The Secret of the Martian Moons Page 4

  “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 above ground. Nelse knew that they were to keep their presence a secret. Their game was to keep watch and hope 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, swiveling 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 t
ake off sometime late tonight,” was the reply. And so it was agreed.

  Chapter 5 Phobos

  When 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 university 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.

&n
bsp; 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 skillfully 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.