turned to a deep blue-black and the sharp bright stars that shone
through the thinner Martian atmosphere were burning whitely, as they had never
done on Earth. The bulbs in his room were glowing pleasantly as he pulled on
his shoes. He caught a glimpse of a tiny crescent moving slowly through the
dark sky. That would be Deimos, the smaller moon.
He
joined the others of the party. They raided the pantry left by Nelson's mother
and had their last meal on the red planet. There was a good store of food,
abandoned like all the rest. When they finished, they donned their respirators,
pulled on their night coveralls—electronically heated garments for the cold outside—pulled the
hoods close over their heads, settled their packs, and followed Worden down
again through the trap door in the Parr home.
Now
they made their way through the old passages under the city itself. Though
there was probably some sort of native lighting, none of it worked, dead as the
rest of the planet's mighty civilization, dead or in cold storage. Beneath the
city itself there was such a web-work of passages,
doorways, entrances downward and exits upward as to leave almost no lengths of
corridor. Nelson, who had visited the underground ways of terrestrial cities,
particularly the maze of trains, moving passageways, and foot tunnels, found
himself comparing them as he strode along behind the other five. It occurred
to him curiously that those Earth cities were somehow so "new" and so
"elementary" compared to this. For a moment he felt awe at the
thought of what this could have been like, all lit up and filled with hustling
Martians.
On
they went, following Worden, who had a map of the underground ways that had
been worked out by explorers. Every now and then he stopped to check his
position, then went on.
After
about four hours of steady wandering in and out of the endless catacombs,
Worden brought them to a halt. He swung open a trap door above, and they
climbed the ladder that rested there.
They
emerged into a large dome, cleared of its interior rooms. As he stuck his head
out of the trap door, Nelson saw that the dome housed a rocket cruiser. A small
duplicate of the great space liner, a craft such as was used for exploration of the
asteroids—a clean powerful little craft, capable of carrying them all comfortably,
capable of fast flight, and carrying a fair cargo. It was as new a ship as he'd
seen, and he realized that it must have been sent sometime in advance for just
this type of emergency.
Telders unsealed the single main lock and they filed
in. Inside it was just as Nelson anticipated. He had studied space training in
a replica of such a craft as this at the Institute. The trim
long central and front cabin, the bunks for six lining the wall, the cargo
chamber, now holding a number of crates, as well as food supplies. The
now fairly small engine space-immensely compact since the recent developments
in rocket engineering—the original spaceships had been about ninety-five
percent engine and fuel. This one was not more than about thirty percent such.
When
all was ready, they checked their watches, and Telders
took control.
"All
set?" called out John Carson Parr, seating himself in the soft bucket
chair next to Telders.
The
rest of them called out their readiness. Nelson was near the controls; he
wanted to watch through the forward port.
Their
target, Phobos, was not in sight. Nelson had not
expected it to be. Telders had undoubtedly figured
just when it would be overhead and arranged their speed and flight in such a
way that they would cross its orbit at the moment the satellite would be there.
Their trip might take a few hours, at the relatively slow speeds of near-planet
regions. Since Phobos circled Mars in slightly over
one day, by the time they had gotten five thousand miles up, it would be up.
"Time!"
called out the rocketeer and punched a button.
Outside,
the curved dome slid back and the open dark sky loomed over them. For a moment
Nelson caught a glimpse of the gray starlit city, its domes cold and dark, the
horizon stretching beyond. The ship lifted slowly, pointed its nose at the
heavens and climbed, rapidly accelerating. In a matter of seconds the city was
a mass of bubbles beneath them, a gem set in the darkness of a sleeping plain
of dark blue, whose edges, even at night, could be plainly defined against the
glaring lightness of the desert.
Nelson
smiled suddenly, oddly, as he looked down. McQueen, near him, said,
"What's the joke, son?"
Nelson
looked up at the burly engineer. "It suddenly struck me," he replied,
"to wonder who else saw us leave."
"Nobody,
I hope," said McQueen. "Wouldn't be a smart thing for them to know
we're still around."
"Oh,
I don't know," said Gutman, glancing down.
"Even if we were seen, they'd probably only suppose we were the last and
going home also."
"Come
to think of it," said Nelson, "we are really the last. There's nobody
left on Mars at all. Nobody."
"Hmm,"
said John Carson Parr, looking thoughtful, "in a way this represents a
real defeat for humanity, our first retreat from space. This is the first time
in a century that there hasn't been a single Earthman on this world. Though we
ourselves may return for a while, right now that world is empty again. As empty
as it must have been for who knows how many thousands of our years."
"Ah,
well," said McQueen, "we'll return. We've got to. You can't keep an
Earthman down for long!"
The
red planet receded slowly, its horizon spreading out as they penetrated the now
black airless sky outside the atmosphere belt. Covering all the sky beneath
them, it seemed like a dark flat surface blotting out the stars. Far to one
edge, Nelson could see the rosy glow that was the line of the coming day. The
surface of nighttime Mars was not black, seen as close as they were, but shone
a dull blue-gray, broken with dark patches where its vegetation continents and
canal streaks showed.
The
trip continued with little conversation, for every man seemed buried in his
thoughts. Nelson watched the sky carefully until at long last he caught sight
of the thin crescent that was their destination. He watched it, knowing that
the ship and the moon were racing together, apparently to collide.
Now
Telders began navigating the ship, changing its
speed, slowing it down, bringing it into an orbit
nearly parallel with that of the little satellite. They raced along like a
small moon themselves, with the larger body coming up fast behind them.
After
another half hour, the sphere of Phobos was filling
their outer view. Now they had the illusion of gliding along just over it, and Telders skilfully brought the
ship closer and closer, changing his speed delicately until at last they were
skimming low over a flat rocky plain.
The
ship dropped steadily until it seemed to be hanging over the surface, and
Nelson could see the small rocks and cracks that marked the surface of the
satellite. Now, with ease, Telders brought the ship
down and very gently it settled to a landing on Phobos.
They
got up from their seats and the sensation was as if they were still in deep
space. They seemed to be without weight. "Easy does it," called out
John Parr. "Carry yourselves as if in weightlessness. This hunk of rock is
only ten miles in diameter. Our weight is in fractions of a pound, don't count
on it."
They
swung around the cabin, gathering their possessions.
"Everybody
know how to use spacesuits?" asked Parr. The
question was merely academic. Without further ado, the six of them climbed into
the new lightweight, completely pressurized and regulated suits that were a
feature of this stage of space-flight history. Nelson had learned the use of
these suits and had worn them in space chambers in training. He climbed into
his own, tested its fitting, fitted the transparent bowl helmet over his head
and heard it click tight to his neck and chest connections. The air clearance
valves instantly opened, the helmet radio promptly snapped on, and it was as if
he were standing amid his friends in normal surroundings.
"No
time to waste," said Parr. "Everybody take a load with him the first
time we go out. We'll make this ship our home, but the observatory has got to
be outside. Let's get going!"
Nelson
took the bundle of tent cloth that had been handed him and, getting in line
behind McQueen,
was the second to clear the lock and set foot on
the surface of Mars' little moon.
Soon
all six were outside, their magnetic shoes bracing against the surface.
Forgetting their supposed urgency, they stood and stared around them.
They
were in a little corner of a barren plain. To one side some ridges of rock
supplied the local equivalent of a mountain. The plain stretched off and came
to an abrupt and rather startling horizon about a few hundred yards from where
they stood. On a world as small as Phobos, this was
the usual experience.
There
was no air on this tiny body, no air and no life. The cold rocky surface,
glistening under the light of a million million
stars, was free of any sign of growth. Above, a great ball hung, now half lit as
the Martian day crept across its surface and as Phobos
itself sped around the greater planet. Even as the six men watched they could
see the red world seem to rotate, could almost feel their little satellite
speeding on its eternal invisible track around and around Mars.
"Enough,
men," called out John Parr. "There'll be plenty of time to study the
view, plenty. Let's get cracking!"
They
started to set up their observatory, their watch post to spy on those who had
once spied on them— whoever or whatever they were!
Chapter 6
Beyond View of
Earth
U |
elson and
Jim Worden went back into the ship and started the task of unloading the
observational equipment. McQueen and Gutman set out
to scout the area and find the best spot for setting up their scopes. Telders and the elder Parr helped unload the crates and set
them up.
The
work was easy. On Mars it would have been fairly hard, on Earth impossible
without a crew of stevedores. Weightlessness is a very convenient thing where
moving cumbersome packages is concerned. They still have a certain resistance
due to inertia, but that can be overcome much more easily than weight. It would
have been a very strange sight indeed on Earth to have seen Nelson Parr, even
though a fairly strong young man of sixteen, carrying a crate several times his
own size. But the novelty of the sight wore off rapidly as Jim Worden, shorter
than Nelson though about fifteen years older, hefted similarly huge bundles.
In a surprisingly short time they had spread
out the
material on a fairly flat space where their
observations could be carried on with the least interruption. Although a tiny
body, Phobos had the same peculiarity as Luna, in
that it did not turn on its own axis more than was sufficient to present the
same side to its parent planet. At the spot where the Parr group had landed,
Mars was a large ball directly overhead at all times.
McQueen
and the rest assisted in putting up the observation shack, wherein the records
would be kept. This was built of plastic walls, sealed airtight to each other
and capable of holding air within it if necessary. As a rule, however, this
shack would house a table, a file, and such records as could be kept in the
airlessness of the natural surface. The men who would be on duty at their
spotting posts would record their findings without removing their spacesuits.
Before
long this shack was up, a special shockproof platform erected beyond it, and
the lenses of the telescope mounted on a simple skeleton framework. No
mechanical motor would be required to keep the objective in sight, for here
the objective was always stationary. Hand controls could sweep any part of Mars
in view. And as the red planet rotated on its axis, and Phobos
followed its own path, very nearly all the surface would be kept under view
regularly.
Radarscopic observation would also be placed in use to register moving bodies
across the face of Mars. This probably would not be used except when such
mysterious motion was suspected by the observer. Then this device could be
focused on the suspected spot and would register the truth or falsehood of the
observation.
They knocked off work to eat in the space
cruiser. After they had satisfied their hunger and privately rejoiced to find Telders as good a ship's cook as he was a ship's navigator,
John Carson Parr called a conference.
"We'll
have to set up a regular system of watching crews. Two men must be on duty
outside at all times. So we shall divide our day into three sections. Two men asleep, two men in the ship, two men outside. The
four men awake will spell each other at two-hour intervals so that no one will
be outside in space-suits too long."
"May
I suggest," put in Worden, "that perhaps it would save time and
trouble to set up a photographic system rather than a human eye system? We do
have telescopic cameras aboard and by attaching them to the scope and
developing them regularly we could detect changes."
The
elder Parr shook his head. "I thought about that, but I feel that the work
we're doing should not be left to the chance eye of a camera. The human eye and
the human mind is capable of spotting those tiny
changes—which may last only a second perhaps. Don't forget that this telescope
will take our eye right down almost to the very surface of Mars. It will be
like hanging in air only about fifty feet up. We should be able to detect any
movement, man-size or greater, but the portion of the surface we can watch at
any one instant will be very, very restricted. For that reason human
selectivity will be quite important.
"And
of course we shall also sweep the wide surfaces with a lower power lens. The
job is not so easy as it seems. A needle in a haystack would
probably be easier to locate/'
The
long vigil began. Gradually the men fell into the routine of their work. As
with all things at first, nothing seemed natural, nothing seemed right. On
their little barren moon there was nothing like day or night. Only the eternal wheeling of Mars on its own orbit, and the rapid
movement of the sun through their black sky. But for them, the sky was
forever dark, the stars forever brilliant. The two men on duty would spell each
other at the scope, endlessly sweeping the face of their former home. Two
would be asleep in bunks. Two would be at work in the ship, or perhaps just
wandering the surface of the moon to catch glimpses of other astronomical
wonders from beyond.
For
besides the eternal globe of Mars, many and varied were the sights they could
see from their vantage point. Near as Mars was to the famous asteroid belt,
there was not a moment when several of these fragmentary planets were not
wheeling across their sky. Some of them came close enough to outshine briefly
even the major planets which were the foremost glories of their views.
Mighty
Jupiter, ruler of the solar system, was strongly in their view with the naked
eye, and four of its satellites, giant worlds for their type, could be seen
with ease. Ringed Saturn could be spotted occasionally, its rings detectable.
Uranus was spotted amid the cluster of stars, and Nelson Parr had talked over
the possibility of locating even distant Neptune by telescope, until Telders worked out its location and showed it to be on the other side of the sun
from them, as was Pluto.
But
the greatest glory of their sky was a brilliantly shining green crescent that
followed the sun in its turns. This world, a glowing, sometimes misty, wonder,
was forever accompanied by a tinier white echo of itself, a crescent always
similar in shape. The name of this beautiful vision was Earth and toward it
their eyes always strayed.
At
first, when they had just set up their post, Earth was a thin crescent, large
in their heavens. As time passed, as days passed, this crescent grew, became
fatter, and as it did so, it grew smaller at the same time. For Earth was
traveling away from Mars, swinging away from it and the sun was lighting more
and more from their viewpost only as it drew miles
and miles away every second.
Nelson
Parr and Jim Worden shared a watch together. They drew each other because in
the few days they had known each other they had grown to recognize a certain
kinship. Jim was older, but, like Nelse, he had been
born on Mars and had the old planet in his blood. Fired by the same inspiration
to discover the secrets of the lost civilization, Jim had had the opportunity
which Nelson had been expecting to have when he had finished his terrestrial
training.
Although
Jim did not speak of it, Nelson assumed that he had a wife and family among
those returned to the green planet. Nelson remembered vaguely seeing a little
girl among those in the dome school at Solis whose last name was Worden. But
none of the married men of the expedition ever spoke of their families—for they
faced a separation of several long and lonely years, and it was best not to
allow their thoughts to dwell on this.
There
was an odd cross between tension and rest-fulness in
their observational work. You couldn't help but feel at ease and at rest
outside under the black heavens and the eternal stars. All about, where Nelson
would be sitting when on duty, there would be no motion. A
plain of eternal silence, of the peace of a dead and sterile chunk of rock.
No bird would stir, no mouse crawl, no blade of green,
with no breeze to wave it.
Above,
only the slowly rotating world of ocher and white and green;
to the naked eye forever unchanging save for the slow and ceaseless
turning. The stars above were constantly wheeling too. Now and then a tiny
planetoid light would move visibly though slowly through the sky.
This
was peaceful, the deceptive peace of interplanetary space. Yet, even in this
peace, there was unease. Seated as Nelson would be at the scope, protected
from the cold and vacuum by a suit which was the masterwork of science, he was
subconsciously always aware of the near horizon. Mentally, his brain,
conditioned by tens of thousands of years of evolution, kept slipping in a
warning that he was dangerously perched at a cliff's edge. And though this was
false, for as the young man would walk forward, the horizon would recede and
the ground apparently rise and flatten out, still always that falling-away
point seemed but a few short strides distant.
That was one kind of tension Nelson felt. The
other was the knowledge that their search was important and hard. Upon it might
turn the whole future of any colonizing, upon it also might turn the strange
and perhaps terrible question as to whether man was alone in his system or
whether he shared it with a hidden and cunning foe.
Nelson,
his eye pressed to the telescope, his hand to its manual controls, slowly swept
the surface of the deserted cities of Mars. His eye moved like an invisible
watchman down streets, across empty roads, through untended fields, over the
doorways of empty domes. It lingered over the long stretches of viaduct and the
lines of green vegetation that revealed the presence of underground ducts and
passages right across the vast and arid plains and deserts, deserts that made
the Sahara and the Gobi seem small and almost friendly.
He
swept the streets of cities that had rarely been visited and never really
explored by the always too few colonists. There were differences in cities, for
the Martian civilization had not apparently been a static or a barren one.
Following the same general lines, forced to do so by the economics of life on
an old and drying-up world, there were strong similarities, and yet, where
possible, there were variations. Not all houses were domes, though the dome
type seemed to be ascendant at the time of the disappearance of life. A few
cities featured square or hexagonal structures, some were laid out in patterns
that suggested a greater surface life than others, once Nelson thought he even
detected traces of whafc^might have been an ancient
and abandoned track for a railway structure. He mentioned this to Jim, who
took the eyepiece and looked himself.
"Yes," said Worden thoughtfully,
"I know that spot. I was there briefly. It's probably one of the oldest
cities on Mars, might correspond to an Athens or a Jerusalem in their culture,
yet when you are there, it looks as modern as any other. What you can see by
eye from the air is often almost invisible or unrecognizable from the ground.
Still ... I always intended to go
back and spend more time there, for it might have proved profitable. The
catacomb structure there is rather more elementary than in most of the cities
and might have been the first such, built way back when the Martians first
realized their world was drying up. In fact, I remember there were a couple
sealed caverns there that our radar screens indicated clearly as museums. Ah,
well, we couldn't break in there any more than we succeeded elsewhere!"
Nelson
took back the eyepiece and stared again. "Gee, it would be something to
find out the history of that city. I wonder if the Martians wouldn't be likely
to show up there first?"
He
stared steadily at the vacant city, but no motion or change rewarded his eye.
Jim said, as he watched, "One thing I'm sure of. The Martians were
sentimental about themselves. They had museums, they protected their property
and homes, just as the ancient Egyptians did. They may have had a religion that
held they would return someday after death, but the trouble with that is that,
unlike the Egyptians, they simply wouldn't make any pictures or statues of themselves.
Not one!"
"Maybe
they had a superstitious idea that if aliens looked on their likeness it would
somehow hurt their souls," said Nelson. "Some backward savages on
Earth look on photography that way."
"Ahh," murmured Jim, "that would be all very well
if the Martians were backward—but they were not!"
Time
passed steadily. Even under the strange circumstances routine began to quiet
the tension. The Earth was moving ever farther from them, and began to diminish
as a brilliant star, to cling closer and closer to the flaming corona of the
sun. Drawing ever farther away from Mars, it would soon pass behind the sun,
and vanish from the sight of the stranded six for several long months.
As
they took their turns at the observation post, they began to expect no changes.
They watched but no longer switched back when tricks of their eyes made them
imagine a flicker of motion where there had been none. Once McQueen called an
alarm, but it turned out that he had seen a brief dust spout occasioned from
the bare sand by a rare freak of the red-desert winds.
The
seasons of Mars were changing steadily, and Nelson watched the gleaming white
polar cap dwindle and the southern polar cap build up. The Earth clung so close
to the sun that it could be glimpsed only by straining against the sun's fiery glare, and at last came the moment when the tiny
green dot vanished completely from their sky. This was a somber moment for the
expedition. For a brief spell they went around silent and thoughtful, feeling
more than ever how thoroughly they were cut off from their parent world and
all they held dear.
But
the observations never ceased. Always two men were out watching, checking,
measuring. Jim and Nelse were on duty during a period
when Mars was but a quarter crescent with night
creeping steadily across its face. On the edge of the daylight portion, the
city which Jim had called one of the oldest was in view, and Nelson
concentrated his scope upon it. Several times he had returned to this Martian
Athens, his mind speculating on the mystery of a history no man might ever
learn. His eye moved over its hexagonal buildings, as the shadows of twilight
lengthened steadily. He stared down at the circular doorways set in the homes.
He looked at the square flat plates in the ground that opened into underground
passages and chambers unseen by man. He could almost see the plants closing in
on themselves, folding their leaves into furry fists
against the oncoming cold thin-aired night.
Slowly
the vision in his eyepiece grew darker as night swept over the city. In a few
more minutes he would have to shift his view elsewhere, for the city at night
became invisible in the darker dark of the Martian night. Still buried in his
thoughts, he stared down at the city, his eyes straining to keep the details of
houses and markings as the view changed from light to dark, turned gray, became
blue-gray, then blacker and finally merged into black. At the
very instant that he stared, he saw a flicker.
A light went on in the city! A tiny circle of white light where there had been a doorway to a
building. A tiny circle that had been an open door, where no door should
have been opened!
And
even as Nelson gaped speechless with surprise, the tiny circle flickered,
blinked, and vanished as the door swung shut!
Chapter
7 Deimos
K |
elson parr caught his breath, let out a shout. "Hey!" came
Jim Worden's voice in his earphones. "You trying
to blast my ears off?" "I saw a light, Jim!" Nelse
held his voice back by sheer force of will. He felt like shouting and jumping
around. "Where?" came back Jim's voice, rising excitedly in pitch.
Worden crowded in to the eyepiece of the scope, trying to push Nelson aside so
that he could take a look.
"It's
gone now, but I saw something," was young Parr's reply, and he told Worden
what he had seen. Jim looked carefully, but the city was in darkness and they
could see nothing. Not a light broke the secrecy of the view.
"What
did it look like, son?" came the voice of the
elder Parr on their helmet phones. Though in the ship, he had been tuned in on
their suit speakers and heard their comments. Soon Nelson could hear the voices
of the other expedition members chiming in as the excitement woke them from
their sleep or task.
In very short order, all six were outside,
grouped
around the scope while Nelson was explaining again
what he had seen. There were excited comments and suggestions, then John Carson Parr called for silence.
"Now
listen, men, let's not lose our heads. We're not likely to spot any more signs
immediately and certainly not while that area is in darkness. We know where to
look and from now on, we'll keep a strict watch there every minute it's in the
sunlight. Go on back to your duties. I think we've finally found our quarry,
but this is only the beginning."
Reluctantly
the four off duty drifted back to the ship. Jim and Nelson stood out the rest
of their watch, but they saw nothing further to excite comment.
In
spite of their efforts, it was not until four watches later that something was
seen. This time, again in the same ancient Martian city, one of the men was
sure that he had seen a crushed spot in the growths around a certain structure
that looked as if some large craft had landed and departed from there. But
keeping track of one certain spot is hard to do when the surface is constantly
turning and your own observation platform, the little moon, is also moving.
Next
thing was the discovery by Gutman of a door in
another part of the city that was unquestionably half open. They could see no
sign of action near it, but there it was, not closed. By the time the next observation
of the city occurred, about twenty hours later, that door was shut again.
The
six watchers were keyed up with excitement. Among themselves they were
discussing who would be the lucky man to first spot the Martians. "It's
pretty obvious," said Gutman, expressing the
general opinion,
"that they waited until Earth was entirely out of the sky to
come out of their hiding places."
John
Parr was not certain, however, that they would ever be able to actually make
out the forms of the Martians if they did spot them. "We're still a little
far away to see any definite shapes of creatures. If you saw a man from where
we are, you would not see more than a blurry spot. We may have actually to make
a trip down to Mars and sneak up on them."
Jim
Worden laughed. "A fine chance we'd havel These
Martians are the cagiest creatures anyone ever hunted. I'll bet they've got
some sort of radar system that would tell them instantly the first time we even
hit their atmosphere. Don't forget how long they successfully hid from
us."
A
strange idea suddenly slipped into Nelson's head. He debated with himself
whether he should mention it, finally chancing it. "Do you suppose that
perhaps these are not the Martians? Maybe they're some other set of explorers
from elsewhere in space taking a look around now that we've abandoned the
place?"
Jim
Worden laughed. Bryan McQueen patted Nelse on the
back. "It could be, but it's highly unlikely. After all, how would these
other explorers know we'd left unless they'd been watching us all along? Now
the Martians might have been watching us, that I can
believe. But why look for trouble elsewhere? One set of extra-Terrestrials is
enough."
By
the next period when their Martian Athens came into sight, it was early morning
there on Mars. As the sun rose and its belt of light flooded into the streets
of the ancient town, McQueen, who was on observation, let out a shout. Piled in
plain sight in the area between two structures were several large objects
exactly like boxes or crates. They all took turns looking but there was no
doubt about it. They could see no motion around, but it was clear that now the
unknowns had decided they could dispense with a certain amount of secrecy.
"How
many more hours of observation do we have?*' asked the elder Parr anxiously.
Telders glanced up, gave a
quick calculation. "Not good. This sector isn't going to be visible from
here for more than another couple hours. Then it will be rotated away from us
and we won't see the city for— ummm—maybe thirty
hours."
John
Parr slammed one gloved hand angrily into the other. "Blast!" he
groaned. "This is just the time we have to keep that place under constant
watch. I'm sure, I'm as sure as I'm standing here, that something or someone is
going to pick up those crates and take them somewhere. If we
could only see how and who and where they take them to, we'll be well on our
way to solving this whole business."
"There's
no way we can watch that city all day," said Worden. "Not from
here."
"Then
why can't we find a better spot where we can see it?" urged Nelson.
"Could we see the city all day from Deimos?"
"Now
that's an idea!" said his father quickly. "Telders,
will you check that and see?"
Telders ran inside their cruiser and, after a few
moments' checking on their charts and calculators, called out on his helmet
phone. "Yes, if we can get an observer on Deimos
within the next two hours, we could watch that city from there during the broad
daylight for at least the next ten hours."
John
Parr called back to Telders, "Is the ship's lifeboat
in workable order?"
"Of
course," came back the instant reply. "And it can make the trip
easily."
"O.K.,"
said Parr, "we'll do it." He turned to the men. "Worden, you and
Nelse were due to take the next shift, so you'll be
in best shape for the job. Take the lifeboat, load on the other scope and
lenses, and get going. Telders will give you the
figures for the trip."
Nelson's
heart gave a bound. Then he and Jim Worden raced back to the big cruiser,
followed instructions, hastily loading the necessary equipment in the
cruiser's small lifeboat, itself a tiny spaceship capable of interplanetary
flight on its own. There was no need to load up on food or water. The little
craft always carried sufficient provisions in the event of an emergency and had
its own water flask and regeneration system. When the two had the lenses and
frame of their scope stowed safely into the tiny cramped cabin, they opened the
emergency panel in the cruiser's side and the little craft slipped out gently
and bounced onto its own runners on the rocky surface of Phobos.
Telders
rushed out of the navigational corner of the bigger ship,
handed them a sheet of paper. "Here's the data on our various satellite
speeds and positions. Mostly you can make the trip by eye, however. It's only a
short distance as they gol Take it easy when you come
into Deimos though."
Worden
and Nelson checked their own suits, hastily went over
the lifeboat's equipment as every good spaceman should and verified with their
own eyes that it was all in working order. The little ship was only about
fourteen feet long and its strong little engine and fuel space occupied fully
half of that length. The two would have to cramp themselves into the forward
seven feet along with their belongings.
"Who's
going to drive?" asked Jim. "I know how, but it's been quite a number
of years since I piloted anything in space. Zipping through the air in explorer
ramblers is about my pace today."
"I'll
take it up," said Nelson, sounding more confident than he felt. "I
handled these at the Space Academy only a few months ago and I'm fairly sure
this will be no different."
His
father nodded. "O.K., it's probably better that way. The younger you are, the better your reactions and the faster your control.
Just remember to keep your head and you'll be all right."
So
Nelson slipped into the driver's seat and Jim piled into the space next to him,
almost on his lap. They slid the transparent quarter-top closed over them, set
the molecular seals. Jim spread out Telders' notes on
his lap, where he could call them off if needed to his companion.
Nelson
opened the throttle, felt the engine hum. He kicked
the ground rockets into operation, felt the ship slide forward on its runners
over the rocky plain. Boosting it quickly, he blasted his jump-off tubes and
with a sharp jolt they were off the surface of Phobos
and into space.
"Watch that!" yelped Jim. "I
almost banged my head on the top with that jackrabbit takeoff!"
"Sorry,"
Nelse murmured, busy at his controls. "I'll get
the feel of this in a moment. I forgot that we weren't taking off against Earth's
gravity."
He
set his teeth and flexed his fingers again. This was a test he had never really
had. It was one thing to pilot this type of craft under Earth conditions in
controlled testing spheres, quite another to be entrusted with it in real
earnest under real space circumstances. He eased up his speed, took the little
craft easily around in a wide half circle and headed it outward from the
little moon.
They
could see their objective ahead of them, a tiny spot of white moving across the
endless panorama of outer space. Mars' second moon was half the size of Phobos, being only about five miles in diameter. It was
nine thousand miles farther away from the red planet than the inner moon and
took nearly three times as long to circle it once. As such it was even now
moving slowly over the daylight hemisphere, and their mystery city objective
would be in plain sight as Deimos moved through the
Martian sky.
Nelson
Parr's problem was simply to pilot the little boat outward and into the orbit
of Deimos, bringing it into the same speed and
cutting ahead of it as he did, so as to arrive at the little satellite at a
proper landing tempo. He set up the various figures on the ship's little
automatic navigator and after it had clicked and chewed this data electronically
he noted the times and alternate speeds with which he was presented. He chose
the alternate that would get him there fastest, although this was always a
riskier course.
He
stepped up his rocket blasts and the two men felt themselves being pushed back
in their seats as the little boat accelerated steadily. Nelson was determined
to make the astronomically short trip in less than two hours. He piled on speed
and boosted the craft up heavily, then let it coast for about half an hour at
over twenty thousand miles an hour top speed. While they coasted, Jim and he
speculated on the Martians.
Nelson
mentioned again the strange three-fingered handprint that he had found on the Congreve.
Worden
remarked, "I'm inclined to think now that these creatures were not the
Martians. Your suggestion before sounds a little more likely
now."
"Why
do you say that?" asked Nelson, his eyes watching the steadily growing
disk of Deimos, outlined against the star-strewn
black of space.
"Because
I've figured out that the Martians must have had much the same kind of hand we
have. I've studied their things, their machinery, their
household stuff. It has always seemed to me that their handles and controls
were designed to fit a hand like our own and not anything very different. Of
course, I could be mistaken, but in things like this, the mechanics of everyday
living can be a pretty reliable guide."
Nelson
nodded briefly, switched on the engines and began his
braking maneuvers. Again they were shoved into their seats, and conversation
died as they fought to bring the craft into landing adjustment.
Nelson was too busy at the controls to pay
much attention to outside things, but Jim Worden was watching space. He was
staring at a group of bright stars when suddenly one of them blinked out. He
stared wide-eyed, then another next to it blinked off and the first came into
sight. "Hey!" he said. Nelson looked up. "What?"
Worden
stared sharply. He could see nothing more. "Sorry, thought I saw something
just then." He explained what he'd seen. "Thought
maybe it could have been another ship between us and that sector of the
sky."
"Probably just a
meteor," said Nelson.
Now
they were rapidly approaching Deimos. The little
moon, like its sister, was quite spherical and fairly smooth-surfaced. They
winged around it a couple of times to brake their
speed exactly, and then Nelson brought the ship down and skimmed the surface.
It was apparent that Deimos also showed but one
hemisphere to Mars; a curious circumstance was Nelson s fleeting thought, as he
jockeyed to find a good spot for their observations.
Finally,
he came down for his landing on a wide flat belt, shining ruddy in the daytime
glow of Mars. They slid neatly to a perfect stop on a hard and smooth surface.
"Good
work," said Jim glancing at the control dials. "Telders
couldn't have done it better. Now let's get the junk out."
Adjusting
their suits to space, they slid open the boat's top and climbed carefully out.
Outside of the fact that the horizon was even nearer their feet than before,
this little world was not very different from the barren satellite they had
left. Above them the globe of the red planet was visibly smaller but still
quite large enough to see details with the naked eye.
Without
wasting words, they unstrapped the framework of their telescope. Then they
looked around. "This isn't as good a landing place as we thought,"
said Nelson, now that he could see his whereabouts better. "You might have
told me I was coming in on a slant."
"Didn't
want to upset you," said Jim. "Fact is I was hoping I wouldn't get
another jolt."
Mars
was not properly in the center of their sky, but down at one side. "I
think we'll just carry the frame and lens over about three miles and we'll get
a better view," said Nelson. Suiting action to words, he hefted the
framework and apparatus, and Worden loaded himself with other stuff. Then they
started off in easy long bounds.
In
only a short time they had covered the space, so easy is it to travel without
weight. The boat had fallen out of sight beneath the horizon after the first
two or three such bounds. Almost a fifth of the satellite away, on the flattish
plain, they set up their instruments.
It
was more than two hours since they had left Phobos
and they were relieved when they finally put their eyes in turn to the eyepiece
of their scope to see that the mysterious crates were still standing in plain
sight exactly as they had been. By this time their friends on Phobos had lost sight of the objective. It was a relief to
know that in the half hour that no one had been able to observe the spot,
nothing had happened.
There was one drawback though. At this
distance from Mars, the lens which had been powerful enough to carry their
vision to such a close range was weaker. Visually they seemed farther away and
streets and objects in the ancient Martian city were therefore smaller in
appearance.
"Is
this the strongest lens we have?" asked Nelson, bent over the instrument.
"No," said Jim.
"There's one stronger still."
"Got it here?" asked Nelson, still
absorbed in the view.
"No, it's back
on the ship, I'm afraid," said Jim, after looking through the stuff they
had brought.
"Maybe
one of us had better go back and get it," Nelse
suggested. "If we spot anything, we're not going to get any decent details
with this eyepiece."
"I'll
go," said Jim. "You keep the watch." He set off back to the ship
without waiting for Nelson to object. In a few moments he had disappeared below
the narrow horizon.
Nelson
Parr watched the pile of crates, but nothing happened. He casually swept the
telescope back and forth over the city, checking its open areas and connecting
viaducts. Then he drew in his breath sharply, stopped his sweep. Over a
hitherto unnoticed old road, by tie side of the green belt leading into the
city, three shapes were moving!
He
watched them and was able to make out that they were vehicles of some sort,
rather tear-shaped and moving swiftly without sign of wheels. If he had the
stronger lens he could have made out their full detail, but as it was he could
make out their dull metallic glint and nothing more.
He fidgeted, wondering when Worden was coming
back. He kept the teardrop shapes in sight, noticing that they were following a
route that would bring them up to the crates fairly soon. Undoubtedly they were
conveyances which would pick up the boxes and take them somewhere else,
probably to the main hideaway of the Martians. He dared not take his eye off
them and yet he longed to drop everything and go after Worden to hurry him up.
It
seemed to him that Jim was taking unusually long. He couldn't call him on his
helmet phone, for he knew that the limited direct beam transmission would work
only when both senders were in sight, or at least on the same plane.
Quickly
he calculated mentally the speed of the teardrops and the distance and time it
would take them to reach the crates. That should give him about twenty minutes.
He decided to take the chance. He removed his eye from the view, glanced
around. Worden was still not in sight.
He
turned back to where they had left the ship and went after it as fast as he
dared in the nearly gravity-less conditions of little Deimos.
Leaping along he kept watching to spot Jim returning to him, but strangely he
did not see him.
Before
long he spotted their spaceboat in the distance. He
made it in three more giant leaps—and found Worden. His friend and companion
was lying just outside the little rocket boat, lying flat on the ground,
motionless.
Nelson
bent over him, turned him over. Jim Worden's helmet
was shattered, his air gone. One look
at Jim's face, and Nelson knew that his
companion was dead. Nelson got to his feet, stunned. Then he looked at the
rocket ship and got his second shock.
Someone
or something had gotten into it and smashed its controls! As if a madman with
an ax had chopped away at it, the little craft had been ruined, its control
board battered to a mass of broken wires and tubes, its engines hacked and
bent.
Chapter 8
Pursuit
of Shadows
or a moment Nelson
simply stood there, too horrified to do anything, aware only of the loss of
his friend, unthinking of his own danger. Why had this happened? Surely the
Martians could not think of them as enemies? Then his horror was replaced by
cold steely anger. This act, this ugly killing, was the act of cowards, of
creatures that had not dared come face to face, had not dared show themselves.
For it was obvious that Jim Worden had been struck from behind, struck
probably while in the act of climbing into the little rocket boat to get the
telescope lens. The cowards had crept up on him, struck when his back was
turned, without a word of warning.
Then,
too, there was the deliberate destruction of the rocket. That was an act
designed to block any further aid to Jim and Nelson. It was an act designed to
leave Nelson stranded, helpless. He turned, looked into the ship, keeping a
wary eye for motion behind him. He estimated the stock of supplies, the tanks
of air.
It wasn't much. He and Jim hadn't expected to
stay on the smaller moon more than a dozen hours or so, hence very little food,
scarcely more air. It was clear that Nelson's own hours were seriously limited.
He glanced at the radio in the ship, but that too had been ripped apart. He
could not even call for help, though his chances of being heard even if it were
working would have been slight.
He
searched for a weapon, wondering whether the ship had carried any among its
regular lifeboat provisions. But there were no weapons, for what need would an
interplanetary lifeboat have for such things in the lifeless reaches of space?
So
he turned back to the ship, standing before the crumpled body, and knew he was
alone, unarmed on a moon stalked by the unknown. He realized that he himself
must be their next target, that they must have him marked for death.
Warily he glanced around. Low ridges of rocks
bordered one side, on the other the horizon cut the plain very near to him.
All a foe would have to do would be to stay just beyond the horizon, stalk, and
when his back was turned long enough, a few flying leaps would be enough for
the foe to land on his back. Who could tell who was waiting just out of sight?
Nelson
thought fast and coldly. He might die, but he would see his slayers first. He
would not be caught. He would come to grips with them and they would see, yes,
they would see.
And
then another thought struck him. He remembered Jim's remark during their trip
to Deimos about another ship, something that had
blocked the light of stars for a moment. That, he thought, must have been the
spaceship in which these unseen stalkers had arrived. That ship must still be
here, must be somewhere on DeimosI
The
thing he could do, the only apparent course that held even a glimmer of a
chance for him, was to try to find that other spacecraft, find it and somehow
capture it! Wild as that chance seemed, there was simply no other course! And
while hunting it, escape the clutches of the killers!
Nelson
looked around sharply. He saw nothing, yet instinctively felt that he was being
watched. Behind the rocks possibly. ... He turned, glanced into the spaceship,
acting as if he suspected nothing. Then slowly he walked around the ship. On
the other side, he ducked down as if to examine something, glanced carefully
around the side, hoping to detect some signs of his hunters. But they were out
of sight.
He
walked back, then started off in bounds back to where
the telescope still stood. He would act as if he did not know they were
following him, but he would keep moving fast enough to prevent their leaping
upon him unawares.
He
retraced his course to the observation post in great leaps, feeling they must
be following him. Once, glancing back at the top of a particularly high leap,
he thought he spotted a movement in the distance. But he could not be sure.
Leap, bound, leap, he went on, the great ruddy disk of Mars looming higher in
his sky, until at last he came to the spot where he had left his telescope.
It was not there! It was gone! Nothing was
present but some tracks in the dust, some blurry footprints, prints of which
all that could be told was that they were not his own.
Nelson
wasted no time searching around. It was clear to him that there must be several
in the party of unknown stalkers. While a couple were
watching the spaceship, others must have carted away his instruments, probably
taking them to their own spaceship.
Nelson
spotted another bit of motion on his horizon. Wheeling around, he felt he saw
something else move behind one of the rock ridges which seemed to be about the
only distinguishing feature of this otherwise bald-surfaced worldlet.
They were closing in on him from several sides.
He
leaped again, continuing in the direction in which he was going. Now he cast
caution to the winds, and leaped as fast and far as he could, determined to see
if he could outdistance his pursuers and thus lose them, or perhaps
accidentally arrive at the spot where their spaceship was resting before they
had time to get there and move it.
What
followed now was like a scene out of a peculiarly unpleasant nightmare. Nelson
was moving forward over the bleak red-lit landscape of Dehnos,
hurtling now upward into the black and starry sky, now plunging with eerie
slowness down toward the gray rocky landscape with its fiery overtones and
jet-black shadows. Forward and forward as if forever, and as he moved, Mars
seemed to move in the sky, for he was on his way to circling the tiny world and
nearing the hemisphere where Mars never shone, the side upon which the sun was
now shining equally strangely in the dark cold sky.
Behind
him he occasionally glimpsed movement, a tiny spot, glinting red as the Marslight hit it at the top of its own pursuing bounds. He
urged his body forward and drove on, silently, in the murderous emptiness of Deimos.
After
a while Mars vanished from view entirely, and below him the moonscape shone
cold and white where the far sun with its weirdly flickering corona dominated
the heavens. And now he came to a very rough section of the surface, where the
flat plain was for once replaced with a frothy sea of ridges and crevices.
Here there was the darkness of space on the surface,
here there were shadows and hiding places.
He
bounded into a lightless tiny canyon and here decided to end his flight. He had
seen no sign of the other spacecraft, but it occurred to him now that this very
area might be the ideal place to hide it. He slipped into a dark and shadowed
corner beneath an overhanging wall, where no light penetrated to reveal his
presence and there he waited.
At
first there was no sign of pursuit. He caught his breath again, stood there
tensely waiting. Then he saw a spot flicker past overhead, lit by the sun a moment,
a spot that could be the size of a bounding manlike being. Another followed and
then three more in rapid succession.
He
waited, planning to slip up above the ridge and spy on them, but suddenly one
of them shot back overhead. Quickly Nelson crouched down in the shadow. Had
they spotted him?
One
by one the mysterious figures shot back, and it dawned on Nelson that they too
had landed in this same nest of ridges and canyons. Then perhaps his guess
about the hiding place of their spaceship was right? Was it somewhere nearby?
He
felt a vibration in the rocky surface through the metal soles of his boots. The
pursuers were in this very canyon walking, walking toward him!
Nelson
Parr started to walk forward, keeping ahead of the unknowns. If they were
coming his way it meant one of two things. Either they had spotted him by some
means, such as radar, or else this was the canyon leading to their spaceship.
In either case, the trail was hot and Nelson might come upon the ship before
they did.
He
tried to keep his steps from vibrating. It came to him that apparently they had
not spotted him after all, had abandoned the chase, for the heaviness of their
tread indicated they were not concerned with the possibility of warning their
quarry. Therefore it must be they were heading toward their ship.
Nelson
kept in tie shadow and moved silently along, turning
a sharp corner. He stopped, baffled. For beyond the corner there was only the
sudden wall of the canyon, the end of the crevice—and no craft. Behind him the
tread could be felt, echoing through the stone with that long-carrying
intensity possible only in the cold and vacuum of a little world. Desperately
his eyes searched the canyon and now he saw that in the base of the wall was a
deeper blackness, a black spot that the reflected light did not penetrate. It
was a cave.
Quickly
he dashed across the remaining space and into the dark opening. He found the
cave to be a natural tunnel, a crack penetrating downward into the rocky
surface of Deimos. He hid in the entrance, waited.
In
a few moments, five figures rounded the corner of the deep canyon. They were
manlike, walking upright on legs, having arms like men, muffled from all
detail by curious gray rubbery garments from head to toe, with only dark slits
for eyepieces. Two of them carried the frame and equipment of his telescope,
the others carried objects that might be weapons. They walked on, directly
toward Nelson, directly to the mouth of his tunnel.
Nelson
had no choice but to push farther on into the blackness. He scrambled ahead,
hoping there were no sudden drops in the lightless dark interior. He bumped
into a wall and, with his pursuers not yet quite at the opening, dared to flick
on a light momentarily from his helmet. He saw that the tunnel turned and proceeded
in a steadily downward incline. He headed on, disappearing from view as fights
suddenly flicked on where he had been as the five unknowns walked into the
tunnel.
Casting
caution aside, Nelson ran as fast as he could down the dark tunnel, in the
uncanny blackness. As he ran he gradually became aware that there was a dim
bluish light in the depths of the tunnel, that some sort of radiation or glow
made the tunnel not as pitch-dark as it had been at first. And in this dim glow
he also became aware of something else. This tunnel was no natural feature. It
was smooth-surfaced, leveled, graded. It was artificial. And just as this
became clear to him, he burst into a crossing where the tunnel branched into
three short corridors, each of which ended at a closed metal door.
He
hesitated, not knowing which way to turn. Knowing his pursuers were close on
his heels, he went to the door directly before him. He saw no knob or obvious
means of opening it. He pushed upon it, but it remained immovable. Feeling the
vibration of footsteps, he glanced rapidly about, picked the farther corridor,
ran to it, and flattened himself against the wall, hoping to keep himself out
of sight, hoping that he had not picked the very corridor his pursuers would
take.
He
waited, breathless, and then the five came into sight and marched up to the
middle door, the one Nelson had tried. Without even glancing around, the first
man reached up and probed a hole set just to one side
of the door and shoved a finger into it. The door slid aside and the men
marched through and it closed behind them.
Nelson
waited a moment, then slipped out and went softly up
to the door himself. He glanced at it, spotted the little indentation which
evidently was the electronic control that motivated it.
For
a brief while, he hesitated. It was obvious to him that this was no hiding
place of a spaceship. That even if the five unknowns had arrived on Deimos by a ship, that this must be much more than that.
This looked like a permanent hideaway, and not the hangar of a craft. He did
not have to follow them. He could go outside now and hunt for the real
spaceship hangar. But he knew that would be possibly pointless and might simply
make him a target for some other sentinel's chase. No, the thing to do was to
get to the heart of the matter,
enter the base itself, learn at least something of
the truth.
And there was always Jim Worden. Somehow, to
flee Deimos would be to betray his comrade. Nelson
frowned, and the anger he had felt on first finding his friend's body again
flooded through him. Vigorously, boldly, he reached out a finger, punched it
into the little hole beside the door.
There
was a tingling sensation in his finger, and then the door silently slid back
into the rock. There was darkness beyond but Nelson stepped unhesitatingly
into it. The door slid tightly shut behind him.
Chapter V face to Face
n the utter blackness,
Nelson strained his senses to detect the slightest sign that would indicate
just where he was. But no ray of light, no vibration, reached him. Cautiously
he reached his hand up, flicked on the dim glow of his helmet lamp momentarily.
He
was alone in a tiny room hollowed out of the cold rock. The door through which
he had entered was sealed tightly behind him. In front of him a few feet was a
similar door. Outside of that, there was nothing else in the little chamber.
He
looked at the door, saw that it too bore the indentation
beside it which was the opener. He pushed his finger into it. Again a slight
tingling feeling and that door slid aside.
He
felt a sudden vibration around him, a slight push as something seemed to flow
over his suit and helmet. Through the open door was
again only darkness and the motion of the unseen substance.
For
a moment he was puzzled until he realized that
the entry room was an airlock, that he had entered
a place beneath the surface of the little moon where there was air under
pressure. But where—and who would be watching?
He
flicked his helmet light on again. This time he saw that he was facing a short
corridor from which branched off a number of others. He stepped through the
door, and as he did so, the door slid silently shut behind him. In the darkness
he strained his eyes, but the five strangers who had preceded him were out of
sight. He saw no sign of life.
He
dared his helmet light again and this time left it on, dimly glowing, just
enough to betray the outlines of his immediate surroundings, not enough to
attract attention.
How
was he to know where to go, which corridor to follow? He tried to recall
whether he had ever read anything of the system of the Martian underground
corridors that would help him. Explorers had worked out what they believed to
be the methods and general layout of the subsurface workings of Mars. If these
unknowns were the lost Martians, then perhaps that system would work here.
But
he could think of nothing that would help. And it also occurred to him, grimly,
that it made no difference. Anywhere he went here would be a discovery, any
path might lead to disaster or to hope, and only trial would tell. And so he
stepped out softly and made his way along the corridor directly ahead.
It
seemed to wind in a generally curving way and it seemed to descend farther and
farther beneath the surface. At last he rounded a corner and in the light of
his helmet he saw that there were several doors set into the wall along this
section. He stopped before the first, saw that the
indentation system was standard here. He reached a finger for it, hesitated. It
dawned on him that nowhere on Mars had he ever recalled hearing of or seeing
such a system. The Martian doors were always circular, opening when they did by
a touch.
Could
it be that these moon-hiding strangers were not the lost Martians? He
remembered Jim Worden's speculation on the hands of the vanished civilization's
makers and the contrast with the handprint on the Congreve. He opened the door.
There
was darkness, and his helmet light penetrated it to show that it was but a
room, moderately sized, and empty. He glanced around, but there was nothing
there and dust lay undisturbed on the floor.
He
withdrew his head, went on to the next door and tried that. Again
an empty room. One after another he tried the doors in this section and
they were all bare. Evidently this part of the hideaway had never been occupied
or else had been abandoned.
He
went on along the main corridor, around more turns, winding down again and
coming out on a new level. Here there were more rooms. He wondered if he were
right to pry into them, for he might suddenly burst into one which was
occupied. But again he realized there was little else he could do.
He
punched open the first of these new doors, and this room was not empty. No one
was there and it also was dusty, but it was obviously a storeroom of sorts.
There were strange balls there, big metallic globes as large as Nelson himself,
with curious markings, and bands of some substance to hold them together.
Possibly boxes or containers of some sort . . .
The
next room held an assortment of globes of smaller sizes, one of which was half
open. Nelson went into the room and glanced into the sphere. It was almost
empty, but there were scraps of stuff inside, the sort of material that might
be used in packing delicate apparatus.
Then
these were indeed storerooms. Nelson wondered if he would be able to find one
with weapons in it or something practical. It dawned on him that he was hungry
and thirsty. He hadn't eaten in quite a long time. Perhaps if he hunted hard
enough he might find food.
He
went into every room along the line then. Most had the globes, one was piled
high with huge rolls of some plasticlike substance, another had shelves with stocks of little objects tooled
from metal, the use of which he could not guess. And finally he came to the
chamber at the end of this particular line and found what he sought.
This
room had shelves piled high with curious cubical packages, soft to the touch,
strangely like packets of raw tea. He lifted one, then
broke it open with his hands. He saw that inside it was of a spongy grayish
consistency and looked as if it might be some sort of food. The only way to
find out would be to test it.
He
had not opened his helmet thus far and now he had to face that decision. He
couldn't eat with his helmet on; there was no device that would permit that.
And though there was air here, he had no idea as to whether it would prove
breathable to him. It might be very thin, it might be an atmosphere designed to
give comfort to beings that would die in oxygen. If, for instance, the unknowns
had originated on a planet like Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus, this air would be
high in chlorine and ammonia, and would be deadly gas to a human.
But
on the other hand, what choice did he really have? So he reached up and opened
his helmet. There was a puff as the air in his suit escaped into the quite
thinner air around. He choked for a minute trying to catch his breath, coughed
severely several times and then managed to control his lungs. The new air was
breathable. Thin, stale-tasting, oddly metallic, but
breathable.
Nelson
sat down on the floor and looked and sniffed again at the broken packet he
held. It smelled moldy, but definitely like something of an organic nature. He
tasted a bit of it experimentally. Not at all bad, he realized, for it tasted
a bit like mushroom. He crammed a chunk into his mouth and munched on it.
It
proved quite satisfying. Not quite like anything he remembered having eaten,
the nearest he could determine of its taste was as if you could imagine bread
made from mushrooms gone a little bit sour. He supposed that if he were not so hungry and the surroundings not so strange he
would refuse to eat the stuff.
He
sat there satisfying his hunger and wondering where he could find something to
drink when he felt the vibration of footsteps coming from outside. Instantly
he snapped off his helmet light and sat rigidly in the darkness, wishing he had
thought to close the room's door.
The
footsteps came closer, stopped nearby. For a few moments there was no sound, then suddenly the room was flooded with light. Nelson was
blinded as the glare hit his eyes. He leaped to his feet.
"Stop! Stand right where you are!" said a
sharp high-pitched voice. Nelson stood where he was, staring at the man
standing in the doorway, the being from the interior of Deimos.
He
was a human, or at least human enough to pass for such on first inspection. He
stood about five feet high and his odd hands were holding a curious pistollike weapon, holding it a bit tremblingly but managing
to keep it pointed at Nelson enough for the young man to know that to move
would be to invite sudden death.
The
stranger's skin was pale and white like that of a being who has spent all his
life indoors, away from the sun. There seemed to be a faint bluish tinge to his
skin. His eyes were sharp and hazel-colored, almost yellowish. His hair was
white with a glint of metallic silver, sparse on his scalp but adorning his
face in a short straggly beard. The old man, for he was visibly old, as shown
by the lines around his eyes and face, was clad in a tight-fitting one-piece
blue garment without ornament or distinction of cut.
His
hands had but three fingers, and they ended in a short splay of tiny tendrils
instead of nails. They were the hands of the unknown searcher of the Congreve.
Nelson stood, arms away from his sides,
staring at him, mentally wondering whether he could chance an attack. The old
man was scared, and a scared man with a gun can be many times more dangerous
than a calm one. Nelson decided to wait and see what the old man had to say.
"Sit
down and finish eating," said the old man in a whispering voice. "Sit
down but don't make any outcry; don't make noise if you want to keep your
life."
Nelson
was still hungry and he saw no reason for disobeying this order. Something was
wrong here, he told himself. This man did not act like an aroused conqueror or
proud captor. Casually the Earthling squatted again and finished the piece of
the synthetic bread-food he had been chewing on when discovered.
The
old man stood there waiting for him to finish. When Nelson had swallowed the
last piece and looked up at him inquiringly, he nodded to himself and said,
"I don't want to harm you, so please just listen to me. I can help you a
little, if you will do me an assistance."
"Can
you lead me to Jim Worden's killers?" Nelson said. "That's who I came
in here to find."
"Who is Jim Worden?"
the stranger asked, puzzled.
"Jim
was my friend," Nelson said slowly. "He was struck from behind, his
helmet shattered when your men wrecked our craft up on the surface."
The
old man seemed really startled at this, his hand shook visibly. "Killed?
They really killed a manl Oh .
. , this is very bad!" He repeated this to himself a few times, then
suddenly paled and said very quickly, "Oh, you must not think I did it!
Not me. Not my friends. I wouldn't do such a thing, never."
"If
you didn't do it, who did? How can I find them and how
can I get out of here afterward?" Nelson felt himself getting the
uppermost for a moment as the old man showed genuine panic at the news of the
slaying.
But
the stranger recovered suddenly and his eyes narrowed. "Oh no, you can
never get out of here. You must never leave here. Your friends on Earth must
never know."
Nelson
sat back on his heels. "Oh? Well, then what's your game?"
The
old man paused a moment. "You don't understand. But I want to make a
bargain with you. I can't let you go home, but I can lead you to the ones you
seek if you will agree to help me also."
Nelson
thought a moment. Whatever could this stranger want? He decided to pretend
agreement. After all, the more he knew, the more chance he had of escaping. He
nodded. "O.K. What's the problem?"
Now
the old man seemed, to be the uncertain one. It was as if, having gone this
far, he had exhausted his limited stock of courage and didn't know whether he
could proceed. Finally he started to explain:
"My
name is Kunosh. I am ... ah ... an official
of . . . my people here in Deimos. Sort of like a . .
. chairman or maybe a sheriff ... or
something like both, I can't quite explain here. We are a small group of people
and we live here in the interior of this little moon. I can't tell you how we
came here because I am not allowed to and we don't have time for it. You must
take my word for it. There are several thousands of us living here."
The old man stopped, groping for words. He
twisted the weapon in his hands, forgetting entirely about keeping it pointed
at Nelson. But the young man realized he had more to gain by listening now
than by attempting to wrest it from him. Kunosh went
on again:
"You
must understand, young Earthling, that we don't bear anyone any ill will. We
never harmed a soul, we never want to hurt anybody. I
must tell you so that you will know this, I must tell
you again we are opposed to the use of force. We never want to fight anyone, we never want to hurt anyone. Certainly we cannot
stand to kill anyone. None of us hurt your friend. We couldn't, we just simply couldn't, couldn't! It's what we believe,
it's what we feel!"
Nelson
looked at the weapon in Kunosh's hands. He thought to
himself that not so long ago Kunosh was apparently
willing to use it on him. The old man seemed to read his thoughts.
"My
threatening you with this . . . ers-gun . . . was the most dreadful thing I ever had to do in my life, believe
me. I think I would have died if you had made me shoot it!
"But
now that you are listening to me, you must listen more. There are a few bad men
among our people who have lost faith. They have slipped from the strict tenets
of their ancestors and they
will use force! From
what you told me, they have already done so. They have become dangerous to us, to
you. In our eyes they are turned monsters, degenerates!"
The old man stopped, overcome by the horror
of
his own thought. In a moment he continued, his
eyes gleaming with the anger of a fanatic. "These bad men have slipped in
among us and have seized control of our little moon. They have captured us all
with their violence! We are all driven frantic with the thought of the dreadful
things they are planning to do! And you are now the only one who could overcome
these dreadful men!"
Nelson
got to his feet. He wasn't afraid of the old man now. He didn't understand such
a people as these who would not even defend themselves, but he saw that he had
a chance. "Are these bad men the ones who just came down from the surface,
the ones who were tracking me?"
Kunosh nodded. "They must be. I am sure they
are the ones you are hunting. Here," he said suddenly, thrusting the strange
ers-gun into Nelson's hand, "you take this. I
don't like even to hold it. My people have not touched such a thing as this
since my ancestors put it into the museum of barbarian horrors—oh, it must be
many thousands and thousands of your years ago.
"I
know you will help us. Come with me, I will lead you to the bad men and you
will get rid of them for us. Then you will have brought your friend justice and
we will be freed of these dreadful throwbacks."
The
young man hefted the strange gun. It looked odd but it did look deadly. If it
was indeed as old as Kunosh had said, what an amazing
vista that opened for speculation! Then it must be that these moon-dwellers
were the ancient Martians! Who else could
have had a heritage from so far back that was
obviously mechanically in advance of Earth?
In
his eagerness Kunosh had not waited to hear whether
Nelson agreed to his terms. The young man made no effort to remind him. Now
that he had the weapon and a guide, he would follow through and see what could
be seen. After that—well, he'd see about his get-away!
Chapter 10
The Fiends Wear Stripes I"
(Ita signal from
Kunosh, Nelson nicked on his hel-.
met light and the old man, with a wave of his hand over a spot near the
entranceway, turned off the glow in the room. Then, in the restricted rays of
the helmet, the two left and started off down
the
corridor.
Nelson's
heart beat faster as they went on down through the deserted corridors near the
surface of the little moon. At long last it seemed to him that he was going to
see the ancient Martians at their occupations, to learn the mysteries of their
civilization, to know what sort of secrets were tucked away in their vaults
beneath the red world's surface.
It
was apparent to the young man that the entire moon of Deimos
was honeycombed with rooms and tunnels. It must, he realized, be almost hollow.
He turned and asked Kunosh, who was moving silently
before him through the gloom of the corridors.
The
old man quickly shook his head. "Not now. I
haven't time to answer
questions. Wait, we are coming to places where there will be people."
Now the lighting in the corridors was
becoming brighter and the air seemed fresher. Nelson felt a breeze against his
face, a breeze that came and went and he realized that an artificial
air-circulation system . was
in operation near the central depths of Deimos. The
floors were no longer dusty and began to show the marks of feet and usage. Then
at last they rounded a turn and came face to face with a group of people
walking.
The
strangers' faces showed recognition and unconcern when they saw Kunosh, who was ahead, but as soon as they set eyes on
Nelson Parr there was visible consternation. They shrank against the walls to
let him pass with the widest of margins, their faces went pale, and they showed
every sign of outright terror.
The
people were of the same race as Kunosh and all were
clad in very much the same sort of undistinc-tive
garments. The women among them were distinguished only by a slightly smaller
size, a delicate cast of features and somewhat more ornate clothing, generally
of a lighter shade of blue, or in several cases even green. Nelson supposed
that perhaps these differences indicated marital status or perhaps work
relationships.
Now
there were doors that were open and sometimes even open underground plazas.
Nelson could see that they were passing through a busy community. He saw
workshops where oddly shaped machinery worked unattended at unguessable
tasks. He looked into doorways that led into homes, where two or three
pale-faced and fragile children would look soberly at him and shrink back out
of sight. He passed people carrying packages, women carrying babies. He saw
open chambers at junctions in the network of tunneling where markets seemed to
be in progress, and once they walked through a series of rooms wherein strange
green-gray plants were growing under the glare of sun-type lamps. This was
obviously one of their chemically operated farms, such as would have been
necessary to sustain life in such a sunless world.
But
wherever Kunosh and Nelson put in their appearance,
there were fright and terror. On Earth, Nelson thought, if strangers appeared
in some remote region of the world, they would be surrounded by inquiring, curious
grownups and screaming, excited children. But these people were lacking in all
that. They seemed terrified of anything strange, they seemed —he groped in his
mind for the picture he sought— they seemed like rabbits or even pale
frightened white mice.
None
of the men questioned Kunosh, though plainly he was
recognized by all. Whenever he and Nelson put in an appearance, there was
silence and a scurrying away of all who dared flee.
Nelson
was aware that they were nearing the heart of the little world. At last Kunosh stopped before a door, opened it, and they slipped
into a narrow dark hall. Kunosh closed the door and
they stood again in darkness.
"Be
careful now," the old man whispered. "We are right next door to the
Central Control Hall, where . . . the monsters . . . are holding our leaders
prisoners. This is the heart and brain of our world. This little hallway runs
right next to it and I can lead you to an entrance that will take you right
near these . . . usurpers. Follow me quietly."
He
started off in the narrow darkness and Nelson followed at his heels, holding
the ers-gun and wondering desperately just what
course he would follow. Now that he was close to the end of his mission, he
became sharply aware of how little he knew, how little Kunosh
had actually told him.
For
instance, how many of the enemy were there? Were they
armed? How would he know them when he saw them? And a last thought suddenly
popped into his head—exactly what would the ers-gun
do? Did it shoot a pellet as a pistol would? Was it a ray projector of some
sort and if so, what sort of ray? Would things explode? If it was atomic in
nature, it would be extremely dangerous to fire it in a closed room . . .
deadly as well to the one who fired as to the one who got shot.
It
occurred to him then that perhaps Kunosh knew that,
knew the shooter would die also, and that accounted for his own reluctance to
handle the gun. Nelson might thus be a convenient guinea pig. On the other
hand, the obvious rabbit-nature of the people and Kunosh's
fanaticism argued against that theory.
Nelson's
gloved hand felt sweaty as he held the strange weapon. He knew he would have to
make up his mind in a matter of split seconds if he had to fire it. He didn't
know what he would do.
Kunosh
came to a stop, and Nelson crowded up close to him.
The Deimosian whispered, "I'm going to open the
door now. You rush in. The fiends—the fiends wear stripes!"
Suddenly
there was a crack of dull light which widened as a door silently rolled back
into the wall. The room into which Nelson looked was dimly lit, long but
narrow. There were various desks and platforms up and down its length. It
looked like a combination business office, spaceship control room, and
electronic communications relay station. There was a small group of men,
perhaps a dozen in all, standing around a lighted panel in the wall opposite
Nelson, apparently discussing the glowing sets of hieroglyphics and Deimos language notations showing there.
It
was a marvelous stroke of luck that none of the men were looking their way.
Nelson stepped softly inside the chamber. Now he saw that among the dozen
figures were five wearing garments which were striped red and black up and down
from neck to ankle. These, then, were enemy.
Nelson
looked down at the weapon in his hand, estimating whether he should chance
using it. He raised it but then was startled to realize that it had no
indication of any directional finder. Its operating end seemed glassy and wide
and there was no way of telling whether it would spray all in sight or only
one small spot.
He
could not aim it at any individual without taking the chance of hitting all.
But the weapon seemed heavy and strong. He reversed it and, walking softly and
swiftly up to the group, swung it back over his head and brought the heavy butt
end down on the skull of the nearest striped man.
The
man fell as if struck by lightning. The others turned with cries of
consternation and fright.
Now suddenly feeling the flush of anger and
remembering the vicious way Jim Worden had been killed, Nelson whirled upon
the other four foemen.
There
were screams of terror from everyone in the room. The blue-clad Deimosians dashed around in sheer panic. The red-and-black
characters seemed equally alarmed, and in their confusion Nelson was able to
knock down a second with a swing of his gun.
Then
the other three launched themselves at him. He felt a fist crash against his
face and was surprised to find it so light. Nelson waded into the three, realizing
how big and strong he was in comparison. He grabbed two, disregarding their
blows and banged their heads together. The third broke and tried to run.
"Stop
him!" called Nelson, but not one of the blue-clad men moved. They were
simply standing away from him, shaking, and white with terror. The man in the
striped suit was nearing the farther door, clearly going to make a get-away,
when the Earthling swung the ers-gun and threw it with all his might, just as he had learned to do when
playing football at the Institute back on Earth.
His
practice stood him well. The bulky weapon shot through the air and crashed
against the running man. The enemy fell to the floor and lay there stunned.
Now
Kunosh took charge. He called out orders to the Deimosians in the room, and they threw off some of their
fright and hastily tied their recent conquerors hand and foot.
Nelson
looked around. That was fast, he told himself. "Are there any more of
them around?" he asked Kunosh. The old man
nodded.
"There are several more, but when they
hear about this, they will leave and go back where they came from."
Nelson walked over and picked up the ers-gan again. He wasn't going to let it out of his hands now until he was sure
he was safe. Then the significance of what Kunosh had
said penetrated. "What was that? Did you say 'go back where they came
from'?"
When
Kunosh repeated, Nelson quickly asked, "Where
did they come from? They're not part of your own people?"
Kunosh was silent and a little frightened for a moment.
"Well," he said slowly, "they are from our own people, really. I
was just—just—just using a figure of speech."
Nelson
began to feel himself getting angry again. "Oh no you
weren't!" he said slowly. "You have to stop and think to
translate everything you want to say to me into English and you must mean
exactly what you said. These people didn't come from Deimos,
though they may look like your kind. Where did they come from?"
He
hefted the weapon angrily. He had no love for these cowardly people. He
realized that now that he had rid them of their old enemy, he himself represented
a new menace—and possibly a greater one in their rabbity
eyes.
Kunosh didn't answer for a while, but stood there,
looking very upset and starting to wring his hands. Nelson noticed several of
the blue-clad men beginning to edge toward the exits. He raised his weapon.
"Stop, all of you!" he called. "Just sit down where you are.
Now
that I've got all you Deimos leaders here, you re not going to get away until you tell me everything I
want to know!"
The
others hesitated, not understanding his words, but fearing his tones. Kunosh translated the command in a soft sibilant tongue.
Shaking, the seven sat down where they were. Kunosh
backed against a wall, pale and troubled.
Nelson
turned to him. "Now, old man, I want to know just where these monsters' of
yours came from!" But Kunosh merely stood, mute
and shaking.
"Go
ahead, tell him, you old fool," said another voice. Nelson glanced down.
The speaker was one of the men in the red-and-black coveralls. He was sitting
on the floor, his hands and feet tied, but he had recovered consciousness from
the scuffle. He stared at Nelson coldly, without fear.
When
Kunosh remained silent, the foeman spit. "Well,
I'll tell you," he said. Kunosh gave an order
and three of his compatriots suddenly lunged for the speaker. But before they
could clamp their hands over his mouth, he triumphantly snapped out,
"We're from the other moon!" A hand smothered his mouth, but the
bound man bit down and the owner of the hand yelped and pulled it away just
long enough for the word "Phobos!" to pop
before he was quieted again.
Nelson
felt himself going pale. His father and his friends were on Phobos—and
if that satellite was also a honeycomb world, then by this time they might all
be prisoners—or slain!
Chapter 11 The Secret of the Moons
think you'd better
tell me everything about you and Mars and the rest," said Nelson slowly
and sofdy, keeping his temper just barely under
control, "I think you've been playing me for a fool here, that you're no
more my friend than this monster' of yours." Nelson's anger showed in the
set of his brow and he waved the m-gun menacingly.
Kunosh
bit his lip, glanced around at his compatriots and muttered something,
apparently a translation. There was a bit of whispering back and forth, and
finally Kunosh shrugged.
"We
don't want you to feel that way," he said, turning to Nelson.
"Honestly, we're very grateful to you and we've agreed to let you hear
what you want to know. You'll be the very first outsider to know it—but—we'll
tell you." He nodded to his fellows, and one of them went over to a wall
and turned some dials on one of the inset panels.
"While
he's setting up the past-record viewers, I think it would be good to get these .. . Phobosians . . . out of here," said Kunosh, and without waiting to see
what Nelson would do, his men started to carry
out the bound enemies. For a moment Nelson was uncertain. He realized that he
couldn't entirely trust anything that these cowardly creatures might do. Then,
as they started to carry out the man who had interrupted them, Nelson called,
"Stop! Leave that one here. I may want to ask him some questions myself. He seems to speak and understand English."
Kunosh frowned, started to object, but seeing that
Nelson was still by no means calmed down, waved his friends back. They propped
up the red-and-black stripe-suited stranger on one of the low seats against the
wall, though they still kept a grip on his mouth to prevent him from talking.
The rest of the foemen had already been removed from the room.
Nelson
nodded to Kunosh. "All right, you can start. Are
you the lost Martians?"
The
old man shook his head, went over to the now glowing wall panel.
"No," he answered. "We did not come from Mars. We come from a
world in the system of this star," and his hand caused a picture to flash
on the wall screen.
A
brilliant blue-white star shone against the blackness of space. Around it
could be seen the disks of several planets, moving slowly around it. Kunosh pointed as he spoke:
"This
is the star you people call Vega. Around it are seven
planets, and on one of these planets our people originated."
On
the screen, one of the disks came closer, enlarged until it filled the screen
to show a small world, rocky in nature, crisscrossed with ridges of low
mountains, many lakes of various sizes, two or three deep but narrow seas. A
world by no means as beautiful or apparently as large as Earth, one without
many plains, where green vegetation grew only on mountainsides, or in the
innumerable twisting valleys between the gray crags of rock and cliff.
"This
was our home world," Kunosh said. "On it we
evolved from savages and we found our way to civilization and the culture that
is the only true culture."
The
scene swooped down to the surface of this world and Nelson could see villages
nestling against the rocks, roads that climbed the mountains and tunnels that
cut through to neighboring valleys. An industrious world,
but still essentially one that seemed restricted to small communities.
There was never a sign of anything like a large city.
"We
took pleasure in boring into the mountains, putting our factories beneath the
rock where they would not interfere with our small farming areas."
The
scene dipped suddenly underground and before Nelson s eyes flashed a network of
caverns and tunnels and rocky workshops where the little people of the Vegan
race hammered and cast and drilled and made things. The scene changed, and
Nelson recognized that it was an educational device designed to show progression,
for the caves enlarged, the corridors from being crude, became wide and
smoothed, the caves where men worked by hand now showed machinery of increasing
complexity, puffs of smoke indicating the passage of steam power, then the
yellowish glow of electricity and finally the white softness of atomic lighting.
More and more it was clear, as the disk would rise in its view above the
surface to show that the villages had not perceptibly changed, that the bulk of
the life on this world was being carried on underground. It occurred to Nelson
now that these people were more like gophers in their ways than rabbits.
"We
spread our civilization over our entire world and we had a very happy world. We
invented all that we needed and we did not need any contact with other
worlds."
There
was a curious scene shown. A strange squarish craft
bouncing down from the sky on flaring rockets into a valley. Fliers of some
sort emerging from it, their shapes concealed by bulky spacesuits. A delegation of the small pale Vegans meeting them, apparently
denying them entry to the world, showing no hospitality, and the strangers
leaving again in their ship, never to return.
"We
were sufficient to ourselves. We did not welcome intruders with their crude
ways and ugly thinking and horrible arts. Our own art and science were
perfection, why should we mix it up with lower types?" Kunosh's
voice began to reflect some of his fanaticism and pride, Nelson noted.
"But
surely your people must have realized they could learn a lot of new things from
other planets? Didn't you want to have spaceships too?" Nelson asked.
Kunosh turned toward him a moment, his eyes flickering
in the glow of the wall panel. "Their new things stank of killing and
violence. Their art was horrible and unsuited to our world. What we had invented
was our own work and our own secret. Why should we give it to them in exchange
for such trash?"
Nelson
realized he was dealing with a type of small-mindedness that had never been
seen on Earth. For a moment the thought of a world of such people gave him a
chill. He shifted the ers-gun in his hand uneasily.
"Was
there no war on your world? I should think that a world of small valleys would
have many languages and cultures?" he asked.
Kunosh shook his head. "No. We never fought
with each other, why should we? As for language, we have no record of more than
one. Possibly all our people originated in one spot and moved out."
Nelson
thought there was something slightly wrong about this, from what he could
remember of language studies. "And possibly there was some dirty work done
you'd rather not remember!" snapped another voice, and Nelson saw that it
was the prisoner taking advantage of his captors' inattention. Again they
silenced him.
The
Earthling stared at the cold eyes of the captive, turned again to Kunosh, who was likewise glaring at the prisoner.
"Suppose you let him talk. I've an idea he might help you get at the full
story."
The
old man seemed to be trying to keep his temper under control. Finally he
barked a word and turned back to his panel.
"As
I said, we never had any wars in our recorded history and we didn't want any.
Our philosophers developed our culture along the lines of harmony. We looked
on all forms of violence and compulsion as evil, as returns to the animal, and
we carefully weeded out all such throwbacks." Kunosh
could not resist throwing a nasty look at the prisoner, who glared back at him.
The screen flashed again over homes and
scenes. It was evident that here was a world where nothing visible indicated
weapons or warfare. Yet, somehow, Nelson did not feel that these were people
with peace in their souls. There was something basically sneaky in their
approach. They liked too well to hide their doings from the light, to travel in
secret in tunnels, to conceal probably from their own minds the roots of their
nature. Curiosity, the young man remembered from one of his instructors'
lectures, was the root of man's development from the beast. These people must
have had curiosity to have advanced as they did. If so, this curiosity would
have forced them to space flight and to interest in their neighboring worlds.
Instead they had rebufEed these visits. Why? Only one
emotion suggested itself as powerful enough to overrule intelligent curiosity.
Fear. Overpowering cowardice.
Somehow, in their development, this trait had persisted, manifesting itself in
their opposition to suggestions of combat, in probably erasing from their memory
the many combats and struggles they must surely have won to have built their
world culture.
Kunosh was talking. "We lived happily in our
rocky world on Vega. We could listen to our neighboring worlds on our radios
and receivers, but we had no desire to speak to them. We knew they had made contacts
among each other—and that they had conflicts with each other. We saw some of
them and were glad we had nothing to do with such monsters."
On
the panel were scenes of space. There were fleets of little rockets darting
against the blackness. There was a shot of two such exploding suddenly against
the stars. There was a shot of several of the Vegan people staring in horror at
a similar scene on what was probably a telescopic projector.
"The
fact is that they had trade and friendship most of the time, and we were left
out!" said the Phobosian suddenly. Kunosh whirled at him.
"That's
a throwback viewl You're a
filthy degenerate to think good of such a thing!" The Phobosian
merely stuck out his tongue while Kunosh waved a
fist.
The
old man recovered his temper. "Anyway, we were happy and getting along,
our noisy neighbors leaving us stricdy alone, and
then the Marauders arrived!"
There
was silence. On the panel, interstellar space showed. Then there came a moving
glimmer of tiny fights. The scene sharpened and Nelson could make out black
shapes, the dark forms of long spaceships moving in. And he suddenly realized
that there were not just a few, but hundreds, even thousands of giant
spaceships in that fleet!
"Our
first indication of the cosmic plague was when some refugee spaceships arrived
at our neighbor worlds. We saw them through our observatories."
The
panel showed two or three odd craft circling into a Vegan world, accompanied by
the squarish craft native to that planet. "These
refugees came from stars beyond our own. None of our neighbors had ever developed
star flight, but these strangers came among them with their terrible story.
They had been war-craft of some far-off system, and one day there had come into
their system this tremendous fleet of terrible black ships. These ships had
destroyed all that came before them. They had landed on their worlds and out of
them came huge armies of terrible creatures who robbed and burned, and killed
everything in their way."
Kunosh stopped, his voice
emotionally out of control. Nelson could feel the silence in the room, the
horror at the scenes which were being shown on the panel. There, before his
eyes, he could see cities burning and falling, huge masses of shapeless terror
swamping the fields and houses, crowds of terrified people fleeing vainly only
to be burned down!
He
caught his breath. "Are these actual scenes?" he asked.
"No,"
Kunosh replied. "How could they be? They are
artists' reproductions of the accounts given by the few who escaped. But they
are faithfully made.
"Our
ancestors were disturbed at this, very disturbed. Our neighbor worlds began to
arm against them. They were devoting all their efforts to building war fleets
and defenses. But we were not going to do that. To do such terrible things
would be to sink to the level of animals. It would destroy our civilization. And besides it was obviously futile. These Marauders, as we
called them, apparently were traveling the universe to ruin and pillage and
rob. There were thousands of their big ships and they must have been armed
beyond all our conceptions!
"We
didn't know how long it would be before they arrived at Vega and killed us all!
We thought we had a few years, and we finally decided that the only smart thing
to do would be to flee. We didn't have spaceships but we knew all about them.
We knew we could make them. Our science was advanced enough.
"We
held a great conference in our world and we talked it over until we decided
what to do/'
The
scene showed a large underground cavern with hundreds of the rabbity men in heated debate.
"We
built two giant spaceships in the form of two great big spheres. These ships
were large enough to carry many thousands of people. Inside them they had room
for factories and storehouses, synthetic farms, and all the things needed to
carry on life entirely within them without need of sun or surface."
The
screen showed two tremendous frameworks going up, being filled in, being
surfaced. Nelson gasped as he realized that he was looking at ships larger than
any about which he had ever dreamed. By comparing them
with the mountains nearby, he saw that the two ships towered above them, that
the men who were building them seemed smaller than ants. Why—he gasped—they
were the sizes of the two moons of Mars I
His
suspicion was confirmed as the artificial globes were surfaced. The outside of
the two vessels was made to look like barren rocks and cold stony plain. Before
his eyes the contours of Deimos and Phobos took shape!
Kunosh
went on: "We were just in time. As we were finishing our escape craft, the
first of the Marauder ships was sighted."
The
screen showed a single advance scout, long and black and deadly-looking,
flashing into the blue rays of the Vega system. A cloud of squarish
battlecraft from the other worlds rose to meet it,
but the black ship easily evaded them and disappeared in the direction from
which it had come.
"Plainly our system was to be the next
victim. We had no more time to lose. So we manned our two ships and took
off."
Nelson
watched columns of men and women and children disappear into the interiors of
the two great ships, while loads and loads of stores and things were crated in. Then, from their rocky valleys, the two towering
spheres lifted slowly without sign of rocket or jet. They moved up in the sky
and vanished.
Kunosh continued. "To travel between the stars
takes more than the lifetime of any man. We could not build small ships and go.
So what we did was to build two tiny worlds in which we could continue to live
and work and have children while they traveled the long distances to safer
regions of the heavens. Our trip across space took ..." he paused to mentally calculate his figures into terms
Nelson could understand ". . . about three thousand of your terrestrial
years."
There
were glimpses of life inside Deimos and Phobos as they moved together across the empty stretches of
interstellar space. Nelson could catch views of the two worldlets,
honeycombed with life, with anxious leaders viewing the stars toward which they
drove, with several glimpses of huge machinery in the core of the spheres,
driving the two vast craft by some means not yet discovered by humanity on
Earth.
Then
finally the screen showed a yellow star approaching and growing. Several
planets were picked out circling it, and Nelson recognized the ringed vision of
Saturn. The two huge craft entered the solar system, picked their way around
it and came close to Mars.
"Of all worlds, this one seemed the best
for us," said Kunosh. "We looked at Earth,
which was more like our home world, but we found it already filled with people
and animal life of all kinds."
Nelson
was suddenly startled as the panel swooped down on Earth, and before his eyes
plunged through cloud and rain to pick out the jungles of Africa, to spot a
tiger leaping upon its prey in India, to flash briefly into a nest of snakes in
some South American tree-top, and then, to his wide-eyed amazement, to swoop
along an open field of green, to hover for a few incredible minutes over a
battlefield on which men in plumed hats and curving metal helmets fought. Men
dressed in gleaming breastplates, lugging cumbersome blunderbusses which they
set up on tripods and fired at each other amid clouds of black smoke. He saw
snorting cavalry go thundering across the field, while Cromwell's Roundheads
and the Cavaliers battled furiously with swords.
"That
must have been about the seventeenth century," remarked Nelson, realizing
that he was seeing an actual visual record of some historical battle.
"About
four hundred of your years ago, anyway," said Kunosh.
The
panel shifted to Mars, swooped low over its surface, over its deserts and green
continents and cities. It was as quiet and deserted as ever. "We found
this world, without violent weather, without inhabitants. We found the cities
waiting to be taken and lived in and ready. We decided to stop, to put our two
ships into orbits around it and watch to see if this was no deception."
Now the vision of Mars steadied to that as
seen from the surface of Deimos. Nelson said then,
"Then your two ships have been moons of Mars for four hundred years and
still you never colonized it!"
Kunosh looked at him gravely. "We are a very
cautious people," he began, only to be interrupted by the Phobos captive who had been quiet up to this point.
"You mean foolish and
cowardly!"
Kunosh angrily shook his head. "Cautious. We
didn't know whether the Marauders were going to visit this system someday and
we didn't know whether they had followed us. If they had we wanted to be ready
to make our get-away without delay. Again, we were suspicious about this empty
world. What had happened to its inhabitants? Were they wiped out by some
dreadful plague that would do the same to us? Were they hiding, waiting to leap
out and kill us all once we settled down? Anyway, until we found out, we were
determined to take no chances."
Kunosh paused awhile, picking his words.
"There was another factor as well. Our study of historical development,
of our cruder neighbors in the Vega system, showed us that you Earthmen were on
your way to discovering the secrets of nature. We knew it would be but a matter
of a few more generations before you would begin to hit on the rocket method of
space flight. We knew that it would not be long, in an astronomical sense,
before you too came to Mars to explore. We had no desire to mix with you or to
engage in trade or perhaps get involved in arguments or warfare. If we did any
of these things, it would change our ancient way of life; it would destroy our
own civilization!"
The captive Phobosian
burst out, "Aw—nonsense! All that thinking is wrong! People with courage
and honor can obtain the respect of others with honor and can benefit by such
contact. This idea of always being in hiding and avoiding other civilizations
will be the death of all our people!"
Kunosh looked at the captive thoughtfully.
"Yes," he began, then turned back to Nelson.
"What this enemy has said has become much the prevailing way of thought on
our other spaceship, the moon you call Phobos. There,
for some reason we can't understand, the ancient tried and honorable ways of
our ancestors have been corrupted and perverted by such thoughts as these. The people there, though once our brothers, have split from us in
views. From the first, they were the advocates of landing on Mars and
taking a do-or-die stand. Their weaklings got the best of their true thinkers
and advocated an end to running. They have even dared to send spies to Earth,
disguised as Earthlings, with false faces and false hands, to keep an eye on
the intentions of its inhabitants. They have been on Mars itself, prying into
the works there, watching you colonists. In fact, I even think they started the
business on Earth of suggesting your colony's abandonment."
The
Phobos man laughed. "We didn't. We didn't have
to, and in spite of your fears, we've never interfered with Earth's politics.
Oh, maybe we made a few mistakes by being spotted, but nothing much came of it.
One of our best agents got into this young man's room when he was coming back
to Mars. If he had found what he was looking for, we'd have known about
this spying expedition they left behind and
they'd never have spotted us when we took over Mars."
"And
now look at the situation!" Kunosh snapped.
"You tried to seize control of our smaller moon too, and drag our people
down in your wild plan to land on Mars and take it over before the Earthmen
decide to come back again. But thanks to your own bungling, this young savage
was able to knock you all down. This should show you that when it comes to
cleverness, as you are determined to try, you cannot stand up to these Earth
people."
Kunosh snapped orders in his own language. "I
can't stand the sight of this traitor," he then said to Nelson. Before
Nelson could reply, the Phobosian had been hustled
out of the room and out of sight.
"What
do you plan to do now?" Nelson asked the old man.
It
was plain that as even rabbits will turn when cornered so would these Vegans,
who had modeled their thinking on rabbit lines. Evidently the Vegans on Phobos had tired of running, and were now like dangerous
animals, ready to seize the home planet that had been hanging before their
overcautious eyes the moment the last Earthlings left it. Like frenzied rabbits,
they would bite . . . and had already done so where Jim Worden was concerned.
Chapter 72 ^ vega
I/unosh switched off the wall panel, turned up the u hghting in
the room. There were now only three |\
other Vegans present, sitting at panels or machines that probably dealt with
governmental problems. The old man did not answer the young man for a while.
Finally he shrugged.
"We
haven't made up our minds. Our general feeling is that we will stay here in
our moon home in hiding until we see what happens. If the Phobos
backsliders do attempt to settle Mars, we will watch them at their folly. If
they die there, we shall still be here and shall continue our vigil. We will
not come out until we are certain that never again will we have to encounter
the strange ways of other-world people! Perhaps we may even decide to move our
moon to some other star again and leave the vile throwbacks to their certain
sad fate!"
Nelson
looked at him. What a strange race, he thought. Capable of
lies, capable of deception, endlessly cowardly, and yet thinking itself so
superior!
The
whole mentality was unhealthy, he reflected. A thought occurred to him:
"Sometime
in your past, before you were civilized, you must have fought. You couldn't
have conquered even the wild animals of your native world without some spark of
violent courage. And besides, where did this ers-gun
come from? It's a weapon ..."
Kunosh shook his head. "If there were such
traits amongst our primitive ancestors, they were animal characteristics which
we have carefully weeded out and overcome. As for the weapon you have in your
hands—it is something one of the first space visitors from our neighboring
worlds around Vega left behind. We put it in our museum of horrors and that's
where I took it from."
Young
Parr hefted the odd gun and looked at it. "What does it do?" he
asked. "You never told me."
The
Vegan answered, "I don't quite know myself. I prefer not to think about
such awful matters. We ourselves have no weapons of our own, unless the degenerates
of Phobos have made some since. There might be such
on their ship."
Nelson's
eyes popped. "On what? On their ship! But, of
course, they must have a ship here on your moon! Where is it? If I can get to
it, I can use it to go back and warn my friends."
Kunosh looked horrified. "Didn't I tell you
that you must never leave here? We can't let you go!"
"And
you can't stop me either!" yelled Nelson angrily. "You won't use
force, and I've got your only gun." He pointed it at Kunosh.
"Now take me to the Phobo-sians' ship. The one
they used to come here."
For
a moment it seemed as if the old man was going to refuse. He had no reply to
Nelson's challenge, for it was true, the old Vegan would never stoop to using
force. But then he glanced a moment at a dial on the wall, which looked as if
it were a register of time, bit his Hp, and turned.
He
left the room with Nelson at his heels holding the m-gun firmly. They walked
through several halls with the natives again shrinking away from them as Kunosh warned them of the situation. They walked until they
came to a shaft leading vertically upward. There was a moving chain of
platforms, like the scoops of a dump truck, going up the shaft. Kunosh stepped on one and Nelson quickly joined him. They
rose slowly in the enclosed space of the shaft.
"Where does this
go?" asked Nelson.
"This
goes up to our own spaceship port, which is in a cavern just underneath the
surface. We have several craft there which we use between the two moons when we
need them. The Phobosian ship must be there."
The
shaft continued its rise until it came to a stop at a small room cut in the
rock. They stepped out of the scoop belt and Kunosh
opened one of their sliding doors. They came through a second small chamber,
which Nelson recognized as another airlock. They stepped out into a huge hangarlike hall where a number of curiously designed craft
rested. They were somewhat wider and squatter than terrestrial designs, and in
one corner was one that was very nearly cubical.
At
a ship near the far wall, Nelson caught sight of several men in red-and-black
striped suits clustering about the open door. "Hey!" he grabbed Kunosh by the arm.
"Those are our prisoners! They're getting away!"
The old man stopped him. "Of course.
We're sending them home. What
did you
expect us to do? We're
not going to do
anything as bestial as locking
them up or even killing them."
"Blast it!" shouted Nelson
in fury.
"You cowards!" He dashed
for the
Phobos craft, shouting
to the
men to stop or he'd shoot.
The men in red-and-black stripes glanced
back at him and, instead of
stopping, rushed to get into
their ship. As the last one
piled into the open door
and started to slam it shut,
Nelson stopped, grabbed up his ers-gwi and aimed it.
Behind him he heard Kunosh give a
gasp and turn to run back
to shelter
in the
shaft's airlock room. For a
split second it occurred
to Nelson
that if this unknown device fired an atomic or
an explosive
charge, it might mean his own
death also in that enclosed
space, but he was past worrying.
These men had killed Jim
Wor-den and
were a menace to his
father's expedition. He touched off the
trigger button of the gun.
Nothing happened.
The door of the small spaceship
slammed shut. There was a whirring
sound and a cleft appeared
in the
stony ceiling of the chamber. With
a whoosh
the air
in the
place started roaring out
into the near vacuum of
the outer surface of Deimos. Nelson
stood staring down at the weapon
in confusion.
Desperately he began punching parts
of it,
in hopes
that somehow he would hit
on the means of making it
work. But nothing happened.
The Fhobos ship
gave a vibration, lifted gently and hurled itself upward through the wide roof
opening and into space, en route to its Phobos base.
Nelson
felt his breath being sucked away, and he hastily closed his helmet and
activated his spacesuit air system. The spaceship was gone and Kunosh was safely out of sight, protected by the airlock.
For
a while Nelson debated what to do. He could leap out of the cavern through the
roof hole, which was now beginning to close. Once on the surface, maybe he
could signal his friends on Phobos. On the other
hand, it might be too late. Once the escaped men reached their home, they would
waste no time seizing the Earth expedition they had so carefully avoided during
the months of its stay on their surface.
On
the other hand, if he went back to Kunosh, he might
manage to learn how to run one of their other spaceships and thus make his own
get-away. Then it struck him that surely the Vegan colony on Deimos had some means of communicating directly with
then-sister starship of Phobos. Why, there must be a
radio link or something even more advanced!
He
started toward the airlock doorway as the cavern roof sealed shut again and he
heard the whispering sigh of air being pumped back in the hangar. He studied
the ers-gun carefully as he did so, and regretted
that he had not taken the time to do so while Kunosh
was telling the history of his people.
It
looked like a dangerous weapon, but try as he would, no knob would turn,
nothing would move on the thing. Now he poked his finger into the depression
that opened the airlock chamber. Kunosh stood there
in an attitude of listening. He seemed surprised to see Nelson.
The
young man grabbed his arm. "How does this thing work?" he snapped.
"It didn't go off! Suppose your enemies had guns and I had needed it to
save your people?"
Kunosh shrugged. "That was the chance you
took. After all—you are really nothing to ones as advanced as we. As for this ers-gun ... well,
you don t think our ancestors would be so foolish as to keep such a thing in
existence. This is a museum model, a dummy good enough to represent the real
thing and therefore good enough for our museum of horrors. The original working
reality we destroyed centuries ago!"
Nelson
gritted his teeth in frustration. These spineless rabbits! These conceited
gophers! he thought. Well, he could always use the
ere-gun as a club!
He
reversed the weapon, hefted it threateningly. "You must have means of
talking with the Phobos star-ship?" he said, and
when Kunosh nodded slightly, added, "Well, then,
take me to it!"
The
old man silently turned and the two went back without further word. Down the
descending side of the scoop shaft, out through the halls,
and back to the very same central governing room they had been before.
The
clerks and directors—or whatever they were— were back on the job again. At
Nelson's entry they halted the routines they were engaged on and then slowly
returned to them, keeping an eye cocked toward the stranger.
Kunosh went over to the far end of the room. There was a large wall panel there and he pressed
some studs. The panel flickered, glowed to life, and settled down. Before them
was a room identical in every way with the one they were standing in. The two
starships must have been built on the same plans save for the difference in
size.
In
this Phobos room, men in the striped clothing
distinctive to that branch of the Vegans were gathered in heated discussion. As
they noticed that the inter-moon panel was in operation, two of the men
detached themselves and strode over to face Kunosh
and Nelson.
Young
Parr saw at once that these men had a confidence and hardness utterly lacking
in the rabbitlike creatures of Deimos.
The leader looked coldly at Kunosh and said something
in their native tongue. Kunosh didn't bother to
answer him, distaste for his opponent chieftain evident on his face. He jerked
a finger to indicate that it was the Earthling who wanted the interview.
The
Phobosian looked hard at Nelson, changed to English.
"Oh, one of the two that got away. I didn't believe that old scarecrow had
the nerve to capture you. Where's your friend?"
Nelson
stared back at him. "He was killed by your cowardly gang ... or didn't they bother to tell
you?"
The
other simply stared at him for a moment. He shifted his glance to Kunosh, who was biting his lip. "My—gang—as you call
them—killed nobody. If we'd wanted to kill you, we could have done so easily
anytime in the last few months. Why should we have to do so now?"
For a moment Nelson was speechless.
"You're lying!" he said. "Your men sneaked up on Jim Worden and
attacked him when he wasn't looking. Then your men smashed our ship!"
The
Phobos leader turned to Kunosh,
said slowly, "So you do know how to use violence when you have to, you old
hypocrite! Your gang of weaklings make me sick. All your prating about bestiality and throw-backs just to cover
up your own bred-in-the-bone rottenness."
A
cold chill ran down the young Earthling's spine. Could it be,
could it possibly be that the killing had been done by the Deimosians,
those rabbits? And it suddenly dawned on him that it had to be so. What the Phobosian had said made sense. They could have killed them
anytime, certainly they didn't need to follow them and do it on Deimos ... an act
that would alienate their cowardly kin even more. And then there was the
dishonest business about the ers-gun
...
Nelson
drew away from the old man. He spoke to the Phobos
chieftain, "Where's the rest of my expedition? My
father, Gutman, and the others?"
The
other looked at him. "We took them prisoner as soon as we saw they had
track of our Mars operation. They're safely under guard—and we have thrown
overboard our ideas of hiding and running." He turned to Kunosh, addressed him:
"We're
sending a ship back to pick up this Earth-man. We want him where we know he
won't escape and where you won t be able to kill him when he's asleep either!
Tell your rabbits to grab him!"
Kunosh stirred uneasily. He whined something back
through the panel in his native tongue, but the Pho-bosian
merely angrily repeated his request.
Nelson
hefted the weapon. As a club, it could do plenty damage if the Deimosians attempted to carry out that order. The men in
the room behind him had come to their feet, were slinking slowly closer to him.
The Earthling turned his back to the panel. "Don't try it!" he
warned. "I can do plenty of damage if you dare touch me I"
The
little crowd of Deimosians, their faces pale and
twitching, their mouths working, continued to close in on him. Cowards or not,
they were going to seize him. And Nelson realized now how true the Phobos charge was. The Deimosians
could kill if they had to and undoubtedly were the slayers of Jim Worden. What
a fool Kunosh had made of him!
He
swung his weapon threateningly. The band shuffled closer to him, stood
gathering their courage until they would leap at him in a burst of final
desperation.
The
communication panel to Phobos was still open, and
several more of the striped-clad men had gathered before it on the Phobos side to watch the interesting spectacle of their
cowardly brethren put to the test. Nelson could hear comments in their native
language through the panel.
But
as he braced himself for the assault, he heard a new note through the panel. The sound of someone running into the central Phobos
room and shouting something. He heard a sudden rusding
as the men on that moon seemed taken by a new thing. The young Earthling risked
a glance back over his shoulder.
The Phobos men had
drawn away from the panel, were standing around a gesticulating newcomer. Now
the advancing ring of Deimosians closing in on Nelson
hesitated, stopped, and its members began to break away in confusion. Whatever
was being said over the panel must have been very important to distract their
attention.
Nelson lowered his weapon,
turned. Kunosh was at the panel, gesticulating to his
opposite chieftain. The other man, who had turned away from his viewing plate,
broke away from the messenger and returned to the panel, his face pale and
shaken. Apparently breathless, evidently under the throes of great shock, he
blurted out something to Kunosh.
The
old man sagged and almost collapsed. There was a sudden silence in the Deimos room, and shock visibly ran through every man there.
"What
is it?" asked Nelson in a whisper. Kunosh
couldn't answer him, but the Phobos leader looked at
him blankly through the panel and said:
"The
Marauders!"
Chapter 73 Runaway Satellites
I |
he Marauders! The dread pirates of the starry spaces who
had invaded the worlds of Vega, destroying and conquering! The Phobos leader stared at Nelson through the panel, and
repeated his words. "Our radar screens, which are far more advanced than
your own devices and reach out to the orbit of Pluto, have detected an array of
space vessels coming toward the sun. They are numbered in the hundreds and
hundreds—a long stream reaching far out into the empty space between the stars,
heading for this system like an arrow!
"Already
the vanguard is inside Pluto's orbit and still coming strong! It can be nothing
else but the Marauder fleet! The horde of star pirates coming upon us at
last!"
The
Phobosian suddenly clapped a hand to his forehead,
turned away from the communication screen and hastened over to his comrades. A
violent discussion was already under way there in the inner moon's control
room.
Behind
Nelson, on Deimos, similar confusion already
reigned. Kunosh, who had recovered somewhat,
was holding another of his governing board by
the shoulder and shouting at him. The other men were frantically running back
and forth, apparendy unable to recover their senses.
The news had struck them like a bomb, had disrupted their entire mentalities, so
geared to hiding instead of action.
Bewildered
and entirely overlooked in the turmoil, Nelson Parr sat down and simply
watched. What was he himself to do? Obviously he ought to take advantage of
this confusion to escape—but where could he go?
He
could probably find his way back to the Deimos
spaceship hangar, but once there what would he do? He doubted if he could run
one of their ships and if he did manage to, where would he take it? He couldn't
go to Phobos because that would simply be delivering himself from one captivity to another one. He could get to
Mars, but it was deserted. He could probably keep himself alive there, but that
would not remove the danger of the Marauders finding him.
Actually
his most urgent task, his duty, was to find some way of notifying Earth of the
danger, readying Earth's defenses. It seemed, from what he had seen and heard
of the oncoming pirate horde, that the best warcraft
Earth could muster would hardly have a chance. He knew that really there was no
chance at all. Warcraft for space was something
almost unheard of. It had been speculated upon in stories before space flight
really got under way, but the cold reality of interplanetary flight had
brought no actual need for them. There had been no other planetary civilization
to fight, no savage natives of other worlds, and the expenses and complexities
of astral navigation had made space piracy an impossible fantasy—besides, what
was there for such pirates to steal? In short, there had never been any reason
for space-going warships.
On
Earth itself, warfare between nations had been successfully abolished for over
a hundred years, and save for a few ceremonial guards of honor there were
really no soldiers. There were police forces only, and there were some stores
of old armaments in various government warehouses and vaults.
At
least if Earth could be warned in time, the leaders might hastily equip some
spaceships with guns, or with means of launching atomic torpedoes. They might
at least arm the people so that any attempt by the Marauders to land would cost
them plenty.
In
any case, Earth had to be warned! But how? At the
moment it was already on the other side of the sun, well over two hundred
million miles away, out of sight of both Mars and the invading fleet. No radio,
not even such super-radios as perhaps the Vegans might possess, could possibly
reach Earth across the interference of the sun.
The
only way to warn Earth would be to go there ...
and that seemed to be an impossible hope.
The
Deimosians had recovered a little of their senses,
though they were still white and shaking. On the Phobos
side, a serious conference was already taking place. Kunosh
walked over to the panel and switched it off. He rapped for order, yelled a
command, repeated it, and finally got the attention of his men.
They
slowly quieted down, gathered around him. Kunosh
talked swiftly, heatedly. There was little debate as the stunned councilors
listened to him. Nelson^ sitting at one side, assumed
that this was a hasty conference to discuss ways and means of saving themselves.
He got up, went over, and broke in:
"I
want to say something, Kunosh. If you are deciding
what to do, I have a suggestion to make."
The
old man glanced at him sharply. "This is an important meeting. What can
you have to say?"
Nelson
spoke swiftly. "Your only hope of fighting off the Marauders is to throw
in your lot with Earth. Earth has a huge population, great
factories, and plenty of courage. If you come to Earth, warn the people,
they will welcome your aid, give you shelter. With the special information you
can bring, Earth can find a way to build defenses. Even if they can't, they can
make it so hot for the pirates that they'll go away. Earth needs your science;
you can use it to bargain for a place to settle down, a permanent home.
"Take
Deimos across space to Earth while there is still
time to outrun the Marauders. You can't hope to hide here forever, especially
since they may have records of your two moons from the Vega days, may be
looking for you!"
Kunosh listened to him, frowning and shaking his
head. He spoke to the others in the room, apparently translating Nelson's
words. The councilors glanced at him with horror. Those nearest him drew away.
The old man brushed a hand over his brow.
"No!
No! That would be as unpleasant to us as being captured by the devils from the
stars. You are as strange to us as they are! We are not going to break the
stern traditions of our ancestors by trying to fight or by giving strangers our
ancient secrets 1 There isn't a true Vegan here who
wouldn't agree with me!"
The
obvious fear and hatred reflected on the faces of those in the room made Nelson
realize the futility of arguing with these incredible cowards. These rabbits
were vicious, they were panicky, and beyond sane reason. "Then what can
you do?" Nelson demanded truculently.
Kunosh paid no further attention to him while
talking heatedly to the councilors. Then, as the meeting broke up with the room
emptying as the others scurried from the chamber on urgent missions, he looked
at Nelson.
"Were going to run for our lives! We're going to activate the engines of this
starship world and race away from this solar system and away from the Marauders.
Once we're in the deeps of space at full speed they'll never locate us. We'll
go on until we can find a star or planet somewhere where they can't ever find
us. Even if it takes thousands and thousands of years, we'll keep on
going!"
Nelson
gasped, "But when are you starting? What about me? I don't want to go
along!"
Kunosh
waved a hand indifferently. "Do what you want. Do you think we can be
concerned about you now?"
Nelson
grabbed him by the arm, swung him around. "I
don't give a rap if you don't care, but I do. I want one of your spaceships!
Now! Lead me to it, or I'll break your arm!"
Kunosh winced in terror. "All
right, all right! You still have an hour before we can start Deimos moving. Go ahead up to the hangar, take a ship, and
go! Leave us alone! We don't want youl"
Nelson
held on to his arm, brandished his weapon.
"You'll come along with me until I get the shipl
I'm taking no chances with a lying sneak like you! Come on!"
He
dragged the squeaking old man out of the chamber and force-walked him back
through the halls to the shaft scoops. Around him, in the mazes of the
star-ship moon, there were wild scenes of panic. Men and women were scurrying
back and forth frantically and wastefully. No one seemed to be in control, no
one seemed to be able to keep his head. If men were busy at starting the actual
preparations for running away, it was not evident.
Nelson
and Kunosh reached the shaft, got on it, moved
upward. "What will Phobos do?" the young
man asked as they rose.
"I
don't know and I don't care," snapped back the Deimosian.
"This is a good opportunity to leave those degenerates to their own
undoing. At least that'll be some good coming out of this!"
They
reached the hangar, passed through the locks. Inside the subsurface area there
were several craft. To Nelson's eyes all seemed small and designed only for
short intermoon flights. As the old man seemed
indifferent as to which one he took, he insisted on walking over to each and
examining all of them. He ignored Kunosh's protests
of impatience and time lost.
He
could reach Mars with these ships, but apparently they were not built for
longer journeys. To strand himself on the red planet
would be an escape for a short while but would be no help to Earth. Then in the
corner he caught sight of the ship that was so oddly cubical. Hastily he closed
in and walked around it.
It
was visibly larger than the other craft, and now that he was so close, he could
see that it was quite different in almost every respect. The metal was darker
and slightly pitted as if from extensive flight. There were a few narrow squarish portholes, dark and glassy. And there were odd
projecting bumps that looked suspiciously like guns!
"What's
this?" he asked. "It doesn't look like one of your other ships at
all!"
"It's
a ship from another Vega world. We . . . took it with us as a curiosity when we
left Vega. It's a vile battle cruiser of the Malakarji
people. We use it as a horror exhibit for our children."
Nelson
looked for the entrance, found it, a square doorway, set firm in the surface.
"Open it!" He shoved Kunosh toward it.
The
Vegan pushed down a plug set in the center. The door suddenly pushed outward
like a cork, swung upward. "The entire ship has controls like that. We've
kept it in working order," he said. "You can take this one, if you
want to, only be quick!" He stood aside and waited for Nelson to go in.
But the young man was too smart to be caught.
"Oh
no," he said, "you go in first. You'll show
me everything I need to know before I'll trust you out of my sight!"
"Bah!" Kunosh
stamped his foot, but he climbed into the airlock of the odd ship, with Nelson
at his heels.
Inside,
the structure was amazingly like a little house. The driving machinery, which
was clearly not rockets but must be on the order of the advanced controls used
by the starship moons, was apparently housed in the ground floor. The living
and storage quarters were evidently on the second and top floor of the little
cube.
Nelson
found himself entering the chamber on the bottom floor and was in the midst of
bright, gleaming, massive machines at whose nature he could not guess. There
was a huge thick wheel circling the entire lower floor and that was probably a
major part of the drive. Perhaps magnetic currents had something to do with it,
or the paragravital flows which recent science had
begun to detect. The two climbed a short ladder to the upper floor.
Here
there were several oddly placed rooms. The control room was in the exact center
of the ship and looked out through a rounded transparent bull's-eye directly
overhead in the roof of the cube. Panels in the walls of the room gave views
from all four directions, though the ship was apparently blind from its basement
side. Evidently it flew directly upward, and probably
caused a semblance of gravity down against its floors when in normal flight.
Around
this central control room were about eight small chambers, obviously sleeping,
eating, and storage quarters. On each side and above, there were what were quite obviously cannon emplacements.
Nelson made Kunosh
explain the layout. The old man insisted that the ship was ready to fly, that
apparently its source of power did not require fuels other than atomic piles
which when once installed would supply power for countless thousands of years.
The old man pushed in a plug on the tablelike main
control board. Immediately a soft light glowed in the room, the wall panels lit
up to show the outside walls of the cavern. Several lights glowed in various
colors on the stud-covered table. Hastily Kunosh pointed
to each, stating in turn, "Power, direction, acceleration, deceleration,
heat, light, airflow," and so on.
It
was apparent to Nelson that the ship was indeed in working order. If it was
atomically powered, then it ought to be able to make the trip to Earth! He
didn't know how fast it could go but it was at least a hope.
Kunosh was hopping up and down, anxious to leave.
Satisfied, Nelson nodded, and the old man scurried down the ladder and out the
door. Through one of the wall panels, Nelson could see him run out of the
hangar. Nelson pushed the plug that closed the airlock door and sealed the
curious ship.
Let's
see, he said to himself, reviewing the various controls. Where's the
communications—or isn't there one? He looked about. Set against one wall was a
circular glassy device, the typical viewplate.
Several plugs set at its side were the obvious controls. He plugged one at
random.
The
screen flickered, steadied. A face looked out at Nelson. It was the face of his
father, John Carson Parr!
Chapter 14
In
the Cubeship
ad!" shouted Nelson joyfully. "You're all right then! You
escaped the Phobos men!"
His
father's lined features stared back at Nelson in surprise and then with
pleasure. "This is a surprise, son, a real
surprise. I thought I would get through to the rulers of Deimos
and instead I got you. Where in heaven's name are you? That cabin behind you
doesn't look like Kunosh's headquarters."
"I'm
still on Deimos, Dad, but I'm in a spaceship that I'm
going to return back to Mars in ...
or maybe try for Earth. What happened to you? Are you broadcasting from Phobos or from Mars or our ship?"
John
Parr moved his head to one side and Nelson caught a glimpse of the same central
control room of Phobos that he had seen before.
Standing just behind the Earth expedition leader was the grim face of the chief
of the Phobos natives. Nelson got a glimpse of men
busy at charts and panels in the depths of the room—and among them he was sure
he spotted the figures of Telders and McQueen,
working shoulder to shoulder with the natives.
"I'm on Phobos
as you see, deep in its center. I guess you know now what these two moons
really are. We heard something about you from the men with whom you had that
fight. They were quite angry here about your interference, you know. Apparendy that old schemer Kunosh
took you in completely."
"Yes,
yes," Nelson nodded. "But tell me about you and the men. What
happened to you?"
The
elder Parr glanced down, presumably at his watch. Looking up he said,
"There isn't very much time, but I'll try. We weren't worried about your
absence for about twenty hours, when it was about time for you and Jim to
return. When you still failed to show up, we began to get uneasy. We tried
radioing you when Deimos came into sight, but we got
no answer at all.
"We
were keeping an eye on Deimos for your return and
were watching it by telescope when we saw a fight appear on the surface and
something take off. We supposed it was you two and tried to keep track of the
object but lost it amid the stars. WTien you failed
to make a landing here we got worried again, for the trip between the two moons
at that point should not have taken long. We gathered to discuss whether we
ought to take off and go to Deimos to see what had
happened there, when we heard someone knocking on the outside of our space-lock
door.
"Naturally
we assumed it was you at last. We got the lock open and a bunch of men dashed
in dressed in spacesuits and helmets. We hardly had a chance to make a fight of
it when they were all over us and had us prisoner.
"They took us out of our ship and down
underground. I suppose the insides of the two moons are pretty much alike.
Anyway it's a huge spaceship here, a star-going spaceship ten miles in diameter
capable of carrying tens of thousands of men, women and children and supporting
a whole series of generations while the ship crossed between stars.
"The
leader, Doldnan, talked with us after they had
installed us in a fairly comfortable guarded room. He seemed a decent sort,
explained that they were engaging in preparations for moving their whole
population to Mars and making their home there. It seems they had been watching
this world for centuries before getting up the nerve to do it.
"Doldnan told us that they had not intended touching us on
the surface, figuring that they didn't want to do anything to make Earth angry.
But when their delegation returned from Deimos, one
they had sent to try to persuade their people there to join in the colonization
scheme, they heard what had happened to Worden and how Kunosh
had put the blame on them. So Doldnan said they had
to go upsurface and grab us before we got some sort
of wrong report and try to take revenge."
Nelson
nodded. "Kunosh managed to make the Phobosians the bad ones all right. He said they had seized
the moon by force."
John
Parr shook his head. "Actually he wasn't telling the truth. The men from Phobos were only talking and arguing with Kunosh's councilors when you burst in and hit them. If you
hadn't been along, Kunosh and his men would have had
to do the dirty work themselves—but they always prefer to have someone else
risk their lives. They wanted to spread bad blood between Earth and the Phobos people."
Nelson
was puzzled. "I don't quite understand. Kunosh
claims the Phobosians are Vegans who deserted their
old traditions of hatred against force, who have become desperate and
vicious."
John
smiled a bit and cast a glance behind him. "To tell you the truth, to a
certain extent Kunosh is right. Originally all the
Vegans were like him, cowardly, slippery, and convinced of their own
superiority. That's why the Phobosians did nothing
for so long about taking over Mars. But the last couple of generations here
have been watching Earth and our Mars colony and taking heart. Doldnan told me their spies reported favorably of our
scientific integrity and peaceful intent. They have been debating this matter
for a long time, and only very recently has the anticow-ardice
faction won control of Phobos. On Deimos,
however, the most fanatical supporters of the old views clustered and
prevented even the debate from reaching their populace. The two moons have
barely been talking to each other for the last generation.
"Don't
get the idea, though," the elderly space explorer hastened to add,
"that the Phobosians are regular wildcats.
Actually they're almost as cautious as their smaller moon kin. They can't quite
get over the customs of ages of rabbitlike existence.
They don't like violence any more than Kunosh does,
but they have enough sense to face up to a fight if they have to."
Nelson
suddenly remembered his position and his father's. Time was running out and he
was still standing in the controls of this strange ship while danger was
rushing on them all.
"Yes, Dad. But what are you going to do now? I tried to
talk Kunosh into taking Deimos
to Earth and helping us fight off the Marauders. Gosh, Dad, with the science
they've got in this moon we might have a chance! But I couldn't make him agree.
They're going to start the starship up and run away!"
John
nodded. "When they discovered the Marauders coming, Doldnan
managed to keep his people from too much panic. They held a big conference, then called us in. After they'd explained the problem, they
themselves asked us if Earth would give them protection and refuge in exchange
for their scientific secrets. Of course we agreed, urged them to take their
moon to Earth as fast as possible. I do have some authority as leader of the
old Mars colony and as head of this expedition. And the stuff these people have
here-well, some of their discoveries will give us a big boost! You should see
their space drive alone! Imagine a drive, nonrocket
in nature, that can move a ship this size across
dozens of fight-years!"
Nelson
was thrilled. "Shall I join you? What do you think I ought to do? I've got
this spaceship though I don't know its powers."
"Yes,"
said Parr, and turning away from the screen, conferred briefly with Doldnan. He turned back hastily. "You'll have to
start at once, son. I'm told our moon has been in motion for the past half hour
already, starting to swing out to make a race for the Earth. We're on the
sunward side and going to race in, cutting inside Mercury's orbit to swing
around and out again to join Earth on the other side of the sun. You'll have to
outrace us, because Deimos is on the outward side of
Mars now and if Kunosh makes good his escape plans it
will start outward at any moment."
"Gosh,
you're right." Nelson jumped to the tablelike
control board of his strange ship. There were flickering lights on a curious
panel there, but he could not decipher them. Doubtless the original designers
of the ship had a code that told them what their ship's detectors indicated,
but the Earthling had no time to figure it out. He glanced through the windows
of the ship. He was still inside the hangar, but glancing upward he saw that
the open dome was showing a visible motion of stars.
He
stared a few seconds at the visible sky and realized that the motion of the
stars was different from what it should be in the normal orbital motion of the
small moon. Kunosh had started the starship going!
Every precious second wasted now would take him farther away from Earth,
farther away from a rendezvous with Phobos.
Nelson
went back to the telescreen. He saw that his father
was busy conferring with several of the native councilors. "Good-by,"
Nelson called. "I'm going to take off. I'll try to catch up with you as
soon as possible, if this ship can do it. Call me later!"
His
father glanced back, waved. Nelson switched off, ran
back to the controls. He could feel beneath his feet a curious vibration—the
whole moon was undergoing a series of tiny quakes as it was being shaken out of
its orbital inertia, forced to respond to controls that had not been used in
hundreds of Earth years.
Hastily
he checked his control plugs, reviewing Kunosh's
hasty words. He wondered if the old man had lied even
about this—it wouldn't be past him to do that. Well, he had no other chance but
to try the plugs. He pushed the plug that was to seal the ship and was pleased
to hear the far-off thud as the outside door slid into place. A light glowing
on his board confirmed that and added to his knowledge of the controls.
He
glanced upward and saw that the hangar was still open to the skies. Evidently Kunosh, who could have closed it and made trouble for him,
was sincere in his desire that the Earthling go away. Nelson punched in the
starter plug and felt the ship begin to vibrate on a tune of its own.
Somewhere
in the engine floor below him there was a high-pitched whine that settled down into
a low humming. There was a smell of ozone as currents started to flow into bars
and condensers that had been idle since before the Pyramids were built. The
ship seemed vibrant with its own life, seemed as if it were poised on its toes,
ready for a leap into the void which was its natural surrounding.
Nelson
punched the accelerator button, manipulated the hand
bars below it. The ship gave a light jolt, and Nelson felt the strange
sensation of pressure against his feet. He saw the cavern walls suddenly slip
downward and in an instant the outer surface of Dei-mos
passed in view and vanished below. He glanced to the side windows, saw the cold
gray surface of the little moon spread out, and he directed the cubical ship
upward, steadily accelerating.
His
eyes took in the control panel and he watched the various lights shift thereon.
Quickly he recognized a little white square in the center as indicating his own
ship. To one side a large red mass was gathering and changing in color. This
must indicate the moon he was leaving. He recognized the system as very akin to
a radar board, though apparendy the Malakarji Vegans used a color system to indicate different
bodies. An arrow of red pointed steadily to one side—and he recognized this as
the Mars direction. Nelson nodded to himself—he wouldn't have much trouble with
this ship, even though it did seem to be blind on the underside.
He
brought the ship to a hanging position near the moon while he studied the area
of space in which he found himself. It was as his father had said. Phobos was on the sunward side of Mars, out of sight in
eclipse by the bulk of the red planet, now dark beneath Nelson's gaze. The sun
could be seen by the edge of its corona peeking from one hemisphere of Mars.
Deimos
was on what could be termed the outer side of Mars, facing away from the sun.
Its position in relation to die oncoming Marauder fleet was at right angles,
the enemy ships coming in a full ninety degrees removed. It was apparent
already that Deimos was farther away from Mars than
it had been before.
Kunosh was taking his moon into the empty reaches
of outer space—directly away from Earth, from Mars,
from the Marauders. By the time the dread black
ships reached Mars, Deimos would be lost in the
untraceable void between the stars.
Nelson
raced to the controls. He had to turn the ship, race around Mars, and head
sunward at top speed if he ever hoped to see Earth again I
Chapter 15
The
Long Road Home
t the moment of takeoff, Nelson's cubical craft was y\ heading away from Deimos but much in the same
direction as the moon. He ran his fingers over the control board lightly,
getting the feel of it, and then punched another button. There was a dizzying
grinding noise and the whole houselike ship seemed to
tilt. There was a split-second feeling of falling and then the engine caught in
again and the gravital thrust was resumed. Now,
however, the craft was moving away from Deimos at
right angles to Mars.
It
was eerie the way this odd ship operated. Built as it was like a small sealed
house, with eveiything upright against a floor, it
was totally unlike any ship Nelson had seen, even on the most experimental designs
of the earliest space conquerors. As a rule ships were designed to fly in
weightlessness, riding on the static impetus delivered by their rockets. While
the rocket drive was on, those within the ship would be restricted to their
hammocks and cushioned rests under the weight of an acceleration of several
gravities. After
this drive, which never lasted too long, the rest
of the trip would take place in free fall—where there was no feeling of top or
bottom, where floor and ceiling were the same.
On
this odd vessel there was always one gravity acceleration
and no free fall. Perhaps not exactly one gravity, for
Nelson felt singularly light. The planet for which this ship had been designed
must have been smaller than Earth, its gravity somewhat weaker, and its
controls adjusted accordingly. Still it was a pleasant feeling for the young
man, who had been so long virtually weightless.
Nelson
watched the heavens as his cube tore along. Deimos
rapidly diminished in size, became a white dot, and vanished amid the stars.
Mars did not change much in diameter, but the sun was rising over its disk as
Nelson's ship rushed away from its shadow into the direct rays of the sun. That
body assumed at last its usual appearance—a blindingly brilliant white ball of
light, surrounded by a waving glow of fiery projections that were its coronary
discharges. All this appeared against the jet-black airless sky of space!
Nelson
searched the sky for a sign of Phobos. This proved a
difficult task, for as that tiny body was between the sun and himself, it was always the unfit dark side that he would
see. He could hope to see the runaway moon, therefore, only by the manner in
which it might black out the view of stars whose light it crossed. And as the
moon was also heading almost directly sunward, always the bright glare of Sol
would hurt the eye of the searcher.
It didn't take too long for the cubical ship
to get clear of Mars' bulk—and it dawned on Nelson that its speed of one gravity was an illusion. Inside, this acceleration effect
remained fixed, but plainly the craft had a greater capacity for speed than
that. Somehow this extra pressure was deflected or absorbed so that it never
affected the interior of the cube. Another invention that would immensely
improve the art of space flight—if there was such an art left after the
Marauders got through with the solar systeml
Nelson
studied the control board again to try to determine what were
the equivalents of speed and pressure indicators. He found a glowing
bulb of green that had originally been very dim, was now fairly bright, and
seemed to be growing stronger all the time. Carefully he adjusted the
acceleration plug and the glow softened. This, then, was the speedometer
system, and the young man used it to level off at a steady rate of speed until
he was clear around Mars and heading in the proper direction.
It
occurred to him that the builders of this ship must have been a keen-eyed race
if they could depend on slight shifts of color intensity as a reliable
scientific guide.
Clear
of Mars, he again turned the craft, experiencing the odd second of tilt, and
this time pointed the roof of the ship almost directly at the sun. He pulled
the accelerator plug out and watched the green bulb grow brighter until it
became almost blinding.
For
a moment he bit his lip as he realized that he still had no way of knowing just
how fast he would be going and therefore just how and when to slow down or
shift. This was going to be a very dangerous business—he was, in fact, flying almost blind and
it would take a miracle of sorts if he could bring this ship into port again!
To
navigate through space one had to know not only the exact whereabouts and speed
of your objective, but a very definitely exact idea of your own speed and
whereabouts. Doubtless the builders of this Vegan vessel could read this
information, but it was an unlearned language to Nelson.
Anxiously
he went to the telescreen, turned it on. Nothing
appeared but shifting lights. He wanted to turn on a general radio call, but he
could not tell how or what controlled that. He tried various plugs at random,
giving each a chance. Finally he got a hum
on one, called, worked his screen.
■There
was a flicker of bright light, the passing glimpse of a face. Holding his
breath, he jiggled the button back and forth and then at last the screen
steadied and he looked again into the face of a Phobo-sian.
The view was not as clear as before, but it was steady.
The
stranger saw him, turned away and apparently called. In a few minutes McQueen's
ruddy features flashed into view.
"Hi, feller. Heard about your little
troubles. What's on your mind?"
Quickly Nelson oudined
his problem to McQueen. The man frowned a minute, then said, "Well, I can have the
navigators here locate you and give you your speed and direction from our radar
observations. You can slow up or speed up a bit and they can follow you and
tell you what you're doing. In that way you can build up a rough chart of how
your ship operates and what power light indicates what power speed. How's that?"
This
made good sense, and although it might mean losing time, it was vital to crack
the problem of his ship's controls. McQueen's face gave way to that of Telders, their expedition's crack astral navigator.
Then began a half hour of shifting speed and marking
notes.
Nelson would push the plug down and dim the bulb. Telders
would take a reading on Phobos' super-radar and tell
the boy his speed. Nelson would then accelerate slowly and get a new reading
from the rocketeer. In this way young Parr finally jotted
down a listing equivalent of speed for every power of his control board light
and was able to get that clear.
Next
he obtained from Telders the exact direction and
course that the giant starship was following. They were proceeding at near
maximum acceleration (their greatest speed was unsafe in planetary zones) almost
directly toward the sun. When they passed within Mercury's orbit, they would
shift sufficiently to miss the sun and tear on past it, coming to within eight
million miles of its blazing atmosphere. This would be a ticklish and
unpleasant experience but it would not last long, so great
would be their speed at that moment. Once past it they would blast along
away from it and straight toward Earth, slowing down as they got past the orbit
of Venus.
The
trip would probably take about five weeks at the acceleration of which Phobos was capable. "I advise you to try to catch us
and land here," said Telders. "I don't
think your little ship could possibly survive such acceleration and such a
near-sun course itself."
Nelson
nodded. He corrected his direction so that he was following directly on Phobos' trail—having located it on his visual screens by
following Telders' directions. Then he pulled out his
acceleration plug full blast. The green bulb was blinding.
Suddenly
there was nothing else to do but wait. It would take hours to catch up with Phobos and there was nothing to do but sit it out. And now
Nelson realized that he hadn't eaten, that he was famished.
He
waved good-by to Telders, telling him that he'd tune
back in in another hour, and switched off. He set out
to find the cube's kitchen.
The
ship was indeed a little house! He looked into a couple of small bedrooms,
oddly equipped, but clearly sleeping chambers with recognizable pneumatic
beds. He passed through a sort of wardroom-library, whose books were small wall
panels which flashed rapidly moving series of unreadable colored symbols when
activated. There were markings on doors in these symbols, and he recognized
that the alphabet these Malakarji used was made up of
seven simple symbols, but always used in color, thereby making the same symbol
serve at least nine possible letters, depending on whether the figure was red,
or blue, or some other color.
He
found the kitchen at last, a compact chamber with a counterlike
board running the length and the usual plugs, marked with colored letters. It
dawned on Nelson then that if the ship had been last used a few thousand years
ago, there would be no hope of finding edible supplies!
Well,
nothing gained by not trying. He began to work the plugs to see what he could
get.
He
got water right away. There was a squishing sound and a little transparent
container popped out of a wall opening, like a plug from a message tube. He
held it in his hand and looked at it. There was a cap at one end which he
untwisted, and after that it was just like a glass of water. It tasted odd,
tangy, with a curious, but not unpleasant chemical undertone. But it quenched
the thirst.
Several
other plugs did not work. One disgorged another transparent container filled
with a grayish jellylike substance. When he untwisted the cap, it gave off an
odor so bad that Nelson gagged. He looked hastily around for a garbage disposal
unit, saw an opening in the opposite wall and tossed it in. There was a gulping
sound, the opening closed a mechanical jaw, then slid
open again, empty and waiting.
After
testing all the plugs, he found that there were about five that produced
results, not counting the one with the rotten contents. He had an assortment of
containers, each filled with some kind of food, not one of which he could
recognize, and all seemingly made of brightly colored jellylike materials. He
tried one.
It
was good, almost meaty in flavor. Hungrily he ate it all, scooping with his
fingers, having found no evidence of spoons or forks. He tried one of the
others, found it different but equally satisfying—and suddenly he realized that
his hunger had gone, that he had fed.
Well, at least he wouldn't starve on this
trip, he thought. The food was apparently synthetic, manufactured by heaven
alone knows what atomic alchemy from raw materials. Another secret that would
be a boon to Earth! He wondered whether the first container, the foul one, was
a breakdown on that food line, or whether it was something the builders of the
ship actually liked. There were still some people back on Earth who liked such
things as whale blubber, rancid butter, Limburger cheese, hundred-year-old
eggs, and slugs under rocks, so why not allow the Mala-karji
similar peculiarities?
He
returned to the central control room, tuned back on Phobos.
His father answered this time and they chatted awhile before plugging off. The
moon had had enough of a head start so that even at full acceleration it would
be a good long time before Nelson could catch up. And now he was getting tired.
So
he went to the nearest bedroom, curled up on the Vegan pallet there, and fell
asleep. For once he felt at ease and the gravity of the ship gave his body a
comfort it had not felt for too long a time.
He
woke almost ten hours later, having slept much longer than he'd intended. He
sat up refreshed, glanced at his watch, and went into the control room. He
could see that Mars had grown appreciably smaller and near-ing
his blind underside. He sought again to spot Phobos
visually but still failed. Yet it should have been closer. He tuned in and
again caught a Phobos observer, who called in
McQueen, evidently the only Earthling on duty at that time.
Bryan looked a little worried when he saw Nelson.
"I'm afraid I've got some bad news for
you, my boy," he said. "You haven't gotten any closer to us in the
past few hours; in fact, you're falling behind."
Nelson
bit his lip. "I've been on full acceleration all this time," he said.
The other shook his head.
"Yes,
but so have we. And, my lad, this moon here is something really terrific. We're
going faster than you are and gaining steadily. I guess your ship, and no ship
that size, could hope to beat this star-going freighter. But here's your
dad."
John
Carson Parr came into sight and McQueen stepped aside for him. The older man
rubbed his eyes, having just awakened from sleep, and peered anxiously at his
son. "I hope you're well set on that old houseboat of yours," he
said, trying to be light, "because you're going to have your own private
yacht for some time."
Nelson
tried to smile, though he felt uneasy at the thought of making the long journey
past the sun to Earth by himself. "Oh, I'm okay. You ought to taste the
food here—more crazy flavors of gelatin than we ever dreamed of in our wildest
nightmares!"
The
older Parr cracked a smile. "That's good. Dold-nan
can't slow up his moon to pick you up. He's got thousands of other lives to
consider. So you'll have to follow us as best you can."
"That's
all right. I wouldn't expect Phobos to wait for me.
Can you have Telders plot me a course of my
own?"
His
father nodded. "We've already worked it out. Telders
will give you the listings and tell you when to shift speeds and directions. We
expect Phobos to reach Earth in about five weeks as
you know, by going the shortest, fastest and most dangerous way. However,
we've worked out a more circular orbit for you, that won't take you much closer
than inside Venus' orbit and have you swing out and join up with Earth in about
four months' time. To make it any sooner would be altogether too risky for that
little space-going bungalow."
"It
looks as if I'll have plenty of time to learn to read their books," Nelson
said jokingly.
"Doubt
you can do that," said his father, not catching the tone of his son's
comment. "However, I suppose you'll find some way to pass the time. I've
got to tell you that we may not be able to keep in contact much longer as we
outdistance you. Besides, I know Doldnan is worried
about our conversations. He thinks the Marauders may be able to spot us by
it."
"That's
right," said Nelson. "I guess—we'd better say good-by then until we
meet on Earth." He smiled at his father, who said some cheery words and
stepped aside for Karl Telders.
Nelson
jotted down the navigator's readings and thanked him. Getting one more glimpse
of his dad, he waved, called farewell, and cut off the telescreen.
Nelson was alone in space.
Now
began a period of inactivity, of quiet, watchful flight. Nelson carefully kept
track of the passage of time, dividing his periods into nights and days, living
by the accurate hands of his spaceman's watch. He carefully, systematically,
explored all the comers of the houselike cube,
teaching himself as much as possible of the value of
each and every machine and device in it. He examined the ground floor with its
odd drive, but refrained from trying to get to the root of anything there for
fear of breakage.
The
alphabet and "books" of the Malakarji remained
unreadable, though he did spend a day listing the various symbols and their
colored variations and trying to decipher them. He caught no evidence anywhere
of pictures and never learned just what the Malakarji
Vegans looked like.
It
was at a time when he was about halfway between Mars and the orbit of Venus
when he happened to make a routine check of his control room radar board. Phobos was long off the board and out of sight, probably
nearing its destination. Mars was a red disk barely visible toward the rear of
a side window. No other objects showed on his board, no
asteroids of which he had passed a few, not even meteor clusters which
registered briefly as blue sparks.
He
saw on the edge of the board, in the direction of Mars, a little yellow dot. Now
red was for planetary objects, white for his own ship, blue were meteors, and a
wisp of green had appeared once for a small comet. But what did yellow
represent?
He
watched the dot and even as he watched, a second yellow dot appeared, then a
third. He caught his breath, wondered. Then four more yellow dots appeared.
The first dot was now visibly closer to his central white square, and as he
watched, the others began to fan out behind it like the V of a flight of wild
ducks.
An
unnatural movement, thought Nelson, as he watched in puzzlement. The sort of
thing intelligence would do, not some astral
phenomena. And then it struck him. These must be spaceships. Following
him, able to close in on him even at his tremendous rate of speed, too fast for
any Earth-made craft to match.
The
Marauders had arrived, had spotted him, were chasing
him!
CkaptCt jó One Against the Maraudersl
NXiousLY Nelse watched as an eighth and a ninth yellow dot
appeared on his board, joining the formation. He saw by their apparent speed
across his dial that they were traveling much faster than he was, that they
were going directly for him, would catch him soon.
He
hesitated over his controls for a moment. Possibly the cubical spaceship was
capable of more speed than it had—in fact he knew it was. But Telders had laid out a carefully plotted course for his
craft to follow. Nelson knew that if he changed speed or otherwise altered
the exact path that the navigator had calculated for him, his chances of
getting back to Earth would rapidly vanish.
Space
flight is such a difficult thing to calculate. Unlike traveling on the seas of
Earth, with which it is sometimes compared, it is much more like trying to hit
one of a flight of wild ducks with a strong slingshot while riding on the back
of another flying bird going in a different direction. Each planet is moving at
different speed; each affects the other as it goes. To
travel between them requires an exact knowledge of
all the immediate locations, directions and speeds, and the ability to figure
out at lightning speed the same relationships at any given time in the future.
It was work performed by intricate machines, built into the controls of Earth's
ships.
Probably
there was such machinery built into the Vegan spaceship too, but Nelson had
never located it, and if he had, would not likely have been able to determine
how to use it. Furthermore, he lacked the astro-gators'
charts which every ship carried giving the figures for the solar system
planets.
At
this moment there was a difficult decision for him to make—one that he must
make without delay. If he tried to outrace the Marauders, it might possibly
work, but it would result in his becoming desperately lost, perhaps doomed to
chase Earth around the sun by hit-or-miss efforts for years to come—if the
cubical space house's mysterious power source held out that long.
Yet
not to change speed would mean his capture or destruction for sure. For an
instant he hung over the plugs at his odd control table, his hands hanging motionless.
For an instant thoughts of Earth ran through his head,
of its men and women rushing to prepare defenses, of spaceships being hastily
equipped with available weapons to stand off invasion. Every second, every
hour, every day gained for them was valuable. The life of one man was nothing. He
smashed down on his speed plug, watched the green bulb suddenly flare
blindingly as his fingers relentlessy pressed down
the plug.
He felt a strain growing on him. In spite of
the excellent system of gravity and compensational effects built into the amazing
eubeship, it was evident that he was under tremendous
acceleration. On his observation dial he saw the flying wedge of yellow dots
suddenly pull back, start to disappear off the board, as they were outstripped.
Now
their progress off the board stopped as only one was left in sight at the edge
of the board. Stubbornly it lingered, refusing to disappear. Then, to Nelson's
horror, it slowly, slowly, began to crawl back.
The
green speed bulb still blazed, and yet the pursuing ship was coming back and
then the second and third yellow dots fought their way back into range and
slowly the others began to creep up.
Nelson
knew that his die was cast. He was already ahead of Telders'
carefully plotted course, at what speed, the unreadable gauges of his Malakarji craft could not tell him. There were no planets
near him. He was somewhere near the orbit of Venus,
but that body was far away. Nelson punched the controls that would turn the
ship, swerve it off.
If
he could not outrun his pursuers, he could dodge, twist, turn, give them a chase for their money!
The
cube swung far away and the yellow dots swerved off the board again. Now Nelson
headed on, at right angles to the course he had been following. He took the
time to glance out of the visual window panels, but he could not see the
Marauders. He knew he wouldn't, for they must be tens of thousands of miles
distant and invisible against the star-strewn blackness of the sky.
He went back to his panel, and again the
yellow dots had come into sight, swinging after him, catching up. He watched
awhile as they drew closer and closer. He had another idea now.
When
he felt that they must be very close, when their V was well into the board,
nearing the white square central light that was Nelson's ship, he yanked up the
speed plug completely. The green indicator suddenly dimmed and went out. His
ship's engines were off.
He
felt a vertigo as the little house's gravity vanished
with the silencing of the engines. His feet drifted up from the deck and his
head reeled as weightlessness returned.
On
the panel he saw the yellow dots sweep past his cube fast and vanish off it in
the other direction. Nelson punched a direction plug, rammed down his speed
again, and the white cube started to reverse its speed, to dash away in another
direction.
For
a while it seemed to work. Anxiously Nelson hovered over the panel, but the
yellow dots continued to be absent. For a moment he thought uneasily that
perhaps the Marauders had not been chasing him, had been headed toward Earth,
and that he had sacrificed his course needlessly. Perhaps he had only
mistakenly supposed they knew of his existence, and had simply misinterpreted
their change of direction.
He
realized that he was perspiring freely as he watched the board. His ship was
probably heading back out toward Mars again if its speed had been fully
reversed. He wondered if it was so, because he knew that it would have been
impossible for any Earthbuilt rocket to make such a
reversal. But the capacities of this cube were unknown.
He
supposed that some sort of magnetic lines of force were the guiding means of
its propulsion. His father had briefly mentioned something about cosmic power
lines of force unknown to terrestrial science, about accumulators, and had
ventured the hint that the cubeship's power might be
attained in some such way. But the capacities of such a vessel were still unclear,
if indeed that was the means.
Well,
maybe it had worked. Maybe the Marauders were left behind, but if they were
roving the solar system, he'd encounter them again. Nelson realized that he had
better investigate the cube's weapons.
There
were what seemed to be gun projections on each of the four walls—at least he
remembered seeing the little bulges as he had gone into the craft for the first
time. He went into die outer shell, saw that there
were such bulges at the inside, but that apparently the controls for them were
also in the central room. He returned, hunted for them.
He
slid aside a metal panel on one wall and saw four small polished disks set
therein. He pressed one of the several plugs set neatly beneath each one. Instantly
the disk became transparent and he saw that it was a small visual panel giving
a view of space similar to that shown by the major "windows." Across
this disk appeared various spidery cross lines, directional lines.
Nelson
pushed a second plug and a glow appeared in the center of the crossbars. It
changed slowly from blue to green as he watched. He heard a humming sound
coming from the board. The green changed slowly to yellow and began to work
into orange. In a flash of intuition it struck Nelson that a force charge was
building up, that something was charging the weapon in that wall.
The
orange changed to a burning red dot, and then there was a click, and a plug
popped out. The red dot remained, and now Nelson was sure that all he had to do
was to push the new plug in and the weapon would discharge.
Taking
no chances, young Parr proceeded to activate and charge the other three gunsights. Then he returned to the main control observation
panel.
Even
as he went toward it he knew the yellow dots were back. He leaned over the
panel. The V of
nine pursuers was there, reversed, coming again straight as an arrow for
Nelson's ship.
He
could dodge again, but eventually they would catch him. He decided to try his
luck with the ship's guns.
Nelson
watched the yellow dots creep slowly closer to his ship. He stepped over to the
wall panel and the four visual disks. On one of them a spot of yellow had
appeared at one far edge. The first of the Marauders was in sight of the ship's
detectors.
Nelson
risked a glance out the actual window panel, but he could see nothing against
the stars. But the gun-sights showed the enemy moving slowly closer to the
central line of crossbars.
Another
yellow dot appeared dimly behind the first one, but the first was visibly
glowing brighter. Nelson watched closely with held breath as the yellow dot
drew nearer the glowing point of scarlet. Minutes passed as he stood, keyed on
edge, waiting for the two dots to overlap. At last the red dot began to eclipse
the yellow one, to show an orange tint. He watched, his hand on the plug, and
then came the moment that there was but a single dot in the exact center of the
disk—a bright pure orange. Nelson pushed the plug in.
There
was an instantaneous flash of blinding white, and when Nelson's eyes stopped
blinking, the disk was dark, one yellow spot—that of the second ship-hovering
near the rim, and a dimmed yellow dot rapidly moving out to the edge and
vanishing. A spot of blue shone in the crossbars and began to build up to
green, as a new charge was loading into the gun.
Evidently
the weapons launched a bolt of atomic power, like a huge lightning blast. He
wondered whether it had destroyed the Marauder or only disabled it.
Now
he glanced at the three other weapon disks and was dismayed to see that two of
them carried yellow dots in sight. While he had been waiting, the rest of the
pursuers had come up, were surrounding his ship, closing in.
He
had not yet tasted the power of their weapons. His shot had probably taken them
completely by surprise. But now they would come for him with their weapons
blazing. Nelson realized that if they did, he had but scant moments to live.
He
gritted his teeth. Well, he'd put up a fight as long as he could. All his four
guns were activated, and on two of them, yellow dots were closing in to his
target sight. He watched them come, bracing himself unconsciously for the blow
that must surely be heading his way.
But
somehow they were holding their fire. He was wet with perspiration as another
red fire spot turned orange with its target. He slammed down the plug, and was
rewarded by another blinding white flash, taking care this time to look away so
that his sight would not be dazzled.
But
when he looked back the yellow dot was still in the center of the disk and
glowing brighter and brighter. He gazed with horror. Somehow the shot had been
neutralized, deflected!
There
came a terrific clap of thunder in his ears and the cube jolted violently.
Nelson was thrown from his feet. The ship's lights dimmed almost to darkness as
he slid across the floor, tingling as if a mighty hand had slapped him.
He
sat up dazed and shaken. Slowly the ship's lights struggled back into
brightness again. Nelson got to his knees, and then to his feet, dizzy from the
shock. He shook his head, forced himself back to his full senses, groped back
to the defense panel. But all four disks were black, lifeless, burned out.
Somehow,
he thought, they were able to catch that thunderbolt, toss it back on its
track, back to me! The ship was now helpless!
He
hurried back to the control panel, but to his horror, it too was dark. They had
blown the ship's control system entirely. He was now boxed up, blind in space,
out of control.
Nelson sat down and stared a moment. Would
the
Marauders
leave him there now, go on their way? No, he decided, it wasn't like them.
They'd come in person to look the ship over, to see what they had captured. Well,
he'd give them a fight if they did!
He
got up, went to the room he'd been using as sleeping quarters, found his
spacesuit, climbed into it. He buckled it on fully, secured his space helmet
tightly, leaving only the face panel open. Attired thus, he went to the ladderway to the lower level, descended, and found the
cabinet of tools that he had discovered there in his tour of exploration. He
found a nice thick metal bar, a couple feet long, a perfect crowbar or cudgel.
Armed with this, he clambered back up to the central chamber.
He
didn't have too long to wait. In a little while he heard a bump and a scraping
sound along the outside of the ship. There was a clanging as if something was
being affixed to the outside. Then there was a buzzing sound, and he
recognized the noise of the outer space lock door being opened. There was a
vibration in the floor as heavy feet tramped through and a sudden stir in the
ship's air as the inner lock door slid open.
Nelson
closed his helmet face panel, slipped up to the entry to his chamber, and
hefted his crowbar. He heard the clang of heavy feet stamping around down on
the floor below. Then suddenly a black metallic helmet popped up through the
round passageway in the floor. Nelson swung at it, and
the head pulled back.
He
had a glimpse of a curiously ridged black helmet, of a broad eye panel beneath
it, and a brief glimpse of two eyes darkly within. At least the Marauders were
humanoid, Nelson thought.
He waited. Then suddenly the opening seemed
to erupt figures. Three, four black metal-clad men
popped up through the floor trap as if shot from guns. Nelson swung his bar,
dashed in at them.
He
felt his weapon thud satisfyingly against a metal-clad body. There was a
yelling. He got a glimpse of a man
s face glaring at him through a helmet, as a black form loomed suddenly over
him ... a dark face with pale blue
eyes, set under a jutting pair of red eyebrows. Nelson swung his club, but it
was torn from his hands, and a second later there came a terrific thud on the
side of his helmet, a second crash as someone else struck him, and everything
went dark.
ChaptCr /7 Incredible Daybreak
elson Parr turned over in bed, snuggling his face against his pillow. Gradually he
became aware that he had been asleep, that he was waking up. Still, the
drowsiness of slumber kept him from opening his eyes. He was warm,
comfortable, and snug in bed, and the feel of the sheets was good.
He
wondered whether there would be school today, down at the main junction, but
then he remembered that he had graduated long ago. Well, then, he was going to
Earth to study. Again, this thought did not ring true. No, he thought, still
snuggled down, still unwilling to drop his last moments of sleep, that had been
done and he was home now. So then what was he supposed to do today?
He
lay still awhile, thinking. Gradually an uneasiness
began to fill his mind. Various thoughts and strange memories pushed into his
brain. They were going to evacuate Mars? But they already had! And he'd gone
somewhere with his dad ..
. oh, yes, to Pho-bos and Deimos. There'd been Jim Worden, he remembered now, and a
cold chill suddenly struck him.
Why,
Jim was dead, and terrible things had happened, and there had been Kunosh and his lies and treachery and then the cubical ship
and then a chase.
The
Marauders! The
thought exploded in Nelson's head like a bomb. His eyes popped open and he sat
up in bed with a start.
He
blinked. The first thing he saw was a triangular piece of cloth tacked to the
wall bearing the inscription in bright red letters, Solis Lacus General School. It was his old school banner. He swiftly
moved his eyes about. There was a carefully hand-framed fix-photo of his father
and some ceremony. Against the wall was a jumping
stick and other athletic equipment. His eyes fell on his old bureau, on his
little folding desk, on a chair. On the chair was a pile of clothes, neatly
folded. His rocket-travel jumper, his shoes.
He
looked at his bed, and it was his own bed and this was his own room in his
father's house on Mars. Nelson rubbed his eyes, looked
at his hands. Could this all have been a dream?
But
the memory was too vivid. He rubbed his head and winced a little. There was a
tender spot on his scalp where the Marauder club had struck him. This was no
dream! But how had he got here? And what had happened to the space plunderers?
He
climbed out of bed, half expecting someone to rush in, attack him. But he heard
nothing. He was dressed in a pair of his own pajamas, a pair he remembered
having left behind.
Hastily
he changed clothes, got dressed. He glanced at himself in a mirror. He seemed
changed, spacetanned. He looked as if he had been
through an experience, no doubt about it.
Dressed,
he stared around the bedroom he thought he had left behind forever. It seemed
unchanged, and yet... he carefully
enumerated everything in it. There was a
change. Something caught his eye on the main wall. There had always been a
blank panel there, a Martian picture panel presumably, inactive like all the
Martian mysteries. It was still there—but it was no longer black and dull.
The
panel was alive with light and color. Nelson went over,
stared at it. There was a picture there, a painting perhaps, if you could
imagine a painting made of light and pure color and incredible full-dimensional
realism. It showed a scene on some strange fantasy world. Two suns glowed down
from a purple sky and a figure in weird armor was battling with a dragonlike being. Nelson stared at it, awed by the scope.
It might have been a true color, true depth photo—but it was fantasy.
Or
was it fantasy? Perhaps—perhaps it was an actual photo of some place in the
universe.
Nelson
now perceived that another panel presumed to hide the original closet fixture
of the Martian room was gently bright with color, though not picturing
anything. He went over to it, touched it, and the panel drew silently aside.
There
was a closet there, and in it hung clothing of strange designs and weaves, the
clothing of the lost Martians.
Nelson opened the door of his room, went out. He heard nothing, saw nobody. Swiftly he
went through the house. Everywhere it was the same. Where there had been
mysterious and unresponsive panels, fixtures that wouldn't operate, now there
were life and energy. The rooms glowed with a source of light plainly different
from the crude string of Earth-made atomic bulbs. The kitchen apparatus, oddly
designed, was responsive to the touch. The closets would open and there were
all manner of Martian wonders in them.
In the main room, Nelson touched a panel that
had been dark as long as he could remember and music came into the room. Music
that followed no rules of symphonic construction, yet pleased and charmed. And
with the music, lights and colors played over the room in harmony with it.
Nelson
now did what so far he had not dared to do. He looked out of a window. It was
apparently early morning, for the sun was rising low
in the dark sky. Already the Iollipoplike plants that
grew everywhere in the city were unfolding their
cores, to reach out hungrily for the light that meant life to them. And Nelson
realized that there were at least twice as many of these plants as there had
been before.
There
was a roadway passing the house and he saw something come along it. There was a
flash and he got a glimpse of an oddly shaped vehicle bulleting past him ... a Martian "car," one of those
glimpsed on radar photos in the hidden vaults but never actually gotten at by
Earth's explorers.
He
left the window, suddenly hungry, returned to the kitchen. A panel revealed
rows and rows of what were probably Martian canned edibles, but Nelson decided
not to chance them. There was still his mother's portable storage space and
there were still plenty of good old Earth foods left behind. So he made himself
a breakfast and as he sat there, he tried to figure things out.
There
wasn't much he could work on. He had been caught by the Marauders, overcome.
Obviously he had then been taken back to Mars by them, installed here, while
they systematically plundered the old planet of its hidden treasures. Evidently
they'd had no trouble cracking the secrets of its vaults. Probably to as accomplished
a race of superscientific bandits, this would be
simple.
Nelson
was wondering how long it would take them to loot Mars before they set off to
feast on Earth, and what they intended to do with him, when he heard footsteps
come up to the door of the house. They were hard, firm steps, and Nelson gulped
down the food in his mouth, stood up and went into the living room just as the
door opened and two men came in.
They
were short and chunkily built, both with the same kind of darkly tanned
space-burned complexions, both with sharp pale blue eyes, both with short
shocks of red hair, both smiling with reckless confidence. They were the faces
of Marauders that Nelson had last seen through the eye slits of black space
armor.
Now
the two men, wearing brilliantly colored jackets, short leathery pants, and
knee boots, stared at Nelson. One laughed, advanced toward the boy.
"Ah," he said in jovial-sounding though somewhat sharply clipped
words, "here's our bantam rooster now, up and doing."
And
before Nelson could get over his surprise, the Marauder grabbed him by an arm
and slapped him comradely on the back. The young man jerked his arm away,
turned angrily.
"Oh,
now, Taktor," called the other man, "watch
out! He's liable to give you a dose of his strong right arm too!"
The
first man hastily disengaged himself, backed away, holding up his hands, while
laughing. "Take it easy," he said quickly. "Whoa, boy, we don't
mean any harm!"
The
other man nodded, also smiling broadly. "Indeed not. Why, we think you
put up a real good batde. I know at least one
commander that's not going to live down the wallop your Malakarji
bolt handed his ship. He's going to be a mighty foolish-looking officer every
time your story comes up!"
Nelson
blazed up. "You don't mean any harm! Why did you follow me? Why do you
come tearing up and down the universe on mischief? I don't know what you call
yourselves, but the rest of the universe calls you a gang of murdering
Marauders!"
The
first man held up his hands again, shaking his head softly, but still smiling.
"Uh—uh, now don't get mad," he said. "We know just what it is
that some
people have called us. I
guess to them we might be the Marauders. But you got us wrong, boy. We're just
after a little adventure and fun and exploration. And maybe right a few wrongs
while getting them."
"Oh,"
said Nelson sarcastically, "you call looting and plundering this old
planet fun and adventure, do you? And I suppose when you start in to burn and
murder on Earth, that'll be called exploration?"
The
two men's faces suddenly sobered. The first one shook his head. "Now wait
a minute, young fellow, before you go on like that. Better sit down and talk a
bit. You've got a lot of strange ideas." He set am
example by drawing up a cushion and sitting down.
His
comrade switched off the wall music and sat down himself. Nelson, suspicious,
settled himself o* a chair.
"First,"
said one, "I'd better introduce myself. I'm Taktor:
Word-leamer, and this is Bodril: Space-leader. We've been given the job of talking
this over with you. As you can tell by my name, it's my profession to learn
languages and I took the liberty of learning yours when you were unconscious
the last few days. We have means of reading brain patterns and transposing them
to other brains that can give us the exact hang of a language almost
overnight."
Nelson
nodded slowly. Then that would account also for their knowledge of where he had
lived when on Mars. They'd picked that up in the course of their probing.
"Second,"
said the man called Bodril, "we're not doing the
looting and plundering around here; you and your friends were doing that. This house now. You think of it as yours and you've moved
your stuff in here and tried to break open the private closets and belongings
of its real owners. This happens to be the home of Kaktal:
Valve-maker and his family, and he's had to put off claiming it and coming home
until we get things cleared with you.
"To
top it off, we hoped to find things as spick and span as we left them and
instead we find all sorts of monkeying around. You
people tried to blow up our vaults, even tried an atomic blast in one place.
You marked up our cities, dumped your furniture all over the place, tried to
fool around with our plantations, ran all kinds of
crazy wiring all over the place, and so on. It's us that should be angry, not
you."
Nelson
jumped to his feet. "What are you trying to put over!
Already you're trying to steal this planet as your very own, handing out the
houses, and taking great airs just because you know how to work the lost
Martian vaults and locks. You come from some forgotten hole in the galaxy,
tearing about, breaking up honest people's civilizations, and leaving a trail
of wreckage. If this world belongs to anybody, it would be the old Martians.
And since they're all gone and buried, it's the rightful inheritance of their
neighbors in space, and that's us people of Earth!"
The
two stared at him for a moment, speechless. Then, as one, they turned, their
eyes wrinkled, and burst into fits of laughter. They slapped each other on the
back and howled.
Finally
Taktor caught his breath, wiped his brow, and choked
out to the indignant Nelson, "Why—don't you know yet what we're talking
about? The 'forgotten hole in the galaxy' we came from is here, right here!
We're the 'lost' Martians, fellow! This is our world! We're from Mars and we've
come home!"
"You! You are the real Martians!" Nelson
exclaimed in amazement. "But how can that be? Where have you been? We
found no sign of you." He stopped, then suddenly narrowed his eyes and
added suspiciously, "Or is this just a trick on your part? Are you making
a claim just to throw a false track?"
Taktor and Bodril stopped
smiling, looked at each other briefly.
"Well," said Bodril, "that's a good
point. How can we prove we're the rightful owners of this world?"
Taktor waved a hand. "Oh, I think we can prove
it all right. Now that our vaults are open, the Martian files available, our
young friend will have no trouble seeing the truth. For one thing he'll find
the clothing we left in our houses fits our build. He'll find pictures, screen
records, life studies, color statues, and so on in our various halls and
museums and he'll recognize our people from tiiem. He
can study our history for himself.
"Here,"
he turned to Nelson, "watch this." He turned to the wall panel which
had been serving as a music channel, flicked his hand over it. Immediately it
cleared, presented a scene looking in upon a room. There were several people there, dressed in odd costumes and evidendy
they were engaged in bitter controversy. Nelson recognized that tiiis was undoubtedly part of a play, probably being run
off on some entertainment channel.
The
costumes were fantastic, definitely of a prema-chine
culture, and the play probably represented something from the works of some
Martian Shakespeare or an Aristophanes. The locale was undoubtedly Mars, and
the characters were clearly of the same race as his two Marauders. All were
red-haired, all pale-blue-eyed.
Taktor waved his hand again and the picture was
replaced by one recognizable as a classroom platform, whereon
an instructor was obviously explaining something about history and pointing to
a chart on the wall. This chart, actually a wonderfully alive relief map, was
recognizable to Nelson as part of the familiar Martian landscape. Despite his
suspicion, he leaned forward with interest, studying what seemed to be the outlines
of ancient Martian states, as they must have been in some early
pre-canal-building period.
Taktor waved his hand again and again,
and more and more scenes of all sorts appeared. Discussions,
dances, musicmakers, more plays. Clearly there
was a widely varied culture alive on Mars at that moment, a culture whose
people were always the race of the Marauders, and which was so deep, so
widespread, and so clearly geared to the red planet as to leave the matter no
longer disputable.
Nelson
nodded to Bodril's arched eyebrows. "You've made
your point, I admit it. But that doesn't account for where you've been or how
you got your bad reputation as Marauders."
Bodril smiled. "I guess that calls for some
history, eh, Taktor?"
The
Word-learner nodded soberly. "That's one of the things I'm supposed to go
into now, before we can bring this young Earthling before the Command Board.
Make yourself comfortable then, and I'll try to clear things up a little."
Chapter 18
The
Star Wanderers
N |
elson drew
his chair up closer, while Taktor: Word-learner
flickered through the central wall screen until he had a scene he was seeking.
It was a relief globe of Mars, a planet whose green areas were vastly greater
and showed small lakes and even a sea-size mass of blue in their midst. The
desert regions were present but lesser in area.
"This
is Mars as it was at about the dawn of our recorded history. This was perhaps—a
half million or so of your years ago. As you see, even at that time the planet
was drying up and the deserts were growing. Our people inhabited one
particular fertile area in the Southern Hemisphere, where we lived amid the
forests and were pretty much of a farmer folk.
"Our
earliest records show small isolated city-states quite often warring among each
other for the dwindling lakes and water rights—for even then the problem of
water was an overwhelming one. I learn from your mind and language that gold
apparently occupied the major role in your development of an exchange medium.
On Mars it was water rights from the very first,
and our original and oldest currency consisted
of pledges and permits for water.
"We
had a number of wars among each other as time went on," said Taktor, and his flickering fingers in the air over the wall
panel called forth various changes of scenery. There were shots of walled
cities, snug amid green cactus jungles, shots of men in bronze and iron armor
bashing away at each other with swords and axes. "This sort of thing
lasted thousands of years, our states growing in
size, our race moving out, discovering other fertile belts, spreading over all
the habitable areas always in search of water.
"In
the course of this time we improved our civilization—and our ways of warfare.
We learned to make self-moving vessels for the land and even for the air. By
and by only three big combinations of cities existed as self-ruling states, and
there was the grave danger of a new and final war with the newly developed
atomic power weapons."
Taktor
again displayed a hemisphere of Mars and this time Nelson could note that the
deserts had spread, the green areas contracted, the lakes and seas vanished.
"About
this time also we ourselves realized that our world had changed even in the
course of our own history. We also were noting that our atmosphere was slowly
thinning, that our world was growing colder. A great conference was called and
our best brains thrashed the whole thing out. We had never become many
different races—all Martians are the same color and build, all had the same
language, so really there was nothing dividing us save matters of pride and
points of government. All these were not important as soon as we realized that
no one could win a war wherein the planet itself was dying. We discussed this
thing for an entire generation, with every man and woman joining in by means of
radio communication, and eventually we emerged with one state federation and
with a long and difficult program for saving the planet. We pooled our
resources, went without, but in another generation we had laid out the main
canal system, set up the system of water supply from our polar reserves,
organized our agriculture on a world conservation basis."
Nelson's
fascinated eyes saw the familiar network of canals sprout across the face of
the hemisphere. He saw thousands of men toiling with atomic and hand diggers to
lay down tens of thousands of miles of unbreakable and uncorrosive
pipelines. He saw men going through the growing fields and forests destroying
the unproductive plants and cultivating only those which produced the most food
value at the least water usage.
"Because
we saw that air too was thinning, we next set out to build airtight cities, to
put our factories and main structures underground," went on Taktor, and scenes illustrating this flashed before Nelson
s eyes.
"All
this work took time and several thousands of your years went by before we had
completed it. By then our world was much as it is today, our agriculture
tightly controlled and almost entirely automatic. We had evolved atomic
sciences to points which enabled us to make immense caverns, unbreakable walls,
to travel where we willed."
"Did you build spaceships then?"
asked Nelson.
"You
could have gone to Earth then, conquered it for yourself."
"We
didn't pay much attention to spaceships in those days, but after our work was
completed we did. We visited Earth ..."
On the screen flashed a scene taken from a ship approaching Earth. Nelson
watched and noticed that it was different from the world he'd known. Great
white ice sheets covered much of its Northern Hemisphere and swirling clouds
obscured the rest of the planet. Obviously it was a period during one of the
great ice ages.
"We
found Earth an uninviting world, stormy and cold, filled with jungles such as
we had never imagined, wild beasts of terrible temper—for there were never any
big animals on Mars, there were no other mammals besides ourselves—and wild
savage men." Here Nelson got a glimpse—an actual 3-D color photo taken
from fife—of cavemen, hairy, painted, bent-shouldered men, whose sharp eyes
peered from shaggy eyebrows, and whose hands clutched crude spears of chipped
stone.
"Although
Earth had the water and air we needed, we didn't like it, preferred the quiet
and order of Mars. We went to all the other worlds of this system, but you must
know yourself what we found. None could ever be home, none were inviting."
Taktor flashed a few quick scenes of the planets
Nelson himself had studied. "So we settled down on our own world and
studied and thought and debated. By and by our various arguments over matters
of the most obscure and often silly points of philosophy, of game making,
became more and more violent. Fights between debaters became frequent, and
struggles between audiences at games and lectures became commonplace. More
and more we found ourselves returning to the ways of violence and combat.
Instead of the fight for food and water which had marked our early days of
savagery, we had fights over athletic contests or differences of opinion as to
whether the universe was expanding or contracting. People began to go armed and
men wore insignia to demonstrate their particular enthusiasms.
"Finally
it reached such a point of bloodshed that we were all a little surprised and
frightened." Here there was a scene in an underground arena, obviously one
of the caverns beneath a city. A mass of Martians were milling about, and
Nelson caught glimpses of knives rising and falling, splashed with red, and
finally the incredible blast of a small atomic bomb blotted out the arena.
"We
called a planetwide conference and again our whole
world took counsel. It became clear to us that we were stagnating, that having
no further frontiers to discover, no more great building projects to make, we
were turning upon ourselves. Our frustration was breaking us down. We discussed
then the problem of finding a way to fly to the stars."
Taktor
stopped a moment. Bodril: Space-leader leaned
forward, said, "You see the stars are infinite in number. Once we could go
to the stars, there could never be an end to exploration, to adventure. And
maybe we could find other civilized beings to debate with, to exhaust our
energies on, to trade knowledge with."
Bodril sat back, glanced
at Taktor. "Sorry to internipt."
The other looked at him, said, "Maybe you ought to continue from here.
It's more in your line now."
The
Space-leader nodded, turned again to Nelson. "Perhaps you Earthlings have
considered the problem of star travel?"
"Yes,"
Nelson answered. "We have thought of it, but it has always seemed a hard
and profitless task. The stars are so far away that even if we could travel at the
speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, it would take us almost four years just
to get to the nearest star. It would take an equally long time to come home.
And it will never be possible to travel even at that light speed, because solid
matter, such as ships and men, would cease to exist as matter and become merely
energy when moving so fast."
Bodril nodded. "I see you people are well
advanced. Not at all like the cavemen Taktor
showed us. You have hit on the root of the problem exactly.
"With
our perfected release of atomic power, it is possible to imagine a spaceship
accelerating until it actually becomes light. We knew we could send a ship to
the stars if we wanted to. It would be a matter of keeping the spaceship as
fast as possible without too dangerous a distortion due to the laws governing
mass and speed. The safety point in actual practice turns out to be about half
the speed of light. So that we could go to the nearest star
and return, not in eight years, but in sixteen years."
Taktor put in, "That is always assuming there
was anything worth seeing around the nearest star. And as a matter of fact,
there wasn't much." He waved a hand.
On
the wall appeared a long black ship, much like the present Marauder craft
Nelson saw it leave Mars, head out into the great vastness of space toward a
dim star. He saw that star grow into a red ball, Proxima
Centauri he supposed it to be from his lessons. Around it he saw one dark huge
world appear, a cold gaseous planet deadly to life. He saw the black ship turn,
circle awhile, and then head back. He saw it ease down onto Mars and land.
"The
men who flew that craft were due for a terrible surprise," said Bodril. "They thought they had found an amazing thing,
for once they had started out, their trip had seemed
to last but a few short months instead of the long years that they had prepared
for. They thought that the theories of astronomy and physics were wrong, that
the stars were easily reached in short times. But they returned to find that
what had been but a few months to them was still seventeen years for those they
had left behind! Their friends were old or dead, their families grown up or
changed, their children seeming older than their parents."
"I
know," said Nelson. "It was the time distortion that takes place as
speed increases. Einstein worked that out on Earth two centuries ago."
"Yes,"
said Bodril, "then you know. There is a law of
nature that rules speed. The faster a body goes, the more its length draws out
to infinity and the shorter its time duration becomes. In practice it means
that in a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light, its actual length
is drawn out by this speed to many, many times its original length, and the
motion and time sense of passengers and machinery within it is slowed down. To
men riding inside, a trip may seem to take but a minute when to those waiting
on a home planet the same period takes hours or days. The crew of a starship
live and age slowly, but they themselves are not aware of it, for everything
about them has changed in the same proportion. Only when they slow down, return
to normal, can the difference be discovered."
"What
this meant," said Taktor slowly, "was that
trips to the stars were perfectly practical within the lifetime of the crew,
but that the price they would pay would be permanent exile from their families
and homes. The world they would return to after*what might seem a trip of a
single year would be a hundred or a thousand years in the future of the world
they had left. They would be friendless men on a planet of strangers. It was
too high a price to pay."
There
was silence for a while in the room. Then Taktor went
on, "The matter was discussed for a long time and no one came to any
decisions. A few men did leave in ships, and did come back to be lonely
strangers. But nobody wanted this fate. For a while the matter was let drop.
Then the violent fights and arguments began again and new bloodshed was breaking
out. Again, the whole world took counsel."
Another presentation of people in Martian
homes listening to their scientists and social leaders talking. "This time a startling new course was
proposed. At first it was so unusual, people were
unable to credit it as serious. But then it began to take hold on imaginations
and very rapidly became the rage of every man, woman, and child on Mars.
"It was nothing less than the mass
vacationing of the entire population to the stars! The idea was to build enough
ships, thousands in number, to have a place for every living Martian, including
the children and babies. Then to seal all fragile things, to lock up our cities
and properties, to install automatic controls on the agriculture and workings
of our world, and go en masse to the stars! In that way we could all have our
relaxations, end our frustrations, enjoy the glories and wonders of the
universe, visit distant worlds, learn new things, and all return home together.
There would be no lonely exiles, no agonized young men looking for familiar
faces amid a world of their great-grandchildren grown up, no wives or mothers
kissing their men good-by forever, knowing they would never see them again
during their lifetime."
Nelson
watched the screen as he saw the project go into operation. He saw the great
fleets of black star-ships growing, as the incredible underground factories of
Mars poured them out from materials mined on asteroids and planet cores. He saw
the controls being set up, he saw the sealing up of the caverns and vaults by
impermeable subatomic shields. At a question as to why these shields resisted
even the atom bombs of the Earth explorers, Taktor
said, "Actually a dimensional shift was used here. A thin layer of matter
on the surface of each vault wall and door was shifted slightly out of this
dimension, warped across a fourth dimension flex. No blast could even touch
such a surface."
Finally
Nelson saw a scene whereon the great black starships,
each holding thousands of people, lifted from their desert beds and took off
for the stars.
"That first star trip took seven years
for those on the ships. We visited dozens of stars, explored hundreds of
planets, turned up several that were inhabited. After our seven years we
returned to a Mars that had aged several thousand years. But it did not matter,
for we had done our work well. The planet was still ready and waiting, our
fields still growing, our water still pumping, our homes still untouched.
"That
first trip satisfied our frustrations and culture for almost ten generations.
We had brought back so much in knowledge and material that it took that length
of time to exhaust it all. The tenth generation took off again for the stars,
and again Mars was left untenanted and locked up."
Nelson
watched fascinated as scenes among the stars flashed before him. He saw worlds
galore, some vast and cold, some small and dark. He saw mountainous worlds and
desert ones. He saw red suns and blue suns and multiple ones. He saw beings of
dreadful shape attack the Martians when they landed. He saw manlike beings
welcome the star visitors, trading with them, saw the Martian men and women
wandering the streets of weird cities arm in arm like tourists on vacation. He
saw Martians climbing mountains so high their tops were without air. He saw
Martians hunting incredible beasts in purple forests. And he saw warfare.
He
saw that the Martians were a tough and vigorous people, who responded to attack
with attack. That they never flinched from opposition but met
it and forced their way in. He saw that they never took no for an answer
from a strange civilization, insisting always on their right to entry. Nelson
was not sure he could agree with their actions.
"No
wonder they called you Marauders," Nelson said. "It seems to me that
you did a lot of things no honest explorer would do."
"Hey,
wait before you call us names," said Bodril.
"But we weren't really pirates. We stole notlung,
we enslaved nobody, we left things always better and
richer than we found them."
"What
about the Vegans?" asked Nelson, thinking he had found a flaw in their story. "They are terrified of you, told about your
reputation in their system, and how they had to flee from your coming."
"Oh,
them," said Bodril. "They're a pretty
slippery crowd. They lived on a small mountainous world and used to try to
wreck approaching spaceships from the civilized planets near them—like the Malakarji, one of whose ships you seem to have been using.
When a ship would land on their world in need of fuel or repair, they'd trap
the crew, steal the ship. They had a completely wrong and crooked system of
thinking. They pretended they were better than their neighbors and didn't want
to trade with them when actually it was their neighbor worlds who cut them off, refused to take chances with their sneaky
cunning."
"We
gave them a shaking upl" said Taktor. "Scared the daylights out of
them. Their leaders, the worst ones, built a couple of big spherical
starships, and ran away when they heard we were coming. Don't know where they
went, but without those leaders we were able to open their world to honest
trade and make it safe for space travelers."
"That
happened on this last trip," said Bodril.
"I myself helped on that campaign. Only a couple years
ago it seems like, though I guess it must be a
couple thousand years ago your time. Wonder where those Vegan refugees went?
Maybe next time our descendants go out they could try to follow them, look
them up." Suddenly he narrowed his eyes and stared sharply at Nelson.
"Say, just where did you get that Malakarji
Vegan houseboat you were in when we caught you?"
"Yes,"
said Taktor, eyes gleaming, "where'd you get it
and why did you think we were enemies? Who told you about the Marauders?"
Chapter 19
The
Black Cruiser
W |
hy...uh..." Nelson stammered, caught off guard. Somehow
he had simply assumed that they had known all about the moon secrets and the
Vegan runaways, but now he realized that they couldn't possibly have known. To
the Martians the fact that their planet had had two moons would come as a big
surprise, for when they had left several thousand years before it hadn't any
and when they returned it still was moonless.
Swiftly
he outlined to Taktor and Bodril
the events which had taken place during the last few months. They listened to
him with obvious amazement. When the young man told how he had been given the
cubical ship by Kunosh, they nodded.
"It
was probably one they had seized by treachery and took along with them. The Malakarji are fairly nice people as they go. We got along
fine with them once we showed them their charge guns weren't enough to beat
us," Bodril remarked. Taktor
was lost in thought. Finally he said, "You
say one of the moon ships simply ran away, but
the other headed for Earth along with your father and his men. Do you suppose
your peoples will believe them?"
When
Nelson nodded, he went on, "If that is so, then Earth must be expecting us
to attack them in force. Then your people must be arming themselves and getting
ready to beat off any visitors from Mars! And if these Vegans live up to their
word and hand over some of their power sources, then the situation is quite
dangerous."
He
fell silent, but Bodril took up the line of thought.
"You see, Nelson, it is one thing to develop tremendous power sources,
power beyond the atom, power that taps the basic core of the universe itself
such as we have done and the Vegans have, and to know just what it is that you are
doing. As you discover it, you learn its terrible possibilities. Wrongly used,
or used by people who don't really understand it, you can blow up a planet by
accident. You can explode a sun! The trouble is that the Vegans were too
cowardly to play too much with it and that your Earth people are still too
young to be properly cautious. Add to that their idea that they are defending
themselves against Marauders and total ruin, and they may not wait to
learn."
Nelson
saw their point. "And you can't wait and let them be, because then they'll
get up an attacking expedition and come here. Earth won't stand still. We're
like yourselves, you know."
Taktor: Word-learner smiled a bit. "You know
why? You know why we never attempted to interfere or attack the men of Earth
and why we don't want to have to fight them off now? It's because we're all
from the same stock. We Martians are your own distant cousins. We have the same
inheritance."
"What!" Nelson
said, startled. "How's that?"
Taktor
nodded. "One of the reasons that led us into hunting around the universe
is to find the race that took our ancestors from Earth. It must have been about
a half million terrestrial years ago when something or some star-beings were
passing through the Sol System. They landed on Earth, captured a group of
shaggy cavemen, took them to Mars, and dumped them in the middle of the largest
and most fruitful jungle area in the Southern Hemisphere. Those were our
ancestors.
"We
found this out by exhaustive archaeology. We can trace primitive skeletons back
just so far and no farther. And when we first visited Earth we proved our
theory completely. So, you see, we are as human as you are. We, too, developed
fast, a little ahead of you in some ways, mainly because Mars never had the ice
ages, earthquakes, floods and epidemics that your much larger world had, not to
mention the problem of different races and languages."
Bodril glanced at a timepiece. "I think we can
break this up. Personally, I'm hungry. How about something to
eat?"
They
got up and went into the kitchen. There Taktor
manipulated the native cooking equipment, incredible working devices, and with
hardly any effort the three sat down to a rather remarkable meal the like of
which Nelson had never eaten before.
When
they were done, Taktor informed them that they were
expected at a meeting of the Command Board where the matter of Earth would be
discussed.
Nelson
climbed into his warm outdoor jumper, adjusted his respirator, and went out of
the house. The two Martians hadn't brought along respirators, and the reason
for that was that their vehicle was parked just outside. They didn't bother
about the short time they were in the open, simply leaped into their vessel and
when Nelson was in, slammed the airtight door and went. The vehicle, a simple
eggshell device, had almost no machinery and skimmed the ground without actually
touching it. The power supply was a system of broadcast power used throughout
Mars. This had been shut down and sealed during the Martians' absence and was
another reason for the utter failure of the colonizers to make any native
equipment function.
The
Command Board was located in a large domed building at the center of the city.
Several vehicles were already there, and Nelson and his two escorts entered to
find a group of about thirty men already seated in comfortable easy chairs
around a series of low tables obviously housing recorders and transmitters.
There
was a strong similarity between all the men there, Nelson noted as he was
introduced and presented to several of the leaders. None were over five feet
four, all were very broad-shouldered and deep-chested,
stocky and muscular, and all were red-haired.
A
graying oldster seemed to be the head. He was Norfal:
World-talker and played the role of chairman.
When
Nelson had seated himself, Bodril took the floor.
Talking in Martian, he outlined Nelson's story and the entire problem. Sitting
next to young Parr, Taktor: Word-learner whispered a
rapid translation of everything that was going on.
Then there followed some heated discussion.
There was none, Nelson was relieved to note, who counseled war. It was agreed
that every effort must be spent to find some way of making peace with their
neighbor world. The problem was how to get through to them.
A
suggestion was made that they broadcast directly to Earth when their planetary
positions permitted it. If Nelson came before the cameras and explained, then
perhaps that would break down terrestrial suspicions.
"It
won't work," Nelson said when he heard this. "I am sure the Earth
leaders will believe that I am speaking under hypnosis or compulsion. That sort
of trick was tried in our wars and they would surely suspect it. I don't think
they would believe anything you said, in view of the stories the Vegans must
have told them."
Another
suggestion was made that they simply leave Earth alone. But Norfal
himself rejected that. If they did, then sooner or later Earth would attack the
Martians. Even if they didn't, if ever a future generation of Martians wanted
to set off for the stars again, leaving Mars untenanted, they would certainly
find the planet devastated or ruined by the time they returned. It was
essential, Norfal insisted, to make peace and
establish good relations right away, without delay.
Finally
Nelson took the floor. He had been listening to all the various viewpoints and
saw that they were getting nowhere. "I have an idea," he said.
"I think I can find a way." Taktor was
translating his words into Martian as he spoke.
"While
the people of the Earth will not believe me if I spoke from Mars, they will
believe me if I meet them in person. It seems to me that I have got to go back
myself and tell them about you. If you still have the Vegan cubeship
you found me in, I can go back in that, for they must be still expecting it.
They would let me through if I arrived in that."
There
was some conversation and then Norfal answered:
"I think you speak correctly. If you yourself could appear there, then
indeed they might listen to reason. But it will not be possible for you to use
the cubeship. Not only would it be all too slow in
making the trip, but it is still out of commission. The blast that hit it has
burned out its powerlines. They would all have to be
repaired. And then, if you appeared in that ship, why would they believe you?
There would be no evidence that your account of the—the Marauders—was anything
but a dream."
Bodril got the floor. "I think I can find a
solution. If Nelson Parr could go back to Earth in a Martian cruiser, he would
arrive there very fast and very soon. The cruiser would prove our reality.
While perhaps a whole fleet of our ships might run the risk of encountering
terrestrial suicide attackers, one swift small cruiser could slip through their
guards . . . and would not be such a menace as to draw too heavy or too violent
fire."
This
struck a responsive note. The meeting ended with the plan's approval. Besides
its being the quickest way out, Nelson realized that the bravado and daring
involved in the cruiser idea appealed to the Martian sense of adventurousness.
During
the next few days Nelson had a chance to look over the secrets of the world on
which he had been born. He was shown through the great underground workshops,
saw the vast all-mechanical machinery that turned out most of the products
used on Mars without the need of human supervision. He spent fascinating hours
in museum and recording rooms, gazing with awe and wonder at the vivid records
of life on distant star worlds. All too soon the time came to depart.
The
cruiser was a sleek black craft, a couple of hundred feet long, streamlined
and rakish in appearance. It rested on the desert floor outside Solis Lacus, in
an area reserved to the great star vessels themselves. For as far as the eye
could see were row on row of giant ships, thousands of feet in length, towering
up like manmade cliffs. Among them the cruiser seemed almost a speck.
Bodril: Space-leader, who had been a captain of one
of the great ships, had volunteered to pilot the little cruiser to Earth. Once
again Nelson took leave of the red desert of Mars as he paused in the lock of
the cruiser to look back. Then he entered, found his way to the forward control
cabin.
Bodril was seated at an amazingly simple control
board. It was a glassy hemisphere in which seemed to float tiny images of the
inner planets. The board was strictly automatic. All controls were primarily
machine run. The art of space flight had been so simplified that all a pilot
had to do was to indicate where he wanted to go. The mechanical controls did
the rest, automatically computing the course, launching the ship, directing
its speed and slowing it on arrival.
Without
more ado, Bodril flicked the starter and leaned back.
The ship left the ground, soared upward
and pointed itself sunward. Nelson felt nothing.
It was smooth.
There was nothing to do for most of the trip,
and it was a blessing that it could be done so fast. The Earth was visible but
still far away on the other side of the sun. The ship, which could travel at
interstellar speeds if necessary, cut the intercepting orbit short. They would
approach Earth in about four days' travel.
During
this time Nelson tried to put out of his head thoughts of his ordeal to come.
He felt sure that Earth's defenders would not be caught napping. He examined
the ship's armament, an impressive array of weapons and shields. He talked with
other members of the crew, and found them seasoned space warriors, veterans of
many a battle with monster and inhuman warriors. The stories they told were
always amazing.
Steadily
they neared the Earth. Then came a moment when an alarm rang throughout the
ship. Nelson dashed to the control room. Bodril sat
before the pilot board, hand resting on chin, an odd smile on his lips. When
Nelson came up, he pointed.
They
were still a million miles from Earth, but now a single spot hung in the void
between them. "It must be the outermost scout of the defending
fleet," said Bodril.
Contact had been made.
Chapter 20 The Battle of
Earth
1 |
here's only one
of them/' said Nelson, studying the board. "It's probably an advance scout
patrol." They rapidly closed in, not bothering to halt their regular
course for Earth. The other ship did not falter on its own
course. It seemed to be swinging out to intercept them.
"What
sort of craft would it be?" asked Bodril. "Rocket-driven? What kind of armament?"
Nelson
thought a moment. "It would be rocket-driven of course, because we have no
other kind of space drive yet—unless there were ships of another sort stored
away on Phobos. I don't think they would risk
something like that as a first scout. But as for armament, that's a puzzle.
"You
see, we never had a space war. There are no other intelligent races in this
system, and we never had any space pirates or powerful colonies. So we never
had a space-going war fleet. There are a number of fast emergency rocket craft,
and that is probably one of them. They could be armed in a hurry. I imagine
outside torpedo tubes could be rigged on their hulls
easily enough, fitted with rocket torpedoes adopted from the guided missiles
used during Earth's last great war. With atomic warheads, they could be quite
dangerous. Add proximity fuses, and it wouldn't be much trouble firing them at
an invader."
Bodril nodded. "That sounds like a good guess.
I've got our outer radar screens up so if anything approaches us, we'll know
of it."
They
could see the Earth defender approaching now and beginning to show up in their
telescopic view-plates. It was, as surmised, a small streamlined rocket,
heading still directly toward them, riding on streams of blue-white atomic fire
from its tubes. Now, even as they watched, they saw a spurt of yellow-white
fire from its side and a spark seemed to travel out from it and vanish.
"That's
the torpedo!" said Nelson. Bodril nodded silently, shifted a lever on his panel. Instantly a point of
color appeared in the hemispheric space sector plate. The torpedo was on track.
Bodril watched it a moment,
saw it nearing the thin outer circle that marked their own ship's outer sphere
of sensitivity. The moment it touched, there was a flicker, then a flash.
For an instant Nelson was blinded by the glare that swept in through the
nearest visual port in the control room. "That was a thorium disintegration
bomb," said Bodril.
"Won't
the rays penetrate our hull even now?" asked Nelson.
"Nothing but
visual light can get through
our neu-tralizer screen," said Bodril. "A good thing too.
If I
thought it was otherwise,
Fd
have blown that cruiser off the map the instant
we spotted
it. We
used to do that when attacked,
until we got the Procyon people's neutralizer devices."
"We should make a
careful point not to hurt
anyone," said Nelson.
"We've got to dodge and
box, but if any of the
defenders get killed, it will
be very
hard to keep Earth tempers down."
"I know," said Bodril. "We'd be the
same. You just better hope then
that that cruiser was shielded
against its own bomb's blast and
rays too."
The cruiser was already
slipping out of sight, far
off and losing speed.
Nelson expressed the opinion that
its crew surely must
have been armored against the
danger. "Probably had but
the one
torpedo," he added.
Now again they were heading on
toward the great glowing green-and-blue world. Nelson could see
the aura of its atmosphere glowing in the rays
of the
sun. He could see mists veiling
parts of its surface, and
the lower edge of South America
peeking through. It was a beautiful
world, he thought, the finest
in the
system.
The moon was not in their
path, but was just emerging
from the other, farther, side
of Earth.
A good
thing, Nelson thought, for the bulk
of whatever
war fleet
Earth had equipped was
probably based there. He explained this thought to Bodril.
"That's luck," said the
Martian space leader. "Maybe we can beat them in."
On they
sped, cutting down the miles
to Earth
hundreds by the
second. Again their radar signaled trouble. There was a line of little spheres
somewhere up ahead of them. Even as they watched they saw these mysterious
objects beginning to float in their direction.
"Must
be space buoys of some sort," said Nelson. "Patterned
after the floating mines of the sea wars. They'll be dangerous."
"Manned?"
asked Bodril, but Nelson shook his head and explained
the idea of mines to him. The Martian broke into a smile. "Well, as long
as they're not manned, they're no trouble."
He
whistled into the ship's communicator. Several answering hails showed his
gunners alert. One after another the Martian cruiser's various gun turrets
blinked into activity on the central board's markers. One after another the
little spheres vanished from their vision screen.
"What's
happening?" asked Nelson.
"I'm
giving my gunners some target practice. They're picking off the space mines by
hand beam," was the reply.
Another
alarm bell rang. This time there were several ships rocketing into their field
of vision from behind them.
"Clever,"
said Bodril. "They slipped up behind us from
somewhere. That'll keep us alert, but probably won't be much trouble. As long as we outdistance them. Besides, we can play a
little trick on them that'll have them puzzled." He pressed several
buttons on his board, grinning.
"The
one thing they probably don t expect is that we plan to land on Earth,"
said Nelson.
"Exactly. I'm sure they think we are just an advance
scout for a great fleet of invaders. So I'm giving them plenty of grounds for
their belief." He looked up from the board. "Look to our rear,
Nelson," he said.
The young Terrestrial turned, went over to
the port plate that looked out their rear. He gasped. Stringing out behind them
was a long line of identical cruisers, long black Martian craft. Farther behind
them, behind even the pursuing Earth ships, was a shadowy black cloud, the
mighty bulk of the entire Mars Marauder fleet!
"What is it!
Where'd they come from!" For one terrible
sinking instant the thought flashed through Nelson's head that he had been
deceived. That the Martians had fooled him into revealing Earth's secrets and
then had secretly launched a Marauder invasion on his heels. Bodrii's chuckle relieved the thought in an instant.
"Nice
show, eh! It's a three-dimension picture show we're putting on. For the last
million miles we have been spraying out a special type of dust on our course.
Projectors from our rear are now setting up some excellent films of our fleet
in full array. The dust motes pick up the projection, which is atomically
attuned to them and reflect the picture perfectly. It also will deceive
radars. But look at our attackers!"
On
their viewplate, the Earth fleet was shifting
swiftly, spreading out, moving no longer directly for the advance Martian ship,
which appeared to be but the smallest and weakest of patrol scouts, but was
heading suicidally for what appeared to be the mighty
mass of battleships a million miles to their rear!
"There
isn't a single defender coming for us now!" said Nelson amazed. "How
could they be so foolish!"
"Don't
take it to heart," said Bodril. "After all,
these men are truly brave, believe me. There are mighty few races in the galaxy
that would have the courage to go for the main fleet when surprised like that.
Almost all simply cut and run. You realize that every man in those Earth ships
believes he is going to certain death? That every man there is prepared to
throw away his life in an effort to save his world? It makes even a man like myself proud to share ancestors with them."
A
lump came to Nelson's throat. What the Martian had said was true. Those ships
must have been hastily manned with volunteers from the trade crews, from passenger
ships, from mining craft. They must have been piloted by every navigator his
world could scrape up, down to and including first-year students at Nelson's
own academy. For now it was clear that the trick had lured away all Earth's
defending spaceships.
From
the direction of Luna, another fleet was emerging, an array of some thirty or
forty ships of all sizes. This new and last fleet was also heading out, away
from Bodril's little cruiser,
out to meet what they thought was the invincible horde of Marauders!
But
the cruiser was already within the moon's orbit and slowing down, beginning to
work itself into an orbit preparatory to making a landing. "Look!"
Nelson pointed.
A
tiny sphere was showing its small crescent now between the moon and Earth.
"It's Phobos!" Nelson said. "That's
the Vegan starship that used to be one of Mars* moons. It seems to have been
placed in an orbit around Earth now, a sort of halfway station for the moon
flight." Bodril nodded quiedy,
asked about any other satellites. Nelson named the several man-made platforms
that circled the Earth closer down, and Bodril recorded the information for their caution in coming
in.
"Where
will we land?" he asked. "Better make it some
place where they won't try to bomb us from the air. I suggest a big
city."
Nelson
looked over the face of the Earth which now filled their entire view. "If
we land in a city, they wouldn't dare try to drop an H-bomb from the air
warplanes. That's a good idea. In fact I know the best place for our landing.
Why not the central courtyard of the Capital's official buildings? That's the
last place they'd dare to risk even bullets!"
"Good," said Bodril, "point it out to me."
Nelson
did so. "Can this ship land in such a limited space?"
"Watch and see,"
was the reply.
The
rakish black Martian craft swooped down. In an instant the whistling of the
outer atmosphere vibrated through their hull. Lower and lower the piratical
vessel plunged, the land below jumping up toward them in green vividness. Now
they were tearing along over roads and houses, swooping ever closer to the
great towered city that was their goal. Past outskirts and suburban homes, over
city streets, over skyscrapers and factories, their ship whooshed.
Below,
Nelson could see the flickering dots of aircraft futilely trying to pursue
them. Blazing red jets plunged up at them, and little clouds of smoke gave
evidence of the way in which ancient cannon and antiaircraft protections had
been taken from warehouses and museums and installed around the metropolis.
The
attacks stopped as the craft was over the city itself. The danger of damaging
buildings and citizens was too great to risk for the one attacker.
Now
ahead could be seen the slender white towers and graceful domes of the Capital
itself. Bodril swept his ship up, stood it almost on
its tail, and then began to slip it down in ever narrowing spirals.
Nelson
hung onto the handgrips and watched. He saw the tops of the towers appear, and
noticed them dotted with the faces of watching people. Gracefully the ship
slipped below the roof levels, spiraled down past windows clogged with the
staring government clerks and employees. Then the central courtyard appeared,
a wide plaza lined with trees and gardens, with statues of great men of history
ornamenting the outer lanes.
With
the ease of a dancer, the black cruiser from Mars righted itself
and settled without a jar in the exact center of the marble plaza.
Bodril turned in his seat,
waved a hand. "It's up to you now, Nelson," he said.
Walking
with the tremor of the seaman first come to land, of the spaceman unfamiliar to
gravity, and with the son come home, Nelson made his way to an opening airlock,
past the sober-faced squat crew members watching him silently, down the lock
and stepped out on the surface of Earth.
He saw a group of men emerge from the ornate
doorway of the great Central Building. Nelson waved to them, started to walk
slowly toward them. The men came on hesitantly, then one of them suddenly waved
back, ran forward from the group. It was a gray-haired man, a man space-tanned,
his face deep-lined. It was John Carson Parr.
The
rest of the story is easily told. Once father and son had greeted each other,
it was possible to bring Nelson's story before Earth's leaders, with the entire
population of the planet following his words on television and radio as he
stood before the officials and told them of their Martian neighbors. Bodril appeared later and managed to impress the people of
Earth with the humanness of their red planet cousins.
The
pact that was negotiated then and there cemented forever the alliance of the
only two civilized worlds in this system. That day was a day of rejoicing, a
holiday forever.
As
for the Vegans, one of their stories is simply accounted for. Doldnan and his Phobosians had already
thrown in their lot with Earth, foresworn the ways of their remote ancestors.
Their people were given space on the newly cleared and warmed Antarctic
Continent, and the secrets of their civilization and science given in exchange
for their new home world. The moon ship once known as Phobos
remained where it was, a convenient way station for interplanetary flight, an auxiliary moon.
As
for the cowardly people of Deimos, Kunosh and his crew, they have never been traced and never
been
heard from. Doubdess,
like all such spineless creatures, they are doomed to flee forever through the
endless uncharted reaches of outer space, always pursued by imaginary terrors,
always the victims of their own folly, always a dreadful example to all those
who have to decide between truth and lies, between courage and flight.