I looked back at the wreck. I would have to be careful. It was nearly out of sight. But the low hill was before me, of rounded sand-worn rock, and completely barren. It was hardly a hill at all, being more a diminutive rocky outcrop from the dust.
I warned myself as I climbed it. I felt my breath coming quickly and I detected a strange weakness in my limbs and lack of purpose in my mind. Even breathing oxygen as I was with every breath, I would have to go easy on this planet. The pressure was very low. If I wished to survive, I would have to match the Martian slowness.
From the top, I saw the plain extend into infinity all about me. In the distance, which might be ten miles away from my eminence, the land looked faintly pink with the tiny flowers. No change. No new thing any way I looked. Only in a land of gentle hollow, which I judged to be two miles distant, did the vegetation seem a little thicker. But I saw no reason to suppose that even there I would find new species of plants or creatures.
I walked back to the rocket. As I went, I suddenly thought of what had occurred to me about these plants. It was the fibre roots, their distribution on the ground. Lack of water was their limiting factor. Lack of water had more effect on Earth, there were more things growing. And on Earth, plants like these, in any desert, would be completely eaten by lizards, active and voracious insects, cattle, goats, and sheep. And the reason why those things did not exist on Mars was the lack of plants to increase the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
I doubted if there would be any more active creatures than the insects I had seen. If there were, they would eat the plants, denude the planet, and then there would be no oxygen at all. I was thinking now, numbly. . . .
It was strange, I thought, how I had had to leave the Earth altogether before I realised that it was only the preponderance of water on our planet that made the plant life preponderate over the animal, thus supporting animals at all. Even on Earth, where there was not enough water the plants were soon eliminated by the warm-blooded creatures that ate every living thing, then died themselves.
Water was the key to life on Mars. The pressure was sufficient, the actual pressure of the inert air. But water—I Despite my own self-waming I hurried back to the rocket.
I went round the tail. I turned and looked back along the furrow that the machine had torn in the desert when it landed. There was nothing but tangled, scattered wreckage there. But inside?
I entered the shattered hull by a gaping hole. There was a fuel tank, still intact, one out of the many we had started with. I scrambled in, in semi-darkness, over sharp edges of twisted metal. I saw the liquid oxygen tank, which I knew must be there. But water? We had used it, and not only for domestic purposes in the galley. It had been an essential constituent of our fuel mixture, limiting the temperature of the firing chambers. There ought to be a thousand-gallon tank. There must be a thousand-gallon tank.
There was fear in my heart as I scrambled through the wreckage, the twisted girders, the broken machines. I had to crawl on my hands and knees, lever myself up through gaps, and peer through the dark shadows. Like any diver in any wreck, I was afraid of being trapped there. But my fear that my oxygen might give out while I was deeply involved in that portion of the wreck was conquered by my feeling that there must be water. Fleetingly, strangely, I felt a kind of faith. It was as though I were fated, and there must be everything I needed.
Then, dimly, not above me, as I had expected, but below me, I saw the tank. I stopped and stared in horror.
Even from where I was, I could see that it was split. It was in that portion of the rocket which, against the ground, had borne the brunt of the final crash. I crawled down to it and was not content until I had taken the cover off and put my head inside.
There was enough light penetrating through the crack to show me that there was nothing at the bottom but a shallow puddle.
I do not know how long I remained there, while the meaning slowly came home to me. I was as though stunned. After the accident, the arrival at Mars, the landing, and finally my discovery of a way of breathing and moving about on Mars, it seemed somehow impossible that I should find myself without the one thing which I had decided was most necessary to life on this arid planet.
It was as though I had had a vision of myself in my mind, of how I would live, ultimately, with plants growing under glass and supplying food and oxygen and all the things a man needs to live. It was true I had realised there would be difficulties. Because there was no fire on Mars, I would have great difficulties to solve when I began any sort of manufacture. But it had been there, my conception of myself as a skilled, ingenious man, who would and could survive.
But now no water. None but the little, twenty gallons maybe, that happened to be in the service tank in the living quarters of the ship
I withdrew my head from the tank and sat down beside it, inside the wreck, still dazed.
I went over my reasoning again. I had seen the plants that were the vegetation of this part of Mars. They had a widespreading surface root system which appeared to indicate that they grew on the nightly dew which settled on the earth. On the west-facing slopes, which would get the sunlight latest in the morning, they were thicker, as though they grew better where the moisture lasted longer. Where the ground dipped to a hollow, they grew, comparatively, in profusion. But where the ground was arid they hardly grew at all.
I looked down between my feet to the crack in the rocket's hull where the water had run out, and almost gave a cry. The plants were growing there, white and bereft of sunlight, but in profusion, like some sickly, white jungle.
But the water was gone, wasted, and absorbed into the sponge-like earth. The plants could not be grown again, with glass over them, though that thousand gallons would have lasted many, many days.
Because I had no water, I could not make a garden of thickly-growing plants. Because I had no garden, I would soon run out of both food and air.
For a moment, I almost went mad. It was the strangeness of my reasoning, the unaccustomed channels along which it had to flow, the chill in the shadowed interior of the rocket, and the silence, the deathless silence of that frightful, desolate, and lonely planet. I feared, too, that the oxygen in my cylinder would soon give out.
I scrambled madly out of that wrecked portion of the ship again. I went back to the airlock, and let myself in, with difficulty, into those tilted compartments which offered, at best, a temporary haven until the steadily leaking oxygen gave out there, too.
9
rr is STRANGE what happens to a man when he faces death.
I tried not to think while I made myself a meal in that hopeless, upturned galley. It was afterwards that I had to face it, when I lay on my improvised couch amid the internal wreckage of the shattered rocket. The glow of the single naked light bulb seemed to hypnotise me as it reflected dully from the metallic surfaces around.
I had seen enough, during my trip outside, to know now what I had. I had air and food and drinking water for perhaps a hundred and fifty days. After that, nothing.
Nothing? I had the wrecked machinery of the rocket. I had a great tank of fuel which on Earth would provide me with power enough to drive me around the globe in search of irrigation water if I had to go to the polar ice-cap in search of it. On Mars, due to lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, that fuel would not even bum.
I had one electric battery, which fed my one good light. The battery would not last a hundred and fifty days. The bulb was burning dimly' already. In space, we had used a little internal combustion engine to charge it, feeding the engine with fuel and oxygen and allowing the exhaust to discharge into space itself. Now, I could only do that if I were willing to use up my oxygen at an appalling rate with no hope of replenishment when it was done.
What else had I? There had been no spare stores or pioneering equipment on the rocket. There were two useless gyros and a host of pumps, some broken, some sound, and many miles of piping. The pumps had been used for feeding fuels and liquids to the various motors. Most
of them had been electrically driven.
I was on a planet with an atmosphere so thin that the sunlight, though weaker than on Earth, yet seemed far hotter when it shone. Yet in the shade the temperature was hardly ever above freezing. At night outside, it must be very cold. And that thinness of the atmosphere was what really affected the supply of water. If I were to go out and dig in that hollow I had seen, in search of water, and if I were miraculously fortunate enough to be able to make a well, the evaporation from the surface of the water I exposed would be so rapid that the well would soon be dry again.
Probably if I went even to the polar regions—though I could not, being tied to the main oxygen tank of the rocket —I would discover that the snow there did not melt in sunlight. As had been observed of the snows of Everest, it would never pass through the melting stage but evaporate straight from snow to vapour as soon as the temperature rose above a certain figure.
Only at night—I looked at my watch and saw that it must be coming night again outside the rocket now—would a light dew settle and turn at once into frost, falling from the air that was too thin to support the burden of its vapour. And only the plants with their fine nets of radiating roots could seize that dew when it happened to melt too slowly in the morning.
I turned and twisted on my couch. I tried to relax and sleep, but I could not. There was one other feature of my environment. What was it? The insects. Because they moved so slowly, they managed to sustain themselves directly from the plants. Perhaps, for all I knew, they drew not only moisture but oxygen from them too, in another form. I was not in a position to investigate the chemistry of life on Mars.
Or was I? Certainly I could not sleep. Yet I could not go out again, from the rocket. My life on Mars, short as it might be, seemed fated to be divided up between some eight hours of work in daylight and sixteen hours of each day hiding inside my shelter.
But, try as I might to be positive in my thinking, to take lenses from the broken telescopes and make myself a glass with which to examine the microscopic, bacterial life of Mars, my mind kept coming back to the thing I lacked, which I needed.
If only I had a fire. If only fire were merely possible in the Martian air. What was man without a fire? Could he ever have advanced from the cave-man stage if it had not been for the lucky accident that, on Earth, most organic substances burned, if they were merely ignited by flint or friction, in the atmosphere of that beneficent planet? What civilisation would ever have been possible, even on Earth, if there had been no fire?
For a while, on my couch in the wrecked rocket, I lay quite still. I remember that I was just beginning to shiver as the temperature fell with the falling night. For an instant my problems passed beyond the bounds of personal fear and horror. I saw them on a greater scale, against the background of the nature of Man himself.
What was Man—what was I—but a creature who had, by a series of lucky accidents, learned to live in trees and so developed hands, learned to come out of trees and so to walk erect, learned to use tools to guard himself, because of the hands he had, and so developed brain? And what would all those accidents have done for him had it not been for the greater one of his discovery of fire?
The lack of fire suddenly seemed to me to be overwhelming, greater even than the lack of air or water. With fire, Man had learned to make machines. With fire even I might have made things for myself, made vehicles, sunk wells, and used the power of fire in a million ways.
Man without fire was a naked, helpless thing, hardly better than the tree-rat he had once been a thousand million years ago. Even three hundred million years ago Man had had fire, and tools and implements of flint. . . .
I slept at that point. I cannot quite explain it. It must have been a combination of nervous and physical exhaustion. Yet at one moment my mind had been nervously active, overtired and sleepless, and the next it was dead.
I dreamed most horribly during that second night on Mars. I dreamed that I saw myself, a latter-day Crusoe, on some fantastic bicycle I had made from bits and pieces of machinery. Instead of a goatskin coat, a parasol, a gun over my shoulder, and a parrot on my arm. I wore an oxygen mask and carried a microscope and a collecting box for specimens. My bicycle broke down when I was too far from the rocket to walk back before my oxygen gave out.
I dreamed again. I had built a perfect dome of glass in which plants flourished. I moved among them, tending them, like a gardener in a hot-house. I watered them with a watering-can, and breathed in the sweet-scented air which they exhaled, exchanging the carbon dioxide in my breath for the oxygen in theirs, and eating them tpo, plucking perfect fruits from them. But they were attacked by some wilt, some blight, some rust that I could not identify. I watched it spread up their stems and leaves and saw them die. Then I saw that the rust, a fungus or a virus as it might be, was growing on my hands. . . .
I awoke, shivering with horror, in the middle of the night. It was the cold that had caused my dreams, I believed. I sought around for garments and coverings and lay down to sleep again.
I could not. I was a man, and Man was a helpless creature who only by a chapter of accidents, by climbing trees and coming down again, by discovering fire and using tools, had acquired a brain. He was nature's joke, who lived purposelessly, brutishly, and knew he was going to die. I lay there in darkness now, and saw life bleakly.
Slowly, I grew warm in my extra coverings, and as I did so, my thoughts began to change.
Suppose, I thought, Man had not climbed trees. Suppose he had not discovered fire, would there never have been anything at all like Man on Earth? Would no living thing ever have become conscious of itself, as I was, nor of the universe around it? Would the stars and the planets have wheeled in their courses for ever, unrealised and unknown, with no eye cast up in wonder? Perhaps it was because I knew I was going to die that I thought about such things.
Yet I seemed to contemplate a mystery. Man was the only self-conscious creature. He was the only living thing to inquire into his place in the universe, to have gods and thoughts beyond his lifetime. Without Man, it would be true to say that the universe itself would have no consciousness of itself. Then, indeed, it would be blind and purposeless.
Strange thoughts, it might be thought, for a perishing castaway in a wreck on an alien planet. But they were not without significance to myself.
It was surely the warmth, the extra garments that had done it. Nothing else could explain the flood of comfort that seemed to settle on both my body and my mind. What did it matter, what could it matter, that I had decided that if Man had not come into being in one way—by climbing trees, by inventing fire—then he would have done so in another? What did it matter to me that I had conceived of Nature suddenly as active in life with a force that went round or through or over obstacles? That I saw life, on this and every other planet, as unstoppable, a part of a process into which it was beyond me to inquire?
I was still lying outstretched in the wreck, with only a hundred and fifty days of life before me, confined and brutish, without hope, and ending, surely, in stark madness. Yet I slept, then, with the sweet innocence of a child, dream-lessly, and in comfort.
10
rr WAS DAWN when I awoke. A grey light was penetrating through the half-buried port-hole. I sat up and rubbed my aching cheeks. Despite the ache, my face cracked into a grin again. I climbed through to the galley, drew a quantity of water, and did what I had not dared to do before. I switched on the electric stove. It did not matter. I would soon have power to charge the batteries.
I thought about it as I sat eating breakfast on the horizontal bulkhead of the galley. It was a shame to cheat on the difficulties that would have faced my imaginary prehistoric man if he had lacked a fire. But he would, presumably, be mobile. He would not have had to content himself with what could be found in a two-mile radius in a desert. He would have found, in the end, those raw chemicals which, mixed together, produced heat. It might have taken him another hundred thousand years before he discovered a
nd was able to make an artificial fire, whether there was oxygen in the air or no. But I had not a hundred thousand years to waste. I had to deal with the circumstances that I had, and do it quickly. The scientific approach was the thing. I pushed my breakfast aside and went back to the control-room.
The instruments immediately available were a barometer, a thermometer, and half a dozen gauges of various types. I did not reject anything. I unscrewed the lot and took them to the airlock. I had to take an oxygen pressure gauge back again while I charged my cylinder, but I was not worried. It seemed to me that there was stuff enough in the wreck for me to live on. Instrument-making would not become a hobby of mine for a year or two.
I adjusted my cylinder and my mask, and went out through the airlock, taking my equipment with me, including my gauges, a screwdriver, and an adjustable spanner. Those were-my tin-openers, to open up the planet Mars.
I was earlier than the previous day. By eleven a.m. I knew from the previous day, the atmosphere would be comfortable. By afternoon, it would be distinctly warm. At present it was cold, particularly out of the sun. A man does not want more than a hint like that. I used the thermometer immediately. The instrument registered ten degrees of frost in the shade and seventy degrees Fahrenheit when exposed to the rays of the small, hot, rising sun. The thin atmosphere of Mars was responsible for that. On Earth the direct heat of the sun would have been masked and the shadows wanned by the thicker air.
Temperature difference eighty degrees. Atmospheric pressure one hundred millibars. I scratched my chin where the mask was chafing it. I would have to do something about that mask.
I wondered if the fuel would do. God knew, I had enough of it, and it was useless as fuel so long as I had no atmospheric oxygen to bum it in. A synthetic petroleum mixture, we had mixed it with oxygen when firing it in the rocket motors. Now I thought of it in another fashion. I laid my instruments carefully on the ground and took my spanners with me into the engine-room, through the hole in the gaping hull.
Rex Gordon Page 5
