Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  I cannot even now say why I told him instead of simply setting out to meet the men and escape with them. I am utterly certain that Eii would not have stopped me.

  WE HAD moved out of the cabin into the centre of the ship again. We were paused hesitantly before the airlock on the metal gallery which formed a platform when the ship was horizontal, a ladder when it was in space. There were still the same four around me: the General, DeLut, Vanburg, and Lieutenant Boles, but other men, of junior rank, found occasion to pass closely by us, and pause, and stand around, in the course of their duties in the ship.

  The General said crisply: "I can only suggest that you don't go back. We've seen quite clearly that their conditions are incapable of fulfilment.''

  "We can't give hostages," Vanburg said. "It isn't the American way. Apart from which, we can't guarantee a situation that we can't control."

  I looked at the airlock. Already it was wearing off, the feeling that my rightful place was far outside it. My place was there, with men, in a hot, humid atmosphere that reeked of machines and oil. In a world of practical action, incisive speech, and decisions made firmly despite all risks. That was the way men lived. I had come near to forgetting it. All the same, I had to go.

  "I'll tell them what you say," I said. "I don't suppose you can even commit yourselves, the Americans, to one ship a year? I'll tell them, of course, that you won't molest them."

  "Our intentions are entirely peaceful," said Boles sincerely.

  "Tell them that well put it to our Government," the General said. "We are only the navigators. We are under orders. As to how much you tell them about what the possibilities really are, I leave that to you. Personally, I would say that if the Russians get a ship up here there's going to be an almighty scramble for this planet. No one's going to rest until it's been prospected thoroughly for radioactive ore."

  I looked at the airlock door again. It was a great, circular sheet of metal, and a member of the crew was already standing by the screw-type handles. I only had to nod and he would open it and I would go inside. The pressure would go down, and I would be sure to feel it, that quite desperate sense of nausea and deflation which I realised I had been living under and enduring all those years. Then I would go out on to the Martian desert. Perhaps for the last time. Perhaps in an hour or two I would be back.

  Or perhaps not. I had, already, met the American ship. I might be used, similarly, to meet the Russians when they turned up. It might be an utterly endless process. I stood there wondering just how much I really owed to Eii and his fellow-creatures. For years, though I had helped them, they had lived in apparent oblivion of me.

  DeLut said: "Just before you go, Holder." He frowned at me as I turned to him.

  "Just this," he said. "Supposing these creatures are all you say they are— intelligent, cultured, and all the rest. The fact remains that they are deficient on the practical action side. This sort of thing has happened before you know. The Indians were highly civilised when your first East India Company Merchants went out there. You British found it necessary to take over the administration of that country. It didn't mean that Indian culture did not have its advantages and its value. Just that it didn't stand up to our sort of civilisation."

  "Well?" I said. It seemed to me that he was putting the situation mildly.

  "Only that I seem to remember that there were hostages there from time to time. My history of the British Empire isn't what it might be. But I fancy that most of them got slaughtered."

  Vanburg laughed grimly. "We might put it even more clearly than that to Holder: that it didn't make any difference in the end. The fact that the British had the technical know-how to get out there made it inevitable that they would win as soon as any bother started."

  "You might tell them that," the General said. "I gather that they are under the impression that they are our superiors. But it isn't ethics or philosophy; it's skill that wins. You could put that to them mildly and suggest that it would be wise if they gave a safe conduct to yourself."

  I nodded and thanked them. Clearly, they did not understand. Ants might talk like that, if they were prospecting taking over the human world. What efficiency of ours could compare with theirs? Ants would, to the ant-mind, win. But it only looked as though the situation was like that on Mars. They had not had the advantage of talking to Eii in the cave.

  I took a step to the airlock and watched the crewman begin to turn the handle. "Though in this case," DeLut said, "they don't seem to have any ostensible civilisation anyway. They're merely hunters who eat raw meat. Typical aborigines. You're wasting your time on them."

  It took all the strength of will I had to step into that airlock. I think they all knew, those who stood around, that they would only have had to make a show of physical restraint to make me succumb willingly to their blandishments. But that was not their business. They had to make contact with whatever there was on Mars, and my presence, unexpected as it might be, was a way of making that contact as smooth as possible. That I was willing to risk my neck in the effort was their good fortune.

  I went in, and the door clashed to behind me. The inner light came on as it did so, and I heard the screws made fast. A pump began to rumble somewhere. I waited as the pressure went slowly, so slowly down. I should have done the bending exercises that DeLut had been hazed into doing when coming in, but I was too busy thinking how fateful events in my life seemed to be tied up with going into 01 out of airlocks.

  It was as bad as I had expected, the physical sense of cold and weakness. I had forgotten so quickly what it was like to live with vitality reduced at a too-low pressure. Then the outer door swung open and I stood looking out at the yellow desert with its ground-clinging blotches of crude plants.

  I thought then of changing my mind. It was the depressive effect of the pressure and the desolation. I knew that, cave or no cave, I could not endure another fifteen years of that. Yet what could I do? Advise Eii other than that his best chance was to keep me, let me do the talking to all these people? With one hostage at the beginning, and assuming that the situation was carefully handled . . .

  Heavily and wearily I climbed down the ladder, turning my face towards it as I descended. From a port-hole in the ship they were waving to me. I did not reply. I put them from my mind: they and their heated air and food and companionship and certainty. Too well I knew their feelings. It is something basic in our nature that makes us take actual pleasure in a struggle with the unknown side by side with other men. They, I was sure, would even be prepared to die in style. But I walked out across the stony ground alone, clumsily and slowly as I did on Mars.

  After I had gone a hundred yards, I could still feel their eyes boring into my back, wondering if they would get a glimpse of what would come to meet me. They would have a long wait, I thought, as I struggled out, away from them, across the surface. And nothing at the end of it, for I had two miles to go and then I would cross a rise of ground and be lost to view.

  I walked head down, watching the ground, careful not to stumble over stones or plants. For a while I did not know what was happening to me. I had seen a rocky ledge some hundred yards ahead and I thought I ought to be about up to it by then.

  I raised my head and it was still a hundred yards ahead, though the plants and stones were disappearing beneath my feet. A green plant and a flat stone shaped like the outline of a cat were just a yard ahead. They disappeared beneath my feet.

  A green plant and a flat stone shaped like a cat. They were ahead again. . . .

  I stopped, I looked back. I was walking in the right direction. The silver rocket-ship was just behind me. Just behind me and not twenty yards away. . . .

  The airlock burst open. DeLut came out. He was waving wildly. I guessed he must be shouting. Behind him came two more men, carrying something that looked like a folded stretcher. There was no one else around. They must have intended the stretcher for myself. Yet I did not believe that I had been stumbling in my tracks.

  I stopped
and waited for them to come to me. I watched them walk. They walked all right. They put one foot before the other. But it was as though they were swimming against a current. They made progress and got precisely nowhere. The two men with the stretcher were wearing clear-type helmets and I could see their faces. Their expressions were those of consternation and astonishment. They looked around them wildly. They well knew that they should have been up to me by then.

  I walked back to them. I made progress quite well in that direction. It was only when I turned and looked away again and at the horizon that I seemed to detect a bend in the fluid air. It was as though the level land was corrugated slighdy, or as though I were looking across a hot surface on a summer's day on Earth, and seeing the light refracted in waves of heat. A mirage maybe. . . .

  It was all round the ship, and deep, that bend or twist in air and earth. It was like a fluid into which one penetrated just so far before one realised what was happening. Only some people, I noticed, could penetrate farther than others before they reached a standstill, while the other side of the bend was like the ground-line on a graph of a declining curve: the farther one got, the nearer one came to it but the less progress forward could be made.

  I put my helmet close to DeLut's. I saw his startled eyes. I yelled: "In infinite time one could get across. This is just the sort of trick they would play!"

  He yelled back: "For Cod's sake come inside! That's an order. You're to come inside the ship again at once!"

  I grinned at him and shrugged my shoulders. I wondered if Eii had known that I would come back to him empty-handed, or if he had guessed that I would, or if he had merely wished to see if I would try to come back at all. I hoped it was the latter. I hoped that he was feeling as pleased that I had tried to come back to him as I was because I did not have to go.

  He had certainly solved the problem of an ant-invasion. Without, I imagined, really doing any thinking. Practical matters were, after all, so far as he was concerned, a waste of time. He ate, he slept, he thought.

  37

  DAY AFTER DAY on the journey back it went on. The ship seemed to he motionlessly among the stars, and we, inside her, floating in zero gravity, climbed around the galleries and hand-rails and met each morning in the General's cabin or the control-room.

  Usually there were just the four of them at each interrogation, all of them specialists in their way, even the General, who might have been said to be a specialist in effectiveness. Certainly he had been chosen for that, as one of the younger, top-flight men who could be given charge of a rocket expedition to another planet as a rare opportunity, such as came to few in peace-time, to make a name for himself and build up his career. But now he did not know if his expedition had been a success or an utter failure. The view that would be taken of it, by the press and in the Pentagon, would depend so absolutely on my testimony. Either he, had been outwitted by creatures which would be thought of as no more important than savage beasts—as though, in an earlier age, he had discovered Africa but been frightened away by elephants—or he had made the first human contact with a quite new plane of reality, a quite new form of knowledge.

  It was not to be wondered at that during those days and weeks and months he and his little group of officers sought to possess themselves of all my knowledge, to have an answer for everything ready when the time came, to be prepared to answer any criticism as to what they could or should have done.

  At first it was the simple, incontrovertible, unbreakable, appalling fact of what had happened that most concerned them. They brought their mathematician into the room three mornings running, and confronted him with me, both of us talking different languages, in an effort to elucidate in the slightest what had happened. They charged him, even in my presence, with the task of framing some coherent explanation, some scientific hypothesis, which was at least sufficiently related to what was known to attract the interest if not the conviction of other scientific minds and to be embodied, however implausibly, in an official statement.

  "Captain Vanburg has got to write a report," the General said. "I've got' to initial it. And I've got personally to report—for God's sake, manl Suppose they call me to the White House. What do I tell the President? Do you think I can give him this sort of stuff?" He tapped a paper that lay on the table between us all. A paper containing a single line of figures which Jaeger, the thin, pale-eyed mathematician, had put forward as one conceivable explanation.

  "I don't see what else you can tell him," Jaeger said. "What is there to say, except what happened and the mathematical hypothesis for it? What d'you expect me to do, put all post-Einstein thinking about the universe, and something far beyond it, into simple words?" He looked trapped and scared. It was his business to explain what he was talking about, and he could not. He did not happen to be Einstein. He was just an operator of abstruse formulae that worked in practice for calculating the progress of a rocket from A to B.

  "Holderl" the General said. "You know those creatures! You know what they think. At least you know what they think about. You talk to him. You try to explain what you know and let him try to explain to you what it means in dieory supposing it has some sense to it. Between you—for God's sake, you've got two months!—you build up something cut and dried!"

  "Well, I look at it this way," I said. "Eii—that's the one I told you about—he'd kept me too long to want to injure me. He sent me to you probably wondering if I'd revert to type, as he maybe thought it. He probably wondered if neither I nor anyone else would go back to him. Perhaps he thought we'd try to declare war on them or something. But he also probably thought that the system of hostages, if it worked, would be a way of keeping us in check. What he saw, in effect, was that I was loyal to him but that no one else was coming back with me, as he would have expected if there was to be an exchange. So he thought quickly. Or maybe he didn't even need to think at all. How am I to know? He knew our limitations all right, and he simply used them. He treated us as a nuisance that should not be allowed to spread around his planet."

  They listened to me. Vanburg and the General, when I first began speaking, looked at me with a kind of hope. What people or things did was obviously within their sphere of interest, as was why they did them. But in the end they suddenly began to look more lost and concerned than ever.

  "How?" the General said. "How, how, how? Dammit, Holder, don't you see that that's the question we have to answer. To say this creature did it—that doesn't mean anything! Except that maybe hell do it again and again, each time we land, and that we'll get no farther! For God's sake talk to Jaeger and tell him howl"

  I thought about that. I was accustomed to Earth air and pressure again by then. I felt comfortable and relaxed, and I was going home.

  "So far as I can tell," I said, "he does it not by asking how at all, but by asking why."

  That broke up that meeting. Or rather is was a quite hysterical giggle from Boles that broke it up.

  In the afternoons, I used to sit on my bunk and write this journal. I had to think how I was going to live when I got back to Earth. I decided that to write my story, and have it ready to sell to a publisher and to newspapers for serialisation would be a good beginning. In fact I decided that it should put quite a nice little nest egg in my bank.

  Another morning they tried a different tack with me. The General was not there when I went into the cabin. He was busy, Vanburg said. "But," he said, looking me in the eye, "I've got to get to the bottom of this. Those are my orders."

  "Fine," I said. "Where do you want to begin? With what I said to Eii and what he said to me, or with my early wandering in the desert and how I first saw the creatures? Probably all we have to do is to decide which bit is going to be most helpful."

  He did not seem to look at it that way. For an instant he looked baffled. Then he said: "Let's concentrate on what they actually did to all of us. You know them. You explain it

  "I can't," I said. "That's Jaeger's job. He's the mathematician."

  "For Jesus Ch
rist's sake!" Vanburg yelled at me. "Haven't we been through that before? He can't explain itl If you can't tell us how, at least tell us what they did! Use your own words! Tell it like you'll tell it to a reporter when we get back! Tell it like we weren't there, that we'd no idea of it, and let's hear what you say!"

  I wondered what the General had said to put the fear of God into a Service Captain. But they were my rescuers. I didn't want to harm them.

  "If you think it's going to help, 111 do my best," I said. "If I had to tell it to anyone who didn't know, I'd put it this way. I don't think this creature I called Eii loved us. I myself was hardly worth bothering about to him, one way or the other. If he'd had any difficulty doing what he did, he'd have been more ruthless. I don't think he'd have had any difficulty fixing us so that we couldn't take off again, but then he'd have had us on his hands. And he didn't actually want to kill me. He might have done that easily when he first saw me, but you know how it is with something you've had around for quite some time. So he just wanted to fix us so that we couldn't walk around and be a nuisance. He probably remembered the confusion he and I used to get into when we tried to talk about space and time. He probably realised as well as I did that he and I saw the universe in quite different ways. I saw plane surfaces and solids, but for all I knew he saw atoms and electrons or whorls in space. He was different, that's the thing you've got to understand. Different and lazy and always ready for a short cut when it came to action. Unless it was hunting or feeding or such things as even lazy humans sometimes do for sport. You shouldn't think of him as a creature without instincts, only as one with far fewer than we have ourselves. So, knowing our limitations, he built a kind of fence around us. I never told you what happened about the fences I tried to build for him, did I?"