The Secret of the Martian Moons (19 page)

The Space-leader nodded, turned again to Nelson. “Perhaps you Earthlings have considered the problem of star travel?”

“Yes,” Nelson answered. “We have thought of it, but it has always seemed a hard and profitless task. The stars are so far away that even if we could travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, it would take us almost four years just to get to the nearest star. It would take an equally long time to come home. And it will never be possible to travel even at that light speed, because solid matter, such as ships and men, would cease to exist as matter and become merely energy when moving so fast.”

Bodril nodded. “I see you people are well advanced. Not at all like the cavemen Taktor showed us. You have hit on the root of the problem exactly.

“With our perfected release of atomic power, it is possible to imagine a spaceship accelerating until it actually becomes light. We knew we could send a ship to the stars if we wanted to. It would be a matter of keeping the spaceship as fast as possible without too dangerous a distortion due to the laws governing mass and speed. The safety point in actual practice turns out to be about half the speed of light. So that we could go to the nearest star and return, not in eight years, but in sixteen years.”

Taktor put in, “That is always assuming there was anything worth seeing around the nearest star. And as a matter of fact, there wasn’t much.” He waved a hand.

On the wall appeared a long black ship, much like the present Marauder craft. Nelson saw it leave Mars, head out into the great vastness of space toward a dim star. He saw that star grow into a red ball, Proxima Centauri he supposed it to be from his lessons. Around it he saw one dark huge world appear, a cold gaseous planet deadly to life. He saw the black ship turn, circle awhile, and then head back. He saw it ease down onto Mars and land.

"The men who flew that craft were due for a terrible surprise,” said Bodril. "They thought they had found an amazing thing, for once they had started out, their trip had seemed to last but a few short months instead of the long years that they had prepared for. They thought that the theories of astronomy and physics were wrong, that the stars were easily reached in short times. But they returned to find that what had been but a few months to them was still seventeen years for those they had left behind! Their friends were old or dead, their families grown up or changed, their children seeming older than their parents.”

"I know,” said Nelson. "It was the time distortion that takes place as speed increases. Einstein worked that out on Earth two centuries ago.”

"Yes,” said Bodril, "then you know. There is a law of nature that rules speed. The faster a body goes, the more its length draws out to infinity and the shorter its time duration becomes. In practice it means that in a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light, its actual length is drawn out by this speed to many, many times its original length, and the motion and time sense of passengers and machinery within it is slowed down. To men riding inside, a trip may seem to take but a minute when to those waiting on a home planet the same period takes hours or days. The crew of a starship live and age slowly, but they themselves are not aware of it, for everything about them has changed in the same proportion. Only when they slow down, return to normal, can the difference be discovered.” “What this meant,” said Taktor slowly, “was that trips to the stars were perfectly practical within the lifetime of the crew, but that the price they would pay would be permanent exile from their families and homes. The world they would return to after*what might seem a trip of a single year would be a hundred or a thousand years in the future of the world they had left. They would be friendless men on a planet of strangers. It was too high a price to pay.”

There was silence for a while in the room. Then Taktor went on, “The matter was discussed for a long time and no one came to any decisions. A few men did leave in ships, and did come back to be lonely strangers. But nobody wanted this fate. For a while the matter was let drop. Then the violent fights and arguments began again and new bloodshed was breaking out. Again, the whole world took counsel.” Another presentation of people in Martian homes listening to their scientists and social leaders talking. “This time a startling new course was proposed. At first it was so unusual, people were unable to credit it as serious. But then it began to take hold on imaginations and very rapidly became the rage of every man, woman, and child on Mars.

“It was nothing less than the mass vacationing of the entire population to the stars! The idea was to build enough ships, thousands in number, to have a place for every living Martian, including the children and babies. Then to seal all fragile things, to lock up our cities and properties, to install automatic controls on the agriculture and workings of our world, and go en masse to the stars! In that way we could all have our relaxations, end our frustrations, enjoy the glories and wonders of the universe, visit distant worlds, learn new things, and all return home together. There would be no lonely exiles, no agonized young men looking for familiar faces amid a world of their great-grandchildren grown up, no wives or mothers kissing their men good-by forever, knowing they would never see them again during their lifetime.”

Nelson watched the screen as he saw the project go into operation. He saw the great fleets of black star-ships growing, as the incredible underground factories of Mars poured them out from materials mined on asteroids and planet cores. He saw the controls being set up, he saw the sealing up of the caverns and vaults by impermeable subatomic shields. At a question as to why these shields resisted even the atom bombs of the Earth explorers, Taktor said, "Actually a dimensional shift was used here. A thin layer of matter on the surface of each vault wall and door was shifted slightly out of this dimension, warped across a fourth dimension flex. No blast could even touch such a surface.” Finally Nelson saw a scene whereon the great black starships, each holding thousands of people, lifted from their desert beds and took off for the stars.

"That first star trip took seven years for those on the ships. We visited dozens of stars, explored hundreds of planets, turned up several that were inhabited. After our seven years we returned to a Mars that had aged several thousand years. But it did not matter, for we had done our work well. The planet was still ready and waiting, our fields still growing, our water still pumping, our homes still untouched.

"That first trip satisfied our frustrations and culture for almost ten generations. We had brought back so much in knowledge and material that it took that length of time to exhaust it all. The tenth generation took off again for the stars, and again Mars was left untenanted and locked up.”

Nelson watched fascinated as scenes among the stars flashed before him. He saw worlds galore, some vast and cold, some small and dark. He saw mountainous worlds and desert ones. He saw red suns and blue suns and multiple ones. He saw beings of dreadful shape attack the Martians when they landed. He saw manlike beings welcome the star visitors, trading with them, saw the Martian men and women wandering the streets of weird cities arm in arm like tourists on vacation. He saw Martians climbing mountains so high their tops were without air. He saw Martians hunting incredible beasts in purple forests. And he saw warfare.

He saw that the Martians were a tough and vigorous people, who responded to attack with attack. That they never flinched from opposition but met it and forced their way in. He saw that they never took no for an answer from a strange civilization, insisting always on their right to entry. Nelson was not sure he could agree with their actions.

“No wonder they called you Marauders,” Nelson said. “It seems to me that you did a lot of things no honest explorer would do.”

“Hey, wait before you call us names,” said Bodril. “But we weren’t really pirates. We stole nothing, we enslaved nobody, we left things always better and richer than we found them.”

“What about the Vegans?” asked Nelson, thinking he had found a flaw in their story. “They are terrified of you, told about your reputation in their system, and how they had to flee from your coming.”

“Oh, them,” said Bodril. “They’re a pretty slippery crowd. They lived on a small mountainous world and used to try to wreck approaching spaceships from the civilized planets near them—like the Malakarji, one of whose ships you seem to have been using. When a ship would land on their world in need of fuel or repair, they’d trap the crew, steal the ship. They had a completely wrong and crooked system of thinking. They pretended they were better than their neighbors and didn’t want to trade with them when actually it was their neighbor worlds who cut them off, refused to take chances with their sneaky cunning.”

“We gave them a shaking up!” said Taktor. “Scared the daylights out of them. Their leaders, the worst ones, built a couple of big spherical starships, and ran away when they heard we were coming. Don’t know where they went, but without those leaders we were able to open their world to honest trade and make it safe for space travelers.”

“That happened on this last trip,” said Bodril. “I myself helped on that campaign. Only a couple years ago it seems like, though I guess it must be a couple thousand years ago your time. Wonder where those Vegan refugees went? Maybe next time our descendants go out they could try to follow them, look them up.” Suddenly he narrowed his eyes and stared sharply at Nelson. “Say, just where did you get that Malakarji Vegan houseboat you were in when we caught you?” “Yes,” said Taktor, eyes gleaming, “where’d you get it and why did you think we were enemies? Who told you about the Marauders?”

Why ... uh .. Nelson stammered, caught off guard. Somehow he had simply assumed that they had known all about the moon secrets and the Vegan ' runaways, but now he realized that they couldn’t possibly have known. To the Martians the fact that their planet had had two moons would come as a big surprise, for when they had left several thousand years before it hadn’t any and when they returned it still was moonless.

Swiftly he outlined to Taktor and Bodril the events which had taken place during the last few months. They listened to him with obvious amazement. When the young man told how he had been given the cubical ship by Kunosh, they nodded.

“It was probably one they had seized by treachery and took along with them. The Malakarji are fairly nice people as they go. We got along fine with them once we showed them their charge guns weren’t enough to beat us,” Bodril remarked.

Taktor was lost in thought. Finally he said, “You say one of the moon ships simply ran away, but the other headed for Earth along with your father and his men. Do you suppose your peoples will believe them?”

When Nelson nodded, he went on, “If that is so, then Earth must be expecting us to attack them in force. Then your people must be arming themselves and getting ready to beat off any visitors from Mars I And if these Vegans live up to their word and hand over some of their power sources, then the situation is quite dangerous.”

He fell silent, but Bodril took up the line of thought. “You see, Nelson, it is one thing to develop tremendous power sources, power beyond the atom, power that taps the basic core of the universe itself such as we have done and the Vegans have, and to know just what it is that you are doing. As you discover it, you learn its terrible possibilities. Wrongly used, or used by people who don’t really understand it, you can blow up a planet by accident. You can explode a sun! The trouble is that the Vegans were too cowardly to play too much with it and that your Earth people are still too young to be properly cautious. Add to that their idea that they are defending themselves against Marauders and total ruin, and they may not wait to learn.”

Nelson saw their point. “And you can’t wait and let them be, because then they’ll get up an attacking expedition and come here. Earth won’t stand still. We’re like yourselves, you know.”

Taktor: Word-learner smiled a bit. “You know why? You know why we never attempted to interfere or attack the men of Earth and why we don’t want to have to fight them off now? It’s because we’re all from the same stock. We Martians are your own distant cousins. We have the same inheritance.”

“What!” Nelson said, startled. “How’s that?”

Taktor nodded. “One of the reasons that led us into hunting around the universe is to find the race that took our ancestors from Earth. It must have been about a half million terrestrial years ago when something or some star-beings were passing through the Sol System. They landed on Earth, captured a group of shaggy cavemen, took them to Mars, and dumped them in the middle of the largest and most fruitful jungle area in the Southern Hemisphere. Those were our ancestors.

“We found this out by exhaustive archaeology. We can trace primitive skeletons back just so far and no farther. And when we first visited Earth we proved our theory completely. So, you see, we are as human as you are. We, too, developed fast, a little ahead of you in some ways, mainly because Mars never had the ice ages, earthquakes, floods and epidemics that your much larger world had, not to mention the problem of different races and languages.”

Bodril glanced at a timepiece. “I think we can break this up. Personally, I’m hungry. How about something to eat?”

They got up and went into the kitchen. There Taktor manipulated the native cooking equipment, incredible working devices, and with hardly any effort the three sat down to a rather remarkable meal the like of which Nelson had never eaten before.

When they were done, Taktor informed them that they were expected at a meeting of the Command Board where the matter of Earth would be discussed.

Nelson climbed into his warm outdoor jumper, adjusted his respirator, and went out of the house. The two Martians hadn’t brought along respirators, and the reason for that was that their vehicle was parked just outside. They didn’t bother about the short time they were in the open, simply leaped into their vessel and when Nelson was in, slammed the airtight door and went. The vehicle, a simple eggshell device, had almost no machinery and skimmed the ground without actually touching it. The power supply was a system of broadcast power used throughout Mars. This had been shut down and sealed during the Martians’ absence and was another reason for the utter failure of the colonizers to make any native equipment function.