LITMIR.BIZ

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it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient Moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

      ‘Mars!’ cried Navigator Lustig.

      ‘Good old Mars!’ said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.

      ‘Well,’ said Captain John Black.

      The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze. At the summit of the house was a cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see a piece of music titled ‘Beautiful Ohio’ sitting on the music rest.

      Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

      The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale.

      ‘I’ll be damned,’ whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers. ‘I’ll be damned.’

      ‘It just can’t be,’ said Samuel Hinkston.

      ‘Lord,’ said Captain John Black.

      There was a call from the chemist. ‘Sir, the atmosphere is thin for breathing. But there’s enough oxygen. It’s safe.’

      ‘Then we’ll go out,’ said Lustig.

      ‘Hold on,’ said Captain John Black. ‘How do we know what this is?’

      ‘It’s a small town with thin but breathable air in it, sir.’

      ‘And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,’ said Hinkston, the archaeologist. ‘Incredible. It can’t be, but it is.’

      Captain John Black looked at him idly. ‘Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?’

      ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.’

      Captain Black stood by the port. ‘Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, ‘Beautiful Ohio? All of which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!’

      ‘Captain Williams, of course!’ cried Hinkston.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel York and his partner. That would explain it!’

      ‘That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we’ve been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after that they’d have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant Martian race, have built such a town as this and aged it in so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it’s been standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them! No, this isn’t York’s work or Williams’. It’s something else. I don’t like it. And I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.’

      ‘For that matter,’ said Lustig, nodding, ‘Williams and his men, as well as York, landed on the opposite side of Mars. We were very careful to land on this side.’

      ‘An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land that Williams and York never saw.’

      ‘Damn it,’ said Hinkston, ‘I want to get out into this town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!’

      ‘I’m willing to wait a moment,’ said Captain John Black.

      ‘It may be, sir, that we’re looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of God, sir.’

      ‘There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr Hinkston.’

      ‘I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could not occur without divine intervention. The detail. It fills me with such feelings that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

      ‘Do neither, then, until we know what we’re up against.’

      ‘Up against?’ Lustig broke in. ‘Against nothing, Captain. It’s a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one I was born in. I like the looks of it.’

      ‘When were you born, Lustig?’

      ‘Nineteen fifty, sir.’

      ‘And you, Hinkston?’

      ‘Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home to me.’

      ‘Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I’m just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows how to make some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me. It’s too much like Green Bluff.’ He turned to the radioman. ‘Radio Earth. Tell them we’ve landed. That’s all. Tell them we’ll radio a full report tomorrow.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like the face of a man in his fortieth year. ‘Tell you what we’ll do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston’ll look the town over. The other men’ll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the hell out. A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket. That’s Captain Wilder’s rocket, I think, due to be ready to take off next Christmas. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed.’

      ‘So are we. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.’

      ‘Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on, Lustig, Hinkston.’

      The three men walked together down through the levels of the ship.

      It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom scent

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