The Secret of the Martian Moons (2 page)

Nelson unstrapped his seat belt, murmured an excuse to the others present, and kicked himself away toward the corridor leading to the sleeping quarters.

Although there were several theoretical ways of supplying an artificial gravity to a spaceship, none had ever proved practical on a long-run ship. All interfered with observation and direction, all compelled the ships to assume odd and difficult shapes, all made it impossible to make landings and takeoffs in a single vessel.

The original dreamers who planned spaceships in the ancient days of the twentieth century before even the moon had been reached had cooked up elaborate schemes for planet ferries, subsatellite way stations, and circular liners that would themselves never touch the surface of any world. Like all such paper schemes, these had proved entirely impractical. The practical spaceship had to be able to land and leave its destination in much the same way that the practical airplane and boat had to. This, when space is involved, meant no gravity when aloft.

So Nelson Parr swam through the air of the corridor like a large ungainly fish swimming through transparent water. Out of the circular passenger room, past the bulge of the forward gyroscope compartment, and into the short passageway lined with the doors of the tiny sleeping compartments. To his surprise the little hallway was dark.

As the lighting was from permanent atomic bulbs, this was entirely unexpected. Somehow the bulbs must have been shielded, perhaps even broken. It was pitch dark. Nelson groped for the door to the gyro room behind him, swung it open. The light from there cut into the short hall, lit it dimly.

Nelson pushed off toward his own compartment. He bumped against it as the door to the gyro room swung shut on its automatic springs. Nelson groped for the handle to his door, found it ajar. He pushed against it, floated into his quarters.

The light was out here too, but the tiny space porthole was unshielded and the sharp cold glow of the stars pierced the little chamber. For an instant Nelson saw a dark bulk loom across the limited view. Then he was thrown back as a heavy weight flung itself at him, shoved through the door and hurled itself in the direction of the crew’s quarters.

Nelson yelled “Stop!” and threw himself off the far wall. He plunged through the door into his own cubicle just as the flash of light in the hallway showed that who ever it was who had been snooping had escaped into the next section of the liner.

Regaining his feet, Nelson reached for the ceiling light, flicked back the plastic hood which was the only means of turning off its permanent glow. The soft atomic whiteness illuminated the little compartment. Nelson squeezed himself down on his bunk and looked around.

Clearly the place had been the subject of search and clearly the probe had been interrupted before it had been completed. His valise was open, its contents scattered. A drawer in the wall was open and disarranged. The mirrored door to his little washstand was ajar.

Nelson stood up, opened his locker. His jacket, coat, and spare clothing still hung there, apparently undisturbed. He reached into the jacket pocket and to his relief his fingers touched the surface of the envelope. He withdrew it, looked at it.

It was just an ordinary mail envelope, thin opaque plastic. Across its face was written his father’s name and the word Urgent!

Undoubtedly it would have been discovered had the searcher had but a few more minutes. What that would have meant Nelson had no idea, but he made sure the chance would not come so easily again. He thrust the letter into concealment between his skin and the tight-fitting space-flight coverall he was wearing. From now on, the letter would go with him everywhere.

He closed the locker door, glanced into the wash-stand cabinet to see if everything there was accounted for, and then swung shut its mirrored door. For a moment he glanced at his own reflection. As he did so, his eyes were drawn to the surface of the mirror. He stared for a moment in disbelief at what he saw. There was a handprint clearly visible on the bright unbreakable glassy surface.

A perfectly made print of a strange right hand-one that had but three wide unnatural fingers—fingers with fringed snaky fingertips!

The handprint was freshly damp and evidently had been left in haste by the unknown intruder. Even as Nelson watched, it was slowly evaporating, for the air in a space liner is not high in humidity. The young man strained his eyes until the print vanished entirely. By blowing gently against the mirror he was able to make it come back into view briefly, enough to confirm the strangeness of its form.

Nelson Parr sat down on his narrow bunk perplexed. His original anger at the discovery of someone searching his possessions was changing into a sort of sudden tingling wonder. Who—or what—had been the prowler? Who, in the universe, had a hand like that?

The answer was simple, too simple, Nelson knew. It was nobody. Although men had been exploring their own solar system for a century and a half, they had not found any intelligent beings other than themselves. There were creatures in the crystal jungles of Venus that were very bright—for animals. Nelson knew that students of evolution considered that in another million years’ time these creatures would work their way up to something like civilization. There had been no evidences of intelligent life on the other worlds.

The pitifully narrow twilight belt of Mercury, with its violent winds, now oven-hot and now icy-cold, harbored the lowest type of rock-clinging moss and deep-rooted cactus only. The crater bottoms of Luna, where a thin atmosphere sometimes gathered in the heat of the sun, had fast-growing and fast-dying crops of green stuff, part vegetable, part something else—but not animal. Two or three of the larger satellites of Jupiter had tough hardy forms of plant life, and even a few very queer and sluggish animal forms fighting for a foothold against the intolerable cold at that distance from the sun. Farther out from Jupiter, the worlds wheeled cold and lifeless, brilliant and changing perhaps in their chemical and crystalline reactions, but sterile nonetheless.

There was always Mars as the holdout. But the intelligent life of the Earth’s neighbor was a mystery—a dead mystery apparently. There had been intelligence there, yes. A wonderful, tremendous, brilliantly skilled intelligence. But it was gone totally, save for its works. And despite all the decades that men like Nelson’s father had spent exploring there, they did not even know exactly what the Martians looked like.

Except for one factor—they must have resembled men. Their homes and belongings seemed designed for manlike beings—and Nelson remembered that the Martians had a hand with five fingers, as the handgrips on certain instruments had proved beyond doubt.

But that left no known race to account for this print.

Nobody on any world known to man had a three-fingered hand of such a curious pattern! Perhaps, thought Nelson suddenly, the explorers had been mistaken about the Martian hand? Perhaps this was the true appearance of a Martian's hand? Perhaps then the Martians were not extinct . . . and one of them was here, on board the Congreve, returning home.

That raised another thought. Returning home from Earth? And what had it been doing there?

Nelson stood up, patting the place in his suit where he had hidden the envelope Dr. Perrault had addressed to his father. This must have considerable importance to attract the attention of such a spy? What was up? Well, he’d find out in time. Meanwhile he would have to take great care not to be caught off guard.

He went out of his compartment, closed the door and made his way back to the passengers’ chamber. He noticed as he did so that the lights were again unshielded in the corridor. As he rejoined the company of his fellow passengers he debated the course he should take. Should he tell people about it, ask for help on a search? Would they believe him?

He decided they probably wouldn’t. Merely because he had seen what he thought was something odd on his mirror, something that had since disappeared, they wouldn’t get excited. After all, nothing actually had been taken. A search might simply cause the unknown to keep under cover.

What he had to do was to keep an eye on everyone. Obviously whoever it was must be wearing artificial flesh-simulated hands. It would be fairly easy to make a pair of gloves designed to look and feel just like human flesh. A three-fingered hand would fit into such a five-fingered glove so that none might suspect the trick. Yet, Nelson supposed, it couldn’t be quite as flexible as a human hand—or could it? He would study everyone’s hands for signs of strangeness.

He observed the passengers. He watched the crew, making special excuses to cover even the men on duty in the atomically dangerous feeding-chamber room. But it all proved futile.

Wait as he did, there never seemed to have been another attempt on his room. Despite careful arrangements of his drawer to show whether any disarrangement took place in his absence, he found nothing. Watching hands for clumsiness proved quite difficult when most people did very little save sit and read, watch canned-shows, or stand duty.

Time dragged on, as it does on even the speediest space flight. The flight to Mars from Earth had once taken one and a quarter years each way. That was in the old days of the chemical-type rockets fueled and launched from the Lunar base, after other big rockets had ferried the riders to the moon. The time had been cut as the development of atomic fuels had been perfected. It took longer than had been supposed, but with the perfection of direct application of atomic reaction to space flight the ability to accelerate for long periods of time was vastly increased.

The speed of a spaceship depends entirely on how long a period rocket acceleration can be kept up. As there is no friction in the empty voids between the worlds, once a speed is reached, it remains the same unless deliberately countered and slowed by an opposite rocket action. But the amount of acceleration depended on how much fuel a ship could carry. Where chemical fuel was concerned, the weights involved were so enormous and the results actually so weak that, from a celestial viewpoint, the speeds were very, very slow. But atomic power can produce tremendous volumes of energy from very little bulk. All that had to be discovered was a means of liberating it which did not involve massively heavy shielding and massively heavy piles. That final discovery did not occur until space flight was already well under way.

The trip to Mars now, while the planet was at its nearest orbital point to Earth, was a matter of about three weeks. In that time one had to amuse oneself as best one could. Space on a ship, even the largest liner, is limited. The grand sight of interplanetary space as seen through the ship's thick but crystal-clear portholes was always breathtaking, but essentially unchanging.

Nelson, like the others aboard ship, made a point of looking toward Mars the first thing on arising each ship’s morning. The red dot grew slowly, taking on a disk-like appearance that gradually became larger and began to show surface markings. The orange-red “star” became a russet-yellow disk with a visible white spot that was the icecap of the North Pole, the frozen surface of the ancient world’s last two large bodies of water—the South Pole being the other.

In time, faint bluish-green discolorations could be noted against the surface. These were the fertile lands, the large oases where the land of Mars had not yet dried and where grew the prairies and forests. The explorers of Mars had come to consider these regions as the “continents” of the world, separated from each other not by seas of water but by seas of desert. By far, most of Mars was desert—endless reaches of rusty rock, barren waterless plains, great stretches of slowly shifting yellow sand or reddish dry dust, and occasional very low stumpy lines of mountains, worn down to be little more than ridges above the general flatness, for there were no true mountains on Mars. No mountains, no lakes, no rivers, no rains. Once in a very great while, so rarely that Nelson had seen only two in his dozen years of life there, there were clouds, white clouds moving slowly across the deep blue sky.

And there were the Martian structures, the means by which the continents of vegetation kept alive. But they could not be glimpsed from space, not until perhaps the very last day.

The ship decelerated and Nelson was no closer to the solution of his problem. There were strange characters among the crew—but then there always were. The silence and eeriness of space flight always produced quirks of character among the professional sailors of space. Nelson could see nothing in this to arouse real suspicion.

On the last day there was too much excitement to pay any further attention. The ship was decelerating fast, under full engine power. Gravity was thus being simulated and it was hard to get around, for the drive was often against the normal setup of the compartments and rooms. Passengers were packing. The crew was tightening up the ship for the landing. Then the order was boomed through the liner to buckle into safety seats, the pressures grew, and the ship battled its way down.

About the hull arose a thin hissing and then a roaring as they tore into the Martian atmosphere. The ship heeled and jerked as the pilot kept it steady. Finally after an hour’s breathless fall the ship eased to a complete stop and settled softly to the surface of the Martian world.

Nelson unstrapped himself from his seat. As he stood up, he suddenly felt a surge of strength. The four years on Earth had built up his muscles to resist a far heavier gravity. Yet something in his body reacted with pleasure. This he felt was home. His body relaxed into the familiar patterns of his boyhood and he knew what he had been missing for so long—the gravity of Mars was the pull of his own world, the planet to which he had been born.

He packed his possessions into his valise, left his compartment and made his way to the exit lock, before which other passengers were waiting. As he caught sight of them, his hand thrust once more underneath his shirt to pat the envelope that was safely there.

The exit opened at last and Nelson made his way through, down the metal ladder that had been run up by the outer attendants and stood once more on the rocky surface of the planet’s sole operating spaceport. Someone in the crew called to him but in his excitement he paid no attention.