Page:Wonder Stories Quarterly Volume 2 Number 2 (Winter 1931).djvu/94

 HEY laid him to rest in the bare gaunt abbey of Westminster. To rest with the great—this greatest one of them all. The city was muffled. The women wept: the men whispered in low tones, and the children stopped in their play as the cortege passed solemnly by. Sir Stewart Knightlow was dead: Knightlow the magnetic, the man with the charmed life, and the tragic history.

Curious what an influence the name of Knightlow had exerted during the past couple of decades: man, woman and child had followed his exploits. The men had honored him for his achievements, the women had pitied him for the pathos of his private life, but to the children, he was the super-hero, the worshipful one: the speed king, holder of all the records on land and water, and in the air: the master adventurer, the only man who had trodden on the soil of Mars and returned to the earth alive.

And now he was dead, slain in a simple street accident, this greatest of all explorers, before whose star the adventures of Cortez and Columbus paled ineffectually. Knightlow dead? It seemed incredible, even as the funeral procession wound slowly by, and they laid his bones beneath the "dull cold marble."

In the privacy of his home, the dead man's lawyer fingered contemplatively a bulky package. He mumbled the direction: "To be opened only after my death. Stewart Knightlow, Bart.," appearing on the envelope, stroked his chin once or twice as if trying to gauge the contents of the document without opening the cover. Then suddenly, he ripped open the seals, and drew out many pages of closely written matter, headed in Sir Stewart's bold hand-writing, "My Life."

Seating himself in his most comfortable armchair, the old lawyer turned over the pages and read, at first with the semi-boredom of professional duty, then increasing interest and horror.

 

So this was Mars! Our quantum-control space ship had made a perfect landing, and we could see through our window-like lenses stretches of desert on either side of us, waterless and inhospitable. Above, the sky was clear and cloudless, like that of the "land of azure blue," as the Riviera is poetically called, but the firmament seemed higher, the light more intense, and the blue more vivid as it contrasted sharply with the bright red earth that extended as far as we could view, in a monotonous flat plain. The sun beat down fiercely on the ruby desert, which seemed to glow red-hot in response, a very sea of fire. Awkroyd, the climatologist had been taking readings. He uttered a low whistle.

"What d'you think of this boys?" he asked excitedly lapsing into his native Irish brogue, "Faith, the astronomers are wrong entoirely about timperature. Moind you, the barometric pressure is about right: it's about wan quarter that of the earth, just as Campbell supposed, an' the later investigations into the composition of the atmosphere aren't too wide of the mark, oither.

"The atmosphere's made up of 80 per cent oxygen, about foive per cent carbon dioxide, about foive per cent nitrogen, about foive per cent helium, and the remainder consists of rare gases such as argon and krypton, an' a lot I canot diagnose at all. But as for the timperature: Poynting put it at well below freezing point, an' my thermometer shows a hundred an' fifty two deg. Fahrenheit in the shade."

"That's easily accounted for," put in Ray Browne, the naturalist, with that patronizing air I detested so, "here we are under the direct rays of the sun, in the middle of a dry desert beside which the Sahara is a children's playground. There's not a drop of water anywhere, nor will there be until the polar cap melts. Even then, the water will simply flow into the irrigation canals and be swallowed up by the thirsty plants that extend for miles on either side of their banks.

"To conduct the heat away from the land, we