Secret of the Black Planet by Milton Lesser

Author:Milton Lesser [Lesser, Milton]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi, Anthologies (multiple authors)
Publisher: Belmont Books
Published: 1951-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

High up on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, so high that it is crisply cool even in summer, there is a city. It is a new city and a beautiful one, but people shun it — except every once in a while when the rabble come up from the valleys below to hurl their stones. Then the dwellers in the city retreat behind their bolted doors and wait with fear while the angry mobs start the long trek down and back to their valleys. The dwellers in the city have learned to live with fear, for they are Children of the Chalice.

There is on Venus also such a city, and one on Mars. There are hamlets for the Children of the Chalice on the Jovian Moons. But not all of the Children live in the recommended places ...

"I see her, Mark. Oh, Mark, here comes Susan!"

The woman, whose name was Hannah Bentley, stood shivering near the window, squinting out into the gathering gloom. Night on Mars carries on its quick black wings a terrible cold, even in Syrtis Major City, the capital.

"Then come away from the window," Mark Bentley told his wife. "If you stay, Susan will know you were watching, and she'll know you were worried."

"Who's worried? Susan can take care of herself, Mark Bentley!"

"You're worried. Now come away from that window."

Hannah Bentley backed away from the thick glass, and then they could hear Susan inserting her key in the lock. A blast of frigid air swept in with Susan from the cold streets outside and the girl had to lean all her weight against the door to shut it.

"Hul-lo," she said, unzipping her furs.

"Her eye, Mark! Look at her eye! The poor thing — "

"I'm all right." Susan eluded her mother's embrace. "I just got into a fight, that's all."

"Your eye is blackened."

"Well, you should see them. Two of them, two boys. I won, Mama." Mark Bentley nodded, "Of course you won. You're of the Chalice."

"But it isn't right, Mark. It isn't right that an eighteen-year-old girl should have to fight like a boy."

"She's of the Chalice." He always said it like that, Hannah Bentley knew, as if it were the answer to everything.

Susan blew on her hands to warm them. She had long and graceful hands, and they were like the rest of her. Tall and lithe, blossoming only recently into young womanhood. she was beautiful, and her mother had never been anything but plain. Her father was big and work-hardened, but homely Perhaps the Chalice was responsible for that, too, for Susan Bentley's beauty.

"I don't care, Mark. Susan is a woman now and if that has to happen every time she goes off to visit a friend on the other side of town — "

"What can we do?"

"We can move out of Syrtis Major, that's what. To one of the Chalice Cities, where we belong."

"What? Segregated like that as if — as if we weren't human! Now you, Hannah, you're human.... "

"So are you, Mark! You and Susan.

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