"Cidade Perdida de Marte" , uma novela de Ray Bradbury , publicado pela primeira vez em Playboy várias capas .
. . Eu acho que foi sobre turistas que viajaram para uma cidade antiga em Marte. Acho que um deles pode ter sido um astronauta, mas tenho certeza de que nem todos foram. . . . Eu acho que um turista era um caçador, outro era um poeta, mas não me lembro de mais nada.
Aaronson ran his finger down the printed guest list.
"An actor, a beautiful woman who happens to be an actress, a hunter, a poet, a poet's wife, a rocket captain, a former technician. All aboard!"
On the afterdeck of the huge craft, Aaronson spread forth his maps.
"Ladies, gentlemen," he said. "This is more than a four-day drinking bout, party, excursion. This is a search!"
He waited for their faces to light properly, and for them to glance from his eyes to the charts, and then said:
"We are seeking the fabled Lost City of Mars, once called Dia-Sao, the City of Doom. Something terrible about it. The inhabitants fled as from a plague. The City left empty. Still empty now, centuries later."
"We," said Captain Wilder, have charted, mapped and cross-indexed every acre of land on Mars in the last fifteen years. You can't mislay a city the size of the one you speak of."
"True," said Aaronson, "you've mapped it from the sky, from the land. But you have not charted it via water, for the canals have been empty until now! So we shall take the new waters that fill this last canal and go where the boats once went in the olden days, and see the very last new things that need to be seen on Mars." The rich man continued: "And somewhere on our traveling, as sure as the breath in our mouths, we shall find the most beautiful, the most fantastic, the most awful city in the history of this old world. And walk in that city and—who knows?—find the reason why the Martians ran screaming away from it, as the legend says, thousands of years ago."
Eventualmente, um deles percebe o perigo (acho que foi o astronauta) e os sobreviventes mal conseguem escapar.
Parkhill shouted below. And Wilder was flying up, up along the wall, looking this way and that.
Everywhere, the sky was closing in. The petals were coming down, coming down. There was only a last small patch of stone sky to his right. He blasted for that. And kicking, made it through, flying, as the final flange of steel clipped into place and the City was closed to itself.
He hung for a moment, suspended, and then flew with the woman down along the outer wall to the dock, where Aaronson stood by the yacht staring at the huge shut gates.
"Parkhill," whispered Wilder, looking at the City, the walls, the gates. "You fool. You damned fool."
They waited a moment longer and listened to the City, humming, alive, kept to itself, its great mouth filled with a few bits of warmth, a few lost people somewhere hid away in there. The gates would stay shut now, forever. The City had what it needed to go on a long while.