The Martian Shore

By CHARLES L. FONTENAY

Shaan made the longest crawl in history—to avoid crawling before tyrants!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, April 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The lone figure trudged across the Hellas Desert toward Alpheus Canal. He moved fast in the low gravity of Mars, but the canal was miles away and the afternoon was far gone.

Robbo Shaan turned his marsuit temperature unit down a degree. He still perspired freely, but he didn't dare turn it any lower. Only a green Earthand would ignore any survival factor when stranded on the Martian desert.

Shaan had no map, no compass. But he remembered there was a private dome in the middle of the canal, just about due east from him. He didn't have enough oxygen to reach it. They had seen to that. But he'd try till he died.

The brand itched on his forehead, and scalded in the sweat that poured down from his close-cropped blond hair. With his marshelmet on, there was no way to scratch it. It throbbed.

Even if he reached the dome, or any dome, that brand guaranteed that he would be shot on sight.

Soldiers of the Imperial Government of Mars had dropped the jetcopter to the sand hours before, and turned Robbo Shaan out to die. He had stood on the red sand and watched the 'copter with the four-winged eagles painted on its sides, as it rose and fled away from him in the direction of Mars City.

He smiled grimly. The Imperial Constitution did not permit the Government to kill a man outright, no matter what his crime. This was the way they did it instead.

Robbo Shaan's crime was simple. He believed in the old democratic form of government the Martian dome-cities had had after the Martian people won their freedom from the Earth corporations in the Charax Uprising—and had recently lost. Shaan had talked democracy, and under the new Imperial Government that was treason.

There was no appeal from his sentence. If he lived—and how could he live without food or oxygen?—he was an outcast. It was a peculiar legal contradiction; the government was prohibited from executing him outright, but, once he had been branded, it was the duty 

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