The Secret of the Martian Moons Page 2

  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

  The 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 liner, 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 disk-like 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 man-made 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 automatic, 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.”

  Chapter 3 The Last Men on Mars

  For 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 exactly 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 above ground 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.