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Page 13
Vas Kor breakfasted on board. Then he emerged upon the aerial dock,
entered an elevator, and was borne quickly to the street below,
where he was soon engulfed by the early morning throng of workers
hastening to their daily duties.
Among them his warrior trappings were no more remarkable than is
a pair of trousers upon Broadway. All Martian men are warriors,
save those physically unable to bear arms. The tradesman and
his clerk clank with their martial trappings as they pursue their
vocations. The schoolboy, coming into the world, as he does, almost
adult from the snowy shell that has encompassed his development
for five long years, knows so little of life without a sword at
his hip that he would feel the same discomfiture at going abroad
unarmed that an Earth boy would experience in walking the streets
knicker-bockerless.
Vas Kor's destination lay in Greater Helium, which lies some
seventy-five miles across the level plain from Lesser Helium. He
had landed at the latter city because the air patrol is less
suspicious and alert than that above the larger metropolis where
lies the palace of the jeddak.
As he moved with the throng in the parklike canyon of the thoroughfare
the life of an awakening Martian city was in evidence about him.
Houses, raised high upon their slender metal columns for the night
were dropping gently toward the ground. Among the flowers upon the
scarlet sward which lies about the buildings children were already
playing, and comely women laughing and chatting with their neighbours
as they culled gorgeous blossoms for the vases within doors.
The pleasant "kaor" of the Barsoomian greeting fell continually
upon the ears of the stranger as friends and neighbours took up
the duties of a new day.
The district in which he had landed was residential--a district of
merchants of the more prosperous sort. Everywhere were evidences
of luxury and wealth. Slaves appeared upon every housetop with
gorgeous silks and costly furs, laying them in the sun for airing.
Jewel-encrusted women lolled even thus early upon the carven
balconies before their sleeping apartments. Later in the day they
would repair to the roofs when the slaves had arranged couches and
pitched silken canopies to shade them from the sun.
Strains of inspiring music broke pleasantly from open windows,
for the Martians have solved the problem of attuning the nerves
pleasantly to the sudden transition from sleep to waking that proves
so difficult a thing for most Earth folk.
Above him raced the long, light passenger fliers, plying, each in
its proper plane, between the numerous landing-stages for internal
passenger traffic. Landing-stages that tower high into the heavens
are for the great international passenger liners. Freighters have
other landing-stages at various lower levels, to within a couple
of hundred feet of the ground; nor dare any flier rise or drop from
one plane to another except in certain restricted districts where
horizontal traffic is forbidden.
Along the close-cropped sward which paves the avenue ground fliers
were moving in continuous lines in opposite directions. For the
greater part they skimmed along the surface of the sward, soaring
gracefully into the air at times to pass over a slower-going driver
ahead, or at intersections, where the north and south traffic has
the right of way and the east and west must rise above it.
From private hangars upon many a roof top fliers were darting into
the line of traffic. Gay farewells and parting admonitions mingled
with the whirring of motors and the subdued noises of the city.
Yet with all the swift movement and the countless thousands rushing
hither and thither, the predominant suggestion was that of luxurious
ease and soft noiselessness.
Martians dislike harsh, discordant clamour. The only loud noises
they can abide are the martial sounds of war, the clash of arms,
the collision of two mighty dreadnoughts of the air. To them there
is no sweeter music than this.
At the intersection of two broad avenues Vas Kor descended from the
street level to one of the great pneumatic stations of the city.
Here he paid before a little wicket the fare to his destination
with a couple of the dull, oval coins of Helium.
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