“We don’t want you to feel that way,” he said, turning to Nelson. “Honestly, we’re very grateful to you and we’ve agreed to let you hear what you want to know. You’ll be the very first outsider to know it—but—we’ll tell you.” He nodded to his fellows, and one of them went over to a wall and turned some dials on one of the inset panels.
“While he’s setting up the past-record viewers, I think it would be good to get these ... Phobosians ... out of here,” said Kunosh, and without waiting to see what Nelson would do, his men started to carry out the bound enemies. For a moment Nelson was uncertain. He realized that he couldn’t entirely trust anything that these cowardly creatures might do. Then, as they started to carry out the man who had interrupted them, Nelson called, ‘‘Stop! Leave that one here. I may want to ask him some questions myself. He seems to speak and understand English.”
Kunosh frowned, started to object, but seeing that Nelson was still by no means calmed down, waved his friends back. They propped up the red-and-black stripe-suited stranger on one of the low seats against the wall, though they still kept a grip on his mouth to prevent him from talking. The rest of the foemen had already been removed from the room.
Nelson nodded to Kunosh. “All right, you can start. Are you the lost Martians?”
The old man shook his head, went over to the now glowing wall panel. “No,” he answered. “We did not come from Mars. We come from a world in the system of this star,” and his hand caused a picture to flash on the wall screen.
A brilliant blue-white star shone against the blackness of space. Around it could be seen the disks of several planets, moving slowly around it. Kunosh pointed as he spoke:
“This is the star you people call Vega. Around it are seven planets, and on one of these planets our people originated.”
On the screen, one of the disks came closer, enlarged until it filled the screen to show a small world, rocky in nature, crisscrossed with ridges of low mountains,
many lakes of various sizes, two or three deep but narrow seas. A world by no means as beautiful or apparently as large as Earth, one without many plains, where green vegetation grew only on mountainsides, or in the innumerable twisting valleys between the gray crags of rock and cliff.
“This was our home world,” Kunosh said. “On it we evolved from savages and we found our way to civilization and the culture that is the only true culture.”
The scene swooped down to the surface of this world and Nelson could see villages nestling against the rocks, roads that climbed the mountains and tunnels that cut through to neighboring valleys. An industrious world, but still essentially one that seemed restricted to small communities. There was never a sign of anything like a large city.
“We took pleasure in boring into the mountains, putting our factories beneath the rock where they would not interfere with our small farming areas.”
The scene dipped suddenly underground and before Nelson’s eyes flashed a network of caverns and tunnels and rocky workshops where the little people of the Vegan race hammered and cast and drilled and made things. The scene changed, and Nelson recognized that it was an educational device designed to show progression, for the caves enlarged, the corridors from being crude, became wide and smoothed, the caves where men worked by hand now showed machinery of increasing complexity, puffs of smoke indicating the passage of steam power, then the yellowish glow of electricity and finally the white softness of atomic lighting. More and more it was clear, as the disk would rise in its view above the surface to show that the villages had not perceptibly changed, that the bulk of the life on this world was being carried on underground. It occurred to Nelson now that these people were more like gophers in their ways than rabbits.
“We spread our civilization over our entire world and we had a very happy world. We invented all that we needed and we did not need any contact with other worlds.”
There was a curious scene shown. A strange squarish craft bouncing down from the sky on flaring rockets into a valley. Fliers of some sort emerging from it, their shapes concealed by bulky spacesuits. A delegation of the small pale Vegans meeting them, apparently denying them entry to the world, showing no hospitality, and the strangers leaving again in their ship, never to return.
“We were sufficient to ourselves. We did not welcome intruders with their crude ways and ugly thinking and horrible arts. Our own art and science were perfection, why should we mix it up with lower types?” Kunosh's voice began to reflect some of his fanaticism and pride, Nelson noted.
“But surely your people must have realized they could learn a lot of new things from other planets? Didn't you want to have spaceships too?” Nelson asked.
Kunosh turned toward him a moment, his eyes flickering in the glow of the wall panel. “Their new things stank of killing and violence. Their art was horrible and unsuited to our world. What we had invented was our own work and our own secret. Why should we give it to them in exchange for such trash?”
Nelson realized he was dealing with a type of small-mindedness that had never been seen on Earth. For a moment the thought of a world of such people gave him a chill. He shifted the ers-gun in his hand uneasily.
“Was there no war on your world? I should think that a world of small valleys would have many languages and cultures?” he asked.
Kunosh shook his head. “No. We never fought with each other, why should we? As for language, we have no record of more than one. Possibly all our people originated in one spot and moved out.”
Nelson thought there was something slightly wrong about this, from what he could remember of language studies. “And possibly there was some dirty work done you’d rather not remember!” snapped another voice, and Nelson saw that it was the prisoner taking advantage of his captors’ inattention. Again they silenced him.
The Earthling stared at the cold eyes of the captive, turned again to Kunosh, who was likewise glaring at the prisoner. “Suppose you let him talk. I’ve an idea he might help you get at the full story.”
The old man seemed to be trying to keep his temper under control. Finally he barked a word and turned back to his panel.
“As I said, we never had any wars in our recorded history and we didn’t want any. Our philosophers developed our culture along the lines of harmony. We looked on all forms of violence and compulsion as evil, as returns to the animal, and we carefully weeded out all such throwbacks.” Kunosh could not resist throwing a nasty look at the prisoner, who glared back at him.
The screen flashed again over homes and scenes. It was evident that here was a world where nothing visible indicated weapons or warfare. Yet, somehow, Nelson did not feel that these were people with peace in their souls. There was something basically sneaky in their approach. They liked too well to hide their doings from the light, to travel in secret in tunnels, to conceal probably from their own minds the roots of their nature. Curiosity, the young man remembered from one of his instructors’ lectures, was the root of man’s development from the beast. These people must have had curiosity to have advanced as they did. If so, this curiosity would have forced them to space flight and to interest in their neighboring worlds. Instead they had rebuffed these visits. Why? Only one emotion suggested itself as powerful enough to overrule intelligent curiosity. Fear. Overpowering cowardice. Somehow, in their development, this trait had persisted, manifesting itself in their opposition to suggestions of combat, in probably erasing from their memory the many combats and struggles they must surely have won to have built their world culture.
Kunosh was talking. “We lived happily in our rocky world on Vega. We could listen to our neighboring worlds on our radios and receivers, but we had no desire to speak to them. We knew they had made contacts among each other—and that they had conflicts with each other. We saw some of them and were glad we had nothing to do with such monsters.”
On the panel were scenes of space. There were fleets of little rockets darting against the blackness. There was a shot of two such exploding suddenly against the
stars. There was a shot of several of the Vegan people staring in horror at a similar scene on what was probably a telescopic projector.
“The fact is that they had trade and friendship most of the time, and we were left out!” said the Phobosian suddenly. Kunosh whirled at him.
“That’s a throwback view! You’re a filthy degenerate to think good of such a thing!” The Phobosian merely stuck out his tongue while Kunosh waved a fist.
The old man recovered his temper. “Anyway, we were happy and getting along, our noisy neighbors leaving us strictly alone, and then the Marauders arrived!”
There was silence. On the panel, interstellar space showed. Then there came a moving glimmer of tiny fights. The scene sharpened and Nelson could make out black shapes, the dark forms of long spaceships moving in. And he suddenly realized that there were not just a few, but hundreds, even thousands of giant spaceships in that fleet!
“Our first indication of the cosmic plague was when some refugee spaceships arrived at our neighbor worlds. We saw them through our observatories.”
The panel showed two or three odd craft circling into a Vegan world, accompanied by the squarish craft native to that planet. “These refugees came from stars beyond our own. None of our neighbors had ever developed star flight, but these strangers came among them with their terrible story. They had been war-craft of some far-off system, and one day there had come into their system this tremendous fleet of terrible black ships. These ships had destroyed all that came before them. They had landed on their worlds and out of them came huge armies of terrible creatures who robbed and burned, and killed everything in their way I”
Kunosh stopped, his voice emotionally out of control. Nelson could feel the silence in the room, the horror at the scenes which were being shown on the panel. There, before his eyes, he could see cities burning and falling, huge masses of shapeless terror swamping the fields and houses, crowds of terrified people fleeing vainly only to be burned down!
He caught his breath. “Are these actual scenes?” he asked.
“No,” Kunosh replied. “How could they be? They are artists' reproductions of the accounts given by the few who escaped. But they are faithfully made.
“Our ancestors were disturbed at this, very disturbed. Our neighbor worlds began to arm against them. They were devoting all their efforts to building war fleets and defenses. But we were not going to do that. To do such terrible things would be to sink to the level of animals. It would destroy our civilization. And besides it was obviously futile. These Marauders, as we called them, apparently were traveling the universe to ruin and pillage and rob. There were thousands of their big ships and they must have been armed beyond all our conceptions!
“We didn't know how long it would be before they arrived at Vega and killed us all! We thought we had a few years, and we finally decided that the only smart thing to do would be to flee. We didn’t have spaceships but we knew all about them. We knew we could make them. Our science was advanced enough.
“We held a great conference in our world and we talked it over until we decided what to do.”
The scene showed a large underground cavern with hundreds of the rabbity men in heated debate.
“We built two giant spaceships in the form of two great big spheres. These ships were large enough to carry many thousands of people. Inside them they had room for factories and storehouses, synthetic farms, and all the things needed to carry on life entirely within them without need of sun or surface.”
The screen showed two tremendous frameworks going up, being filled in, being surfaced. Nelson gasped as he realized that he was looking at ships larger than any about which he had ever dreamed. By comparing them with the mountains nearby, he saw that the two ships towered above them, that the men who were building them seemed smaller than ants. Why—he gasped—they were the sizes of the two moons of Mars!
His suspicion was confirmed as the artificial globes were surfaced. The outside of the two vessels was made to look like barren rocks and cold stony plain. Before his eyes the contours of Deimos and Phobos took shape!
Kunosh went on: “We were just in time. As we were finishing our escape craft, the first of the Marauder ships was sighted.”
The screen showed a single advance scout, long and black and deadly-looking, flashing into the blue rays of the Vega system. A cloud of squarish battlecraft from the other worlds rose to meet it, but the black ship easily evaded them and disappeared in the direction from which it had come.
“Plainly our system was to be the next victim. We had no more time to lose. So we manned our two ships and took off.”
Nelson watched columns of men and women and children disappear into the interiors of the two great ships, while loads and loads of stores and things were crated in. Then, from their rocky valleys, the two towering spheres lifted slowly without sign of rocket or jet. They moved up in the sky and vanished.
Kunosh continued. “To travel between the stars takes more than the lifetime of any man. We could not build small ships and go. So what we did was to build two tiny worlds in which we could continue to live and work and have children while they traveled the long distances to safer regions of the heavens. Our trip across space took ...” he paused to mentally calculate his figures into terms Nelson could understand “. . . about three thousand of your terrestrial years.”
There were glimpses of life inside Deimos and Phobos as they moved together across the empty stretches of interstellar space. Nelson could catch views of the two worldlets, honeycombed with life, with anxious leaders viewing the stars toward which they drove, with several glimpses of huge machinery in the core of the spheres, driving the two vast craft by some means not yet discovered by humanity on Earth.
Then finally the screen showed a yellow star approaching and growing. Several planets were picked out circling it, and Nelson recognized the ringed vision of Saturn. The two huge craft entered the solar system, picked their way around it and came close to Mars.
“Of all worlds, this one seemed the best for us,” said Kunosh. “We looked at Earth, which was more like our home world, but we found it already filled with people and animal life of all kinds.”
Nelson was suddenly startled as the panel swooped down on Earth, and before his eyes plunged through cloud and rain to pick out the jungles of Africa, to spot a tiger leaping upon its prey in India, to flash briefly into a nest of snakes in some South American tree-top, and then, to his wide-eyed amazement, to swoop along an open field of green, to hover for a few incredible minutes over a battlefield on which men in plumed hats and curving metal helmets fought. Men dressed in gleaming breastplates, lugging cumbersome blunderbusses which they set up on tripods and fired at each other amid clouds of black smoke. He saw snorting cavalry go thundering across the field, while Cromwell’s Roundheads and the Cavaliers battled furiously with swords.
“That must have been about the seventeenth century,” remarked Nelson, realizing that he was seeing an actual visual record of some historical battle.
“About four hundred of your years ago, anyway,” said Kunosh.
The panel shifted to Mars, swooped low over its surface, over its deserts and green continents and cities. It was as quiet and deserted as ever. “We found this world, without violent weather, without inhabitants. We found the cities waiting to be taken and lived in and ready. We decided to stop, to put our two ships into orbits around it and watch to see if this was no deception.”
Now the vision of Mars steadied to that as seen from the surface of Deimos. Nelson said then, “Then your two ships have been moons of Mars for four hundred years and still you never colonized it!”
Kunosh looked at him gravely. “We are a very cautious people,” he began, only to be interrupted by the Phobos captive who had been quiet up to this point. “You mean foolish and cowardly!”
Kunosh angrily shook his head. “Cautious. We didn’t know whether the Marauders were going to visit this system someday and we didn’t know whether they had
followed us. If they had we wanted to be ready to make our get-away without delay. Again, we were suspicious about this empty world. What had happened to its inhabitants? Were they wiped out by some dreadful plague that would do the same to us? Were they hiding, waiting to leap out and kill us all once we settled down? Anyway, until we found out, we were determined to take no chances.”
Kunosh paused awhile, picking his words. “There was another factor as well. Our study of historical development, of our cruder neighbors in the Vega system, showed us that you Earthmen were on your way to discovering the secrets of nature. We knew it would be but a matter of a few more generations before you would begin to hit on the rocket method of space flight. We knew that it would not be long, in an astronomical sense, before you too came to Mars to explore. We had no desire to mix with you or to engage in trade or perhaps get involved in arguments or warfare. If we did any of these things, it would change our ancient way of life; it would destroy our own civilization!”
The captive Phobosian burst out, “Aw—nonsense! All that thinking is wrong! People with courage and honor can obtain the respect of others with honor and can benefit by such contact. This idea of always being in hiding and avoiding other civilizations will be the death of all our people!”
Kunosh looked at the captive thoughtfully. “Yes,” he began, then turned back to Nelson. “What this enemy has said has become much the prevailing way of thought on our other spaceship, the moon you call Phobos. There, for some reason we cant understand, the ancient tried and honorable ways of our ancestors have been corrupted and perverted by such thoughts as these. The people there, though once our brothers, have split from us in views. From the first, they were the advocates of landing on Mars and taking a do-or-die stand. Their weaklings got the best of their true thinkers and advocated an end to running. They have even dared to send spies to Earth, disguised as Earthlings, with false faces and false hands, to keep an eye on the intentions of its inhabitants. They have been on Mars itself, prying into the works there, watching you colonists. In fact, I even think they started the business on Earth of suggesting your colony’s abandonment.”
The Secret of the Martian Moons Page 9
