Stowaway to Mars

by John Wyndham

  ‘What about my idea of control by the ship which brought it?’ put in the doctor.

  But Joan shook her head.

  ‘I tell you, its responses were quicker than our own.’

  Froud said: ‘You’re fooling. You can’t really mean it. Why it’s, it’s preposterous.’

  ‘I know,’ she admitted quietly. ‘But preposterous or not, there it is. There is only one other possibility and that’s my father’s explanation and if he’s right, Einstein was wrong. And though I admire my father, my devotion has its limits.

  ‘I was sure almost from the first that it was an entity: not just an enlarged tool as other machines are. That’s why it frightened me at the beginning, and that’s why I never quite lost my fright of it. I suppose it was due to not knowing what it could do, and what its limitations were. You see, it was so, so utterly alien. Yet I thought all the thoughts you are thinking now when I wasn’t actually with it. Of course it is ridiculous: such a thing could not possibly be. I used to lie awake at night devising tests for it to prove to myself that it wasn’t true. But they didn’t prove it. Everything I did seemed to show me more and more clearly that it was an individual, as much cut off from Mars as we were.

  ‘I tell you, when I tested it, it understood what I was doing. It used to watch us with its lenses as if it knew what was puzzling us. It could look after itself, too; while it was with us, it even replaced one of its damaged feet with a new one which it made itself. I’m prepared to admit that it might have been made to do all that by remote control, except for one thing the lack of time lag.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Dugan, as if the idea had just filtered past his resistance.

  ‘You mean that this thing was a what shall we call it? a robot?’

  ‘We shall not call it a robot,’ said Doctor Grayson. ‘“Robot” was a word which Capek used to mean a synthetic human workman, but since Froud’s miserable profession took the word up, it’s ceased to mean anything. Anyway, there’s no synthetic man appearance about this thing.’ He turned to Joan. ‘The trouble about you is that you’re such a level-headed young woman. If almost anyone else I know had come out with a suggestion like that, I’d have recommended a nice long sleep, with a sedative. As it is….’ He shrugged.

  ‘It takes some getting used to,’ she admitted.

  Froud nodded. ‘More than that. By the way, this isn’t your idea of doing a journalist a good turn and providing him with copy, is it?’

  ‘And yet,’ Joan went on, ‘when you get used to the idea, it doesn’t seem quite so unreasonable, somehow. Machinery must be gradually evolving in some way: why not towards this?’ She looked at Dale. ‘Have you ever really considered the machine?’

  Dale turned a good humoured, but rather puzzled face. Evidently he meant to let bygones be bygones, for he did not treat her latest fantastic suggestion with the contempt he had poured upon the first. His manner was akin to that of one who conscientiously plays a game within the bounds of rules made by the other player, and he managed with a good grace:

  ‘I don’t quite see what you mean I’m always considering machines. Have been since I was so high, but certainly not the kind that….’

  Joan shook her head. ‘No, I put it badly. I don’t mean the machine we were talking about, nor any particular machine. I was thinking of The Machine, considered as a force in the world.’

  ‘In fact, the genus machina,’ suggested the doctor.

  ‘Exactly.’ Joan nodded emphatically, and then smoothed back the hair which had become suspended in front of her face. Dale’s expression cleared.

  ‘Oh, I see. But it’s rather a large and difficult question to answer offhand. I don’t seem to see it like that. Being used to them and always among them, I tend to think of machines or machinery, but hardly ever of The Machine. You see, ever since I was little I’ve been happiest when I was with machinery; it’s been a great part of my life. I’ve known the feel of so many machines, and they’ve all been different. I can’t get outside, as it were, and see the whole range of machines as one class. But I know what you mean, up to a point, because my wife not only can, but frequently does, see The Machine like that. It’s one of the points where we’ve never had anything in common.

  ‘You see, I couldn’t do without machines I don’t just mean that I should starve if all machines were broken, that’s obvious: about eighty percent of the world would starve, too. I mean that they seem to be essential to something in me. A pianist losing his fingers would lose no more than I should if I were entirely deprived of them. They are a great part to me, the essential part of the world I grew up in.

  ‘There is use and abuse of machinery as there is of everything else, but when you talk of The Machine, you are seeing it from an angle that I don’t know. I think that my wife would understand you better than I do. She quite certainly thinks of The Machine almost as a personification, and she hates it and fears it. Or rather, she hates it because she fears it, and she fears it because she doesn’t understand it. The completely primitive attitude savages are afraid of thunderstorms for the same reason. But she goes further, she is determined not to understand it: even while she lives by it, she tries to pretend to herself that the need for it does not exist and that mankind would be altogether happier and better without machinery. Two minutes’ honest thought would reduce the whole attitude to an absurdity in her own eyes, but it seems to be a subject on which she is incapable of a second’s honest thought again, to me, a curiously primitive trait in an otherwise highly civilised person. When one examines her attitude dispassionately, one finds that it has a great deal in common with that of a native who will not examine the nature of his most inimical gods for fear of bringing their wrath down on his head. He ignores them as much as possible to avoid rousing his own fear of them. There must have been something of the kind in Mary Shelley’s mind when she conceived that Frankenstein story. I am sure that The Machine is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster in my wife’s mind. It is as though the superstition which has been scraped off natural phenomena had attached itself to machinery instead, as far as she is concerned.’ He paused as though a new thought had just struck him. ‘Yes, that’s what it is. Her attitude to machines is rankly superstitious. It sounds rather ridiculous to you, I suppose. But if you could hear her talk about them, I think you’d understand what I mean.’

  ‘I understand you perfectly,’ the doctor assured him. ‘One’s met it so often in women of quite different types and in a few men, too, of course, but comparatively rarely. If it only occurred in the backward types (where it is almost inevitable), it would be easier to understand. I mean the unintelligent, stupid woman of the domestic class who is afraid of a vacuum cleaner or of a telephone doesn’t surprise one, but the intelligent woman who uses these things and other small machines regularly will frequently refuse to understand how they or her car or her gyrocurt work, and will maintain at the back of her mind the same attitude as the stupid woman. It is this refusal to learn which is so puzzling. It is possible that a small, almost negligible class may do it with the deliberate idea of encouraging male pride by their own apparent helplessness, and in a few it may be due to sheer mental laziness but why should so many otherwise mentally active women choose to be lazy on this particular subject? Somewhere and somehow connected with the idea of machinery there arises this curious inhibition.’

  ‘Perhaps it is because women, on the whole, do not come into contact with machinery as much as men do?’ Dugan suggested.

  ‘Again, that might account for a very small number, but nowadays both girls and boys encounter small domestic machines from their earliest consciousness, yet the difference soon begins to show. I’m generalising, so don’t go throwing particular instances of brilliant women engineers at me in general, I say, the boy becomes intrigued by the intimate details of the machine, but the girl’s interest falls behind his: she accepts the fact that the thing works without caring why, and finally she reaches the state when she does not want to know why. She bec
omes not only uninterested, but antagonistic and this though her life may at any time depend upon its proper working. Odd, you must admit.’

  Jealousy,’ Froud murmured, addressing no one in particular; ‘green eyed monster, et cetera.’

  ‘I thought you’d been silent for a long time. What exactly do you mean by “jealousy” in that cryptic tone?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘The highest duty of woman is motherhood,’ Froud said. ‘It is the crown of her existence. No woman can say she is fulfilled until she has created life with her own life, until she has felt within her the stir of a new life beginning, until she has performed that holy function which Mother Nature has made her glorious task, her mystic joy, her supreme achievement down the echoing ages.’

  ‘What on earth is all this about?’ asked the doctor patiently.

  Froud raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t you like it? My readers love it. It seems to console them a bit for all the actual messiness of reproduction, somehow makes them forget that cats, rats and periwinkles do the same thing so much more efficiently and easily.’

  ‘Well, just forget your readers for a bit, if you’ve got anything to say. Try ordinary prose.’

  ‘My art is spurned. All right, at your request, I strip off the rococo. Listen. No one can deny that woman’s greatest urge (like you, Doc, I generalise) is creative. If he did try to deny it he would come up against the fact of the race’s survival, the life force, George Bernard Shaw and other phenomena. So let us admit that she embodies this intense creative urge.

  ‘So far, so good. But Nature, that well known postulate, has taken great care that for all its power, its direction shall be severely limited. In other words she has said to herself: “Let woman be creative, but let her create the right things she mustn’t go footling about creating omnibuses, tin openers or insurance companies let her creative instinct be concentrated on producing children and on the matters connected therewith.”

  ‘I, personally, think it was a mean trick. It has resulted in vast quantities of women in a vastly interesting world being shut into vastly uninteresting compartments. Because, you see, Nature’s little scheme necessitated a curtailment of the imagination to keep them on the job. Hence the average woman; history means nothing to her; the future means less (although her children will have to live in that future); world catastrophes are far less interesting than local mishaps. Nature has given her an ingrowing imagination, working chiefly in a bedroom setting. So monotonous.’

  ‘Very quaint,’ agreed the doctor, ‘but what’s all this got to do with…?’

  ‘Ah! I’m just coming to that. The point is this: they simply have not got the imagination to see the machines as we see them, but they have the power to be jealous of them. Women are creators: The Machine is a creator: in that they are rivals. They are afraid of it, too. What is it they fear subconsciously? Is it that man may one day use The Machine to create life? to usurp their prerogative? They do not know why they fear it, but they resent it. They resent having to share their men with it they’re sulkily jealous. They try to minimise it as though they were dismissing a rival’s charms. There is nothing good they can say for it. It’s noisy, it’s dirty, it’s ugly, it’s oily, it stinks: and, anyway, it is only a jumble of metal bits what can be really interesting in that? It is not human and sentient. There you have the crux: the new inhuman creator confronts the human creator.’

  ‘I suppose all that means something,’ Dugan said reflectively as Froud stopped.

  ‘Certainly,’ agreed the doctor; ‘it means that men are more interested in machines than women are.’

  ‘But hadn’t you already said…?’

  ‘I had.’

  Froud waved a casual hand. ‘Oh, go ahead, don’t mind me. I merely tried to shed a little light on the troubled waters.’

  ‘Oil,’ said the doctor. He turned to Joan.

  ‘Speaking as a woman, what did you think of that mouthful?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘Not much.’

  ‘That was only to be expected,’ Froud said. ‘Now if it were possible for her to speak as a neuter….’

  ‘All the same,’ Joan went on, ‘most of the women I know who dislike machines dislike them actively. I mean that they dislike them differently from the way in which they dislike, say, an inconvenient house. But then, I should say that such women have resented men’s toys all through the centuries, just as men have resented the same type of woman’s absorption in domesticity.

  ‘But we seem to have got off the subject. Dale was telling us what he felt about machines, he only instanced Mrs. Curtance to show us what he didn’t think, but we haven’t let him finish.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can, very well. It is, as you say, a feeling. When I think about it, it’s difficult to find the words. But I can tell you something of what I don’t feel. I don’t feel that a good machine is an utterly impersonal thing a jumble of metal bits, as Froud was saying just now any more than I feel that a musical composition is a jumble of notes. And it can’t be impersonal. Something of the ingenuity, skill and pride of work that went into the making of it remains in it just as something of the sculptor remains in carved stone.

  ‘And there is a delight in machines, a kind of sensuous delight that derives from smooth running, swiftly spinning bars and wheels, sliding rods, precise swings and the perfect interaction of parts. And, behind it all, a sense of power. Power which, coupled to men’s brains, knows no bounds.’

  ‘Power to do what?’ Joan asked.

  ‘To do anything to do everything perhaps not to do anything. I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if power is the goal in, itself: as if a force drove one to master force.’

  His words were followed by a silence during which Dugan looked as if he supposed all that also meant something. Joan, noticing his frown, wondered if he disagreed. He shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know. You people all make it sound so frightfully complicated. I mean, I like machines all right, they’re grand fun to play about with, but I’m hanged if I can see half of what you’re talking about. They’ve just been made for us to use: and a mighty dull world it would be without them. I’d hate to have been born a couple of centuries ago or even one century ago. Think of not being able to fly! It’d have been well, I mean to say, what did they do then? Honestly, I don’t see what you’re getting at. We’ve got machines; we couldn’t get on without them. Naturally, we use them. I don’t see what more there is to be said.’

  An unexpected voice chimed in for his support. Burns for once was paying some attention to the rest.

  ‘Aye, you’re right, lad. Use your machines and use them decently. Don’t overdrive them and break their hearts. Look after them an’ they’ll not let you down which is more than you can say for some human beings.’

  Chapter 13. Arrival

  This is not the place to lecture upon the details of the interplanetary journey. If you want the figures of the quantity of explosives used, of the changes consequent upon extra load, rates of acceleration and deceleration, necessary corrections of course, divergencies between theory and performance, etc., you will find them, together with a host of other details, carefully considered in Dale’s book, The Bridging of Space, and some of them, more popularly arranged, in Froud’s Flight of the ‘Gloria Mundi’. Here, one is interested chiefly in the aspect which neither of these gentlemen saw fit, for one reason or another, to include in his book. And though I believe that Froud toyed for a time with the idea of a less impersonal story of the flight, it is unlikely now that it will ever be written. Almost twelve years have passed since the Mount Wilson observatory lost sight of the Gloria 11. Whether Dale, Froud and the rest of their party ever reached Venus in her we cannot tell but she has never returned.

  Therefore, if I do not tell you this story as I had it, partly from Joan and partly from the rest, it is likely that it may never be told. But in case you should say to yourself ‘these people seem to have talked a great deal, but one feels that they might
have done that anywhere. They seem singularly unmoved by the fact that they are taking part in one of history’s greatest adventures’: in case you say that, let me point out that though travelling through space may be an exciting adventure in prospect and in retrospect, yet in actual accomplishment, I am assured, it is extremely tedious.

  It was Dr. Grayson, I think, who said:

  ‘Fancy buying undying fame merely at the cost of six months’ close confinement.’

  While Froud quoted the classic words of an earlier intrepid flier:

  “It was a lousy trip and that’s praising it.”‘

  But looking back on the journey they get it in perspective and agree that it was not a monotonous whole. The longer view reveals that it fell into distinct phases, each with its own particular complexion. One of the most marked of these was the period which followed Joan’s announcement of her belief in a sentient machine.

  Whether she timed it by skill or luck, there is no doubt that the moment was well chosen. Four weeks before, with the memories of everyday life clinging more closely, it would have met with immediate ridicule. But now, from a mixture of motives, it was not airily dismissed. For one thing, they knew the girl better and their attitudes towards her had changed, and, for another, one could not afford, with the threat of a deadly boredom overhanging, to dismiss any subject which showed possibilities of interesting discussion. Her fantastically improbable suggestion had, therefore, a more kindly reception than it deserved, though it is doubtful if any one of the rest took it as more than a basis for entertaining speculation. But, certainly, at this time their interest in the conditions they expected to find upon Mars became sharper.

  Dale’s anticipations were modest, but he admitted that he would be disappointed to find only a waterless world, incapable of supporting life, though he had started with just that expectation.