The Secret of the Martian Moons Read Online Free PDF Page A

recognizing the familiar scenes of his boyhood.
    But now he took notice as he had never before of the things which alone made this place habitable. Though there were vents for air conditioning, there was an atomic heater of Earthly make that kept the room warm. Though there were areas in wall and ceiling which must have been sources of light, the only lighting in the room was an openly visible system of wiring attaching to a normal Earthly bulb. He knew in the kitchen the Martian stove still stood silently mysterious while his mother cooked their meals over an imported and too-small aluminum burner. He knew in their bathroom they would wash as always with a limited quantity of chemically purified and constantly reused water from a small tank clamped unbeautifully to the Martian wall.
    Although there was a closet in his bedroom, Nelson did not attempt to hang his clothes in it after unpacking. For the closet door would not open and never had been opened. Instead, he hung his clothes in the thin plastic-board folding closet that had been brought from their home world several dozen years before.
    He returned to the main room, sat down to his first meal at home in four years. The talk was about the evacuation of Mars. Suddenly Nelson realized that his mother and sister had known about this for several days. A thought occurred to him.
    “If this evacuation is actually old news to you, then what was it that Perrault had to tell you?” he asked his father during a lull in the conversation.
    John Carson Parr looked at him sharply. “Why, that had to do with something else. Nothing of importance,” he said, glancing at his wife and daughter. Silently he shook his head as if to warn Nelson to say nothing further on the subject.
    Nelson wondered about that letter often in the days that followed. But the matter of removing the Earth colony was not a simple one. Everyone’s time was occupied. During the next few days a great fleet of spaceships and liners and freighters put down on the desert surrounding Solis Lacus. Besides the Congreve, the other liners of space, usually on duty nearer the sun, came down from the deep blue sky and perched upright on the sand. The Goddard, the Pickering, the Valier, the Ziolkovsky, the other liners of the type arrived. And the freighters came in, some of them fresh from storage on Earth, as the mining developments had come to a halt following the synthesis of elements on Earth. Nelson was amazed to see ships bearing the colors and emblems of the long defunct trading companies that had originally built up the once lucrative asteroid trade.
    Then there was the problem of assigning space to the three hundred remaining colonists. Spaceships never had too much cargo room, and it would take just about every inch to transport the men, women, and children safely. Very little of their personal possessions could be taken. They would have to leave things like furniture and excess clothing, books and radios, cars and planes behind. But then, most of that material was made to suit the rigors of the Martian climate, a world where in midsummer temperatures might reach the seventies and yet plunge to thirty and forty below zero by midnight. Where in winter the temperature at midday would never pass above zero and might drop to a hundred or more below by nightfall. A world whose air was too thin to support planes built to Earthly designs and yet would fly planes too wide-winged and weakly powered to operate in the thicker air and heavier gravity of Earth.
    Nelson and his father and his father’s associates in the leadership of the colony were busy listing available spaces, assigning families, seeing that (hey were stowed aboard and that the ships took off for the green-glowing evening star as fast as they were completely booked. They had to settle arguments as to what could go and what could be left behind. They had to arbitrate between people who insisted they had