It was mid-morning. I could not expect the night to intervene. I came out from my wire again with a portable apparatus I had made. It consisted of a battery and a coil of wire and stakes, together with a machine that I can only describe as a mechanical cross-bow. I advanced towards the creatures, unslung my coil, and began to drive in the stakes across their front.
I had judged the speed of their approach carefully to give myself plenty of time to get set up. The wire—the most I had—extended for a hundred yards. Connected to a trembler coil and the battery, it formed a barrier. Behind it, I established myself. I mounted the cross-bow on the tricycle, fitted an arrow in the slot, and wound back the gear which drew back the wire. When I touched the trigger this time, the arrow would be driven with the power, if not the speed, of a rifle bullet.
I must admit that the reason that the apparatus was mounted on the tricycle was that if it did not work, if it could not stop them, then I would have the speed to make my getaway. I had been so unsuccessful against the one creature that I doubted my ability against a dozen, even with the improved apparatus that I had. And I still could not believe that they would not have sufficient intelligence to try to turn my flanks.
They came on, paying no attention to me at all. There was something inexorable about their progress across the plain. I waited for them with mixed feelings. At first, I thought the longer they took the better. I had no wish to try conclusions with them. But the waiting was nerve-racking. After ten minutes my one thought was the wish that they would come and that I could get the experiment over with.
Except for the one on the extreme right, they looked different from the earlier example of their species I had seen. They looked shorter and fatter, and more like perambulating barrels or grease tubs than anything I could conceive. I imagined, wrongly I later believed, that I was facing a tribe or pack of them, with one male and—perhaps, I did not know—a following of females. I could not even dream whether the bi-sexual system was also the rule on Mars.
What destroyed my project was that the 'male' broke from the pack. I watched him with horror and fascination. He came upon a place where I had been cutting fruit. It was an episode which taught me much about his degree of intelligence. I had noticed already that he was going from one to another of the fruit he had severed several days before, and, at every mark he had made on the ground, he altered course slightly and the group altered with him. Now he came to a spot where his tracks were overlaid by mine and the fruit was gone.
He stopped. He looked around the horizon. He showed evidence of distress by moving back and forth across his front while the rest of the line stood waiting. I gasped when I saw what was happening. It was as though he had had a fixed plan in his mind, an area which had to be covered that day, and now that plan had gone awry. But did not that imply intelligence of a sort? Had I not been wrong in my estimates then? I watched him carefully and with anxiety. And then I saw him do what insects do when they are disturbed in their instinctive processes.
While the line stood stopped, he went off alone. He started on my right and he went farther to my right. He began to cut the fruit and mark the ground again, as he had done a few days earlier.
And he was going round my wire. That would not do. I started forward. At least I knew now which one I had to stop. I in turn made a sortie as though in an armoured car. It would have been ludicrous, if it had not been deadly, this conflict between an Earth man with improvised resources and a Martian who had not the kind of intelligence which could tell him what was happening.
I approached and fired, still moving forward, at a distance of fifty yards. My cross-bow was capable of sighting like a rifle and I could not miss. I watched the arrow fly, and immediately drew back, half-turning, but watching him, and ready to take to flight.
The arrow penetrated. I think it would have gone through a thin sheet of armoured steel. I saw him stagger. And then, blindly oblivious, he went on.
He went on, as he had been doing, still cutting fruit and marking the ground, in the direction of the wreck 1 I left my wire fence, which already was outflanked, and rode parallel with him, at a distance of almost a hundred yards, towards the other fence, the one round the wreck, which I had left alive. I was there, watching him, when, reeling and staggering, but apparently understanding nothing, not even his own approaching end, he reached it. I saw him actually touch and breast the wire. I saw the flash.
And he still went on. He fell to earth not more than a few yards from the wreck itself. He tried to get up, and he collapsed again. The rest of the creatures, in line, stood waiting.
I felt simultaneous triumph and dismay. I had killed. I had won a round. And yet my fencing was not strong enough or powerful enough to stop the Things. I saw what happened when the leader died. Indeed, I could only tell when he died by what happened.
The next to him in the line moved forward. He followed the new track of severed fruit and marked ground that the dead leader had made. And the rest of the line moved forward too, as though nothing had happened. They began to 'graze' once more, and they came up against my isolated stretch of wire.
I saw another flash, and one of them convulsed and fell. But neither he nor any other of them paid the slightest attention to that fact. He got up and came on. They went through the wire and advanced towards me. I retreated before them. I fitted another arrow to my bow and fired. I killed again. Riding round and round them, while they remained oblivious to me, I killed four times. Then I had no more arrows left and they kept on, closing their ranks and still razing the crop all around the wreck. At the wreck itself, they split and flowed round it like a tide.
In despair, I looked to the horizon to the northwards. There was so much of the plain that was still untouched. Then I saw, on the horizon to the northwards, the heads and bodies of other groups of Things.
I knew I was defeated. The plain was becoming utter desert round me, and I could not stop the forward movement of the flood.
I took refuge in a sandy, salty patch of earth where no plants grew. I watched the creatures, all that afternoon, eat up my crop. They avoided the salty, sandy area, and at nightfall they were all to the southward, silent, and, I presumed, sleeping.
I went back slowly to the wreck across the utter desert. I looked in my bin, which was undisturbed. I had two layers of fruit, far too little in bulk to last me through the Martian double year. And I had five carcasses in all, gross bulbous things, the dead, insect-minded creatures that I hated.
I shuddered as I went inside. I thought that I would probably have to try to eat the things, but I was already feeling sick, and the thought was worse. I would not have touched or approached any of them except that the first had died almost outside my door.
Then, passing him in the evening light, I saw that a form of decay had set in already. The gross, twisted body was covered with a mauve sheen, presumably of bacteria, and, loathesomely, his extremities were already encrusted with a white powder.
A powder resembling that of the sandy, salty patches in the soil of which I had found only two in all my wanderings. I looked down at the white powder which, raised by my passage, had harmlessly coated me, and felt a sudden disgust of insane proportions. I did not understand Mars. More than not understanding. I suddenly felt frightened of it, madly, to a degree which left my own new certainty of ultimate starvation as little more than a minor, distant, and peaceful threat.
22
i Dm NOT expect to sleep that night: I was too near the utter humiliation of despair. I had seen all my work come to nothing and all my hopes vanquished in an afternoon. But that was not the worst of it. What humiliated me beyond bearing was that I had made scarcely a ripple in the life of the plains of Mars. I did not know how it could have been. I had read enough books in my time, fanciful stories of how strange, Earth-men, strangers on strange planets, had mastered their environment by a few quick moves and ruled triumphantly and ail-powerfully. Perhaps I had dreamed of something of that sort for myself. But, instead, I f
ound that my situation was more like that of the first white men to penetrate into the great plains of North America: in a strange land and facing strange threats, and always on the brink of starvation, it was, or had been, touch and go whether I would learn enough of what I faced in time or whether I would perish just because I did not realise enough the strangeness.
My camp in the wreck, which had come to seem my home, familiar, and offering security by its permanence, now seemed to me once more what it had been in the first place, a precarious foothold on a world in which the only thing I could expect was the unexpected. Only while, before, I had been ready for anything, including almost any subversion of the laws of nature, I now understood that the natural laws of science must and did apply but that what I lacked was the knowledge, the imagination even, to understand the ways, different from those on Earth, that they could apply.
Bitterly, helplessly, foolishly and ridiculously, I went inside the rocket. I closed the airlock behind me, and in the metal room that was of Earth, that had been built on Earth, and yet which, symbolically it now seemed to me, lay tilted, broken, and useless for its intended purpose, I sat down and put my head between my hands.
I waited, numbly, thinking of nothing, while outside the mild damp evening settled down, the summer damp, the short-lived, beneficent season of growth on Mars. Creatures, I thought, that performed purposeful actions yet were incapable of learning. That was the mistake I had made—it came to me slowly, seeping into my empty mind: I had presumed that, as among the competitive life of Earth, all living creatures could learn and reason, or at least react to the stimulus of pain and death. But the creatures that had swept my plain clear as a cloud of locusts had behaved like locusts. That one should die or suffer when he reached a certain spot had in no way prevented him or any other of them from pressing on. As much might I have thought to teach grass that because it was grazed to the earth in a certain place it should not grow in that place again.
Outside, I knew, the air was mild, with dew soaking into the parched earth. The plants would recover from the loss of their fruit, would grow fresh roots and re-establish themselves to withstand the long drought that lay ahead. Before the next active season came they would fruit again. But by then I would be dead and the shell in which I lived would become an empty sepulchre, a rustless monument to my futility, a warning to some future generation of Earth-men when they came.
I must write a diary, I thought. I must leave a message, which would persist changelessly in the changeless air. Here, I would say, or somewhere in this vicinity, would be found the skeleton of the man who had not understood that peaceful nomadic creatures living in a non-competitive world, would not develop Earth reactions, and would be, because of their very innocence, unstoppable, while their 'minds' if they had any remained incomprehensible to me. - I touched the depths of despair during that evening when I sat in the wreck on Mars. It was not so much the thought of death that embittered me. Everyone must die, and he who is in despair because of that had better not live at all, since whether it is foreseen in six months, six years, or sixty, it is the same. It was my defeat that rankled, the knowledge that I had had success within my grasp and had failed simply because I had not been efficient enough to compete with other, dim-witted creatures for the fruits of an empty plain.
I began to feel angry with myself because I had not gathered in the fruits earlier, even if they were unripe. I felt angry because I had not made larger, stouter fences, with a hundrd thousand volts upon them, so that the spark would leap out and kill whatever approached before it actually touched and broke the wire. My anger touched itself off in me like a spark. It was like a powder train, as though I had been only waiting to explode.
I got up and put on my mask and cylinder, to go outside. I do not know what I hoped to do there. It was night by then, and I had the sense to take my torch, but I cannot dream that I hoped to accomplish anything in the vacancy of the plain beneath the Martian moons. I think, looking back on it, that I must have felt already, unknown to my conscious mind, the faintest vibration of the earth. I must have thought that there was Something out there, and, angry as I was, the existence of anything, if it were only alive and within my reach, was enough to send me out. I had learned one lesson not with my mind but with my soul: that whatever was coming to me I must go out to meet it, for if I waited for it to come to me I would be defeated.
I let myself through the airlock. It was cold and damp outside, and, for the first time since I had been on Mars I believed I could feel a cool wind stirring. The temperature must have been near to freezing, and yet it was not frost but dew that silvered the world around me in the cold hard light of the two small moons. Night on Mars. Incomprehensibly, inexplicably, my anger and despair hardened into an exultation. I walked away quickly from the wreck and went to that litde rocky rise of land to which I had first gone when I had been the first man to set foot on the soil of Mars. It was not my dominion, that place. Indeed, in it, I was more helpless than the senseless beasts. But I was the first to try myself in it, and to learn the hard way, and the very stimulus of the cold told me that I was not defeated yet.
I went up on to the little rocky rise and looked all around. I stilled and tensed as soon as my eye caught a glint, a flash.
It was from the south-westward, from the region to which the Things had gone. I saw it again, like searchlights or ships' lights far out at sea. And, beneath me, I felt a rumbling in the ground. It was as though, in the far distance, the sound not carrying through the thin rare air, a shunting engine were running on iron rails.
I remembered the beast I bad seen on that other night, the second species, of which I had only seen the light. If it were a beast, I thought. The resemblance came to me again between the greater thing, which illuminated the area of its passage, and some vehicle back on Earth. My mind, stimulated as it was, ran wild with fantastic guesses. Some vehicle manned by an intelligent race perhaps? What, after all, did I know of Mars? It had been too glibly supposed that a space-traveller, landing on a strange planet, would rapidly make contact with the dominant species there. On Earth, if he landed, he would most likely first see cows in the field where his machine touched down. . . . And at nightfall, headlamps along a road. . . .
I was ready for anything when I saw the Lights turn in my direction. I remained where I was as they came to me with inconceivable rapidity on a winding course. A vehicle, I thought, it must be. . . . And then again I felt the thunder as of great legs stamping.
I would not abandon my guess at once. Was it not possible that on Mars a civilisation existed that had never known a wheel? But, as the creature came, whatever it was, my mind began to work at lightning speed. No, it was not possible that any civilisation involving mechanical contrivances should exist if there were no wheels. And yet, what could it be, on Mars, that moved at a speed like that? I had already thought enough of the economics, the bio-economics of life in a rarefied atmosphere. How much air must a creature of that size breathe—it seemed to me that even in the Martian gravitational field it must weigh many tons— merely to sustain its body heat? I had begun those speculations when I had first seen the ant-like insects and discovered that they had lungs. Recendy, I had seen the great two-legged creatures, but they, though big, had been steady and inexorable rather than active in their movements, and I had not been slow to guess how much of those bloated bodies was used for breathing air. Yet this—
In the bright moonlight, it turned, momentarily, broadside on to me. I saw pale lights along its side that were too like those phosphorescent orbs of deep sea fish for the comparison to escape me. But the thing was a hundred feet in length! And it turned, swiftly and thunderously, and came on towards met
I stood in startled fright and was ready to run at last. Anger and the exultation of the night were one thing, but when panic came it was black. If I had known which way to run, I would have done so. But the creature—I rejected the vehicle hypothesis now—turned aside when a hundred yards away and passed
beneath me. It went on, past me, towards the wreck. . . .
I felt, as it passed, a wave of heat. It was a surge of hot air coming up to me. I could not credit what the thing was, or how it lived, but I knew, suddenly, why it lived and moved at night.
I had not time, to think. In the silver light, and with its
lights brilliantly illuminating its every movement, I saw it go
to the wreck and past it. Was it my imagination that it
paused an instant by the wreck, and was it chance that it
bathed the rocket for a moment with its light? But it went
on. It went to where the man-like creatures lay that I had
killed in a scattered group to the northward of the wreck,
and there it stopped. ^
I watched it, fascinated, horrified, and appalled. I was beyond fear and understanding while I watched. For a moment I think 1 exceeded myself. The strangeness of what I saw was such as to hold my attention and my whole mind so that I even forgot, for instance, the possibilities of what was to happen to myself.
For the creature—if creature it could be called—went to one and then another of the corpses. It seemed to me to inspect them, as though wondering how and why they died. It was a while before I heard a ghastly crunching sound and realised that what was taking place was a gigantic meal.
Watching, fearful beyond panic from my knoll, I tried to understand. This, then, was presumably the Martian Tyrannosaurus. But if I could have understood how any creature, in an almost oxygen-free air, could hope to digest and bum such vast quantities of food, I might have believed it better. As it was, I began numbly to think of myself again, of how those creatures, whatever they were, were all that had been left to me of my harvest. What I was seeing now, applied to myself, was the taking away from him who had not even that which he had. My anger came again in such insane proportions that if I had had the means to attack I would have done so, though the creature proved to be the legendary fire-breathing dragon itself.
Rex Gordon Page 11