The Secret of the Martian Moons (4 page)

Nelson and his father and his father’s associates in the leadership of the colony were busy listing available spaces, assigning families, seeing that (hey were stowed aboard and that the ships took off for the green-glowing evening star as fast as they were completely booked. They had to settle arguments as to what could go and what could be left behind. They had to arbitrate between people who insisted they had not enough room or were separated from their friends. They had to console weeping mothers who did not want to leave their homes, even on this alien world, to make new starts on what would be to them a very strange and hard planet. All had been promised good homes and jobs, but it was nonetheless exile.

Through all this, Nelson worked and watched with a heavy heart. As each man departed, as each ship roared away into the sky never to return, he knew that mankind had lost another chance to open up a treasure house that had no equal in history. For they left Mars almost as mysterious as they had found it.

Mars was a complete world, a world which had known a tremendous and far-advanced civilization. And it had been sealed up by its original people, sealed up and abandoned with its basic organization still running.

An old world, Mars could only keep its areas of plantation and vegetation going by piping the waters from the poles as they melted during the summers. To do this, the Martians had built up with heaven alone knows what tremendous effort and ingenuity over what must have been tens of thousands of years a world-wide system of irrigation. Webbing the planet from pole to pole were the great viaducts and underground sealed currents. Pumping stations operating no one knew on what power source kept the waters moving uphill against the gravital pull from the poles to the higher regions of the equators. The vegetation growing in thin strips alongside these lines had allowed even pre-rocket astronomers to see them, to map them, even to name them as the great Percival Lowell had done as far back as 1895. In the great continents of blue-green trees where the Martian cities had been found, these conduits alone enabled the planet’s plant life to continue on a world otherwise without rain, river or well.

And it was all sealed. The colonists had found Martian machines plainly designed for land travel and air travel, but they could find no way of activating them. The power source was a mystery. Theory said that somehow the Martians must have broadcast their power from central stations, and these machines picked up their energy like a radio picks up a program. But where the power-sending stations were no Earth explorer had ever found out.

The Martians had used their thousands of years advancement to produce locks and metals that resisted all efforts to crack. A closed Martian door, such as lined the endless underground corridors and halls, simply could not be opened. Drills could not scratch their surfaces, explosives could not mar them, atomic reactions could not shake them or dent them. They had resisted successfully the best efforts of the best scientists of Earth.

Nelson knew that if they could but once get past these doors, could but once explore the factories and machinery behind them, they would be able to make the planet live again. They could make the dome houses naturally habitable. They could fly the hundreds of thousands of Martian vehicles that were plainly available in garage domes everywhere. They could get into the libraries of the vanished Martians and enrich their knowledge of the universe a thousandfold.

They had had over a century to do this—and they had failed. Mars was like the legendary ship, the Marie Celeste, the ship that had been found in the Atlantic, sailing along, its table set for lunch, its boilers still warm, the log open on the captain’s desk awaiting a note, its lifeboats still hanging, its crew’s clothing still in place, and entirely empty of crew. Without reason or cause, its crew had vanished into thin air.

And there was the case of the famous city of Angkor deep in the jungles of Indo-China. A great city, the capital of what was once a great empire, simply abandoned, its population departing en masse into the jungle, taking nothing with them, not even their possessions.

And that was Mars. Where its people had gone to, nobody could imagine. They had simply vanished. They had taken nothing with them, except perhaps their clothing, for their homes were untouched, their cities still intact, undamaged, their agriculture still automatically functioning, probably their entire planet ready to resume full life once someone could find the controls. They had left no pictures of themselves, no statues, no inscriptions that could be read. They had left no bodies, no skeletons, no cemeteries. Possibly there were some somewhere, must be, Nelson had always thought, but to find them in this world of desert would be sheer luck. And there had never been enough explorers here to warrant such a stroke of luck yet.

Now there never would be, probably. Nelson’s thoughts were glum as he finished packing the very valise with which he had arrived. Their day had come. Only one ship waited for the last members of the colony. Out at the spaceport, it was already two-thirds full, and now only the Parrs and his father’s immediate associates were awaited. After them, there would be nobody else. The planet would be as empty of human life as it had been before the first ship had made its wild rocket-driven landing so long ago.

Outside, his mother was already in the little car. Nelson went through the dome house, mentally saying good-by to the scenes. His little sister came out tearfully from her room clutching her favorite doll. Tearfully she kissed it and set it up in a sitting position on the floor of the living room. It, too, was excess weight. Then with a sob she ran to join her mother. Nelson followed his father through the door, adjusted his respirator mask, and swung the rounded door shut. It clicked tight, adhering with that fine keenness of Martian architecture to the surface of the blue dome. The two males piled into the car, started the engine.

The trip to the spaceport was made in silence, as each strove to imprint on his memory their last glimpse of what they had regarded as their home world. At the spaceport, they were checked off by the ship’s captain, their baggage taken from them and sent up to their space.

John Parr turned to his wife. “You and Beth go aboard to our cabin. Nelse and I want to talk a minute with Worden before we join you.”

Nelson's mother nodded and, casting her husband and son a strange long glance, took her daughter's hand and went off to the ship. As they went, Nelson felt his fathers hand close on his arm. "Stay close to me,” he heard his dad whisper.

A sudden thrill ran through the young man. He turned. In the little space of the corrugated-roofed spaceport house, there were now only the captain, a crew member of the liner, and his dad's assistant, Jim Worden, the thirty-year-old explorer. John Parr waited until the women had vanished into die distant liner and the captain and his crewman were starting to leave.

He nodded to Worden, and started to walk slowly toward the ship, letting the two crewmen get well ahead of them. The three Mars colonists walked slowly, as if reluctant to leave.

Nelson saw the captain reach the entry port with his man and look back. The Parrs were coming, he could see, for Nelson saw the captain vanish into the space lock. Now his father began to rush, and Nelson and Jim Worden followed him fast. At a point nearly below the ship, out of sight of anyone in the ship, they dropped to the ground.

Nelson watched Jim frantically searching for something. He touched a little projecting knob in the blast-scarred surface of the field. A small circular trap door opened.

“Quick!” breathed the elder Parr, and Nelson needed no second word. Jim was scrambling down into the dark space beneath the desert surface. Nelson climbed in on top of him, and his father came at his heels, and closed the trap over their heads.

“Hurry,” Worden said, “we’ve got to get as far down this passage as we can before the ship takes off. Follow me!” He produced a flash from his pocket and in its glow the three men raced, bent down in the low passage, as fast as they could.

As they ran, Nelson burst out, “Are we staying behind, Dad? Are we really going to stay?”

Just behind him, panting with the exertion of their cramped running, John Carson Parr replied, “We’ve got a special mission to do here. We’ve got to do it all alone, without Earth knowing. We’re the last men on Mars—and no outside observer must know it!”

They scurried along the tunnel like huge ungainly rabbits, until they burst into a larger tunnel which Nelson recognized as one of the innumerable underground hallways of the city. The three stopped with one accord, out of breath, and waited.

In a few minutes there was a distant rumble and a blast of heat down the tiny tunnel from which they had emerged. “That’s the blast-off,” said Worden. “The ship’s gone.”

John Parr nodded. “The last ship to Earth. Certainly for a long, long time, anyway.”

Nelson looked at the small tunnel. “How’d you find such a convenient escape hole?” he asked.

Worden glanced up at it. “Burned it out in the sand with an atomic borer. I noticed this branch of the tunnels came close to our spaceport field. Figured out the rest. Did it last week.”

“Come on,” said Nelson’s father, “we’ve got a lot to do yet.” He led the way down the corridor, lighting the way with his pocket flash. Silently the other two followed.

Nelson had been in the Martian tunnels before, many times in fact, and never found them dull. They were always a mystery, always a source of intrigue as to what lay behind the occasional dull metallic circular doors they passed. He knew from his father’s and everyone else’s experience that these doors could not be budged in any way. Even were they to blast the tunnel itself and the surrounding countryside into dust, the doors would hold.

A certain amount of vague knowledge had been gained by the use of radar and electronic measurements of the space concealed by these doors. They had in some instances gotten shadowy photographs of odd-shaped masses, sometimes of what seemed like single pieces of equipment, sometimes of crates, rarely anything that could be recognized. Worden, he knew, had produced a number of radar photos from vaults near the polar seas that certainly looked like boats of a sort.

The three walked the dark hallways until Nelson had estimated that they must be under the fertile region and nearing the great catacombs of the city. Finally they came to a point where a chalked X marked a particular side corridor. This they entered. In a few minutes they emerged into a corner of two tunnels. Here Worden reached forward and snapped a switch. An Earth-made bulb lit up, revealing a group of boxes, a table, some equipment, several cots, and cases of food.

“Well,” said John Parr, “here we are and here we stay for a couple days. Sit down, make yourself at home,” he added jocularly.

“How about some lunch?” said Worden. “I’m hungry after all that running.” He went over to a portable stove, switched on a burner, and set about opening a couple of cans.

Nelson, by this time, was so bubbling over with excitement and curiosity that he just didn’t know where to begin. Finally he burst out, “For goodness sake, Dad, will you tell me what this is all about? What are we doing here? Why are we staying?” Worden looked up, looked at the stem-faced leader of the Martian colony. “You mean to say, John, that you never told him what was going on?”

John Parr smiled a little shamefacedly. “I guess I knew Nelson would stick by us and follow me without having to be told. We can tell him now.”

They sat down at the table, and, while Worden piled some warmed-up chow in paper plates and put cups of hot vita-coff before them, John Parr mused a moment and then said:

“You remember that letter you gave me from Perrault. What we are doing now is according to his instructions, in the event of evacuation orders going out.”

Worden nodded, and Parr continued, “In the course of exploration work on Mars, from the very first days, certain obscure facts would turn up that seemed to indicate some sort of activity here that could not be accounted for. These items were extremely slight, so slight in fact that it was not practical to make their existence public nor to attempt to draw any conclusions. As the years passed, the compilation and classification of knowledge about Mars caused these little things to be placed in a special file of their own. During the past few years, some attempts have been made to interpret their meaning.

“As a result of this study, it was found advisable to create a special committee to check the whole problem. This committee had to remain extremely secret, a small group of Mars specialists, reporting only to Perrault himself on Earth, who is responsible directly to the President of the Interplanetary Institute.”

“Your pop is the head of the committee, Nelse. And now that he’s told you I guess that makes you a member, the sixth member.”

“Yes,” broke in Nelson, impressed but still baffled, “but what exactly are we looking for? What sort of things were discovered to make all this necessary?” Parr pursed his lips, took a sip of his drink. “Actually, it’s hard to define them. If we had to write them up for the papers, probably they’d be laughed at. At first we used to think they were just accidents or mistakes. You see sometimes it would just be that things were displaced. A group of Martian cars in their garage, for instance, might be lined up in a certain way, just like the Martians left them. The next time an explorer happened on that particular garage, it might turn out that the cars had shifted positions. That maybe one was slightly out of line or reversed.”

“You could figure that some other explorer had come and shoved them around trying to make one go, only the records showed unmistakably that nobody had been there between the two visits,” said Worden.

“That’s right. We’d check carefully and could prove that nobody, that is nobody known to the colonists, had been there. Or we might find footprints in the soil outside a dome house where no one was living. Never could trace the prints, never could find anyone who’d admit having been there,” said Parr.