The Secret of the Martian Moons Read Free

had been the subject of search and clearly the probe had been interrupted before it had been completed. His valise was open, its contents scattered. A drawer in the wall was open and disarranged. The mirrored door to his little washstand was ajar.
    Nelson stood up, opened his locker. His jacket, coat, and spare clothing still hung there, apparently undisturbed. He reached into the jacket pocket and to his relief his fingers touched the surface of the envelope. He withdrew it, looked at it.
    It was just an ordinary mail envelope, thin opaque plastic. Across its face was written his father’s name and the word Urgent!
    Undoubtedly it would have been discovered had the searcher had but a few more minutes. What that would have meant Nelson had no idea, but he made sure the chance would not come so easily again. He thrust the letter into concealment between his skin and the tight-fitting space-flight coverall he was wearing. From now on, the letter would go with him everywhere.
    He closed the locker door, glanced into the wash-stand cabinet to see if everything there was accounted for, and then swung shut its mirrored door. For a moment he glanced at his own reflection. As he did so, his eyes were drawn to the surface of the mirror. He stared for a moment in disbelief at what he saw. There was a handprint clearly visible on the bright unbreakable glassy surface.
    A perfectly made print of a strange right hand-one that had but three wide unnatural fingers—fingers with fringed snaky fingertips!

Chapter 2  Farewell to the Red Planet
    The handprint was freshly damp and evidently had been left in haste by the unknown intruder. Even as Nelson watched, it was slowly evaporating, for the air in a space liner is not high in humidity. The young man strained his eyes until the print vanished entirely. By blowing gently against the mirror he was able to make it come back into view briefly, enough to confirm the strangeness of its form.
    Nelson Parr sat down on his narrow bunk perplexed. His original anger at the discovery of someone searching his possessions was changing into a sort of sudden tingling wonder. Who—or what—had been the prowler? Who, in the universe, had a hand like that?
    The answer was simple, too simple, Nelson knew. It was nobody. Although men had been exploring their own solar system for a century and a half, they had not found any intelligent beings other than themselves. There were creatures in the crystal jungles of Venus that were very bright—for animals. Nelson knew that students of evolution considered that in another million years’ time these creatures would work their way up to something like civilization. There had been no evidences of intelligent life on the other worlds.
    The pitifully narrow twilight belt of Mercury, with its violent winds, now oven-hot and now icy-cold, harbored the lowest type of rock-clinging moss and deep-rooted cactus only. The crater bottoms of Luna, where a thin atmosphere sometimes gathered in the heat of the sun, had fast-growing and fast-dying crops of green stuff, part vegetable, part something else—but not animal. Two or three of the larger satellites of Jupiter had tough hardy forms of plant life, and even a few very queer and sluggish animal forms fighting for a foothold against the intolerable cold at that distance from the sun. Farther out from Jupiter, the worlds wheeled cold and lifeless, brilliant and changing perhaps in their chemical and crystalline reactions, but sterile nonetheless.
    There was always Mars as the holdout. But the intelligent life of the Earth’s neighbor was a mystery—a dead mystery apparently. There had been intelligence there, yes. A wonderful, tremendous, brilliantly skilled intelligence. But it was gone totally, save for its works. And despite all the decades that men like Nelson’s father had spent exploring there, they did not even know exactly what the Martians looked like.
    Except for one