It was a shock to see that his shape was vaguely man-like. I ought not to have been startled by that fact, despite his size. I should have thought that that general shape, with a body mounted on two legs, and with two appendages for use as arms, had been so successful on Earth that it was at least probable that some creature would be endowed with the same equipment on any other planet bearing life. But it was not his similarities to a man but his differences that appalled me. And yet his actions had a purposefulness that was almost human.
He came forward in bursts or periods of walking of about a hundred yards. At first, such was my own immediate and animal reaction, I thought he was stalking me. I watched him without appearing to watch him, ready, this time, to learn what I could before I indulged in flight or self-defensive action. Then I realised that he was making no attempt at self-concealment, not even during the periods of not-walking, when, had he been stalking in Earth-fashion, he would have frozen to absolute motionlessness. He moved and did something during those times when he was stopped, and I realised that, far from stalking me, he was utterly oblivious of me and was taking no notice either of myself, or of the rocket, or of all that scattered wreckage which lay around, incontestable but hardly explicable to him, over a quarter-mile area of his Martian plain.
I moved then. I went quickly to my bow and took up a position immediately behind a large tank or vat that I had been making with the idea and hope of collecting the fruit when it ripened in my area and storing it and processing it and turning it into food. But he paid no attention to my motion any more than he had to my stillness. He too was interested in the fruit: that was the next thing that registered with me. When I saw what he was doing I thought instandy of that isolated sample of the fruit I had seen away in the north, that had been sliced, or bitten, clean in half.
He was a quarter-mile away from me now, and still coming forward. Every hundred yards he stopped and bent forward the pale blue barrel-shape of his body. His arm made a circular motion as though to strike a, blow. It was the fruit he touched, or picked, or sliced: I could see that. But then, after an instant's pause, he performed what I can only describe as a little dance. He took a pace or two forward and another back and seemed to trail a leg. I watched him with a puzzlement that was overlaid by a growing fear.
I did not know if I were going to be able to live off the products of the plain. I did know that if I were going to win my harvest and gamer it I would have to contest an area, a territory, with whatever creatures the slowly softening climate brought down to me from the north. And here was the first, unknown and with all the menace of the unknown, doing something within the territory, which I must establish as my own.
The onus was on me to attack. If Tie' was as oblivious and incurious of me as he seemed to be, then it was I who would have to drive him off. But I was not, in this situation, the Modem Man, with a gun in his hand and all the power and might of an unchallengeable civilisation behind him. Instead I was a lonely, puny, diminutive creature whose weapon—the bow I held now—was itself a symbol not of strength but weakness. I was one of my land—and ignorant.
I went forward to the limit of my wire. The creature took no notice of me. It was typical of what I now regarded as his mystery that he was not coming straight towards me but rather on a course which would take him within a hundred yards of me and past. I could not conceive of any creature on Earth that would pass so near to an utterly strange and alien feature in its environment and not pause or hesitate or draw back and look, yet this Thing did none of those things. He came on and I saw he was monstrous now: twenty feet tall and slow, and yet inexplicably dainty in his movements. I wondered if I should go outside my wire— I would have to do that if I were going to attack—and I wondered if, were I to attack and be defeated, I would be able to get back again and switch on the electric current which I regarded as my only real defence.
I knew in my mind that I ought not to go out. I ought to watch and then, maybe, later, follow. But, at the same time, I found it impossible to be stricdy logical. The Thing was there, and if I did not face it then, how would I face it later when it came back, perhaps with half a dozen others, perhaps with half a hundred or a horde? I pulled a switch which I had set near the perimeter of the wire for just this purpose, unhooked a section, and stepped through. I had never understood before how it is that fear drives a man forward to attack, but now I knew.
I went into the path of the creature, and he came on towards me. My hand was on my bow and I felt an almost irresistible urge to shoot. It took all my intelligence to restrain myself from attempted murder until I had exhausted every other course. For the Thing had eyes—nature had so far repeated herself as to endow him with binocular vision —and, for the first time, I saw them fixed on me as he approached at a distance of a hundred yards.
Approached, and kept on coming, huge and bulbous, with a strangely mincing gait. As he towered up towards me I looked back quickly at the way I would have to run, saw the gap in my wire open and the switch ready to make it impassable to any creature I could know or understand, and then I picked up a stone and threw it.
I missed. It whistled past his head. And he kept on coming, I imagined, threateningly. Desperately, my hand went to my bow again, but then I rejected it and picked up another stone. I was dimly aware that my purpose was not to declare open war but merely to drive him off. I threw again and hit him square in the middle of what I can only describe by calling it his face.
He came on. He was damaged. I saw an injury to his eye. It was too late to fire my bow now. I turned from his path and ran.
He went on, straight past me. I turned stupidly and stared. Within twenty yards of me, and presenting a perfect target for my bow, he stopped. He leant forward. With a swipe of his arm, he severed half an unripe fruit. He lifted it to his head and seemed to taste it. He dropped it and began what I had thought of as his dance. Now I saw that what he did was to make a mark, with his foot, upon the ground. Then he altered his course to the westwards and went on.
I followed in his tracks. Wildly I looked around the whole horizon. There was nothing else to be seen. Except for this one incomprehensible creature the plain was as it had been ever since I had landed on it. Crazily, I tried to remember my experiences on the night I had spent out in the north. I remembered the lights, the great beast stamping, and then I looked at the back of the Thing before me.
The memory and the actuality did not fit. I was not now looking at the thing I had seen and heard. But I was looking at the one that had cut the fruit. I saw as I passed the one I had seen him cut that it looked the same exactly as the fruit I had seen in the evening in the north. I do not know which thought compelled me most: the knowledge that I was not dealing with a single species or the fact that this Thing, whatever it was, now seemed to me strangely dumb and senseless.
I had thought that any creature on Mars must have the same reactions that were common to all Earth species. It must know pain and fear and aggression. If it were intelligent, it must have curiosity. If it were not, it must have courage or its equivalent. But, as I looked at the great barrel back of the retreating creature, I could make nothing of it except that it had a blind, decisive purpose. It went to another plant and treated it as it had the first, and then it turned north-west abruptly, with me on its tail, wondering.
It seemed to me that it had tried the fruit in the vicinity of the wreck, discovered that it was not yet ripe, and now was retreating northwards.
I do not know why I drew my bow. I think it was the same instinct for self-assertion which makes small boys watch insects for a while, ants perhaps as they cross the road, and then either stamp on them or try to injure them and attempt to stop their flow. It is one of the less admirable of human traits: a desire to use power, or to try power for power's sake. But, standing behind the Thing as he stopped again, I fitted an arrow to my bow, drew back the string, and fired.
I had practised sufficiently to hit a target seven feet wide at a distance of twenty
yards. My arrow flew true. It hit the pale blue and apparendy fleshy body. It must have hurt, too, for, for the first time, I saw the creature quiver.
But the sharpened arrow-tip of hard cast iron did not penetrate. It fell back after thudding against the hide. And the creature did not so much as turn. While I followed him to the limit of where I dared to go on foot within the range of my oxygen supply, and after I stopped and I saw him marching on, he paid no attention to me. He went over my horizon and out of sight, tirelessly and incomprehensibly, showing, in his every movement, a conscious purpose, but never once, so far as I could see, the slightest sign of consciousness.
20
I WAS WORKING on my tanks and vats. The thing to do was to collect and store the fruit within my fortress and behind my wire as soon as it was ripe. Just how I would process it I did not know. I had tried my laboratory' process on specimens of the unripe fruit and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Sometimes I got a sweet-tasting result with the flavour of pineapple and the consistency of dough, and sometimes I got a pullulating mass. But what I thought of, all the time, was of how a creature could have conscious purpose but not the consciousness that went with it. Even ants and bees, if you injured them, became conscious of you and ran away or turned round to attack. Or was I being too provincial and parochial in my thinking? I ran my electric welding iron slowly down a seam. Because Earth was a crowded planet, with a good supply of oxygen and an infinite variety of species of every order, was it simply that I, born in that environment, could not conceive of a creature that was not competitive and never went to war?
But the thing had looked almost like a man, round-headed, two-legged, two-armed, two-eyed. Did not that imply a similar line of development to that which had produced humanity on Earth? Or, if not humanity, then at least, say, squirrels or kangaroos or apes, or any other of the creatures which on Earth had learned to walk on two legs and to use two others for the purpose of transferring food from earth to mouth? Did the very existence of the thing imply that at one time one part of Mars at least had been covered by trees and forests, while the actions of the thing implied that at least there had been intelligence, once?
I looked at the plain around me, desolate and empty as it was, though at that time it was in fact producing the utmost phase of food and life the planet ever knew. I think it was that, the sight of the plain of which by now I knew every fold and stone in my vicinity, which convinced me. Mars had been like that for such countless ages that whatever preceded it was irrelevant. It was not the creature that was strange but I who was jumping to conclusions.
I looked away to the south, where, beyond a region of utter desert, the southern polar cap must be collecting the moisture from the air, laying it down in layer on layer of frost, ready to release it again in six months' time, after the elapse of a quarter of the Martian year. I had decided already that whatever mobile life there was on Mars, at this stage of the planet's development, regardless of what had gone before, must be capable of crossing that desert, of starting again in the south when the new spring came. The creatures, I had thought, must be highly mobile and large in
size. But I had not thought of their subjective characteristics, of their 'character' as it were.
It could not be intelligence that would send them on that twice-annual trek. A creature developing intelligence in that environment would perish before the intelligence, needed to understand the nature of seasonal change, was' sufficient to send it out across hundreds of miles of desert in the hope of meeting a new birth of life half across a world. Only instinct, the race-learning that developed from one generation to the next, could be enough to start the process.
Suddenly I felt lonely, more lonely than I had since I had ever comprehended that there were other creatures beside myself upon the planet. I looked around me and the horizon seemed narrower and more pinched, the sky a more ghastly green, and the land more barren. For I understood that I had been wrong to impute either human or animal intelligence to the creatures. I had been wrong to think in terms of backbones and brains. I would have been nearer if I had thought in terms of ostriches and emus and two-legged birds that lived flightiessly their rurining, instinctive lives on the plains of Earth. I would have been nearer still if I had not thought of the vertebrates at all but of insects and spineless creatures, even more blind and incapable of learning, which only appeared to have intelligence and conscious purpose, and which, because of their intractability, made small boys hate them.
I looked at my bow, which, despite its proved uselessness, still lay near me as I worked. I knew now why I had attempted to shoot the Thing. It had been the natural and inevitable reaction of any human creature to a being whose nature he could not understand and whose mental processes, if any, he could not envisage. It had not only been a senseless will to power. It was something deeper, an atavistic fear.
On Earth, there must have been a time when the intelligent creatures, those capable of curiosity, learning, and some dim self-consciousness, had been at the mercy of the non-intelligent. It might be possible to trace that time back to the contest between the animals and the reptiles, or even farther, to the conflict between the vertebrates and the invertebrates. Man's ancestors then had known fear, and I knew the fear again: the fear of the creatures that were coming to me across the plains of Mars. For human life was intelligent life and its satisfactions were those of conscious appreciation. It was something not understandable, not estimable to me, what blind joys and pleasures creatures however vast could have whose actions were compulsions, who never knew the slightest choice, and whose virtue was their endurance, their ability to sustain purpose and action blindly.
The prospect of sharing a planet with such Things left my mind in a bitter daze. It was as though I were contemplating not the specific difficulties of my lot, my continued uncertainty about my food supply and my knowledge that I would have to fight for it, but something greater. I was contemplating, even as I shrugged my shoulders and went back to work, the nature of life itself, the knowledge that it was at once universal and by no means confined to what we would regard as intelligence. If life were blind, and could exist blindly, through countless generations on a planet, and if human intelligence such as I had were simply a joke or an accident in the universe, then what was the use of anything? What was the purpose of anything, even if one presumed a God, a creator, who could conceivably have a purpose?
Perhaps I was on the verge of madness when I was living, still in and near the wreck, during the interval between the coming of the first of the Things and the arrival of the horde. It was as though, on Earth, the knowledge that there were other people, never, after all, so very far away, closed the mind to certain questions. One drew comfort from other people's mere existence. But where people did not exist? Where life was vast, apparently purposeful, yet also futile, serving no conceivable purpose except to sustain itself? There was nothing beautiful to me then in the sight of the brighter stars which shone dimly through the green haze that hung above me. I felt, as I waited—and the trouble was that the waiting lasted several days—that I had sunk to that level, during my life on Mars, at which I contemplated the inner heart, the emptiness and vacancy which existed beneath all human and animal experience of a universe which was as blind and hopeless and as purposeless as I myself would become if I allowed myself to be that way.
It was sheer stubbornness that made me complete my work on the storage vats and begin to pick the fruit. It was stubbornness that made me grin to myself and refuse to admit that I was facing death or undue difficulty. After all, I did not know what else might come, beside these Things. I had not met the second species yet. And I refused to admit that my desert was a desert or that creatures, senseless as they might be, could be incapable of yielding to some form of contact. If a natural man was anything, I thought, he was a naturalist.
21
I WAS PICKING the fruit when it happened. It was ripe so far as I could see, having turned a reddish gold which gav
e the whole plain a sheen, and I could not understand what held the creatures back. Sensibly, while they did hang back, I worked at my farthest from the wreck. I went out more than a mile to the northwards, picked the melon-like harvest, and put them in sacks which I hung from my tricycle, which I then pushed back to the circumference of my wire. Arriving at the wire, I looked around the horizon, lifted a certain stone, and pulled a hidden switch. With the current disconnected, I entered my compound after disconnecting a portion of the wire, unpacked my cargo and emptied it into the storage vat. Usually I needed, at that point, to go inside the wreck. I would examine my machines and pressure gauges, refill my oxygen cylinder, and note and record the progress of my latest micro-biological experiments with the fruit. I had solved the problem of making it barely edible, and, I hoped, of storing the products, in a dried and dehydrated form. But what the food value was, I could not guess. I was trying, by every means Ij knew, to grow a variety of yeasts and cultures in the juices, in the hope of producing protein, carbohydrates, and also vitamins.
After spending perhaps half an hour attending to my various chores and researches, I would let myself out of the wreck again, by the simplified and improved airlock I had made by then, take a glance at my vast but still almost empty bins, and set out once more across the plain, working the northward section first.
It was at the end of one of these runs, when I had ridden out on my tricycle and was prepared to pick, that I saw them coming. They were visible to the north of me, a long line of perhaps two dozen heads, picking like locusts so that the horizon behind them looked strangely pale and green, denuded.
I froze where I was. So slow was their progress that I was able to stay and watch them for half an hour. They stopped at intervals. As to what they did with the fruit when they had picked it, I could only make out that they seemed to eat it. I watched, amazed and startled at their apparent digestive process. They themselves looked gross and ripe, well-fed, as well they might if they had grazed, in that fashion, all the way down from the northern pole. Then, hastily, I began to pick what fruit I could. I realised that I would have time to take at least one more load back home. I worked with the speed of despair, went back and retired temporarily behind my wire.
Rex Gordon Page 10