The Secret of the Martian Moons (6 page)

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 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.

“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 comer 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!

Nelson 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 Lima, 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. Hinged 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 restfulness 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 what 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. Its 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 modem 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!”