viewpost only as it drew miles and miles away every second.
Nelson Parr and Jim Worden shared a watch together. They drew each other because in the few days they had known each other they had grown to recognize a certain kinship. Jim was older, but, like Nelse, he had been born on Mars and had the old planet in his blood. Fired by the same inspiration to discover the secrets of the lost civilization, Jim had had the opportunity which Nelson had been expecting to have when he had finished his terrestrial training.
Although Jim did not speak of it, Nelson assumed that he had a wife and family among those returned to the green planet. Nelson remembered vaguely seeing a little girl among those in the dome school at Solis whose last name was Worden. But none of the married men of the expedition ever spoke of their families—for they faced a separation of several long and lonely years, and it was best not to allow their thoughts to dwell on this.
There was an odd cross between tension and restfulness in their observational work. You couldn’t help but feel at ease and at rest outside under the black heavens and the eternal stars. All about, where Nelson would be sitting when on duty, there would be no motion. A plain of eternal silence, of the peace of a dead and sterile chunk of rock. No bird would stir, no mouse crawl, no blade of green, with no breeze to wave it.
Above, only the slowly rotating world of ocher and white and green; to the naked eye forever unchanging save for the slow and ceaseless turning. The stars above were constantly wheeling too. Now and then a tiny planetoid light would move visibly though slowly through the sky.
This was peaceful, the deceptive peace of interplanetary space. Yet, even in this peace, there was unease. Seated as Nelson would be at the scope, protected from the cold and vacuum by a suit which was the masterwork of science, he was subconsciously always aware of the near horizon. Mentally, his brain, conditioned by tens of thousands of years of evolution, kept slipping in a warning that he was dangerously perched at a cliff’s edge. And though this was false, for as the young man would walk forward, the horizon would recede and the ground apparently rise and flatten out, still always that falling-away point seemed but a few short strides distant.
That was one kind of tension Nelson felt. The other was the knowledge that their search was important and hard. Upon it might turn the whole future of any colonizing, upon it also might turn the strange and perhaps terrible question as to whether man was alone in his system or whether he shared it with a hidden and cunning foe.
Nelson, his eye pressed to the telescope, his hand to its manual controls, slowly swept the surface of the deserted cities of Mars. His eye moved like an invisible watchman down streets, across empty roads, through untended fields, over the doorways of empty domes. It lingered over the long stretches of viaduct and the lines of green vegetation that revealed the presence of underground ducts and passages right across the vast and arid plains and deserts, deserts that made the Sahara and the Gobi seem small and almost friendly.
He swept the streets of cities that had rarely been visited and never really explored by the always too few colonists. There were differences in cities, for the Martian civilization had not apparently been a static or a barren one. Following the same general lines, forced to do so by the economics of life on an old and drying-up world, there were strong similarities, and yet, where possible, there were variations. Not all houses were domes, though the dome type seemed to be ascendant at the time of the disappearance of life. A few cities featured square or hexagonal structures, some were laid out in patterns that suggested a greater surface life than others, once Nelson thought he even detected traces of what might have been an ancient and
Nelson Parr and Jim Worden shared a watch together. They drew each other because in the few days they had known each other they had grown to recognize a certain kinship. Jim was older, but, like Nelse, he had been born on Mars and had the old planet in his blood. Fired by the same inspiration to discover the secrets of the lost civilization, Jim had had the opportunity which Nelson had been expecting to have when he had finished his terrestrial training.
Although Jim did not speak of it, Nelson assumed that he had a wife and family among those returned to the green planet. Nelson remembered vaguely seeing a little girl among those in the dome school at Solis whose last name was Worden. But none of the married men of the expedition ever spoke of their families—for they faced a separation of several long and lonely years, and it was best not to allow their thoughts to dwell on this.
There was an odd cross between tension and restfulness in their observational work. You couldn’t help but feel at ease and at rest outside under the black heavens and the eternal stars. All about, where Nelson would be sitting when on duty, there would be no motion. A plain of eternal silence, of the peace of a dead and sterile chunk of rock. No bird would stir, no mouse crawl, no blade of green, with no breeze to wave it.
Above, only the slowly rotating world of ocher and white and green; to the naked eye forever unchanging save for the slow and ceaseless turning. The stars above were constantly wheeling too. Now and then a tiny planetoid light would move visibly though slowly through the sky.
This was peaceful, the deceptive peace of interplanetary space. Yet, even in this peace, there was unease. Seated as Nelson would be at the scope, protected from the cold and vacuum by a suit which was the masterwork of science, he was subconsciously always aware of the near horizon. Mentally, his brain, conditioned by tens of thousands of years of evolution, kept slipping in a warning that he was dangerously perched at a cliff’s edge. And though this was false, for as the young man would walk forward, the horizon would recede and the ground apparently rise and flatten out, still always that falling-away point seemed but a few short strides distant.
That was one kind of tension Nelson felt. The other was the knowledge that their search was important and hard. Upon it might turn the whole future of any colonizing, upon it also might turn the strange and perhaps terrible question as to whether man was alone in his system or whether he shared it with a hidden and cunning foe.
Nelson, his eye pressed to the telescope, his hand to its manual controls, slowly swept the surface of the deserted cities of Mars. His eye moved like an invisible watchman down streets, across empty roads, through untended fields, over the doorways of empty domes. It lingered over the long stretches of viaduct and the lines of green vegetation that revealed the presence of underground ducts and passages right across the vast and arid plains and deserts, deserts that made the Sahara and the Gobi seem small and almost friendly.
He swept the streets of cities that had rarely been visited and never really explored by the always too few colonists. There were differences in cities, for the Martian civilization had not apparently been a static or a barren one. Following the same general lines, forced to do so by the economics of life on an old and drying-up world, there were strong similarities, and yet, where possible, there were variations. Not all houses were domes, though the dome type seemed to be ascendant at the time of the disappearance of life. A few cities featured square or hexagonal structures, some were laid out in patterns that suggested a greater surface life than others, once Nelson thought he even detected traces of what might have been an ancient and
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