The Secret of the Martian Moons (3 page)

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.”

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.

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.