ee the sense of
it. "And if they have reasons, then why don't they defend it? They were
alerted while we were on Mercury. They must have spaceships if they are
the enemy. Where are they?"

The ground was now but a few hundred feet below them, and still no one
paid the strange ship hanging in the sky any attention. While the crew
stood with bated breath, Lockhart brought the ship down and down, until
it came to rest barely fifty feet above an intersection. There it hung,
nearly touching the roofs, and was ignored.

The shining masts of the Sun-tap station continued to gleam, following
the tiny bright Sun in its course through the dark blue of the sky. One
of the two small Martian moons was climbing upward along the horizon.
The canals beyond were dark lines of conduit, through which no
life-giving waters flowed. And the Martians did nothing.

Chapter 11. _Martians Don't Care_

"I don't like the looks of this at all," said Lockhart finally. "I
suspect a trap. Yet we've got to land and get at that base. I'm going to
take the ship out into the desert beyond the city and let a scouting
squad go in first."

The _Magellan_ lifted back into the sky, then moved out over the ocher
wasteland that was the barren desert of the red planet. Slowly the ship
dropped again until its pointed nether end hung about twenty feet above
the cold shale and time-worn sand.

Captain Boulton and Ferrati were selected to do the initial survey. Burl
and Haines helped them climb through the packed spaces of the outer
hold. The jeep was swung out to the lowermost cargo port, and the
spaceship's cargo derrick lowered the compact army vehicle to the
ground.

The two scouts then put on altitude suits with oxygen masks, slung
walkie-talkies about their chests, took light carbines in hand and
pistols in belts and went down the rope ladder from the cargo port. They
climbed into the sturdy jeep with its specially-designed carburetor and
pressurized engine. The vehicle had been prepared to operate in the
light atmosphere of Mars, as thin as the air on a Himalayan mountaintop,
and low in free oxygen.

Burl and Haines, clad in pressure suits themselves, sat in the open port
and watched the jeep set off. The engine kicked over and barked a few
times in the strange air. Then Boulton at the wheel threw in the clutch,
stepped on the gas, and the squat little car, painted in Air Force blue,
rolled off over the flat rocky surface, kicking up a light