Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  I sat on the crest, and it seemed to me that for the first time since I had been on Mars a faint breeze stirred. I felt its movement in my hair as I looked across the gulf before me. I waited, rested, and let the hope drain out of me to acceptance.

  Slowly, because there was nothing else to do, I eased myself towards the edge. I wished to look down into the gulf before I turned and went back to my machine and began to trek to east and west in search of a gap in the range that I knew already did not exist.

  The edge was sharp and steep where I had happened to reach the summit, and I lay down on my face to look down over.

  28

  rr WAS a flower, not unlike a rose, with a faint pink tinge. It was growing on a ledge above the terrace I was looking down upon. And when I reached out a hand to touch it, it burst, and showered me with a million fragments of tiny crystals.

  I went on looking. I looked at my hand, surprised to find that it contained nothing but was powdered, as though with pollen. Then I looked down at the terrace, where other pastel-coloured flowers and plant fronds grew. I scrambled to my knees and then to my feet, and went to where a rock-fall gave a ready path to the lower level.

  The rock-fall had been used, that and half a dozen others. It was as though an army had passed across it. I tried to envisage the passes, the paths and crossings all along the ranges, where the migratory creatures passed twice a year across the barren regions. But chiefly I was interested in those flowers. I had seen a rose, and it had proved to be a complete illusion.

  They, the plants and flowers, only lay in cul-de-sacs along the terrace. Where anything had passed, even within a dozen yards, they did not exist. And when I moved towards them along the level they dispersed before me, shattered, it seemed, by the tiniest vibration of my approaching movement. It was only when I moved stealthily, hardly breathing in my mask, that I could come to them.

  Plants? They were crystalline and transparent. They were crystal plants such as we used to grow as children, from saturated solutions in a jar of water.

  Only there was no water there. They were arid products of a mineral world, and when, driven beyond endurance by the thought of water, I took my water-bottle from my belt and uncorked it, ready to take a drink, they fell in swathes around me.

  It was not vibration that killed them, after all, but moisture, even the perspiration from my skin, which was dispersed in the air around me by any sudden movement. And when I noticed that my water-bottle felt sticky and looked at it, I saw that it was not the bottle but my hand, which had been powdered by the brittle substance of the plants by that time. It had gone damp with a viscous mixture, as though it had been covered with powdered sugar on a damp and steamy day on Earth.

  For a moment I was in a panic. God knew what I thought. I tried to wipe my hand and half expected to see the crystals begin to grow on it. But nothing of that sort happened. It was only that, as I shook my water-bottle, further swathes of destruction were caused among the mineral plants around me. Hurriedly, I drank, then corked it.

  I wondered, too late, whether I had been wise to drink with so much of the powder in the air and on my person. The water had a sweet taste, unlike anything I had known, and I could not imagine what alien form of life I might have introduced into my body.

  For a while, I simply stood, ready for any agony, any pain. I looked down into the shadowed valley below me, beyond the terrace edge. The shadow was going off it now, as the sim came round to the west to shine along it.

  I waited so long, that I found I had licked my lips unconsciously. I was aware of it only when I felt a taste of renewed sweetness in my mouth. I think I went mad for a moment then. It was an instant's rage at the inexplicable quality of the phenomenon with which I was confronted. It was an instant's knowledge that, not knowing what I had to fear, I could not do right by taking forethought. It was a momentary willingness to die, to get it over.

  I tore the mask from my face and deliberately licked my hand then put the mask back on. I revelled in the sweet-salt taste. I had a momentary sense of triumph. At least I had gained that—a taste of attractive food again—before I diedl Then I wondered with horror what I had done.

  Again I waited to die, and did not. Instead, I felt a craving. I had not known the panic and terror I was in until I felt the agony of hope. Suppose—just suppose, I told myself—that these things could be eaten. . . . My mind went dark with suppositions. They were mineral creatures, growing in arid air from powdered rock. They could not be living. They must be raw minerals, creations of the breeze and air perhaps. And yet they could not have attained then-shapes—their same shapes, for I could identify a dominant species and several more—unless they had had some cause to adopt the form.

  Standing on that ledge above the valley, I lived instants of terror and agony, hope, and fear. Pain, had it come, would have been a quick release. But I did not know. I was ready to call on Cod to tell Him that I did not know, the very God I had thought I hated. For minerals will crystallise out in the same form, again and again, precise to every facet and every angle. Yet minerals cannot duplicate themselves, unless and except that certain viruses are minerals, of a similar basic structure only more complex. Most likely, I thought, it was another drug that I was taking, something infinitely habit-forming, that paralysed the centres of the brain. I remembered my experiment with the "honey' of the insects.

  But I was one who was otherwise condemned to die. I saw my future before me, brutal and short as it would be. I could go back. I could fell these accursed 'plants'. I could mount my machine again and ride off into the desert, there to perish slowly.

  I walked to the 'plants' before me. I held out my hands and caught their substance as they dissolved. I took off my mask and ate, and it was like eating treacle or sucking sugar cane. The only thing was, it increased my thirst, and I had to wash the substance down with copious draughts of water.

  I did not fall insensible. I can hardly have eaten an ounce or two before I felt as though I had had a meal. I felt comfortably weary, and had it not been that I was becoming concerned about my oxygen supply, and the need to get back to my machine before darkness fell, I would have lain down where I was and rested.

  As it was, I took a lazy, yet comparatively energetic step towards the terrace edge. The sunlight was creeping round into the valley now. It was my one opportunity to see what lay below me and make new plans.

  The terraces descended in steps to the valley floor on my side as upon the other. They were like gardens, like European vineyards, without a tenant or a master.

  But in the bottom of the valley, on a floor of arid rock, lay one of my creatures of the night. She was—how can I describe it?—she was suckling her brood of young.

  THAT NIGHT I watched the skyline of the hills. Twice in the darkness I saw reflected lights among the peaks. For a while, cautiously, I ran my engine to charge the battery and work the air and water production plant. The air-com-presser worked as well as always, but the water was slow in coming. After an hour, I had gained only half a pint. On the other side of the hills the air would be even dryer. That fact might be fatal to me if, as I hoped, I had reached my journey's end.

  Then I lay, still awake, still watchful, looking up at the star-filled sky, and considered a form of life that had never been on Earth. On Earth no life could exist that was bora of dryness, that dissolved and became something else at a touch of moisture. Even on Mars only a narrow region, a valley sheltered by hills from cloud and moisture, could have been its birthplace, and that near the equator of the planet. Thinking of it, and seeing the inevitability that life would be bom in, and adapted to, all conditions, 1 wondered what form what we knew as life would take on gaseous bodies like the sun, on worlds of snow and ice and frozen gases like the planet Neptune. For what I had seen seemed to imply, to me, that life was not an unique thing, existing only in a form adapted to the special conditions of our planet, Earth, but a fundamental regenerative quality of all matter.

  We had been blin
d. I had been blind. When we had supposed that life could only exist in the form that was adapted to Earth conditions, we had been as self-centered, as egotistical, as when our ancestors had supposed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun and all the stars and planets revolved around it.

  But I lay awake long after that, thinking how I, a totally alien creature, dependent on one feature of my environment, water, which was an anathema to the life of that secluded zone, could adapt myself to the circumstances I found and find a niche for myself in a strange ecology.

  Even when I slept my mind must still have been battling with my problem for I dreamed that creatures from other planets had come to Earth. One required heat and could not exist in a temperature of less than that of a white-hot furnace. Another required shelter from all bacterial life whatever. A third could only live in an atmosphere of nitric acid gas. In each case they could only live if mankind were to help them and create artificial conditions for them.

  When I awoke, it was daylight. I looked up at the long white slope with its slabs and steps. I stood, and turned round, and looked at my machine. Somehow that had to go up there. I had regarded the project as impossible the previous day, when I had thought that I would have to go not only up but over, and seen my time ticking out because of lack of food. Now I thought in terms of longer periods, of the years through which I might have to live on Mars.

  If I lived. If I could accomplish the one essential and enlist the co-operation of an intelligence utterly alien to my own. I was desperate.

  I looked over my food supply It was pitifully small by now, but I had suffered no ill effects from my strange meal of the previous day. Yet what I had must still go with me It was all the rest of the equipment on my machine that I unloaded and dumped amid a pile of rocks

  I had breakfast then. Then I took a steel crowbar from my equipment and began to dig away at the first step of the crumbling rock. I chose the point with care: a place where, if all the steps were evened out in a straight road up. I would be able to drive the machine up all that slope.

  It took me half an hour to even that first step out, to cut back the Up and even out and pack the debris to make a ramp below. Then I went down to my machine, climbed

  aboard, swung it cautiously round in a circle, and put it to the slope. I went up, cautiously but with just sufficient reserve of power, on to the slope below the second step. I stopped the machine there, and chocked the wheels and tracks.

  It took me three days to make the whole ascent, camping twice on the ledges in the middle of the slope. During that time, I went twice to the crest on foot. At the crest, I moved with the caution of a hunter stalking game. I crossed the crest on my belly, and slid down to the terrace where I filled my cooking pot with the 'food' I found. Like a hunter, I was thin and grimed, covered with the powder from the rock, alert, long-haired, unkempt, and frightened. Would a creature from another planet, I wondered, show such excessive care when approaching Man on Earth? Perhaps not if he came equipped, in a vessel that made him self-contained, so that he could treat with the human race as a sovereign power. But I, aware of the chances and mischances of a planetary landing, thought I would do well to hide for a while, and watch, and study. I did not know Martians, but I did know Earth men and their reactions to anything strange and probably obnoxious.

  The third night I spent upon the crest. I had brought with me, in my effort to bring eveiything I could, a small object-telescope from one of the sextants that had been used as navigational instruments aboard the rocket. It was through this small instrument, from a vantage point in a cleft between two rocks on the summit ridge, that I watched the valley.

  During the daytime I had seen little of the creatures. There had only been the 'mother' and four or five—I was not sure which—small editions of her, basking or sleeping on the rocks. In the distance along the valley I had once imagined I could see another tribe. I had envisaged the valley as some nursery of the species, through which all the more human, animal creatures must pass on their twiceannual trek from pole to pole, and where the creatures had their birth and being before they left the valley to follow the wave of life as night-predators upon it. I had a theory, insubstantial as it was, that the creatures could not have evolved simultaneously with the Martian 'men', and that therefore they must have some other, simpler, more basic way of life, from which the continual passing of a defenceless prey had led them in a bygone age, until, following the migration, they had become masters of all the planet.

  Watching from my crevice, I saw the lights in the valley bottom begin to come to life at sundown. I saw them stationary at first, as merely a ruddy glow below me. Then, after rising through the spectrum towards the blue, they began to move. One vast row, the 'mother' I presumed, glowed a steady turquoise. The others, higher in frequency, startled me with sharp flashes of pure violet. But I could make no headway with their 'language'. What I could understand was the movement, the running together of the lights, their separating and their chasing. They went round in circles like children engaged in play.

  I put my glass away and watched the silent patterns below me with the naked eye. Could I rely on my feeling that the activity was play? I tried to imagine whether all life, even totally alien life, must always leam in the same way, by trial and error, by the acquiring of custom and habit which would govern all later actions. Perhaps it was not so. Perhaps some stranger kind of nervous system, unimaginable to us, could exist, something that learned its habits and way of life not as men and kittens and tigers do, by way of sport, but by some more sudden accretion of responses. But if so, the fact that what went on below me in the darkness looked like play was a hopeful sign. The difference, appalling as it was, between myself and those strange creatures, was not too great. . . .

  Cautiously, careful not to step into the moonlight or to cast a shadow on the white rocks, I withdrew from my cleft.

  I had seen that the creatures remained, for the most part in the valley bottom, only occasionally climbing a few terraces up the sides, but I had no wish to become the mouse for their cat-like sport, should they even by the remotest chance see my single movement. I retreated from the crest and waited for daylight, when I felt safe enough, and slept.

  That evening, I took all the wire I had brought with me from the wreck. Before darkness, I prospected along the crest until I found a crack into which I could only just insert my body and yet which gave me a view of the valley and of a point on a terrace just below me. From the crack to the terrace I laid out my wire, hiding it in hollows between the rocks and burying it with rubble where it had to cross the open. On the terrace itself, I buried it two feet deep. Then I made a metal frame to protect the light bulb.

  When darkness fell, I was in my crack. To my hand was the wire that led from the bulb below me back into the machine behind me and the battery By using coils and resistances in the circuit, I could cause the bulb to glow from red, through yellow, to a pure white light. I could not produce a blue light except from the torch which I kept to hand. To cover that, I had cut strips of coloured material from my clothes.

  I was ready. I was prepared to make the first true and desperate contact between the human race and that which I could only suppose to be the dominant Martian species. There was no other way. Even if I had been prepared to live like a rat in a burrow in the wall of their garden home, I still lacked water. I lacked shelter. I lacked a steady source of fuel and power. Even the food, miraculously sustaining as I had found it over a short period, could not form a permanent diet for me. I needed more of everything. . .

  I needed a Man Friday. I needed some one creature that knew the land and knew the ropes. I needed a Thing that I could train and use to supplement my strength, a body that could live freely in, or be independent of, that thin atmosphere and the cold. I needed an intelligence that was at home on Mars, to supplement my own.

  And, above all, I needed to prove the dominance of the human species. I needed to prove to myself, as well as for
all other men who were to come, that Man, even naked, with no more tools than would fit him for survival, could yet dominate an alien planet. For it seemed to me that either there was something in humanity, some grasp, some spirit, some intelligence and transcending understanding which would make all human history worth while, or there was nothing: nothing but a momentary squirming of helpless, fated life in all the myriads of individuals of our species, doomed to end and as meaningless while it lasted as cloud of bacteria that multiplied explosively in a fluid, then, having used up their food, died off and left the liquid still. Either I had in me something which fitted me to survive, even among more highly developed forms, so that Man was the chosen race that would inherit the universe as a whole, or my intelligence was a joke, a grim accident of fate, as though a worm should know its own humility, and I could not care how soon I died nor what giant's foot was raised to stamp on me and black me out.

  My improvised preparations made, I was in my cleft of rock and ready for my trial. I had learned at last that even on that barren planet Mars it was not what I could do with things that mattered, but my relations with other creatures, other life, as even Crusoe had found when, after the trials and storms and shipwreck, his existence had become dependent on the savages—and the goats.

  30

  IT WAS IN the fifteenth year of my stay on the planet that the American ship landed in Latitude thirty-five on the southern plain, which was in summer then and which presented the same aspect as the northern flatlands when I had first seen them.