“Not in a hundred lifetimes!” Drai said emphatically. Ken laughed outright. Curiously enough, his own original horror of the fearful chill of these Solar planets seemed to have evaporated; he actually felt eager to make the test. With the help of Drai and Lee he climbed into the armor they had brought from Mercury, sealed it, and tested its various working parts. Then he entered the air lock of the Karella, and observed his instruments carefully while it was pumped out. Still nothing appeared to be wrong, and he closed the switch actuating the motor of the outer door.
For some reason, as the Martian landscape was unveiled before him, his mind was dwelling on the curious discoloration of the suit that had been exposed to Planet Three’s atmosphere, and wondering if anything of the sort was likely to happen here.
Curiously enough, one hundred sixty million miles away, a thirteen year old boy was trying to account for a fire which seemed to have burned over a small patch of brush, isolated by bare rock, on a hillside five miles west of his home.
11
Even to an Earth man, Mars is not a world to promote enthusiasm. It is rather cold at the best of times, much too dry, and woefully lacking in air — breathable or otherwise. The first and last of these points struck Ken most forcibly.
The landscape in front of him was very flat. It was also very patchy. In some spots bare rock showed, but those were few and far between. Much of the area seemed to be dark, naked soil, with bits of green, brown, red and yellow mingling in the general background. Nearly half of the landscape seemed to be composed of the patches of white, which had seemed to be a solid mass from space. Probably, Ken realized, they formed a solid covering closer to the center of the white region; they had landed on its edge, as planned.
He took a careful step away from the ship’s side. The gravity was less than that of Sarr, but distinctly greater than on Mercury, and the armor was a severe burden. The two tentacles inside his right “sleeve” forced the clumsy pipe of steel downward almost to the ground, and manipulated the handlers at the end. With some difficulty, he scraped loose a piece of dark brown soil and raised it to eye level. He locked the “knees” of the armor and settled back on the tail-like prop that extended from the rear of the metal trunk, so that he could give all his attention to examining the specimen.
The glass of his face plate showed no signs of differential contraction so far, but he carefully avoided letting the soil touch it during the examination. He almost forgot this precaution, however, when he saw the tiny varicolored objects on the surface of the sample. Weird as they were in shape, they were unquestionably plants — tiny, oddly soft-looking compared to the crystalline growths of Sarr, but still plants. And they lived in this frightful cold! Already those nearest the metal of his handler were shrivelling and curling, cold as the outside of his armor, already must be. Eagerly Ken reported this to the listeners inside.
“This life must have something in common with that of Three,” he added. “Both must run on chemical energy of the same general sort, since there’s no important difference in their temperatures. This soil must have all the elements necessary, even if the compounds aren’t quite right for what we want — who ever heard of a life form that didn’t have a good deal of latitude that way?” He looked back at the sample he was holding. “It looks a little different around the edges, as though the heat of my armor were making some change in it. You may be right, Drai— there may be some volatile substance in this soil that’s evaporating now. I wonder if I can trap it?” He lapsed into thought, dropping his specimen.
“You can try afterward. Why not investigate the white patches?” called Drai. “And the rocks, too; they might be something familiar — and soils are made from rock, after all.” Ken admitted the justice of this, hitched himself off the rear prop, unlocked his leg joints, and resumed his walk away from the ship.