Percival Lowell
Canals in the Sand
Kevin J. Anderson
Under the sweltering heat of the Sahara, Percival Lowell stood beside his own tent at the center of the camp and reveled in the clamor of his vast construction site. The excavations extended beyond the vanishing point of the flat desert horizon. Thousands of sweating workers—who worked for mere pennies a day—moved like choreographed machinery as they dug monumental trenches according to Lowell’s commands, scribing a long line in the sand.
Lowell had seen the same on Mars: long canals, straight lines extending thousands of miles across the rusted desert. His own observations had absolutely convinced him that such markings must be indicative of surface life on a dying world.
Other astronomers claimed not to see the network of canals, that the lines on the disk of Mars were not there. It reminded him of the trial of Galileo, when the high church officials and Pope Paul V had refused to see the moons of Jupiter through the astronomer’s “optick glass,” denying the evidence of their own eyes. Lowell couldn’t decide if his own contemporaries were similarly bullheaded, or just plain blind.
He took a deep breath, ignoring the pounding sun. The fiery heat and dust and petroleum stench practically curled the hairs in his mustache. With recently washed hands, he fished inside the front pocket of his cream jacket and withdrew his special pair of pince-nez with lenses made of red-stained glass. Through the copper oxide tint, he could look out at the blistering and dead Sahara, seeing instead the scarlet sands of Mars. Mars.
How could one stand out here in the desert and not intuitively understand why the Martians would need to construct an extravagant set of canals to transport precious water from the melting ice caps down to their ancient cities? Water covered sixty percent of the Earth’s surface, while Mars remained one vast planetary wasteland. The Martians’ magnificent canals had endured as their world grew parched and withered with age, as their civilization mummified. By this time, those once glorious minds must be desperate, ready to grasp at any hope.
Lowell strolled out along the well-packed path from the encampment to the long ditch his army of workers had dug in the shifting sands. Compared to what the Martians had accomplished, it seemed a child’s futile effort, and it certainly wouldn’t endure long—but then Lowell’s canal was not required to.
It must remain only long enough to send a signal.
If Ogilvy’s calculations were correct, Lowell had little time. He prayed his Bedouin workers would be fast enough. But he vowed nothing would deter him. After all, he had built his great Arizona observatory in a mere six weeks from groundbreaking to first light. He could certainly handle digging a ditch, even if it was ten miles long out in the middle of the Sahara.
Night on Mars Hill in the Arizona Territory, at an elevation of seven thousand feet, with clear skies far from the smoke of men. The big refractor and the observatory dome had been completed just in time to allow observations of the 1894 opposition of Mars.
Lowell spent his every free moment at the telescope.
His fellow Bostonian William H. Pickering, an astronomer for Harvard, and his assistant, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, both stood inside the chill, echoing dome of the Flagstaff Observatory, waiting for Lowell to relinquish the eyepiece. The wooden-plank walls of the observatory dome exuded a resinous scent. From where he sat in the uncomfortable chair, porkpie hat turned backward on his head and sketch pad in his lap, Lowell could sense their impatience.
“It is my telescope, gentlemen, and I will do the observing,” Lowell said, not removing his eye from the wavering disk of the ruddy world, where fine lines appeared and disappeared as the visibility shifted in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Mister Lowell, sir,” Pickering said, clearing his throat, “I understand your eagerness to use the refractor, but we are your professional astronomers, with the proper qualifications—”
Lowell finally turned, feeling annoyance heat his skin. “Qualifications, Mr. Pickering? I have exceptionally keen eyesight—and an exceptionally large fortune, which has built this telescope and pays your stipend. Therefore I am fully qualified.”
He snorted, looking down from his seat on the padded ladder and adjusting the porkpie hat on his head. “Perhaps if your Harvard had agreed to engage in a joint venture with me, Pickering, rather than calling me ‘egoistic and unreasonable,’ I would be more inclined to share. But instead, my own alma mater could not be convinced to do more than give you two gentlemen leave to work here, and then lease—lease!—me one of their small telescopes.”
Douglass took a step back and looked to Pickering for his cue. Pickering, as always, cleared his throat and searched in vain for words.
Lowell’s nostrils flared over his mustache. “You gentlemen are welcome to devote your nights to the study of the heavens at any other time, but this is Mars and it is at opposition. Please indulge this unworthy amateur.” He turned back to the telescope, while the others shuffled their feet uncomfortably and continued to wait. Within moments, Lowell had become totally engrossed in the view, his universe shrunk down to the tiny circle visible through the eyepiece.
Tact was a commodity that served little purpose when time was short. Lowell had selected Pickering, in part, because of his successful studies of Mars in 1892 at Arequipa in Peru. Pickering, a decent though somewhat stuffy administrator, had spent the winter of ’93 in Boston supervising the design and construction of this observatory, which had been shipped out piece by piece to Flagstaff the following spring. Every bit of the project was a rush, because Lowell demanded that the telescope absolutely must be functional by the time of the planetary opposition. Such a close encounter with Mars would not come again for many years.
Lowell drew a deep breath, shifted himself in his seat high above the observatory floor, and craned his neck. He fiddled with the eyepiece, and Mars stared back at him. He had the strangest sensation of being on the opposite end of a microscope, as if some immense being from across the cosmos were watching him, as someone with a microscope studied creatures that swarmed and multiplied in a drop of water.
His hands working independently, guided by the information channeled through the refractor tube, Lowell deftly sketched Mars, copying the lines he saw on the face of the planet. He had never been an armchair astronomer and would go blind before he ever allowed himself to be considered one. He and his staff had already recorded some four hundred canals on Mars—canals that other observers preposterously refused to see!
Lowell’s outspoken beliefs had earned him much scorn, but no descendant of the great Boston family could remain quiet about deep convictions. In this case, and in many others, Percival Lowell knew he was right and the rest of the world was wrong—and he had proved it.
Well after midnight, his eyes burned. He flipped over the page in his sketch pad to where he had already scribed another perfect circle for a new map. Daylight hours were best used to prepare for the next clear night’s observing.
Lowell noted that Douglass and Pickering had left unobtrusively, and he hoped they were at least doing work at the other telescopes, since the seeing was so extraordinary this evening. He blinked, oriented his hand and a newly sharpened pencil on the map pad, then pressed against the eyepiece again.
A brilliant green flash leaped from the surface of Mars.
Lowell barely restrained himself from crying out. The flame had been a vivid emerald, a jet of fire as of a great explosion or some kind of immense cannon shot, a huge mass of luminous gas, trailing a green mist behind it.
Once previously, Lowell had seen the glint of sunlight on the Martian ice caps, which had fooled him into seeing a dazzling message—but it had not been like this. Not so green, so violent, so prominent.
Before long he witnessed another green flash, and quickly noted the exact time on the pad in his lap. His excitement grew as he formulated his own explanation for the phenomenon …
Several days later he received a telegram from Ogilvy, a prominent London astronomer, confirming the green flashes from Mars. Ogilvy himself had counted flashes on ten nights, while Lowell had recorded several others, which had occurred during the daylight hours in England.
Lowell knew exactly what the flashes must be, and he exhibited no reluctance whatsoever in telling others about his theories. Obviously, these brilliant flares were indications of stupendous launches, a fleet of ships exploding away from Martian gravity into space.
There could be no other explanation. The Martians were coming!
Work crews toiled day and night to move the sand: some complaining, some happy for the meager pay, some shaking their sweat-dripping heads at the insanity of this loud American and his incomprehensible obsession.
The Bedouins thought he was mad, as did many of Lowell’s colleagues. But the superstitious Bedouins understood nothing of the universe … nor, for that matter, did most other astronomers.
He allowed no slacking in the construction for any reason. Shovels tossed sand up over the walls of the ditches; half-naked boys ran with ladles and buckets, while camels strained to drag barrels of warm water along the length of the dry canal. Lowell supervised here, and he could only hope that the other two trenches would be completed in time to intersect with this one.
When the teams grew too tired to continue, he hired more. Lowell had spread his funds as far as Cairo and Alexandria. He had bribed port officials, paid for the construction of a new railroad out into the desert, leading nowhere, so that a private train could deliver supplies and workers to Lowell’s canals.
The sand hissed in the breeze, glittering in the sun. A drummer pounded a cadence to keep the workers in a steady rhythm, like galley slaves. But they were being paid for this labor, and they had volunteered, so Lowell felt no sympathy for them.
Smoke curled into the air, carrying an acrid, sulfurous stench as brown-skinned men dumped wagonloads of hot bitumen into the newly dug trench. The sticky black mass would hold the sands in place, bind them into a thick, flammable mass. Still the walls shifted, and the bitumen ran black and sticky in the heat of the day.
Grumbling, Lowell doubted the sloping walls of sand would hold if one of the great dust storms of the Sahara swept across the dunes. With one mighty breath, God could erase all of Lowell’s handiwork, the fruits of years of labor and a squandered family fortune.
If only luck could hold until he sent his signal …
The great Suez Canal had been completed three decades earlier. For years the United States had discussed excavating a canal across Central America, as soon as the government found some way to grab the necessary land. Lowell’s own project was not impossible. It could not be impossible.
He strutted up and down the edge of the ditch, a dusty bandanna wrapped over his mouth, nose, and mustache. He recalled the ancient Hebrew slaves, erecting immense monuments for the pharaohs. But the pharaohs had had decades, even generations, to complete their enormous projects. Lowell had no such luxury.
The line in the sand stretched into a shimmer of mirage in the wavering air. Just a ditch, many miles long, extending to meet two other ditches in what his surveyors guaranteed would be a perfect equilateral triangle.
Back home in Boston, leaving the Flagstaff Observatory in the hands of Pickering and Douglass for the autumn, Lowell had calculated the absolute limit of his financial resources, determining the largest excavation he could complete, since the governments of the world refused to help in what they called his “crackpot scheme.”
And still Percival Lowell had accomplished little more than a gnat, compared to Martian accomplishments, even allowing for the fact that their task would have been simpler, given that Martian gravity was only a third of Earth’s. He had postulated Martian beings, therefore, three times the size of a human; in their reduced gravity, such Martians could be twenty-one times as efficient and have eighty-one times the effective strength of an earthbound man. For such a species, the project of planetary canals seemed not unlikely.
Lowell’s notebooks lay in the tent, but he had done the mathematics himself, letting the engineers double-check his work. Three trenches, each ten miles long, five yards wide, filled with liquid to a depth of an inch or so, equaled thousands and thousands of gallons of petroleum distillate, naphtha, kerosene. The convoys traveled endlessly across the Sahara: an impossible task, made possible—just barely—through the use of his great fortune.
It was a huge investment, but what better way could Lowell spend his money?
Douglass and Pickering had squawked when he had cut his generous allowance of funding for the Flagstaff Observatory down to a maintenance stipend. “How are we to continue our research?” their plaintive telegram had wailed.
“Come to the Sahara,” he had replied, “and I will show you.”
If Lowell succeeded in signaling the Martians, here and now, astronomical observatories around the world would never again lack for funding.
But they had to hurry. Hurry.
A blustery man, not intimidated by challenge, Lowell nevertheless found himself stuttering in awe when he met in Milan with the great Giovanni Schiaparelli—discoverer of asteroids and the original cartographer of the canals of Mars.
After spotting the green flashes, then laying plans for his great project to signal back to the Martians, Lowell had allotted himself half a year to travel to Europe and generate support. He had taken a first-class cabin on a steamer bound for England. Reaching London, he had sought out Ogilvy and immediately enlisted his aid.
The other astronomer had at first been skeptical that there could be any living thing on that remote, forbidding planet. Lowell, however, had been very persuasive.
Obtaining leave from his observatory, Ogilvy accompanied Lowell on his travels. Ogilvy’s friend, a journalist named Wells, also asked to travel with them in hopes of getting a good story for his newspaper, but Lowell would have none of it. The newspapers had resoundingly ridiculed Lowell’s theories about the Martian canals, and he wanted nothing further to do with reporters, not in the initial stages of a project of such importance.
The two men proceeded across the Channel and thence to Paris for an excellent dinner and conversation with the well-known French writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion, who gave Lowell’s idea a favorable reception. He beamed with pleasure to hear the Frenchman proclaim that Lowell’s own theories about the canals and life on Mars had been “ascertained indubitably.”
By train and private carriage, Lowell and a wide-eyed Ogilvy—who had never previously visited the Continent—traveled to Italy to meet with Schiaparelli in his small villa.
Schiaparelli had been director of the Milan Observatory since 1862, where he had discovered the asteroid Hesperia, written a brilliant treatise on comets and meteors, and created his original maps of the Martian canali in 1877, only a year after Lowell himself had graduated with honors from Harvard. During that same opposition, the American astronomer Asaph Hall had discovered the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos—Fear and Dread. But using only an eight-inch telescope, Schiaparelli had exposed a more profound cosmic secret.
“When I originally drew my maps,” the old astronomer said, struggling with his English, “I meant to represent the lines merely as channels or cracks in the surface. I understand that canali implies a different thing to non-Italian ears, suggesting man-made canals—”
“Not man-made,” Lowell interrupted, extracting his pipe from its case and tamping a load of sweet tobacco from his pouch, “but made by intelligent beings, whose minds may be immeasurably superior to ours. Extraterrestrial life does not mean extraterrestrial human life. Under changed conditions, life itself must take on other forms.”
“Yes, yes.” Schiaparelli nodded, took a sip of his deep red wine, then a bigger gulp. He blinked his rheumy eyes. “But your subsequent observations have convinced even me, my friend.”
Lowell leaned forward intently, lacing his fingers together over his knees. “I wish you could see what I have seen on the red disk of the Great God of War, Schiaparelli. Such wonders.”
The old astronomer sighed. His rooms were filled with books, oil lamps, and melted lumps of candles in terra-cotta dishes. A pair of spectacles lay on an open tome, while an enormous magnifying glass rested in easy reach on another stack of books.
“I can only imagine them. My own eyesight has grown so poor that I must now occupy my mind and my time with the study of history. Though I can no longer study comets or meteors or planets, even an old man with dim vision can make astute observations of history.”
“Tell him about Mars, Lowell, my good man,” Ogilvy said, searching for something else to eat, and finally settling on some water crackers and old cheese left out on the sideboard in the Italian’s dim rooms.
Lowell opened his mind’s eye wide as he spoke in an oddly quiet and reverent voice, totally distinct from his usual booming, commanding tone. Thoughts of Mars still made him breathless with astonishment.
“You drew the canals yourself, Schiaparelli—narrow dark lines of uniform width and intensity, perfectly straight. Some even compose portions of great circles across the globe. As I view them from Flagstaff in my best refractor, they look to be gossamer filaments, cobwebs on the face of the Martian disk, threads to draw your mind after them, across millions of miles of intervening void.”
Schiaparelli rubbed his eyes. “In my youth I, myself, never conceived them to be more than blemishes.”
Lowell raised his eyebrows dubiously. “Geometrical precision on a planetary scale? What else can it be but the mark of an intelligent race? If we could respond in kind, would we not be morally obligated to do so, in the name of humanity?”
Ogilvy coughed on his cracker and looked about for something to drink, finally settling on a wicker-wrapped bottle of Chianti that Schiaparelli had opened for them. He poured sloppily into a glass on the sideboard, then took a quick swallow, only to renew his coughing fit. Lowell scowled at the British astronomer for shattering his spell of imagination.
He puffed on his pipe and settled back in the fine leatherbound chair. Outside on the open balcony, pigeons fluttered in the sunlight. Schiaparelli still watched him with an intent stare. Ogilvy began to page through one of the open history books.
“Imagine it, Schiaparelli,” Lowell continued. “Think of a parched, dying world inhabited by a once marvelous civilization, beings with the science and ingenuity to keep themselves alive at all costs. Why, the very existence of a planetwide system of canals implies a world order that knows no national boundaries, a society that long ago forgot its political disputes and racial animosity, uniting the populace in a desperate quest for water. Water …”
“And the dark spots, Lowell?” Ogilvy asked, turning back to the conversation. Schiaparelli drank more of his Chianti, amused and fascinated by the description. “Tell him about the oases.”
Lowell stood up to stretch, placed his hands behind his back, and turned to the balcony to watch the pigeons. “Pumping stations, obviously.”
The old Italian astronomer stared at where the walls of his villa met the ceiling, but he seemed to see nothing, perhaps only a blur with his used-up eyes. Lowell felt a rare flash of sympathy—losing one’s eyesight must be the greatest hell a dedicated astronomer could imagine.
“But if Mars is so arid, Lowell, surely all the water would evaporate from these open canals long before it reaches its destination … if the temperature is much above freezing, that is—and it must be above freezing in order for the water to be in its liquid state.” Schiaparelli’s forehead creased in a frown.
Ogilvy piped up, pacing the room. “And don’t forget, my good man, the astronomical distances involved. If these canals were simple waterways or aqueducts, we would never be able to see them from Earth. They would be much too narrow. How do you account for that?”
Annoyed, Lowell turned to the Englishman. He and Ogilvy had already had this discussion in earnest several times, and again on the train ride to Milan. But he saw Ogilvy’s raised eyebrow and understood that the other man had raised the question just to give Lowell a chance to explain.
“Ah, there is a simple answer for both questions,” Lowell said, then paused to draw deeply from his pipe. “Almost certainly the lines we see are aqueducts with lush vegetation growing in irrigated croplands along the borders. The only remaining forests on Mars, towering high in the low gravity, sipping precious water from the fertile soil—much as the Egyptians grow their crops in the plains around the Nile. I estimate the darkened fringes of the aqueducts to be about thirty miles wide. This vegetation would not only emphasize the lines of the canals, but would also shield the open water from rapid evaporation. Simple, you see? It is quite clear.”
Ogilvy nodded, and Schiaparelli gave a distant smile. The old astronomer seemed more amused than impassioned by the concepts. Lowell came closer to his host, barely controlling his own enthusiasm. “My proposed plan follows a similar principle, Schiaparelli. The project I have conceived will take place on a much smaller scale, naturally, since I am but one man and, alas, our own earthly civilization has no stomach for such dreams.
“I have already dispatched surveyors and work teams to the Sahara, in the flat desert in western Egypt. I will excavate three canals of my own, each ten miles long, across an otherwise featureless basin, to form a perfect equilateral triangle. A geometrical symbol impossible to explain with random natural processes, and therefore a clear message that intelligent life inhabits this world. To make them more visible, I must emphasize my puny canals with lines of fire, by filling the trenches with petroleum products and igniting them. It will be a brief but dramatic message, blazing into the night.” His eyes sparkled, his voice rose in volume.
“But why this tremendous effort, my friend?” Schiaparelli asked. “Why now?”
Promptly, he and Ogilvy described the repeated green flashes, the launches of enormous vehicles, ships sent to Earth. Based on Ogilvy’s observations and calculations derived from a careful scrutiny of celestial mechanics, Lowell believed he knew the travel time the Martians required to reach Earth.
Lowell’s voice became husky. “As you can see, the Martians are on their way. We must show them where to land, where they will meet with an openhearted welcome from earthbound admirers of their past triumphs and their current travails.”
Lowell took a deep breath and spoke with absolute confidence. “Gentlemen, I intend to lead that party. I will be the first man to shake hands with a Martian.”
Finally.
Finally. Lowell had never been a man of extraordinary patience, but the last week of waiting for the three trenches to join at precise corners had been the most interminable time of his life.
Now, under the starlight and the residual heat that wafted off the baked sands, Lowell stood with his torch in hand, feeling like a tribal shaman, ready to ignite his weapon against the darkness, his symbol of welcome to aliens from another world.
The stench of petroleum distillates stung his eyes and nostrils. The chemical smell had driven off the camels and most of the workers, save those few foremen—mostly Europeans—who intended to watch the spectacle. On high dunes in the distance, the curious Bedouins had gathered by their own tents to observe. This would be an event for their storytellers to repeat for generations.
Working with his reluctant assistants, Pickering and Douglass, Lowell had gone to a great deal of trouble to calculate the best time when the Sahara night would face Mars, so that his transient shout into the universe had the best chance of being seen—if not from the inbound Martian emissary ships, then from those survivors who had remained on the red planet.
Lowell turned to the telegraph operator beside him. Miles of overland cable had been run to the other vertices of the great triangle in the sand, so that the teams could communicate with each other. “Signal Pickering and Douglass at the other two intersections. Tell them to light their channels.”
The telegraph operator pecked away at his key, sending a brief message. When the clicks fell into silence, Lowell stepped to the brink of his canal in the sand. He stared down into the bitumen-lined trench, the foul-smelling black mass that was now pooled with kerosene and gasoline dumped from enormous tanks that had been hauled across the desert by his private railroad.
Lowell tossed his torch into the fuel, then watched the fire spread like a hungry demon, rushing down the channel. The inferno devoured the dumped petroleum, hot enough to ignite the sticky bitumen liner so that the triangular symbol would burn for a long time.
Across the desert into the night, rifle shots rang out, signaling to other torchbearers stationed along the ten miles of each canal, who also tossed their burning brands into the ditch so that the fire could engulf the entire triangle. Martians and fire, Lowell thought—what a strange combination.
Lowell’s family had already made its mark on the world. Towns had been named after the Lowells and the Lawrences; his maternal grandfather was Abbott Lawrence, minister to Britain. His father, Augustus Lowell, was descended from the early Massachusetts colonists. His family had amassed its fortune in textiles, in landholdings, in finance. But Percival himself would make the greatest mark—on two worlds instead of one.
An unbroken wall of flame roared up into the night. He prayed the Martians were watching. He had so much to say to them.
Lowell found it difficult to sleep even long after the inferno had died down. He lay on his cot in his tent, smelling the dying smoke and harsh fumes, listening to the whisper of settling sand sloughing into the bottom of the trench from the burned walls. Far off in the Bedouin camp a pair of camels belched at each other.
In only a year or two, the shifting desert would erase most of his line in the sand, leaving only a dark scar. But if his intended audience received the message, Earth would be a dramatically changed place in that time, and his effort would not be in vain.
Lowell found his situation incredibly strange: he, a wealthy Boston Brahmin, now resting fitfully in an austere tent in the middle of a vast desert that had been made even more unpleasant by his own construction work.
Summoning images of beauty to his mind, he recalled his experiences in Japan, as much an alien world as this Sahara, perhaps even as alien as Mars. He thought of colors bright as enamel and lacquer, gold filigree and cloisonné, the heady perfumes of peonies and burning incense. He remembered being escorted along narrow avenues of carefully tended trees where an explosion of white petals drifted on the winds for the annual cherry blossom festival. He recalled the delicate ritual of a tea ceremony, and the thin atonal melody plucked out on a biwa as spiced morsels sizzled on a small hibachi.
During those years as ambassador to Japan, Lowell had lugged his six-inch refractor with him, staring, staring, seeing the Earth but watching the stars …
He had graduated from Harvard with distinction in mathematics at the age of twenty-one, and he had received the Bowdoin Prize for his essay, “The Rank of England as a European Power Between the Death of Elizabeth and the Death of Anne.” He had traveled the world, studied the classics, experienced numerous foreign cultures, proved his facility in languages, even tried to join the fighting in the Serbo-Turkish War. What did he care that mere astronomers scorned his ideas?
Lowell had sailed for Japan in 1883, where he was asked to serve as foreign secretary for a special diplomatic mission from Korea to the United States—though at the time he had never even seen Korea. Returning to Tokyo, he had later been asked to help write Japan’s new constitution.
Lying sleepless on his cot, he spoke aloud to the apex of his tent, where the canvas rippled in a faint breeze. “I have experience as an ambassador to foreign cultures. I have diplomatic credentials. How could the Martians be stranger than what I have already seen?”
The cylinder screamed through the air with the wailing of a thousand lost souls, trailing behind it a tongue of fire from atmospheric friction and a bright green mist from outgassing extraterrestrial substances.
Lowell burst out of his shaded tent to see the commotion under the midday sun. A burnt smudge of smoke smoldered like a scar across the ceramic-blue sky. Booms of sound thundered in waves as the gigantic ship/projectile crossed overhead.
“It’s the emissaries from Mars!” Lowell shouted, raising his hands in the air. “The Martians!”
Like an exploding warship, the cylinder crashed into the desert with a spewed plume of sand and dust. Lowell felt the tremor of impact in his knees, despite the cushioning desert. He laughed aloud, yelling for Douglass and Pickering to join him.
After the burning of the enormous triangle, most of the workers had returned to their widely scattered lands, leaving only a few team bosses to tidy up the loose ends of the construction. Lowell had sold his now useless railroad for scrap steel, giving the salvagers a decent percentage of the profits. The place rapidly turned into a ghost town, which some of the European bosses had quietly begun calling “Lowell’s Folly.” Pickering and Douglass had returned from the other two base camps to join him here. To wait …
Now, as the dust settled in the distance, the other two astronomers ran up, their faces ruddy with sunburn and excitement. “We are vindicated!” Lowell cried. He clapped them each on the shoulder. “The Martians are here!”
The remaining Bedouin helpers fled the camp in panic, thrashing their camels to an awkward gallop across the dunes. Idiots, he thought. Fools. They did not realize the honor that had been bestowed here.
“The world as we know it is about to change. Come, let us put together an expedition. We must welcome our visitors from space.”
The heat from the pit rose up in a tremendous wave, overwhelming even the blistering daytime pounding of the Sahara. Pickering dropped back, coughing, but Lowell plodded forward, hunched over, shielding his watering eyes. On an impulse, he reached into the pocket of his cream-colored suit jacket and withdrew his bright red spectacles, placing them over his eyes, seeing the world as a Martian would, the better to understand them.
Because of the residual heat, he could not get close to the crash site, and he felt a terrible dread that the Martian ship had exploded when it struck the ground, that all the interplanetary ambassadors had been obliterated by fire.
But then he heard faint pounding sounds within the metal-walled cylinder, mechanical noises, a soft unscrewing …
Finally, Douglass dragged him back. “It’s too hot, Mister Lowell! We must wait.”
With savage disappointment, Lowell stumbled away, keeping his head turned to stare at the smoldering crater through his red-lensed spectacles. “I have waited years for this moment. I can tolerate a few more hours—but not much longer than that.”
His eyes stinging from tears not entirely caused by the blistering heat, he followed the other two men back to the main camp.
Douglass fetched some water, toiletries, and fresh clothes after sweaty hours spent in the dim shelter of their tents. He and Pickering ate ravenously of a quickly prepared meal, though Lowell himself felt no hunger. His stomach tied itself in knots as he felt his life’s work coming to its climax.
Lowell used some of the tepid water to shave, leaning over a small mirror. Then he changed into a fine new suit and straightened his collar, keeping his gaze intent on the still-glowing pit visible through the propped-open tent flap. Finally, in the cool of the desert night, he told his two companions to wait behind.
“You can’t go alone, man,” Pickering said, after clearing his throat again.
“Nonsense.” Lowell brushed the other astronomer’s grasp from his arm. “It was my money that brought the Martians to this landing site, and I claim the right.”
“That’s the same argument you used with your damned telescope,” Pickering muttered, but did not pursue the discussion. Douglass hunkered down, looking forlorn.
Lowell strode across the surrounding dunes in his black leather shoes, mulling over an appropriate speech, wondering if by some miracle the Martians might speak English. No matter, he thought. He had a knack for languages, and would manage to communicate somehow.
Looking dapper, he approached the edge of the pit. He noted with fascination that the heat of the impact had been great enough to fuse some of the sand grains into lumps of glass. If the Martians could survive that, they must be prime specimens indeed.
He stood on the brink, looking down into the glow that lit up the crater as if it were day. A long shiny lid had been unscrewed from the large pitted cylinder and lay on the blasted sands. Below, he saw clanking machines stirring, odd tentacled creatures moving about, exhibiting an industriousness no doubt born of their dire circumstances on Mars. Most remarkable, he saw, was a tall, newly assembled construction rising up on stiltlike tripod legs. The heat was still incredible.
Magnificent! Lowell felt proud and overwhelmed to be mankind’s emissary. Now that they had reached Earth, though, the poor Martians could be saved.
Lowell hurried forward to greet the Martians. The wonders of the universe awaited him.