ext goal. What's it like?"

Russ put his hands behind his head and looked up at the bottom of the
bunk above him. "We can see Mars well enough; there's no cloud blanket
and the atmosphere is thin but clear. You've seen the photos and the
colored sketches?"

"I've seen it from our viewplates, but so far it's just a tiny, red
disc. We're about at Earth's orbit now, even though Earth is many
millions of miles away from us. Mars is still about fifty million miles
further, but we're gaining speed quite rapidly and Lockhart thinks we'll
make it soon enough." Burl picked up one of the books from the ship's
library and started to thumb through it to locate a color chart of the
planet.

Russ waved a hand. "You don't have to show me. I've studied Mars by
telescope so often I know it by heart. It's mostly a sort of light,
reddish-tan, a kind of pale russet. We think that's desert. There are
some fairly large sections that are bluish-green--at least in the
Martian summers. In their winters these sections fade very greatly."

"That's vegetation," Burl broke in. "It must be! Everybody agrees it
acts like it. And there are the white polar caps, too."

"You can tell which season is which by the size of the polar ice caps.
When one is big, the other is almost gone. Then there's the problem of
the canals...."

"Do you believe in them?" asked Burl. "The books disagree. Some think
they're real--even say they look as if they had been built by
intelligent beings as irrigation channels to take the melting waters of
the poles down to the fertile lands. But other astronomers claim they
can't see them--or that they're illusions, series of cracks, or lines of
dark dust blown by winds."

"Personally, I've come to believe in them," Russ argued. "They've been
photographed--something is there. They're very faint, spidery lines, but
they certainly are straight and regular. We'll find out soon enough."

Find out they did. Russ was up and about and the normal life of the ship
resumed. During their passage of Earth's orbit, they had managed to
raise the United States on the ship's radio. For three days they were
able to converse with their home base. They exchanged news and data,
transmitted back all they had learned and eagerly asked for news.

The men of the crew had the chance to send messages home, and Burl even
talked briefly with his father. There had been an important discovery
made on Earth.

The lines of force had finally been traced