The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (59 page)

“That was quite a storm,” said Gibson. “Does this sort of thing happen very often on Mars? And why didn’t we get any warnings?”

The pilot, now that he had got over his initial shock, was doing some quick thinking, the inevitable court of enquiry obviously looming large in his mind. Even on autopilot, he
should
have gone forward more often….

“I’ve never seen one like it before,” he said, “though I’ve done at least fifty trips between Lowell and Skia. The trouble is that we don’t know anything about Martian meteorology, even now. And there are only half a dozen met stations on the planet— not enough to give us an accurate picture.”

“What about Phobos? Couldn’t they have seen what was happening and warned us?”

The pilot grabbed his almanac and ruffled rapidly through the pages.

“Phobos hasn’t risen yet,” he said after a brief calculation. “I guess the storm blew up suddenly out of Hades— appropriate name, isn’t it?— and has probably collapsed again now. I don’t suppose it went anywhere near Charontis, so
they
couldn’t have warned us either. It was just one of those accidents that’s nobody’s fault.”

This thought seemed to cheer him considerably, but Gibson found it hard to be so philosophical.

“Meanwhile,” he retorted, “we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. How long will it take them to find us? Or is there any chance of repairing the ship?”

“Not a hope of that; the jets are ruined. They were made to work on air, not sand, you know!”

“Well, can we radio Skia?”

“Not now we’re on the ground. But when Phobos rises in— let’s see— an hour’s time, we’ll be able to call the observatory and they can relay us on. That’s the way we’ve got to do all our long-distance stuff here, you know. The ionosphere’s too feeble to bounce signals round the way you do on Earth. Anyway, I’ll go and check that the radio is O.K.”

He went forward and started tinkering with the ship’s transmitter, while Hilton busied himself checking the heaters and cabin air pressure, leaving the two remaining passengers looking at each other a little thoughtfully.

“This is a fine kettle of fish!” exploded Gibson, half in anger and half in amusement. “I’ve come safely from Earth to Mars— more than fifty million kilometers— and as soon as I set foot inside a miserable aeroplane
this
is what happens! I’ll stick to spaceships in future.”

Jimmy grinned. “It’ll give us something to tell the others when we get back, won’t it? Maybe we’ll be able to do some real exploring at last.” He peered through the windows, cupping his hands over his eyes to keep out the cabin light. The surrounding landscape was now in complete darkness, apart from the illumination from the ship.

“There seem to be hills all round us; we were lucky to get down in one piece. Good Lord— there’s a cliff here on this side— another few meters and we’d have gone smack into it!”

“Any idea where we are?” Gibson called to the pilot. This tactless remark earned him a very stony stare.

“About 120 east, 20 north. The storm can’t have thrown us very far off course.”

“Then we’re somewhere in the Aetheria,” said Gibson, bending over the maps. “Yes— there’s a hilly region marked here. Not much information about it.”

“It’s the first time anyone’s ever landed here— that’s why. This part of Mars is almost unexplored; it’s been thoroughly mapped from the air, but that’s all.”

Gibson was amused to see how Jimmy brightened at this news. There was certainly something exciting about being in a region where no human foot had ever trodden before.

“I hate to cast a gloom over the proceedings,” remarked Hilton, in a tone of voice hinting that this was exactly what he was going to do, “but I’m not at all sure you’ll be able to radio Phobos even when it does rise.”

“What!” yelped the pilot. “The set’s O.K.— I’ve just tested it.”

“Yes— but have you noticed where we are? We can’t even
see
Phobos. That cliff’s due south of us and blocks the view completely. That means that they won’t be able to pick up our microwave signals. What’s even worse, they won’t be able to locate us in their telescopes.”

There was a shocked silence.

“
Now
what do we do?” asked Gibson. He had a horrible vision of a thousand-kilometer trek across the desert to Charontis, but dismissed it from his mind at once. They couldn’t possibly carry the oxygen for the trip, still less the food and equipment necessary. And no one could spend the night unprotected on the surface of Mars, even here near the Equator.

“We’ll just have to signal in some other way,” said Hilton calmly. “In the morning we’ll climb those hills and have a look round. Meanwhile I suggest we take it easy.” He yawned and stretched himself, filling the cabin from ceiling to floor. “We’ve got no immediate worries; there’s air for several days, and power in the batteries to keep us warm almost indefinitely. We may get a bit hungry if we’re here more than a week, but I don’t think that’s at all likely to happen.”

By a kind of unspoken mutual consent, Hilton had taken control. Perhaps he was not even consciously aware of the fact, but he was now the leader of the little party. The pilot had delegated his own authority without a second thought.

“Phobos rises in an hour, you said?” asked Hilton.

“Yes.”

“When does it transit? I can never remember what this crazy little moon of yours gets up to.”

“Well, it rises in the west and sets in the east about four hours later.”

“So it’ll be due south around midnight?”

“That’s right. Oh Lord— that means we won’t be able to see it anyway. It’ll be eclipsed for at least an hour!”

“
What
a moon!” snorted Gibson. “When you want it most badly, you can’t even see the blasted thing!”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Hilton calmly. “We’ll know just where it is, and it won’t do any harm to try the radio then. That’s all we can do tonight. Has anyone got a pack of cards? No? Then what about entertaining us, Martin, with some of your stories?”

It was a rash remark, and Gibson seized his chance immediately.

“I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” he said. “
You’re
the one who has the stories to tell.”

Hilton stiffened, and for a moment Gibson wondered if he had offended him. He knew that Hilton seldom talked about the Saturnian expedition, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. The chance would never come again, and, as is true of all great adventures, its telling would do their morale good. Perhaps Hilton realized this too, for presently he relaxed and smiled.

“You’ve got me nicely cornered, haven’t you, Martin? Well, I’ll talk— but on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“No direct quotes, please!”

“As if I would!”

“And when you
do
write it up, let me see the manuscript first.”

“Of course.”

This was better than Gibson had dared to hope. He had no immediate intention of writing about Hilton’s adventures, but it was nice to know that he could do so if he wished. The possibility that he might never have the chance simply did not cross his mind.

Outside the walls of the ship, the fierce Martian night reigned supreme— a night studded with needle-sharp, unwinking stars. The pale light of Deimos made the surrounding landscape dimly visible, as if lit with a cold phosphorescence. Out of the east Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky, was rising in his glory. But the thoughts of the four men in the crashed aircraft were six hundred million kilometers still farther from the sun.

It still puzzled many people— the curious fact that man had visited Saturn but not Jupiter, so much closer at hand. But in space-travel, sheer distance is of no importance, and Saturn had been reached because of a single astonishing stroke of luck that still seemed too good to be true. Orbiting Saturn was Titan, the largest satellite in the Solar System— about twice the size of Earth’s moon. As far back as 1944 it had been discovered that Titan possessed an atmosphere. It was not an atmosphere one could breathe: it was immensely more valuable than that. For it was an atmosphere of methane, one of the ideal propellants for atomic rockets.

This had given rise to a situation unique in the history of spaceflight. For the first time, an expedition could be sent to a strange world with the virtual certainty that refueling would be possible on arrival.

The
Arcturus
and her crew of six had been launched in space from the orbit of Mars. She had reached the Saturnian systems only nine months later, with just enough fuel to land safely on Titan. Then the pumps had been started, and the great tanks replenished from the countless trillions of tons of methane that were there for the taking. Refueling on Titan whenever necessary, the
Arcturus
had visited every one of Saturn’s fifteen known moons, and had even skirted the great ring system itself. In a few months, more was learned about Saturn than in all the previous centuries of telescopic examination.

There had been a price to pay. Two of the crew had died of radiation sickness after emergency repairs to one of the atomic motors. They had been buried on Dione, the fourth moon. And the leader of the expedition, Captain Envers, had been killed by an avalanche of frozen air on Titan; his body had never been found. Hilton had assumed command, and had brought the
Arcturus
safely back to Mars a year later, with only two men to help him.

All these bare facts Gibson knew well enough. He could still remember listening to those radio messages that had come trickling back through space, relayed from world to world. But it was a different thing altogether to hear Hilton telling the story in his quiet, curiously impersonal manner, as if he had been a spectator rather than a participant.

He spoke of Titan and its smaller brethren, the little moons which, circling Saturn, made the planet almost a scale model of the Solar System. He described how at last they had landed on the innermost moon of all, Mimas, only half as far from Saturn as the Moon is from the Earth.

“We came down in a wide valley between a couple of mountains, where we were sure the ground would be pretty solid. We weren’t going to make the mistake we did on Rhea! It was a good landing, and we climbed into our suits to go outside. It’s funny how impatient you always are to do that, no matter how many times you’ve set down on a new world.

“Of course, Mimas hasn’t much gravity— only a hundredth of Earth’s. That was enough to keep us from jumping off into space. I liked it that way; you knew you’d always come down safely again if you waited long enough.

“It was early in the morning when we landed. Mimas has a day a bit shorter than Earth’s— it goes round Saturn in twenty-two hours, and as it keeps the same face towards the planet its day and month are the same length— just as they are on the Moon. We’d come down in the northern hemisphere, not far from the Equator, and most of Saturn was above the horizon. It looked quite weird— a huge crescent horn sticking up into the sky, like some impossibly bent mountain thousands of miles high.

“Of course you’ve all seen the films we made— especially the speeded-up color one showing a complete cycle of Saturn’s phases. But I don’t think they can give you much idea of what it was like to live with that enormous thing always there in the sky. It was so big, you see, that one couldn’t take it in a single view. If you stood facing it and held your arms wide open, you could just imagine your finger tips touching the opposite ends of the rings. We couldn’t see the rings themselves very well, because they were almost edge-on, but you could always tell they were there by the wide, dusky band of shadow they cast on the planet.

“None of us ever got tired of watching it. It’s spinning so fast, you know— the pattern was always changing. The cloud formations, if that’s what they were, used to whip round from one side of the disc to the other in a few hours, changing continually as they moved. And there were the most wonderful colors— greens and browns and yellows chiefly. Now and then there’d be great, slow eruptions, and something as big as Earth would rise up out of the depths and spread itself sluggishly in a huge stain halfway round the planet.

“You could never take your eyes off it for long. Even when it was new and so completely invisible, you could still tell it was there because of the great hole in the stars. And here’s a funny thing which I haven’t reported because I was never quite sure of it. Once or twice, when we were in the planet’s shadow and its disc should have been completely dark, I thought I saw a faint phosphorescent glow coming from the night side. It didn’t last long— if it really happened at all. Perhaps it was some kind of chemical reaction going on down there in that spinning cauldron.

“Are you surprised that I want to go to Saturn again? What I’d like to do is to get
really
close this time— and by that I mean within a thousand kilometers. It should be quite safe and wouldn’t take much power. All you need do is to go into a parabolic orbit and let yourself fall in like a comet going round the Sun. Of course, you’d only spend a few minutes actually close to Saturn, but you could get a lot of records in that time.

“And I want to land on Mimas again, and see that great shining crescent reaching halfway up the sky. It’ll be worth the journey, just to watch Saturn waxing and waning, and to see the storms chasing themselves round his Equator. Yes— it would be worth it, even if
I
didn’t get back this time.”

There were no mock heroics in this closing remark. It was merely a simple statement of fact, and Hilton’s listeners believed him completely. While the spell lasted, every one of them would be willing to strike the same bargain.

Gibson ended the long silence by going to the cabin window and peering out into the night.

“Can we have the lights off?” he called. Complete darkness fell as the pilot obeyed his request. The others joined him at the window.

“Look,” said Gibson. “Up there— you can just see it if you crane your neck.”

The cliff against which they were lying was no longer a wall of absolute and unrelieved darkness. On its very topmost peaks a new light was playing, spilling over the broken crags and filtering down into the valley. Phobos had leapt out of the west and was climbing on its meteoric rise towards the south, racing backwards across the sky.