Stand by for Mars!, Carey Rockwell [early readers .TXT] 📗

him tie the rope around his shoulders, he stuffed his nose with the waste cotton. He stepped to the opening. Roger gave three quick jerks on the rope and Astro started hauling in.

With Astro’s help, Tom was soon free and clear, standing beside Astro on the jet-boat deck.

“Phoooeeeey!” said Tom, spitting out the sand that had filtered into his mouth. “I never want to do that again!” He dusted himself off and flashed his emergency light around the deck. “Look at that!” he said in amazement. “If we’d kept on digging, we’d have been trapped down there for⁠—” he paused and looked at Astro who was grinning⁠—“a long, long time!” He held the light on the sand that was flowing out of the open hatch of the passenger lounge.

“Come on,” urged Astro. “Let’s get Roger out of there!”

They called to Roger through the hose and told him to bring two more emergency lights and the remainder of the Martian water. Three minutes later the Polaris unit was together again.

Standing on the deck beside his two unit-mates, Roger brushed himself off and smiled. “Well,” he said, “looks like we made it!”

“Yeah,” said Tom, “but take a look at this!” He walked across the jet-boat deck to the nearest window port. What should have been a clear view of the desert was a mass of solidly packed sand.

“Oh, no!” cried Roger. “Don’t tell me we have to go through that again?”

“I don’t think it’ll be so bad this time,” said Astro.

“Why not?” asked Tom.

“The sand is banked the heaviest on the port side of the ship. And the window ports on the starboard side of the control deck were pretty high off the ground.”

“Well, let’s not just stand here and talk about it,” said Roger. “Let’s take a look!” He turned and walked through the jet-boat deck.

Tom and Astro followed the blond cadet through the darkened passages of the dead ship, and after digging a small pile of sand away from the control-deck hatch, found themselves once more amid the jumble of the wrecked instruments.

For the first time in three days, the boys saw sunlight streaking through the crystal port.

“I told you,” cried Astro triumphantly.

“But there still isn’t any way out of this place!” said Roger. “We can’t break that port. It’s six inches thick!”

“Find me a wrench,” said Astro. “I can take the whole window port apart from inside. How do you think they replace these things when they get cracked?”

Hurriedly searching through the rubble, Tom finally produced a wrench and handed it to Astro. In a half hour Astro had taken the whole section down and had pushed the crystal outward. The air of the desert rushed into the control room in a hot blast.

“Whew!” cried Roger. “It must be at least a hundred and twenty-five degrees out there!”

“Come on. Let’s take a look,” said Tom. “And keep your fingers crossed!”

“Why?” asked Roger.

“That we can dig enough of the sand away from the ship to make it recognizable from the air.”

Following Tom’s lead, Roger and Astro climbed through the open port and out onto the sand.

“Well, blast my jets!” said Astro. “You can’t even tell there was a storm.”

“You can’t if you don’t look at the ship,” said Tom bitterly. “That was the only thing around here of any size that would offer resistance to the sand and make it pile up. And, spaceman, look at that pile!”

Astro and Roger turned to look at the spaceship. Instead of seeing the ship, they saw a small mountain of sand, well over a hundred feet high. They walked around it and soon discovered that the window port in the control deck had been the only possible way out.

“Call it what you want,” said Roger, “but I think it’s just plain dumb luck that we were able to get out!” He eyed the mound of sand. Unless one knew there was a spaceship beneath it, it would have been impossible to distinguish it from the rest of the desert.

“We’re not in the clear yet!” commented Astro grimly. “It would take a hundred men at least a week to clear away enough of that sand so search parties could recognize it.” He glanced toward the horizon. “There isn’t anything but sand here, fellows, sand that stretches for a thousand miles in every direction.”

“And we’ve got to walk it,” said Tom.

“Either that or sit here and die of thirst,” said Roger.

“Any canals around here, Tom?” asked Astro softly.

“There better be,” replied Tom thoughtfully. He turned to Roger. “If you can estimate our position, Roger, I’ll go back inside and see if I can find a chart to plot it on. That way, we might get a direction to start on at least.”

Astro glanced up at the pale-blue sky. “It’s going to be a hot day,” he said softly, looking out over the flat plain of the desert, “an awful hot day!”

XX

“Got everything we need?” asked Tom.

“Everything we’ll need⁠—and about all we can safely carry without weighing ourselves down too much,” answered Roger. “Enough food for a week, the rest of the Martian water, space goggles to protect our eyes from the sun and emergency lights for each of us.”

“Not much to walk a hundred and fifty miles on,” offered Astro. “Too bad the sand got in the galley and messed up the rest of that good food.”

“We’ll have plenty to get us by⁠—if my calculations are right,” said Tom. “One hundred and fifty-four miles to be exact.”

“Exact only as far as my sun sight told me,” said Roger.

“Do you think it’s right?” asked Tom.

“I’ll answer you this way,” Roger replied. “I took that sight six times in a half hour and got a mean average on all of them that came out within a few miles of each other. If I’m wrong, I’m very wrong, but if I’m right, we’re within three to five miles of the position I gave you.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Astro. “If