Lost Race of Mars

Chapter 3

Minutes after blast-off the ship cut off its engines. The sudden silence was strange after the steady roar of the rockets. The ship had now reached escape velocity and had broken free of the grasp of Earth’s gravity. For the rest of the trip it would simply coast through space,

“falling” in a wide curve toward the place where Mars would be three weeks from now.

The first few days of life in space were fascinating. Outside the ports was the marvelous darkness, broken by the bright, hard dots of light which were the stars. Earth was far behind already, a dwindling blue-green globe. The seas and continents could still be made out, though not very clearly. The moon loomed up, pockmarked with crater and enormous mountains. Then the moon, too, was left far behind. Only the immense glory of the Milky Way, spread out along the sky like a torrent of blazing jewels, was visible—and also the sun, too brilliant to be looked at directly, and the planets.

When Jim and Sally finally grew tired of staring at the stars and planets outside, they were allowed to explore the ship. With half a dozen other children they were taken on a tour of the rocket engine room at the rear, and of the control room in the nose. The spaceship carried a crew of seven, and they were all friendly and willing to answer questions, even the captain.

But by the fourth day out Jim and Sally had explored just about every inch of the ship. They had stared at the stars until their eyes tingled and ached. They had played games in the ship’s lounge until they were tired of games. The ship carried a big library of books and video tapes, and for a few more days Jim and Sally amused themselves with those. But even that grew boring after a while.

“Who would have believed it?” Jim asked. “Here we are, traveling in space, and we’re bored! ”

“It’s almost like being in a prison,” Sally said glumly.

It was. The ship was only two hundred feet long, and once you had explored it from end to end there was nothing else to see. Outside, of course, the was the beauty of space, but that never changed much from one hour to the next. Although the ship was moving Marsward at a terrific speed, it seemed as though it were standing still, just hanging against the backdrop of the skies. Jim wondered how the early space explorers had managed to stand the boredom of being cooped up for seven and eight months at a stretch.

Then one day there came a break in the routine. It was Midpoint Day—the day that the ship reached the point where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Mars exactly balanced each other. Once the ship had passed this point, it would be held in Mars’ gravitational grip, with no chance whatever of dropping back to Earth. The initial speed of seven miles a second had guaranteed that Midpoint would be reached. If the ship had started out at a lower velocity, Earth would have been able to pull her back.

All passengers were ordered to their cabins while the ship made turnover. The engines were turned on briefly and the ship turned end over end, so its tail now faced Mars instead of Earth. Then the engines were cut off again and the ship resumed its drop through space toward the red planet.

A gong was sounded. “All passengers report to lounge,” came the announcement. The crew waited there, all of them wearing breathing suits. It was time for all greenhorns to be inducted into the Order of Pluto. The ship’s artificial gravity was shut off. As the passengers drifted about, floating in mid-air, the crewmen went among them. The crewmen had magnetic soles on their boots, and so did not float. One by one the floundering passengers were dragged down by their feet and tossed around the lounge. It took only the slightest push to send someone drifting halfway across the cabin.

When the horseplay was over the gravity was turned on again. The new members of the Order of Pluto were given a drink of Spaceman’s Punch, and a membership card that proved the had passed Midpoint and so had escaped from Earth’s gravitational field.

Jim and Sally were allowed to have only one cup each of the Spaceman’s Punch, but some of the grownups had a good deal, and began to get silly and frisky. The party went on for most of the afternoon. It was a welcome change from the daily monotony of the trip.

Mars grew ever closer. It now looked the way Earth had in the days just after blast-off. It was a big disk—dull red, not blue-green as Earth was—with greenish patches here and there, and whitecaps of snow at the poles. As the ship grew nearer, variations in color could be seen. Some areas were vivid scarlet, other yellowish-brown, still others copper-colored. The pale-green patches of vegetation stood out clearly against the various shades of red of the deserts.

From time to time two tiny shapes, barely visible, could be seen flitting rapidly across the face of the red planet. Jim and Sally knew what those were: Deimos and Phobos, the two miniature moons of Mars. Phobos was only ten miles in diameter, Deimos even smaller. The zoomed around Mars like two buzzing little insects, Phobos making two complete circuits every day, Deimos going around once every thirty hours.

The voyage took on fresh interest. It was possible now to see clearly the gradations in color between the different deserts. The famous canals were visible, great lines extending over thousands of miles. Another day, and Sally and Jim could see areas where sandstorms were raging—swirling yellow cloud-mushrooms sprouting on the desert.

And then, finally, on the twentieth day, came the announcement everyone was waiting for:

“We will land on Mars tomorrow.”

The last day aboard ship was spent mostly in breathing-suit drill. Since a human being forced to breathe the thin Martian air would die of oxygen starvation in a few minutes, it was necessary to wear breathing suits except under the colony dome. The suits were lightweight plastic, with metal heating filaments embedded in them. The arm and leg sections were corrugated to give fairly easy motion. The was a large, clear helmet to wear. The breathing apparatus was worn on the back. A supply of air was constantly circulated, purified chemically, and recirculated. It was possible to exist almost indefinitely in one of the suits without a fresh supply of air.

Controls mounted on the chest of each suit governed the temperature within, switched radio communicators on and off, and regulated the proportion of oxygen being fed into the helmet.

A tube of fresh water was placed inside the helmet where it could be reached by turning the head. Life inside a breathing suit was inconvenient, but it could be endured for stretches of about half a day at a time without too much nuisance.

The suits came in only three sizes—large, medium, and small. The biggest suits could hold a man up to six feet four in height, and anyone bigger than that had to be specially provided for. The small size was adjustable for children between three and five feet tall. Children smaller than that rarely went to space. Jim and Sally were given medium-sized suits, as was their mother. Dr. Chambers received a large-sized suit. All the passengers drilled for several hours until everyone knew exactly how to get in and out of the suits and how to operate them.

Mars now bulked enormous in the view ports, taking up the entire sky. It turned slowly beneath them, a vast red-and-green ball. The ship plunged down, tail-first, heading toward Mars at a sharp angle.

With all the passengers once again strapped down, the ship’s engines were turned on. The rockets blasted once again to brake the ship’s plunge. The thin air of Mars did its part to slow down the fall. Gently, the ship coasted down to its landing spot. The impact of landing was surprisingly mild. The engines were cut off.

The captain’s voice came over the cabin loudspeaker. “We have made a successful landing on Mars. Passengers may unstrap. Everyone don breathing suits and report to the lounge when ready.”

Jim pointed to the port. “Look!”

Clouds of reddish dust drifted outside, But the surface of Mars could be seen—an endless expanse of barren-looking desert, brick-red, broken only by the twisted, stumpy wisps of plants.

Two years ago the Chambers family had made a trip out West. “It looks like the Arizona desert,” Sally said, “only more so.”

Jim wriggled rapidly into his breathing suit and was the first member of his family to climb the spiral stairway to the lounge. About half of the other passengers were there already. The captain was saying, “It’s a bit after noon, local time. The temperature out there is fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Adjust your heat controls accordingly.”

The crewmen circulated through the lounge, making sure all the passengers had put on their breathing suits properly. As each passenger was checked out, he was led to the exit hatch. A collapsible ladder dangled from the rim of the hatch to the ground.

“Be careful when you climb down,” Jim was told. “The gravity is only one third what you’re used to, but you can still get a nasty bump if you fall off.”

He climbed down very carefully, one hand after the other, and jumped off one rung from the bottom. His boots threw up a little cloud of sand.

He looked around. The sky was very blue, almost purple. There were no clouds. A sharp breeze was blowing, sharp enough for him to feel it through his thick suit. The sand, loose and crumbling, danced and swirled.

Four vehicles were parked about a hundred yards from the ship. They looked like metal beetles, low and bullet-shaped. They were half-tracks with sturdy wheels in the rear and tractor treads in front. A few figures in breathing suits stood nearby. The Martian welcoming committee, no doubt.

When all of the ship’s passengers had been unloaded and checked against the master list to make sure no one had strayed, they were herded toward the waiting half-tracks. Jim and Sally walked close together, just in front of their parents. Because the gravity was only thirty-eight percent of that on Earth, walking was easy. They felt like skipping and leaping around, but they had been warned not to because it used up energy and air for no good reason.

Each of the half-track sand-crawlers held ten people plus the driver. Three of them were rapidly loaded up. The fourth drove up next to the spaceship. It would be used to carry the cargo back to the colony.

Their Mars Colony driver greeted them with a quick smile. Over his suit radio he said, “This sand-crawler can be made airtight, but it isn’t just now. So keep your breathing suits on and don’t open your helmets until you’re told to.”

Jim and Sally had no intention of opening their helmets. They obediently took the seats assigned to them. The sand-crawler began to move. It traveled rapidly but bumpily over the monotonous desert. After about half an hour, the huge plastic dome that covered Mars Colony could be seen shimmering in the sunlight.

The sand-crawler swung round and circled the dome until it came to a shuttered entrance. Jim and Sally could see men within the dome turning big control wheels. The shutter opened, the sand-crawler passed through, and the shutter closed behind them. A door in front of them opened now and the sand-crawler rolled forward into the colony itself. Behind them, the second sand-crawler was repeating the passage through the air lock, and then the third.

The sand-crawler came to a halt. The door opened and the passengers got out. Their driver removed his helmet, indicating to the new arrivals that they could do the same. When everyone was helmet-less he said, “This is Mars Colony. Remove your breathing suits and remain right here, please, until further instructions.”

“Smell the air!” Sally cried, as she peeled off the breathing suit. “It’s just like Earth air!”

“Not quite,” Jim grinned. “But it’s better than ship air and breathing-suit air.”

It was actually quite pleasant—almost like a spring day, with bright sunshine overhead and the air warm and sweet-smelling. The dome was practically invisible from within. But a glance outside at the weird landscape made everything seem quite different.

The suitless newcomers stood together, looking around uneasily. A tall colonist holding a sheet of paper came over to them and announced, “I’m Dave Rodgers, in charge of new colonists.

Those of you who are here as permanent settlers will come with me and I’ll assign you to your living quarters.”

He called twenty names. The new colonists went off in a truck with him. Of the eight people left, four were the Chambers family. The others included a rich couple who had come to Mars as sightseers, and two reporters who were here to do research for magazine articles about the colony.

A stocky man with gray hair was talking to Dr. Chambers. “Your laboratory and living quarters will be on Lower Level One, Dr. Chambers. We’ll give you all the cooperation we can. You have to realize, of course, that we’re too busy here to devote much time to impractical things like pure research, though.”

“Naturally,” Dr. Chambers said. “That was made clear to me before I left Earth.”

“Very well, then. Come with me, please.”