Rebels of the Red Planet | Page 2

desert was a lens that
distorted and concealed by its intervention. The groundcar was a
mechanical bug, an alienness with which timorous man had allied
himself; allied with it against reality, she and Nuwell were hastened by
it through reality, unseeing, toward the goal of a more comfortable
unreality.
The groundcar bumped and slithered, and an orange dust-cloud boiled
up from its broad tires and wafted away across the sculpted sand. The
desert stretched away, silent and empty, to the distant horizon; the
groundcar the only humming disturbance of its silence and emptiness.
The steel-blue sky shimmered above, a lens capping the red surface.
The groundcar rolled westward, slashing toward its goal from the
distant lowland of Solis Lacus. Far away, two men, machineless,
plodded this same Xanthe Desert toward the same goal; but they
plodded southward, approaching on a different radius.
They were naked. In a thin atmosphere without sufficient oxygen to
support animal life or even the higher forms of terrestrial plant life,
they wore no marsuits, no helmets, no oxygen tanks.

The man who walked in front was tall, erect, powerfully muscled. His
features and short-clipped hair were coarse, but self-assured
intelligence shone in his smoky eyes. He moved across the loose sand,
barefoot, with easy grace.
The--man?--that shambled behind him was as tall, but appeared shorter
and even more muscular because his shoulders and head were hunched
forward. His even coarser face was characterized by vacuously slack
mouth and blue eyes empty of any expression except an occasional
brief frown of puzzlement.
Toward a focal point: from the east, two people; from the north, two
people. If in the efficient self-assurance of Adam Hennessey could be
paralleled a variant harmony with the insistent surfaceness of S. Nuwell
Eli, does any coincidental parallelism exist between Brute Hennessey
and Maya Cara Nome?
Puzzlement was the climate of Brute's mind. This surface film of things
through which he ploughed his way, the swarming currents below the
surface--all were chaos. He grasped vaguely at comprehension without
achieving, the effective coalescence of electric ideas always falling
short before reaching consciousness.
The two men plodded, naked, through the loose sand. Above them in
the Mars-blue dome of day, the weak sun turned downward, warning of
its eventual departure.
A two-passengered groundcar and two men, widely apart, and yet
bound for the same destination....
The destination was a lone, sprawling building in the desert. It could
have been a huge warehouse, or a fortress, of black, almost windowless
Martian stone. The only outstanding feature of its virtually featureless
hulk was a tower which struck upward from its northern side.
As the summer afternoon progressed, Dr. G. O. T. Hennessey paced the
windy summit of the tower, peered frequently into the desert north
beneath a sunshading hand, and waggled his goat beard in annoyance

under his transparent marshelmet.
Had the helmet speaker been on or the air less thin, one might have
determined that Goat Hennessey was utilizing some choice profanity,
directed at those two absent personages whose names were,
respectively, Adam and Brute.
The airlock to the tower elevator opened and a small creature--a
child?--emerged onto the roof. Distorted, humpbacked and
barrel-chested, it scuttled on reed-thin legs to Goat's side. It wore no
marsuit.
"Father!" screeched this apparition, its thin voice curiously muffled by
the tenuous air. "Petway fell in the laundry vat!"
"For the love of space!" muttered Goat in exasperation. "Is there water
in it?"
When the newcomer gave no sign of hearing, Goat realized his helmet
speaker was off. He switched it on.
"Is there water in the vat?" he repeated.
"Yes, sir. It's full of suds and clothes."
"Well, go fish him out before he soaks up all the water. The soap will
make him sick."
The messenger turned, almost tripping over its own broad feet, and
went back through the airlock. Goat returned to his northward vigil.
Miles away, Nuwell slowed the groundcar as it approached the lip of
that precipitous slope bordering the short canal which connects
Juventae Fons with the Arorae Sinus Lowland. He consulted a rough
chart, and turned the groundcar southward. A drive of about a kilometer
brought them to a wide descending ledge down which they were able to
drive into the canal.
Here, on the flat lowland surface, the canal sage grew thick, a

gray-green expanse stretching unbroken to the distant cliff that was the
other side of the canal. Occasionally above its smoothness thrust the
giant barrel of a canal cactus.
Nuwell headed the groundcar straight across the canal, for the chart
showed that the nearest upward ledge on the other side was
conveniently almost opposite. The big wheels bent and crushed the
canal sage, leaving a double trail.
The canal sage brought with it the comforting feeling of surface life
once more. This