Great Stories of Space Travel Read online

  A distant shout turned us around. Burton was at the rock, beside the ship. He was bending down, his eye to the far side of the mysterious hole.

  He looked for another second, then straightened.

  “They line up,” he said when he reached us. “The bottom of the hole in the cactus is right in the middle when you sight through the hole in the rock.”

  “As if somebody came around and whacked the cactus regularly,” Janus said, looking around warily.

  “To keep the line of sight through the holes clear?” I wondered. “Why not just remove the cactus?”

  “Religious,” Janus explained.

  The gauntlet he had discarded lay ignored on the ground, in the shadow of the cactus. We went on past the ridge toward an outcropping of rock about a hundred yards farther on. We walked silently, each of us wondering if what we half-expected would really be there.

  It was. In one of the tall, weathered spires in the outcropping, some ten feet below its peak and four feet above the ground, was a round four-inch hole.

  Allenby sat down on a rock, nursing his ankle, and remarked that anybody who believed this crazy business was really happening must have holes in the rocks in his head.

  Burton put his eye to the hole and whistled. “Sixty feet long if it’s an inch,” he said. “The other end’s just a pinpoint. But you can see it. The damn thing’s perfectly straight.”

  I looked back the way we had come. The cactus stood on the ridge, with its U-shaped bite, and beyond was the ship, and beside it the perforated rock.

  “If we surveyed,” I said, “I bet the holes would all line up right to the last millimeter.”

  “But,” Randolph complained, “why would anybody go out and bore holes in things all along a line through the desert?”

  “Religious,” Janus muttered. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

  We stood there by the outcropping and looked out along the wide, red desert beyond. It stretched flatly for miles from this point, south toward Mars’ equator —dead sandy wastes, crisscrossed by the “canals,” which we had observed while landing to be great straggly patches of vegetation, probably strung along underground waterflows.

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  We jumped half out of our skins. Ozone bit at our nostrils. Our hair stirred in the electrical uproar.

  “L-look,” Janus chattered, lowering his smoking gun.

  About forty feet to our left, a small rabbity creature poked its head from behind a rock and stared at us in utter horror.

  Janus raised his gun again.

  “Don’t bother,” said Allenby tiredly. “I don’t think it intends to attack.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sure it isn’t a Martian with religious convictions.”

  Janus wet his lips and looked a little shamefaced. “I guess I’m kind of taut.”

  “That’s what I taut,” said Allenby.

  The creature darted from behind its rock and, looking at us over its shoulder, employed six legs to make small but very fast tracks.

  We turned our attention again to the desert. Far out, black against Mars’ azure horizon, was a line of low hills.

  “Shall we go look?” asked Burton, eyes gleaming at the mystery.

  Janus hefted his gun nervously. It was still crackling from the discharge. “I say let’s get back to the ship!”

  Allenby sighed. “My leg hurts.” He studied the hills. “Give me the field-glasses.”

  Randolph handed them over. Allenby put them to the shield of his mask, and adjusted them.

  After a moment he sighed again. “There’s a hole. On a plane surface that catches the Sun. A lousy damned round little impossible hole.”

  “Those hills,” Burton observed, “must be thousands of feet thick.”

  The argument lasted all the way back to the ship.

  Janus, holding out for his belief that the whole thing was of religious origin, kept looking around for Martians as if he expected them to pour screaming from the hills.

  Burton came up with the suggestion that perhaps the holes had been made by a disintegrator-ray.

  “It’s possible,” Allenby admitted. “This might have been the scene of some great battle—”

  “With only one such weapon?” I objected.

  Allenby swore as he stumbled. “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen any other lines of holes—only the one. In a battle, the whole joint should be cut up.”

  That was good for a few moments’ silent thought. Then Allenby said, “It might have been brought out by one side as a last resort. Sort of an ace in the hole.”

  I resisted the temptation to mutiny. “But would even one such weapon, in battle, make only one line of holes? Wouldn’t it be played in an arc against the enemy? You know it would.”

  “Well—”

  “Wouldn’t it cut slices out of the landscape, instead of boring holes? And wouldn’t it sway or vibrate enough to make the holes miles away from it something less than perfect circles?”

  “It could have been very firmly mounted.”

  “Hugh, does that sound like a practical weapon to you?”

  Two seconds of silence. “On the other hand,” he said, “instead of a war, the whole thing might have been designed to frighten some primitive race—or even some kind of beast—the hole out of here. A demonstration—”

  “Religious,” Janus grumbled, still looking around.

  We walked on, passing the cactus on the low ridge.

  “Interesting,” said Gonzales. “The evidence that whatever causes the phenomenon has happened again and again. I’m afraid that the war theory—”

  “Oh, my God!” gasped Burton.

  We stared at him.

  “The ship,” he whispered. “It’s right in line with the holes! If whatever made them is still in operation. .

  “Run!” yelled Allenby, and we ran like fiends.

  We got the ship into the air, out of line with the holes to what we fervently hoped was safety, and then we realized we were admitting our fear that the mysterious hole-maker might still be lurking around.

  Well, the evidence was all for it, as Gonzales had reminded us—that cactus had been oozing.

  We cruised at twenty thousand feet and thought it over.

  Janus, whose only training was in photography, said, “Some kind of omnivorous animal? Or bird? Eats rocks and everything?”

  “I will not totally discount the notion of such an animal,” Randolph said. “But I will resist to the death the suggestion that it forages with geometric precision.”

  After a while, Allenby said, “Land, Burton. By that ‘canal.’ Lots of plant life—fauna, too. We’ll do a little collecting.”

  Burton set us down feather-light at the very edge of the sprawling flat expanse of vegetation, commenting that the scene reminded him of his native Texas pear-flats.

  We wandered in the chilly air, each of us except Burton pursuing his specialty. Randolph relentlessly stalked another of the rabbity creatures. Gonzales was carefully digging up plants and stowing them in jars. Janus was busy with his cameras, recording every aspect of Mars transferable to film. Allenby walked around, helping anybody who needed it. An astronomer, he’d done half his work on the way to Mars and would do the other half on the return trip. Burton lounged in the Sun, his back against a ship’s fin, and played chess with Allenby, who was calling out his moves in a bull roar. I grubbed for rocks.

  My search took me farther and farther away from the others—all I could find around the ‘canal’ was gravel, and I wanted to chip at some big stuff. I walked toward a long rise a half-mile or so away, beyond which rose an enticing array of house-sized boulders.

  As I moved out of earshot, I heard Randolph snarl, “Burton, will you stop yelling, ‘Kt to B-2 and check?’ Every time you open your yap, this critter takes off on me.”

  Then I saw the groove.

  It started right where the ground began to rise—a thin, shallow, c
urve-bottomed groove in the dirt at my feet, about half an inch across, running off straight toward higher ground.

  With my eyes glued to it, I walked. The ground slowly rose. The groove deepened, widened—now it was about three inches across, about one and a half deep.

  I walked on, holding my breath. Four inches wide. Two inches deep.

  The ground rose some more. Four and three-eighths inches wide. I didn’t have to measure it—I knew.

  Now, as the ground rose, the edges of the groove began to curve inward over the groove. They touched. No more groove.

  The ground had risen, the groove had stayed level and gone underground.

  Except that now it wasn’t a groove. It was a round tunnel.

  A hole.

  A few paces farther on, I thumped the ground with my heel where the hole ought to be. The dirt crumbled, and there was the little dark tunnel, running straight in both directions.

  I walked on, the ground falling away gradually again. The entire process was repeated in reverse. A hairline appeared in the dirt—widened—became lips that drew slowly apart to reveal the neat straight four-inch groove—which shrank as slowly to a shallow line of the ground—and vanished.

  I looked ahead of me. There was one low ridge of ground between me and the enormous boulders. A neat four-inch semicircle was bitten out of the very top of the ridge. In the house-sized boulder directly beyond was a four-inch hole.

  Allenby winced and called the others when I came back and reported.

  “The mystery deepens ” he told them. He turned to me. “Lead on, Peters. You’re temporary drill leader.”

  Thank God he didn’t say Fall in.

  The holes went straight through the nest of boulders —there’d be a hole in one and, ten or twenty feet farther on in the next boulder, another hole. And then another, and another—right through the nest in a line. About thirty holes in all.

  Burton, standing by the boulder I’d first seen, flashed his flashlight into the hole. Randolph, clear on the other side of the jumbled nest, eye to hole, saw it.

  Straight as a string!

  The ground sloped away on the far side of the nest —no holes were visible in that direction—just miles of desert. So, after we’d stared at the holes for a while and they didn’t go away, we headed back for the canal.

  “Is there any possibility,” asked Janus, as we walked, “that it could be a natural phenomenon?”

  “There are no straight lines in nature,” Randolph said, a little shortly. “That goes for a bunch of circles in a straight line. And for perfect circles, too.”

  “A planet is a circle,” objected Janus.

  “An oblate spheroid,” Allenby corrected.

  “A planet’s orbit—”

  “An ellipse.”

  Janus walked a few steps, frowning. Then he said, “I remember reading that there is something darned near a perfect circle in nature.” He paused a moment. “Potholes.” And he looked at me, as mineralogist, to corroborate.

  “What kind of potholes?” I asked cautiously. “Do you mean where part of a limestone deposit has dissol—”

  “No. I once read that when a glacier passes over a hard rock that’s lying on some softer rock, it grinds the hard rock down into the softer, and both of them sort of wear down to fit together, and it all ends up with a round hole in the soft rock.”

  “Probably neither stone,” I told Janus, “would be homogeneous. The softer parts would abrade faster in the soft stone. The end result wouldn’t be a perfect circle.”

  Janus’s face fell.

  “Now,” I said, “would anyone care to define this term ‘perfect circle’ we’re throwing around so blithely? Because such holes as Janus describes are often pretty damned round.”

  Randolph said, “Well..

  “It is settled, then,” Gonzales said, a little sarcastically. “Your discussion, gentlemen, has established that the long, horizontal holes we have found were caused by glacial action.”

  “Oh, no,” Janus argued seriously. “I once read that Mars never had any glaciers.”

  All of us shuddered.

  Half an hour later, we spotted more holes, about a mile down the ‘canal,’ still on a line, marching along the desert, through cacti, rocks, hills, even through one edge of the low vegetation of the ‘canal’ for thirty feet or so. It was the damnedest thing to bend down and look straight through all that curling, twisting growth ... a round tunnel from either end.

  We followed the holes for about a mile, to the rim of an enormous saucerlike valley that sank gradually before us until, miles away, it was thousands of feet deep. We stared out across it, wondering about the other side.

  Allenby said determinedly, “We’ll burrow to the bottom of these holes, once and for all. Back to the ship, men!”

  We hiked back, climbed in and took off.

  At an altitude of fifty feet, Burton lined the nose of the ship on the most recent line of holes and we flew out over the valley.

  On the other side was a range of hefty hills. The holes went through them. Straight through. We would approach one hill—Burton would manipulate the front viewscreen until we spotted the hole—we would pass over the hill and spot the other end of the hole in the rear screen.

  One hole was two hundred and eighty miles long.

  Four hours later, we were halfway around Mars.

  Randolph was sitting by a side port, chin on one hand, his eyes unbelieving. “All around the planet,” he kept repeating. “All around the planet..."

  “Halfway at least,” Allenby mused. “And we can assume that it continues in a straight line, through anything and everything that gets in its way..." He gazed out the front port at the uneven blue-green haze of a ‘canal’ off to our left. “For the love of Heaven, why?”

  Then Allenby fell down. We all did.

  Burton had suddenly slapped at the control board, and the ship braked and sank like a plugged duck. At the last second, Burton propped up the nose with a short burst, the ten-foot wheels hit desert sand and in five hundred yards we had jounced to a stop.

  Allenby got up from the floor. “Why did you do that?” he asked Burton politely, nursing a bruised elbow.

  Burton’s nose was almost touching the front port. “Look!” he said, and pointed.

  About two miles away, the Martian village looked like a handful of yellow marbles flung on the desert.

  We checked our guns. We put on our oxygen-masks. We checked our guns again. We got out of the ship and made damned sure the airlock was locked.

  An hour later, we crawled inch by painstaking inch up a high sand dune and poked our heads over the top.

  The Martians were runts—the tallest of them less than five feet tall—and skinny as a pencil. Dried-up and brown, they wore loincloths of woven fiber.

  They stood among the dusty-looking inverted-bowl buildings of their village, and every one of them was looking straight up at us with unblinking brown eyes.

  The six safeties of our six guns clicked off like a rattle of dice. The Martians stood there and gawped.

  “Probably a highly developed sense of hearing in this thin atmosphere,” Allenby murmured. “Heard us coming.”

  “They thought that landing of Burton’s was an earthquake,” Randolph grumbled sourly.

  “Marsquake,” corrected Janus. One look at the village’s scrawny occupants seemed to have convinced him that his life was in no danger.

  Holding the Martians covered, we examined the village from atop the thirty-foot dune.

  The domelike buildings were constructed of something that looked like adobe. No windows—probably built with sandstorms in mind. The doors were about halfway up the sloping sides, and from each door a stone ramp wound down around the house to the ground—again with sandstorms in mind, no doubt, so drifting dunes wouldn’t block the entrances.

  The center of the village was a wide street, a long sandy area some thirty feet wide. On either side of it, the houses were scattered at random, as if
each Martian had simply hunted for a comfortable place to sit and then built a house around it.

  “Look,” whispered Randolph.

  One Martian had stepped from a group situated on the far side of the street from us. He started to cross the street, his round brown eyes on us, his small bare feet plodding sand, and we saw that in addition to a loincloth he wore jewelry—a hammered metal ring, a bracelet on one skinny ankle. The Sun caught a copperish gleam on his bald narrow head, and we saw a band of metal there, just above where his eyebrows should have been.

  “The super-chief,” Allenby murmured. “Oh, shaman me!”

  As the bejeweled Martian approached the center of the street, he glanced briefly at the ground at his feet. Then he raised his head, stepped with dignity across the exact center of the street and came on toward us, passing the dusty-looking buildings of his realm and the dusty-looking groups of his subjects.

  He reached the slope of the dune we lay on, paused —and raised small hands over his head, palms toward us.

  “I think,” Allenby said, “that an anthropologist would give odds on that gesture meaning peace.”

  He stood up, holstered his gun—without buttoning the flap—and raised his own hands over his head. We all did.

  The Martian language consisted of squeaks.

  We made friendly noises, the chief squeaked and pretty soon we were the center of a group of wide-eyed Martians, none of whom made a sound. Evidently no one dared peep while the chief spoke—very likely the most articulate Martians simply squeaked themselves into the job. Allenby, of course, said they just squeaked, by.

  He was going through the business of drawing concentric circles in the sand, pointing at the third orbit away from the Sun and thumping his chest. The crowd around us kept growing as more Martians emerged from the dome buildings to see what was going on. Down the winding ramps of the buildings on our side of the street, plodding through the sand, blinking brown eyes at us, not making a sound.