The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald A. Wollheim

Author:Donald A. Wollheim
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 The Secret of the Moons

“I think you’d better tell me everything about you and Mars and the rest,” said Nelson slowly and softly, keeping his temper just barely under control. “I think you’ve been playing me for a fool here, that you’re no more my friend than this monster of yours.” Nelson’s anger showed in the set of his brow and he waved the ers-gun menacingly.

Kunosh bit his lip, glanced around at his compatriots and muttered something, apparently a translation. There was a bit of whispering back and forth, and finally Kunosh shrugged.

“We don’t want you to feel that way,” he said, turning to Nelson. “Honestly, we’re very grateful to you and we’ve agreed to let you hear what you want to know. You’ll be the very first outsider to know it—but—we’ll tell you.” He nodded to his fellows, and one of them went over to a wall and turned some dials on one of the inset panels.

“While he’s setting up the past-record viewers, I think it would be good to get these ... Phobosians ... out of here,” said Kunosh, and without waiting to see what Nelson would do, his men started to carry out the bound enemies. For a moment Nelson was uncertain. He realized that he couldn’t entirely trust anything that these cowardly creatures might do. Then, as they started to carry out the man who had interrupted them, Nelson called, ‘‘Stop! Leave that one here. I may want to ask him some questions myself. He seems to speak and understand English.”

Kunosh frowned, started to object, but seeing that Nelson was still by no means calmed down, waved his friends back. They propped up the red-and-black stripe-suited stranger on one of the low seats against the wall, though they still kept a grip on his mouth to prevent him from talking. The rest of the foemen had already been removed from the room.

Nelson nodded to Kunosh. “All right, you can start. Are you the lost Martians?”

The old man shook his head, went over to the now glowing wall panel. “No,” he answered. “We did not come from Mars. We come from a world in the system of this star,” and his hand caused a picture to flash on the wall screen.

A brilliant blue-white star shone against the blackness of space. Around it could be seen the disks of several planets, moving slowly around it. Kunosh pointed as he spoke:

“This is the star you people call Vega. Around it are seven planets, and on one of these planets our people originated.”

On the screen, one of the disks came closer, enlarged until it filled the screen to show a small world, rocky in nature, crisscrossed with ridges of low mountains,

many lakes of various sizes, two or three deep but narrow seas. A world by no means as beautiful or apparently as large as Earth, one without many plains, where green vegetation grew only on mountainsides, or in the innumerable twisting valleys between the gray crags of rock and cliff.

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