Stowaway to Mars

by John Wyndham

  In its time, he was telling her, Hanno had been the home of between five and six million people. Nowadays the machines had adapted much of it for their own use while the rest stood empty save for the airtight building where the surviving men and women dwelt.

  ‘Where are they?’ Joan put in. ‘I haven’t seen anyone but you yet. When can I see the rest?’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow. They insist that you shall be medically examined first. You may easily be a carrier of Earth germs which would be fatal to us.’

  ‘But if to them, why not to you?’

  ‘Someone had to take the risk.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m glad it was me.’

  Joan hesitated. Then it became possible only to change the subject.

  ‘Why are there none of them in the streets?’

  He explained that the majority never left the central building. ‘We can if we want to,’ he added, ‘but we seldom want to. We are almost museum pieces. They scarcely need us any longer.’

  She frowned. ‘They’ evidently meant the machines.

  ‘I know it must sound silly, but I still can’t help thinking along my old lines. I don’t understand why they haven’t conquered you and wiped you out. And yet you, yourself, seem to think of them as friends almost protectively.’

  ‘Can you not bring yourself to see that machines are not the enemies, but the complements of mankind? It is of your kind of machine I am talking now. Clearly you do not in the least appreciate what you have found. Humanity is flexible, machinery is not. If you do not adapt to it, it will conquer you. You must learn to use the controls of the car that is carrying you, or it will run away with you.’ He paused, and then went on: ‘But that applies to you to whom the machine is new. With us it is utterly different. You say our attitude to them is protective. That is true. They are our future all the future we have. Did I not tell you that they are the children of our brains? They are the final extension of ourselves, so that we have every reason to be proud, not jealous of them.

  ‘But circumstances on your Earth give another aspect. The larger planet has the longer life. Your race’s day is far from done, so you are both jealous and afraid of the machines. It may be that you will be jealous of them to the end, for the end of man on Earth will not be like his end on Mars. Because our planet is small, the end has come early in evolution no more natural forms can develop here. But Earth is barely in her middle age; there is time yet for many kinds of creatures to rule her. It may easily be that you will strangle yourselves with your own machines and thus make your own prophecies come true, and that another creature will arise to look back on man as man looks back on the reptiles.’

  ‘No,’ Joan’s objection was a reflex. ‘Mankind must be the peak.’

  ‘What vanity! I tell you, the great Lords of the Earth are yet to come. They may evolve from man, or they may not. But if they do, they will not be men as we know them. There is change always change. Even on this dying planet we are the instruments which have evolved new lords to come after us: perhaps they will make others to follow them. Do you really think that for all the millions of years to come you can face Nature unchanged? We have tried, and changed even as we tried. And now that we have made the machines to fight Nature we find that we are no more than the tools of that evolution which is Nature herself. We say we fight her while we do her bidding the joke is on us.’

  Vaygan led on. He showed her magnificent halls, bare and deserted, great libraries where were books printed upon imperishable sheets, but with the characters all but faded from the pages. She saw that long stretches of the shelves gaped empty. The machines had taken all of any use to them: the rest dealt with human beings they were no longer needed. He took her through galleries which he himself had never seen before, filled with sculptures upon which the settling dust had mounted age by age. They went into theatres whose strange circular stages had known no actors for thousands of years. He tried, in a place not unlike a television or cinema theatre, to give her a glimpse of the thriving Hanno of long ago, but the machinery was corroded and useless. He showed her a hall filled with queer little cars which had once raced along the streets outside. She was surprised at the preservation of it a11. A city on Earth neglected for a fraction of the time that Hanno had been empty would have fallen into mounds of ruin. Vaygan ascribed it partly to the dryness of Mars and the lack of growing things, and partly to the hardness of the materials. ‘But, even so,’ he said, ‘if you look at the corners of the buildings you will see that they are not as sharp as they were. The wind has fretted the sand against them, but I think, in the end, that they will outlast the wind.’

  They came to districts where they were completely alone, with the streets as empty as the buildings to either side of them. The effect was melancholy. Joan began to long for activity and movement again, even if it were only the bustle of the machines. She fancied that Vaygan, too, seemed relieved when she suggested that they should turn back.

  ‘Now I will show you that part of Hanno which is not dead,’ he said.

  He took her into one of the factories where machines made more machines. She looked about it, hoping to understand a little of what was going on and vainly trying to change a lifetime’s habits of thought. She felt that once her mind would accept the idea of a living machine as an accomplished fact she would be able to sympathise with Vaygan’s attitude. But still her reason balked at it. To advance the theory in the living room of the Gloria Mundi had been one thing: to accept the reality of it was quite another. Was it, she wondered, a part of that inadaptability Vaygan had spoken about? She followed thoughtfully as he led on into another hall.

  ‘This is one of the repair shops,’ he told her.

  She noticed the different sections allotted to the mending or replacement of damaged tentacles, legs, lenses or other parts.

  ‘There seem to be a lot of breakages,’ she said.

  ‘There are, but it doesn’t matter. Once we tried giving the machines a more complex nervous system for their own protection. It worked, but we gave it up. It caused unnecessary pain when there was an accident, and the parts are very easily renewed. There is only one thing which we cannot replace, and that is memory, because each individual’s memory is built up of his own accumulation of observations. If that is smashed, a fresh memory blank must be put in and the machine has to begin all over again. It is as near to death as a machine can come for it has lost everything which built its personality.’

  Joan was reminded of a question which she had several times intended to ask:

  ‘Those queer machines in the bushes and on the desert there’s nothing like them here. What are they?’

  ‘Mistakes, mostly. Mistakes or experiments which have either escaped or been turned out there to see how they survive.’

  ‘But why haven’t you destroyed them?’

  ‘They don’t worry us and they seldom come near the cities. Usually they roam about in bands. You see, they have no factories and if anything goes wrong, they must rebuild themselves from one another’s parts. There is still such a thing as luck in the world, and it’s not impossible that the “mistakes” may prove valuable in teaching the rest something.

  ‘The machines are by no means perfect yet probably they never will be so there are constant attempts to improve them. At one time we thought we could build a machine which need not start with blank memory plates. It would save the time spent in building memories education, if you like to call it that. A groundwork of artificial memory was built in to give them a start usually with deplorable results. Now we think it impossible, but for many years experimenters went on trying and it was during that time that most of the “mistakes” were created. If one takes these machines’ he waved a hand around him ‘if one takes these as normal, one might say that those in the desert are mad. Nowadays we try (or, rather, the machines try, for they build themselves) very little tampering with mind.’

  ‘Mind,’ Joan repeated. ‘I wish I could grasp that. A mechanical brain in control I find difficult to u
nderstand: a mechanical mind, impossible.’

  Vaygan looked puzzled. ‘Mind is the control of brain by memory. Why should that be hard to understand?’

  Joan gave it up. How could she explain one tenth of her difficulties to a man who regarded machines as a race of beings differing from himself only in the material of their construction?

  After her medical examination an affair of blood testing machines, mechanical ultra short wave cameras and automatic response registers, Vaygan took her back to the room on the third level of the central building. She shed her air suit and helmet with relief.’

  ‘When shall we know when I can meet the others?’ she asked. He thought it likely that the reports of the tests would be made the next morning.

  ‘And what about my friends?’ she went on. ‘What is happening to them?’

  She half hoped that he would switch on the television panel again, but the idea did not seem to occur to him. He said:

  ‘The machines are looking after them.’

  ‘What do you think they will do?’

  ‘They’re going to send them back very soon.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Certainly. Your friends could not live peacefully with our machines. They do not understand them. Nor could your people mix with ours; there is too much difference. Your race is young and ambitious; ours has that peace which the approach of death is said to give to the aged. As a race, we are resigned….’

  He stood beside the window. The sunlight was slanting now. The spaces between the buildings were thrown into deep shadow, beyond them the arid red sand still sparkled as though it quivered.

  ‘As a race….’ Joan said. ‘But you? What are you thinking as a man, Vaygan?’

  His smile was wistful as he turned to her.

  ‘I was not so much thinking as feeling, feeling history.’

  ‘History?’

  ‘The growing pains of young civilisations. Mars was not always old, you know. In its adolescence there were ambitions, wars, victories, defeats and, above all, hopes. It was a beautiful world. There were trees, animals, flowers; there were seasons when the leaves came and seasons when they fell; there were men and women in their millions. We have histories…

  ‘But then, very many thousands of years ago Mars began to grow old. The water became scarcer and scarcer; that united us. For the first time in our history all the nations worked together, and they built the great canals which kept our soil fertile for many generations. But it was only a temporary victory. There were always desert patches, and as time went on they spread like a malignant disease. They drove back the plants until it was only on the canal banks that anything could grow.

  ‘Our air grew thinner. It leaked slowly away into space until life in the open became impossible for us: We have put off the end in one way and another; clinging until the last as life always clings. We don’t know why. Everything must end in time. In some hundreds of millions of years the sun itself will flicker for the last time and every trace of life will vanish from the system yet we have struggled to preserve ourselves against our reason for a few generations longer. And so, in spite of all we have done and everything we know, we have come to a dwindling end; a few listless survivors who must spend their lives in a prison of their own building.

  ‘I was thinking of all that we have lost: all that you still have. And of the things that I have never had. We are born old. I never knew the joy, energy and ambitions which are in youth yet I know the loss and I feel that I have been robbed of my heritage. You can dream of the future and of your children’s future: we can dream of nothing but the past. I think that I should be content with that as very old people are content, but I am not. I have seen the men of your race and I am jealous of them. Against my reason I resent the fate which has placed me in a dying world where existence has no features. It is as though a forgotten thing had revived in me. An unfamiliar stirring, or perhaps an empty aching impossible of fulfilment. I feel that I could cry out: “Give me life. Let me live before I die.”‘

  He paused and looked at her again, searching her face.

  ‘You don’t understand you can’t understand. Youth flows in you; it rises in your veins as sap used to rise in our trees. It colours every thought of yours, this hope, this sense of the future. Even when you are old you will not feel the tired dry barrenness which we can never forget.’

  ‘And yet,’ Joan said gently, ‘you are not speaking now as if life held nothing for you. You talked before as if you had forgotten emotion, and yet now

  ‘I had. I had forgotten it. We must forget it in this world…. This is not the real Vaygan talking to you now; not the Vaygan you met last night. This is a younger Vaygan; the Vaygan who might have been a million years ago. The Vaygan who dare not exist now lest he should die of discouragement.’

  ‘It is you who have done this to me. You and those others with you. But mostly you, yourself. You have given me a glimpse, a vision of people who still live. There is something how shall I say? a spirit in you and around you. It is the life force of young things striving, reaching out, still climbing upward to the peaks of life. We crossed those peaks long ago and we have been descending on the other side these thousands of years. Yet there is this thing which calls from you to me and stirs in me those vestiges of a Vaygan who in the long forgotten ages was joyously scaling those peaks with no knowledge of the futility which lay beyond. This thing almost makes me think against my better knowledge that the end is not just the coldness of universal cinders. I feel now that only to have lived would have been an achievement perhaps only to have died, like those men in the rocket. At least they knew hope before they died.’

  Joan said nothing. She barely followed his words and their meaning was lost, but with her eyes on his she saw more than he told. His hands took hers, trembling a little. His broad chest rose and fell with deeper breaths. It seemed to her as though a lay figure of a man were coming to life.

  ‘You!’ he whispered. ‘You have lent me life for a little while. You have fanned a spark which was almost dead, and it hurts me, Joan. It hurts me…’

  Chapter 22. A Siege is Raised

  Dugan knocked up a switch and the spare bulb of the searchlight mounted at the window in a temporary reflector went dead. He snatched up a pair of field glasses and pointed them at the group on the sand hill close by the bushes. For some minutes he watched the flashes from a bright piece of metal held in a man’s hand. Then he lowered the glasses, flashed out the sign for ‘message received’ on the searchlight bulb, and turned to the others.

  ‘They say their air supply is good for another eight hours yet,’ he said.

  The four looked at one another.

  ‘Well, is there anything we can dot’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Damned if I can think of it,’ Dale muttered.

  Froud looked again at the party on the sand hill. In the dry air it was possible to make out even at that distance the overalled figures of the four Russians and the ring of imprisoning machines.

  ‘I’m feeling a bit of a swine,’ he said. ‘Sheer human decency ought to have made us warn them. Instead, I just encouraged Karaminoff to go head first into trouble.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about that. They wouldn’t have believed us, and they were bound to meet the machines sooner or later,’ the doctor told him.

  Froud grunted. ‘Maybe. All the same there’s a hell of a difference between trying to save a man and shoving him in. However, he did at least have the sense to get back when he saw what was coming out of the bushes. But what the devil can we do about it? They’ve got them the same way as they got us. They’ve been there nearly six hours now, and it’s not likely they’ll be interrupted this time…’ He broke off. ‘Hi, Dugan, they’re flashing.’

  Dugan put up his glasses once more. After a minute:

  ‘Can’t read it. Must be signalling their own ship again,’ he announced.

  Froud pressed his face against the window in an effort to look astern. The fact that the wind
ow was set in the curving bow restricted his field, but he could see enough half a dozen of the grotesquely assembled machines posted unmovingly opposite the entrance port.

  ‘Still there,’ he said gloomily. He crossed the room and sat down on the side of one of the couches. ‘This is a hell of a mess. It’s dead certain that if we go out there we’ll get caught too, and that won’t help anybody. But if we’re ever going to get away, we’ve got to get out sooner or later to upend the ship and that’s going to be no light job. Seems to me as if Joan and Burns had the better deal, after all at least it was over quickly…. Why the devil can’t they let us alone, anyway?’

  ‘To divide their planet between us?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Rot. Those things out there can’t reason like that. If they were human beings, there’d be some sense in their resentment. But machines I ask you, why should machines attack us at sight?’

  ‘Metal, I think,’ Dugan contributed unexpectedly. ‘They seem to be short of it. You saw how they rebuilt themselves from one another’s parts. They could get a lot of metal from a ship like this.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Froud agreed. ‘With us out of the way they could break her up. I wonder if you’ve hit it.’

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for us to remove ourselves?’ the doctor suggested tentatively. ‘I mean, to shoot the G.M. along the ground by use of the tail rockets?’

  ‘We’d be more likely to dig into a sand hill and bury ourselves on a surface like this,’ Dale thought.

  ‘And it wouldn’t do us much good if we did move a few miles,’ Froud added. ‘Our friends the nickel plated nightmares would just come along too.’