CHAPTER VII

A Mine on Mars

The sun came up small and white and hot, shining from a black sky upon an endless level orange waste of rocks and sand, broken with a black swamp in the distant north. Even from the eminence of the time-worn plateau, the straight horizon seemed far nearer than on earth, due to the greater curvature of the planet's surface.

Men were gathering about the air-lock, under the direction of the Prince, assembling mining equipment.

"Shall we be able to go out without vacuum suits?" Bill asked Captain Brand.

"I think so, when it gets warm enough. The air is light--the amount of oxygen at the surface is about equal to that in the air nine miles above sea level on earth. But the pull of gravity here is only about one-third as much as it is on the earth, and less oxygen will be required to furnish energy. I think we can stand it, if we don't take too much exertion."

The rays of the oddly small sun beat fiercely through the thin air. Soon the Prince went into the air-lock, closed the inner door behind him and started the pumps. When the dial showed the pressures equalized he opened the outer door, and stepped out upon the red rocks.

All were watching him intently, through the vitrolite panels. Paula clasped her hands in nervous anxiety. Bill saw the Prince step confidently out, sniff the air as though testing it, and take a few deep breaths. Then he drew his legs beneath him and made an astounding leap, that carried him twenty feet high. He fell in a long arc, struck on his shoulder in a pile of loose red sand. He got up, gasping for air as if the effort had exhausted him, and staggered back to the air-lock. Quickly he sealed the outer door behind him, opened the valve, and raised the pressure.

"Feels funny," he said when he opened the inner door. "Like trying to breathe on top of a mountain--only more so. The jump was great fun, but rather exhausting. I imagine it would be dangerous for a fellow with a weak heart. All right to come out now. Air is still cool, but the rocks are getting hot under the sun."

He held open the door. "The guards will come first."

Six of the thirty-odd members of the crew had been detailed to act as guards, to prevent surprise. Each was to carry two rocket torpedoes--such a burden was not too much upon this planet, with its lesser gravity. They would watch from the cliffs at the edge of the little plateau upon which the sunship had landed.

Bill and four other men entered the air-lock--and Paula. The girl had insisted upon having some duty assigned to her, and this had seemed easier than the mining.

The door was closed behind them, the air pumped out until Bill gasped for breath and heard a drumming in his ears. Then the outer door was opened and they looked out upon Mars. Motion was easy, yet the slightest effort was tiring. Bill found himself panting merely from the exertion of lifting the two heavy torpedoes to his shoulders.

With Paula behind him, he stepped through the outer door. The air felt chill and thin. Loose red sand crumbled yieldingly under their feet.

They separated at the door, Bill starting toward the south end of the pleateau, Paula toward the north point, and the men going to stations along the sides.

"Just lie at the top of the cliffs and watch," the Prince had ordered. "When you have anything to report, flash with your ray pistols, in code. Signal every thirty minutes, anyhow. We will have a man watching from the bridge. Report to him anything moving. We will fire off a red signal rocket when you are to come back."

He had tried to keep Paula from going out, but the girl had insisted. At last he had agreed.

"Better to have you keeping watch than handling a pick and shovel, or pushing a barrow," he had told her. "But I hate to see you go so far off. Something might happen. If they find us, though, they will probably get us all. Don't get hurt."

Bill had seen the Prince looking anxiously at the slender, brown-eyed girl as they entered the air-lock. He had seen him move forward quickly, as though to ask her to come back--move forward, and then turn aside with a flush that became a bitterly cynical smile.

As Bill walked across the top of the barren red plateau, he looked back at the girl moving slowly in the opposite direction. He had glanced at her eyes as they left the ship. They were shadowed, heavy-lidded. In their brown depths lurked despair and tragic determination. Bill, watching her now, thought that all life had gone out of her. She seemed a dull automaton, driven only by the energy of a determined will. All hope and life and vivacity had gone from her manner. Yet she walked as if she had a stern task to do.

"I wonder----" Bill muttered. "Can she mean--suicide?"

He turned uncertainly, as if to go after her. Then, deciding that his thought was mere fancy, he trudged on across the red plateau to his station.

Behind him, he saw other parties emerging from the air-lock. The Prince and Dr. Trainor were setting up apparatus of some kind, probably, Bill thought, to take magnetic and meteorological observations. Men with prospecting hammers were scattering over all the plateau.

"Almost any sort of ferruginous rock is sure to contain the tiny amount of cerium we need," Dr. Trainor had said.

* * * * *

Bill reached the end of the plateau. The age-worn cliffs of red granite and burned lava fell sheer for a hundred feet, to a long slope of talus. Below the rubble of sand and boulders the flat desert stretched away, almost visibly curving to vanish beneath the near red horizon.

It was a desolate and depressing scene, this view of a dead and sun-baked planet. There was no sign of living thing, no moving object, no green of life--the canals, with their verdure, were far out of sight.

"Hard to realize there's a race of vampires across there, living in great metal domes," Bill muttered, as he threw himself flat on the rocks at the lip of the precipice, and leveled one of the heavy torpedoes before him. "But I don't blame 'em for wanting to go to a more cheerful world."

Looking behind him, he soon saw men busy with electric drills not a hundred yards from the slender silver cylinder that was the _Red Rover_. The earth quivered beneath him as a shot was set off, and he saw a great fountain of crushed rock thrown into the air.

Men with barrows, an hour later, were wheeling the crushed rock to gleaming electrical reducing apparatus that Dr. Trainor and the Prince were setting up beside the sunship. Evidently there had been no difficulty in finding ore that carried a satisfactory amount of cerium.

Bill continued to scan the orange-red desert below him through the powerful telescope along the rocket tube. He kept his watch before him, and at half-hour intervals sent the three short flashes with his ray pistol, which meant "All is well."

Two hours must have gone by before he saw the blue globe. It came into view low over the red rim of the desert below him, crept closer on a wavering path.

"Martian ship in view," he signalled. "A blue globe, about ten feet in diameter. Follows curious winding course, as if following something."

"Keep rocket trained upon it," came the cautiously flashed reply. "Fire if it observes us."

"Globe following animals," he flashed back. "Two grayish bipeds leaping before it. Running with marvelous agility."

He was peering through the telescope sight of the rocket tube. Keeping the cross hairs upon the little blue globe, he could still see the creatures that fled before it. They were almost like men--or erect, hairy apes. Bipeds, they were, with human-like arms, and erect heads. Covered with short gray hair or fur, they carried no weapons.

They fled from the globe at a curious leaping run, which carried them over the flat red desert with remarkable speed. They came straight for the foot of the cliff from which Bill watched, the blue globe close behind them. When one of them stumbled over a block of lava and fell sprawling headlong on the sand, the other gray creature stopped to help it. The blue globe stopped, too, hanging still twenty feet above the red sand, waited for them to rise and run desperately on again.

Bill felt a quick flood of sympathy for the gray creatures. One had stopped to help the other. That meant that they felt affection. And the globe had waited for them to run again. It seemed to be baiting them maliciously. Almost he fired the rocket. But his orders had been not to fire unless the ship were discovered.

Now they were not a mile away. Suddenly Bill perceived a tiny, light-gray object grasped close to the breast of one of the gray bipeds. Evidently it was a young one, in the arms of its mother. The other creature seemed a male. It was the mother that had fallen.

They came on toward the cliff.

They were very clearly in view, and not five hundred yards below, when the female fell again. The male stopped to aid her, and the globe poised itself above them, waited. The mother seemed unable to rise. The other creature lifted her, and she fell limply back.

As if in rage, the gray male sprang toward the blue globe, crouching.

A tiny purple spark leapt from it. A flash of violet fire enveloped him. He was flung twisted and sprawling to the ground. Burned and torn and bleeding, he drew himself to all fours, and crept on toward the blue globe.

Suddenly the sphere dropped to the ground. A round panel swung open in its side--it was turned from Bill, so that he could not see within. Green things crept out. They were creatures like the one he had seen in the Mexican desert--a cluster of slender, flexible green tentacles, with suction disks, an insignificant green body, and three malevolent purple eyes, at the ends of foot-long stalks.

There were three of the things.

The creeping male flung himself madly upon one of them. It coiled itself about him; suction disks fastened themselves against his skin. For a time he writhed and struggled, fighting in agony against the squeezing green coils. Then he was still.

One of the things grasped the little gray object in the mother's arms. She fought to shield it, to cover it with her own body. It was torn away from her, hidden in the hideously writhing green coils.

The third of the monsters flung itself upon the mother, wrapping snake-like tentacles about her, dragging her struggling body down shuddering and writhing in agony while the blood of life was sucked from it.

Bill watched, silent and trembling with horror.

"The things chased them--for fun!" he muttered fiercely. "Just a sample of what it will be on the earth--if we don't stop 'em."

Presently the green monsters left their victims--which were now mere shriveled husks. They dragged themselves back into the blue globe, which rose swiftly into the air. The round panel had closed.

From his station on the cliff, Bill watched the thing through the telescope sight of the rocket, keeping the cross hairs upon it. It came up to his own level--above it. Suddenly it paused. He was sure that the things in it had seen the _Red Rover_.

Quickly, he pressed a little nickeled lever. A soft whir came from the rocket tube. He pressed the red button. The torpedo leapt forward, with the white rays driving back. The empty shell was flung back in Bill's hand.

A great burst of vivid orange flame enveloped the cobalt globe. It disintegrated into a rain of white metal fragments.

"Take that, damn you!" he muttered in fierce satisfaction.

"Globe brought down successfully," he flashed. "Evidently it had sighted us. Green Martians from it had killed gray bipeds. May I inspect remains?"

"You may," permission was flashed back from the Prince. "But be absent not over half an hour."

In a moment another message came. "All lookouts be doubly alert. Globe may be searched for. Miners making good progress. We can leave by sunset. Courage!----The Prince."

* * * * *

Strapping the remaining rocket torpedo to his shoulders, and thrusting his ray pistol ready in his belt, Bill walked back along the brink of the precipice until he saw a comparatively easy way to the red plain below, and scrambled over the rim. Erosion of untold ages had left cracks and irregularities in the rock. Because of the slighter gravity of Mars, it was a simple feat to support his weight with the grip of his fingers on a ledge. In five minutes he had clambered down to the bank of talus. Hurriedly he scrambled down over great fallen boulders, panting and gasping for breath in the thin air.

He reached the red sand of the plain--it was worn by winds of ages into an impalpable scarlet dust, that rose in a thin, murky cloud about him, and settled in a blood-colored stain upon his perspiring limbs. The dry dust yielded beneath his feet as he made his way toward the silent gray bodies, making his progress most difficult.

Almost exhausted, he reached the gray creatures, examined them. They were far different from human beings, despite obvious similarities. Each of their "hands" had but three clawed digits; a curious, disk-like appendage took the place of the nose. In skeletal structure they were far different from _homo sapiens_.

Wearily Bill trudged back to the towering red cliff, red dust swirling up about him. He was oddly exhausted by his exertions, trifling as they had been. The murky red dust he inhaled was irritating to his nostrils; he choked and sneezed. Sweat ran in muddy red streams from his body, and he was suddenly very thirsty.

All the top of the red granite plateau--it was evidently the stone heart of an ancient mountain--was hidden from him. He could see nothing of the _Red Rover_ or any of her crew. He could see no living thing.

The flat plain of red dust lay about him, curving below a near horizon. Loose dust sucked at his feet, rose about him in a suffocating saffron cloud. The sun, a little crimson globe in a blue-black sky, shone blisteringly. The sky was soberly dark, cold and hostile. In alarmed haste, he struggled toward the grim line of high, red cliffs.

Then he saw a round white object in the red sand.

Pausing to gasp for breath and to rub the sweat and red mud from his forehead, he kicked at it curiously. A sun-bleached human skull rolled out of the scarlet dust. He knew at once that it was human, not a skull of a creature like the gray things behind him on the sand.

With the unpleasant feeling that he was opening the forbidden book of some forgotten tragedy, he fell to his knees in the dust, and scooped about with his fingers. His right had closed upon a man's thigh bone. His left caught in a rotten leather belt, that pulled a human vertebra out of the dust. The belt had a tarnished silver buckle, and he looked at it with a gasp.

It bore an elaborate initial "E."

"E!" he muttered. "Envers! He got to Mars. And died here. Trying to get to the mountain, I guess. Lord! what a death! A man all alone, in the dust and the sun. A strange world. Strange monsters."

The loneliness of the red desert, the mystery of it, and its alien spirit, wrapped itself about him like a mantle of fear. He staggered to his feet, and set off at a stumbling run through the sand toward the cliff. But in a moment he paused.

"He might have left something!" he muttered.

He turned, and plodded back to where he had left the skull and the rotted belt, and dug again with his fingers. He found the rest of the skeleton, even bits of hair, clothing and human skin, preserved in the dry dust. He found an empty canteen, a rusty pocketknife, buttons, coins, and a ray pistol that was burned out.

Then his plowing fingers brought up a little black book from the dust.

It was Envers' diary.

Most of it was still legible. It is available in printed form today, and gives a detailed account of the tragic venture. The hopeful starting from earth. The dangers and discouragements of the voyage. A mutiny; half the crew killed. The thrill of landing on a new planet. The attack of the blue globes. How they took the ship, carried their prisoners to the pens, where they tried to use them to breed a new variety of domestic animals. Envers' escape, his desperate attempt to find the ship where they had landed in the desert.

Bill did not read it all then. He took time to read only that last tragic entry.

"Water all gone. See now I will never reach mountain where I landed. Probably they have moved sunship anyhow. Might have been better to have stayed in the pen. Food and water there.... But how could God create such things? So hideous, so malignant! I pray they will not use my ship to go to earth. I hoped to find and destroy it. But it is too late."

Thick red dust swirled up in Bill's face. He tried to breathe, choked and sneezed and strangled. Looking up from the yellowed pages of the dead explorer's notebook, he saw great clouds of red dust hiding the darkly blue sky in the east. It seemed almost that a colossal red-yellowed cylinder was being rolled swiftly upon him from eastward.

A dust-storm was upon him! One of the terrific dust-storms of Mars, so fierce that they are visible to astronomers across forty million miles of space.

Clutching the faded notebook, he ran across the sand again, toward the red cliffs. The wind howled behind him, overtook him and came screaming about his ears. Red dust fogged chokingly about his head. The line of cliffs before him vanished in a murky red haze. The wind blew swiftly, yet it was thin, exerting little force. The dusty air became an acrid fluid, choking, unbreathable.

Blindly, he staggered on, toward the rocks. He reached them, fought his way up the bank of talus, scrambling over gigantic blocks of lava. The base of the cliff was before him, a massive, perpendicular wall, rising out of sight in red haze. He skirted it, saw a climbable chimney, scrambled up.

At last he drew himself over the top, and lay flat. Scarlet dust-clouds swirled about him: he could not see twenty yards. He made no attempt to find the _Red Rover_; he knew he could not locate it in the dust.

* * * * *

Hours passed as he lay there, blinded, suffocating, feeling the hot misery of acrid dust and perspiration caked in a drying mud upon his skin. Thin winds screamed about the rocks, hot as a furnace-blast. He leveled his torpedo, tried to watch. But he could see only a murky wall of red, with the sun biting through it like a tiny, round blood-ruby.

The red sun had been near the zenith. Slowly it crept down, toward an unseen horizon. It alone gave him an idea of direction, and of the passage of time. Then it, too, vanished in the dust.

Suddenly the wind was still. The dust settled slowly. In half an hour the red sun came into view again, just above the red western horizon. Objects about the mile-long plateau began to take shape. The _Red Rover_ still lay where she had been, in the center. Men were still busily at work at the mining machinery--they had struggled on through the storm.

"All lookouts signal reports," the Prince flashed from the ship.

"Found Envers' body and brought his diary," Bill flashed when it came his turn.

"Now preparing to depart," came from the Prince. "Getting apparatus aboard. Have the required cerium. Return signal will be fired soon."

Bill watched the dusty sky, over whose formerly dark-blue face the storm had drawn a yellowish haze. In a few minutes he saw a blue globe. Then another, and a third. They were far toward the southeast, drifting high and fast through the saffron haze. It seemed that they were searching out the route over which the globe that he had brought down must have come.

"Three globe-ships in sight," he signalled. "Approaching us."

Some of the other lookouts had evidently seen them, for he saw the flicker of other ray pistols across the plateau.

Without preamble, the red signal rocket was fired. Bill heard the report of it--sharp and thin in the rare atmosphere. He saw the livid scarlet flare.

He got to his feet, shouldered the heavy rocket tube, and ran stumbling back to the _Red Rover_. He saw other men running; saw men struggling to get the mining machinery back on the ship.

Looking back, he saw the three blue globes swimming swiftly nearer. Then he saw others, a full score of them. They were far off, tiny circles of blue in the saffron sky. They seemed to be rapidly flying toward the _Red Rover_.

He looked expectantly northward, toward the end of the plateau to which Paula had gone. He saw nothing of her. She was not returning in answer to the signal rocket.

He was utterly exhausted when he reached the sunship, panting, gasping for the thin air. The others were all like himself, caked with dried red mud, gasping asthmatically from exertion and excitement. Men were struggling to get pieces of heavy machinery aboard the flier--vitalium power generators that had been used to heat the furnaces, and even a motor ray tube that had been borrowed from the ship's power plant for emergency use in the improvised smelter.

The Prince and Dr. Trainor were laboring furiously over an odd piece of apparatus. On the red sand beside the silver sunship, they had set up a tripod on which was mounted a curious glistening device. There were lenses, prisms, condensers, mirrors. The core of it seemed to be a strange vacuum tube--which had an electrode of cerium, surrounded with a queer vitalium grid. A tiny filament was glowing in it; and the induction coil which powered the tube, fed by vitalium batteries, was buzzing incessantly.

"Better get aboard, and off!" Bill cried. "No use to lose our lives, our chance to save the world--just for a little mining machinery."

The Prince looked up in a moment, leaving the queer little device to Dr. Trainor. "Look at the Martian ships!" he cried, sweeping out an arm. "Must be thirty in sight, swarming up like flies. We couldn't get away. And against those purple atomic bombs, the torpedoes wouldn't have a chance. Besides, we have some of the ship's machinery out here. Some generators, and a ray tube."

Bill looked up, saw the swarming blue globes, circling above them in the saffron sky, some of them not a mile above. He shrugged hopelessly, then looked anxiously off to the north again, scanning the red plateau.

"Paula! What's become of her?" he demanded.

"Paula? Is she gone?" The Prince turned from the tripod, looked around suddenly. "Paula! What could have happened to her?"

"A broken heart has happened to her," Bill told him.

"You think--you think----" stammered the Prince. There was sudden alarm in his dark eyes, and a great tender longing. His bitterly cynical smile was gone.

"Bill, she can't be gone!" he cried, almost in agony.

"You know she was on lookout duty at the north end of the plateau. She hasn't come back."

"I've got to find her!"

"What is it to you? I thought you didn't care!" Bill was stern.

"I thought I didn't, except as a friend. But I was wrong. If she's gone, Bill--it will kill me!"

The Prince spun about with abrupt decision.

"Get everything aboard, and fit the ship to take off, as soon as possible," he ordered. "Dr. Trainor is in command. Give him any help he needs. Brand, test everything when the tube is replaced; keep the ship ready to fly." He turned swiftly to Trainor, who still worked deftly over the glittering little machine on the tripod. "Doc, you can operate that by yourself, as well as if I were here. Do your best--for mankind! I'm going to find your daughter."

Trainor nodded in silent assent, his fingers busy.

The Prince, sticking a ray pistol in his belt, set off at a desperate run toward the north end of the plateau. After a moment's hesitation, Bill staggered along behind him, still carrying the rocket torpedo strapped to his back.

It was only half a mile to the end of the plateau. In a few minutes the Prince was there. Bill staggered up just as he was reading a few scrawled words on a scrap of paper that he had found fastened to a boulder where Paula had been stationed.

"To the Prince of Space," it ran. "I can't go on. You must know that I love you--desperately. It was maddening to be with you, to know that you don't care. I know the story of your life, know that you can never care for me. The red dust is blowing now, and I am going down in the desert to die. Please don't look for me--it will do no good. Pardon me for writing this, but I wanted you to know--why I am going. Because I love you. Paula."