My heart gave an extra thump. Then there was hope for me. I asked her
if she wanted to marry a man of high rank or of low rank. She answered,
"Nowadays very few young men reach the rank degrees, but many of my
friends are hoping to marry such. But I first want one whom I love. He
must be noble, lovable, intelligent, ambitious and capable of achieving
honor by an outstanding action of which I may be proud."
Our talk and thoughts had so confused Xora that she was forgetting
to apply her flying rules. We were dodging and barely escaping
collisions with planes which seemed suddenly to be cluttering the sky.
A small plane came alongside us. The occupant was in uniform, which I
recognized as an air policeman's. Recognizing Xora, he cautioned her
and indicated that she was out of her flying altitude. She immediately
followed the instructions he gave. After he had left, she told me he
was a schoolmate of hers and was now serving his first year in the
general army of service, of which all policemen were members.
"He certainly went against the rules by not giving me a summons. I
suppose he was being considerate of you as an Earth visitor to Mars."
During this time, I had been almost unaware of the city below. Xora now
called my attention to the view. She said the city had been constructed
five years before. It looked more like a large park than a city. There
were no streets, but wide park lanes, criss-crossing each other. There
was a large round lake in the center, surrounded by beautiful buildings.
Carefully kept lawns, gardens, and buildings covered all the surface
space. The roof tops were pleasant to see with no unsightly water
tanks, chimneys, signs, wiring, smoke, and junk. There were no
broken-down hulks of unoccupied buildings, no dirty, drab, or sooty
walls, no fire escapes. The flat or slanting roofs were all covered
with well kept verdure and flower beds.
There were courts of different shapes, five or six clustered together,
surrounded by green markings like a hedge, with a very visible letter
in the Martian calligraphy within a center flowerbed denoting, I
suppose, its number and location.
Along the rivers, busy waterways with freight ships and pleasure
yachts, were clean flat beaches. On the Amboria city side of the river,
on the edge and over part of the river on the extreme southern end,
many large buildings covered a space equivalent to about two hundred
and fifty New York city blocks. I asked Xora what these large buildings
were.
She answered, "They are our general stores."
"Why so large?" I wanted to know.
"They are the only stores we have for our city," she explained. "They
have the capacity to daily receive, unload, and store the contents
of one thousand large freight airplanes landing on their roofs,
two hundred fifty large freight ships, two hundred fifty freight
submarines, all sailing under and unloading inside the buildings, and
two hundred fifty long freight trains. If necessary, they can double
this capacity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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