The Secret of the Martian Moons Read Free Page A

factor—they must have resembled men. Their homes and belongings seemed designed for manlike beings—and Nelson remembered that the Martians had a hand with five fingers, as the handgrips on certain instruments had proved beyond doubt.
    But that left no known race to account for this print.
    Nobody on any world known to man had a three-fingered hand of such a curious pattern! Perhaps, thought Nelson suddenly, the explorers had been mistaken about the Martian hand? Perhaps this was the true appearance of a Martian's hand? Perhaps then the Martians were not extinct . . . and one of them was here, on board the Congreve, returning home.
    That raised another thought. Returning home from Earth? And what had it been doing there?
    Nelson stood up, patting the place in his suit where he had hidden the envelope Dr. Perrault had addressed to his father. This must have considerable importance to attract the attention of such a spy? What was up? Well, he’d find out in time. Meanwhile he would have to take great care not to be caught off guard.
    He went out of his compartment, closed the door and made his way back to the passengers’ chamber. He noticed as he did so that the lights were again unshielded in the corridor. As he rejoined the company of his fellow passengers he debated the course he should take. Should he tell people about it, ask for help on a search? Would they believe him?
    He decided they probably wouldn’t. Merely because he had seen what he thought was something odd on his mirror, something that had since disappeared, they wouldn’t get excited. After all, nothing actually had been taken. A search might simply cause the unknown to keep under cover.
    What he had to do was to keep an eye on everyone. Obviously whoever it was must be wearing artificial flesh-simulated hands. It would be fairly easy to make a pair of gloves designed to look and feel just like human flesh. A three-fingered hand would fit into such a five-fingered glove so that none might suspect the trick. Yet, Nelson supposed, it couldn’t be quite as flexible as a human hand—or could it? He would study everyone’s hands for signs of strangeness.
    He observed the passengers. He watched the crew, making special excuses to cover even the men on duty in the atomically dangerous feeding-chamber room. But it all proved futile.
    Wait as he did, there never seemed to have been another attempt on his room. Despite careful arrangements of his drawer to show whether any disarrangement took place in his absence, he found nothing. Watching hands for clumsiness proved quite difficult when most people did very little save sit and read, watch canned-shows, or stand duty.
    Time dragged on, as it does on even the speediest space flight. The flight to Mars from Earth had once taken one and a quarter years each way. That was in the old days of the chemical-type rockets fueled and launched from the Lunar base, after other big rockets had ferried the riders to the moon. The time had been cut as the development of atomic fuels had been perfected. It took longer than had been supposed, but with the perfection of direct application of atomic reaction to space flight the ability to accelerate for long periods of time was vastly increased.
    The speed of a spaceship depends entirely on how long a period rocket acceleration can be kept up. As there is no friction in the empty voids between the worlds, once a speed is reached, it remains the same unless deliberately countered and slowed by an opposite rocket action. But the amount of acceleration depended on how much fuel a ship could carry. Where chemical fuel was concerned, the weights involved were so enormous and the results actually so weak that, from a celestial viewpoint, the speeds were very, very slow. But atomic power can produce tremendous volumes of energy from very little bulk. All that had to be discovered was a means of liberating it which did not involve massively heavy