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The Prince of Mars Returns (World Cultural Heritage Library)
The Prince of Mars Returns - World Cultural Heritage Library Author:Philip Francis Nowlan Because his name is similar to that of a legendary Martian prince, whose return from the dead has long been prophesized, Hanley finds himself elected to wed a beautiful warrior maid and then lead a revolution against the Red Planet's tyrannical ruler. CONTENTS: — Chapter 1: To Mars — Chapter 2: Lil-rin of the Ta n'Ur — Chapter ... more »3: The Birrok
Chapter 4: I Wed Lil-rin
Chapter 5: Honeymoon And Disaster
Chapter 6: Intrigues of Gakko
Chapter 7: I Trail Gakko's Villains
Chapter 8: I Rescue Lil-rin
Chapter 9: I Become a Legend
Chapter 10: Danan of the Atl Antin
Chapter 11: In the Desert
Chapter 12: Attacked!
Chapter 13: The Tables Are Turned
Chapter 14: We Reach Gakalu
Chapter 15: Condemned by Gakko
Chapter 16: The Crash of Doom
Chapter 17: Alar-Lur of Mars
a selection from Chapter 1: To Mars
I, Captain Daniel J. Hanley, chief meteorologist of the General Rocket Corporation, had no intention of going to Mars when I stepped into the new space car and pressed gently but with finality on the gravity-screen lever. I was conscious only of a great urge to get as far away as possible from a certain young woman who had--but why go into details about that? It is enough that I didn't fully realize what I was doing. And as a result, here I was, the first man ever to pass beyond the stratosphere of Earth, actually hovering a scant mile above a Martian landscape, trembling with suppressed excitement and giving not a thought to the girl who had driven me to my mad, premature plunge into space. I faced infinity with reckless abandon, and found that I liked it. What did it matter if the end came in a day, week, or month? Why, there were no days, weeks, or months in interplanetary space! Only eternal, blazing noon on one side of my tiny craft and everlasting midnight on the other, while countless galaxies gleamed upon me in new glory from all sides. That I landed on Mars, instead of some other planet, was due solely to chance. In hurling my tiny craft madly, blindly away from Earth I happened to set it on an orbit that brought it closer to Mars than to any other heavenly body. As I drew nearer, the planet grew in size and in interest, until it entirely filled the great lens of my wide-angle scope. Its mountain ranges and peculiar canals became plainly visible. I manipulated my rocket blasts a bit and swung closer. There was no indication that the canals were man-made. Rather they seemed furrows caused by glancing blows of meteors. And there were many craters which, though small like those of the moon, appeared to be the result of head-on meteoric impact. As the planet grew still larger, I could see that there were no oceans and continents in the sense that we know them on Earth. Nevertheless, the divisions between the ice caps, polar seas, solid vegetation belts, canal-irrigated sections, and finally the vast and eternally dry, red equatorial belt, were clear and sharp. The northern and southern hemispheres, widely divided by this belt, seemed duplicates. "Why not inspect the planet at close range?" I asked myself. So here I was, easing down over a countryside such as no man of Earth had ever seen.« less