Madness From Mars

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 71.37KB 23 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Title : Madness from Mars

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1939

Genre : science fiction

Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text

of this book

Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition

with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.

Date of e-text : February 14, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

Madness from Mars

Clifford D. Simak

The _Hello Mars IV_ was coming home, back from the outward

reaches of space, the first ship ever to reach the Red Planet and

return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus Observatory

on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving

its position. Hours later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote

that flashed in the outer void.

Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship's

outward voyage, far out until its silvery hull had dwindled into

nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or sign

of _Hello Mars IV_ - nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up

again that minute speck in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.

Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On

the Moon, powerful radio stations were capable of hurling ultra-

short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But

man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million

miles of space. So _Hello Mars IV_ had arrowed out into the

silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder

over its fate.

Now, with Mars once again swinging into conjunction, the ship

was coming back - a tiny gnat of steel pushing itself along with

twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel. Heading Earthward out of

that region of silent mystery, spurning space-miles beneath its

steel-shod heels. Triumphant, with the red dust of Mars still

clinging to its plates - a mote of light in the telescopic lenses.

Aboard it were five brave men - Thomas Delvaney, the

expedition's leader; Jerry Cooper, the red-thatched navigator;

Andy Smith, the world's ace cameraman, and two space-hands,

Jimmy Watson and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-

Moon run.

There had been three other _Hello Mars_ ships - three other

ships that had never come back - three other flights that had

collided with a meteor a million miles out from the Moon. The

second had flared briefly, deep in space, a red splash of flame in

the telescopes through which the flight was watched - the fuel

tanks had exploded. The third had simply disappeared. On and on

it had gone, boring outward until lost from sight. That had been six

years ago, but men still wondered what had happened.

Four years later - two years ago - the _Hello Mars IV_ had taken

off. Today it was returning, a gleaming thing far out in space, a

shining symbol of man's conquest of the planets. It had reached

Mars - and it was coming back. There would be others, now - and

still others. Some would flare against the black and be lost forever.

But others would win through, and man, blindly groping, always

outward, to break his earthly bonds, at last would be on the

pathway to the stars.

Jack Woods, _Express_ reporter, lit a cigarette and asked:

'What do you figure they found out there, Doc?'

Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary

Communications Research Commission, puffed clouds of smoke

from his black cigar and answered irritably:

'How in blue hell would I know what they found? I hope they

found something. This trip cost us a million bucks.'

'But can't you give me some idea of what they might have

found?' persisted Woods. 'Some idea of what Mars is like. Any new

ideas.'

Dr. Gilmer wrangled the cigar viciously.

'And have you spread it all over the front page,' he said. 'Spin

something out of my own head just because you chaps are too

impatient to wait for the actual data. Not by a damn sight. You

reporters get my goat sometimes.'

'Ah, Doc, give us something,' pleaded Gary Henderson, staff

man for the Star.

'Sure,' said Don Buckley, of the _Spaceways_. 'What do you

care? You can always say we misquoted you. It wouldn't be the

first time.'

Gilmer gestured toward the official welcoming committee that

stood a short distance away.

'Why don't you get the mayor to say something, boys?' he

suggested. 'The mayor is always ready to say something.'

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Madness From Mars.pdf

共23页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Madness From Mars

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: