Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/64

 not going to get far while he was worried by these Martian phantoms, and the sooner they could be erased, the better.

Perhaps I was wrong there. Perhaps I ought simply to have waited, hoping that the effect of the concussion would wear off. After all, except for the anxiety that must be going on at the other end of our radio link, there was no pressing hurry. The sun-charger would keep our batteries up, even at this distance from the sun; water is on an almost closed circuit, with very little loss, air-regeneration, too; there was victualing enough to last two of us for eighteen months. I could have waited. But it is one thing to consider a situation retrospectively, and quite another to be at close quarters with a single companion who is slightly off his head, and wondering whether time is likely to make him better or worse...

However, as the radio seemed to be in some way entangled in his mind with the intentions of his cunning Martians, I decided to lay aside that subject of the moment, and tried tackling him on his other specialty. I pulled out a lump of caked sand that I had brought inside, and handed it to him.

"What do you reckon that is?" I asked.

He gave it the briefest of glances,

"Haematite — Fe₂O₃," he said, looking at me as if I had asked a pretty stupid question. "Mars," he said, patiently, "is practically all oxides of one kind or another. This'll be the commonest."

"I've been thinking," I said. "One of our main objects, after getting here at all, is to bring in a preliminary report on the geology of Mars."

"Areology," he corrected me. "You can't possibly talk about the geology of Mars. Doesn't make sense."

"All right, areology," I agreed, finding his lucidity encouraging and irritating at the same time. "Well, we can at least make a start on that. There is a dark line on the horizon, over that way, that wants looking into—might be vegetation of some kind. If we get the platform out, we could have a look at it, and at the topography in general, too."

I made the suggestion with a casual air, and awaited his answer with some anxiety, for I felt that if I could use his geological — or areological — interests to lure him outside, even a brief expedition might serve to dispel this notion of 64