Collected Short Fiction, page 62
“Very good, sir,” said Brand.
A FEW hours later the Red Rover was sweeping around Mars, on a long curve, many thousands of miles from the surface of the red planet.
“We’ll pick out the spot to land while the sun is shinning on it,” Captain Brand told Bill. “Then we can keep over it, as it sweeps around into the shadow, timing ourselves to land just after midnight.”
“Isn’t there danger that we may be seen?”
“Of course. We can only minimize it by keeping a few thousand miles above the surface as long as it is day, and landing at night, and in a deserted section.”
As they drew nearer, the telescope revealed the surface of the hostile planet more distinctly. Bill peered intently into an eyepiece, scanning the red globe for signs of it malignant inhabitants.
“The canals seem to be strips of greenish vegetation, irrigated from some sort of irrigation system that brings water from the melting ice-caps,” he said.
“Lowell, the old American astronomer, knew that two hundred years ago,” said Captain Brand, “though some of his contemporaries claimed that they could not see the ‘canals.’ ”
“I can make out low green trees, and metal structures. I think there are long pipes, as well as open channels, to spread the water. And I see a great dome of white metal—it must be five hundred feet across. . . . There are several of them in sight, mostly located where the canals intersect.”
“They might be great community buildings—cities,” suggested Brand. “On account of the dust-storms that so often hide the surface of the planet, it would probably be necessary to cover a city up in some way.”
“And I see something moving. A little blue dot, it seems. Probably a little flier on the same order as those we have seen; but only a few feet in diameter. It seemed to be sailing from one of the white domes to another.” Brand moved to another telescope.
“Yes, I see them. Two in one place. They seem to be floating along, high and fast. And just to the right is a whole line of them, flying one behind the other. Crossing a patch of red desert.”
“What’s this?” Bill cried in some excitement. “Looks like animals of some kind in a pen. They look like people, almost.”
“What! Let me see!”
Brand rushed over from his telescope. Bill relinquished him the instrument. “See. Just above the center of the field. Right in the edge of that cultivated strip, by what looks like a big aluminum water-pipe.”
“Yes. Yes, I see something. A big stockade. And it has things in it. But not men, I think. They are gray and hairy. But they seem to walk on two legs.”
“Something like apes, maybe.”
“I’ve got it,” cried Brand. “They’re domestic animals! The ruling Martians are parasites. They must have something to suck blood out of. They live on these creatures!”
“Probably so,” Bill admitted. “Do you suppose they will keep people penned up that way, if they conquer the world?”
“Likely.” He shuddered. “No good in thinking of it. We must be selecting the place to land.”
He returned to his instrument.
“I’ve got it,” he said presently. “A low mountain, in a big sweep of red desert. About sixty degrees north of the equator. Not a canal or a white dome in a hundred miles.”
Long hours went by, while the Red Rover hung above the chosen landing place, waiting for it to sweep into the shadow of night. Bill peered intently through his telescope, watching the narrow strips of vegetation across the bare stretches of orange desert. He studied the bright metal and gray masonry of irrigation works, the widely scattered, white metal domes that seemed to cover cities, the hurtling blue globes that flashed in swift flight between them. Two or three times he caught sight of a tiny, creeping green thing that he thought was one of the hideous, blood-sucking Martians. And he saw half a dozen broad metal pens, or pastures, in which the hairy gray bipeds were confined.
Shining machines were moving across the green strips of fertile land, evidently cultivating them.
The Prince, Dr. Trainor, and Paula were asleep in their staterooms. Bill retired for a short rest, came back to find the planet beneath them in darkness. The Red Rover was dropping swiftly, with Captain Brand still at the bridge.
Rapidly, the stars vanished in an expanding circle below them. Phobos and Deimos, the small moons of Mars, hurtling across the sky with different velocities shed scant light upon the barren desert below. Captain Brand eased the ship down, using the rays as little as possible, to cut down the danger of detection.
The Red Rover dropped silently to the center of a low, cliff-rimmed plateau that rose from the red, sandy desert. In the faint light of stars and hurtling moons, the ocherous waste lay flat in all directions—there are no high mountains on Mars. The air was clear, and so thin that the stars shone with hot brilliance, almost, Bill thought, as if the ship were still out in space.
Silent hours went by, as they waited for dawn. The thin white disk of the nearer moon slid down beneath the black eastern horizon, and rose again to make another hurtling flight.
Just before dawn the Prince appeared, an eager smile on his alert lean face, evidently well recovered from the long, struggling in the laboratory.
“I’ve all the mining machinery ready,” Captain Brand told him. “We can get out as soon as it’s warm enough—it’s a hundred and fifty below zero out there now.”
“It ought to warm up right soon after sunrise—thin as this air is. You seem to have picked about the loneliest spot on the planet, all right. There’s a lot of danger, though, that we may be discovered before we get the cerium.”
“Funny feeling to be the first men on a new world,” said Bill.
“But we’re not the first,” the Prince said. “I am sure that Envers landed on Mars—I think the Martian ships are based on a study of his machinery.”
“Envers may have waited here in the desert for the sun to rise, just as we are doing,” murmured Brand. “In fact, if he wanted to look around without being seen, he may have landed right near here. This is probably the best place on the planet to land without being detected.”
CHAPTER VII
A Mine on Mars
THE sun came up small and white and hot, shining from a black sky upon an endless level orange waste of rocks and sand, broken with a black swamp in the distant north. Even from the eminence of the time-worn plateau, the straight horizon seemed far nearer than on earth, due to the greater curvature of the planet’s surface.
Men were gathering about the air-lock, under the direction of the Prince, assembling mining equipment.
“Shall we be able to go out without vacuum suits?” Bill asked Captain Brand.
“I think so, when it gets warm enough. The air is light—the amount of oxygen at the surface is about equal to that in the air nine miles above sea level on earth. But the pull of gravity here is only about one-third as much as it is on the earth, and less oxygen will be required to furnish energy. I think we can stand it, if we don’t take too much exertion.”
The rays of the oddly small sun beat fiercely through the thin air. Soon the Prince went into the air-lock, closed the inner door behind him and started the pumps. When the dial showed the pressures equalized he opened the outer door, and stepped out upon the red rocks.
All were watching him intently, through the vitrolite panels. Paula clasped her hands in nervous anxiety. Bill saw the Prince step confidently out, sniff the air as though testing it, and take a few deep breaths. Then he drew his legs beneath him and made an astounding leap, that carried him twenty feet high. He fell in a long arc, struck on his shoulder in a pile of loose red sand. He got up, gasping for air as if the effort had exhausted him, and staggered back to the airlock. Quickly he sealed the outer door behind him, opened the valve, and raised the pressure.
“Feels funny,” he said when he opened the inner door. “Like trying to breathe on top of a mountain—only more so. The jump was great fun, but rather exhausting. I imagine it would be dangerous for a fellow with a weak heart. All right to come out now. Air is still cool, but the rocks are getting hot under the sun.”
He held open the door. “The guards will come first.” Six of the thirty-odd members of the crew had been detailed to act as guards, to prevent surprise. Each was to carry two rocket torpedoes—such a burden was not too much upon this planet, with its lesser gravity. They would watch from the cliffs at the edge of the little plateau upon which the sunship had landed.
Bill and four other men entered the air-lock—and Paula. The girl had insisted upon having some duty assigned to her, and this had seemed easier than the mining.
The door was closed behind them, the air pumped out until Bill gasped for breath and heard a drumming in his ears. Then the outer door was opened and they looked out upon Mars. Motion was easy, yet the slightest effort was tiring. Bill found himself panting merely from the exertion of lifting the two heavy torpedoes to his shoulders.
With Paula behind him, he stepped through the outer door. The air felt chill and thin. Loose red sand crumbled yieldingly under their feet.
They separated at the door, Bill starting toward the south end of the pleateau, Paula toward the north point, and the men going to stations along the sides.
“Just lie at the top of the cliffs and watch,” the Prince had ordered. “When you have anything to report, flash with your ray pistols, in code. Signal every thirty minutes, anyhow. We will have a man watching from the bridge. Report to him anything moving. We will fire off a red signal rocket when you are to come back.”
He had tried to keep Paula from going out, but the girl had insisted. At last he had agreed.
“Better to have you keeping watch than handling a pick and shovel, or pushing a barrow,” he had told her. “But I hate to see you go so far off. Something might happen. If they find us, though, they will probably get us all. Don’t get hurt.”
Bill had seen the Prince looking anxiously at the slender, brown-eyed girl as they entered the air-lock. He had seen him move forward quickly, as though to ask her to come back—move forward, and then turn aside with a flush that became a bitterly cynical smile.
As Bill walked across the top of the barren red plateau, he looked back at the girl moving slowly in the opposite direction. He had glanced at her eyes as they left the ship. They were shadowed, heavy-lidded. In their brown depths lurked despair and tragic determination. Bill, watching her now, thought that all life had gone out of her. She seemed a dull automaton, driven only by the energy of a determined will. All hope and life and vivacity had gone from her manner. Yet she walked as if she had a stern task to do.
“I wonder——” Bill muttered. “Can she mean—suicide?”
He turned uncertainly, as if to go after her. Then, deciding that his thought was mere fancy, he trudged on across the red plateau to his station.
Behind him, he saw other parties emerging from the air-lock. The Prince and Dr. Trainor were setting up apparatus of some kind, probably, Bill thought, to take magnetic and meteorological observations. Men with prospecting hammers were scattering over all the plateau.
“Almost any sort of ferruginous rock is sure to contain the tiny amount of cerium we need,” Dr. Trainor had said.
BILL reached the end of the plateau. The age-worn cliffs of red granite and burned lava fell sheer for a hundred feet, to a long slope of talus. Below the rubble of sand and boulders the flat desert stretched away, almost visibly curving to vanish beneath the near red horizon.
It was a desolate and depressing scene, this view of a dead and sun-baked planet. There was no sign of living thing, no moving object, no green of life—the canals, with their verdure, were far out of sight.
“Hard to realize there’s a race of vampires across there, living in great metal domes,” Bill muttered, as he threw himself flat on the rocks at the lip of the precipice, and leveled one of the heavy torpedoes before him. “But I don’t blame ’em for wanting to go to a more cheerful world.”
Looking behind him, he soon saw men busy with electric drills not a hundred yards from the slender silver cylinder that was the Red Rover. The earth quivered beneath him as a shot was set off, and he saw a great fountain of crushed rock thrown into the air.
Men with barrows, an hour later, were wheeling the crushed rock to gleaming electrical reducing apparatus that Dr. Trainor and the Prince were setting up beside the sunship. Evidently there had been no difficulty in finding ore that carried a satisfactory amount of cerium.
Bill continued to scan the orange-red desert below him through the powerful telescope along the rocket tube. He kept his watch before him, and at half-hour intervals sent the three short flashes with his ray pistol, which meant “All is well.”
Two hours must have gone by before he saw the blue globe. It came into view low over the red rim of the desert below him, crept closer on a wavering path.
“Martian ship in view,” he signalled. “A blue globe, about ten feet in diameter. Follows curious winding course, as if following something.”
“Keep rocket trained upon it,” came the cautiously flashed reply. “Fire if it observes us.”
“Globe following animals,” he flashed back. “Two grayish bipeds leaping before it. Running with marvelous agility.”
He was peering through the telescope sight of the rocket tube. Keeping the cross hairs upon the little blue globe, he could still see the creatures that fled before it. They were almost like men—or erect, hairy apes. Bipeds, they were, with human-like arms, and erect heads. Covered with short gray hair or fur, they carried no weapons.
They fled from the globe at a curious leaping run, which carried them over the flat red desert with remarkable speed. They came straight for the foot of the cliff from which Bill watched, the blue globe close behind them. When one of them stumbled over a block of lava and fell sprawling headlong on the sand, the other gray creature stopped to help it. The blue globe stopped, too, hanging still twenty feet above the red sand, waited for them to rise and run desperately on again.
Bill felt a quick flood of sympathy for the gray creatures. One had stopped to help the other. That meant that they felt affection. And the globe had waited for them to run again. It seemed to be baiting them maliciously. Almost he fired the rocket. But his orders had been not to fire unless the ship were discovered.
Now they were not a mile away. Suddenly Bill perceived a tiny, light-gray object grasped close to the breast of one of the gray bipeds. Evidently it was a young one, in the arms of its mother. The other creature seemed a male. It was the mother that had fallen.
They came on toward the cliff.
They were very clearly in view, and not five hundred yards below, when the female fell again. The male stopped to aid her, and the globe poised itself above them, waited. The mother seemed unable to rise. The other creature lifted her, and she fell limply back.
As if in rage, the gray male sprang toward the blue globe, crouching.
A tiny purple spark leapt from it. A flash of violet fire enveloped him. He was flung twisted and sprawling to the ground. Burned and torn and bleeding, he drew himself to all fours, and crept on toward the blue globe.
Suddenly the sphere dropped to the ground. A round panel swung open in its side—it was turned from Bill, so that he could not see within. Green things crept out. They were creatures like the one he had seen in the Mexican desert—a cluster of slender, flexible green tentacles, with suction disks, an insignificant green body, and three malevolent purple eyes, at the ends of foot-long stalks.
There were three of the things.
The creeping male flung himself madly upon one of them. It coiled itself about him; suction disks fastened themselves against his skin. For a time he writhed and struggled, fighting in agony against the squeezing green coils. Then he was still.
One of the things grasped the little gray object in the mother’s arms. She fought to shield it, to cover it with her own body. It was torn away from her, hidden in the hideously writhing green coils.
The third of the monsters flung itself upon the mother, wrapping snake-like tentacles about her, dragging her struggling body down shuddering and writhing in agony while the blood of life was sucked from it.
Bill watched, silent and trembling with horror.
“The things chased them—for fun!” he muttered fiercely. “Just a sample of what it will be on the earth—if we don’t stop ’em.”
Presently the green monsters left their victims—which were now mere shriveled husks. They dragged themselves back into the blue globe, which rose swiftly into the air. The round panel had closed.
From his station on the cliff, Bill watched the thing through the telescope sight of the rocket, keeping the cross hairs upon it. It came up to his own level—above it. Suddenly it paused. He was sure that the things in it had seen the Red Rover.
Quickly, he pressed a little nickeled lever. A soft whir came from the rocket tube. He pressed the red button. The torpedo leapt forward, with the white rays driving back. The empty shell was flung back in Bill’s hand.
A great burst of vivid orange flame enveloped the cobalt globe. It disintegrated into a rain of white metal fragments.
“Take that, damn you!” he muttered in fierce satisfaction.
“Globe brought down successfully,” he flashed. “Evidently it had sighted us. Green Martians from it had killed gray bipeds. May I inspect remains?”
“You may,” permission was flashed back from the Prince. “But be absent not over half an hour.”
In a moment another message came. “All lookouts be doubly alert. Globe may be searched for. Miners making good progress. We can leave by sunset. Courage! The Prince.”
STRAPPING the remaining rocket torpedo to his shoulders, and thrusting his ray pistol ready in his belt, Bill walked back along the brink of the precipice until he saw a comparatively easy way to the red plain below, and scrambled over the rim. Erosion of untold ages had left cracks and irregularities in the rock. Because of the slighter gravity of Mars, it was a simple feat to support his weight with the grip of his fingers on a ledge. In five minutes he had clambered down to the bank of talus. Hurriedly he scrambled down over great fallen boulders, panting and gasping for breath in the thin air.
