Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  "Gordon Holder," I said. "Engineer of an unofficial British expedition that left Woomera fifteen years ago. The expedition was not successful. I am the only survivor."

  They digested that. Looking at their faces, I could not tell if they had heard that our expedition had gone off or not.

  It was DeLut who burst through our reserve. "One thing seems clear," he said excitedly. "Mars isn't all like these deserts we've been surveyingl" Having said it, he had to move away from the doorway, for a steward entered, bringing me the meal I had accepted.

  I looked at the ham and eggs and wondered if my digestion would cope. There was a cup of coffee as well as a glass of water on the tray and I could hardly take my eyes off that. I did so momentarily to look at DeLut over the steward's shoulder. "If you mean there's some place on Mars that can produce food like this, you're wrong," I said.

  Vanburg said sharply: "You haven't starved."

  The General waited until the steward had gone out again. Then he said: "What's this about going back to the place you came from in an hour?" He had the authority. He made it clear that his were the questions to be answered first.

  I told them in my own way while I ate. I was surprised at my reaction to the food. When I first saw it, my appetite went into rhapsodies about it. When I began to eat, it was different. It seemed to me that the taste was not quite as I remembered it. My teeth were in a poor state too, and I was not used to chewing. It seemed I had not remembered the power and patience required to masticate a slice of ham. Before I was half through it, my jaw was aching and I gave up. The egg I managed, and the cup of coffee was like a smoker's first cigarette after a long, long time.

  I told them about our take-off, our accident, and how I had crazily decided to try to land on Mars. It seemed to me that I should tell them, to begin with, something that their own experience would enable them to understand.

  "It was just luck that the ship cracked when she landed," I told them. "If she hadn't, I'd have been like yourselves, thinking of the possible bacterial infection of different kinds of life. I would have had to make experiments until I was convinced that even the inert part of the Martian atmosphere was breathable without ill effects. By the time I had decided, by trial, to bring my pressure down, and begun to look for a source of oxygen, I would have been too late. My own air supply would have been exhausted. As it was, I was plunged right into it. I either lived or died. I lived, and after that all the machines I built, or rather altered, from the wreck, grew only from my immediate needs. I succeeded in distilling Martian air because that was the only way I could hope to produce oxygen quickly enough to be of any use to me, and because anyway I had already been moving in that direction when I compressed and decompressed it to precipitate out the water. I was just lucky. I did those things quickly that I had to do quickly if I was going to go on living. The really troublesome thing, the problem of finding some sort of food that would sustain human life indefinitely, I never did solve really. Oh, I found things that were edible. That is a different matter.

  Dr. Bombard did that twenty years ago, when he crossed our own water desert, the Atlantic, on a rubber raft, though he ruined his digestion in the process."

  I paused at that. They were following me closely I could see. Lieutenant Boles had discovered his function in the gathering. He had taken a notebook out and was taking notes. But they were all grimly holding back their unasked questions and were willing to keep silent only so long as I continued.

  "I could have done the same for a while," I said. "I had begun to make certain brews. These plants you see out here. At a certain time of the year they produce a fruit. By breaking that down with earth bacteria, I succeeded in making a kind of mess of yeast. And there were other things. Certain sugar-carbohydrate substances produce themselves here by a peculiar process in a land of mineral form. But there is no doubt about it. If it hadn't been for my present hosts I would have succumbed to some deficiency disease or other, either scurvy or beriberi or something of that sort, some ten or twelve or even fifteen years ago."

  I saw them tense. They knew that they had reached the crux of the matter now.

  "You can see," I said, "that I owe them a land of gratitude. One in particular. He won't be really understandable to you. He isn't quite to me, after fifteen years. But it's him I represent. It's his point of view that I've come to put to you."

  33

  FIFTEEN YEARS earlier, I had not expected to survive.

  It was from behind that the interruption came. I was conscious of a new blaze of light, cutting into the ruby beams, from that direction. Involuntarily, I turned. It was one of the youngsters that I had last seen disappearing down the valley. Seeing the lights above, he had evidendy returned. Could I attribute human emotions to him? Could I say that he was intrigued and puzzled? Certainly his lights were deployed in the same way as were the gigantic red ones. He with his white lights was searching me and my equipment and my machine with all the absorption of a child who had just discovered that a kitten lived.

  I heard a sound behind me. It was the mother moving forward and I turned in time to see her bearing down. To attempt to run from her was as hopeless as it would have been to run from an earthquake. I had an instant of pure terror as I saw her bulk above me, and then the lights around me changed to green.

  It is hopeless to attempt to convey the beauty of that colour. I could call it winsome, or pleading, or rueful with a touch of laughter, but there simply has not been on Earth such a colloquy of light. We are bom of a race that has lived, for long ages, as far as its emotions are concerned, by ear and sound. We are affected direcdy by exhortations, and cries, and screams of agony. Even our lower creatures, born of the same ancestral forms, communicate briefly with danger cries and warnings, with love and mating calls, and the others of their species respond to their emotions. To us, the sublime is almost always sound, and there is nothing in our knowledge, nothing but the echo of playing elephants in a symphony, which can match the communications those Martian creatures make with light.

  The green came from the smaller creature, and the mother stopped. Blue-green it was, the childish pleading, and it was answered by a slate-grey-green, that even to me in my terror conveyed a 'no'. But they were not steady those lights, at that stage. They came and went and wavered, and seemed to explore the resources of an area of the spectrum. To my eyes, wide and fearful, it seemed that the lights that played above my head were cut and mixed: as though my eyes, for all their staring, could not comprehend, no more than alien ears can understand the finer inflections of our speech. I deduced a 'please', a 'no' as one does on hearing a foreign language to the vocabulary of which, and even the grammar, one has not a clue. And, to me, it seemed that the mother became uncertain in her emotions. From time to time she flashed a glimpse of red again, and then whole moments of her lightning 'speech' would be suffused with red, so that it was red-green, red-blue and red-yellow that she 'spoke', only, a moment later, to be changed to an ethereal violet which ran to blue and green without the red.

  I, on my knees between them, felt for my hidden wire, my switch, my key. I switched on my lamp. I sent the signal for 'yes' and then the question mark. 'Yes?" I said again, and again 'yes?" and 'yes?" It was the only way I knew to plead. Oblivious then, and blind with terror, I crawled to my machine. I took up my water can, and opened it, and again sent 'yesr* I let a little oxygen leak out from my tank into the air, and again sent 'yes?" It was the only way I knew to plead, to demonstrate my needs and my weakness to them, desperately, in some mad hope that they would think of me as a creature that needed help, not something to be killed.

  As soon as I had become active, they had become 'silent'. They stood, on either side of me, in a kind of radiance of their own creating. Only occasionally, as I demonstrated this and that, and sent my eternal plea of 'yes?' would some communication pass above my head from the younger to the elder.

  I stopped, exhausted. I knew no more that I could do. And the mother moved away from
me, down into the valley.

  I followed, or tried to follow, with the young one close beside me. When I came to a place I could not descend, he paused and waited, then went ahead and smoothed a path for me, clearing and levelling the ground so that I could descend. I followed him, and limped thus into their camp on the valley floor. Oxygen was something they could not understand, but, as dawn broke quiedy as a first radiance among the peaks, he led me to a cavern in the far hillside, and there, as he left me and I entered all alone, I heard a murmur and tinkle. There, deep in the hillside, and flowing by I knew not what subterranean channels from the polar regions was that which was as incalculable and rare on Mars as a hot stream or a flow of naked lava would be on Earth: a tiny runnel of water which found its way through a cavity in the limestone and fell perpetually in the darkness into a cavern, a shaft, of unknown depth.

  He knew: that was what overwhelmed me. He, the young one, had understood my hopeless, desperate signals. I lay in the darkness, taking off my mask and burying my head in that heaven-sent pool, drinking and drinking as I had never drunk in my life before, then putting on my mask again and gasping with exhaustion, oblivious of a rumbling in the mouth of the cave behind me.

  It was some time, and broad daylight before I staggered back to the entrance of the cave, to see my machine which had been placed there, to discover how and if it were damaged, and to start, or hope to start, my oxygen-making plant. Only, as I approached it, I saw a shadow across the entrance.

  He had built a wall, a vertical wall, to keep me in. He had penned me like a sheep in a fold, like a white mouse in a cage. It was only then, looking up at a triangle of sky above that high white wall, that I realised that I was as far as ever from gaining control of even a young one of the Martian species.

  Far from making him my Man Friday in that desert world, it was he who was keeping me as a kind of pet, and it would be I who, if I wished to raise my status, would have to display my value to him.

  THETENSION had increased in the cabin of the rocket. The four of them were all looking at me: DeLut standing in the doorway, Lieutenant Boles on the bunk beside me with his notebook in his hand, Captain Vanburg, big and fair, frowning in the effort to understand, and the General whose face had become a mask.

  "You mean," DeLut said, a gleam of excitement entering his dark eyes, "—you mean—I'm the biologist here—you mean there are intelligent creatures on this planet?"

  Looking him in the eyes, I answered: "Yes."

  "What kind—" he said. "Dammit, you know the sensation this will be on Earthl What size are they? What shape? What sort of civilisation have they? And where do they have their towns and villages? How do they live in— this?" He waved his hand to indicate not the scene inside the rocket but the desert that lay outside it, the endless plain with which they had just become acquainted, the dearth of life, the low temperatures and the thin cold air.

  I told them. I confined myself to a physical description. To my surprise, they accepted the size. They must have been prepared for that. But my description of appearance, of physiological detail, and of things which lived in comfort inside their hides, independendy of atmosphere or cold or animal needs, except for food, seemed to daze them and raise a doubt. I could see it in their eyes.

  "And you say they are," DeLut said again uncertainly, "intelligent?"

  Once more I answered with emphasis: "Yes."

  "He asked you," Vanburg said, his heavy face lined with caution, "what sort of social organisation do they have?"

  "A complicated one," I answered. "Based on a family system."

  That got him no farther. He wanted something he could grasp and hold on to. He said: "What do they make and do?"

  I told them: "Nothing."

  They sat there and stared at me.

  "They hunt," I said. "They eat. They sleep. They die."

  Captain Vanburg's face had a frown that I assumed was patience. After a silence, he said: "You've been with them fifteen years. It's not for us to say they haven't what you say they have."

  I faced them steadily. "All right," I said. "Have it your own way. They don't build houses. They don't make machines. They don't go to work at eight o'clock each morning and knock off at five o'clock at night. And they don't build rockets and fly between the planets. So they are not intelligent."

  The General said: "Captain Vanburg didn't deny your statement, Holder."

  "They have a language," I said. "They talk with light waves as we do with sound waves. Only they don't express themselves in words. They don't have a written language with precise meanings. If you see them talk, it's as though you saw a symphony in colour. But maybe that isn't an evidence of intelligence either. You might say that our birds communicate with one another with sounds. Some people say glorious sounds. Yet they say a bird has no intelligence."

  They were all still looking at me: puzzled, stubborn, patient. Boles suddenly remembered his notebook and wrote something in it. I imagined him writing: "Communicate with lights like birds with sounds." I gave them time, and then I told them.

  "They have had intelligence enough for this," I said. "When they realised that I couldn't produce colour-patterned light waves, they learned a code I taught them, based on the morse code. They learned it quickly and

  easily, but took no further interest in it except as a means to talk to me. And they realise the meaning of your arrival here. They knew I was the first, and you are the second, and that soon there will be more and more men coming to their planet. And to them it's as though they were threatened with a plague of troublesome ants."

  They looked, for a moment, troubled. They could not conceive of the minds of the creatures I was telling them about. They could only imagine them as being like themselves or like some other Earth creature. They wanted to ask questions, but they did not know what questions it was right to ask.

  "Or worse," I said.

  They knew then. I saw Vanburg's lips tense. The General's eyes took on the hard, cold look of a man expecting war.

  "It was my fault," I told them quietly. "Before I knew them perfecdy, before I'd thought out all the possibilities of what might happen in the future, I had told them too much about ourselves. They had asked me, indifferently, not very interested in my answer, if there were any creatures like themselves on Earth: things, they intimated, of the same size and tonnage and importance. And I, like a fool, told them that there were. I mentioned whales, creatures that were able to reach their size on Earth despite our heavier gravity because they spent their whole lives suspended in a fluid. You understand. I was trying to impress them with the similarities between our planets. I was trying to convince them of the kinship of all life."

  "You needed to do that?" the General said. He was wondering what armaments these creatures might possess.

  I did not answer him. In the cabin of his ship, which I hoped would take me back to Earth, I told him only what I had to tell.

  "They said: so those, the whales, were the dominant species on our Earth. I said they weren't They wanted to know about the intelligence of whales. I said we did not know. All we did know was that they had brains of greater size and complexity than man's. Then they must be dominant, they intimated. And I was a fool. I was intent on impressing them with my own importance. I told them no, on the contrary, it was we who hunted whales. We were not interested in their brains. We boiled them down for oil."

  They thought about that and understood. I had almost forgotten how good and quick and practical the human intelligence was.

  "So," the General said, "you've told them that we won't harm them? You've told them that we aren't in a position, and won't be for a hundred years, to dispute their planet with them? And you want to go back now, and tell them that we come in peace?"

  I could see why he had been chosen for his mission. He had all the practical determination and opportunism that made a leader. He came from, and was the latest of, a long line of pioneers. He might have been Cook telling the Aborigines who then owned all A
ustralia that the white man did not come to harm them. He might have been one of the first Americans telling the Indians that all the settlers wanted was a few square yards on which to live. He might have been an armoured Conquistador promising the first Aztec he met the peace of God, or an Englishman promising mutual co-operation to the Polynesian islanders. And, like all those forerunners of himself, he believed that what he said was true, as indeed it was for him, and for the moment only: for a man who's job it was to deal with a practical situation on the spot.

  "That," I said, "is the general idea. Only there is one slight difficulty. They have had me with them for fifteen years. And they have got fixed ideas about us and about our science. For instance, they are under the impression that even you, the first expedition to land and take off again, would like to take a miniature specimen of themselves with you, a young one, say. And they think, rightly or wrongly, that at the first opportunity you get, you will dissect one. Then you will discover what they imagine to be a fact: that they have substances within them which would be of infinite value to the human race. They are, I've told you, more highly developed forms of life than we are. What we would find in them might be of more value than any vitamins or ambergris or fish-oil. So they envisage that shortly men would come back to Mars, and set up a factory, and ride out in killer tractors to drag back their bodies. And all, you understand, in the name of medicine and human love and pity—which it would be, they see quite clearly, as long as mankind thinks only of himself and his own needs." They looked affronted.

  "You forget," I told them, "that when you see them, these creatures will be no more than gross animals to you, just as you are tiny animals to them. They don't have houses or a civilisation as we know it any more than we have a civilisation as they know it. Your only contact can be through me, and that is tenuous—a groping in a gulf of darkness. They themselves aren't certain how much of my intelligence is natural and how much is due to the time they have spent on training me to understand them. And if I bring one of them to you, and translate your remarks and questions to him, and translate his answers, it'll look to you like a circus trick. You'll have no more cause to believe in his intelligence than you would in that of a performing horse."