The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald A. Wollheim Read Free Book Online Page A

was a good store of food, abandoned like all the rest. When they finished, they donned their respirators, pulled on their night coveralls—-electronically heated garments for the cold outside-pulled the hoods close over their heads, settled their packs, and followed Worden down again through the trap door in the Parr home.
    Now they made their way through the old passages under the city itself. Though there was probably some sort of native lighting, none of it worked, dead as the rest of the planet’s mighty civilization, dead or in cold storage. Beneath the city itself there was such a web-work of passages, doorways, entrances downward and exits upward as to leave almost no lengths of corridor. Nelson, who had visited the underground ways of terrestrial cities, particularly the maze of trains, moving passageways, and foot tunnels, found himself comparing them as he strode along behind the other five. It occurred to him curiously that those Earth cities were somehow so “new” and so “elementary” compared to this. For a moment he felt awe at the thought of what this could have been like, all lit up and filled with hustling Martians.
    On they went, following Worden, who had a map of the underground ways that had been worked out by explorers. Every now and then he stopped to check his position, then went on.
    After about four hours of steady wandering in and out of the endless catacombs, Worden brought them to a halt. He swung open a trap door above, and they climbed the ladder that rested there.
    They emerged into a large dome, cleared of its interior rooms. As he stuck his head out of the trap door, Nelson saw that the dome housed a rocket cruiser. A small duplicate of the great space liner, a craft such as was used for exploration of the asteroids—a clean powerful little craft, capable of carrying them all comfortably, capable of fast flight, and carrying a fair cargo. It was as new a ship as he’d seen, and he realized that it must have been sent sometime in advance for just this type of emergency.
    Telders unsealed the single main lock and they filed in. Inside it was just as Nelson anticipated. He had studied space training in a replica of such a craft as this at the Institute. The trim long central and front cabin, the bunks for six lining the wall, the cargo chamber, now holding a number of crates, as well as food supplies. The now fairly small engine space— immensely compact since the recent developments in rocket engineering—the original spaceships had been about ninety-five percent engine and fuel. This one was not more than about thirty percent such.
    When all was ready, they checked their watches, and Telders took control.
    “All set?” called out John Carson Parr, seating himself in the soft bucket chair next to Telders.
    The rest of them called out their readiness. Nelson was near the controls; he wanted to watch through the forward port.
    Their target, Phobos, was not in sight. Nelson had not expected it to be. Telders had undoubtedly figured just when it would be overhead and arranged their speed and flight in such a way that they would cross its orbit at the moment the satellite would be there. Their trip might take a few hours, at the relatively slow speeds of near-planet regions. Since Phobos circled Mars in slightly over one day, by the time they had gotten five thousand miles up, it would be up.
    ‘‘Time!” called out the rocketeer and punched a button.
    Outside, the curved dome slid back and the open dark sky loomed over them. For a moment Nelson caught a glimpse of the gray starlit city, its domes cold and dark, the horizon stretching beyond. The ship lifted slowly, pointed its nose at the heavens and climbed, rapidly accelerating. In a matter of seconds the city was a mass of bubbles beneath them, a gem set in the darkness of a sleeping plain of dark blue, whose edges, even at night, could be plainly defined against the glaring lightness of