The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone chose this part of the planet to live on.

It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm, close companionship of their fellows.

He reached over and flicked the switch of the visor set in the nose of the ship for observation purposes. The scene revealed was as disappointingly prosaic to him now, as it had been when he had first seen it. It looked just as the mid-western deserts used to look before the Consul had turned them into fertile agricultural grounds, with one exception: the ground was as red as blood, even in the feeble light of the Martian moons.

There was a wind blowing, carrying the sand and the half-vegetable, half-animal "tumblies" along with it. But the wind always blew on Mars at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to the pole.

The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down, aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the engines.

The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect is as though something very vital had died.

Lawrence stood there trying to accustom his ears to the silence that claimed the ship, saving only the weep of the wind outside. And the wind became, in that moment, as all-pervading, as much a part of things as the rockets had been. The difference was that the rocket noise existed for only a brief while, and the wind had moaned out on those somber plains for—how many millions of years had it been?

He shook off the mood, drew on a light, electrically-heated suit with an oxygen container on the back. It completely covered every part of his body, and was especially designed for Mars, having two metaglass openings for his eyes and a voice amplifier just below it.

After that, he stepped out into the air-lock, the sound detectors 

 Prev. P 11/16 next