Translator's Error

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Administrator Richard Potterboy and historian Theodore McGinnis arrive on Mars to confront the collapse of the Martian Rehabilitation Project, only to find that the latest effort to melt the polar ice has ended in absurd disaster. Philip Grisby explains that the polar furnaces sank, leaving the planet at the mercy of the Blotting Pads—green, disk-like creatures that drink up water and excrete tar, undoing every attempt to revive Mars's canals and civilization. What follows is a bleakly comic tour through bureaucratic failure, scientific frustration, and the stubborn hope of restoring a dying world. As the men cross the desolate landscape, they learn that the Blotting Pads can be destroyed only by electrocution, a fact that shaped the canal system itself, and they confront the eerie mystery that no human has ever been killed on Mars despite the dangers. At the ruins, McGinnis uncovers two indestructible walls covered in murals and hieroglyphics that preserve the tragic history of Mars: a once-fertile planet slowly ruined by the Blotting Pads, while the telepathic Martian Cones wither and vanish as the water disappears. The story ends with the Cones buried in sand, the walls fading into unreadable blankness, and the human project reduced to a lonely deuterium water container drifting across the planet.