The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 11

Find out they did. Russ was up and about and the normal life of the s.h.i.+p resumed. During their pa.s.sage of Earth's...o...b..t, they had managed to raise the United States on the s.h.i.+p's radio. For three days they were able to converse with their home base. They exchanged news and data, transmitted back all they had learned and eagerly asked for news.

The men of the crew had the chance to send messages home, and Burl even talked briefly with his father. There had been an important discovery made on Earth.

The lines of force had finally been traced. The distortions visible on Mars, as well as the one from Mercury before its cutoff, had been worked out directionally. There was no doubt that a line of force had been channeled outward to a point in s.p.a.ce that now proved to be that of a planet. The planet was Pluto.

"Pluto!" That was the shocked word uttered by everyone within hearing distance when the radio voice said it.

"Pluto! Why, that's the end of the line! The most distant planet," said Oberfield, shocked. "We'll have to go there--all the way!"

That fact sobered everyone. It meant the trip must last many times longer than anyone had expected. But they were a band of men who had achieved great things--they had managed so far to work together in harmony, and they felt that since they had conquered two planets--what were a few more?

Mars gradually grew larger on their telescopic viewers as the _Magellan_ fell onward through s.p.a.ce, riding the beam of gravity that was like a pulling rope to them. The slow down and reverse was made in good order--the sphere swinging around, readjusting, and the great, driving Zeta-ring generators now pus.h.i.+ng and braking.

Then one wake period, Russ and Burl went to the telescope and trained it again on the oncoming planet. The now large disc of the ruddy world swung onto the screen. It looked strange, not at all like the drawings.

Burl had never seen it through Terrestrial telescopes, but he sensed something was wrong. He realized suddenly, "Both poles are enlarged!

It's winter on _both_ hemispheres! And that's impossible!"

Yet it was so. Both the Martian ice caps were present and both extended down the northern and southern hemispheres of the world. The men stared in silence.

Slowly Russ tried to figure it out, "The greenish-blue areas can scarcely be seen. Where they should be, there're darker patches of brown, against the yellowish-red that now seems to be the desert areas.

It seems to be winter on both sides and it looks bad. It looks to me as if Mars were a fast-dying world."

Burl squinted his eyes. "Yet I see the ca.n.a.ls. The straight lines are still visible--see?"

Russ nodded. "They're real. But what's happened?"

Indeed, the planet seemed blighted. "It's the Sun-tap," Burl decided.

"We should have realized what it would do."

"Remember Earth the week it was working? The temperature fell several degrees, began to damage crops? Remember how it snowed in places where snow had never fallen in July? Remember the predictions of disaster for crops, of danger from winter snows if the drop continued?"

Russ went on in his careful, explanatory way. "And for Mars it has continued. Mars was always colder than Earth; life there must have been far more precariously balanced. During the day, on the Martian equator in midsummer, the highest temperature is not likely to be more than 70 or 80; and at night, even then, it would fall below freezing.

Vegetation on Mars must have been hardy in the best of times, and life carried on under great difficulties.

"Now the margin of warmth and light has been cut. It has been just enough to keep both polar caps frozen, to prevent water from reaching the fertile regions, and the cold has advanced enough to bar the growth and regeneration of plant life. If the Sun-tapping on Mars is not stopped, all life there will die out, and it will be a permanently dead world forever."

The news spread throughout the crew and there was a feeling of anger and urgency. n.o.body knew what lived on Mars, yet the subject of Mars and Martians had always intrigued the imaginations of people on Earth. Now, to hear that the unknown enemy had nearly slain a neighboring world brought home vividly just what would also have been the fate of Earth.

The day finally came when the big s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p slid into an orbit about the ruddy planet. It circled just outside the atmospheric level while the men aboard studied the surface for its secrets.

Mars was indeed inhabited. This fact was borne home by the ca.n.a.ls and the very evident artificial nature of their construction. They could see clearly through their telescopes that there was an intricate global network of pipelines, pumping stations, and irrigation viaducts from pole to pole. They also saw that at the intersections of the ca.n.a.ls were dark sections crisscrossed with thin blobs of gray and black which proved under the telescopes to be cl.u.s.ters of buildings. There were cities on Mars, linked by the waterways.

They saw no aircraft. They detected no railroad lines or roadways beyond the ca.n.a.lways themselves. The many regions of darker, better ground, intersected by the ca.n.a.ls which no longer fulfilled their purposes, were covered with thick vegetation--forests of dying, wintery stalks. Only a flicker of dark green here and there showed where some faint irrigation still got through.

They saw also that there were lines of white, which had not been visible before. Snow was gathering in low spots, and the planet was freezing up.

The lines of solar distortion were strong, and they traced them to their point of concentration. The point was not some isolated spot far in a desert, away from Martian investigation. To the amazement of the men, the location of the Sun-tap station was actually within a Martian city!

"Do you suppose," Lockhart queried the others, "that the Martians themselves are the builders of this setup--that this is their project--that they are the criminals and not the victims?"

There was no answer. The evidence was apparent, but it made no sense. If the Martians had created this thing, it was destroying them. And yet, if they had not created it, why did they--so clearly a race that had attained a high level of engineering ability--tolerate its continual existence?

As the s.h.i.+p descended, they saw the city emerge. It consisted of hundreds of gray mounds--buildings laid out in the form of neat hemispherical structures, like skysc.r.a.per igloos, with rows of circular windows. Each building was like the next, and they fitted together in a series of great circles, radiating outward from the meeting spot of the ca.n.a.ls.

The explorer crew waited at the s.h.i.+p's rocket launchers for an attack.

The tail of the teardrop housed the built-in armament--the rocket tubes which could send forth destruction to an enemy. But though Haines sat with his finger on the launcher b.u.t.ton, no aircraft rose to meet them from the city below. No guns barked at them. No panic started in the streets.

They could see tiny dots of living beings moving about, but no sign of alarm, no evidence that they had been noticed.

Even here, at the equator, there were streaks of white snow in the streets and rings of rime along the bases of the buildings.

Directly below them lay the Sun-tap station. The lines converged here, and the rings of distortion could be seen in the atmosphere, causing the city to flicker as if from the presence of invisible waves.

Then they saw the masts and their s.h.i.+ning acc.u.mulators projecting about a cleared spot near the outskirts of the city. The customary walled ring and the open machinery were not visible.

"The Sun-tap station is under the city!" said Lockhart, shocked. "It's been built beneath the streets somewhere, and the Martians walk around above it and let the masts alone! They must be the builders!"

"If so, why are they killing themselves?" Burl couldn't see the sense of it. "And if they have reasons, then why don't they defend it? They were alerted while we were on Mercury. They must have s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps if they are the enemy. Where are they?"

The ground was now but a few hundred feet below them, and still no one paid the strange s.h.i.+p hanging in the sky any attention. While the crew stood with bated breath, Lockhart brought the s.h.i.+p down and down, until it came to rest barely fifty feet above an intersection. There it hung, nearly touching the roofs, and was ignored.

The s.h.i.+ning masts of the Sun-tap station continued to gleam, following the tiny bright Sun in its course through the dark blue of the sky. One of the two small Martian moons was climbing upward along the horizon.

The ca.n.a.ls beyond were dark lines of conduit, through which no life-giving waters flowed. And the Martians did nothing.

Chapter 11. _Martians Don't Care_

"I don't like the looks of this at all," said Lockhart finally. "I suspect a trap. Yet we've got to land and get at that base. I'm going to take the s.h.i.+p out into the desert beyond the city and let a scouting squad go in first."

The _Magellan_ lifted back into the sky, then moved out over the ocher wasteland that was the barren desert of the red planet. Slowly the s.h.i.+p dropped again until its pointed nether end hung about twenty feet above the cold shale and time-worn sand.

Captain Boulton and Ferrati were selected to do the initial survey. Burl and Haines helped them climb through the packed s.p.a.ces of the outer hold. The jeep was swung out to the lowermost cargo port, and the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p's cargo derrick lowered the compact army vehicle to the ground.

The two scouts then put on alt.i.tude suits with oxygen masks, slung walkie-talkies about their chests, took light carbines in hand and pistols in belts and went down the rope ladder from the cargo port. They climbed into the st.u.r.dy jeep with its specially-designed carburetor and pressurized engine. The vehicle had been prepared to operate in the light atmosphere of Mars, as thin as the air on a Himalayan mountaintop, and low in free oxygen.

Burl and Haines, clad in pressure suits themselves, sat in the open port and watched the jeep set off. The engine kicked over and barked a few times in the strange air. Then Boulton at the wheel threw in the clutch, stepped on the gas, and the squat little car, painted in Air Force blue, rolled off over the flat rocky surface, kicking up a light cloud of sand as it went.

On Haines's lap sat a walkie-talkie. Boulton and Ferrati kept up a running commentary as they approached the city. Ferrati described the ground and the appearance of the oncoming city.

The jeep was now a small object merging with the dark mounds of the city's outermost buildings. "We haven't met any Martians yet," came Ferrari's voice. "Apparently they aren't interested in investigating us even now. And here we are rolling right up to the city limits." There was a pause.

The walkie-talkie emitted a series of squeaks and squawks, and Ferrati's voice came through now with distortion. "We're crossing the city limits--there's a sort of hard, plastic pavement that begins at the very edge. Now we're going down an intersection between the buildings."

The squawks became increasingly louder. They could hear only a word or two. Haines asked whether he was getting through to them, but he could not make out an answer because of the racket.