X - PHOBOS PORT

Mars has two ready-made space stations, her two tiny, close-in moons - Phobos and Deimos, the dogs of the War God, Fear and Panic. Deimos is a jagged, ragged mass of rock; a skipper would he hard put to find a place to put down a ship. Phobos was almost spherical and fairly smooth as we found her; atomic power has manicured her into one big landing field all around her equator - a tidying-up that may have been over hasty; by one very plausible theory the Martian ancients used her themselves as a space station. The proof, if such there be, may lie buried under the slag of Phobos port.

The Rolling Stone slid inside the orbit of Deimos, blasted as she approached the orbit of Phobos and was matched in with Phobos, following an almost identical orbit around Mars only a scant five miles from that moon. She was falling now, falling around Mars but falling toward Phobos, for no vector had been included as yet to prevent that. The fall could not be described as a headlong plunge; at this distance, one radius of Phobos, the moon attracted the tiny mass of the spaceship with a force of less than three ten-thousandths of one Earth­ surface gravity. Captain Stone had ample time in which to calculate a vector which would let him land; it would take the better part of an hour for the Stone to sink to the surface of the satellite.

However, he had chosen to do it the easy way, through outside help. The jet of the Rolling Stone, capable of blasting at six gravities, was almost too much of a tool for the thin gravity field of a ten-mile rock - like swatting a fly with a pile-driver. A few minutes after they had ceased blasting, a small scooter rocket up from Phobos matched with them and anchored to their airlock.

The spacesuited figure who swam in removed his helmet and said, "Permission to board, sir? Jason Thomas, port pilot - you asked for pilot-and-tow?"

"That's right, Captain Thomas."

"Just call me Jay. Got your mass schedule ready?"

Roger Stone gave it to him; he look it over while they looked him over. Meade thought privately that he looked more like a bookkeeper than a dashing spaceman - certainly nothing like the characters in Hazel's show. Lowell stared at him gravely and said, "Are you a Martian, Mister?"

The port pilot answered him with equal gravity. "Sort of, son."

"Then where's your other leg?"

Thomas looked startled, but recovered. "I guess I'm a cut-rate Martian."

Lowell seemed doubtful but did not pursue the point. The port official returned the schedule and said, "Okay, Captain. Where are your outside control-circuit jacks?"

"Just forward of the lock. The inner terminals are here on the board."

"Be a few minutes." He went back outside, moving very rapidly. He was back inside in less than ten minutes.

"That's all the time it took you to mount auxiliary rockets?" Roger Stone asked incredulously.

"Done it a good many times. Gets to be a routine. Besides, I've got good boys working with me." Quickly he plugged a small portable control board to the jacks pointed out to him earlier, and tested his controls. "All set." He glanced at the radar screen. "Nothing to do but loaf for a bit You folks immigrating?"

"Not exactly. It's more of a pleasure trip."

"Now ain't that nice! Though it beats me what pleasure you expect to find on Mars." He glanced out the port where the reddish curve of Mars pushed up into the black.

"We'll do some sightseeing I expect"

"More to see in the State of Vermont than on this whole planet I know." He looked around. "This your whole family?"

"All but my wife." Roger Stone explained the situation.

"Oh, yes! Read about it in the daily War Cry. They got the name of your ship wrong, though."

Hazel snorted in disgust 'Newspapers!"

Yes, mum. I put the War God down just four hours ago. Berths 32 & 33. She's in quarantine, though." He pulled out a pipe 'You folks got static precipitation?"

Yes," agreed Hazel. "Go ahead and smoke, young man."

"Thanks on both counts." He made almost a career of getting it lighted; Pollux began to wonder when he intended to figure his ballistic.

But Jason Thomas did not bother even to glance at the radar screen; instead he started a long and meandering story about his brother-in-law back Earthside. It seemed that this connec­tion of his had tried to train a parrot to act as an alarm clock.

The twins knew nothing of parrots and cared less. Castor began to get worried. Was this moron going to crash the Stone? He began to doubt that Thomas was a pilot of any sort. The story ambled on and on. Thomas interrupted him-self to say, "Better hang on, everybody. And somebody ought to hold the baby."

"I'm not a baby," Lowell protested.

"I wish I was one, youngster." His hand sought his control panel as Hazel gathered Lowell in. "But the joke of the whole thing was - A deafening rumble shook the ship, a sound somehow more earsplitting than their own jet. It continued for seconds only, as it died Thomas continued triumphantly:

- the bird never did learn to tell time. Thanks, folks. The office'll bill you." He stood up with a catlike motion, slid across or without lifting his feet 'Glad to have met you. G'bye!"

They were down on Phobos.

Pollux got up from where he had sprawled on the deck-plates - and bumped his head on the overhead. After that he tried to walk like Jason Thomas. He had weight, real weight, for the first time since Luna, but it amounted to only two ounces in his clothes. "I wonder how high I can jump here?" he said.

"Don't try it," Hazel advised. "Remember the escape velocity of this piece of real estate is only sixty-six feet a second."

"I don't think a man could jump that fast"

"There was Ole Gunderson. He dived right around Phobos­ - a free circular orbit thirty-five miles long. Took him eighty-five minutes. He'd have been traveling yet. If they hadn't grabbed as he came back around."

"Yes, but wasn't he an Olympic jumper or something? And didn't he have to have a special rack or some such to take off from?"

"You wouldn't have to jump," Castor put in. "Sixty-six feet a second is forty-five miles an hour, so the circular speed comes out a bit more than thirty miles an hour. A man can run twenty miles an hour back home, easy. He could certainly get up to forty-five here."

Pollux shook tiis head. "No traction."

"Special spiked shoes and maybe a tangent launching ramp for the last hundred yards - then woosh! off the end and you're gone for good."

"Okay, you try it, Grandpa. I'll wave good-by to you."

Roger Stone whistled loudly. "Quiet, please! If you armchair athletes are quite through, I have an announcement to make."

"Do we go groundside now, Dad?"

"Not if you don't quit interrupting me. I'm going over to the War God. Anyone who wants to come along, or wishes to take a stroll outside, may do so - just as long as you settle the custody of Buster among you. Wear your boots; I understand they have steel strip walkways for the benefit of transients."

Pollux was the first one suited up and into the lock, where he was surprised to find the rope ladder still rolled up. He wondered about Jason Thomas and decided that he must have jumped... a hundred-odd feet of drop wouldn't hurt a man's arches here. But when he opened the outer door he dis­covered that it was quite practical to walk straight down the side of the ship like a fly on a wall. He had heard of this but had not quite believed it, not on a planet ... well, a moon.

The others followed him, Hazel carrying Lowell. Roger Stone stopped when they were down and looked around. "I could have sworn," he said with a puzzled air, "that I spotted the War God not very far east of us just before we landed."