Element 79

by Fred Hoyle

  The first Martian mission was given over to glamour, just like the first lunar mission. It was a case of nipping down from orbit, nipping for a little while out onto the planet itself, nipping back into the module—a quite fat job, this time—and of nipping up again into orbit. Three months out from Earth, three months back, unconscionable thick lumps of bread enclosing an excessively thin slice of meat. Still, the first expedition already cast doubt on the “life on Mars” theory. Not a bug, not a protein, not an amino acid, or any conceivable biochemical relation thereof, was found in the samples brought back to Earth.

  The cognizant biologists took a bad knock. They had pushed a lot of people around, spent a lot of money, and achieved precisely nothing. Goaded into a last spasm, they insisted that further tests be made. Although very extensive samplings were taken by the second mission, not a trace of organic material was found. Life did not exist on Mars. Thereafter the planet was given over to the scientist-explorers.

  Nothing really epoch-making was expected. Yet the instinct to stand where nobody has stood before is strong in all of us. The third mission set about its task of establishing a long-term Martian station with zest and zeal. Preliminary to setting up a permanent energy supply, the same boring down through the underground glaciers was put in hand. It had all been done before, but not there on Mars. This made the mission interesting and worthwhile.

  A great discovery was made during a lull in these preliminary operations. Instruments deep below the surface found sound waves propagating everywhere throughout the ice of the glaciers. Records were immediately flashed back to Earth. They were processed in the NASA laboratories. The amplitude and frequency patterns were definitely not random. Highly complex variations were repeated from time to time, making it virtually certain that the sound waves must be information-carrying. But what, and to whom, and from where? Instructions to the third mission were to keep on transmitting the sound patterns back to Earth and to “proceed” with all due caution.

  Here were Martians at last. It was a good story, told with febrile intensity by press, radio, and T.V. The NASA top brass allowed themselves to be dug up for the occasion. This was the very lifeblood of their budget. It was gravely emphasized that timely and responsible decisions would be made, just as soon as the analysis now in progress had ingested the situation.

  Actually, nobody was getting anywhere toward cracking the code of the sound signals, which just went on and on without cease, night and day, week after week. If only somebody could have had an idea, an idea for making one single rational contact with the stuff. Then a second contact might have been possible, followed by a third, and so on. But nothing whatsoever came of all the writhing and thrashing.

  When the news media saw how the mountain labored, they dropped the whole thing like a hot potato. Time enough to wrestle with the Martian problem as soon as there was something or someone to wrestle with. So the massive-hearted, palpitating public got itself back to the latest aspects of sex-worship.

  By 1984 the stories currently popular on the screen would have seemed pretty ripe material to an earlier generation. Entertainment had been enjoying an apparently never-ending boom, a boom soundly based on affluence and leisure. Yet as it grew, the entertainment industry destroyed itself by consuming, like a fantastic lotus-eating dinosaur, the very material on which it depended for its existence. By now it seemed as if every idea had been flogged to death, as indeed it had. Suspense stories were the hardest hit of all. With each succeeding year, sensation had to be piled on sensation. By 1970, the successes of 1965 seemed woefully out of date. By 1975, it was exactly the same way with the successes of 1970. The human race was steadily becoming “sophisticated,” it was burning out its natural responses, first to more or less normal situations, then to abnormal ones, then to utterly pathological ones.

  Every so often someone came up with a really new gimmick. Then you always kicked yourself for not having seen it first yourself. Gimmicks no longer needed to be clever. The important thing was to be quite new. Like snow in May, they didn’t last long, but while they lasted, you did all right.

  It was easy to understand why in these circumstances sex had become such an intensely marketable commodity. This was the major field of entertainment now, because it was the one field in which originality was not important. Evolution proceeded, not by increased sophistication, but by increased display, by an increased emphasis on realism, the very opposite from the suspense area. Unrelenting pressures from a wealthy industry had forced censorship into retreat after retreat, until by now all attempts at control had virtually broken down. Against sex, the Martian story barely made it as a nine-days’ wonder.

  Yet there was something on Mars, something below the glaciers. It was reasonable to suppose that, whatever it was down below, there were several of them, for they seemed to be communicating one to another with the aid of the sound in the ice. They used sound in ice perhaps like we use sound in air. It made sense, so far. But continued failure to establish any kind of link with the Martians eventually set up a frustration complex, both in the scientist-explorers themselves and at NASA headquarters. Injection of man-made sound into the ice was tried at an early stage. It produced no apparent response, although it was never made clear quite what response could have been expected.

  Many theories about the Martians were advanced. They were all outrageous, but of course even the correct theory had to be outrageous. Any explanation for an intricate system evolving out of an initially simple situation must always seem outrageous. Nothing could be more so than the story of biological evolution here on the Earth—to an outsider, to a Martian, say. It is usual for complex situations to collapse into simpler ones, not the other way round. Most theories were due to cranks who completely missed this point: How does one invert the usual time sense of natural events? How does one get simplicity evolving into complexity?

  The importance of metals near the surface of Mars, metals below the glaciers, was first noticed by a theoretician. Not all the metal would be the same stuff. Because of the different work functions of different metals, there would be contact potentials. Next, what were the important volatiles liberated from the interior of a planet? In order of decreasing quantity: water, carbon dioxide, chlorine, nitrogen. Water and chlorine could give you hydrochloric acid. Different metals in acid gave you an electric current.

  How much energy could be expected? Reckoning a depth of electrolyte, say of one hundred meters, at least an equal depth for the metallic skin, taking 109 erg for the output per gram of material, the grand energy total came out at 1031 erg, equivalent to the output of about ten trillion tons of coal and oil, not much different from the actual coal and oil reserves of the Earth. This could be a minimum estimate. The actual energy total could be one to two orders of magnitude higher still.

  These ideas were first put forward at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The biologists wanted to know their relevance. Maybe there was an electrical storage battery on Mars, so what? Energy wasn’t the same thing as life, although admittedly it was necessary to life. A coal mine, or an oil well, wasn’t alive just because there was energy in it. The point seemed well taken, but the reply was also well taken—in some quarters, at least.

  A coal mine wasn’t alive because for one thing the energy was in a bad form. Coal had to be burned to release the energy, and the heat was disorganized. Electricity was much better, it could be converted directly into controlled motion. Everybody knew this perfectly well. You plugged devices in the home, like a shaver, into the electric supply, not into the boiler—at least you did if you were a physicist. No cognizant biologist liked this crack. Okay, you have an “electric motor” on Mars, so what?

  Well, with controlled motion the logical possibility existed for a feedback between the motion and the flow of electricity. In principle, it was possible for the system to affect itself. In view of the tremendous amount of energy that must be released on Mars, it was quite unreasonable to suppose feedb
ack never happened. Evolution by selection was then just as possible in an electrical system as in a chemical one. It was no more unlikely for complicated surface effects to arise, complicated circuits under continuous modification, than it was for complicated molecules leading to living cells to develop. The principle of competition for the available energy supply, whether chemical or electrical, was the same. The basic logic was the same, and it was this that really counted, not the realization of the logic in practical terms. To push the argument further, it was biological evolution that was really inefficient and rather stupid. First a complex chemical system—the cell—had to be produced. Then cells were put together into what were still chemical assemblies. Only at a late stage did the interesting things happen, with the development of the brain. Wasn’t it through the brain that we think, make judgments, feel emotion? What is the brain but an electrical instrument? Terrestrial biology had evolved through a lot of cumbersome chemistry before it reached the real point, the electronics. On Mars, it had been electronics all the way.

  The popular news media were back on the job now. Displaying to the full their twin characteristics, incredible persistence and incredible inability to see the point, they clamored for an answer to the absurd question: Could Martian computers be said to be really alive? The theoretician, hopelessly harassed by every newspaper from the Herald to the Calgary Eye-Opener, by gangs of men—camera men, sound men, photographers—who had descended on his home, replied that since life was no more than organized data-processing, in accordance with some preassigned program, this could be done just as well by a computer as by a human. He was asked to put it in terms that could be understood by the ordinary housewife. Well, hadn’t a computer just won the world’s chess championship? But was winning a chess game the same thing as being alive? Anyway, wasn’t it necessary to instruct a computer about how to play chess? Wearily, the theoretician explained that humans too were instructed, they had been programed by millions of years of evolution. In any case, what was the aim of a commercial on T.V., what was the aim of an ad in the newspapers? Surely to program people.

  The battery and computer theory wasn’t widely believed at first, because the sound waves in the ice appeared to contradict it. Why would sound waves be used in an electrical system? Not for communication. No system of computers would communicate with each other by sound, not unless the situation on Mars was even more crazy than it seemed to be. One feature of the theory was attractive to NASA, though. It supported a step to which the scientist-administrators were already strongly inclined, to continue the borehole which had been instantly stopped when the signals were first discovered. The thing to do next, it now seemed, was to discover what kind of liquid lay below the ice, if indeed there was any liquid.

  When the hole was completed, instead of a soda squirt, there came a powerful great squirt of filthy, evil-smelling stuff containing chlorine, bromine, and H2S. This was a bad blow to the prospects of a permanent Martian laboratory, but at least it supported the electrolyte theory. Yet the sound signals were still a puzzle.

  The puzzle was solved at last in a singular fashion. One morning the scientist-explorers were astonished to find a shining, cigar-shaped machine standing outside the laboratory. In one side of it they could see an opening, as if a panel had been slid back. Gingerly, in a frankly suspicious frame of mind, they examined the object as best they could without actually entering it. Nothing of any kind, no projection of any sort, was to be discovered on the exterior. It was all completely smooth, a metallic alloy of some kind. A periscopic device was used to examine the interior—so that nobody need enter the thing. Absolutely nothing could be seen. There was no control console inside. It was all completely smooth.

  At least the machine looked quite harmless, unless there were more panels behind which weapons of some kind were lurking. Full information was sent immediately to Earth. Instructions came back, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should proceed with extreme caution, but that reasonable enterprise should not be eschewed.

  The machine lay completely static outside the laboratory for several days. The men looked it over for the hundredth time. Obviously the damn thing had arrived with some kind of intent but had then got itself stuck. It just stood there day after day, with an opening in one side. Two men got into it together, so that if anything happened there would be two of them to deal with it. Nothing happened. There seemed nothing that could happen, since there were no controls—and even if there had been controls, there was nobody to operate them. The two got out, quite safely. The others went in and out, one after the other. It was all apparently quite safe. Yet on the very last man the door closed, without making the slightest sound, not a click or a rustle. The thing moved smoothly away. There was nothing at all that could be done to stop it. The lucky ones watched as it moved forward, at no great pace, for three or four hundred yards. Then it turned at an angle, so that it looked rather like a torpedo launched from an airplane. Like a torpedo it disappeared from sight, into the ice that lay below.

  The following morning the machine was back again, the door in its side open once more. Nobody ventured into it this time. They took welding torches to it. As soon as the heat began to play on the metal, the machine moved away for a few yards, rather as a cow might step away from a bunch of flies on its rump. The men followed it for a while, trying to get their instruments to work on it. Always it moved just a little way ahead of them, as if it was playing some kind of game, or trying to lead them someplace. At last they got fed up and left it alone. Within an hour it was back on their doorstep.

  All these events were transmitted to Earth, along with the record of the sound waves. Immediately following the incident in which the machine made off, Europa-like, with the unfortunate scientist-explorer, the amplitude of the sound was found to be very high. From this it was deduced that the sound waves were simply a form of sonar, used by the machine as it bored its way down through the glacier. Two other points were clear. The machine was only a slave-robot sent by the real Martians to collect samples of whatever it was that had arrived on their planet. From the complexity of the sound waves, it was also evident there must be very many such machines. Probably the interior of the glacier was honeycombed by passages along which they moved in the fashion of subway trains. The sonar was obviously used for navigational purposes and to prevent collisions of one machine with another, and perhaps to prevent them from penetrating into the intricate electronic system of the Martians themselves. Presumably the latter were quite static, like terrestrial computers, the robots being used for mechanical communication.

  A warning was sent from Earth, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should expect to have to deal with more than one of these slave-machines. Caution should be exercised. The warning was superfluous. Something approaching a hundred cigar-shaped machines had already surrounded the laboratory. The urgent question now was whether the mission could extricate itself at all. On every side a mass of shining metal could be seen. Gradually, almost cautiously, the machines began to close in, a foot or two at a time, in a kind of slow, shuffling movement.

  There was nothing to be done except run for it. The men waited until the gleaming monsters were quite close. At first it didn’t seem too bad, because in the weak gravity of Mars they could jump clean over the brutes. The machines responded as if it were only some kind of game. Instead of each machine searching separately for the men, the things worked in a team, apparently in accord with some master plan. They sought to block each of the men, working on data from the sound waves generated in the ground by the men in their flight, or so it seemed. Certainly the machines were not equipped with apparatus sensitive to light. They could not see. When the men stopped, the machines stopped. But as soon as a man took a single step, the machines glided into some new pattern.

  Four of the men made it, three did not. From the safety of the module, the four lucky ones watched in horror as each of the three was cornered, hemmed in by packed lines of machines which could n
ot be jumped. The things built a quadrangle about each man in turn. One machine went into the quadrangle along with the man. The last desperate struggle took a long time, but always it ended the same way, with the man pushed over, sprawling on the ground. The machine rolled over on top of him, but with a door open. The unfortunate victim found himself precipitated into the quite smooth capsule inside the monster. Inevitably, the door closed. The machine with the prize in its belly then began its journey to the depths below. The other machines opened out to make a way for it. The thing moved to a middle distance. Suddenly it tilted and disappeared.

  All this came out after the return of the residue of the third Martian mission. NASA didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Everybody felt the expedition should have been armed with nuclear weapons. Yet NASA could hardly be blamed for its failure to anticipate the existence of developed Martians. Cognizant biologists had expected only to collect a few bugs or, at best, a few primitive plants.

  Preparations were put in hand to plug a batch of nuclear weapons into the surface of Mars. After considerable argument, however, it was decided to wait awhile. For one thing, it wasn’t clear how the Martians, deep below their glaciers, could be harmed by surface explosions. For another, the Martians hadn’t really done anything explicitly hostile. Certainly four perfectly sound citizens had been creamed. Yet look at it from the other side for a moment. Four perfectly sound Martians had probably been sucked up through the borehole drilled by the third mission. Squirting Martians into the atmosphere in the style of a soda siphon would naturally be viewed in a grave light by the other side. Surely it would justify an examination of the situation, even to the extent of hunting down one or two of the strange creatures that had suddenly appeared out of space. We ourselves would hardly have acted in any other way. Whichever way you looked at it, nuclear weapons wouldn’t have much effect, not a kilometer or two down.