Madness from Mars

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The Hello Mars IV was coming home, back from the outward reaches of space, the first ship ever to reach the Red Planet and return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus Observatory on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving its position. Hours later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote that flashed in the outer void.

Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship's outward voyage, far out until its silvery hull had dwindled into nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or sign of Hello Mars IV — nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up again that minute speck in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.

Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On the Moon, powerful radio stations were capable of hurling ultra-short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million miles of space. So Hello Mars IV had arrowed out into the silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder over its fate.

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