Sisko Rolf expected trouble when the patrol ship chased smugglers into the underground caverns of Mars. He did not expect the crash that left him alone in a maze of tunnels forty miles beneath the planet’s surface.
With no hope of reaching the surface and no allies nearby, Rolf begins a desperate search for a way out. Instead he falls into something no one on Mars believes still exists—a hidden world drifting inside a colossal cavern, divided between fertile lands and a blasted desert. Strange races live there, descended from ancient Martian peoples. One group guards the memory of a vanished civilization. Another marches across the wasteland in savage raids.
Among the defenders of this secret world is Altha, a woman whose strange heritage gives her the power to read thoughts. Her people live in fear of slavers who hunt them across the deserts of this tiny world. Outlaws from the surface have also discovered the cavern and now stalk the skies in rocket flyers, eager to seize anything valuable.
For Rolf the discovery changes everything. Beneath the caverns lie the lost seas of Mars—enough water to bring life back to the dry colonies of the northern domes. If he can escape and carry the news to the surface, an entire planet could be saved.
But escape will not be simple. Raiders are closing in, ancient enemies are already marching, and the only ship capable of reaching the surface has fallen into outlaw hands. To reach it, Rolf must cross a battlefield where two strange races clash and every enemy in the cavern is hunting him. Somewhere above them waits a dying world that desperately needs what he has found.
Basil Wells wrote dozens of science fiction and fantasy stories during from the 1940s through the 1970s. “The Hairy Ones” reflects the energetic planetary adventure style that flourished in those magazines, combining lost civilizations, strange Martian races, and high-speed action inside a vividly imagined alien landscape.
