"No," she said, "We don't shop, buy, or sell on Mars. We are given supplies; we obtain them. We do not go shopping, as you Earth people do, merely to look at displays. We go only when we need and are entitled to obtain an article.
"My tandem plane is all ready," she continued.
We then got into it and took to the air. I sat close to her, my body alive with the sense of her beauty.
Then she said, "Our chief guide at the administration building of the ORDDB, our Ordering, Receiving, Distributing and Directory Bureau, has learned your language, and he is anxiously looking forward to showing you around."
We were now approaching two beautiful buildings, both wide and high. We landed near them on a plane parking ground. These two buildings, side by side, were situated at the southern point of the oval lake, exactly in the middle of the city's width, running east and west.
Walking to one of the many doors of one of them, I noticed that the people were all going in one direction only. On the doors were signs in the Martian language which read For Entrance Only; the exit doors were on the opposite side of the building. "That is a rule in all large public buildings in Mars," Xora explained.
In an office on the main floor, Xora introduced me to Mr. Amony, their head guide, who had been awaiting me. He led us into one of their large ground floor catalogue rooms, which was similar to the catalogue room on the third floor of the New York Public Library, but much larger. Two walls were lined with files in alphabetical order. He showed me how to use the files, which gave pictures and information concerning all the articles carried by the stores and instructions on how to obtain them. These catalogues were the only medium of advertising the stores had. Newspapers, magazines, mail, radio or airplanes were never used for advertising purposes.
Each of these buildings, square in shape, covered Earth men's measurements of eleven hundred by eleven hundred lineal feet. In the middle court you could place, side by side, two libraries the size of the New York 42nd Street Public Library Buildings. Each had sixty catalogue rooms on the ground floor. Each room measured one hundred by sixty feet. The hallways on the four sides were fifty feet wide and on every side were escalators, twenty-five feet wide and separated by hand rails every five feet. The people on Mars used only moving stairways and no elevators. To reach higher floors quickly, twenty passenger helicopters were used outside. These constantly operated up and down to and from every floor landing to ground floor.
There were plane landings on each side on every floor and on the roofs of buildings higher than five floors. Beside the moving stairways in these buildings, and in all other large buildings, alongside the moving stairways were two elevator shafts, one used solely for up traffic, the other for down. They were each large enough to hold one of our freight cars, for they measured sixty feet by ten feet.
Used exclusively for freight, these elevators were only platforms supported by wheels eighteen inches in diameter. They also had gear wheels on each corner and on the middle of each side. Running up and down the walls of these shafts were six full-length geared metal beams. When a platform was in the shaft, the gear wheels closely fitted into the cogs or gears of the shaft beams and the platform gear wheels operated either up or down. Weather conditions in re to expansion and contraction did not loosen or tighten the hold that these gear wheels had on the beams. Strong springs helped to keep the hold constant.