The alien intelligence

Before me, not half a mile away, rose the nearest ramparts of the Mountain of the Moon. It was after noon, and the red sun blazed down on the bare, undulating sandy waste with f...

First I heard a faint whispering sound, or rather a hiss, infinitely far away, and up, I thought, over the cliffs. Then the cloth of the tent was lighted by a faint red glow thr...

For a long, long time I gazed into the abyss, lost in the wonder and the mystery of it. Meanwhile the sun climbed over and lit the farther rim, which still was black or dully re...

Just before noon I staggered into a little dell that was covered with unusually profuse growths of the crimson plants. Along a little trickling stream of water they were waist h...

The sun dropped beneath the rim, and the purple dusk began to thicken and to creep over the valley floor. I took up my precious equipment, and Melvar and I walked off through th...

I read it in the faint glow of the phosphorescent globe, and read it again. So Austen was beyond the crescent, if he had been able to carry out his plan. The date of the letter...

At the coming of day we were walking over a gently rolling scarlet plain, scattered with gigantic solitary boulders, that sloped gradually down to the Silver Lake. The lake lay...

So weak was I after that terrible experience that it was noon before I felt able to go on. The thing, as I have said, continued to hang in the sky all day, and to drop regularly...

For perhaps an hour we sat there on the rock. As soon as the smoke cleared, we could see the crimson needles flying high upon their vague red tracks, and we watched them with a...

Perhaps two hundred yards farther on we came to the camp. It was on a little hilltop below a giant tree. By the trunk was a little mud-daubed hut, with an open shed in front of...

Just before daylight Austen completed his calculations, and stated the result. He was very tired, and his eyes were red. He had worked for a day and two nights since we had foun...

I have a very confused recollection of what happened immediately afterward. My own actions seem a vague, disordered dream. My bitter grief at Austen's self-sacrifice was the onl...

I lost little time in the examination of the dead creature. The shafts from which it had come were but a few hundred yards below, and the purple gas was still rolling out of the...