Transcriber’s note:
This story was published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
[86]
]Illustrated by Kelly Freas
The Hitch Hikers
The Rell, a great and ancient Martian race, faced extinction when all moisture was swept from their planet.
Then, one day, a lone visitor—a strange, two-legged creature composed mostly of water—landed on Mars …
BY VERNON L. MC CAIN
The dehydration of the planet had taken centuries in all. The Rell had still been a great race when the process started. Construction of the canals was a prodigious feat but not a truly remarkable one. But what use are even canals when there is nothing to fill them?
What cosmic influences might have caused the disaster baffled even the group-mind of the Rell. Through the eons the atmosphere had drifted into space; and with it went the life-giving moisture. Originally a liquid paradise, the planet was now a dry, hostile husk.
The large groups of Rell had been the first to suffer. But in time even the tiny villages containing mere quadrillions of the submicroscopic