Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  I sat for a moment in the desert, away from the wreck with the jar of petroleum fuel open before me and a scoopful of crystals in my hand. Recklessly, I dropped them in. The fuel took on a bright mauve tinge I I waited for something to happen, but nothing did.

  To the two ends of my wire I attached an inch of fuse wire. I dropped it into the solution and forced on the lid over the wire. I went back to the wreck then, paying out wire as I went. On the other end of the wire was a plug for connection to the battery power supply. I hesitated for a moment, looked back across the desert, then plunged the plug into its socket.

  I even had the sense to throw myself down as I did so, which was just as well, for, as the fuse wire flashed the explosion occurred with a thunderous roar.

  It was moments before chunks of earth and rock had stopped falling about me and clattering against the metal of the wreck, and only then could I arise and view, with sombre satisfaction, the smoking crater in the desert.

  I gave up being a materialist in that moment. I no longer speculated on the nature of humanity, on man's smallness, his short span of life, and the fact that, to some higher creature, he might be as grass. Instead, I returned to my faith in the organising power of the human brain, its ability to organise a universe around it: if need be within its lifespan.

  25

  WHEN i WAS ready to go, I was not in any hurry. I had made my preparations meticulously, but even so to leave the rocket which had been my home, and my mine of all material, and to chance myself on the distant Martian surface, as I would have to do to overtake the wave of life, with all the unknown dangers and contests that that involved, was not a thing for haste.

  I looked at my machine, my half-track. Perhaps still, to anyone who did not know its origin, it must look crude and improvised, the result of a castaway's labour with rough tools. But to me, aware of its engineering soundness, it was as different from what my tricycle had been as a boat must have been to Crusoe compared with his improvised life-rafts of Iashed-up spars.

  There was litde left in the wreck but an empty shell. Even some of the plates had been incorporated in my vehicle, welded there with the ample power I had had ever since; with extreme care, and modification of the carburettor, I had made the charging plant work on the fuel-crystal mixture. Now the charging plant itself was incorporated in the vehicle, as a prime mover and a source of power.

  That I still rode on and not in the thing had been a matter of choice. I had been limited only by the weight which could be supported by the wheels and tracks in the light gravitational field of Mars. But I had favoured the shape and nature of an open truck. Balance and a low centre of gravity had been important, for though the gravitational field was low the mass of my equipment remained the same: any tall vehicle on Mars would soon turn over at the slightest bend or comer.

  I prowled around the wreck, seeking anything more that could conceivably be of use to me as spares. Then I went to the truck and inspected its items one by one for a final check.

  Slung between the axles were the bins which I had made to contain the fruit when I had thought of myself as an agriculturalist and not a hunter. Now they were topped to the limit with fuel, sealed down, in which was dissolved my total supply of crystals. Those bins were padded, so far as possible, against the jolting of the machine. I was no more happy than need be about the stability of the mixture.

  Forward of the bins was my air and water plant, powered by electricity now and comprising chiefly a motor-driven pump. As part of my final check I ran the motor up. At three thousand revs the pump came into action. I watched the thermometers and pressure gauges. The water came off first and there was a long pause before I began to get the liquid air, but it came in the end. After checking the pressure and the fact that the air tank was already full I stopped that motor.

  Above the bins, on trays beneath an awning, I kept my food supply. Pitifully small it looked. That was the grim reason I was going, into the unknown.

  The driving seat was a bench above the battery. The steering was mechanical and none too good, though I expected to use the machine on long straight courses. The controls were electric, and no more than resistances and switches to the motors. Already on the seat, like a dummy human being, was the pressure suit I would wear at night, while a mask was connected to the air supply and ready.

  I walked round to the back of the truck and looked at the equipment there. I had taken everything, everything I could conceive of being useful. It made a tall, broad load. If I struck loose sand or rough terrain much of it might have to be dumped.

  I looked back at the wreck. I had hoped to live there, pursuing peaceful agriculture and building slowly. It was not my fault that I had not been able to live like that on Mars. I felt a certain bitterness on seeing all that steel, and all those closed compartments. Even then, to stay there looked the safer way to live. Despite all my preparations, and all the equipment I carried with me, I was aware of the chance that I might break down, that I might find myself lacking something that could only be found within the wreck.

  But it was already almost noon, and I climbed on board. I took off the mask I was wearing and slipped on the other, that was attached to the machine. I put my portable oxygen cylinder into the rack I had made for it, where it would be instantly accessible beside me and connected it to the liquid oxygen tank for charging.

  I closed the switch that started the charging motor. I let it run for a moment then looked at the voltage dial. Tentatively, I pulled the motor switch, then seized the steering bar as the vehicle lurched into motion.

  I did not look back at the wreck. It would have been as futile as to look up into the sky in search of the planet Earth. Instead, after circling half round my old works and rubbish, I set course due south across the plain of Mars.

  Somewhere in that direction, and still moving away from me at fifteen miles a day, was the wave of Martian life. The days and weeks had passed since the creatures had come to me. I would have to go to the equator and beyond.

  But that was the way life was lived on the arid planet. A man does not adapt his environment to suit himself until he has first adapted himself to his local world.

  Later, I would come back, but not until I had tried conclusions once again with those creatures that were physiologically my superiors. On the front of my machine, in a carefully sprung support, was my single powerful fight bulb. I tested it as I rode, then switched it off again. I could not take risks with burning the filament out, for though I could make vehicles, pumps, and instruments, I had not, for all my ingenuity, been able to make another light bulb. I even went off, knowing I had been defeated in my attempts to construct an article that could be bought in any cut-price store on Earth.

  26

  ENCLOSED IN ITS narrow horizons, and under that Martian sky, which was sometimes clear and almost black, and flecked with stars at noonday, and sometimes vague and vaporous, with a green-blue tinge, the plain was grey and endless. I covered fifty miles that first day, and seventy-five the second, and all the time the vegetation, such as it was, grew sparser.

  By the third day, I was glad if I saw a shred of green in fifty yards. The ground was stony. Once I had to circumnavigate a patch of drifting sand a hundred yards across. It was fine as dust and rose in drifting clouds when I let one wheel stray into it.

  The prospect became more grim. I had estimated a fixed rate for the creatures' travel, but, although I was not yet at the equator by my calculations, there seemed little for them to pause for in that endless desolation. It was more likely, I thought, that, having eaten their way from the northern polar regions, and grown sleek and fat, both the man-like creatures and those that fed on them, they would from that point make all speed southward, towards the lush feeding grounds of the southern pole, there to await the spring.

  I could follow them even there—provided I did not meet with unexpected difficulties or have to make too great deviations on the way.

  I was not sure about that. Mars, seen from Ea
rth, and seen by me during my approach to it, had not an entirely uniform surface. Apart from the climatic colours, which changed with the ripening of the seasons, there were areas of permanent difference. But no one knew of what the difference was composed.

  I went with my eyes open, knowing that one good mountain range would stop me. But for the first week I did nothing but cross that endless plain.

  I would rise stiff and cold in the morning. Wearing the pressure suit at night allowed me at least to maintain a pressure in my body at which I could sleep without actually freezing, and it relieved me from the eternal chafing of a face-mask, but with pressure in it the suit was stiff and uncomfortable. I slept for just so long as I was too weary to even try to turn, and in the morning I always put on my face-mask with the portable cylinder first, then moved and exercised to raise my body heat.

  I ate before I started. It was too much of a performance to do otherwise. Even 'ate' is something of an exaggeration.

  While living in the wreck, I had been able to keep up the temperature and pressure in my living quarters. Now, living in the open all the time, a thing I would not have dreamed possible when first I came to Mars, I craved always for hot drinks. Whatever it was I had for food, a luxury such as tinned meat or a horrid mess resulting from my 'processing' of the Martian fruit, would go into the pot which I heated, as I did evei^rthing else, from the battery of my machine. Then, as a kind of stew, I drank it, replacing my mask and breathing between the gulps.

  It might be thought that a man could not live for long in that way, but a man can live long in almost any way provided that he has to and his basic needs are met.

  Then I drove. I drove in the direction the compass needle pointed, and concentrated on the ground ahead. Every now and then I would look up and see the close horizon exacdy as it was before. Sometimes the circle of sky around me would be just faintly irregular. Sometimes, being on the top of a gende rise, I would be able to see farther than the regular two-and-half miles ahead. A vista of five miles was a view.

  At noon I would stop and cook and eat, and again at six. I made camp then, pegging out an awning from the side of my machine. Somehow it gave me comfort to be covered, though I never proved conclusively that I gained any benefit when in my pressure suit. We are creatures of Earth habit, even I. We do not he in the open for choice, beneath the sky, not even in the deserts of the planet where we five.

  The earth turned pale yellow when I was one week out. There was no doubt about the junction. It took the form of a geological fault or rift about three feet high, and beyond it the horizon looked lop-sided.

  I stopped for a while on that day. Partly it was the need to ease the machine across the fault, partly because I was puzzled by the change. I wondered why scientists and astronomers on Earth had formed no theories as to the evolution of my planet. Why was Mars flat, with wide patches of faint colour? Why not, in view of its thin atmosphere, mountainous and jagged, like the moon? Doubtless it was a matter of indifference, when viewed from Earth, but to a man striving across the planet it was of great moment. Had the planet once been covered by a sea? And had life risen on it as it had on Earth, slowly, from watery beginnings, to become a competing horde of species, until, by desiccation, only a few, the best survivors, had been left? And at what stage of such a process had the new form come, the night-living independent monsters?

  I stopped and thought, rode on, and thought again. Knowledge was what I craved. I looked down at the new ground of yellow sandstone and wondered if I might find fossils.

  When I looked up, there was a range of low white hills before me. Though they were rounded and chalk-like, I knew, from the moment I saw them, that I would never get my machine across.

  27

  i WENT UP the slabs slowly, dragging one foot after the other and pausing every four or five steps to breathe harshly and desperately, bending forward, resting my hands on my knees, and swaying as I stood. As I came to the top of each slab, to the three or four foot step that led up to the next, I waited for minutes until my heart had ceased its turmoil and my pulse was back almost to normal. Then I climbed the step, and often sat there, on the lip, looking down far across the slope to where my machine lay in the plain. Though I had climbed only five hundred feet, and covered a horizontal distance of only twice that amount since I had stopped my engine and set out on foot, I suffered as does an Everest climber on the summit.

  My condition had deteriorated during the journey across the plain. Also it was the first attempt at serious climbing I had made or had occasion to make since I arrived on Mars. I had acclimatised, or I had imagined I had acclimatised very well while I had been living on the flat, but the first attempt at prolonged physical effort had found me out. It was not that there was any appreciable fall in pressure after the distance I had covered. It was just that the plain itself was at an atmospheric 'altitude' above that of Everest's summit, and even breathing oxygen it was beyond the limit of human physiology to go on from there.

  I turned and looked at the steps before me. How many more were there? I did not know. The slope was convex on the side that I was climbing and its summit was hidden from anyone upon its surface. The slabs would be less steep, that was all, I thought, swaying and looking up. If I had come so far, I must be able to do the rest, even though, judging by the formation and angle of the chalk-white rock, the slope on the other side would be precipitous and steep. I began again, toiling upward foot by foot and inch by inch, knowing the futility of it, knowing that I could never get my machine across and that if I descended the other side I would never be able to retrace my steps, but impelled by the final impulse, which had come to me when I had ridden as far as the machine would go and been checked by the first upward step of the outward-sloping slabs: to see, as a final, useless, accomplishment, what lay on the other side.

  The deadweight of my oxygen cylinder held me back. I must have been becoming hazy in my mind, for I imagined at one moment that I would only have to cast it aside and I would mount like the great-lunged creatures I had been following, step by easy step, like a flight of stairs. Or like the other creatures, the mght-living ones, who were independent of all air and could five on the most barren planet provided only they found the substances they needed. But I did not in fact touch my mask, though there was a pain like a band around my chest and the oxygen was scalding me with its cold as I allowed it to pour into my mask in quantities I had not used before. I suffered excruciatingly from thirst, and my lips were becoming raw. I thought, light-headedly, for a while, that what I was searching for was a spring, a pool of fresh, clean water that would lie somewhere near the summit.

  It was: breathe, breathe, breathe, step, breathe, breathe. It had never come to me, on Earth, what the Himalayan mountaineers meant when they said that, at maximum altitude, they were taking six breaths for every step. Now I knew, and I knew too that there was a nagging in my mind. Sooner or later I would have to make the calculation that they made: as to how long the oxygen supply in the cylinder would last, so that I could turn and take the easier way down, and get back to my machine and the source of air before I was left asphyxiating on the heights.

  Not yet. I could not plead that excuse for some hours yet. I must go on. I must get to the summit before it happened. But why? Why even see what lay beyond, when I could not follow with my transport? If there were a pass. . . . But this was the pass. It was the lowest slope in all the range of hills, and I had found, on one of the lower steps, a pile of crystals that told its story: some creature, ageing doubtless, and with its last food left now some days behind, had failed to make the slope and died. So I . . .

  I did not complete that thought. That was, after all, why I was climbing up the slope: because it was all I could do but sit by my machine and wait and contemplate my end. Far from the wreck, and checked in mid-flight across the plains of Mars, there was nothing for me now. I was continuing, on foot, for the last few yards and vertical feet an experiment that had proved abortive. When I went down ag
ain ... It was the thought of the nothingness that would await me when I went down that forced me on.

  I had come too far, too slowly, and too late. There was nothing for me now but wilderness below that range of hills. Shortly—for already the angle of the steps was easing off— I would see the southern plain of Mars, a plain, I did not doubt, exacdy like the northern. And, having seen, I would be left with an empty vision of the promised land.

  I stopped again, and sat, resting my hands on the rock and hanging my head between my arms. Perhaps there would be one more stage, or maybe two. My eyes must have been glazed, unfocused as I stared down at the rock. I felt the pain of its brilliance in the sunlight. Dimly I remembered what I had perceived before: that it was neither chalk nor salt, but some limestone probably, smoothed and rounded though it could not be for a million ages that the puny range had been lapped by seas or dissolved by rain on the equator there, on Mars.

  As my breath came back, I looked up again, towards the crest. I knew I would not be able to see the horizon, but only the sky beyond it yet, but as I looked, my gaze became fixed and set.

  I staggered to my feet, took a few steps farther, staggered again, and flung and leant myself against the final step. I scrambled up on it, and looked, gasping and staring at a new white crest across a gulf.

  Not yet was there any glimpse of the southern plain. Instead, a mile from me, rose another range, while in between was a canyon, the steep terraced slopes of which I could see leading up to the other summit in the sunlight, though the bottom was in the shade.

  It was final, that was my first thought. I had had, at the back of my mind, some thought of spying out the land, of finding the easiest route, and then, by infinite labour, by wires and pitons and days of labour, getting my machine to the top and over. But now, with the gulf before me, that was quite washed out. Not in months could I get my transport both up and over, and down, and up again. And for all I knew the range might go on, fold after fold, all the way across the arid centre and southern tropic of the planet. The very fact that the range ran east and west, and thus cast no shadow to the rising or setting sun, would make it invisible from Earth, Telescopes looking down on a planet could not see mountains but only shadows cast by them.