"Williams did—" returned Hughes equally dead-pan.
Williams flushed under their good-natured grins. "Shakespeare said it, you uneducated yokels," he said loftily. "How come you aren't cheating each other at gin rummy yet? Last I heard one of you owed the other a million dollars."
"It was only six hundred thousand," Hughes grinned, "and I'm about to take him double or nothing!"
The weeks passed slowly. Barely audible, the computers ticked, keeping the ship on course. Bryan and Hughes wrangled amiably over their interminable card-games, throwing an occasional, joking aside to Williams watching the stars, absorbed as a miser fingering his jewels.
Mars, from a minute speck, grew to a planet lying bloody in the cold rays of the distant sun. Strapped down in obedience to the computer-given signal, the ship reversed, fired its rockets and touched down on her supporting pillars of flame and became only a shining needle dwarfed in the immensity of the pinkish-red desert.
They looked at each other doubtfully, conscious of anti-climax. This was little different from the far reaches of the Gobi plateau where they had trained for weary, boring months. Bryan and Hughes drew the lots as the two to don their heated, protective suits and explore within cautious distance of the ship. Williams, restless and bored, watched their horseplay resentfully. Even the tenuous atmosphere of the dead world dimmed the splendor of the heavens; why didn't they hurry and get it over with? He shivered a little watching Bryan and Hughes trudging clumsily in the sand, throwing out a comment occasionally for the benefit of the tape recorder in the cabin.
"This is different from the deserts back home," Hughes said. "Back there you get the feeling they're just waiting for somebody to move in, but here...."
"It's more like a haunted house," Bryan finished for him. Williams, adjusting his headphones, was conscious of a deepening of his faint uneasiness—why didn't they hurry up and get back! All they really had to do was build a cairn and plant the Federation flag. They had found a few rocks and Bryan was stooping to bury the prepared canister with the data of the flight—
Williams watching incredulously as Bryan and Hughes reeled and staggered, was dimly conscious of a sudden faint tremor along the ship. There was an abrupt metallic shrieking in his headset, a background of thundering, grinding bedlam, and over it Bryan's voice frantic—