I approached the ship in daylight of its second day, walking up over the low horizon and wearing an oxygen mask and a simple cylinder. I wore Earth clothes: the last that I
possessed of the overall boiler suits that we had used in our earlier though fated rocket. When I was within half a mile I could make out the stars and stripes that were painted on one small section of the vessel's side. When I was within a quarter of a mile I could see that ship lay still unopened and unmoving, as I had reason to believe she had since the instant that she landed in a beautifully timed and controlled descent.
There was a window or port-hole behind which I fancied I saw a movement, but I did not shout or wave. If they were alive, I did not doubt that they would have been keeping watch and would have seen me. I was not surprised when, after an hour of walking, and when I was within a hundred yards, a disc door began to open, swinging slowly and heavily back, and a figure in a pressure suit came out.
They had improved pressure suits since the time when I had had mine. His was of a bright metallic-thread material which did not blow up around him like a balloon. I saw him stagger as he climbed down from the open airlock port. The suit and the strange, light gravity were new to him. I guessed that this was their first attempt at moving out upon the planet. I saw him turn, look quickly at the horizon all around him, like a man not exactiy afraid but like one who does not know what to expect. He bent and looked quickly at one of the scattered plants, which were in the flower stage. Then, postponing all that until later, he came on towards myself.
We stopped, face to face. I could see his head inside his helmet. His expression was one of uncertainty and amazement. I held out my hand, and I saw him look at it, but there was a pause before he brought up his own. I could sympathise with him, and might have laughed if I had been in a mood for laughing. To come to Mars and find a creature there dressed in a boiler suit, with the habit of shaking hands.
I motioned to him, towards the ship. It was useless to try to talk to him out there. I could see he was talking, for his lips were moving quickly, and his expression was of excitement, but only a faint and muffled sound reached me through his helmet. I guessed what was happening. He was giving a running description of me and of all our actions. He was using the same technique as a volunteer does when engaged in dangerous bomb-disposal: the full account of every move so that if anything happened those who were listening might know the exact move that had been wrong.
I patted him impatiently on the arm, and began to move towards the airlock. He caught up with me immediately and held me back. I felt exasperated at the delay after so many years. I evaded his grasp, which was easy enough to do, since he was clumsy in his suit, and went on towards the airlock.
The door began to swing to as I approached it. Whatever their reason, they were undecided about letting me in at all. It half closed, then stopped, then swung a little open. I began to get angry with them. I went to a port-hole that I could reach. I saw an astonished face, a head and shoulders in uniform behind it. With my finger, I wrote upon the glass, writing carefully backwards: "Let me in!"
The face disappeared, and I heard a cry and a clatter from within the ship. I turned to the airlock again, and it swung slowly open. I gave them a chance to make up their minds. The man in the space suit had caught up with me. He began to hold my arm again and talk fast into his microphone. Watching through his helmet-glass, I saw him stop suddenly, with his mouth open, with an expression of ludicrous dismay.
Suddenly he released me and motioned first tentatively, then emphatically to the airlock. Wryly, I gave him the thumbs-up sign.
There was a skeleton ladder which had descended as the door came open. I went up it. The airlock was better than ours, just as the ship was bigger. It was about five feet in diameter and three feet deep. I could stand in it with a little crouching. But my companion, the second man ever to land on the planet Mars, followed me in. We were crowded then, and though the door closed and the lights came on, nothing happened.
With the helmet six inches from my ear, and in that confined space, I could hear the man inside it talking. He seemed to be arguing fast and speaking in distress. I looked around me for any form of microphone. They must have some method of communication, beside radio, with the airlock. I saw a kind of metal grille let into the golden plastic-covered surface. Towards it, taking off my mask momentarily, I said: "What are you waiting for? Bring up the pressure!" I was astonished at the vehemence of my yell.
My companion turned, and looked at me indignantly.
There was a loudspeaker somewhere behind me. I tried to turn to see it when it startled me by speaking. It said: "Who are you? We haven't air to waste. We have to be sure you're not bringing bacterial infection in. As it is, we're going to have to disinfect the airlock."
I said: "Blast you! I'm an Earth man like yourselves, and I've lived here fifteen years. There's only one bacteria in the whole of Mars to harm you, and I don't carry that around with me!" I spoke quickly, all in one breath, and then replaced my mask. I needed to, and half my words were lost, because the air had begun to whistle in and I got a whiff of it. They were taking no chances. They had dosed it heavily with disinfectant.
We waited. My companion began to go through motions like a diver coming up to surface. He feared the bends, though he must have been breathing in half an atmosphere, and anyway the pressure change was in the wrong direction. Somebody said to him, quite clearly to my ears: "Don't be a fool, John. You'll be all right."
I took my mask off. I coughed a little in the disinfectant haze. I said: "He's disorganised. I don't blame him. So would you be if you were in this gas."
I turned round. I looked at the flush, smooth surface of the outer door. Even after all those years I could not forget the time when, in our ship, in space, it had given way. I shuddered a little, remembering that accident and all that had happened since. I wished I could feel happier then and there. Why could they not have turned up within six months of my landing on the planet? Why had it had to be fifteen years?
I felt a grip on my arm. 'J°nn' had got his helmet off. He was a dark, thin young man with the fanatical eyes of an experimental scientist whose guinea pig is usually himself. He didn't look the type to make mistakes about whether the pressure was going up or down I guessed he was suffering from some deep emotion.
He said: "Are you British?"
"Yes."
He was quiet, looking at me. Then he said:
"You had an explorer A man called Scott. He got to the South Pole, then found that Amundsen had got there before him. Don't take it too hard if you aren't exactly popular on this ship "
I made no comment on that. It did not seem very important to me just then. They couldn't be so petty
The inner door swung open. Facing me, flanked by men in some kind of special uniform, was a U.S. Air Force General.
"Come in," he said tighdy. "And congratulations."
I went in. I went forward with my hand out to him. I began to realise that it would be even harder than I thought, to break the news I had to give.
"Congratulations to you," I said. "You aren't our successors on this planet. You're the first to make a controlled descent." I looked around me. "The first," I said, "to arrive with the means of taking off again." I paused. "You're my rescuers," I added dryly. Then, more dryly and quietly still: "I hope."
31
BUT THAT was in the future. For the present, not knowing the years that were to come, not knowing if I were to live another hour, I was in the cleft upon the hilL overlooking the valley of the creatures.
They came. I saw them staring up the slope below me. I lost sight of the mother from that time forward. I had eyes only for those thin, high lights which crossed terrace after terrace towards me, up the lower slopes. They came desultorily, uncertainly, like kittens chasing a paper ball, and every now and again one of them would wander away, unseen to me in the darkness, suddenly to reappear, coming chasing back along a terrace slope.
&n
bsp; I saw them, watched them, and felt horror at what I was doing. I was too near my light, I thought. I was too near that little winking light which attracted them.
For they were big. As they came nearer, I felt the ground beneath me quiver and I had an all but irresistible impulse to squirm out backwards, away to the outer slope. They must be big, I thought mawelling, as ten-ton yachts. And, I thought, more frightfully, what chance would a creature from another planet have of making contact with Earth children if he were no bigger than a beetle? Perhaps it might be more than he would have with an adult. . . .
I flashed the light in a definite sequence and almost at full brilliance. Two longs, two short, and then a pause. Three longs, and then a longer pause. And then repeat, again and again, until no creature that lived by sight could fail to recognise the rhythm. There were minutes during their ascent when I thought it was all useless, when I thought that maybe their 'mother' would call them back. But as they came, near me now, more than half-way up the slope, I saw that one, with his light organs, whatever they were, around his side and along his side, was copying the colour of my light and flashing my own sequence.
No sooner did he do so, than the others did the same. I felt faint with relief. That, I had thought, to make them watch, be curious, and try to understand, would be the hardest part.
I changed the signal. The letters in morse code, though meaningless to them, had been ZO. I was prepared to go among them by the name of ZO-zo, if only I could make them comprehend that I was an intelligent and living thing. I broke the circuit and stopped the light.
They too stopped. I could see them now, apart from their lights. They were only a third of the slope away, and in the moonlight. Each of them had halted and stood waiting. I let them wait.
One of them flashed my own signal, ZO, in my direction. It seemed to me, or it might have been my imagination, that he could concentrate his lights in a narrow beam on the exact spot where my bulb had been, some twenty yards from me. Instandy, I replied. I sent the signal back. His lights flashed on again in a blaze of colour that began at lilac and went up and out of my spectrum range.
I replied in red. He had stopped. They all stopped. They echoed my colour, like, I thought, children echoing and mocking a man's gruff voice. I switched to white again and they came charging on like terriers who see a rat.
I switched off. It may be thought madness if I say I sensed their mood, but I was not going to have them approach me in too rash a spirit. I watched them continue to come forward and then begin to search around. Again and again I saw them call my signal. I liked that. By their own repetition of it, they would remember it, if their brains —or their responses if they had no brains—were like ours at all.
Two of them turned and went down again towards the valley like children who have tired of playing a game that leads to no conclusion. I watched them go. I had two left, who were coming on now, creeping up, I thought, on the place where my light had been. From time to time they gave my signal. I took to answering now, with one short flash each time they gave it, using minimum illumination and a dull, slow red.
The result was what I hoped. They walked rather than ran towards me, and in the moonlight, as they passed below me, I saw their shapes: like something from the bottom of our seas.
I became afraid again as I began the dangerous second stage. It was not them I was afraid of now—though I wished I had their mother' in my range of view—but that they would smash my bulb and my sole source of communication with them. As they went too near my light, I switched it out. I watched apprehensively as they vainly searched for it. It was only when they turned away again that I switched it on—and when one of them haphazardly came too near myself.
I invented a second signal for them. As they approached the bulb I gave the old sign, the ZO, but when they went too near, I gave three short sharp flashes and switched off. It was patience I needed then: the same sort of patience required by the would-be owner of a well-trained dog. It took me two hours to make them halt when they got that second signal, 'S', so that I knew they understood it as a negative, and during that time they twice lost interest, and could only be recalled by frantic flashing and colour changes of the light.
I lay there sweating. Two hours—three hours in all since I had first attracted them to the light—and all I had done was to teach them two words for 'come' and 'go', an affirmative and a negative. Yet, at the same time, though the needed patience was an agony, and I was stiff and weary from lying crouched among my rocks, I felt a fierce pride and exultation. It had seemed to me impossible only a day or two before that I should make any contact whatever, or invent any common language with creatures so alien to myself. The project, I had told myself, had been impossible —but the impossible I must do any and every minute now.
I had taught them to listen to me. Now I must persuade them to talk to me, to engage, in their own behalf, in inventing a language with me.
I switched off my light. When they signalled to me, ZO, I switched it on again and left it on. It was when, by chance perhaps, one of them sent 'S', that I switched it off. I saw them begin a quick exchange, a violent exchange of colour between themselves. I wished I had the facilities for a show like that. But my eyes could not follow their shades and gradations. It would be like a tone-deaf person trying to make distinctions between closely related sounds. It was better as it was.
Zo, they said, and I switched on. S, they said, and I switched off. One sent his signal clumsily and badly. I sent, in morse, the question mark. He repeated his instruction and I complied. We had gone one stage further, with another symbol.
I gave them four hours of it, and then dismissed them by sending, in reply to all their questions, the letter S, and otherwise keeping silent. I saw them lose interest and begin to wander dowrihill to the valley. I eased myself from the crevice and stood upon the crest.
A sharp, cold light illuminated me, with the intensity of a searchlight. It was the mother, who, gigantic, was fifty yards from me upon the crest. Her light beams, emitted from two round 'eyes' upon either side of her broad, flat head, were met and focused on me. With horror, I realised I was in a trap.
Her great white beams of light were focused on me: on me, the creature that had been 'playing' with her young. Ineffectually, I was flashing my torch, trying to communicate with her as I had with her progeny, and knowing it was useless. Her lights were like a roar that turned my puny flashing into the tiniest chatter. Then her white lights flicked off abruptly and I was illuminated, instead, in a deep red glow. From her sides two ruby beams flashed out, one settling on my machine and the other searching, seeming to penetrate the very earth to my buried wire until it found it and traced it out to my light bulb, the winking light that I had used for my 'experiment'. She had the whole of me then: my machines, my batteries, my artifices, and all the power and hope I had, and she towered over me still, gigantic.
32
WHEN THE ship landed, I went to it. It was like this.
He said: "You've been here fifteen years?" He did not gesture. He was not that kind of man. He simply looked over my shoulder to the airlock, the inner disc of which was slowly closing behind me, and it was as though he indicated the Martian plain, the barren desert, the waterless surface and the arid, too-thin lifeless air.
I stood there facing him in his strange ship, accustoming myself again to the glow of electric lights.on metal surfaces and to the thick, heavy, humidified Earth atmosphere that I had not tasted for so long.
There was a man in Captain's uniform standing just behind him and on his left. Seeing that I simply stood and allowed my presence to speak for itself,. he said. "How d'you get here in the first place?"
I said: "I could answer questions better if you gave me a glass of water. I haven't much time, either. I'm due to go back to where I came from in an hour."
The General called his pack off me. He gave two orders, and a group of men who had been crowded round, appearing from all parts of the ship to stare at me a
s I came in through the airlock, suddenly dispersed. The second order —righdy or wrongly, he gave it with decision—was that I should be given a meal or anything I wanted. Then he himself approached me, held out his hand, and suggested that I accompany him to his cabin. He was courteous and cool. Another officer asked me, with equal enthusiasm, whether I could face a plate of ham and eggs. Once I had touched the mainspring of their hospitality, it seemed that they could never do too much.
I followed the General to his cabin, looking curiously about me as I went. I did not know it then, but by taking an unproved stranger through the centre of that ship he was breaking more of his own Security laws than he or anyone else could even remember. But the situation was unprecedented, and he had to do something with me. Perhaps he thought that, since he could not interview me in the desert, it would be better to have me in his cabin than standing where we were, with a view of the engine and control rooms of his rocket.
It was like an exceedingly diminutive ship's cabin. If that were where the commander slept and lived, I could not imagine how the rest of them fared. I learned later that, like ourselves, they had fallen back heavily on submarine experience, and that many of the "hands' were actually naval volunteers. As it was, by the time he and I were in, and two other officers had followed, as though by right, there was room only for the civilian who had come out to me only in the doorway.
"Captain Vanburg," the General said, indicating the fair-haired officer whose preoccupation was with my origin. "Lieutenant Boles, Mr. John DeLut. My name is Stilwell." Two of us had established ourselves on the berth, which I noticed was fitted with webbing to hold the occupant in in conditions of zero gravity, and the other two on the bench that faced it. Tall, dark DeLut remained standing of necessity. Somewhere behind the panelling a fan switched itself on and added its high whine to the other beating, drumming and hissing sounds which spoke of a rocket-ship maintaining its atmosphere and temperature and pressure in an alien environment.
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