Mars gradually grew larger on their telescopic viewers as the Magellan fell onward through space, riding the beam of gravity that was like a pulling rope to them. The slow down and reverse was made in good order—the sphere swinging around, readjusting, and the great, driving Zeta-ring generators now pushing and braking.
Then one wake period, Russ and Burl went to the telescope and trained it again on the oncoming planet. The now large disc of the ruddy world swung onto the screen. It looked strange, not at all like the drawings.
Burl had never seen it through Terrestrial telescopes, but he sensed something was wrong. He realized suddenly, "Both poles are enlarged! It's winter on both hemispheres! And that's impossible!"
Yet it was so. Both the Martian ice caps were present and both extended down the northern and southern hemispheres of the world. The men stared in silence.
Slowly Russ tried to figure it out, "The greenish-blue areas can scarcely be seen. Where they should be, there're darker patches of brown, against the yellowish-red that now seems to be the desert areas. It seems to be winter on both sides and it looks bad. It looks to me as if Mars were a fast-dying world."
Burl squinted his eyes. "Yet I see the canals. The straight lines are still visible—see?"
Russ nodded. "They're real. But what's happened?"
Indeed, the planet seemed blighted. "It's the Sun-tap," Burl decided. "We should have realized what it would do."
"Remember Earth the week it was working? The temperature fell several degrees, began to damage crops? Remember how it snowed in places where snow had never fallen in July? Remember the predictions of disaster for crops, of danger from winter snows if the drop continued?"
Russ went on in his careful, explanatory way. "And for Mars it has continued. Mars was always colder than Earth; life there must have been far more precariously balanced. During the day, on the Martian equator in midsummer, the highest temperature is not likely to be more than 70° or 80°; and at night, even then, it would fall below freezing. Vegetation on Mars must have been hardy in the best of times, and life carried on under great difficulties.