But I had faith in the regularity of Mars. I knew that while on Earth weather had more effect than climate, on Mars vegetation swept southward from the pole in the Northern summer, due, I imagined, to the melting of the polar cap and the liberation of water vapour into the air. Or perhaps I did not know it. Perhaps it was only a hypothesis of mine. But, of necessity, I was not a theoretical scientist, demanding that facts be gathered and assembled before a conclusion could be drawn from them. As a practical man, I had to guess what facts might be important, which meant I had to make my hypothesis first, in order to decide what I had to look for.
The average spacing of plants around the wreck was one of five yards and one foot in all directions. The plants grew to a maximum of three inches high and their roots spread out, above ground, to a distance of two feet six inches. To the south, the distance between the plants was the same, and so was their height and their circumference, but their appearance differed. They looked somehow, strangely, thinner on the ground. To the north, the average distribution was one plant in less than each five yards. Their circumference was narrower, but they grew to four inches high. The ants' nests, as I called them, were distinctly more frequent in the north.
I decided to make my first journey, my first long journey with an all-night camp, to the north. It was possible that I was being misled. The insects and the flowering plants were desert fauna and flora. Perhaps I would only be going deeper into the desert. Perhaps, indeed, my 'south' was north. But only experiment could decide. I had reached that stage of my knowledge of the Martian terrain: I was ready for the experimental testing of my hypothesis.
I set off at dawn, when the slanting sun-rays somehow reflected from the upper atmosphere and caused it to take on that pale-green hue, like a faintly perceptible fluid in which the unwinking stars still seemed to swim. It was cold, dreadfully cold, at that hour on the Martian surface, and at that hour, though I doubt if I would have talked much to a companion if I had had one—it would hardly have been possible while wearing masks—I missed companionship most keenly. I discovered an awful fact: that though it may be difficult to leave good friends and plunge into the unknown, it is even more difficult when you have no friends to leave and no one to watch you go.
I took a slightly different route from the one I had taken on my previous half-day passage. It was thus that I passed an area where there were no plants at all, while away to the right of me was a drift of sand. I stopped for a moment to gain my breath and look at it. It was only sand, and should have been disheartening. But any change in that endless landscape was an improvement to me then. I went to the sand and took a specimen. Even common sand might have its uses. If it was pure sand, I might make glass with it. ... I remounted and rode on.
By noon, the sand was gone, and I stopped to take measurements of the plants. They agreed with my previous jottings. My sense of expectation grew. In the direction in which I was travelling there seemed to be a regular increment of growth, not merely a local improvement due to some difference in the surface.
But first, before pressing on, I had to eat, and that was a difficult and dangerous business. I had tried, once, to breathe the Martian air. My mind had become hazy and drunken, with all the symptoms of anoxia, and I had hardly had sense enough to replace my mask. I had learned that while the Martian air was not in the slightest dangerous of itself—I breathed it all the time when mixed with oxygen in my mask—it was deceptive. The body struggled for breath, yet seemed to be breathing normally. So now, sitting behide my machine on the desert earth, beneath the blue-black noonday sky which shone with stars all around the horizon's edge though the sun was overhead, I cautiously took off my mask after taking a breath, drank of the water I had brought with me, and replaced my mask again. Eating was even more difficult, when I had to chew, yet the whole process had to be gone through carefully.
I sat on for five minutes after eating. I wished I had someone to talk to once again. It was not for the sake of companionship this time, but because, by talking, I could have expected to clear my mind about what, if anything, I hoped to find. Man, I thought grimly, is a talking animal. That is how his mind works: by words and expressed concepts which make his experiences become real and have meaning for him. Without words, without talk about what he sees and thinks, he is little better than the brutes. Then I remounted and rode on once more.
Previously, I had been able to make a straight track across the waste. The plants had rarely come directly beneath my wheels, and when they had, I had not noticed them. They had been too thin to cause a bump. Now, I could not help but run over them, they were perceptibly so much thicker on the ground, and when I did so there was not so much a bump as a slight squelch. I was thankful that the plain was not too stony. My improvised saddle was not too comfortable, and I bad not been able to fit my machine with springs. And now, in the afternoon, I sweated as I rode.
The distance I could cover by nightfall would be my total distance. At dawn the following day, I would have to turn back in order to return to the rocket before the succeeding night.
It must have been at about three p.m. that I noticed that the plants were becoming a definite obstacle to my progress. I do not think, such was the toil of my travelling, that I noticed what was happening immediately. It was the chance of passing near one of the now all-too-frequent ants' nests that stopped me. I noticed not so much something new as an absence of what there had been.
The strange creatures which I called ants had always been visible until that moment. Always, around the nests, I had seen them coming and going and I had been to some pains not to run over them as I passed. Now, I remembered that I had not seen them for some time. And, seeing the nest from above, I saw that its opening, the hole or door at the top which the workers used, was closed.
I stopped and stared at the nest. It was, indubitably, of the same type as before, of the same pyramidal shape and made, as they all were, of the unchanging desert earth. But the hole had been plugged and the mound was lifeless.
I looked around me at the plants. Was it connected or disconnected that they seemed to have lost their flowers? Though, in this comparatively lush region of the desert, I had earlier seen double blooms, now such flowers as there were were faded, with fallen petals. Ahead of me, the desert stretched green, not pink or mauve.
I rode on for perhaps half an hour, then stopped again. The plants, flowerless, were one foot high, and I was toiling through them. But it was not that which stopped me. It was the sight, on the top of one of the plants, of a green, round fruit.
The ants were in hibernation—though the word, so far as I could guess, referred to the wrong season—and yet there was a fruit.
I remembered how, on seeing the flowers, I had thought: Flowers for what? Then I had seen the ants.
It was two hours later, and almost on the evening of my advance into the region of the Martian summer, that I pushed my progress so far as to see the first ripe fruit. It was large and tough and leathery, like a cactus. It was about a foot in diameter and two feet high.
It would have been taller still, perhaps four feet or so, except that it had been bitten clean in half.
Yet when I tried to cut it with my knife, the skin was as tough as my leather shoe sole.
15
i REMEMBER another picture of my famous precursor in the art of lonely living. He stands on the empty beach of his earthly island, looking downwards and wearing an expression of fear and disconcertment. And what causes his strained attitude, he who until that moment had had nothing to hope or fear, is a naked human footprint in the sand.
So I must have stood, looking at that bitten cactus-fruit. It was the fruit for which I had perhaps been looking, which might, just conceivably might, yield to some treatment which might turn it into human food. But, in the moment of finding it, as a part of finding it, I became aware that I was not alone.
I had simply not believed in large-scale life on the planet Mars. That there could be other creatures of even remote
ly animal nature had seemed as impossible to me as that an Abominable Snowman should dwell on the upper reaches of the mountains in Tibet. It had been an unlikely fiction, not sustainable on any practical grounds at all.
Yet on Earth the wildest tundra supported reindeer. There were great creatures, polar bears and whales, which sustained themselves at the very poles. Our Earth deserts supported such outlandish creatures as the camel, the llama, and the yak. If there was no animal life at Everest's summit, it was not due to altitude or cold but because the gales and snow and ice had reduced the land to naked rock.
While I, as I looked away from the fruit and quickly all about me, saw I was in a fruiting desert now. I was on the very rim of the planet's summer, and ahead of me the land was tinged with red and gold.
The red and gold had been seen from Earth. We had said that because there was so little oxygen in the atmosphere only the lowest plants could grow there. But perhaps even in that we had been guilty of confusion in our own minds. We men on Earth judged all things by ourselves. We put the camel as a lower form of life than the higher apes, although, unquestionably, it was a more highly adapted form.
Higher life, lower life, I thought, looking at that reddish, yellow-cored, bitten fruit: what did we judge them by, intelligence? If we did, then biology was not a science. That life was "highest', if such a term could be used at all, which had adapted itself farthest from the sea of chemical syrups which had bome it.
For it came to me instantly, as I stared unbelievingly at that sliced fruit, that I was not the "highest' life on Mars. On the contrary, I was a highly ill-adapted being. I lived with difficulty and by machines. I was no better adapted to survive on Mars than was a child on Earth that had been stricken by infantile paralysis and confined to an artificial lung.
It took all my will-power to restrain myself from the urge to leap back upon my machine, to turn it round, and to ride back, at all speed, into my naked, open desert. For a creature that could slice through a fruit like that must be formidable in the extreme—formidable if only because of the size to which it had grown, as it must have grown, on a planet with half the gravitational force of Earth.
I forced myself to stand and think. My eyes had, after all, assured me that there was nothing visible within the confines of my horizon. And I knew, realizing what the rapid change in the desert meant, that it was no use to flee.
The desert near the wreck had been, since I had landed on it, a vacancy of sparsely flowering plants. The plants there would always remain sparse. Their distribution could not change as the season advanced. But they could, and must, develop as these plants had developed. They were, when I had left them, still in the stage of spring and blossom. They were still being pollinated by the 'insects'. But they must, soon, begin to fruit like these. And then, if creatures lived on the fruits, and moved southwards in the bearing season. . . .
I had not once thought, since I had seen the plants around the wreck, what fruit they bore. I had been satisfied with the simple relationship between the plants and the insects, not considering that on Earth no relationships were so simple. As well might I have seen an apple tree in bloom and thought that the tree and the bees which hummed around it were the finished picture, without a thought of birds. Or I might have seen a field of com and not predicated man!
I looked quickly around me again as some half-formed thought slipped through my mind, and then I resumed my staring at that fruit. The thoughts were welling up in me so swiftly that half of them were lost and only the more consistent, dominant ones, remained with me and registered on my memory.
I could have guessed that there would be other creatures. Even Earth astronomers, once convinced that there was plant life on the planet, could have done so. Perhaps there had been an unsuspected innocence in all our thinking about such matters. Planets with little oxygen in the air, we had thought, could not bear animals. Mars could have none, and nor could Venus, because her atmosphere seemed to consist largely of carbon dioxide!
We had once thought, on similar a priori reasoning, that the sun revolved around the Earth.
There, contemplating that bitten fruit on Mars, I thought suddenly in new terms of our cosmos. I thought of Earth as a well-watered planet on which vegetation thrived and was the dominant form of life. That was what the quantity of oxygen in the Earth atmosphere meant—not that ours was a planet greatly suited to animal and human life but that the oxygen-breathing animals could not keep pace with the oxygen-exhaling plants. On Venus, it would be the other way. If 'animal' life consisted only of bacteria, still, there, it must be the dominant form, and plants, though growing in conditions which might be perfect for them, would still be the rarer types, eaten, probably, as soon as they appeared. And on Mars?
Oxygen was rare in the atmosphere, as I knew too well. There was, I had already discovered, an excess of carbon dioxide over it.
I looked round fearfully, then back at the fruit again. I looked round once more, at the gendy rolling plain that was in my view, then back once more. I had the evidence before me and I knew, both from the light gravitational attraction of the planet, and from the thinness of the air, that if creatures there were, besides myself, they must have grown to gargantuan size, with long and slender bones, great bellow-like lungs, and jaws that could slice such a fruit in half.
I turned at last, at last conquering the flood of thoughts that batded through my brain. I did what I might have done whole minutes sooner. I looked not at the fruit but at the ground besides the plant, to the earth that was trodden by my footsteps, but which might bear the imprint of another.
I saw it there, the elongated impression, as of a giant's shoe-sole.
I moved beyond the plant. The earth was disturbed beside it and for some little distance northwards. Then, by impressions in the ground, and from the trodden, broken roots of plants, I inferred that a two-legged creature had come rapidly from north-eastwards, stopped at the plant, and then moved back north-westwards. Heaven knew that I was no tracker, but the impressions were unmistakable, as unmistakable as footprints on a shore.
And I had not made them. I did not make weighty footprints three yards apart. What I did not know was whether the creature that had made them was man, or bird, or beast.
16
BEFORE SUNSET, I moved five more miles back into the still unfruiting desert, and there I camped. I had thought, previously, of the difficulties and dangers of this camp in the open on the Martian surface. I had brought the pressure suit to wear as insulation against the cold, and a tiny tent or covering in which I could lie beside my machine on open ground. I had wondered, seriously if that would be enough, and whether I could survive.
But now it was not the cold I feared.
The cold, indeed, was less than I expected. I have mentioned the dew which was the only irrigation of that whole vast plain, but now, so near the summer belt of life, the dew settled down from nightfall onwards with almost the proportions of a soaking mist. As, with my gloved hands, I touched the fabric of the narrow tent above me, made as it was from bunk-sheets from the wreck, I felt it tight and drumlike, and, through the foreplate of my helmet, I saw that it was translucent with the light of one or other of the moons of Mars.
I had retired into the tent at sundown, remembering my cautious fears of the cold of night. I had allowed my pressure suit partially to inflate, to give me that extra pressure which I knew would help me to guard against the cold. But now, within an hour, I moved to go out again into the Martian night. For one thing, the cold did not seem to be happening in that location and at that season. At least the dew was settling and not yet freezing. And, for another thing, I had more to fear than cold.
It was difficult to get out of that narrow tent in my clumsy pressure suit. I lay for a while with only my head out, looking up at the stars which looked, now it was night, too like the same stars seen from Earth. It was some time before I realised what it was. They were winking, as stars do when shining through the heavy atmosphere of Earth.
It must have been the mist, and the temperature gradations which must exist in the upper reaches of the thin but deeply layered atmosphere of the smaller planet. Then, turning my head, I saw one small moon almost right above me and another setting in the west. I struggled out and to my feet.
There was a stillness. I was used to stillness. It was the greatest and most lonely feature of the plain around the wreck. I had often thought that I had never known silence until I came to Mars.
But why had I come out? It had not been to admire the view nor to undergo the experience of seeing two moons in the sky at once. Nor had it been simply because I could not sleep, my mind being too active and far too full of thoughts. I had moved, instinctively, into the little space between my tent and my machine, and now I looked slowly, turning carefully so as not to make any sound, around the whole horizon.
It was empty, as empty as it had always been and as I had known it would be and yet had found reason to assure myself that it would be. Mars, I told myself, was not a planet for nocturnal creatures. The mist was heavy now, clinging and just faintly visible in the moonlight on the surface, but by dawn the plain would be covered with a layer of frost.
Since I could not sleep, I walked to and fro a little. Tomorrow, I must go back to the wreck. I dared not delay, even moved as I was by the conflicting motives of curiosity and fear. I had brought a sample of the fruit, but I had not dared to taste it yet. Too much depended on my getting back to where I came from to risk the slightest physical disability on the way.
Even if the fruit were edible, it was still not a good prospect for me to try to live on it exclusively, as I*"Would have to do when my store of food ran out. And it might not be edible. I did not see how it could be when the plants it came from had that ammoniacal flavour which marked the difference of their chemistry from anything we had on Earth.
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