The Secret of the Martian Moons (16 page)

Several other plugs did not work. One disgorged another transparent container filled with a grayish jellylike substance. When he untwisted the cap, it gave off an odor so bad that Nelson gagged. He looked hastily around for a garbage disposal unit, saw an opening in the opposite wall and tossed it in. There was a gulping sound, the opening closed a mechanical jaw, then slid open again, empty and waiting.

After testing all the plugs, he found that there were about five that produced results, not counting the one with the rotten contents. He had an assortment of containers, each filled with some kind of food, not one of which he could recognize, and all seemingly made of brightly colored jellylike materials. He tried one.

It was good, almost meaty in flavor. Hungrily he ate it all, scooping with his fingers, having found no evidence of spoons or forks. He tried one of the others, found it different but equally satisfying—and suddenly he realized that his hunger had gone, that he had fed.

Well, at least he wouldn’t starve on this trip, he thought. The food was apparently synthetic, manufactured by heaven alone knows what atomic alchemy from raw materials. Another secret that would be a boon to Earth! He wondered whether the first container, the foul one, was a breakdown on that food line, or whether it was something the builders of the ship actually liked. There were still some people back on Earth who liked such things as whale blubber, rancid butter, Limburger cheese, hundred-year-old eggs, and slugs under rocks, so why not allow the Mala-karji similar peculiarities?

He returned to the central control room, tuned back on Phobos. His father answered this time and they chatted awhile before plugging off. The moon had had enough of a head start so that even at full acceleration it would be a good long time before Nelson could catch up. And now he was getting tired.

So he went to the nearest bedroom, curled up on the Vegan pallet there, and fell asleep. For once he felt at ease and the gravity of the ship gave his body a comfort it had not felt for too long a time.

He woke almost ten hours later, having slept much longer than he’d intended. He sat up refreshed, glanced at his watch, and went into the control room. He could see that Mars had grown appreciably smaller and nearing his blind underside. He sought again to spot Phobos visually but still failed. Yet it should have been closer. He tuned in and again caught a Phobos observer, who called in McQueen, evidently the only Earthling on duty at that time.

Bryan looked a little worried when he saw Nelson.

“I'm afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, my boy/' he said. “You haven’t gotten any closer to us in the past few hours; in fact, you’re falling behind.”

Nelson bit his lip. “I’ve been on full acceleration all this time,” he said. The other shook his head.

“Yes, but so have we. And, my lad, this moon here is something really terrific. Were going faster than you are and gaining steadily. I guess your ship, and no ship that size, could hope to beat this star-going freighter. But here’s your dad.”

John Carson Parr came into sight and McQueen stepped aside for him. The older man rubbed his eyes, having just awakened from sleep, and peered anxiously at his son. “I hope you’re well set on that old houseboat of yours,” he said, trying to be light, “because you’re going to have your own private yacht for some time.” Nelson tried to smile, though he felt uneasy at the thought of making the long journey past the sun to Earth by himself. “Oh, I’m okay. You ought to taste the food here—more crazy flavors of gelatin than we ever dreamed of in our wildest nightmares!”

The older Parr cracked a smile. “That’s good. Doldnan can’t slow up his moon to pick you up. He’s got thousands of other lives to consider. So you’ll have to follow us as best you can.”

“That’s all right. I wouldn’t expect Phobos to wait for me. Can you have Telders plot me a course of my own?”

His father nodded. “We’ve already worked it out. Telders will give you the listings and tell you when to shift speeds and directions. We expect Phobos to reach Earth in about five weeks as you know, by going the shortest, fastest and most dangerous way. However, we’ve worked out a more circular orbit for you, that won’t take you much closer than inside Venus’ orbit and have you swing out and join up with Earth in about four months’ time. To make it any sooner would be altogether too risky for that little spacegoing bungalow.”

“It looks as if I’ll have plenty of time to learn to read their books,” Nelson said jokingly.

“Doubt you can do that,” said his father, not catching the tone of his son’s comment. “However, I suppose you’ll find some way to pass the time. I’ve got to tell you that we may not be able to keep in contact much longer as we outdistance you. Besides, I know Doldnan is worried about our conversations. He thinks the Marauders may be able to spot us by it.”

“That’s right,” said Nelson. “I guess—we’d better say good-by then until we meet on Earth.” He smiled at his father, who said some cheery words and stepped aside for Karl Telders.

Nelson jotted down the navigator’s readings and thanked him. Getting one more glimpse of his dad, he waved, called farewell, and cut off the telescreen. Nelson was alone in space.

Now began a period of inactivity, of quiet, watchful flight. Nelson carefully kept track of the passage of time, dividing his periods into nights and days, living by the accurate hands of his spaceman’s watch. He carefully, systematically, explored all the comers of the houselike cube, teaching himself as much as possible of the value of each and every machine and device in it. He examined the ground floor with its odd drive, but refrained from trying to get to the root of anything there for fear of breakage.

The alphabet and “books” of the Malakarji remained unreadable, though he did spend a day listing the various symbols and their colored variations and trying to decipher them. He caught no evidence anywhere of pictures and never learned just what the Malakarji Vegans looked like.

It was at a time when he was about halfway between Mars and the orbit of Venus when he happened to make a routine check of his control room radar board. Phobos was long off the board and out of sight, probably nearing its destination. Mars was a red disk barely visible toward the rear of a side window. No other objects showed on his board, no asteroids of which he had passed a few, not even meteor clusters which registered briefly as blue sparks.

He saw on the edge of the board, in the direction of Mars, a little yellow dot. Now red was for planetary objects, white for his own ship, blue were meteors, and a wisp of green had appeared once for a small comet. But what did yellow represent?

He watched the dot and even as he watched, a second yellow dot appeared, then a third. He caught his breath, wondered. Then four more yellow dots appeared. The first dot was now visibly closer to his central white square, and as he watched, the others began to fan out behind it like the V of a flight of wild ducks.

An unnatural movement, thought Nelson, as he watched in puzzlement. The sort of thing intelligence would do, not some astral phenomena. And then it struck him. These must be spaceships. Following him, able to close in on him even at his tremendous rate of speed, too fast for any Earth-made craft to match.

The Marauders had arrived, had spotted him, were chasing him!

Anxiously Nelse watched as an eighth and a ninth yellow dot appeared on his board, joining the formation. He saw by their apparent speed across his dial that they were traveling much faster than he was, that they were going directly for him, would catch him soon.

He hesitated over his controls for a moment. Possibly the cubical spaceship was capable of more speed than it had—in fact he knew it was. But Telders had laid out a carefully plotted course for his craft to follow. Nelson knew that if he changed speed or otherwise altered the exact path that the navigator had calculated for him, his chances of getting back to Earth would rapidly vanish.

Space flight is such a difficult thing to calculate. Unlike traveling on the seas of Earth, with which it is sometimes compared, it is much more like trying to hit one of a flight of wild ducks with a strong slingshot while riding on the back of another flying bird going in a different direction. Each planet is moving at different speed; each affects the other as it goes. To travel between them requires an exact knowledge of all the immediate locations, directions and speeds, and the ability to figure out at lightning speed the same relationships at any given time in die future. It was work performed by intricate machines, built into the controls of Earth’s ships.

Probably there was such machinery built into the Vegan spaceship too, but Nelson had never located it, and if he had, would not likely have been able to determine how to use it. Furthermore, he lacked the astrogators’ charts which every ship carried giving the figures for the solar system planets.

At this moment there was a difficult decision for him to make—one that he must make without delay. If he tried to outrace the Marauders, it might possibly work, but it would result in his becoming desperately lost, perhaps doomed to chase Earth around the sun by hit-or-miss efforts for years to come—if the cubical space house’s mysterious power source held out that long.

Yet not to change speed would mean his capture or destruction for sure. For an instant he hung over the plugs at his odd control table, his hands hanging motionless. For an instant thoughts of Earth ran through his head, of its men and women rushing to prepare defenses, of spaceships being hastily equipped with available weapons to stand off invasion. Every second, every hour, every day gained for them was valuable. The life of one man was nothing. He smashed down on his speed plug, watched the green bulb suddenly flare blindingly as his fingers relentlessly pressed down the plug.

He felt a strain growing on him. In spite of the excellent system of gravity and compensational effects built into the amazing cubeship, it was evident that he was under tremendous acceleration. On his observation dial he saw the flying wedge of yellow dots suddenly pull back, start to disappear off the board, as they were outstripped.

Now their progress off the board stopped as only one was left in sight at the edge of the board. Stubbornly it lingered, refusing to disappear. Then, to Nelson’s horror, it slowly, slowly, began to crawl back.

The green speed bulb still blazed, and yet tire pursuing ship was coming back and then the second and third yellow dots fought their way back into range and slowly the others began to creep up.

Nelson knew that his die was cast. He was already ahead of Telders’ carefully plotted course, at what speed, the unreadable gauges of his Malakarji craft could not tell him. There were no planets near him. He was somewhere near the orbit of Venus, but that body was far away. Nelson punched the controls that would turn the ship, swerve it off.

If he could not outrun his pursuers, he could dodge, twist, turn, give them a chase for their money!

The cube swung far away and the yellow dots swerved off the board again. Now Nelson headed on, at right angles to the course he had been following. He took the time to glance out of the visual window panels, but he could not see the Marauders. He knew he wouldn’t, for they must be tens of thousands of miles distant and invisible against the star-strewn blackness of the sky.

He went back to his panel, and again the yellow dots had come into sight, swinging after him, catching up. He watched awhile as they drew closer and closer. He had another idea now.

When he felt that they must be very close, when their V was well into the board, nearing the white square central light that was Nelson’s ship, he yanked up the speed plug completely. The green indicator suddenly dimmed and went out. His ship’s engines were off.

He felt a vertigo as the little house’s gravity vanished with the silencing of the engines. His feet drifted up from the deck and his head reeled as weightlessness returned.

On the panel he saw the yellow dots sweep past his cube fast and vanish off it in the other direction. Nelson punched a direction plug, rammed down his speed again, and the white cube started to reverse its speed, to dash away in another direction.

For a while it seemed to work. Anxiously Nelson hovered over the panel, but the yellow dots continued to be absent. For a moment he thought uneasily that perhaps the Marauders had not been chasing him, had been headed toward Earth, and that he had sacrificed his course needlessly. Perhaps he had only mistakenly supposed they knew of his existence, and had simply misinterpreted their change of direction.

He realized that he was perspiring freely as he watched the board. His ship was probably heading back out toward Mars again if its speed had been fully reversed. He wondered if it was so, because he knew that it would have been impossible for any Earth-built rocket to make such a reversal. But the capacities of this cube were unknown.

He supposed that some sort of magnetic lines of force were the guiding means of its propulsion. His father had briefly mentioned something about cosmic power lines of force unknown to terrestrial science, about accumulators, and had ventured the hint that the cubeship’s power might be attained in some such way. But the capacities of such a vessel were still unclear, if indeed that was the means.

Well, maybe it had worked. Maybe the Marauders were left behind, but if they were roving the solar system, he’d encounter them again. Nelson realized that he had better investigate the cube’s weapons.

There were what seemed to be gun projections on each of the four walls—at least he remembered seeing the little bulges as he had gone into the craft for the first time. He went into the outer shell, saw that there were such bulges at the inside, but that apparently the controls for them were also in the central room. He returned, hunted for them.

He slid aside a metal panel on one wall and saw four small polished disks set therein. He pressed one of the several plugs set neatly beneath each one. Instantly the disk became transparent and he saw that it was a small visual panel giving a view of space similar to that shown by the major “windows.” Across this disk appeared various spidery cross lines, directional lines.