Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April-May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
MARS CONFIDENTIAL!
Jack Lait & Lee Mortimer
Illustrator: L. R. Summers
Here is history's biggest news scoop! Those intrepidreporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose best-sellingexposes of life's seamy side from New York to Medicine Hathave made them famous, here strip away the veil of millionsof miles to bring you the lowdown on our sister planet. Itis an amazing account of vice and violence, of virtues andvictims, told in vivid, jet-speed style.
Here you'll learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, thepart the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapinethat has made this heavenly body the cesspool of theUniverse. In other words, this is Mars—Confidential!
P-s-s-s-s-t!
HERE WE GO AGAIN—Confidential.
We turned New York inside out. We turned Chicago upside down. InWashington we turned the insiders out and the outsiders in. The howlscan still be heard since we dissected the U.S.A.
But Mars was our toughest task of spectroscoping. The cab driversspoke a different language and the bell-hops couldn't read ourcurrency. Yet, we think we have X-rayed the dizziest—and this mayamaze you—the dirtiest planet in the solar system. Beside it, theEarth is as white as the Moon, and Chicago is as peaceful as the MilkyWay.
By the time we went through Mars—its canals, its caves, itssatellites and its catacombs—we knew more about it than anyone wholives there.
We make no attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to makeMars a better place in which to live; in fact, we don't give a damnwhat kind of a place it is to live in.
This will be the story of a planet that could have been another proudand majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead,in the comic books and the pulp magazines.
We give you MARS CONFIDENTIAL!
I
THE LOWDOWN CONFIDENTIAL
Before the space ship which brings the arriving traveler lands at theMartian National Airport, it swoops gracefully over the nearby city ina salute. The narrow ribbons, laid out in geometric order, graduallygrow wider until the water in these man-made rivers becomes crystalclear and sparkles in the reflection of the sun.
As Mars comes closer, the visitor from Earth quickly realizes it has amanner and a glamor of its own; it is unworldy, it is out of thisworld. It is not the air of distinction one finds in New York orLondon or Paris. The Martian feeling is dreamlike; it comes from beingclose to the stuff dreams are made of.
However, after the sojourner lands, he discovers that Mars is not muchdifferent than the planet he left; indeed, men are pretty much thesame all over the universe, whether they carry their plumbing insideor outside their bodies.
As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft,cheap gambling, drunke