The Man Who Loved Mars. Lin Carter

her fingers in my arm. I didn’t blame her: your first actual look at the Martian landscape can be an amazing experience.

      The craters are the first surprise Mars has for you. There are so many of them, and they are everywhere. Some of them are just little pockmarks in the ground that you can barely put your fist into; and they range all the way up to the super-monster, in the southeastern corner of whose ringwall the entire colony of Sun Lake City is built.

      Her fingers dug in. I glanced down, seeing her wide-eyed stare beneath the goggles, and grinned faintly, remembering my own astonishment. For the second big surprise is when you discover that the Red Planet is not red at all, but a patchwork crazy-quilt of yellow dustlands and blue moss growth, broken here and there by vivid patches of raw orange and brilliant, impossible purple.

      The first settlers couldn’t get over their amazement at the color scheme. Which is absurd, but human enough. In hindsight it’s hard to understand how anybody ever made the mistake of thinking Mars was going to be red. After all, one of the Russian scientists, Tikhov or somebody like that, deduced that Martian vegetation, if there turned out to actually be any Martian vegetation, would have to be blue in order for the planet to look red from the viewpoint of Earthside visual astronomers. He realized that more than a century and a half ago, back around 1909. And it wasn’t even that clever a deduction in the first place. All it took was a fair grasp of the mechanics of light, which the old-time boys had figured out even earlier, starting with Newton.

      We just stood there for a while, just staring around. The sky was dead, dull black, lightening a little toward dusty violet at the edges of the horizon where the air molecules got a chance to bunch up a bit and do some diffracting. The stars were piercingly sharp and clear, and they were weirdly different from the stars you see at night, Earthside. These did not twinkle, did not waver in the slightest, and they were the damndest colors. Earthside the stars mostly seem glittering, flashing white, sometimes with a touch of blue or red, but that is simply because the faint, colors of starlight have little chance of getting through Earth’s mulligan stew of an atmosphere. Here they blaze in the rarest of colors: half a dozen shades of green and blue, all tones from pale yellow through red, and even a few you simply wouldn’t believe, like Alpha Derceto, which is pure brown, and Delta Erigius, which is puce.

      She was looking up, searching about. Grinning, I asked her if she was looking for the moons, and she nodded and asked where they were. I tried to tell her that they were simply too damn small to be visible to the unaided vision, except under certain rather rare circumstances, but she found that impossible to believe.

      “But that’s simply insane!” she said, the thin air making her voice tinny and flat. “Why, back home you can even see a communications satellite on clear nights, if you know where to look. And they’re only ten or fifteen feet across, where here— Well, Deimos, the nearest moon, is supposed to have a diameter of ten miles. It’s just crazy to say you simply can’t see them at all!”

      “I didn’t say you couldn’t see them at all, I said they were too small to be seen except under certain rare conditions,” I reminded her. “One of those conditions is knowing just where to look. In the first place, Deimos is the outer moon, not the nearest, and it’s the only one you can see without magnification, because it moves so very slowly—it takes two days, local time, to cross the sky. The trouble is that it has a lousy albedo, and it’s too high for its size to make any difference in its degree of visibility.”

      She sounded dubious. “Is that really true? What about the other one?”

      “Phobos you never can see at all,” I told her, “even though it’s bigger than Deimos, has a higher albedo—that means ‘reflecting power,’ by the way. It’s also very, very, very close to the surface of the planet.”

      “Then why can’t you see it?”

      “Because it moves too fast. It goes all around the planet three whole times in a single day, and if you don’t think that is fast, well, stop and think about it.”

      “But I still don’t see—!”

      “You simply can’t know where precisely to look for it. It’s a question of albedo, for the most part. You see, Mars is so much farther from the sun than Earth is that we don’t get more than a tiny fraction of the light Earth gets. Now back on Earth, a full moon is dazzlingly bright, because it has an awful lot of light to reflect. But here the moons have only a tiny fraction of that much light, and they have lower albedos too.

      “But the main problem with Phobos is not that it is much too dim and dark to show up very well, but it whizzes by so rapidly that you never know just where in the sky to look for it at any given time. You have to search the sky from horizon to horizon, slowly and carefully, and even then, under the best of conditions you’d have to be mighty lucky to—”

      I broke off as moss rustled and squeaked under heavy boots behind me.

      “Your first lesson in Marsology, my dear?” Dr. Keresny broke in amiably. “Forgive me for interrupting, but the skimmer is all packed. Cn. Tengren, we are ready when you are.”