The Secret of the Martian Moons

By DONALD A. WOLLHEIM

Jacket and Endpaper Designs by Alex Schomburg

THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY Philadelphia * Toronto

Copyright, 1955 By Donald A. Wollheim

Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions and Possessions Copyright in the Republic of the Philippines

FIRST EDITION

To the memory of PERCIVAL LOWELL whose inspired vision of Mars will continue to haunt men’s minds until we go there.

When Lemuel Gulliver, famous voyager of Gullivers Travels, visited the flying island of Laputa which was inhabited entirely by scientists, he was told that:

“They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half . .

Now when Gullivers Travels was written it was 1726, and there was no telescope on Earth strong enough possibly to see the two moons of Mars. It was not until one hundred and fifty years later that these two satellites were finally seen and charted . . . and the astonishing truth was so close to what Swift had written as to be almost unbelievable!

Asaph Hall was the astronomer who finally located Gulliver’s moons and the place was the U.S. Naval Observatory near Washington, D.C., the date August 1877. He found that Mars had two small satellites, one revolving around the red planet in 7 hours and 39 minutes from a distance of 5,800 miles, and the other taking 30 hours and 18 minutes to circle Mars from a distance of 14,600 miles. Now these are not quite the same figures given by the stargazers of Laputa, but they are close enough to be almost within a reasonable margin of error!

As Mars was named after the Roman god of war, Dr. Hall named the nearer satellite Phobos, meaning "fear,” and the farther body Deimos, which means "panic.”

The question is how could Swift have known about them? Could it be that some disguised visitor from space had let the information drop in his hearing? We’ll never know; it will always be a puzzle.

Whether Mars and its two moons will also forever remain a puzzle, only the future years will tell. Mars is one of the best mapped planets in the sky and yet the more that men know about it the greater the mystery. Many believe it to be the home of some sort of life. Its “canal” markings are a source of heated argument. Its icecaps and changing colorings make for endless discussion and speculation.

In this novel I have chosen to depict Mars as presented by the late Professor Lowell, of Flagstaff Observatory, and his followers. It has always been the view most exciting to men’s minds and it is still upheld by a substantial section of planetologists. This is the theory of a world whereon a planetwide irrigation project is revealed to the eyes of Earth by a spidery network of pole-to-pole canals! In connection with this the question has always been raised as to why, if Mars is the abode of intelligent beings, they have made no effort to contact us? In this novel, I suggest one possible answer to this riddle.

But whether it is the right one and whether Mars is as I have described it, is something that cannot be answered until the day that either the Martians land on Earth or we go there. And I believe one of these events will surely come to pass within the next hundred years.

Of course Nelson Parr had known about the widespread latest debate on what they called the Martian Question. In fact, to him it seemed like old stuff. When he had first arrived on Earth four years ago, the many wonders of the parent planet fully occupied his inquiring twelve-year-old mind. Musty debates over obscure questions, such as seemed to be always the feature of the official live-cast band, hardly held interest for him—not with all the fascinating things there were to learn.

Even so, after Nelson had come to realize that what his father’s friends on Mars had called “Greenfaces” were so well in evidence, it used to make him quite indignant. Had his very intensive courses at the Institute for Interplanetary Exploration not taken up so much of his time, he might even then, as a boy, taken to arguing the matter. But he soon learned that as far as his classmates, born and raised on Earth, were concerned, it was all a bore.

Evidently the business of complaining about the high cost of keeping up their small Martian colony and its continual lack of any profitable return was a sore spot to legislators. As he studied and advanced, Nelson found he could understand why the old stuck-in-the-mud Greenface thinkers thought that way. It was true that since people had learned how to make any element or raw material out of synthetic atoms back in the last century, the twenty-first, Martian mining had come to a halt. Now all that the Mars colonists could hope to contribute was knowledge. And they had failed to do so. In fact, their efforts were pretty well stumped.

But the old debate about the Martian costs had cropped up again the very week that Nelson had graduated and shipped back home aboard the passenger liner Congreve. He had been busy packing, saying good-by to his friends, selling his books and storing away his mementos. Even in those days of 2120, a hundred and fifty years after the invention of space rockets, room was still limited on the liners. Nelson had ignored the news. With the excitement of the trip home, the bustle and hustle of the takeoff at the spaceport, the acceleration bumps, the moon landing and refueling, and then the jump into the big swim to the red planet, he hadn't given the matter further thought.

When things had leveled off afterward and he had overheard one of the crewmen, a steward named Jack Santos, remarking that “it was about time they junked this dusty old Mars drag,” then Nelson got angry.

“That’s a lot of Greenface growlbait!” Nelson burst out, putting down the micro-manual on which he was boning up. “A lot of weak sisters who never had what it took to be pioneers ran back to Earth trying to put the blame on Mars. They try to cover up their own lack of guts by claiming we’ll never crack that old Martian science—but we will!”

Jack Santos turned to Nelson. “What’s a Green-face?” he asked. “That’s a new one on me.”

Nelson sat up in his seat, eased the straps that held him down in the weightless cabin. “That’s what we high-skyers call the people who come out to the red planet and then want to run home as soon as they find it’s no pleasure garden. My dad says they used to sit outside and just stare up at Old Earth in the evening sky. It’s a green star, you know, so they got called Greenfaces.”

Jack shrugged. “Well, whatever you call ’em, I don’t blame ’em. There’s no place like Earth. But I don’t think the argument is as simple as all that. The fact is that Mars hasn’t paid, that it’s costing a fortune every minute the colony there is kept up and that there isn't any sign it’ll ever pay off.”

“That’s right,” another passenger chimed in, an astronomer en route to an asteroid observatory. “Even if you people did crack the mystery of the Martian machines, it’d probably not pay back half of what’s been spent. I’m sure we can invent anything they had long before you can figure it out.”

Nelson looked around. The living space of the liner was limited, a standard in all such vessels. In this chamber, which did duty as a passenger lounge, there were about a dozen hammock-slung seats, crowded closely on walls, floor, and ceiling, racks of video screens, 3-D tape projectors, micro-readers, and so on. About a half dozen passengers were present, all now listening to the discussion. Nelson realized that he alone was in favor of the colony’s continuation. He rose to the odds.

“We'll never invent what’s on Mars for another ten thousand years!” he declared. “Why, you can’t imagine the things that are there, in the storerooms, in the houses themselves, the constructions, the—oh, you can’t just describe it all. If it takes a couple more centuries, we still ought to stick it out and work out the principles of those engines. Just one of them in working order would boost our civilization on Earth tremendously!”

The steward laughed. “But you’ve never cracked even one of them ... in fact I understand you can’t even open the clothes closets in Martian bedrooms! In a hundred years your father and his friends and the ones who went before him never even made a dent in the problem!”

“Besides, we’ve already taken samples of those machines back to Earth. We can work on them at our leisure without going all the way to Mars to do it,” said another passenger.

“How do you know they’d work at all back on Earth?” asked Nelson.

Jack Santos had been fiddling around with a video and finally seemed to be getting results. No one answered the last question as they watched the screen light up and the tridimensional picture waver into reality. Jack worked the hand dials carefully. “We’re very nearly out at the limit of visible reception,” he announced, "but sometimes we can get a period of good vision.”

Sure enough, the set which had faded out yesterday as the liner had passed the five-million-mile mark came to life once more. For a few brief minutes the illusion of looking from a balcony into a living scene came into being. They were looking down on another session of the Earth experts. By a clever system of montage both the audience in the seats of the great assembly and the pulsing face of the speaker could be seen. He was talking rapidly and energetically.

With a little start Nelson realized that the Martian colony’s maintenance was still being discussed. This debate had lasted much longer than in the years before. Nelson felt a trifle uneasy as he wondered whether this time they might actually vote to cut down or scrap the Martian settlement.

He thought of his father, the renowned leader of the research base there, John Carson Parr. He remembered how many times, as a boy at the dinner table in their sealed-in home in the eerily empty Martian city, his father had explained his hopes of what wonders they would uncover there.

The video wavered, flickered, and went slowly out. Jack Santos flicked off the power. “Out of range again.”

Nelson leaned back thoughtfully. He recalled how he had first felt when he landed on Earth, the strangeness of it all. He knew he was unusual in being one of the very few people actually to have been born on Mars. Colonists usually went back home before they raised families, but John Parr and his wife were made of sterner stuff. They wanted their children to be true Martians and so Nelson had actually been born in the little hospital that serviced the entire small colony. To him the lighter gravity was the normal one, and the day he landed on Earth had been a very hard one.

Because he was used to weighing so little, his muscles had never developed the normal strength of an Earth boy’s. He had spent his first few weeks on Earth simply learning all over again how to walk, how to breathe, how to carry his weight around all day. But he had come through the ordeal. His heritage as a human had proved capable, and before he was on Earth six months Nelson had been able to hold his own with the best. As he had gone on with his studies, as the first year went into the second and third, he had even begun to acquire a high standing in sports. He had gained a place on the Institute basketball team, had won track contests, and was a strong contender in tennis and other games requiring bodily speed.

When, at last, he had come to the spaceport to embark once again for home, he was a bronzed, tall, muscular young man of sixteen, with an unruly shock of chestnut hair, sharp green eyes, and a special zest for the part he planned to assume as a true high-skyer.

As Nelson mused about the takeoff day, he remembered that the famous scientist Leroy Perrault had shown up unexpectedly to say good-by to him. Nelson had been quite surprised, for he had met the savant only once during his entire stay on Earth and certainly did not consider himself important enough to warrant a personal farewell. He knew that Perrault was a good friend of his father, a strong supporter of the colony, who held some sort of position in the Interplanetary Bureau, exactly what he never quite ascertained. Still . . . and then Nelson flushed inwardly as he remembered that the keen-eyed old man had indeed had an ulterior motive. When Perrault and young Nelson had momentarily been out of sight of others, the scientist had hastily taken a letter from the inside pocket of his coat and slipped it into Nelson's hands.

“Give this to your father as soon as you land. Don’t let it get out of your possession until then. It’s important!" Perrault had whispered this to Nelson as he guided the letter out of sight in his clothes.

It dawned on Nelson then that he had forgotten all about it in the excitement of the takeoff. A chill ran up and down his back for a moment—where was the letter now? It must still be in the pocket of the jacket he had been wearing at the time. And that jacket was hanging right now in his little cabin locker, unguarded and unwatched!