Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  Weight. The stable, rational pull of the gravitational attraction of a solid body.

  I pulled the cushioning from one of the couches. I laid it on a level surface, and laid myself on it. I thought.

  I was on a not-completely-airless world at a distance from the sun that would have made the temperatures dangerous except for the windless transparency of the air. Certainly I would not dare to expose myself at night. I had, I hoped, air enough and food enough to last some time. I was then in what had been the highest level of the rocket. If the lower levels were intact, even the top two, then I would have a pressure suit and an airlock. But I must not be rash. The slightest mistake would be irretrievable.

  Was I actually thinking of living on Mars? It seemed I was.

  7

  WHEN I HAD determined on my course of action, I got up. The first thing I did was to move about the compartment I was in. It took me most of the evening to salvage everything I could find in it. I realised that it was evening whenever the dim light began to fade. Quickly then, but deliberately, I made my first experiment. I went to the door, the hatchway, that led to the lower compartments of the rocket. If only, I thought, Maxwell had stayed up here, with that door closed, instead of clustering, with the rest of them, around the airlock. It was airtight, that hatch that had become a door, and it opened inwards.

  If it would open, then there was air on the other side of it. If not, I was trapped.

  I unfastened the catch and pulled. For a desperate instant I thought that it was hopeless. Then it came towards me and I slid down into the angle of the compartment. I quickly crawled up again. I was looking into a dark hole, for no lights were burning.

  I climbed through. I thought I knew that ship. I had lived in her and I had known every inch. But move any room, however familiar, upon its side, and it ceases to be familiar at all. The very stairway that had led down no longer did so. It led across from one wall to another. Yet it was going to be no better in daylight, this part of it.

  I felt my way along the ladder to the farther wall. There was another hatch there, that led into the engine-room. I felt for, and found, the handle that should have opened that. But, despite my efforts, it refused to open. Either it had warped and bent in the crash, or, more likely, there was a vacuum behind it. I crouched, clinging to the ladder, and thought.

  I saw no reason to suppose that the electrical circuits of the ship were dead. The cells that fed them were in the engine-room, but it was not the engine-room that had made those clumps of wreckage on the plain, or this second bulkhead would have certainly received some damage. It had been the fuel tanks and the rocket motors that had been lost. The engine-room, with its gyros and electrical equipment must be still there. The lights had only gone out for the same reason that I had been left in darkness during take-off: the bulbs had failed.

  After that first heavy failure of light bulbs a number of spares had been carefully wrapped and put in a cupboard in the galley. But where was the galley? It was in the level I was in and opposite to the airlock. But were either of those items up or down? I clung to the ladder-stairway and tried to visualise the relation between the way the steps had faced and the galley and airlock doors.

  The galley was diagonally upwards. I had a frightful scramble to reach it. By standing upright unsupported on the middle of the steps I could reach its doorway. That was the first time Mars helped me, with it lighter gravity. I could muscle myself up into it with little difficulty. To find the cupboard where the light bulbs were was another matter. The cupboards had been arranged to hold their contents irrespective of the angle of the ship, but even so I dislodged the contents of one shelf and was showered by articles which crashed their way downwards, seemingly a dozen times, before they lay still in the compartment far below me.

  When I found the bulbs in the darkness, half of them were broken. Trying them in the galley light socket, I found one, exactly one, that sprang to light.

  If Mars had had anything like the gravitational power of Earth that fight would not have survived the crash, and nor would I. That was the thought that consoled me when I looked down in the dim illumination and saw the chaos that lay below me. The first thing I saw was the pressure suit, helmet buried and legs expanded, that looked like a body on its head among the wreckage.

  Standing astride the galley doorway and looking down between my legs at the shadowed compartment, with its gleams of metal and areas of total darkness cast by my shadow, I thought that a sailor, wrecked in a submarine on an ocean bed, could hardly be in a position worse than mine.

  Yet, looking, I wondered what it was, particularly, that worried me. I was making progress, wasn't I? I had a light now. I was doing fine.

  Then I looked at that pressure suit again. Its legs, too human, stood upright from the wreckage.

  Inflated, though they had not been.

  Hurriedly, I lowered myself down from the galley. I took footing on the skeleton girder of the stairway, then lowered myself down again. I scrambled to that pressure suit with haste. It was inflated all right. Hard. But no one had been pumping air into it.

  There was only one possible supposition. The air in the pressure suit was what had been there before. But the air in my compartments was leaking out. That they should have remained perfectly airtight after the crash had been unlikely.

  In the semi-darkness, I stared at the closed hatch to the engine-room. It was through that the pressure-adjustment mechanisms lay. But there was an air-inlet, from the liquid-oxygen tanks, in each compartment. I scrambled across the room again. The pipe entered from what had been the ceiling. When I put my face against it, I could feel a steady draught. I was getting air, yet the pressure was falling. The pressure-adjustment was out of action. Either that or the oxygen tank itself was empty. I felt a crawling up my spine.

  There was a wheel-valve on the pipe. I turned it off and waited. When I opened it again, there was a violent hiss for an instant, betraying the build-up of the pressure.

  I crouched by that pipe for a long time. There was oxygen coming through it, but very slowly, not quickly enough to compensate for the fall in pressure due to innumerable tiny leaks in the rocket structure. The pressure inside my shell must be very little higher than that of the atmosphere of Mars outside. But richer in oxygen of course. Far richer. That was why I was living and moving normally.

  I got up. I suddenly went out of that compartment altogether. I went back to the couch I had made for myself on the one level portion of the control compartment. I lay down there to think again.

  I gave a silent prayer to God, or Fate, or Chance. A prayer of thankfulness.

  Men had climbed Everest on Earth wearing open-circuit oxygen apparatus. They breathed the thin air outside but had it enriched with oxygen at a flow-rate of two to four litres every minute. On Everest and Mars alike, the pressure was high enough for that. Only at lower pressures still would the blood fail to absorb the oxygen that was there. I even knew the figures. A man needed 60 mb pressure of oxygen in his lungs. On Mars there was a pressure of 100, but only one per cent or less of that was oxygen. But an enriched Martian atmosphere could be breathed. Breathed normally, with the waste products being exhaled into the open air.

  God, or Chance, or Fate, had showed me how. By a miracle, my ship, on crashing, had converted itself from the self-contained to the open-circuit principle. Or, to put it another way, given the crash, and the rupture of the skin of the ship, it had been bound to happen.

  I had often thought that the will of God and the laws of Science were closely intertwined.

  I lay there thinking how I could now go out on the planet Mars wearing not a clumsy pressure suit but only a cylinder, the weight of which I would hardly feel, and a simple mask. And my oxygen supply, which would only have lasted another hundred days or so, would now last longer. As for the air-purification cylinders, needed in all close-circuit systems to remove the carbon dioxide from the breath, I could do without them—unless Mars proved to have some actively poi
sonous constituent in her atmosphere. In that case I was quite finished.

  I tried to sleep, but I woke up once, crying out in teror in the lonely darkness. Then the cold in my wrecked metal shell made me get up and move about.

  8

  I SPENT those dawn hours working on my mask. At all costs I must discover what lay outside. I took the oxygen cylinder from the useless pressure suit and made connections that recharged it from the ship's supply. Anxiously, I broke off work from time to time to look for the light of dawn on the patch of earth that was visible through the port.

  The glass was steamed inside. When there was light, it looked as though there was a rime of frost upon the earth. I thought it as well that work on the airlock kept me busy until the sun was really up.

  I had to simplify the mechanism of the airlock before I could get out at all. Working amid the wreckage, I thought that perhaps I should not go out. I should set everything to rights inside the ship and measure my resources. But, until I could get out and at least look at the world I had landed on, I felt like a trapped rat. I worked desperately, driven on by all the unanswered questions in my mind, but even so it took me longer than I thought.

  I had set my watch at six o'clock during the dawn and pushed the regulator across to 'slow' to compensate for the day of twenty-four and a half hours instead of twenty-four. It was eleven by the watch by the time I was ready, in my mask, before the finished airlock.

  I thought over everything, particularly my reasoning about the air. Now I could go, I stood there in the half-light, realising the chance that I was taking. Some planets, such as Jupiter and Uranus, had atmospheres of ammonia. No amount of enriching with oxygen would help a man if he once breathed that. Yet what choice had IP I had not crashed the ship on Mars merely to stay inside it.

  I dropped quickly to my knees, to get into the airlock, which was at an angle downwards. I was driven forward as much by claustrophobia and fear of what I should find as by hope and expectation. I hardly thought at alL even with irony, of what an historic moment this was.

  Yet it was an historic moment as I opened the inner door and climbed into the airlock. From the angle of the lock I judged that the outer door would just, but only just, clear the ground. After I had turned, with difficulty, and closed the inner door behind me, I had only to pull back a bar to be the first man ever to set foot on Mars.

  I was in darkness. I had the bar beneath my hand. I hesitated a moment, and I pulled it. I did not set foot on Mars. I fell out upon it, in a hopeless scramble.

  Blinding light. My eyes were unaccustomed to light after the semi-darkness of the ship.

  Solid earth. A dusty, stony surface beneath my hands and knees. Perhaps I should call it not earth but 'mars? I was rolling over and scrambling to my feet, or trying to, but finding myself under the curve of the ship.

  My first, immediate reaction? Fear. Fear because I had taken a breath, instinctively as I felt myself falling. It did not smell like Earth air, nor taste like it. It was different enough to turn all my imagined fears into apparent facts. I sucked at my oxygen tube and waited for pain, for death. I thought of nothing but breathing, and yet it was moments before, on my hands and knees, I dared take another whiff. But it must largely have been composed of nitrogen and other inert gases.

  I struggled up from my knees. I was not choking. As soon as I realised that, I had an impulse to move out from under the curve of the ship. As my eyes adjusted, I stared about me.

  I was aware of wonder, savage interest, and acute despair.

  The wonder came because my first oveiwhelming impression was of a level plain that was not a plain. To see the formation of the land on which I stood demanded a readjustment of impressions that had become a part of me. When, on Earth, the horizon is seen two miles away, it means that the land is not level but has a convex slope. On dead level ground, for a standing man, the horizon on Earth is five miles distance. This horizon was flat, and two miles away, and the ground was level.

  The savage interest came because, after one sweeping glance around the horizon, I focused on the foreground and saw a flower. The implications of that were so big that I did not attempt to understand them immediately. I simply registered that before me, just beyond the torn earth caused by the crashing ship, was a patch of fibrous green with a tiny pink flower in the very centre, shaped like a diminutive anemone.

  My mind said: Life! Then the disappointment set in, ranging rapidly downwards to acute despair. I had known what to expect, yet the sight of it hit me like a blow.

  I had seen deserts. I had lived at Woomera, and I had flown out there by way of Iraq. I knew that deserts were not, for the most part, mere wastes of rolling sand. I knew that a man, if he had a flock of goats, could live on ten square miles of the average desert. But I did not see how I could live on this stony, dusty waste, with its tiny scattered flowers even if I had a whole planet of it to play with.

  It was so bad, the emptiness and desolation, that I turned away from it, to look at the rocket I had left. But even there I saw not hope but only the miracle of my escape so far.

  Not only was the tail of the wreck completely missing, but the rest was not only torn and scarred and twisted but strangely flattened. Only the part I had been in, say one-tenth of the whole and farthest from the impact, had been left to any degree at all intact.

  I turned once more from the rocket again, and looked at the plain. There were the other flowers, I saw now, separated from each other by varying distances, but never by less than a yard at least. I took a few paces forward and went down on one knee to look closely at the first one.

  It was all root-system, with infinitely soft and fine tendrils, green where they were above ground, running out in all directions. It was a delicate spider's web of a plant, with a lone flower in the centre. Certainly there was nothing like it on Earth, and it was very different from the primitive moss and lichens which had been supposed as the flora of

  Mars. Far from being primitive, it was a highly developed form.

  But a flower, I thought, still bending over it. Bees? I looked around the plain in all directions. I could see no sign of flying insects, and I could not imagine any. Bees were not exactly suited to high-altitude flight in rarefied air. The lack of oxygen would surely inhibit the growth of any truly active animal or insect life just as the lack of moisture made the plants rare and wide-rooted.

  A thought came into my mind and was lost again. Bending as I was, I had seen a movement to my right. I looked more closely. I was wrong about the absence of mobile life. There was an insect. Six inches long, and apparently all legs, it had a spidery shape, with a small but fleshy body. I wondered that I had not seen it before, for the body, what there was of it, was a brilliant red. And then I saw the slowness of its movements.

  It was bending over a flower, into which it had inserted a long proboscis. It sipped like a bee. But it moved, even when it left that flower and moved toward the next, like an Earth animal in slow motion. I was fascinated by that terrible slowness. Only a creature whose metabolism was very, very slow could move like that. And only a creature without enemies could survive if it did. I was looking at life on Mars—perhaps the only life on Mars.

  I stood up. What had I been thinking when I saw the insect? Something . . . something about the plant. I could not remember.

  I walked a little away from the rocket, turned round and looked at the horizon. I walked round the rocket and looked again. To the west were low, dune-like hills. Apart from that, in every direction, there was the plain. And the horizon lay closely round me. In no direction could I see more than the land I could cross in less than an hour on foot.

  What should I do? Examine the rocket or set out across the plain? I stood for a minute in indecision, noticing that my breathing was deep but steady through my mask. I saw another insect, moving with the same, painful, incredible slowness of the first one. That was all there was in my range of vision: the flowers that must grow from the nighdy dew on the scattered e
arth, and the insects which supped from them. I must see if there were anything more to see.

  Desperately, I set off to the westward. Walking in that light gravitational pull, I felt strangely hampered by the movements of my own legs, as though they should have been longer so that I could take easy, flying strides. Those insects, I thought. The amount of energy they used must be incredibly small. But then, the rate at which they could burn their food, their fuel, in this thin and barren air, must be even smaller, slower. Suppose I gave one of them a whiff of oxygen. Would he leap like a flea on Earth, or would he simply shrivel up and die? Again, I tried to recover the thought I had had about this plant, but I could not do it. Something, surely, about the nature of life on Mars.

  I approached the low hills with surprising speed. There were only the same plants, the same species, all the way. There was a certain order about their deployment on the ground. On level ground, or on gentle slopes to the north or south, they were placed regularly, each one four feet from the next. On slopes to the east, they had a wider spacing. In hollows, and on west-facing slopes, they were distinctly thicker. I was thinking of this when I saw one of the insects' nests.

  Naturally they would have nests, I thought. Like bees on Earth. They would forage during the daylight and retire at night. On Earth, flowers could only be reached in quick succession by creatures which flew. Here, nothing grew tall. The flowers were hardly more than half an inch from the ground, and the insects stood easily over them. It was as though the bees' function, on Earth, had been taken over by the ants, the latter, with no birds in the sky, having prospered and grown big.

  The nest was a mound, three feet tall, with an opening at the top. An insect was climbing slowly and painfully up, another was climbing down. I shuddered. I thought that such nests might be a source of honey. I imagined myself eating it. . . .