Long hours went by, while the Red Rover hung above the chosen landing place, waiting for it to sweep into the shadow of night. Bill peered intently through his telescope, watching the narrow strips of vegetation across the bare stretches of orange desert. He studied the bright metal and gray masonry of irrigation works, the widely scattered, white metal domes that seemed to cover cities, the hurtling blue globes that flashed in swift flight between them. Two or three times he caught sight of a tiny, creeping green thing that he thought was one of the hideous, blood-sucking Martians. And he saw half a dozen broad metal pens, or pastures, in which the hairy gray bipeds were confined.
Shining machines were moving across the green strips of fertile land, evidently cultivating them.
The Prince, Dr. Trainor, and Paula were asleep in their staterooms. Bill retired for a short rest, came back to find the planet beneath them in darkness. The Red Rover was dropping swiftly, with Captain Brand still at the bridge.
Rapidly, the stars vanished in an expanding circle below them. Phobos and Deimos, the small moons of Mars, hurtling across the sky with different velocities shed scant light upon the barren desert below. Captain Brand eased the ship down, using the rays as little as possible, to cut down the danger of detection.
The Red Rover dropped silently to the center of a low, cliff-rimmed plateau that rose from the red, sandy desert. In the faint light of stars and hurtling moons, the ocherous waste lay flat in all directions—there are no high mountains on Mars. The air was clear, and so thin that the stars shone with hot brilliance, almost, Bill thought, as if the ship were still out in space.
Silent hours went by, as they waited for dawn. The thin white disk of the nearer moon slid down beneath the black eastern horizon, and rose again to make another hurtling flight.
Just before dawn the Prince appeared, an eager smile on his alert lean face, evidently well recovered from the long struggling in the laboratory.
"I've all the mining machinery ready," Captain Brand told him. "We can get out as soon as it's warm enough—it's a hundred and fifty below zero out there now."
"It ought to warm up right soon after sunrise—thin as this air is. You seem to have picked about the loneliest spot on the planet, all right. There's a lot of danger, though, that we may be discovered before we get the cerium."
"Funny feeling to be the first men on a new world," said Bill.