The Secret of the Martian Moons

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “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!

  Chapter 6 Beyond View of Earth

  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!”

  Nelson took back the eyepiece and stared again. “Gee, it would be something to find out the history of that city. I wonder if the Martians wouldn’t be likely to show up there first?”

  He stared steadily at the vacant city, but no motion or change rewarded his eye. Jim said, as he watched, “One thing I’m sure of. The Martians were sentimental about themselves. They had museums, they protected their property and homes, just as the ancient Egyptians did. They may have had a religion that held they would return someday after death, but the trouble with that is that, unlike the Egyptians, they simply wouldn't make any pictures or statues of themselves. Not one!”

  “Maybe they had a superstitious idea that if aliens looked on their likeness it would somehow hurt then-souls,” said Nelson. “Some backward savages on Earth look on photography that way.”

  “Ahh,” murmured Jim, “that would be all very well if the Martians were backward—but they were not!”

  Time passed steadily. Even under the strange circumstances routine began to quiet the tension. The Earth was moving ever farther from them, and began to diminish as a brilliant star, to cling closer and closer to the flaming corona of the sun. Drawing ever farther away from Mars, it would soon pass behind the sun, and vanish from the sight of the stranded six for several long months.

  As they took their turns at die observation post, they began to expect no changes. They watched but no longer switched back when tricks of their eyes made them imagine a flicker of motion where there had been none. Once McQueen called an alarm, but it turned out that he had seen a brief dust spout occasioned from the bare sand by a rare freak of the red-desert winds.

  The seasons of Mars were changing steadily, and Nelson watched the gleaming white polar cap dwindle and the southern polar cap build up. The Earth clung so close to the sun that it could be glimpsed only by straining against the sun's fiery glare, and at last came the moment when the tiny green dot vanished completely from their sky. This was a somber moment for the expedition. For a brief spell they went around silent and thoughtful, feeling more than ever how thoroughly they were cut off from their parent world and all they held dear.

  But the observations never ceased. Always two men were out watching, checking, measuring. Jim and Nelse were on duty during a period when Mars was but a quarter crescent with night creeping steadily across its face. On the edge of the daylight portion, the city which Jim had called one of the oldest was in view, and Nelson concentrated his scope upon it. Several times he had returned to this Martian Athens, his mind speculating on the mystery of a history no man might ever learn. His eye moved over its hexagonal buildings, as the shadows of twilight lengthened steadily. He stared down at the circular doorways set in the homes. He looked at the square flat plates in the ground that opened into underground passages and chambers unseen by man. He could almost see the plants closing in on themselves, folding their leaves into furry fists against the oncoming cold thin-aired night.

  Slowly the vision in his eyepiece grew darker as night swept over the city. In a few more minutes he would have to shift his view elsewhere, for the city at night became invisible in the darker dark of the Martian night. Still buried in his thoughts, he stared down at the city, his eyes straining to keep the details of houses and markings as the view changed from light to dark, turned gray, became blue-gray, then blacker and finally merged into black. At the very instant that he stared, he saw a flicker.

  A light went on in the city! A tiny circle of white light where there had been a doorway to a building. A tiny circle that had been an open door, where no door should have been opened!

  And even as Nelson gaped speechless with surprise, the tiny circle flickered, blinked, and vanished as the door swung shut!

  Chapter 7 Deimos

  Nelson Parr caught his breath, let out a shout. “Hey!” came Jim Worden s voice in his earphones. “You trying to blast my ears off?”

  “I saw a light, Jim!�
� Nelse held his voice back by sheer force of will. He felt like shouting and jumping around. “Where?” came back Jim's voice, rising excitedly in pitch. Worden crowded in to the eyepiece of the scope, trying to push Nelson aside so that he could take a look.

  “It's gone now, but I saw something,” was young Parr’s reply, and he told Worden what he had seen. Jim looked carefully, but the city was in darkness and they could see nothing. Not a light broke the secrecy of the view.

  “What did it look like, son?” came the voice of the elder Parr on their helmet phones. Though in the ship, he had been tuned in on their suit speakers and heard their comments. Soon Nelson could hear the voices of the other expedition members chiming in as the excitement woke them from their sleep or task.

  In very short order, all six were outside, grouped around the scope while Nelson was explaining again what he had seen. There were excited comments and suggestions, then John Carson Parr called for silence.

  “Now listen, men, let s not lose our heads. We’re not likely to spot any more signs immediately and certainly not while that area is in darkness. We know where to look and from now on, we’ll keep a strict watch there every minute it’s in the sunlight. Go on back to your duties. I think we’ve finally found our quarry, but this is only the beginning.”

  Reluctantly the four off duty drifted back to the ship. Jim and Nelson stood out the rest of their watch, but they saw nothing further to excite comment.

  In spite of their efforts, it was not until four watches later that something was seen. This time, again in the same ancient Martian city, one of the men was sure that he had seen a crushed spot in the growths around a certain structure that looked as if some large craft had landed and departed from there. But keeping track of one certain spot is hard to do when the surface is constantly turning and your own observation platform, the little moon, is also moving.