"Transmitter working," a crew member said.
Mason got to his feet and lumbered awkwardly over to the transmitter. "I'll tell Davidson what we've found." He bent over the microphone.
Young looked across at Halloway. "Well, I guess we're stuck. How long will our supplies carry us?"
Young looked across at Halloway. "Well, I guess we're stuck. How long will our supplies carry us?"
"And then --" Young snapped his fingers. "Like the Martians." He squinted at the long corroded wall of a ruined house. "I wonder what they were like."
"A semantics team is probing the ruins. Maybe they'll turn up something."
Beyond the ruined city stretched out what had once been an industrial area. Fields of twisted installations, towers and pipes and machinery. Sand-covered and partly rusted. The surface of the land was pocked with great gaping sores. Yawning pits where scoops had once dredged. Entrances of underground mines. Mars was honeycombed. Termite-ridden. A whole race had burrowed and dug in trying to stay alive. The Martians had sucked Mars dry, then fled it.
"A graveyard," Young said. "Well, they got what they deserved."
"You blame them? What should they have done? Perished a few thousand years sooner and left their planet in better shape?"
"They could have left us something," Young said stubbornly. "Maybe we can dig up their bones and boil them. I'd like to get my hands on one of them long enough to --"
A pair of crewmen came hurrying across the sand. "Look at these!" They carried armloads of metal tubes, glittering cylinders heaped up in piles. "Look what we found buried!"
Halloway roused himself. "What is it?"
"Records. Written documents. Get these to the semantics team!" Carmichael spilled his armload at Halloway's feet. "And this isn't all. We found something else -- installations."
"Installations? What kind?"
"Rocket launchers. Old towers, rusty as hell. There are fields of them on the other side of the town." Carmichael wiped perspiration from his red face. "They didn't die, Halloway. They took off. They used up this place, then left."
Doctor Judde and Young pored over the gleaming tubes. "It's coming," Judde murmured, absorbed in the shifting pattern undulating across the scanner.
"Can you make anything out?" Halloway asked tensely.
"They left, all right. Took off. The whole lot of them."
Young turned to Halloway. "What do you think of that? So they didn't die out."
"Can't you tell where they went?"
Judde shook his head. "Some planet their scout ships located. Ideal climate and temperature." He pushed the scanner aside. "In their last period the whole Martian civilization was oriented around this escape planet. Big project, moving a society lock, stock and barrel. It took them three or four hundred years to get everything of value off Mars and on its way to the other planet."
"How did the operation come out?"
"Not so good. The planet was beautiful. But they had to adapt. Apparently they didn't anticipate all the problems arising from colonization on a strange planet." Judde indicated a cylinder. "The colonies deteriorated rapidly. Couldn't keep the traditions and techniques going. The society broke apart. Then came war, barbarism."
"Then their migration was a failure." Halloway pondered. "Maybe it can't be done. Maybe it's impossible."
"Not a failure," Judde corrected. "They lived, at least. This place was no good any more. Better to live as savages on a strange world than stay here and die. So they say, on these cylinders."
"Come along," Young said to Halloway. The two men stepped outside the semantics hut. It was night. The sky was littered with glowing stars. The two moons had risen. They glimmered coldly, two dead eyes in the chilly sky.
"This place won't do," Young stated. "We can't migrate here. That's settled."
Halloway eyed him. "What's on your mind?"
"This was the last of the nine planets. We tested every one of them." Young's face was alive with emotion. "None of them will support life. All of them are lethal or useless, like this rubbish heap. The whole damn solar system is out."
whole damn solar system is out."
"We'll have to leave the solar system."
"And go where? How?"
Young pointed toward the Martian ruins, to the city and the rusted, bent rows of towers. "Where they went. They found a place to go. An untouched world outside the solar system. And they developed some kind of outer-space drive to get them there."
"You mean --"
"Follow them. This solar system is dead. But outside, someplace in some other system, they found an escape world. And they were able to get there."
"We'd have to fight with them if we land on their planet. They won't want to share it."
Young spat angrily on the sand. "Their colonies deteriorated. Remember? Broke down into barbarism. We can handle them. We've got everything in the way of war weapons -- weapons that can wipe a planet clean."
"We don't want to do that."
"What do we want to do? Tell Davidson we're stuck on Terra? Let the human race turn into underground moles? Blind crawling things..."
"If we follow the Martians we'll be competing for their world. They found it; the damn thing belongs to them, not us. And maybe we can't work out their drive. Maybe the schematics are lost."
Judde emerged from the semantics hut. "I've some more information. The whole story is here. Details on the escape planet. Fauna and flora. Studies of its gravity, air density, mineral possessions, soil layer, climate, temperature -- everything."
"How about their drive?"
"Breakdown on that, too. Everything." Judde was shaking with excitement. "I have an idea. Let's get the designs team on these drive schematics and see if they can duplicate it. If they can, we could follow the Martians. We could sort of share their planet with them."
"See?" Young said to Halloway. "Davidson will say the same thing. It's obvious."
Halloway turned and walked off.
"What's wrong with him?" Judde asked.
"Nothing. He'll get over it." Young scratched out a quick message on a piece of paper. "Have this transmitted to Davidson back on Terra."
Judde peered at the message. He whistled. "You're telling him about the Martian migration. And about the escape planet?"
"We want to get started. It'll take a long time to get things under way."
"Will Halloway come around?"
"He'll come around," Young said. "Don't worry about him."
Halloway gazed up at the towers. The leaning, sagging towers from which the Martian transports had been launched thousands of years before.
Nothing stirred. No sign of life. The whole dried-up planet was dead.
Halloway wandered among the towers. The beam from his helmet cut a white path in front of him. Ruins, heaps of rusting metal. Bales of wire and building material. Parts of uncompleted equipment. Half-buried construction sections sticking up from the sand.
He came to a raised platform and mounted the ladder cautiously. He found himself in an observation mount, surrounded by the remains of dials and meters. A telescopic sight stuck up, rusted in place, frozen tight.
"Hey," a voice came from below. "Who's up there?"
"Halloway."
"God, you scared me." Carmichael slid his blast rifle away and climbed the ladder. "What are you doing?"
"Looking around."
Carmichael appeared beside him, puffing and red-faced. "Interesting, these towers. This was an automatic sighting station. Fixed the take-off for supply transports. The population was already gone." Carmichael slapped at the ruined control board. "These supply ships continued to take off, loaded by machines and dispatched by machines, after all the Martians were gone."