Rapidly he adjusted the great instrument, and Bill looked again.
The red disk had expanded enormously, with great increase of detail. It had become a huge red globe, with low mountains and irregularities of surface plainly visible. The prismatic polar caps stood out with glaring whiteness. Dark, green-gray patches, splotched burned orange deserts, and thin, green-black lines—the controversial "canals" of Mars—ran straight across the planet, from white caps toward the darker equatorial zone, intersecting at little round greenish dots.
"Look carefully," Trainor said. "What do you see in the edge of the upper right quadrant, near the center of the disk and just above the equator?"
Bill peered, saw a tiny round dot of blue—it was very small, but sharply edged, perfectly round, bright against the dull red of the planet.
"I see a little blue spot."
"I'm afraid you see the death-sentence of humanity!"
Ordinarily Bill might have snorted—newspapermen are apt to become exceedingly skeptical. But there was something in the gravity of Trainor's words, and in the strangeness of what he had seen through the giant telescope in the tower observatory, that made him pause.
"There's been a lot of fiction," Bill finally remarked, "in the last couple of hundred years. Wells' old book, 'The War of the Worlds,' for example. General theory seems to be that the Martians are drying up and want to steal water. But I never really——"
"I don't know what the motive may be," Trainor said. "But we know that Mars has intelligent life—the canals are proof of that. And we have excellent reason to believe that that life knows of us, and intends us no good. You remember the Envers Expedition?"