For four days the crew of the Aries had waited for the winds to die down. Now, finally, the high ice clouds and the lower dust clouds were subsiding. Only a few thin cirri floated along below them, and the surface atmosphere should not present difficulties.
The red orb expanded swiftly. The top of Olympus Mons, a volcano as wide as the state of New Mexico and 15.5 miles high, sank out of sight. The Tharsis ridge, looking like a colossal dinosaur with fleshy dorsal plates, widened and then dropped out of sight. The Tithonius Chasma, more than 46 miles wide and several miles deep, part of the Vallis Marineris canyon complex, broadened.
For twenty seconds, whiteness surrounded them as they passed through a long, narrow and deep cloud of ice. To the east lay a shadow, night on Mars, advancing at almost the rate it did on Earth. It was the bow which shot darkness and a terrible cold over the wastelands. Not that it was warm on the surface.
When they landed, they would find the temperature to be +20° C.
Orme turned the lander to face west as the thin but still strong wind began to carry them east. He adjusted the pulses to counter the push of the atmosphere. The Barsoom sank, and he noted that the air, though it was becoming thicker, was not moving as swiftly as the higher altitude wind. He decreased the pulses; the raser indicator showed that the Barsoom was maintaining its angle of descent. A straight line drawn from the lander would end dead on the point of contact, the floor of the Tithonius Chasma.
Time passed as he poured data into the transceiver. The transmitter would also be sending photographs of the approaching surface of Mars and of the two Marsnauts in this womb of irradiated plastic.
Like a mouth, the rift opened beneath him. The vast mounds of the volcanoes outside dropped, and presently the ship was below the edges of the awesomely towering cliffs. They were still in the thin but bright sunlight of the red planet. Not until the sun was low would the shadow of the western wall fall on them.
Orme, glancing now and then out of the port, could see the metallic curve of the other vessel buried beneath the landslide. Reddish rocks and a finer material, dust, were mixed in this collapse from the weathered material of the canyon wall. There was little wind here, which made Orme's task easier.
Bronski, overcome by emotion, forgot his English and spoke in Polish. This had been his native language; he had not learned French until the age of ten, when his parents had fled to Sweden and thence to Paris. He corrected himself a moment later, saying, 'It is an artefact! A ship!'
Orme thought that it remained to be proved that it was a spacecraft but he had no time to comment. Besides, he felt that Bronski was right.
The lander settled firmly on its six pads, and it sank a trifle as its telescoping legs absorbed the shock, then recoiled to lift the vessel. Orme cut off the power and sat for a moment feeling the weak pull of Mars and hearing the silence. Then he said jubilantly, 'Martians, we're here!'
He'd planned a number of short speeches, some quite poetic, but he had finally decided to hell with it. He'd say whatever came spontaneously.
Danton's voice broke the silence. 'Congratulations, commander.'
Orme was startled when Bronski's arms enfolded him from behind and his voice bellowed in Orme's ears.
'By God, we've done it!'
'He's here, too,' Orme said, and he meant it. 'Even if this place does look like the devil's workshop.'
2
Orme unstrapped himself and rose slowly, remembering that though there was gravity it was not Earth's. He looked through the port and quickly described what he saw. The lander was 300 feet from the edge of the landslide, resting on an area detected from the Aries. It was comparatively free of the rocks that littered the floor of the canyon; the pads had missed all of them and sat on rock swept smooth of dust by the recent winds. Through the top port he could see the sky, a light blue crossed by a few wisps of whiteness. Coming towards them was the robot explorer, RED II, which had first seen the two Greek characters on the tunnel door. Danton had directed it to approach the Barsoom closely and transmit pictures of the Marsnauts as they left the lander and worked around the Aries. These pictures would be transmitted to the Aries, which would relay them to the satellite and thence to Earth.
Eight hundred feet behind the explorer, invisible even from its height, was the tunnel. Orme and Bronski got to work. After donning their suits and helmets and checking them, they entered the cramped room of the decompression chamber and closed the port leading to the interior of the lander. Orme set a gauge and pressed a button. Within three minutes the pressure in the chamber had been reduced to that of the atmosphere outside. Orme opened the hatch and unrolled a metal ladder. Though he could easily have jumped down to the ground fourteen feet below, he was forbidden to do so. The two were to take no chances.
He clambered down the ladder and stepped backward on to the rock and turned. He felt a headiness which was not caused by the lighter gravity. He, Richard Orme, a black Canadian, was the first human being to step upon the surface of the red planet. Whatever happened from this second on, he would be recorded in history as the first man on Mars. The rover, that metallic insect-like machine, was transmitting pictures of the unique event right now. Of him, Richard Orme, the first Earthman to step upon the ancient rock of another planet.
'Columbus, you should be here!' he said, acutely conscious that 11.5 minutes from now, billions would hear this statement. He did not utter his succeeding thought. And you'd crap in your pants! The old navigator could never even have dreamed of this.
'Five hundred and twenty-three years have brought us a long way!’ he said. He didn't elaborate. There would be enough people on earth who'd understand what he meant and explain it to the viewers.
Bronski came down the ladder then, looked around for a minute, and at a signal from Orme joined him in the work. From a compartment at the bottom of the lander they unloaded a cable, a driller, and a sonar. The latter determined that the landing place was solid rock and thick enough for the anchor. Bronski drilled into the basalt and then disengaged the drill from the power unit. One end of the cable was secured to the part of the drill sticking up from the surface. Orme prepared a cement mixture and poured it down between the drill and the hole.
While waiting for the quick-drying material to harden, they walked to the silvery metal curve protruding from the masses of rock. Standing under the great arc and looking up at it, Orme felt awed. If this was a vessel, and it surely was, then it would be the size of an old passenger liner, say the Queen Mary, or as large as the Zeppelin Hindenburg. Whoever had built it had had an energy source that Earth lacked. To lift this monster from a planet into space, to drive it through interstellar space and to land here required a power staggering to think about.
How long had it lain here at the bottom of this colossal canyon? Long enough, certainly, for the wall to weather and for chunks of rock to fall down and bury it. And then long enough for some force, perhaps the effect of very strong winds over a long time, to remove the rocks that had covered this part of the vessel.
But it was possible that this exposed section had never been' covered. The survey satellite had photographed it many times, but no areographer had noticed it until Lackley, the Australian, had had his 'hunch'.
Or, perhaps, some beings had started to remove the rocks and something had interrupted their work.