* * * * *
_June 18, 1961_
Mars has the whole screen filled. Looks like Death Valley. No sign of
canals, but Pat says that's because of the dust storm down below. It's
nice to have a "down below" again. We're going to land, so I have to go
to my bunk. It's all foam rubber, nylon braid supports and magnesium
tubing. Might as well be cement for all the good it did me at takeoff.
Earth seems awfully far away.
* * * * *
_June 19, 1961_
Well, we're down. We have to wear gas masks with oxygen hook-ups. Kroger
says the air is breathable, but thin, and it has too much dust in it to
be any fun to inhale. He's all for going out and looking for lichen, but
Pat says he's got to set up camp, then get instructions from Earth. So
we just have to wait. The air is very cold, but the Sun is hot as hell
when it hits you. The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe more of a pale
fuchsia. Kroger says it's the dust. The sand underfoot is kind of
rose-colored, and not really gritty. The particles are round and smooth.
No lichen so far. Kroger says maybe in the canals, if there are any
canals. Lloyd wants to play chess again.
Jones won the beard contest. Pat gave him a cigar he'd smuggled on board
(no smoking was allowed on the ship), and Jones threw it away. He
doesn't smoke.
* * * * *
_June 20, 1961_
Got lost today. Pat told me not to go too far from camp, so, when I
took a stroll, I made sure every so often that I could still see the
rocket behind me. Walked for maybe an hour; then the oxygen gauge got
past the halfway mark, so I started back toward the rocket. After maybe
ten steps, the rocket disappeared. One minute it was standing there,
tall and silvery, the next instant it was gone.
Turned on my radio pack and got hold of Pat. Told him what happened, and
he told Kroger. Kroger said I had been following a mirage, to step back
a bit. I did, and I could see the ship again. Kroger said to try and
walk toward where the ship seemed to be, even when it wasn't in view,
and meantime they'd come out after me in the jeep, following my
footprints.
Started walking back, and the ship vanished again. It reappeared,
disappeared, but I kept going. Finally saw the real ship, and Lloyd and
Jones waving their arms at me. They were shouting through their masks,
but I couldn't hear them. The air is too thin to carry sound well.
All at once, something gleamed in their hands, and they started shooting
at me with their rifles. That's when I heard the noise behind me. I was
too scared to turn around, but finally Jones and Lloyd came running
over, and I got up enough nerve to look. There was nothing there, but on
the sand, paralleling mine, were footprints. At least I think they were
footprints. Twice as long as mine, and three times as wide, but kind of
featureless because the sand's loose and dry. They doubled back on
themselves, spaced considerably farther apart.
"What was it?" I asked Lloyd when he got to me.
"Damned if I know," he said. "It was red and scaly, and I think it had a
tail. It was two heads taller than you." He shuddered. "Ran off when we
fired."
"Where," said Jones, "are Pat and Kroger?"
I didn't know. I hadn't seen them, nor the jeep, on my trip back. So we
followed the wheel tracks for a while, and they veered off from my trail
and followed another, very much like the one that had been paralleling
mine when Jones and Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly thing.
"We'd better get them on the radio," said Jones, turning back toward the
ship.
There wasn't anything on the radio but static.
Pat and Kroger haven't come back yet, either.
* * * * *
_June 21, 1961_
We're not alone here. More of the scaly things have come toward the
camp, but a few rifle shots send them away. They hop like kangaroos when
they're startled. Their attitudes aren't menacing, but their appearance
is. And Jones says, "Who knows what's 'menacing' in an alien?"
We're going to look for Kroger and Pat today. Jones says we'd better
before another windstorm blows away the jeep tracks. Fortunately, the
jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we always have the smears to follow, unless
they get covered up, too. We're taking extra oxygen, shells, and rifles.
Food, too, of course. And we're locking up the ship.
* * * * *
It's later, now. We found the jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of those
big tracks nearby. We're taking the jeep to follow the aliens' tracks.
There's some moss around here, on reddish brown rocks that stick up
through the sand, just on the shady side, though. Kroger must be happy
to have found his lichen.
The trail ended at the brink of a deep crevice in the ground. Seems to
be an earthquake-type split in solid rock, with the sand sifting over
this and the far edge like pink silk cataracts. The bottom is in the
shade and can't be seen. The crack seems to extend to our left and right
as far as we can look.
There looks like a trail down the inside of the crevice, but the Sun's
setting, so we're waiting till tomorrow to go down.
Going down was Jones' idea, not mine.
* * * * *
_June 22, 1961_
Well, we're at the bottom, and there's water here, a shallow stream
about thirty feet wide that runs along the center of the canal (we've
decided we're in a canal). No sign of Pat or Kroger yet, but the sand
here is hard-packed and damp, and there are normal-size footprints
mingled with the alien ones, sharp and clear. The aliens seem to have
six or seven toes. It varies from print to print. And they're barefoot,
too, or else they have the damnedest-looking shoes in creation.
The constant shower of sand near the cliff walls is annoying, but it's
sandless (shower-wise) near the stream, so we're following the
footprints along the bank. Also, the air's better down here. Still thin,
but not so bad as on the surface. We're going without masks to save
oxygen for the return trip (Jones assures me there'll _be_ a return
trip), and the air's only a little bit sandy, but handkerchiefs over
nose and mouth solve this.
We look like desperadoes, what with the rifles and covered faces. I said
as much to Lloyd and he told me to shut up. Moss all over the cliff
walls. Swell luck for Kroger.
* * * * *
We've found Kroger and Pat, with the help of the aliens. Or maybe I
should call them the Martians. Either way, it's better than what Jones
calls them.
They took away our rifles and brought us right to Kroger and Pat,
without our even asking. Jones is mad at the way they got the rifles so
easily. When we came upon them (a group of maybe ten, huddling behind a
boulder in ambush), he fired, but the shots either bounced off their
scales or stuck in their thick hides. Anyway, they took the rifles away
and threw them into the stream, and picked us all up and took us into a
hole in the cliff wall. The hole went on practically forever, but it
didn't get dark. Kroger tells me that there are phosphorescent bacteria
living in the mold on the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave smell,
but it's richer in oxygen than even at the stream.
We're in a small cave that is just off a bigger cave where lots of
tunnels come together. I can't remember which one we came in through,
and neither can anyone else. Jones asked me what the hell I kept writing
in the diary for, did I want to make it a gift to Martian archeologists?
But I said where there's life there's hope, and now he won't talk to me.
I congratulated Kroger on the lichen I'd seen, but he just said a short
and unscientific word and went to sleep.
There's a Martian guarding the entrance to our cave. I don't know what
they intend to do with us. Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just left us
here, and we're out of rations.
Kroger tried talking to the guard once, but he (or it) made a whistling
kind of sound and flashed a mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the teeth are
in multiple rows, like a tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't told me.
* * * * *
_June 23, 1961, I think_
We're either in a docket or a zoo. I can't tell which. There's a rather
square platform surrounded on all four sides by running water, maybe
twenty feet across, and we're on it. Martians keep coming to the far
edge of the water and looking at us and whistling at each other. A
little Martian came near the edge of the water and a larger Martian
whistled like crazy and dragged it away.
"Water must be dangerous to them," said Kroger.
"We shoulda brought water pistols," Jones muttered.
Pat said maybe we can swim to safety. Kroger told Pat he was crazy, that
the little island we're on here underground is bordered by a fast river
that goes into the planet. We'd end up drowned in some grotto in the
heart of the planet, says Kroger.
"What the hell," says Pat, "it's better than starving."
It is not.
* * * * *
_June 24, 1961, probably_
I'm hungry. So is everybody else. Right now I could eat a dinner raw, in
a centrifuge, and keep it down. A Martian threw a stone at Jones today,
and Jones threw one back at him and broke off a couple of scales. The
Martian whistled furiously and went away. When the crowd thinned out,
same as it did yesterday (must be some sort of sleeping cycle here),
Kroger talked Lloyd into swimming across the river and getting the red
scales. Lloyd started at the upstream part of the current, and was about
a hundred yards below this underground island before he made the far
side. Sure is a swift current.
But he got the scales, walked very far upstream of us, and swam back
with them. The stream sides are steep, like in a fjord, and we had to
lift him out of the swirling cold water, with the scales gripped in his
fist. Or what was left of the scales. They had melted down in the water
and left his hand all sticky.
Kroger took the gummy things, studied them in the uncertain light, then
tasted them and grinned.
The Martians are made of sugar.
* * * * *
Later, same day. Kroger said that the Martian metabolism must be like
Terran (Earth-type) metabolism, only with no pancreas to make insulin.
They store their energy on the _outside_ of their bodies, in the form of
scales. He's watched them more closely and seen that they have long
rubbery tubes for tongues, and that they now and then suck up water from
the stream while they're watching us, being careful not to get their
lips (all sugar, of course) wet. He guesses that their "blood" must be
almost pure water, and that it washes away (from the inside, of course)
the sugar they need for energy.
I asked him where the sugar came from, and he said probably their bodies
isolated carbon from something (he thought it might be the moss) and
combined it with the hydrogen and oxygen in the water (even _I_ knew the
formula for water) to make sugar, a common carbohydrate.
Like plants, on Earth, he said. Except, instead of using special cells
on leaves to form carbohydrates with the help of sunpower, as Earth
plants do in photosynthesis (Kroger spelled that word for me), they used
the _shape_ of the scales like prisms, to isolate the spectra (another
Kroger word) necessary to form the sugar.
"I don't get it," I said politely, when he'd finished his spiel.
"Simple," he said, as though he were addressing me by name. "They have a
twofold reason to fear water. One: by complete solvency in that medium,
they lose all energy and die. Two: even partial sprinkling alters the
shape of the scales, and they are unable to use sunpower to form more
sugar, and still die, if a bit slower."
"Oh," I said, taking it down verbatim. "So now what do we do?"
"We remove our boots," said Kroger, sitting on the ground and doing so,
"and then we cross this stream, fill the boots with water, and _spray_
our way to freedom."
"Which tunnel do we take?" asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the thought of
escape.
Kroger shrugged. "We'll have to chance taking any that seem to slope
upward. In any event, we can always follow it back and start again."
"I dunno," said Jones. "Remember those _teeth_ of theirs. They must be
for biting something more substantial than moss, Kroger."
"We'll risk it," said Pat. "It's better to go down fighting than to die
of starvation."
The hell it is.
* * * * *
_June 24, 1961, for sure_
The Martians have coal mines. _That's_ what they use those teeth for. We
passed through one and surprised a lot of them chewing gritty hunks of
anthracite out of the walls. They came running at us, whistling with
those tubelike tongues, and drooling dry coal dust, but Pat swung one of
his boots in an arc that splashed all over the ground in front of them,
and they turned tail (literally) and clattered off down another tunnel,
sounding like a locomotive whistle gone berserk.
We made the surface in another hour, back in the canal, and were lucky
enough to find our own trail to follow toward the place above which the
jeep still waited.
Jones got the rifles out of the stream (the Martians had probably
thought they were beyond recovery there) and we found the jeep. It was
nearly buried in sand, but we got it cleaned off and running, and got
back to the ship quickly. First thing we did on arriving was to break
out the stores and have a celebration feast just outside the door of the
ship.
It was pork again, and I got sick.
* * * * *
_June 25, 1961_
We're going back. Pat says that a week is all we were allowed to stay
and that it's urgent to return and tell what we've learned about Mars
(we know there are Martians, and they're made of sugar).
"Why," I said, "can't we just tell it on the radio?"
"Because," said Pat, "if we tell them now, by the time we get back we'll
be yesterday's news. This way we may be lucky and get a parade."
"Maybe even money," said Kroger, whose mind wasn't always on science.
"But they'll ask why we didn't radio the info, sir," said Jones
uneasily.
"The radio," said Pat, nodding to Lloyd, "was unfortunately broken
shortly after landing."
Lloyd blinked, then nodded back and walked around the rocket. I heard a
crunching sound and the shattering of glass, not unlike the noise made
when one drives a rifle butt through a radio.
Well, it's time for takeoff.
* * * * *
This time it wasn't so bad. I thought I was getting my space-legs, but
Pat says there's less gravity on Mars, so escape velocity didn't have to
be so fast, hence a smoother (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing
bunks.
Lloyd wants to play chess again. I'll be careful not to win this time.
However, if I don't win, maybe this time _I'll_ be the one to quit.
Kroger is busy in his cramped lab space trying to classify the little
moss he was able to gather, and Jones and Pat are up front watching the
white specks revolve on that black velvet again.
Guess I'll take a nap.
* * * * *
_June 26, 1961_
Hell's bells. Kroger says there are two baby Martians loose on board
ship. Pat told him he was nuts, but there are certain signs he's right.
Like the missing charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming (AFAR)
system. And the water gauges are going down. But the clincher is those
two sugar crystals Lloyd had grabbed up when we were in that zoo.
They're gone.
Pat has declared a state of emergency. Quick thinking, that's Pat.
Lloyd, before he remembered and turned scarlet, suggested we radio Earth
for instructions. We can't.
Here we are, somewhere in a void headed for Earth, with enough air and
water left for maybe three days--if the Martians don't take any more.
Kroger is thrilled that he is learning something, maybe, about Martian
reproductive processes. When he told Pat, Pat put it to a vote whether
or not to jettison Kroger through the airlock. However, it was decided
that responsibility was pretty well divided. Lloyd had gotten the
crystals, Kroger had only studied them, and Jones had brought them
aboard.
So Kroger stays, but meanwhile the air is getting worse. Pat suggested
Kroger put us all into a state of suspended animation till landing time,
eight months away. Kroger said, "How?"
* * * * *
_June 27, 1961_
Air is foul and I'm very thirsty. Kroger says that at least--when the
Martians get bigger--they'll have to show themselves. Pat says what do
we do _then_? We can't afford the water we need to melt them down.
Besides, the melted crystals might _all_ turn into little Martians.
Jones says he'll go down spitting.
Pat says why not dismantle interior of rocket to find out where they're
holing up? Fine idea.
How do you dismantle riveted metal plates?
* * * * *
_June 28, 1961_
The AFAR system is no more and the water gauges are still dropping.
Kroger suggests baking bread, then slicing it, then toasting it till it
turns to carbon, and we can use the carbon in the AFAR system.
We'll have to try it, I guess.
* * * * *
The Martians ate the bread. Jones came forward to tell us the loaves
were cooling, and when he got back they were gone. However, he did find
a few of the red crystals on the galley deck (floor). They're good-sized
crystals, too. Which means so are the Martians.
Kroger says the Martians must be intelligent, otherwise they couldn't
have guessed at the carbohydrates present in the bread after a lifelong
diet of anthracite. Pat says let's jettison Kroger.
This time the vote went against Kroger, but he got a last-minute
reprieve by suggesting the crystals be pulverized and mixed with
sulphuric acid. He says this'll produce carbon.