"Halfway at least," Allenby mused. "And we can assume that it continues in a straight line, through anything and everything that gets in its way...." He gazed out the front port at the uneven blue-green haze of a 'canal' off to our left. "For the love of Heaven, why?"
Then Allenby fell down. We all did.
Burton had suddenly slapped at the control board, and the ship braked and sank like a plugged duck. At the last second, Burton propped up the nose with a short burst, the ten-foot wheels hit desert sand and in five hundred yards we had jounced to a stop.
Allenby got up from the floor. "Why did you do that?" he asked Burton politely, nursing a bruised elbow.
Burton's nose was almost touching the front port. "Look!" he said, and pointed.
About two miles away, the Martian village looked like a handful of yellow marbles flung on the desert.
We checked our guns. We put on our oxygen-masks. We checked our guns again. We got out of the ship and made damned sure the airlock was locked.
An hour later, we crawled inch by painstaking inch up a high sand dune and poked our heads over the top.
The Martians were runts—the tallest of them less than five feet tall—and skinny as a pencil. Dried-up and brown, they wore loincloths of woven fiber.