Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 4
Arthur C. Clarke is one of the three best-known science-fiction writers of the twentieth century (along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein). Perhaps best known for his work with director Stanley Kubrick in writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, he is also the author of dozens of novels, stories, and works of nonfiction, including The Fountains of Paradise, Rendezvous with Rama, and Childhood’s End. His most recent novel is Time’s Eye, written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. His second novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), was one of the first attempts to show a realistic (by current standards) exploration of Mars. He lives in Sri Lanka nowadays.
“WE DON’T HAVE much crime on Mars,” said Detective-Inspector Rawlings, a little sadly. “In fact, that’s the chief reason I’m going back to the Yard. If I stayed here much longer, I’d get completely out of practice.”
We were sitting in the main observation lounge of the Phobos Spaceport, looking out across the jagged sun-drenched crags of the tiny moon. The ferry rocket that had brought us up from Mars had left ten minutes ago and was now beginning the long fall back to the ochre-tinted globe hanging there against the stars. In half an hour we would be boarding the liner for Earth—a world on which most of the passengers had never set foot, but still called “home.”
“At the same time,” continued the Inspector, “now and then there’s a case that makes life interesting. You’re an art dealer, Mr. Maccar; I’m sure you heard about that spot of bother at Meridian City a couple of months ago.”
“I don’t think so,” replied the plump, olive-skinned little man I’d taken for just another returning tourist. Presumably the Inspector had already checked through the passenger list; I wondered how much he knew about me, and tried to reassure myself that my conscience was—well, reasonably clear. After all, everybody took something out through Martian customs—
“It’s been rather well hushed up,” said the Inspector, “but you can’t keep these things quiet for long. Anyway, a jewel thief from Earth tried to steal Meridian Museum’s greatest treasure—the Siren Goddess.”
“But that’s absurd!” I objected. “It’s priceless, of course—but it’s only a lump of sandstone. You might just as well steal the Mona Lisa.”
The Inspector grinned, rather mirthlessly. “That’s happened too,” he said. “Maybe the motive was the same. There are collectors who would give a fortune for such an object, even if they could only look at it themselves. Don’t you agree, Mr. Maccar?”
“That’s perfectly true,” said the art dealer. “In my business you meet all sorts of crazy people.”
“Well, this chappie—name’s Danny Weaver—had been well paid by one of them. And if it hadn’t been for a piece of fantastically bad luck, he might have brought it off.”
The Spaceport P.A. system apologized for a further slight delay owing to final fuel checks, and asked a number of passengers to report to Information. While we were waiting for the announcement to finish, I recalled what little I knew about the Siren Goddess. Although I’d never seen the original, like most other departing tourists I had a replica in my baggage. It bore the certificate of the Mars Bureau of Antiquities, guaranteeing that “this full-scale reproduction is an exact copy of the so-called Siren Goddess, discovered in the Mare Sirenium by the Third Expedition, A.D. 2012 (A.M. 23).”
It’s quite a tiny thing to have caused so much controversy. Only eight or nine inches high—you wouldn’t look at it twice if you saw it in a museum on Earth. The head of a young woman, with slightly oriental features, elongated earlobes, hair curled in tight ringlets close to the scalp, lips half parted in an expression of pleasure or surprise—and that’s all.
But it’s an enigma so baffling that it has inspired a hundred religious sects, and driven quite a few archaeologists out of their minds. For a perfectly human head has no right whatsoever to be found on Mars, whose only intelligent inhabitants were crustaceans—“educated lobsters,” as the newspapers are fond of calling them. The aboriginal Martians never came near to achieving spaceflight, and in any event their civilization died before men existed on Earth.
No wonder the Goddess is the Solar System’s number-one mystery. I don’t suppose we’ll find the answer in my lifetime—if we ever do.
“Danny’s plan was beautifully simple,” continued the Inspector. “You know how absolutely dead a Martian city gets on Sunday, when everything closes down and the colonists stay home to watch the TV from Earth. Danny was counting on this when he checked into the hotel in Meridian West, late Friday afternoon. He’d have Saturday for reconnoitering the Museum, an undisturbed Sunday for the job itself, and on Monday morning he’d be just another tourist leaving town. . . .
“Early Saturday he strolled through the little park and crossed over into Meridian East, where the Museum stands. In case you don’t know, the city gets its name because it’s exactly on longitude 180 degrees; there’s a big stone slab in the park with the Prime Meridian engraved on it, so that visitors can get themselves photographed standing in two hemispheres at once. Amazing what simple things amuse some people.
“Danny spent the day going over the Museum, exactly like any other tourist determined to get his money’s worth. But at closing time he didn’t leave; he’d holed up in one of the galleries not open to the public, where the museum had been arranging a Late Canal Period reconstruction but had run out of money before the job could be finished. He stayed there until about midnight, just in case there were any enthusiastic researchers still in the building. Then he emerged and got to work.”
“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “What about the night watchman?”
“My dear chap! They don’t have such luxuries on Mars. There weren’t even any burglar alarms, for who would bother to steal lumps of stone? True, the Goddess was sealed up neatly in a strong glass and metal cabinet, just in case some souvenir hunter took a fancy to her. But even if she were stolen, there was nowhere the thief could hide, and of course all outgoing traffic would be searched as soon as the statue was missed.”
That was true enough. I’d been thinking in terms of Earth, forgetting that every city on Mars is a closed little world of its own beneath the force field that protects it from the freezing nearvacuum. Beyond those electronic shields is the utterly hostile emptiness of the Martian Outback, where a man will die in seconds without protection. That makes law enforcement very easy.
“Danny had a beautiful set of tools, as specialized as a watchmaker’s.
The main item was a microsaw no bigger than a soldering iron; it had a wafer-thin blade, driven at a million cycles a second by an ultrasonic power-pack. It would go through glass or metal like butter—and leave a cut only about as thick as a hair. Which was very important for Danny, as he could not leave any traces of his handiwork.
“I suppose you’ve guessed how he intended to operate. He was going to cut through the base of the cabinet and substitute one of those souvenir replicas for the genuine Goddess. It might be a couple of years before some inquisitive expert discovered the awful truth, and long before then the original would have taken to Earth, perfectly disguised as a copy of itself, with a genuine certificate of authenticity. Pretty neat, eh?
“It must have been a weird business, working in that darkened gallery with all those million-year-old carvings and unexplainable artifacts around him. A museum on Earth is bad enough at night, but at least it’s—well, human. And Gallery Three, which houses the Goddess, is particularly unsettling. It’s full of bas-reliefs showing quite incredible animals fighting each other; they look rather like giant beetles, and most paleontologists flatly deny that they could ever have existed. But imaginary or not, they belonged to this world, and they didn’t disturb Danny as much as the Goddess, staring at him across the ages and defying him to explain her presence here. She gave him the creeps. How do I know? He told me.
“Danny set to work on that cabinet as carefully as any diamond cutter preparing to cleave a gem. It took most of the night to slice out the trapdoor, and it was nearly dawn when he relaxed and put down the saw. There was still a lot of work to do, but the hardest part was over. Putting the replica into the case, checking its appearance against the photos he’d thoughtfully brought with him, and covering up his traces might take a good part of Sunday, but that didn’t worry him in the least. He had another twenty-four hours, and would welcome Monday’s first visitors so that he could mingle with them and make his exit.
“It was a perfectly horrible shock to his nervous system, therefore, when the main doors were noisily unbarred at eight-thirty and the Museum staff—all six of them—started to open up for the day. Danny bolted for the emergency exit, leaving everything behind—tools, Goddesses, the lot.
“He had another big surprise when he found himself in the street: it should have been completely deserted at this time of day, with everyone at home reading the Sunday papers. But here were the citizens of Meridian East, as large as life, heading for plant or office on what was obviously a normal working day.
“By the time poor Danny got back to his hotel, we were waiting for him. We couldn’t claim much credit for deducing that only a visitor from Earth—and a very recent one at that—could have overlooked Meridian City’s chief claim to fame. And I presume you know what that is.”
“Frankly, I don’t,” I answered. “You can’t see much of Mars in six weeks, and I never went east of the Syrtis Major.”
“Well, it’s absurdly simple, but we shouldn’t be too hard on Danny—even the locals occasionally fall into the same trap. It’s something that doesn’t bother us on Earth, where we’ve been able to dump the problem in the Pacific Ocean. But Mars, of course, is all dry land; and that means that somebody is forced to live with the International Date Line. . . .
“Danny, you see, had planned the job from Meridian West. It was Sunday over there all right—and it was still Sunday there when we picked him up at the hotel. But over in Meridian East, half a mile away, it was only Saturday. That little trip across the park had made all the difference! I told you it was rotten luck.”
There was a long moment of silent sympathy, then I asked, “What did he get?”
“Three years,” said Inspector Rawlings.
“That doesn’t seem very much.”
“Mars years—that makes it almost six of ours. And a whopping fine which, by an odd coincidence, came to exactly the refund value of his return ticket to Earth. He isn’t in jail, of course—Mars can’t afford that kind of nonproductive luxury. Danny has to work for a living, under discreet surveillance. I told you that the Meridian Museum couldn’t afford a night watchman. Well, it has one now. Guess who?”
“All passengers prepare to board in ten minutes! Please collect your hand baggage!” ordered the loudspeakers.
As we started to move toward the airlock, I couldn’t help asking one more question.
“What about the people who put Danny up to it? There must have been a lot of money behind him. Did you get them?”
“Not yet; they’d covered their tracks pretty thoroughly, and I believe Danny was telling the truth when he said he couldn’t give us a lead. Still, it’s not my case. As I told you, I’m going back to my old job at the Yard. But a policeman always keeps his eyes open—like an art dealer, eh, Mr. Maccar? Why, you look a bit green about the gills. Have one of my space-sickness tablets.”
“No thank you,” answered Mr. Maccar, “I’m quite all right.”
His tone was distinctly unfriendly; the social temperature seemed to have dropped below zero in the last few minutes. I looked at Mr. Maccar, and I looked at the Inspector. And suddenly I realized that we were going to have a very interesting trip.
Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon
Leigh Brackett
Born in 1915, Leigh Brackett grew up in California, a self-described tomboy who was strongly influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s adventure stories. She published her first story in 1940 and quickly established herself as one of the leading contributors to the pulp magazines of the time, particularly to Planet Stories. Her stories blended swords-and-sorcery adventure with fantastic science-fictional settings into a mixture known nowadays as the planetary romance. In 1955, Anthony Boucher described her as “the acknowledged mistress of the flamboyant interplanetary adventure” and joked, “No one can rival her in telling such a story as, say, ‘Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon’ so skillfully and even artistically that readers normally allergic to such extravaganzas are astonished to find themselves enjoying it.” The title “Purple Priestess” was mistaken for a real publication of hers, and for nearly a decade fans hounded her about the story, until she finally wrote this story to fill out the spot in her bibliography. It’s not quite her finest work, but to my mind, it’s one of two endcaps on the planetary adventure; after it and Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” that sort of story needed a different form. (In fact, when Leigh Brackett revived her character Eric John Stark for more stories in the 1970s, she moved the setting for the stories out of our solar system.)
Ms. Brackett was a versatile writer who also wrote several crime novels, one western, and a lot of movie scripts. Her last script was for a film by the name of The Empire Strikes Back, for which she received a Hugo Award after her death in 1978. Much of her best short work was collected recently in Martian Quest: The Early Brackett.
IN THE OBSERVATION bubble of the TSS Goddard, Harvey Selden watched the tawny face of the planet grow. He could make out rose-red deserts where tiny sandstorms blew, and dark areas of vegetation like textured silk. Once or twice he caught the bright flash of water from one of the canals. He sat motionless, rapt and delighted. He had been afraid that this confrontation would offer very little to his emotions; he had since childhood witnessed innumerable identical approaches on the tri-di screen, which was almost the same as being there one’s self. But the actuality had a flavor and imminence that he found immensely thrilling.
After all, an alien planet . . .
After all, Mars . . .
He was almost angry when he realized that Bentham had come into the bubble. Bentham was Third Officer and at his age this was an admission of failure. The reason for it, Selden thought, was stamped quite clearly on his face, and he felt sorry for Bentham as he felt sorry for anyone afflicted with alcoholism. Still, the man was friendly and he had seemed much impressed by Selden’s knowledge of Mars. So Selden smiled and nodded.
“Quite a thrill,” he said.
Bentham glanced at the onrushing planet. “It always is. You know anybody down there?”
“No. But after I check in with the Bureau . . .”
“When will you do that?”
“Tomorrow. I mean, counting from after we land, of course . . . a little confusing, isn’t it, this time thing?” He knew they did three or four complete orbits on a descending spiral, which meant three or four days and nights.
Bentham said, “But in the meantime, you don’t know anybody.”
Selden shook his head.
“Well,” said Bentham, “I’m having dinner with some Martian friends. Why don’t you come along? You might find it interesting.”
“Oh,” said Selden eagerly, “that would be . . . But are you sure your friends won’t mind? I mean, an unexpected guest dragged in at the last minute . . .”
“They won’t mind,” Bentham said. “I’ll give them plenty of warning. Where are you staying?”
“The Kahora-Hilton.”
“Of course,” said Bentham. “I’ll pick you up around seven.” He smiled. “Kahora time.”
He went out, leaving Selden with some lingering qualms of doubt. Bentham was perhaps not quite the person he would have chosen to introduce him to Martian society. Still, he was an officer and could be presumed to be a gentleman. And he had been on the Mars run for a long time. Of course he would have friends, and what an unlooked-for and wonderful chance this was to go actually into a Martian home and visit with a Martian family. He was ashamed of his momentary uneasiness, and was able to analyze it quite quickly as being based in his own sense of insecurity, which of course arose from being faced with a totally unfamiliar environment. Once he had brought this negative attitude into the open, it was easy to correct it. After a quarter of an hour of positive therapy, he found himself hardly able to wait for the evening.
Kahora had grown in half a century. Originally, Selden knew, it had been founded as a Trade City under the infamous old Umbrella Treaty, so-called because it could be manipulated to cover anything, which had been concluded between the then World Government of Terra and the impoverished Martian Federation of City-States. At that time the city was housed under a single dome, climate-conditioned for the comfort of the outworld traders and politicians who frequented it and who were unused to the rigors of cold and thin-aired Mars. In addition to the climate, various other luxuries were installed in the Trade Cities, so that they had been compared with certain Biblical locales, and crimes of many different sorts, even murder, had been known to occur in them.
But all of that, or nearly all of that, was in the bad old days of laissez-faire, and now Kahora was the administrative capital of Mars, sheltered under a complex of eight shining domes. From the spaceport fifteen miles away, Selden saw the city as a pale shimmer of gossamer bubbles touched by the low sun. As the spaceport skimmer flew him across the intervening miles of red sand and dark green moss-grass, he saw the lights come on in the quick dusk and the buildings underneath the domes rose and took shape, clean and graceful and clothed in radiance. He thought that he had never seen anything so beautiful. From the landing stage inside one of the domes, a silent battery-powered cab took him to his hotel along gracious streets, where the lights glowed and people of many races walked leisurely. The whole trip, from debarkation to hotel lobby, was accomplished in completely air-conditioned comfort, and Selden was not sorry. The landscape looked awfully bleak, and one needed only to glance at it to know that it was damnably cold. Just before the skimmer entered the airlock it crossed the Kahora canal, and the water looked like black ice. He knew that he might have to cope with all this presently, but he was not in any hurry.
