Kemlo, with two other boys from Satellite K, are allowed to accompany a small research team setting off to reconnoiter Deimos, a moonlet of Mars. The research ship has a smooth journey until it encounters a fierce astral storm, but eventually lands safely on Deimos - where some peculiar magnetic forces put all the instruments out of action. From then on the suspense is terrific. Kemlo and his friends find their way barred by a moving wall of lighted shapes and, scattered, are apparently attacked by transparent figures etched in vivid light. Up to the very end the doubt remains: will the power of the Martian Ghosts triumph or be broken?
Release date:
June 29, 2016
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
202
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THE spinning wheel of Satellite Belt K glittered against the deep blue void. Beyond the Belt, stretching in a semicircle far out into the infinite distance, were the portable generators from which the multi-coloured holding rays speared up like telegraph poles marking a highway for thousands of miles around the Belt.
Krillie bobbed up and down in his excitement until his sister, Krinsetta, tapped him on the shoulder and bade him be still for a moment.
‘But it’s so thrilling!’ Krillie protested. ‘We’ve never had a real race before. Plenty of us have been out in scooters with the older boys and we’ve raced each other then, although we weren’t supposed to.’
‘You boys get up to a lot of things you’re not supposed to do,’ said Krinsetta a little resentfully. ‘Sometimes it makes me wish I were a boy so that I could go chasing off in a space scooter. Or even on a sky horse, for that matter. I think the sky horse is one of the most marvellous inventions we’ve ever seen up here.’
‘M’m,’ Krillie agreed. ‘It certainly is a pretty wonderful invention, and we’re going to have more of them. Only they’ll be smaller than the first one so that boys of my size can ride them.’ He frowned as he added doubtfully: ‘I suppose girls will be able to ride them as well.’
‘Here come the scooters!’ Krinsetta exclaimed as a pulsing sibilant roar was heard and twenty different coloured space scooters flew slowly information from around the far side of the Satellite Belt. The scooters hovered to a halt near the space-suited figures of the starters and judges.
‘Oh dear,’ Krillie sighed, ‘I’ll never be able to explain all this in my diary.’
‘You and your precious diary!’ his sister scoffed, then she added quickly: ‘But you’re getting very clever at writing it and you explain things awfully well. It isn’t everybody who can write a diary, and I think you have a good chance of winning that competition.’
‘You do? Really, Krin?’
‘Yes, I do. You and I and all the other children who live on the Satellite Belt were born here, and it’s very difficult to explain to Earth-children how different everything is for us. I think it’s wonderful how you explain that because we were born in space we don’t need to wear space suits and that we get plenty of fun from quite different sorts of things. I’m sure when your diary is finished and sent to Earth to be read by the children there, they’ll understand a great deal more about us up here.’
‘We’re a space generation,’ said Krillie importantly. ‘Mum says that we’re living the way men on Earth dreamed about doing hundreds of years ago. Would you like to visit Earth, Krin?’
‘I don’t think so,’ his sister replied slowly. ‘From what Earth-children who visit here tell us, I should think they don’t have nearly so much fun as we do. And they get darkness on Earth, and sometimes it’s hot and sometimes it’s cold. They get winds blowing, too, and all sorts of peculiar things. I shouldn’t like it, I’m sure. Up here we always have brightness and light, and we don’t have winds and storms and things.’
‘No, but we have meteorites and cosmic rays,’ Krillie reminded her. ‘I don’t suppose any of the winds they have on Earth can blow a space ship to pieces as our cosmic rays or a big meteorite can.’
‘That’s true. But scientists invented the holding rays, and while we have those around us, we’re perfectly safe. Father was telling me that when Earth-people first started to build the great ships and planned to moor these Satellite Belts in the sky to act as space stations they had to wait for years and years before some clever scientists invented the holding rays; because without them people would have been killed and ships blown to pieces by the meteorites and cosmic rays.’
‘Ah-h!’ Krillie exclaimed knowingly. ‘And there’s solar radiation, too. Being born up here, we’re ack—ack …”
‘Acclimatised?’ Krinsetta suggested.
‘Well, anyway, we’re born to it, so it doesn’t affect us. But our parents still have to live in the air-conditioned sections, and have to wear sun visors when they go outside the Belt—as they are now.’ He pointed to groups of adults standing talking together as they watched the space scooters assemble. ‘I’m glad you think my diary’s all right,’ he said after a pause, ‘although some of the things I have to explain are certainly difficult.’
‘You do it very well,’ said Krinsetta with a smile. ‘But you worry too much, Krillie. After all, Earth-children are capable of working things out for themselves. They have books about life in space, and I understand that they are taught all about the history of the Satellite Belts, so really you’re only telling them what we do from day to day—like this race.’
‘There’s never been a race like this before, though. But Kemlo won’t tell me the reason for it; he won’t trust me.’ Krillie pouted.
‘Of course Kemlo trusts you. But he’s the Captain of Space Scouts and one of the senior boys in the technical grade. Sometimes those boys are told secrets by the science teachers, or even by the Elders, so they can’t always tell us everything they know. The Elders govern the Satellite Belts and they know what they’re doing. If they tell the older boys a secret, it means they trust them, but it doesn’t mean they don’t trust us. It’s just that perhaps we’re not old enough to understand.’
‘I suppose so,’ Krillie admitted. ‘But when I asked Kemlo why the race was being arranged, he said he couldn’t tell me for sure but that it was the only way of deciding something.’
‘Races mostly do decide something,’ said Krinsetta loftily. ‘Don’t be impatient, Krillie. We shall know in good time. Look!’ She pointed to the assembled scooters. ‘They’re being assigned their places. It won’t be long now before they start. Don’t those holding rays look pretty in all different colours?’
‘They’re going to colour all holding rays, so Kemlo says. There’s been a lot of argument and some of the science teachers and engineers think the rays ought to be coloured to make them more noticeable than the ordinary misty look they mostly have.’ Krillie looked toward the poles of coloured lights stretching away into the distance. ‘Now, how do I explain those?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Some of the Earth-boys who have visited us told me that when they put anything in the air, it falls down on them. But we can walk about in the sky, and the engineers have put those portable generators for the holding rays all the way out for thousands of miles, and they just stay there.’
‘Krillie, you’re forgetting your earliest lessons,’ his sister admonished him. ‘You know very well that there is no gravity outside the air-conditioned sections of the Belt.’
‘I know, I know,’ he replied impatiently. ‘But how do you explain it?’
‘I shouldn’t try. The Earth-children have lessons in all that sort of thing.’
‘I can see Kemlo!’ Krillie cried, suddenly forgetting his difficulty in explaining everyday happenings in his diary, as a sleek red space scooter manoeuvred into position. ‘Why isn’t he going off first?’
‘They’re being handicapped,’ said Krinsetta. ‘Those who have the best chance of winning start last of all. Kemlo is very experienced and clever at handling a scooter, and so are his friends, Kerowski and Kartin, and one or two others.’
‘I think Kartin is better than Kerowski,’ said Krillie frankly, then was silent as they watched the space-suited figures of the starters and judges move clear of the now evenly strung-out formation of scooters.
The judges climbed into their hover ship, and in a few moments the ship soared upward, circled the Belt and began to hover above the scooter formation. The starters clambered on to one of the observation platforms fixed to the upper edge of the Belt, where they could be seen operating the portable relay equipment by which they would give instructions to the scooter pilots.
A long, red-coloured ray beamed out from the observation platform, wavered across the space scooters, then clicked out.
‘That’s to warn the pilots to get ready.’ Krillie began to bounce up and down as excitement took hold again. This time his sister did not try to quieten him because she too was becoming excited.
Suddenly the first scooter shot forward, banked in a wide arc and headed for the gap between the first two poles of coloured rays. It turned, skidded slightly, straightened and shot into the next gap; turned and zoomed into the third gap. But when turning to enter the fourth gap its pilot misjudged both speed and distance and the scooter hit one of the poles and bounced off it.
The pilot then swung his craft clear, turned in a wide sweep and tried again. This time he got through the gap and skidded the scooter into a vast slide, trying to make up lost time, and aimed for the fifth gap.
By now, he had some idea of the angle at which he had to steer the scooter and made better time. But at the eighth gap he again hit a pole of coloured rays. Again he bounced off it, righted the craft, and continued on his course.
‘It’s not so easy, is it?’ Krillie observed. ‘The second one should start any time now.’
‘As he spoke a bright blue craft slid from the formation to begin its zooming, swerving course in and out of the gaps between the poles of coloured holding rays.
‘And so, at regular intervals, the rest of the space scooters took off, one after the other.
The starters were working to a strict handicap timing, but they had to allow for the inefficiency of some of the pilots who, like the one in the first scooter, hit the poles more than once and therefore slowed their own progress.
Krillie was anxious to see his great friend Kemlo start upon the zig-zagging course across the sky. Kemlo was his hero and, apart from being the Captain of Space Scouts, was, in Krillie’s eyes, unbeatable in any sport which concerned the handling of this small, compact but very fast space craft.
At last it was the turn of the bright red scooter, piloted by Kemlo.
The scooter sped forward, banked, turned, came in dead centre between the poles of the first gap; skidded with its tail down and nose up in a perfectly controlled arc. It shot into the second gap, zoomed in toward the third, stood on its tail and headed for the fourth. By now it was obvious that the pilot of this scooter had mastered the technique of controlling his craft. It did a tight turn and maintained maximum speed through the gaps between the poles of holding rays with ample room to spare.
This scooter had been the last to leave the starting-point and undoubtedly the handicapping had been fair, for Kemlo slid his craft with uncanny precision into the gaps and around the poles of coloured holding rays as if he were following a well-worn track.
Way out in the sky, tiny in the distance, were two more hover ships. In these were the judges watching the progress of the speeding space scooters below them as they threaded their way in and out of the gaps between the holding ray poles.
To Krillie and his sister, and all the other people gathered outside the Satellite Belt to watch this fascinating and colourful sky race, it seemed that only a few of the pilots taking part in the race were skilful enough to maintain speed and judgment all the way around the course.
Many adults now used the infra-red binoculars to keep track of the various craft headed out into the infinite blue distance.
There was no question of overtaking, because that would involve too much danger to pilot and craft; the race was one of time, the handicapping such that the first scooter to set off or the last could have the chance of winning, providing its pilot zig-zagged in and out between the poles without wasting too much time on the turns. But the distance between each craft was too great for overtaking, so that there was no danger of a collision.
The first scooter was seen to be heading toward the finish. It was going fairly well, but still taking too wide a sweep in the turns and thus must be losing valuable seconds on its run. Soon all twenty scooters had zig-zagged their way across the sky and came to a hovering halt at the finishing-point.
The red scooter piloted by Kemlo was the last to arrive. He came sliding along the sky in tight-gathere. . .
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