Dumb Martian

by John Wyndham

  It was not necessary, as the Company frequently pointed out, for super­annu­ation at the age of forty to come as a hard­ship to any­one: salaries were good, and they could cite plenty of cases where men had founded bril­liant sub­sequent careers on the savings of their space-service days. That was all right for the men who had saved, and had not been obses­sively inter­ested in the fact that one four-legged ani­mal can run faster than ano­ther. But this was not even an enter­prising way to have lost one's money, so when it came to Duncan's time to leave crew work they made him no more than a rout­ine offer.

  He had never been to Jupiter IV/II, but he knew just what it would be like — some­thing that was second moon to Callisto; itself fourth moon, in order of dis­covery, to Jupiter; would in­evi­tably be one of the grimmer kinds of cosmic pebble. They offered no alter­native, so he signed up at the usual terms: £5,000 a year for five years, all found, plus five months waiting time on half-pay before he could get there, plus six months afterwards, also on half-pay, during ‘readjustment to gravity’.

  Well — it meant the next six years taken care of; five of them with­out expenses, and a nice little sum at the end.

  The splinter in the mouth­ful was: could you get through five years of iso­la­tion without crack­ing up? Even when the psy­cholo­gist had okayed you, you couldn't be sure. Some could: others went to pieces in a few months, and had to be taken off, gibbering. If you got through two years, they said, you'd be okay for five. But the only way to find out about the two was to try...

  “What about my putting in the wait­ing time on Mars? I could live cheaper there,” Duncan suggested.

  They had consulted plane­tary tables and sail­ing schedules, and dis­covered that it would come cheaper for them, too. They had declined to split the differ­ence on the saving thus made, but they had booked him a passage for the follow­ing week, and arranged for him to draw, on credit, from the Company's agent there.

  The Martian colony in and around Port Clarke is rich in ex-space­men who find it more com­fort­able to spend their rear­guard years in the lesser gravity, boader mora­lity and greater eco­nomy obtain­ing there. They are great advisers. Duncan listened, but dis­carded most of it. Such methods of occupy­ing one­self to preserve sanity as learn­ing the Bible or the works of Shake­speare by heart, or copy­ing out three pages of the Ency­clo­paedia every day, or build­ing model space­ships in bottles, struck him not only as tedious, but prob­ably of doubt­ful effi­cacy, as well. The only one which he had felt to show sound prac­tical advan­tages was that which had led him to picking Lellie to share his exile, and he still fancied it was a sound one, in spite of its letting him in for £2,360.

  He was well enough aware of the general opinion about it to refrain from adding a sharp retort to Wishart. Instead, he con­ceded:

  “Maybe it'd not do to take a real woman to a place like that. But a Mart's kind of different...”

  “Even a Mart—” Wishart began, but he was cut short by find­ing him­self drifting slowly across the room as the arrester tubes began to fire.

  Conversation ceased as every­body turned-to on the job of securing all loose objects.

  Jupiter IV/II was, by defini­tion, a sub-moon, and probably a cap­tured aster­oid. The sur­face was not cratered, like Luna's: it was simply a waste of jagged, riven rocks. The satel­lite as a whole had the form of an irre­gular ovoid; it was a bleak, cheer­less lump of stone splin­tered off some vanished planet, with nothing whatever to commend it but its situ­ation.

  There have to be way-load stations. It would be hope­lessly un­eco­nomic to build big ships capable of land­ing on the major planets. A few of the older and smaller ships were indeed built on Earth, and so had to be launched from there, but the very first large, moon-assembled ship estab­lished a new practice. Ships became truly space­ships and were no longer built to stand the strains of high gravi­tatio­nal pull. They began to make their voy­ages, carry­ing fuel, stores, freight and changes of personnel, exclu­sively between satel­lites. Newer types do not put in even at Luna, but use the arti­fi­cial satel­lite, Pseudos, exclu­sively as their Earth terminus.

  Freight between the way-loads and their prima­ries is cus­to­marily consigned in powered cylinders known as crates; passen­gers are ferried back and forth in small rocket-ships. Stations such as Pseudos, or Deimos, the main way-load for Mars, handle enough work to keep a crew busy, but in the out­lying, little-developed posts one man who is part-handler, part-watch­man is enough. Ships visited them in­freq­uently. On Jupiter IV/II one might, according to Duncan's infor­mation, expect an aver­age of one every eight or nine months (Earth).

  The ship continued to slow, coming in on a spiral, adjust­ing her speed to that of the satel­lite. The gyros started up to give stability. The small, jagged world grew until it over­flowed the watch-screens. The ship was man­oeuv­red into a close orbit. Miles of feature­less, formid­able rocks slid mono­to­nously beneath her.

  The station site came sliding on to the screen from the left; a roughly levelled area of a few acres; the first and only sign of order in the stony chaos. At the far end was a pair of hemi­spheri­cal huts, one much larger than the other. At the near end, a few cylin­dri­cal crates were lined up beside a launch­ing ramp hewn from the rock. Down each side of the area stood rows of canvas bins, some stuffed full of a conical shape; others slack, empty or half-empty. A huge para­bolic mirror was perched on a crag behind the station, looking like a mon­strous, formal­ized flower. In the whole scene there was only one sign of move­ment — a small, space-suited figure pranc­ing madly about on a metal apron in front of the larger dome, waving its arms in a wild welcome.

  Duncan left the screen, and went to the cabin. He found Lellie fighting off a large case which, under the influence of de­cele­ra­tion, seemed deter­mined to pin her against the wall. He shoved the case aside, and pulled her out.

  “We're there,” he told her. “Put on your space-suit.”

  Her round eyes ceased to pay attention to the case, and turned towards him. There was no telling from them how she felt, what she thought. She said, simply :

  “Thpace-thuit. Yith — okay.”

  Standing in the airlock of the dome, the out­going Super­inten­dent paid more atten­tion to Lellie than to the pressure-dial. He knew from expe­rience exactly how long equa­lizing took, and opened his face-plate with­out even a glance at the pointer.

  “Wish I'd had the sense to bring one,” be observed. “Could have been mighty useful on the chores, too.”

  He opened the inner door, and led through.

  “Here it is — and welcome to it,” he said.

  The main living-room was oddly shaped by reason of the dome's archi­tec­ture, but it was spacious. It was also ex­ceed­ingly, sordidly untidy.

  “Meant to clean it up — never got around to it, some way,” he added. He looked at Lellie. There was no visible sign of what she thought of the place. “Never can tell with Marts,” he said uneasily. "They kind of non-register.'

  Duncan agreed: “I've figured this one looked aston­ished at being born, and never got over it.”

  The other man went on looking at Lellie. His eyes strayed from her to a gallery of pinned-up terres­trial beauties, and back again.

  “Sort of funny shape Marts are,” he said, musingly.

  “This one's reckoned a good enough looker where she comes from,” Duncan told him, a trifle shortly.

  “Sure. No offence, Bud. I guess they'll all seem a funny shape to me after this spell.” He changed the subject. “I'd better show you the ropes around here.”

  Duncan signed to Lellie to open her faceplate so that she could hear him, and then told her to get out of her suit.

  The dome was the usual type: double-floored, double-walled, with an insulated and eva­cuated space between the two; con­struc­ted as a unit, and held down by metal bars let into the rock. In the living-quarters there were three more size­able rooms, able t
o cope with increased personnel if trade should expand.

  “The rest,” the out­going man explained, “is the regular station stores, mostly food, air cylin­ders, spares of one kind and another, and water — you'll need to watch her on water; most women seem to think it grows natu­rally in pipes.”

  Duncan shook his head.

  “Not Marts. Living in deserts gives 'em a natural respect for water.”

  The other picked up a clip of store-sheets.

  “We'll check and sign these later. It's a nice soft job here. Only freight now is rare metalli­ferous earth. Callisto's not been opened up a lot yet. Hand­ling's easy. They tell you when a crate's on the way: you switch on the radio beacon to bring it in. On dispatch you can't go wrong if you follow the tables.” He looked around the room. “All home com­forts. You read? Plenty of books.” He waved a hand at the packed rows which covered half the inner partition wall. Duncan said he'd never been much of a reader. “Well, it helps,” said the other. “Find pretty well anything that's known in that lot. Records there. Fond of music?”

  Duncan said he liked a good tune.

  “H'm. Better try the other stuff. Tunes get to squir­rel­ling inside your head. Play chess?” He pointed to a board, with men pegged into it.

  Duncan shook his head.

  “Pity. There's a fellow over on Callisto plays a pretty hot game. He'll be disap­pointed not to finish this one. Still, if I was fixed up the way you are, maybe I'd not have been inter­es­ted in chess.” His eyes strayed to Lellie again. “What do you reckon she's going to do here, over and above cook­ing and amu­sing you?” he asked.

  It was not a question that had occurred to Duncan, but he shrugged.

  “Oh, she'll be okay, I guess. There's a natural dumbness about Marts — they'll sit for hours on end, doing damn all. It's a gift they got.”

  “Well, it should come in handy here,” said the other.

  The regular ship's-call work went on. Cases were unloaded, the metalli­ferous earths hosed from the bins into the holds. A small ferry-rocket came up from Callisto carry­ing a couple of time-expired pros­pec­tors, and left again with their two replace­ments. The ship's engineers checked over the station's machinery, made re­new­als, topped up the

  If water tanks, charged the spent air cyl­inders, tested, tink-t ered and tested again before giving their final okay.

  Duncan stood outside on the metal apron where not long ago his pre­deces­sor had per­formed his fan­tas­tic dance of wel­come, to watch the ship take off. She rose straight up, with her jets push­ing her gently. The curve of her hull became an elon­gated crescent shining against the black sky. The maul driving jets started to gush white flame edged with pink. Quickly she picked up speed. Before long she had dwindled to a speck which sank behind the ragged sky­line.

  Quite suddenly Duncan felt as if he, too, had dwindled. He had become a speck upon a barren mass of rock which was itself a speck in the immen­sity. The indif­ferent sky about him had no scale. It was an utterly black void where­in his mother-sun and a myriad more suns flared perpe­tually, without reason or purpose.

  The rocks of the satellite itself, rising up in their harsh crests and ridges, were without scale, too. He could not tell which were near or far away; he could not, in the jumble of hard-lit planes and inky shadows, even make out their true form. There was nothing like them to be seen on Earth, or on Mars. Their unweathered edges were sharp as blades: they had been just as sharp as that for millions upon millions of years, and would be for as long as the satellite should last.

  The un­changing millions of years seemed to stretch out before and behind him. It was not only him­self, it was all life that was a speck, a briefly tran­si­tory acci­dent, utterly un­im­por­tant to the uni­verse. It was a queer little mote dancing for its chance mo­ment in the light of the eternal suns. Reality was just globes of fire and balls of stone rolling on, sense­lessly rolling along through empti­ness, through time un­imagin­able, for ever, and ever, and ever...

  Within his heated suit, Duncan shivered a little. Never before had he been so alone; never so much aware of the vast, callous, futile lone­li­ness of space. Looking out into the black­ness, with light that had left a star a million years ago shining into his eyes, he wondered.

  “Why?” he asked himself. “What the heck's it all about, anyway?”

  The sound of his own un­answer­able question broke up the mood. He shook his head to clear, it of specu­lative non­sense. He turned his back on the uni­verse, reducing it again to its proper status as a back­ground for life in general and human life in parti­cular, and stepped into the airlock.

  The job was, as his prede­cessor had told him, soft. Duncan made his radio contacts with Callisto at pre­arranged times. Usually it was little more than a formal check on one another's continued existence, with perhaps an exchange of comment on the radio news. Only occasionally did they announce a dispatch and tell him when to switch on his beacon. Then, in due course, the cylinder-crate would make its appearance, and float slowly down. It was quite a simple matter to couple it up to a bin to transfer the load.

  The satellite's day was too short for con­ve­nience, and its night, lit by Callisto, and some­times by Jupiter as well, almost as bright; so they dis­regar­ded it, and lived by the calen­dar-clock which kept Earth time on the Green­wich Meri­dian setting. At first much of the time had been occu­pied in dis­posing of the freight that the ship had left. Some of it into the main dome —neces­sities for them­selves, and other items that would store better where there was warmth and air. Some into the small, air­less, unheated dome. The greater part to be stowed and padded care­fully into cylinders and launched off to the Callisto base. But once that work had been cleared, the job was cer­tainly soft, too soft...

  Duncan drew up a programme. At regular inter­vals he would inspect this and that, he would waft him­self up to the crag and check on the sun-motor there, et cetera. But keeping to an un­neces­sary programme requires reso­lution. Sun-motors, for instance, are very neces­sarily built to run for long spells with­out atten­tion. The only action one could take if it should stop would be to call on Callisto for a ferry-rocket to come and take them off until a ship should call to repair it. A break­down there, the Company had explained very clearly, was the only thing that would justify him in leaving his station, with the stores of precious earth, un­manned (and it was also con­veyed that to contrive a break­down for the sake of a change was unlikely to prove worth while). One way and another, the programme did not last long.

  There were times when Duncan found himself wonder­ing whether the bringing of Lellie had been such a good idea after all. On the purely prac­tical side, he'd not have cooked as well as she did, and probably have pigged it quite as badly as his pre­deces­sor had, but if she had not been there, the necessity of looking after him­self would have given him some occu­pation. And even from the angle of company —well, she was that, of a sort, but she was alien, queer; kind of like a half-robot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun. There were, indeed, times — in­creas­ingly freq­uent times, when the very look of her irri­tated him intensely; so did the way she moved, and her gestures, and her silly pidgin-talk when she talked, and her self-contained silence when she didn't, and her with­draw­ness, and all her dif­ferent­ness, and the fact that he would have been £2,360 better off without her ... Nor did she make a serious attempt to remedy her short­comings, even where she had the means. Her face, for instance. You'd think any girl would try to make her best of that — but did she, hell! There was that left eye­brow again: made her look like a sozzled clown, but a lot she cared...

  “For heaven's sake,” he told her once more, “put the cock­eyed thing straight. Don't you know how to fix 'em yet! And you've got your colour on wrong, too. Look at that picture — now look at your­self in the mirror: a great daub of red all in the wrong place. And your hair, too: getting all like sea­weed again. You've got the things to wave it, then for
crysake wave it again, and stop looking like a bloody mermaid. I know you can't help being a damn Mart, but you can at least try to look like a real woman.”

  Lellie looked at the coloured picture, and then com­pared her reflec­tion with it, criti­cally.

  “Yith — okay,” she said, with an equable detach­ment.

  Duncan snorted.

  “And that's another thing. Bloody baby-talk! It's not ‘yith’, it's ‘yes’. Y-E-S, yes. So say ‘yes’.”

  “Yith” said Lellie, obligingly.

  “Oh, for — Can't you hear the difference? S-s-s, not th-th-th. Ye-sss.”

  “Yith,” she said.

  “No. Put your tongue farther back like this —”

  The lesson went on for some time. Finally he grew angry.

  “Just making a monkey out of me, huh! You'd better be careful, my girl. Now, say ‘yes’.”

  She hesitated, looking at his wrathful face.

  “Go on, say it.”

  “Y-yeth,” she said, nervously.

  His hand slapped across her face harder than he had in­ten­ded. The jolt broke her mag­netic contact with the floor, and sent her sail­ing across the room in a spin of arms and legs. She struck the opposite wall, and rebounded to float help­lessly, out of reach of any hold. He strode after her, turned her right up, and set her on her feet. His left hand clutched her overall in a bunch, just below her throat, his right was raised.

  “Again?” he told her.

  Her eyes looked helplessly this way and that. He shook her. She tried. At the sixth attempt she manager: “Yeths.”

  He accepted that for the time being.

  “You can do it, you see — when you try. What you need, my girl, is a bit of firm handling.”

  He let her go. She tottered across the room, holding her hands to her bruised face.

  A number of times while the weeks drew out so slowly into months Duncan found him­self wonder­ing whether he was going to get through. He spun out what work there was as much as he could, but it left still too much time hang­ing heavy on his hands.