Lester del Rey - Marooned on Mars

Most of us will live to see pictures of the Moon—pictures taken by men who actually walked on the surface of that round ball in the sky! Twenty years ago, a rocket weighing a few pounds could travel a few hundred feet at most; now, rockets weighing a few tons travel several hundred miles. From that it is only a short step to building rockets that weigh hundreds of tons and can travel 239,000 miles to the Moon. This will be in the world of tomorrow!

Rocket-driven ships, of course, can travel where there is no air. We know that by actual proof; the less air around a rocket, the better it performs. We also know a great deal about how the ship must be designed and what will be found on the airless Moon when we get there. We’ve never seen the other side of the Moon, but we can be sure it’s about the same as the side we do see. We can even guess how the Moon will prove useful, scientifically and commercially. We will probably establish a permanent base there, even though it will be incredibly expensive.

From there, we will move on. Once we’ve learned the secrets of the Moon and how to build even better rocket ships, we’ll look toward the other planets—Mars, Venus, and the moons around Jupiter.

Mars will probably be the first planet explored. Venus is nearer, but Mars has always aroused more interest Unlike the Moon, Mars seems to have air, water, and life! In our telescopes, we’ve seen the icecaps around the poles melt with the coming of spring, and we’ve noticed that the red planet then begins to turn green. In the fall, this green turns to the shades of autumn leaves on Earth, behaving as if it were living vegetation.

We don’t know whether there is animal life there. Bat it seems possible that the same conditions which produced plant life may also have produced animals of some sort, just as such conditions produced both plants and animals on Earth. There may be some form of strange insect life, for instance, or moving, crawling life of a type we can’t imagine—but we can’t know without going there. We can’t even say that intelligent life is impossible.

Once, some scientists believed there was proof of intelligence on Mars. A lot of speculation was given to the mysterious “canals” of the planet (though the word “canals” is a bad translation of the Italian canal, which means “channels”). These can be seen as straight lines on a map of Mars, crisscrossing the surface. Unfortunately, we still don’t know much about them. We don’t even know they really are so straight, or that many of them aren’t simply tricks played on the tired eyes of the observers.

For a long time it was believed that they were great trenches, dug by the Martians—and that would have indicated a high degree of intelligence there. Then doubts began to grow. Photographs didn’t show them, and the later, bigger telescopes showed them less plainly than the smaller ones. Some people, in fact, never had been able to see them. Hence, a few years ago, science began to believe that there were no canals after all.

Today, this has changed. The latest photographs show some of them as mere fuzzy markings, hard to trace, but definitely there. Some of them seem to come and go; old ones disappear and new ones appear from time to time; modern maps don’t entirely agree with those made half a century ago. But the markings on Mars are real, even though there isn’t enough water on the whole planet to nil such “canals.”

We still know very little about them. They may be evidence of intelligence, but certainly no intelligent life on Mars can have reached our stage of civilization. The thin air—thinner than the air” on top of the highest mountain on Earth—would make fire impossible. Without fire, men would never have come out of the caves to begin smelting metals. Fire was man’s first great tool and metals his second; without such tools for a start, a high level of civilization wouldn’t have a chance. Probably the canals are only some natural phenomena which have nothing to do with intelligent life.

We can’t know for certain until we go there and see for ourselves. Since we’ve always been a highly curious form of life, we’ll make the long trip there to find the answers at the earliest possible moment.

This is an account of such-a first trip as it might be made. The technical details are generally accurate and nothing here is really fantastic. We can already write about such a voyage across millions of miles of space without the need of too much wild imagination. When the accounts of the first real trip are made, sometime in the future, we can be sure they will read something like this fictional one. And it doubtless will be much sooner than many of us imagine.

For the last hour, the big helicopter had been climbing through the night and the thinning air toward the peaks of the Andes. Now, 18,000 feet above sea level, it straightened out and the sound of its motor settled down to a steady hum. Sunlight was already touching the mountain-tops, and the rocket field showed up plainly, only a mile ^ahead.

“The stocky, blond boy in the passenger seat stirred suddenly and began rubbing sleep out of his blue eyes. Chuck Svensen was short for his age—not quite eighteen and only five-feet-seven—and there was no sign of hair on his face yet. He had always had trouble convincing people he was as old as he was, and the eagerness on his face as he saw the rocket field made him look even younger. But there was respect on the pilot’s face.

“Must feel good to be going home to the Moon,” the man suggested with a touch of envy in his voice.

Chuck grinned. “Great. After four years up there at one-sixth Earth weight, I feel like a ton of lead here. But it was worth it!”

“Worth it!” The pilot snorted, and the envy was stronger -this time. “Kid, you’re one of the six luckiest guys alive. I’d give my right arm for a chance to go on that first rocket to Mars!”

Chuck nodded. It still didn’t seem real to him. For four long years he’d watched the ship being built for the journey, without any hope. Even when the Governor at Moon City had won his request to have someone chosen from the Moon group as one of the crew. Chuck had hardly dared to dream. The age limit was set rigidly between eighteen and twenty-seven, and he would be barely eighteen when the date of the take-off came . When his experience with radar and his physical fitness finally won the chance for him, he’d been the most surprised person in all Moon City.

Then had come long nights of study with almost no sleep, a special trip to Earth, and two weeks of grueling tests to prove his ability. Now he had passed, and was on his way back to the Moon—to leave almost at once for Mars!

The helicopter was settling down on the rocket field-Chuck could see men moving about in the heavy clothing required by the bitter cold; the air was too thin for comfortable breathing, and all wore masks that supplied extra oxygen and made them look like inhuman monsters. He adjusted his own mask as the helicopter touched earth, hovered, then slipped onto the field.

The special little rocket ship from the Moon had already landed and was being readied for the trip back. From the three fins at its base, which now served as legs, it stretched up about forty feet to a sharp tip; the whole looked something like a fat cigar equipped with stubby wings. Pumps were busy piping liquid into the fuel tanks and loading cranes were storing boxes of precision tools into the little freight compartment. One huge machine had pulled out the worn lining of the big rocket tube at its tail and was fitting another in place,” while a second was working on the ship’s compact atomic motor, replacing the original cans of plutonium with fresh ones.