Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  I captured one of the insects and put him in a box. I put the box ready to take with me into the rocket on my return.

  Then I did what I hated to do but had to. I took one of the many aluminium bars and pieces which I had had to dismantle from the wreck and walked out to where I had seen the insects' nest. I attacked it with my bar, chipping my way into it from the side. I was wary as I did so, standing back and watching after each few blows. The insects were six inches long as I have said. A creature of the same relative size as myself, attacking an ants' nest back on Earth, would have been attacked in turn and driven off by fighter ants. It was with an expectation of revulsion that I awaited the emergence of the swarm. That the creatures were so slow-moving did not, somehow, lessen the horror that I felt as I imagined breaking through to the inner swarm.

  It did not happen. There was something frightening in the very absence of reaction. Those creatures had no responses whatever to attack. While I dug into the side of their nest they came and went with blind indifference. One of them, emerging from their hole, came straight towards me, stopped when he struck my foot, turned, went out in a semi-circle, and then proceeded happily about his business.

  When I had the side of the nest open, and could see their roadways and their disgusting grubs, they took no notice. One of them, emerging along a channel that I had broken, fell out of the nest and began to walk in circles. He seemed to have utterly no conception of what had happened to him.

  So far as I could see, when night came, they would all die. They were making no immediate effort to rebuild their broken home. I thought about that as I found what I was looking for: a store of greenish liquid in a series of wax-lined cup-like depressions quite near the outside of the nest. I took my sample in an improvised scoop I had brought with me, then carefully built up the nest again. I hoped they would have the sense to reopen the interior channels I had disturbed, but I was not sure. For all I knew, after a million years of stasis, they might die at the slightest disturbance of their way of life. I hoped not. If I found that the honey—I hoped it was that—was all I had to eat, and if a whole nest died each time I took some, I could see myself being forced to adopt a wandering life, and the whole planet would hardly, ultimately, support me.

  I went back to the rocket in haste, hoping my pan had not boiled dry. When I arrived I took my specimens in with me, having thought about it first, and tightly enclosed them in lidded boxes. I had been deliberately taking the risk of some strange infection from the Martian air ever since I had first stepped outside my rocket and, though I was beginning to realise that Mars, like the polar regions of Earth, was singularly lacking in infections, I still kept the chances to the minimum.

  The pan had not boiled dry. When I took off the lid pale fronds were simmering in a concentrated greenish liquid.

  I looked at the result of my handiwork with perturbation.

  I wished I had a dog or a cat to try it on. It was true that the brew had not stained the pan, and, so far as I could see, the very greenness, speaking of chlorophyll and the same sort of photo-synthesis by which plants gained their living back on Earth, was reassuring. The boiling should surely have killed bacteria; and the plants, lacking enemies as did the insects, could have had no reason to carry artificial poisons. All the same, I was doubtful. I took a frond in my mouth and held it there, then spat it out, holding a glass of water ready to wash my mouth.

  No taste. No result at all at first. Then, faintly, perhaps from the steam that was still arising from the pan, I detected the faint aroma of ammonia.

  When I tried again, and bit into a frond, it was distinctly there, faint but repugnant. And there was another taste, which I could not identify. Though I could not identify it, it was enough to cause me to stop my experiments abruptly.

  I stood there wondering, then put my pan away. I had so little to go on, no more than smells and flavours. Yet I saw the danger, and a very acute one it was.

  I know very little about organic chemistry. But I did know that life on Earth consisted mainly of hydrocarbons with their atoms arranged in certain ways. When the precise construction of the molecules was tampered with no living things resulted but plastics and the innumerable and variegated substances of the chemical industry.

  I did not let the devastating knowledge dawn on me just then. I did not dare to. I set to work on my insect. It was unfortunate that I had to kill him with a slender knife, but I had no chloroform nor any of the other equipment of the vivisectionist's table.

  As soon as I used the knife, I knew he was not an insect, but of necessity, I had to go on thinking of him as that, because nor was he a vertebrate. He had no external skeleton and no backbone, but only a leathery skin and strips of gristle in his legs.

  Outwardly,he consisted of two halves, as opposed to the Earth insect's three sections. His after-part consisted of four legs mounted on an internal structure of gristle that would have served as an excellent model for the fuselage of an aeroplane. His fore-part consisted of a similar structure carrying two legs, his long proboscis, and a pigmented area I took to be an eye.

  Inside,the black portion contained what no insect on Earth ever had, a lung. I would be true to say that a good half his weight was lung. It was as though that were the basis of mobile life on Mars: a lung mounted on a means of locomotion. Even the feeding arrangement and diminutive digestive system seemed to be an afterthought. And though I used lenses from the telescopes as my dissection proceeded, I did not find a brain.

  Itappeared that the eye was the brain. At least, the only thing I could detect resembling a nerve-cord ran to it, with branches throughout the rest of the creature's system.

  Ihated the job, and as soon as possible I cleared the mess away. It was possible that I might live on Mars on a diet of 'insects" lungs, but I thought that if I did I would probably die of nausea. If you reached that stage of survival, it was very much a question of why you tried to live at all.

  Myremaining sample was the honey. And I knew by now that it was not honey, that it originated in a plant that had not the chemistry of an Earth plant, and that it served the needs of a creature that was so unlike anything on Earth that I could not place it in any phylum of biology I had heard of.

  Itwas late by then. As always in the wreck, I was working, in my lonely fashion, beneath the single light bulb, with the cold glitter of metal that had once been functional but now was up-ended in a surrealist fashion all around me. Even to work in the galley I had had to move the stove and stand it upon what had once been the wall partition. My table was the old table-top which had been bolted on to the table legs sideways as they stood out rigidly from what now was wall.

  I remembered that Martian honey. I had brought a good supply of it, and first I boiled a little. I still did not dare to touch or taste a thing without boiling first. But this was very different from the faintly ammoniacal steam that had risen from the plants. To describe it is almost impossible. It is easy to speak of an infusion of aromatic herbs, but the mind jumps at once in the wrong directions. The scent that instantly, on the first warming of the pan, filled the interior spaces of the rocket, had nothing to do with thyme or sage nor any of the stranger ingredients that go into Indian curry.

  It was alcoholic in the first place. The nearest I can come to a description is to suggest a parallel with a fine liqueur, on the Benedictine pattern.

  The substance boiled away, at a very low temperature indeed. It did not even leave a stain on the bottom of the pan.

  I found a section of hollow tube that had once been part of the air supply, leading used air back from that compartment to the potassium purification tanks I no longer used. I made a hole in a saucepan lid and inserted the tube and packed the point, bending the tube itself downwards to another container three feet away. I made, in other words, a still. I watched the golden-greenish fluid drip in an oily fashion from the retort.

  It was not alcohol. Had it been alcohol, it would have evaporated in daytime heat at the pressure in the ro
cket. But I tasted it, aware that I was dealing with a substance of largely mineral content.

  It was not alcohol, but three drops were enough to give me the heady feeling I was drunk. One drop more, and I knew that my judgment would be so distorted I would drink the lot.

  I spent an hour grinning like an idiot and wondering how, if I ever got back to Earth, I could market my liquor and clean up a fortune before every government banned it.

  If it was food, if it could even be described as food, though the quantities I had of it were relatively enormous, it was so dangerous, in its scent and flavour, that I came to think of it as the greatest peril I ran on Mars. Not that it was poisonous in its effects. Not that it even left me with a head. But, drinking it, I would have been sure to sit in idle pleasure while the pumps and machines wore out and the wreck fell in ruin all around me. To say it was habit-forming is a fantastic understatement. It was with a trembling hand and with a determination that I still think of as super-human that I went outside the rocket at midnight in my pressure suit and poured my only available Martian 'food' away. I did not trust myself to live within the scent of it even when I was asleep. I might have sleep-walked, drunk of it, and lived thereafter as a grinning, gibbering idiot, for its chemicals, whatever they were, had an immediate and stupendous effect upon the brain.

  Living substances on Mars differed dangerously from their equivalents on Earth.

  13

  i REMEMBER one of the illustrations in the copy of Robinson Crusoe which I read as a boy. Robinson stands on a promontory surveying his island. He wears a goatskin coat and hat, carries his gun over his shoulder, and has his parrot on his arm. Perhaps that is the way a castaway may have looked in those days. I do not know. What I do know is that when I had established myself to the extent of providing myself with the most basic necessities of life for a man of my own age, which was to say air and water and a source of power, and when I had to begin to think of exploring the Martian surface with a view to acquiring the secondary necessities, such as food and a source of raw materials, I must have presented a very different picture.

  The tricycle—I remembered my dream—took me a week to make. That it should be made was not dictated by any conception I had of myself as a twentieth-century man, who must automatically possess some form of transport. It was the result of simple observation and necessity. The Martian plain, what I had seen of it, was flat. It seemed to go on for great distances all around me in all directions. To cross it, I must take large supplies of oxygen and water with me, and, even despite the reduced gravity of the smaller planet, I could not envisage myself carrying these necessities, together with shelter for the night, upon my back. Nor did I think that walking would be a fast enough means of progress when I was tied to my base to the extent of having to return to it to replenish my bulky supplies every few days at least.

  I thought of it as a tricycle, but it was more like a halftrack. The tracks themselves were gear-chains, mounted on gear-wheels, one track on each side of the level platform above the back axles. On Earth, such tracks, made of light unprotected chain, would have rusted through and become immovable as soon as the dust wore off the protective grease. On Mars, owing to the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, there was no rust.

  The tracks were driven by pedals like a bicycle on Earth, or, when the going was tough, the pedals could be assisted by a small electric motor. On Earth the motor would not have been worth taking because of the weight of the battery cells, taken from the wreck, which I used to drive it. On Mars, with the weight of everything cut down to half, it was well worth while. The steering was accomplished by a single wheel at the front, which, with a handlebar and aluminium forks cut from the twisted girder-structure of the wreck, gave the machine its tricycle appearance.

  All the machinery came from the gyros and the control-gear of the rocket. The front wheel itself was one of the large, disc-like wheels which, spinning at thirty thousand revolutions a minute, had been the stabilisers of the rocket.

  On the level platform at the back of the tricycle I mounted a tank of liquid oxygen. When I was ready to make my first excursion across the plain of Mars, I mounted a seat or saddle above the pedals, took off the harness and cylinder I always had to wear when I moved on foot, and connected my mask to the breathing apparatus mounted on the vehicle. The handlebar was a straight bar, with no fancy curves. I carried not a gun but a telescope slung from my shoulder. On my wrist I carried not a parrot but a compass which I had had to make, beginning by magnetising a piece of iron in a coil of wire.

  On the platform behind me, besides the oxygen, were rough boxes containing my equipment. I had only one thing capable of keeping me warm and alive if I had, as I expected, to spend nights out in the open. This was the old pressure suit, which was insulated enough for use in space itself, and which I had to take with me. Apart from that, I had collecting-boxes for the specimens I hoped to find. I had lenses taken from the astronomical telescopes, with which to examine plants and any creatures there might be. I had a hammer, to be used for geological purposes when breaking chips off rocks. I took water and corked bottles.

  I also took, inside my own skull, the brain of a twentieth-century man. It had not been a particularly good brain, back on Earth. No one had admired it. No one had ever called me brilliant. I was just the sort of person who was useful on a camping holiday, who would mend his own punctures when out cycling, and who would give a hand to help decarbonise the engine of a car. As a practical engineer, I had never ranked very high with the mathematicians and professors back at Woomera. I had always been more interested in how than why, in whether things looked as though they were going to work rather than in whether they gave me aesthetic pleasure, and even when I had had a phase of intellectualism and taken to vegetarianism as a hobby, I had been more interested in proving to myself that people could live without eating meat than in all the moral reasons that were given for doing it.

  14

  IN THECOURSE of the next few days I established the geography of my immediate surroundings in the plain. To begin with I was afraid to ride far in any direction lest I lose contact with the wreck and be unable to find it again. The narrow horizons of the desert and its only gendy undulating flatness, meant that, returning from a one-day's journey of fifty miles—nearly two degrees of latitude by the Martian scale—I might pass within three miles of my base and never see the dull gleam of the broken metal hull which was all I would have to guide me at that distance.

  Such a loss of contact with the machines on which I depended for my living would have meant my death within a day, for I could not carry more than forty-eight hours' supply of oxygen with me at that time. I was not content until, by building up girders from the wreck, I had raised a thirty-foot mast above my base, with a flag on top, and then, riding out in all directions, I had established six smaller masts, just out of sight of the main mast, driven into the desert earth and inclined in the direction I must go to regain the centre. Then, I had a target ten miles wide to hit, a circle I could not pass through without the certainty of sighting something, and I felt more confident.

  Perhaps such precautions were unnecessary, but no one should decry them who has not themselves felt the awful loneliness, the sense of vacant, inhuman emptiness engendered by that wilderness of Mars. No man, lost on the icy plateau of Tibet, could know the fear of being out of sight of anything on Mars. He would have above him the Earth sky, of cloud and rain and wind. The icy blast, which would tear at his clothes and threaten him with exhaustion by its buffeting would still be breathable air. Lost he might be, but on Earth he would hardly be more than a few hundred miles, a walkable distance, from human kind and sustenance. On Mars, it was true, he would not have to fear the wind, or very rarely, but instead, he would have an awful stillness. He would have, as I had, a sky above him that was itself unearthly, dark or pale green at times, in morning or afternoon, but otherwise a vast hemisphere of deep blue-black, through which, even in daylight, were visible the baleful s
tars. And even that sky was airless, and the land was populated by creatures which, few in number, would better have not existed for all the use they were to human man, while humanity was millions of miles away—an infinite distance and one quite impassable.

  I knew, as soon as I left the wreck at all, that one slip, one mistake, even so small a slip as a twisted ankle, could cause my death. The wreck was my life, my only way of life, and not for a moment, when I was away from it, could I cease to think about how I could get back before the ticking minutes, which used up my oxygen, caused me to die of drowning in the Martian air.

  I had made my compass, but I did not know if I could rely on it. It was true that one arm of the needle pointed regularly towards the sun at noon, but I was not aware then that planetary magnetism is a function of a world's rotation. All I knew was that even on Earth early navigators had had difficulties due to the variation of the needle and that on Mars such variations had not been charted and there was no one to do it but myself.

  Perhaps there was something ludicrous about my early progress. Before setting off at all, I took specimens of the earth in the immediate vicinity of the wreck, and measured the exact distances between the plants. I counted the number of ants' nests I could see when standing on level ground from one position. Then I rode half a day's journey south, towards the sun (though I could not even be sure of that; it was possible that I was well south of the northern tropic and that the sun was north of me at noon), and took measurements again, on the identical-seeming desert there. Then I rode hastily back to the wreck again, and compared my results with those I obtained by a similar journey north.

  There was only a distance of sixty miles between the two positions. On Mars that was a difference of two degrees. It was as though, on Earth, I was trying to determine the geography of the planet by measuring the distance apart of similar trees, growing in similar conditions, in places as far away as Manchester and London.