Almost despite myself, I found myself thinking of the creature that had sliced the fruit, and made the footprints, in terms of game. If I only knew more about itl It might, for all I knew, be the highest form of life on Mars. It might be, to some degree, intelligent. . . .
What was I thinking of? I turned and paced my way back to my tent again after twenty yards. Cows and bulls and the farmyard beasts of Earth were intelligent to some degree: to a higher degree, probably, than anything I was likely to find on this barren planet. And man ate them because he had to. Was I thinking my way back into my old, incredibly distant, vegetarian crankiness on Earth? Heaven knew, I had outgrown that long ago. I never had been convinced of the moral reasons for vegetarianism. It had not seemed reasonable or just to me that man should kill off all his domestic animals, and turn the world into one vast cornfield, merely because he did not like to eat the flesh of the creatures which, while he was omnivorous, he could at least allow to live. No, it was not that.
It was something far more basic. It was the dimly dawning knowledge that if I were to live on Mars I must come to some terms with my environment. I must fit in with it, if only as a predator. But no creature, even one from another planet, could succeed as a predator, as a killer of what he found, unless he were equipped with adequate means for his defence.
I turned again, and once more walked my twenty yards across the plain, needing to move now in order to keep warm. I had not thought, until that afternoon, that I might need weapons on this planet. I had thought of myself as a lone creature in a wilderness where my main need was to construct. I had thought that I would leam and thereby discover how to fabricate a way of living. But life was not and never had been like that. For any creature living in any environment where there was any other life at all the art of destruction was a prime necessity.
So I would go back tomorrow—today it almost was— and, before I ventured on to the fruiting plain again, or before the plants in my own locality came to fruit, I would equip myself, if only with a bow and arrow.
Peace came to my mind when I decided this. I did not think that, by deciding it, I had evaded my plain duty to myself to leam all I could while I was in the locality frequented by the creatures. I did not think that I had done what a myriad of foolish men before me had also done, decided that destruction was the easier way. I thought, indeed, that I could sleep, and I turned to my tent to do so, hoping to get my rest despite the discomfort of my pressure suit.
While in my pressure suit, I could only see forward through a narrow arc. It was thus not until I turned that I saw it.
It was a light, a moving light, on the horizon to the westwards.
I stood rigidly, and yet it was only the stiffness of the pressure suit that prevented me falling to my knees. I looked and looked again. I closed my eyes and opened them. I tried to imagine that it was a star, or even some phosphorescent Martian glow-worm at some nearer distance. Certainly it was a green, unearthly radiance.
Then it turned and flashed at me, and I saw it was a narrow beam.
I dropped then, suddenly, to my hands and knees. A moment later, I pressed myself down upon the earth. For the light appeared to be coming in my direction before it passed along the horizon and disappeared on my right.
Yet it was not because of the light that I remained flat then, with my helmet pressed down upon the earth. It was because, in that position, sounds came to me, as a tremor through the ground. I had heard nothing through the attenuated air, but sound travelled more readily through the earth.
I do not know what I would have expected to hear, had I known that I would hear sounds at all. On seeing the light, my mind had filled with wild imaginings. I had thought of vehicles, of men, or at least of man-like creatures, of civilisation, of roads, of cities.
But the sound that came to me through my helmet and the earth was that of stamping, of the elephantine movement of some great beast, which first became louder, then faded, and finally died away into the distance.
17
THREE HOURS later, I was on my way. I did not wait for dawn, but started in my pressure suit when my watch assured me that the first light would appear in half an hour.
I drove southwards, urgently, to the wreck, to make what preparations I might for the coming southward surge of life.
I drove across the desert that day as though I felt the hot breath of Martian life behind me, overtaking. I was weary and sleep-dogged after my restless night and my energy of the day before. I had not understood that though I had acclimatised well to the 'altitude' of the Martian air, and though I breathed, while riding, an atmosphere that was three parts oxygen to one of the inert gases of the atmosphere, yet sustained effort was almost impossible to me. By noon, while I toiled under the full, unfiltered sunlight, I guessed that I was hardly more than half-way there, despite my early start.
Never had the desert seemed more endless, more interminable, more desiccated, barren, featureless, and utterly lonely, than it did that afternoon.
Towards sunset, I began to believe that I had lost my way. One thing I had lost, with certainty, was my outward tracks, which, faint though they were across the dusty, stony surface, I had been following earlier. And if I were lost, if I did not find the wreck by sunset, my condition would be serious. I would not be completely lost. By economising on oxygen through the night, I might still be alive by morning and have enough air left to search for another half-hour after dawn. But I could not believe I would do that. I could not believe that I would rest through the night knowing what would depend on that half-hour when morning came. Instead, I would be tempted to wander on, to search by chancy moonlight, use up my air by breathing heavily, as I was already doing throughout that lengthy afternoon.
When the sun was actually on the horizon, I despaired. I made one last desperate rush in the direction which my compass said was south. And, five minutes later, I sighted the easternmost outpost I had set up to guide me back. Either some unsuspected deviation of the compass had upset me—I suspected the magnetism of my machine itself must cause an alternate deflection whether it faced north or south —or in my weariness my steering had been erratic. I did not find the strength to wonder which. I turned in the direction in which I now knew with certainty that the wreck must lie, and arrived there just as final darkness settled down.
I slid through the airlock and took refuge in the sweet Earth-sanity of the interior of the rocket with much the same feelings a dog must have when he finds safety behind his master's gate. I was too tired to eat, but I drank two pints of fresh, clear water and lay down on my improvised couch in the control compartment. I expected to fall asleep immediately and to awake in the morning with a clearer conception of what had happened.
Instead I lay awake, with the light on, and looked about me at the metal walls of the wrecked ship that was my home. In those moments when my overtired, fevered brain lay battling with the unknowns of Mars, I had a clearer conception of myself and of my position on the planet than any I had had since I had landed.
The steel shell which covered me, which provided me with shelter and air and water—that was not Mars. I had only to turn my head and see couches, instruments, pipes and electric leads which had been made on Earth. So far, that was what I had worked with. All my puny striving on this planet had not been a conquest of Mars but only improvisation, with Earth equipment, to fit me for a strange environment.
Mars was stranger, greater, and more unknown than I had imagined that it could be.
I had been a fool. I had been in the position of a creature from another planet who had landed on Earth and chanced to make first contact with the surface on the frozen wastes of Lapland. Seeing the moss, the lichens, and stunted grasses, he would assume that that was all the life there was. Then he would be confronted, as the season advanced, with a herd of reindeer. Or I was one who might have landed on
Earth's Sahara. In a wilderness of sand and thomy scrub, he would have despaired of higher life until suddenly he came upon a camel.
> So I, on my first journey outside my shell, had come across the footprints of some two-footed creature, and seen a light and heard the sound of ponderous movement in the night. What now of my belief that Martian creatures must necessarily be unintelligent and slow-moving, that with so little oxygen in the air to breathe, they would only be able to sustain their body temperatures in the heat of day, and that brains could not develop without the fuel and air and precise temperature control which animals and birds achieved on Earth? I had thought those things.
But now I was not so sure. On Earth, the human body had adapted itself to sustain wide temperature variations in the world around it. Other creatures, such as polar bears, were more adapted. Herbivorous animals on Earth had multiple stomachs, to enable them to deal with the coarsest grasses. Why not, on Mars, creatures with multiple lungs, with lights like deep-sea fish—or even with intelligence of some sort that was totally alien to myself?
I fell asleep at last, shaken and fearful, and by no means as sure of myself as I had been. I dreamed that when the summer wave of life which swept twice yearly across the Martian surface reached my broken rocket the desert around me teemed with forms of life which, if I had not dreamed them, would have been undreamable.
18
WHEN I LOOKED at my watch again it was noon or midnight. In the interior of the rocket I could only tell if it were day or not by turning to look at the half-buried window. It was day, and it must be noon. I got up, and as I moved about inside my shelter it seemed to me that a shade that I was coming to know too well was looking over my shoulder once again.
When Crusoe had discovered that savages were in the habit of visiting his island, he had enlarged his cave and improved the stockade he had built around it. He had feared the unknown inhuman humans. What I did, that very afternoon, was to tear out wiring from the rocket, strip insulation from it, and take it out into the desert. On metal stakes driven into the earth I hung it around the rocket at a radius of twenty yards. Then I ran two insulated leads back to the battery. I found, in the smashed electronic equipment, a transformer. I worked to make a trembler coil and used the transformer to step up the voltage. With the trembler in operation, and with five hundred volts on the wire, I felt I could sleep more securely behind my electric fencing than Crusoe ever could behind his stockade.
Then I went inside again and looked at a specimen of the fruit that I had brought back with me. If there was to be food for me on Mars, then this, or some derivative from it, must be it.
I had some knowledge of the scientific method. I knew the principles that permeated all science, whether botany, biology, or medicine. Experiments must be made in controlled conditions, in which one feature only could be unknown. I was careful therefore to eat nothing and to drink only pure water. Then, gingerly, I tasted the fruit.
At least it did not have the flavour of ammonia, but it was acid as no Earth fruit was ever acid, and bitter, and quite uneatable as it stood. The texture and colour of the flesh beneath the leathery skin was not unlike a melon.
The flavour was such that I was not surprised, when I boiled a portion of the fruit in my aluminium pan, to discover that it etched and stained the surface of the metal. I certainly could not eat it as it was.
I went to my medicine chest and took out the expedition's supply of bicarbonate of soda. It took a teaspoonful to neutralise a saucepan full of the acid fruit. The substance that was left was salty but edible. I watched myself carefully for some hours afterwards, but I felt no ill effects and my hunger seemed to be appeased, though I had acquired a thirst.
I felt baffled. Though I would shortly have, in the desert around me, an unlimited supply of the fruit for food, I had by no means an unlimited stock of bicarbonate of soda. Not only was the quality of the food extremely poor but I would very rapidly run out of the wherewithal to treat it.
Among my remaining stores had been a few cans of milk. One of these I had opened before I went away on my expedition. Since then, it had gone bad and begun to grow a mould, but, in my lonely bachelor fashion, I had not emptied nor thrown away the tin. I had, of necessity, to try everything. I put small cubes of the fruit on plates around the galley. Some, I simply left unprotected. Others I covered with water and left there to ferment. One, I infected with the milk, and still another I touched with a scraping of the mould.
I wished I knew more about yeasts and bacteria. I wished I knew exactly what I was doing, but I did not. All I knew was that savages in many parts of Earth made the most poisonous fruits and roots edible by processes such as I was trying to invent.
Finally, to complete the work of that short day, I went out beneath the pale green sky of the Martian evening and examined the plants carefully in the immediate vicinity of the wreck. I saw now, having seen what to expect farther north, that their flowers were fading. Beneath the petals as they dropped and fell, hard bulbs were forming. I looked for the insects, but I did not see a single one. When I went to their near-by nest, the one I had tapped for their dangerous honey, I discovered that the top was sealed. I went back to the wreck thoughtfully, deciding that summer was on its way.
Since I had still felt no ill effect from my eating of the fruit, I allowed myself to make and eat a normal meal. During it, I tried to puzzle out the question of the seasons.
It had been seen from Earth how the wave of life on Mars started from each pole in turn, following the melting of the ice cap. Some confusion had arisen among astronomers from this fact. At first, it had been thought that this melting of the snows, followed by an expanding wave of life, gave some substance to the theory of the canals, as though Mars were some vast Egypt, where irrigation made the desert flower.
I knew better now. I knew that the moisture was dispersed through the Martian atmosphere as a spreading mist. As, on Earth, comparatively small variations in the sun's power and heat had caused vast ice ages and interregnums, due to the alternate locking up and releasing of water from the icefields of the poles, so on Mars, with its longer year, each hemisphere might be said to have an annual ice age. Mist freezing on the desert where I was would melt each day all the year round. But in the polar regions in winter the ice would not melt but would accumulate, not as snow but as layer upon layer of frost. By the equinox, the air of the planet would be dry.
Then would come the melting of the other polar cap. Those scientists were right who said that water, in its free state, could not exist on Mars, but would evaporate and diffuse itself through the upper atmosphere as it did through the stratosphere on Earth. Yet each night would cause a condensation and a mist, and so, beginning near the pole, and not near the equator as on Earth, the wave of life would sweep across the Martian surface once again. The plants around me in the desert were in this stage. They had grown from the nightly dews, they had spread their wide net of roots, and flowered, and fed the insects and been pollinated by them. Now, for a short period, they would come to their fruition.
But plants did not produce fruit needlessly or uselessly.
Fruit was an attraction for creatures which took it and disseminated the seed. My creatures. Great creatures which had to be huge in size for two reasons.
One reason was what I had already thought of: that the gravitational attraction of a smaller planet demanded a larger structure for its creatures. It was strange to think of, but none the less scientifically inescapable that a large planet could bear only thick-legged, stunted dwarfs, because no strength of material could support the weight of a taller body against a powerful gravitational attraction, while Mars, or Earth's moon, once vegetation was established, would permit giraffe-like creatures the size of elephants.
The moon was barren, but Mars was not, and the conclusion I came to was startling, though it had been staring me in the face.
It was not that Martian life could be very, very large, but that it would have to be. Unless, like the plants, Martian mobile life hibernated for eighteen Earth-months every year, it would, of necessity, have to follow the wave of life. It would
start at one pole, with the melting of the snows, follow the wave of life down to the equator and across it. Then, for three months, it would have to fast and trek slowly down to the other pole, there to await the new life-wave which would sweep up the path the last one had swept down.
Large creatures carry or nurture their young for a longer period. On Earth, with a twelve-month year, the variations of the seasons put a premium on the size of growth represented by men and cows and sheep and other annual-bearing species. On Mars, the 'natural' size would be twice as large. And the need to trek great distances across the planet would give advantage to an even larger size.
Having thought of that, of the natural explanation for what I had seen on my northward journey, and surveying the remains of the first good meal I had eaten in three days, I felt well satisfied. Not even the depressing, metallic surroundings of the rocket could dim my reviving spirits. The fact that I too, if I were to survive on Mars, would have to learn to follow the wave of life, and adopt a nomadic existence on the desert, seemed to me to be just another matter to be taken in my stride. Had I not found a possible source of food? And was I not likely to find edible game just so long as I kept up with the stream?
I got up and looked at my squares of fruit. Two were unchanged, one was fermenting busily, and another had changed colour and gone quite white.
I tasted the white one gingerly. Not even with all will and wish in the Martian world could I say that it tasted pleasant. But I managed to eat a tiny portion of it, and again I did not collapse writhing with stomach pains.
19
HE WAS crossing the plain like some legendary giant. I looked up when I was working outside the wreck, and there he was, coming in towards me from the north-eastwards, striding slowly, well within the pinched horizon of the plain under the thin Martian sunlight and the pale green sky.
I had made a bow, a very good bow with a steel shaft and a wire string and alloy arrows tapped and screwed into iron barbs. It was lying two paces from where I worked, but I froze and did not go to it.
Rex Gordon Page 9
