Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  But I saw it stop, and turn in the moonlight, and face the wreck again. I saw its lights, its radiance rather, that it cast before it, bathe the broken rocket and all the scene of what had been my home. And I saw that light wink on and off, and change colour, running up and down the visual scale from ultra-violet to infra-red and back.

  I think I guessed what was going to happen. I took one pace forward. Then the creature was advancing on the wreck, as though with threatening intent, and I was shouting in my mask and ninning. If the wreck was damaged— and the creature was big enough to do it—then I was completely lost. It would be better to die then and there in defence of my habitation and my machines.

  Neither the sound of my shouting nor my running made any difference to the thing. It advanced upon the wreck with a strange, slow caution, as though, I wildly imagined, it expected the mass of dead steel to get up and retreat from it or attack. I watched with horror, thinking as I ran in the moonlight that that was my end.

  I think it was by accident that my torch flicked on. Certainly the moonlight was bright enough for me not to need it, and I never had used it in the open while on Mars.

  The great thing turned. I had a vision of a gaping mouth that was not so much a jaw as a nightmare opening fringed, as though by a beard, with tiny arms or legs which might be used, I could only guess, as are the similar tentacles of crustaceans, to break up food and to push it in. Then I could see no more. I was bathed with a narrow, brilliant beam of light, of an intensity, it seemed to me, of sunlight.

  I went down on my knees. Terror, when it reaches a certain stage, paralyses all the impulses, so that the mind operates seemingly in a vacuum, conscious of nothing but its own existence. Blinded, bowed, I knelt there.

  The light flicked on, flicked off. As I had seen it do already, it ran up and down the visual scale. But the creature had stopped. It was not approaching me.

  I think it must have been for a minute that I knelt like that I was conscious only of the changing colours of the light and its intermissions. Somehow—how can I convey this?—I gained from those steady charges, unhurried and unstartling as they were, a sense of peace.

  A thought broke through the mask that seemed to have settled on my brain. I put my torch before me and pressed the switch. I pressed it and flicked it off again. It was my final throw of madness, to attempt to communicate with a land-borne deep-sea monster.

  It workedl The radiance, the changing colours faded. In its place, after a pause, came a single flashing light, the echo and image of my torch.

  I flashed. I used my rudimentary knowledge of the Morse code. The letters came back to me, echoing my spacing, senselessly and meaninglessly, but accurately.

  Not understanding, not even daring to imagine what I had discovered, I abandoned my useless groups and phrases, I sent flashes in groups of one and two and three and four. I received an identical answer. Then I sent a group of, counting carefully, ten.

  The answer I got was nine.

  I paused and waited. I received a signal that seemed to me to be a meaningless jumble. I tried to imitate it, and must have succeeded, for I got another one, more difficult, I failed at that, and we both paused, waiting.

  I knew I was faced with a creature of strange and complex intelligence which could not count to ten. What 'she' knew, I can't imagine. That, I imagine, she had discovered some strange and puny, dim-witted creature in her domain.

  She backed away and went carefully round me and away into the night. Behind her, where she had lain while she 'talked' with me, the ground glowed brightly.

  When day came, that patch of ground was bare and covered with white, like salt. And, though three of the corpses outside the wreck were left, they were pullulating masses, mauve in the centre, deliquescent with a shining liquid, but crusted white on the outside with a powder that seemed to grow like fungus.

  Red-eyed, sleeplessly, balefully, I looked at them.

  It was by eating such things as that, that the monstrous creatures lived at night—lived on Mars, in that thin atmosphere, supporting an intelligence of some kind, and radiating a body heat which told of a metabolism and power beyond my dreams.

  23

  i Dm NOT understand the full horror at first. At first I simply stood and looked at the barren plain around me, at the stripped land, and wondered if the creatures would come back. Even about that I only wondered if I would survive their return, or whether, if they had gone on to the southward with their ever onward-rolling wave of life, I would be left to starve slowly on the fruidess plain.

  It was only slowly as I stood there, staring and trying to recall again and again the incidents of the night, that I began dimly to understand. It was then that horror came.

  For they were men, those creatures that had come to me across the plain in daylight, and whom I had killed. It was true that they had defeated me by their stupidity, by their failure to respond to threats, to experience, or even to the fate of the first of them to die. But they were still 'men': two-legged, lung-breathing animals that lived on the fruits of the soil, wandering and nomadic. They were as much 'men' as the Martian 'insect' was an insect, as the 'plants' were plants, and as much as the substance of the desert all around me could be described by our common name of 'earth'.

  Only they were not the highest form of creation on Mars. If what I had seen had the significance I thought it had they were the herds, the field creatures, the cattle of a greater creature that preyed on them at night: something biologically inconceivable to us—and this was where the horror began—something that on Mars at least, could only be conceived of as a higher form.

  Physically shattered by the night, I stood swaying by the wreck under a crushing mental blow. It was minutes, hours maybe, before I began to know what it was. And then my grasp of it, of the reason why I was so appalled, came only slowly to me, item by item, as I thought. For I was facing an experience that had never come to a human being before.

  Man might have thought that, venturing on other planets, he would face new experiences. But he had not. He had thought that he would face the same experiences as on Earth, but of a different order. Perhaps it had been impossible for him to imagine anything quite new, for which his experience had not prepared him. But I, unmoving, not daring to examine the corpses nor the remains of the midnight feast, and yet fascinated, unable to go away and rest and leave the scene, had slowly to understand the significance of what had happened before my eyes.

  My mind moved darkly, as though in prayer. Why had man ever wished to venture from his world? Why had I come? Why had common people everywhere been interested, passionately interested, in space-flight, as soon as its possibility began to tentatively to be established? The need, the urge, was rooted in the human situation, in what every man knew of the universe and of his own position in it. He had had a hope, a strange hope. But on that morning on Mars that hope in me was quelled and my soul seemed to shrivel, my emotions freeze.

  Man found himself. He was a speck of life on that cooling planet, Earth, amid myriads of his fellows. He became aware that the universe around him was incomprehensible in its vastness. He became aware that time, as he knew it, was hardly an infant- in the ages that had been and which must be to come. He knew, too soon he knew, that he personally was condemned to die.

  But he also knew that, around him 0n the Earth, were countless other creatures, which he could dominate. He ruled his planet, and he, alone of the creatures on it, had had the mind, the intelligence, to lift his eyes, his spirit, his comprehension to the stars. Space might be infinite, but he alone had dreamed of crossing it. Time might be infinite, but he had dreamed that his race, his descendants might go on, as the masters they were, to spread explosively through the universe, and to populate it, so that they were no longer dependent on the fate of any one planet. And, in the end, the spirit of man, that highest creature of creation, who had taken his fate into his own hands and become, in a large sense, self-created, would comprehend it all. He would understand
eternity, and by so doing become the master of it. Because the other thing, to be a mite only, to be only a crawling thing that lived for a while on the body of a dying world, as dependent on his environment as the bacteria that thrived for a while in the body of a larger creature, and so to end in nothingness, was too terrible to contemplate.

  Perhaps that was why I, even I, had left my home, had played fretfully with one thing and another, with various ways of living, until my chance had come to carry human experience just one stage further, to be a part of the first expedition to leave the Earth, though I had not thought of it before. Not until that morning after the night on Mars. Not until it began to penetrate to me, however dimly, that the ecology of the planet was not that of Earth: that men were not necessarily the Lords of Creation in a biological sense at all, but only a stage in the development of life, something that on Earth might have its flower just as, in our past, the invertebrates, the reptiles, had had theirs, but which—it was a hypothesis only in those first instants, but a dreadful one—had passed that stage on Mars.

  As I stared at those corpses with red-rimmed eyes on that first morning of knowledge on the planet Mars, I did not understand it all. I did not think in evolutionary terms, nor is it possible for me now to separate my actual thoughts at that time from the accretions that came later, during the following weeks, when I faced the problem constantly, night and day. What I actually thought, and what I am quite sure must have first come to me in that awakening, if only as a bare idea, for it was basic to my understanding, was that great glimpse of the obvious to which my whole experience of Mars had been working up, and, unknown to myself, preparing me.

  My mind went back over the preceding weeks, from and to the moment when I had first brought the rocket in to land and tumbled out on to the Martian surface. I had found life, but had been puzzled to find only a single type of plant. I had found insects, but only a single, highly developed, form. It had been as though, on an older world than Earth, a sheering process had been at work; as though out of the proliferation of such varied species as we knew, only the best of each order, the most highly adapted, had been able to survive. And then I had found a representative of the animal kingdom. Had it been a surprise that these should prove to be a gross and unintelligent, degenerate race of men? I had thought already that, in that thin air, all animal creatures would have to be all lung, and it would be impossible, in the conditions existing on the planet, for any creature to retain that fine adjustment of temperature, pressure, and chemical nicety that was necessary to maintain a finely adjusted nervous system.

  Only what I had not thought of was that there might be some other creature which had developed since Mars was filled with life like Earth. That such a creature should come into being during the slow decline of the planet's life was perhaps inevitable, but I had not thought of it any more than I had solved the problem of how life had come into being at all on a planet that now possessed no sort of sea and which lacked what life most needed, oxygen and water.

  Such a creature would have to be independent of supplies of oxygen from the air. It would have to be able to sustain its body heat regardless of heat or cold or night. It would have to derive its total energy from lower forms of life. It, on Mars, would have to prey on the animal kingdom, and be dependent on it, even as animals on Earth lived only because of the plants that drew energy from the sunlight and the bacteria that drew nitrogen from the air and made it available in the soil. On Earth, man drew oxygen from the air and drank water as a mineral, but for all the rest he was completely dependent on the complex substances built up by other living things. Only one stage further would evolution have to go, and then . . .

  I stared with horror at those decaying masses which I was responsible for having killed so near the wreck. That mauve fluid—could it be the blood? The lung substance, oxygenated, as red human blood was, containing and carrying out to the living tissues not only nourishment, the fuel, but the burning agent too, the whole chemical apparatus for release of power? And what of the white crystalline powder that was slowly encrusting the mass as it decayed? A fungus? Or a virus? Or bacteria? Something, I imagined, that seized on the rare elements, the ones that were rarest and most needed on the planet Mars. Something that seized hydroxides, that retained the substance of life as yeasts and fungi did on Earth.

  What I was looking at was a field of life which a higher creature had exploited; a creature which, I was sure now, had no lungs, and drew in no substances in unprocessed form; a Thing which had no need to exist on Earth, where oxygen was still plentiful in our atmosphere, and water could be had almost anywhere; a Thing which, uninhibited by the need to restrict its size, as it would on our heavier planet, found the animal kingdom its natural prey, though animals were represented on Mars only by a crude caricature of the race of men.

  Cannibals, I thought. Crusoe's island, so quiet and peaceful-seeming, had had its other side, the side of bestiality, of savagery, and his instinct had been to kill, and kill, and kill, because he, with his preconceptions about God and the human place in the universe, was outraged.

  Only Crusoe had not dared to kill. He had not dared, even with his guns, to take on a whole alien world in mortal combat. Instead, he had had to come to terms with what he found, accept the fact of his own weakness, and flee and hide like a hunted thing, and meanwhile try to live.

  He who had herds and crops and air and water.

  24

  i LOOKED at the piles of crystals that had been corpses. I walked around them warily. I tried to remember if the creature had consumed those bodies which were freshest or those in which the decay had been most advanced. Grimly, and as though in confirmation of my horror, I thought that it had been those which were most decayed.

  I hesitated to touch the crystals. On Earth the instruments of decay were species of bacteria. I had never heard of a bacteria producing crystals. But a virus might. A virus might be crystals. There were types of virus on Earth that could be crystallised out, and then, when put in contact with their food, they became as virulent as before.

  I took no chances. I went back to the wreck and made myself a scoop. I brought out lenses from the telescopes, and glass jars with screw tops, and a jug of water.

  What did I think I was going to do? Did I think that I, with no knowledge of biochemistry, and with such crude equipment, was going to embark on a fractional analysis, and so discover the secret of higher life on Mars? I can only say what I did.

  I looked at the crystals, after I had separated a few of them, beneath my most powerful lenses. I noticed that they were long, needle-shaped structures, with pyramidal points. Seen against the light, and singly, they were translucent and had a tinge of blue. I contemplated them for some time as though mere staring would yield up to me a secret of the universe.

  Then I looked around me. I saw, still barely perceptible on that unchanging surface and in that still air, the white trail where the monster had rested. I rose to my feet suddenly and went across to it. With infinite care, I scraped off a sample of the white amorphous powder of which the trail was composed.

  Restlessly, I looked at it beneath my glass. The inspection was fruitless. No structure at all was apparent in the powder. It was only apparent that, despite my care, I had picked up specks of dust and earth among the white. It was with the idea of obtaining a pure sample that I dissolved the powder in a little water. By solution and evaporation. . . .

  I stopped in the middle of my experiment. I picked up the jar of fluid and held it in my hand. Was it my imagination it was warm? I went quickly for a thermometer.

  Not only did the white powder produce heat when mixed with water but when it had been dissolved, and the water evaporated off again, it was no longer an amorphous powder. It became long, needle-shaped crystals with pyramidal ends. . . .

  I thought I had the answer to the problem in my grasp, but then I noticed that the crystals formed from the powder lacked one thing that the others had: the tinge of blue. I knew enough to
suppose some fine and subtle difference of molecular structure between the two.

  I remained, squatting in the desert with the powder and the two sorts of crystals before me, for quite an hour. But my mind was not idle. I theught in terms of creatures that maybe had no lungs, that drew their nourishment from one source, and digested it in one stomach, and, maybe by another digestive system, imbibed an oxygenating agent. Water and air. . . . On a planet like Earth those thing were to be had freely from the environment, but on an arid planet any creature which was to be independent of its environment would need another, more subtie source.

  My mind played not so much with ideas as on them, like the swift visions revealed by summer lightning. I thought of carbon and saltpetre, of gunpowder and explosives, man-made from oxygenising agents. I thought of sources of power within that carbon-oxygen-hydrogen cycle that contained all life.

  I got up abrupdy. I felt at the same time an elevation of the spirit and an obsession. It was something resulting out of my grim patience and determination. It was something I had never known in my life before, the sensation of seeing a thing round and seeing it whole.

  Even my actions were not entirely sane for one who was working on a wild hypothesis. I went to the wreck with impatience and decision, as though I knew exacdy what I was going for. I went into the wrecked compartment of the stem and my glance played on the old charging plant which had supplied the ship with electric power but which I had never used. I looked at the great fuel tank beside it. There was plenty of fuel, but I had had no air to burn it in, no oxygen to spare. Quickly, I drew off a quantity of fuel into a jar and brought it out with me, trailing also a coil of wire.