Then one wake period, Russ and Burl went to the telescope and trained it again on the oncoming planet. The now large disc of the ruddy world swung onto the screen. It looked strange, not at all like the drawings. Burl had never seen it through Terrestrial telescopes, but he sensed something was wrong. He realized suddenly, "Both poles are enlarged! It's winter on _both_ hemispheres! And that's impossible!" Yet it was so. Both the Martian ice caps were present and both extended down the northern and southern hemispheres of the world. The men stared in silence. Slowly Russ tried to figure it out, "The greenish-blue areas can scarcely be seen. Where they should be, there're darker patches of brown, against the yellowish-red that now seems to be the desert areas. It seems to be winter on both sides and it looks bad. It looks to me as if Mars were a fast-dying world." Burl squinted his eyes. "Yet I see the canals. The straight lines are still visible--see?" Russ nodded. "They're real. But what's happened?" Indeed, the planet seemed blighted. "It's the Sun-tap," Burl decided. "We should have realized what it would do." "Remember Earth the week it was working? The temperature fell several degrees, began to damage crops? Remember how it snowed in places where snow had never fallen in July? Remember the predictions of disaster for crops, of danger from winter snows if the drop continued?" Russ went on in his careful, explanatory way. "And for Mars it has continued. Mars was always colder than Earth; life there must have been far more precariously balanced. During the day, on the Martian equator in midsummer, the highest temperature is not likely to be more than 70° or 80°; and at night, even then, it would fall below freezing. Vegetation on Mars must have been hardy in the best of times, and life carried on under great difficulties. "Now the margin of warmth and light has been cut. It has been just enough to keep both polar caps frozen, to prevent water from reaching the fertile regions, and the cold has advanced enough to bar the growth and regeneration of plant life. If the Sun-tapping on Mars is not stopped, all life there will die out, and it will be a permanently dead world forever." The news spread throughout the crew and there was a feeling of anger and urgency. Nobody knew what lived on Mars, yet the subject of Mars and Martians had always intrigued the imaginations of people on Earth. Now, to hear that the unknown enemy had nearly slain a neighboring world brought home vividly just what would also have been the fate of Earth. The day finally came when the big spaceship slid into an orbit about the ruddy planet. It circled just outside the atmospheric level while the men aboard studied the surface for its secrets.