Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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 intrepid reporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose best-selling exposes of life's seamy side from New York to Medicine Hat have made them famous, here strip away the veil of millions of miles to bring you the lowdown on our sister planet. It is an amazing account of vice and violence, of virtues and victims, told in vivid, jet-speed style._
_Here you'll learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, the part the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapine that has made this heavenly body the cesspool of the Universe. 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, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get,thrown on a large screen, a peep show you never saw on your TV duringthe science-fiction hour.
Each day the Earth man spends on Mars makes him feel more at home;thus, it comes as no surprise to the initiated that even here, atleast 35,000,000 miles away from Times Square, there are hoodlums whotalk out of the sides of their mouths and drive expensive convertibleswith white-walled tires and yellow-haired frails. For the Mafia, thedread Black Hand, is in business here--tied up with thesubversives--and neither the Martian Committee for the Investigationof Crime and Vice, nor the Un-Martian Activities Committee, can dentit more than the Kefauver Committee did on Earth, which is practicallyless than nothing.
* * * * *
This is the first time this story has been printed. We were offeredfour trillion dollars in bribes to hold it up; our lives werethreatened and we were shot at with death ray guns.
We got this one night on the fourth bench in Central Park, where wemet by appointment a man who phoned us earlier but refused to tell hisname. When we took one look at him we did not ask for his credentials,we just knew he came from Mars.
This is what he told us:
Shortly after the end of World War II, a syndicate composed ofunderworld big-shots from Chicago, Detroit and Greenpoint planned tobuild a new Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. This was to be a plushproject for big spenders, with Vegas and Reno reserved for thehoi-polloi.
There was to be service by a private airline. It would be soultra-ultra that suckers with only a million would be thumbed away andguys with two million would have to come in through the back door.
The Mafia sent a couple of front men to explore the desert. Somewhereout beyond the atom project they stumbled on what seemed to be theanswer to their prayer.
It was a huge, mausoleum-like structure, standing alone in the deserthundreds of miles from nowhere, unique, exclusive and mysterious. Theprospectors assumed it was the last remnant of some fabulous andlong-dead ghost-mining town.
The entire population consisted of one, a little duffer with a whitegoatee and thick lensed spectacles, wearing boots, chaps and a silkhat.
"This your place, bud?" one of the hoods asked.
When he signified it was, the boys bought it. The price wasagreeable--after they pulled a wicked-looking rod.
Then the money guys came to look over their purchase. They couldn'tmake head or tail of it, and you can hardly blame them, because insidethe great structure they found a huge contraption that looked like acigar (Havana Perfecto) standing on end.
"What the hell is this," they asked the character in the opera hat, inwhat is known as a menacing attitude.
* * * * *
The old pappy guy offered to show them. He escorted them into thecigar, pressed a button here and there, and before you could say "AlCapone" the roof of the shed slid back and they began to move upwardat a terrific rate of speed.
Three or four of the Mafia chieftains were old hop-heads and felt athome. In fact, one of them remarked, "Boy, are we gone." And he wasright.
The soberer Mafistas, after recovering from their first shock, laidungentle fists on their conductor. "What goes on?" he was asked.
"This is a space ship and we are headed for Mars."
"What's Mars?"
"A planet up in space, loaded with gold and diamonds."
"Any bims there?"
"I beg your pardon, sir. What are bims?"
"Get a load of this dope. He never heard of bims. Babes, broads,frails, pigeons, ribs--catch on?"
"Oh, I assume you mean girls. There must be, otherwise what are thediamonds for?"
The outward trip took a week, but it was spent pleasantly. During thattime, the Miami delegation cleaned out Chicago, New York andPittsburgh in a klabiash game.
The hop back, for various reasons, took a little longer. One reasonmay have been the condition of the crew. On the return the boys fromBrooklyn were primed to the ears with _zorkle_.
_Zorkle_ is a Martian medicinal distillation, made from the milk ofthe _schznoogle_--a six-legged cow, seldom milked because few Martianscan run fast enough to catch one. _Zorkle_ is strong enough to ripsteel plates out of battleships, but to stomachs accustomed to thestuff sold in Flatbush, it acted like a gentle stimulant.
Upon their safe landing in Nevada, the Columbuses of this first flightto Mars put in long-distance calls to all the other important hoods inthe country.
The Crime Cartel met in Cleveland--in the third floor front of atenement on Mayfield Road. The purpose of the meeting was to "cut up"Mars.
Considerable dissension arose over the bookmaking facilities, when itwas learned that the radioactive surface of the planet made itunnecessary to send scratches and results by wire. On the contrary,the steel-shod hooves of the animals set up a current which carriedinto every pool room, without a pay-off to the wire service.
The final division found the apportionment as follows:
_New York mob_: Real estate and investments (if any)
_Chicago mob_: Bookmaking and liquor (if any)
_Brooklyn mob_: Protection and assassinations
_Jersey mob_: Numbers (if any) and craps (if any)
_Los Angeles mob_: Girls (if any)
_Galveston and New Orleans mobs_: Dope (if any)
_Cleveland mob_: Casinos (if any)
_Detroit mob_: Summer resorts (if any)
The Detroit boys, incidentally, burned up when they learned theMartian year is twice as long as ours, consequently it takes