The Secret of the Martian Moons (11 page)

Nelson walked over and picked up the ers-gun again. He wasn’t going to let it out of his hands now until he was sure he was safe. Then the significance of what Kunosh had said penetrated. “What was that? Did you say ‘go back where they came from’?”

When Kunosh repeated, Nelson quickly asked, “Where did they come from? They’re not part of your own people?”

Kunosh was silent and a little frightened for a moment. “Well,” he said slowly, “they are from our own people, really. I was just—just—just using a figure of speech.”

Nelson began to feel himself getting angry again. “Oh no you weren’t!” he said slowly. “You have to stop and think to translate everything you want to say to me into English and you must mean exactly what you said. These people didn’t come from Deimos, though they may look like your kind. Where did they come from?”

He hefted the weapon angrily. He had no love for these cowardly people. He realized that now that he had rid them of their old enemy, he himself represented a new menace—and possibly a greater one in their rabbity eyes.

Kunosh didn’t answer for a while, but stood there, looking very upset and starting to wring his hands. Nelson noticed several of the blue-clad men beginning to edge toward the exits. He raised his weapon. “Stop, all of you!” he called. “Just sit down where you are.

Now that I’ve got all you Deimos leaders here, you’re not going to get away until you tell me everything I want to know!”

The others hesitated, not understanding his words, but fearing his tones. Kunosh translated the command in a soft sibilant tongue. Shaking, the seven sat down where they were. Kunosh backed against a wall, pale and troubled.

Nelson turned to him. “Now, old man, I want to know just where these "monsters’ of yours came from!” But Kunosh merely stood, mute and shaking.

“Go ahead, tell him, you old fool,” said another voice. Nelson glanced down. The speaker was one of the men in the red-and-black coveralls. He was sitting on the floor, his hands and feet tied, but he had recovered consciousness from the scuffle. He stared at Nelson coldly, without fear.

When Kunosh remained silent, the foeman spit. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. Kunosh gave an order and three of his compatriots suddenly lunged for the speaker. But before they could clamp their hands over his mouth, he triumphantly snapped out, “We’re from the other moon!” A hand smothered his mouth, but the bound man bit down and the owner of the hand yelped and pulled it away just long enough for the word “Phobos!” to pop before he was quieted again.

Nelson felt himself going pale. His father and his friends were on Phobos—and if that satellite was also a honeycomb world, then by this time they might all be prisoners—or slain!

“I think you’d better tell me everything about you and Mars and the rest,” said Nelson slowly and softly, keeping his temper just barely under control. “I think you’ve been playing me for a fool here, that you’re no more my friend than this monster of yours.” Nelson’s anger showed in the set of his brow and he waved the ers-gun menacingly.

Kunosh bit his lip, glanced around at his compatriots and muttered something, apparently a translation. There was a bit of whispering back and forth, and finally Kunosh shrugged.

“We don’t want you to feel that way,” he said, turning to Nelson. “Honestly, we’re very grateful to you and we’ve agreed to let you hear what you want to know. You’ll be the very first outsider to know it—but—we’ll tell you.” He nodded to his fellows, and one of them went over to a wall and turned some dials on one of the inset panels.

“While he’s setting up the past-record viewers, I think it would be good to get these ... Phobosians ... out of here,” said Kunosh, and without waiting to see what Nelson would do, his men started to carry out the bound enemies. For a moment Nelson was uncertain. He realized that he couldn’t entirely trust anything that these cowardly creatures might do. Then, as they started to carry out the man who had interrupted them, Nelson called, ‘‘Stop! Leave that one here. I may want to ask him some questions myself. He seems to speak and understand English.”

Kunosh frowned, started to object, but seeing that Nelson was still by no means calmed down, waved his friends back. They propped up the red-and-black stripe-suited stranger on one of the low seats against the wall, though they still kept a grip on his mouth to prevent him from talking. The rest of the foemen had already been removed from the room.

Nelson nodded to Kunosh. “All right, you can start. Are you the lost Martians?”

The old man shook his head, went over to the now glowing wall panel. “No,” he answered. “We did not come from Mars. We come from a world in the system of this star,” and his hand caused a picture to flash on the wall screen.

A brilliant blue-white star shone against the blackness of space. Around it could be seen the disks of several planets, moving slowly around it. Kunosh pointed as he spoke:

“This is the star you people call Vega. Around it are seven planets, and on one of these planets our people originated.”

On the screen, one of the disks came closer, enlarged until it filled the screen to show a small world, rocky in nature, crisscrossed with ridges of low mountains,

many lakes of various sizes, two or three deep but narrow seas. A world by no means as beautiful or apparently as large as Earth, one without many plains, where green vegetation grew only on mountainsides, or in the innumerable twisting valleys between the gray crags of rock and cliff.

“This was our home world,” Kunosh said. “On it we evolved from savages and we found our way to civilization and the culture that is the only true culture.”

The scene swooped down to the surface of this world and Nelson could see villages nestling against the rocks, roads that climbed the mountains and tunnels that cut through to neighboring valleys. An industrious world, but still essentially one that seemed restricted to small communities. There was never a sign of anything like a large city.

“We took pleasure in boring into the mountains, putting our factories beneath the rock where they would not interfere with our small farming areas.”

The scene dipped suddenly underground and before Nelson’s eyes flashed a network of caverns and tunnels and rocky workshops where the little people of the Vegan race hammered and cast and drilled and made things. The scene changed, and Nelson recognized that it was an educational device designed to show progression, for the caves enlarged, the corridors from being crude, became wide and smoothed, the caves where men worked by hand now showed machinery of increasing complexity, puffs of smoke indicating the passage of steam power, then the yellowish glow of electricity and finally the white softness of atomic lighting. More and more it was clear, as the disk would rise in its view above the surface to show that the villages had not perceptibly changed, that the bulk of the life on this world was being carried on underground. It occurred to Nelson now that these people were more like gophers in their ways than rabbits.

“We spread our civilization over our entire world and we had a very happy world. We invented all that we needed and we did not need any contact with other worlds.”

There was a curious scene shown. A strange squarish craft bouncing down from the sky on flaring rockets into a valley. Fliers of some sort emerging from it, their shapes concealed by bulky spacesuits. A delegation of the small pale Vegans meeting them, apparently denying them entry to the world, showing no hospitality, and the strangers leaving again in their ship, never to return.

“We were sufficient to ourselves. We did not welcome intruders with their crude ways and ugly thinking and horrible arts. Our own art and science were perfection, why should we mix it up with lower types?” Kunosh's voice began to reflect some of his fanaticism and pride, Nelson noted.

“But surely your people must have realized they could learn a lot of new things from other planets? Didn't you want to have spaceships too?” Nelson asked.

Kunosh turned toward him a moment, his eyes flickering in the glow of the wall panel. “Their new things stank of killing and violence. Their art was horrible and unsuited to our world. What we had invented was our own work and our own secret. Why should we give it to them in exchange for such trash?”

Nelson realized he was dealing with a type of small-mindedness that had never been seen on Earth. For a moment the thought of a world of such people gave him a chill. He shifted the ers-gun in his hand uneasily.

“Was there no war on your world? I should think that a world of small valleys would have many languages and cultures?” he asked.

Kunosh shook his head. “No. We never fought with each other, why should we? As for language, we have no record of more than one. Possibly all our people originated in one spot and moved out.”

Nelson thought there was something slightly wrong about this, from what he could remember of language studies. “And possibly there was some dirty work done you’d rather not remember!” snapped another voice, and Nelson saw that it was the prisoner taking advantage of his captors’ inattention. Again they silenced him.

The Earthling stared at the cold eyes of the captive, turned again to Kunosh, who was likewise glaring at the prisoner. “Suppose you let him talk. I’ve an idea he might help you get at the full story.”

The old man seemed to be trying to keep his temper under control. Finally he barked a word and turned back to his panel.

“As I said, we never had any wars in our recorded history and we didn’t want any. Our philosophers developed our culture along the lines of harmony. We looked on all forms of violence and compulsion as evil, as returns to the animal, and we carefully weeded out all such throwbacks.” Kunosh could not resist throwing a nasty look at the prisoner, who glared back at him.

The screen flashed again over homes and scenes. It was evident that here was a world where nothing visible indicated weapons or warfare. Yet, somehow, Nelson did not feel that these were people with peace in their souls. There was something basically sneaky in their approach. They liked too well to hide their doings from the light, to travel in secret in tunnels, to conceal probably from their own minds the roots of their nature. Curiosity, the young man remembered from one of his instructors’ lectures, was the root of man’s development from the beast. These people must have had curiosity to have advanced as they did. If so, this curiosity would have forced them to space flight and to interest in their neighboring worlds. Instead they had rebuffed these visits. Why? Only one emotion suggested itself as powerful enough to overrule intelligent curiosity. Fear. Overpowering cowardice. Somehow, in their development, this trait had persisted, manifesting itself in their opposition to suggestions of combat, in probably erasing from their memory the many combats and struggles they must surely have won to have built their world culture.

Kunosh was talking. “We lived happily in our rocky world on Vega. We could listen to our neighboring worlds on our radios and receivers, but we had no desire to speak to them. We knew they had made contacts among each other—and that they had conflicts with each other. We saw some of them and were glad we had nothing to do with such monsters.”

On the panel were scenes of space. There were fleets of little rockets darting against the blackness. There was a shot of two such exploding suddenly against the stars. There was a shot of several of the Vegan people staring in horror at a similar scene on what was probably a telescopic projector.

“The fact is that they had trade and friendship most of the time, and we were left out!” said the Phobosian suddenly. Kunosh whirled at him.

“That’s a throwback view! You’re a filthy degenerate to think good of such a thing!” The Phobosian merely stuck out his tongue while Kunosh waved a fist.

The old man recovered his temper. “Anyway, we were happy and getting along, our noisy neighbors leaving us strictly alone, and then the Marauders arrived!”

There was silence. On the panel, interstellar space showed. Then there came a moving glimmer of tiny fights. The scene sharpened and Nelson could make out black shapes, the dark forms of long spaceships moving in. And he suddenly realized that there were not just a few, but hundreds, even thousands of giant spaceships in that fleet!

“Our first indication of the cosmic plague was when some refugee spaceships arrived at our neighbor worlds. We saw them through our observatories.”

The panel showed two or three odd craft circling into a Vegan world, accompanied by the squarish craft native to that planet. “These refugees came from stars beyond our own. None of our neighbors had ever developed star flight, but these strangers came among them with their terrible story. They had been war-craft of some far-off system, and one day there had come into their system this tremendous fleet of terrible black ships. These ships had destroyed all that came before them. They had landed on their worlds and out of them came huge armies of terrible creatures who robbed and burned, and killed everything in their way I”

Kunosh stopped, his voice emotionally out of control. Nelson could feel the silence in the room, the horror at the scenes which were being shown on the panel. There, before his eyes, he could see cities burning and falling, huge masses of shapeless terror swamping the fields and houses, crowds of terrified people fleeing vainly only to be burned down!

He caught his breath. “Are these actual scenes?” he asked.

“No,” Kunosh replied. “How could they be? They are artists' reproductions of the accounts given by the few who escaped. But they are faithfully made.

“Our ancestors were disturbed at this, very disturbed. Our neighbor worlds began to arm against them. They were devoting all their efforts to building war fleets and defenses. But we were not going to do that. To do such terrible things would be to sink to the level of animals. It would destroy our civilization. And besides it was obviously futile. These Marauders, as we called them, apparently were traveling the universe to ruin and pillage and rob. There were thousands of their big ships and they must have been armed beyond all our conceptions!