The Secret of the Martian Moons (18 page)

The other man nodded, also smiling broadly. “Indeed not. Why, we think you put up a real good battle. I know at least one commander that's not going to live down the wallop your Malakarji bolt handed his ship. He’s going to be a mighty foolish-looking officer every time your story comes up!”

Nelson blazed up. “You don’t mean any harm! Why did you follow me? Why do you come tearing up and down the universe on mischief? I don’t know what you call yourselves, but the rest of the universe calls you a gang of murdering Marauders!”

The first man held up his hands again, shaking his head softly, but still smiling. “Uh—uh, now don’t get mad,” he said. “We know just what it is that some people have called us. I guess to them we might be the Marauders. But you got us wrong, boy. Were just after a little adventure and fun and exploration. And maybe right a few wrongs while getting them.”

“Oh,” said Nelson sarcastically, “you call looting and plundering this old planet fun and adventure, do you? And I suppose when you start in to burn and murder on Earth, that’ll be called exploration?”

The two men's faces suddenly sobered. The first one shook his head. “Now wait a minute, young fellow, before you go on like that. Better sit down and talk a bit. You’ve got a lot of strange ideas.” He set am example by drawing up a cushion and sitting down.

His comrade switched off the wall music and sat down himself. Nelson, suspicious, settled himself on a chair.

“First,” said one, “I’d better introduce myself. I’m Taktor: Word-learner, and this is Bodril: Space-leader. We’ve been given the job of talking this over with you. As you can tell by my name, it’s my profession to learn languages and I took the liberty of learning yours when you were unconscious the last few days. We have means of reading brain patterns and transposing them to other brains that can give us the exact hang of a language almost overnight.”

Nelson nodded slowly. Then that would account also for their knowledge of where he had lived when on Mars. They’d picked that up in the course of their probing.

“Second,” said the man called Bodril, “we’re not doing the looting and plundering around here; you and your friends were doing that. This house now. You think of it as yours and you’ve moved your stuff in here and tried to break open the private closets and belongings of its real owners. This happens to be the home of Kaktal: Valve-maker and his family, and he’s had to put off claiming it and coming home until we get things cleared with you.

"To top it off, we hoped to find things as spick and span as we left them and instead we find all sorts of monkeying around. You people tried to blow up our vaults, even tried an atomic blast in one place. You marked up our cities, dumped your furniture all over the place, tried to fool around with our plantations, ran all kinds of crazy wiring all over the place, and so on. It’s us that should be angry, not you.”

Nelson jumped to his feet. "What are you trying to put over! Already you re trying to steal this planet as your very own, handing out the houses, and taking great airs just because you know how to work the lost Martian vaults and locks. You come from some forgotten hole in the galaxy, tearing about, breaking up honest people’s civilizations, and leaving a trail of wreckage. If this world belongs to anybody, it would be the old Martians. And since they’re all gone and buried, it’s the rightful inheritance of their neighbors in space, and that’s us people of Earth!”

The two stared at him for a moment, speechless. Then, as one, they turned, their eyes wrinkled, and burst into fits of laughter. They slapped each other on the back and howled.

Finally Taktor caught his breath, wiped his brow, and choked out to the indignant Nelson, "Why—don’t you know yet what we’re talking about? The ‘forgotten hole in the galaxy’ we came from is here, right here! We’re the ‘lost’ Martians, fellow! This is our world! We’re from Mars and we’ve come home!”

"You! You are the real Martians!” Nelson exclaimed in amazement. “But how can that be? Where have you been? We found no sign of you.” He stopped, then suddenly narrowed his eyes and added suspiciously, “Or is this just a trick on your part? Are you making a claim just to throw a false track?”

Taktor and Bodril stopped smiling, looked at each other briefly. “Well,” said Bodril, “that’s a good point. How can we prove were the rightful owners of this world?”

Taktor waved a hand. “Oh, I think we can prove it all right. Now that our vaults are open, the Martian files available, our young friend will have no trouble seeing the truth. For one thing he’ll find the clothing we left in our houses fits our build. He’ll find pictures, screen records, life studies, color statues, and so on in our various halls and museums and he’ll recognize our people from them. He can study our history for himself.

“Here,” he turned to Nelson, “watch this.” He turned to the wall panel which had been serving as a music channel, flicked his hand over it. Immediately it cleared, presented a scene looking in upon a room. There were several people there, dressed in odd costumes and evidently they were engaged in bitter controversy. Nelson recognized that this was undoubtedly part of a play, probably being run off on some entertainment channel.

The costumes were fantastic, definitely of a premachine culture, and the play probably represented something from the works of some Martian Shakespeare or an Aristophanes. The locale was undoubtedly Mars, and the characters were clearly of the same race as his two Marauders. All were red-haired, all pale-blue eyed.

Taktor waved his hand again and the picture was replaced by one recognizable as a classroom platform, whereon an instructor was obviously explaining something about history and pointing to a chart on the wall. This chart, actually a wonderfully alive relief map, was recognizable to Nelson as part of the familiar Martian landscape. Despite his suspicion, he leaned forward with interest, studying what seemed to be the outlines of ancient Martian states, as they must have been in some early pre-canal-building period.

Taktor waved his hand again and again, and more and more scenes of all sorts appeared. Discussions, dances, musicmakers, more plays. Clearly there was a widely varied culture alive on Mars at that moment, a culture whose people were always the race of the Marauders, and which was so deep, so widespread, and so clearly geared to the red planet as to leave the matter no longer disputable.

Nelson nodded to Bodril’s arched eyebrows. "You’ve made your point, I admit it. But that doesn’t account for where you’ve been or how you got your bad reputation as Marauders.”

Bodril smiled. "I guess that calls for some history, eh, Taktor?”

The Word-learner nodded soberly. “That’s one of the things I’m supposed to go into now, before we can bring this young Earthling before the Command Board. Make yourself comfortable then, and I’ll try to clear things up a little.”

Nelson drew his chair up closer, while Taktor: Word-learner flickered through the central wall screen until he had a scene he was seeking. It was a relief globe of Mars, a planet whose green areas were vastly greater and showed small lakes and even a sea-size mass of blue in their midst. The desert regions were present but lesser in area.

“This is Mars as it was at about the dawn of our recorded history. This was perhaps—a half million or so of your years ago. As you see, even at that time the planet was drying up and the deserts were growing. Our people inhabited one particular fertile area in the Southern Hemisphere, where we lived amid the forests and were pretty much of a farmer folk.

“Our earliest records show small isolated city-states quite often warring among each other for the dwindling lakes and water rights—for even then the problem of water was an overwhelming one. I learn from your mind and language that gold apparently occupied the major role in your development of an exchange medium. On Mars it was water rights from the very first, and our original and oldest currency consisted of pledges and permits for water.

“We had a number of wars among each other as time went on,” said Taktor, and his flickering fingers in the air over the wall panel called forth various changes of scenery. There were shots of walled cities, snug amid green cactus jungles, shots of men in bronze and iron armor bashing away at each other with swords and axes. “This sort of thing lasted thousands of years, our states growing in size, our race moving out, discovering other fertile belts, spreading over all the habitable areas always in search of water.

“In the course of this time we improved our civilization—and our ways of warfare. We learned to make self-moving vessels for the land and even for the air. By and by only three big combinations of cities existed as self-ruling states, and there was the grave danger of a new and final war with the newly developed atomic power weapons.”

Taktor again displayed a hemisphere of Mars and this time Nelson could note that the deserts had spread, the green areas contracted, the lakes and seas vanished.

“About this time also we ourselves realized that our world had changed even in the course of our own history. We also were noting that our atmosphere was slowly thinning, that our world was growing colder. A great conference was called and our best brains thrashed the whole thing out. We had never become many different races—all Martians are the same color and build, all had the same language, so really there was nothing dividing us save matters of pride and points of government. All these were not important as soon as we realized that no one could win a war wherein the planet itself was dying. We discussed this thing for an entire generation, with every man and woman joining in by means of radio communication, and eventually we emerged with one state federation and with a long and difficult program for saving the planet. We pooled our resources, went without, but in another generation we had laid out the main canal system, set up the system of water supply from our polar reserves, organized our agriculture on a world conservation basis.”

Nelson’s fascinated eyes saw the familiar network of canals sprout across the face of the hemisphere. He saw thousands of men toiling with atomic and hand diggers to lay down tens of thousands of miles of unbreakable and uncorrosive pipelines. He saw men going through the growing fields and forests destroying the unproductive plants and cultivating only those which produced the most food value at the least water usage.

“Because we saw that air too was thinning, we next set out to build airtight cities, to put our factories and main structures underground,” went on Taktor, and scenes illustrating this flashed before Nelson’s eyes.

“All this work took time and several thousands of your years went by before we had completed it. By then our world was much as it is today, our agriculture tightly controlled and almost entirely automatic. We had evolved atomic sciences to points which enabled us to make immense caverns, unbreakable walls, to travel where we willed.”

“Did you build spaceships then?” asked Nelson.

“You could have gone to Earth then, conquered it for yourself.”

“We didn't pay much attention to spaceships in those days, but after our work was completed we did. We visited Earth . . .” On the screen flashed a scene taken from a ship approaching Earth. Nelson watched and noticed that it was different from the world he’d known. Great white ice sheets covered much of its Northern Hemisphere and swirling clouds obscured the rest of the planet. Obviously it was a period during one of the great ice ages.

“We found Earth an uninviting world, stormy and cold, filled with jungles such as we had never imagined, wild beasts of terrible temper—for there were never any big animals on Mars, there were no other mammals besides ourselves—and wild savage men.” Here Nelson got a glimpse—an actual 3-D color photo taken from life—of cavemen, hairy, painted, bent-shouldered men, whose sharp eyes peered from shaggy eyebrows, and whose hands clutched crude spears of chipped stone.

“Although Earth had the water and air we needed, we didn’t like it, preferred the quiet and order of Mars. We went to all the other worlds of this system, but you must know yourself what we found. None could ever be home, none were inviting.”

Taktor flashed a few quick scenes of the planets Nelson himself had studied. “So we settled down on our own world and studied and thought and debated. By and by our various arguments over matters of the most obscure and often silly points of philosophy, of game making, became more and more violent. Fights between debaters became frequent, and struggles between audiences at games and lectures became commonplace. More and more we found ourselves returning to the ways of violence and combat. Instead of the fight for food and water which had marked our early days of savagery, we had fights over athletic contests or differences of opinion as to whether the universe was expanding or contracting. People began to go armed and men wore insignia to demonstrate their particular enthusiasms.

“Finally it reached such a point of bloodshed that we were all a little surprised and frightened/’ Here there was a scene in an underground arena, obviously one of the caverns beneath a city. A mass of Martians were milling about, and Nelson caught glimpses of knives rising and falling, splashed with red, and finally the incredible blast of a small atomic bomb blotted out the arena.

“We called a planetwide conference and again our whole world took counsel. It became clear to us that we were stagnating, that having no further frontiers to discover, no more great building projects to make, we were turning upon ourselves. Our frustration was breaking us down. We discussed then the problem of finding a way to fly to the stars.”

Taktor stopped a moment. Bodril: Space-leader leaned forward, said, “You see the stars are infinite in number. Once we could go to the stars, there could never be an end to exploration, to adventure. And maybe we could find other civilized beings to debate with, to exhaust our energies on, to trade knowledge with.”

Bodril sat back, glanced at Taktor. “Sorry to interrupt!” The other looked at him, said, “Maybe you ought to continue from here. It’s more in your line now!”