Rex Gordon

by First on Mars

  I gave them a moment.

  "Which is why," I said, "they ask for tolerance. I have to go back now—my hour is up and I have only come to you on parole. Their suggestion is this: that you change one of your men for me, and leave him as an ambassador or a hostage. He can be a scientist. He can study them. And you can exchange him when you wish. They will permit a landing of one ship a year. In that way, we can live in peace. They do want peace."

  They stared at me. Slowly, Vanburg said: "And you will go back to them, on those terms?"

  I thought of a creature that I knew as Eii. He had been the first. It had been he who put me in the cave. I nodded.

  The General said: "Suppose I agreed to this arrangement. How could I guarantee that other nations would keep it? The Russians are treading on our heels. Their ship may arrive here any day. Your own countrymen will be the next. They aren't going to accept our statement that we have exclusive rights for one ship a year. And if they break the agreement, what happens to our hostage?"

  I looked down at the cabin floor.

  "They don't know about that," I said. "I didn't tell them about our competing nations I never mentioned our habit of making wars. I was not a fool They think of us as a kind of termite as it is. And it's our misfortune to be shaped like the creatures that are their source of food. One word of that will convince them that we belong to a totally lower order. That we should kill not only other species but also one another will be as repugnant to them as the cannibalism of the savages was to Crusoe on his island."

  When I looked up, I saw that they did not understand The idea that I had been a kind of Crusoe would have been comprehensible to them. But that 1 had been Man Friday, that I, with all my technical accomplishment and engineering had been proud to work up even to that relationship with an alien race. ... It was impossible for them to grasp They were men of action and they judged by doing. Were they not, proudly, the first to fly in the gulfs between the stars and planets?

  rr WAS a light in darkness, a single flickering illumination in the shadow that lay across the entrance to the cave. It was Eii, named such because that was my translation of the initial flickering of his light before he learned to signal clearly.

  There was no wall across the cave-mouth then. None was needed since I had learned to live permanently within the cave for my own protection. There was only the water, and the food they gave me, and the equipment that Eii had brought once, incomprehensibly to me, from the distant wreck. I had thought then that he understood my needs. I had imagined for a moment that he knew how necessary fuel was to me and parts and spares for my machines, metal plates with which to build an airtight room. But he did not. He had brought it as stuff, as pertaining to my nature.

  They had not helped me to make the neon tube I was using to reply to the flashing signal. They did not help me in my laborious daily work of mashing the fruit they gave me, fermenting it, and distilling off an alcohol for fuel. That I even needed the blue-white crystals that they used was a surprise to them. I had had to win them round slowly to an understanding of my needs, night after night flashing and elaborating the code from its crude beginnings.

  Even when I had all I needed the 'conversations' went on. Eii had exemplary patience. Perhaps he was one of those rare children that can really keep a pet and train it.

  "You were not here?" he was flashing now, his carefully dimmed light-organ still illuminating, in ghostly fashion, the limestone walls. And I, sitting in the chair I had made, with the neon light mounted above my head upon a stand, and a morse-key on my knee, understood his meaning. It was all, in the early days, like that. It demanded a mental leap, an understanding of what it was for which we had no word. I had to explore, above all, how his mind worked, and he had to guess at mine.

  "I was not born here," I said. I saw his light dim as he memorised the new signal, the word 'bom', which he would read not as letters, as in morse, but as a single comprehensive whole of twelve dots and dashes, and remember perfecdy, but perhaps not quite comprehend

  "You have said another world."

  "At a distance far from here."

  He dimmed again, and then his light changed colour: "There are no such distances as you have tried to say." "Distance," I said. "Not time. Distance is the one that is reversible."

  Startlingly, in bright yellow light, his answer came: "To you it may be like that." Then he shifted his bulk and went away, leaving the cave-mouth empty.

  The next night he was back again. It was always during the period of darkness which was his 'day'. He drew in across the entrance to the cave like a train into a station. Even before he was fully in position, his light was flashing at me so that I had to read it as I turned.

  "How did you cross this distance?"

  I hastened to reply to that, running to my chair. The rarity was that he should ask 'how?' at all Even then I suspected that it was not really what he meant It was only a minor variation from his eternal 'why?'

  "I crossed distance by constructions such as you have seen me make here. They are useful these constructions. They could be of use to you"

  "'Use?*" he flashed. "Why 'use'?" He baffled me. It seemed I would never have done with the alien quality of his mind and be able to explain myself

  "They could do things for you," I said.

  "It is strange," he said, "that you who spend all your time in doing still admire constructions which do your doing for you."

  That was the first time I came across an attitude to doing which was all but incomprehensible to me at the time and which later proved almost impossible to convey to the Americans in their rocket.

  "I cannot breathe or eat or live in this world unless I have equipment," I told him for the thousandth time.

  "You would do well to die I think," he said. "You and those you say are like you."

  I became furious. I touched the rheostat on my equipment and stepped up my battery voltage. "Our deficiencies are our strength!" I said. "Because we have needed covering and all the warmth and comfort you possess by nature, we have had to invent our ways and means. We have learned so much that now it is possible for us to cross those distances we spoke about. Everything would be possible to you too if you would take an interest in construction. At least let me assist you. Let me make constructions which would be of use to youl"

  He thought about that. When he thought, his light dimmed but went neither on nor off.

  "Everything possible?" he said. "By way of doing?"

  "To do is to leaml"

  He flashed a negative.

  "To know how is to know why!"

  He flashed a negative.

  I lost my temper completely. "You know nothing," I told him. "You do not know of what things are composed. You do not know the distances between the stars!"

  His light came on with the green of laughter. "It is you who know nothing, I assure you!"

  Another night he appeared and lay as a black mass across the cave-mouth and said nothing.

  "I have something for you here," I said. "I have watched you in this valley for six months now. I have seen how you are dependent, those of you who stay here, on the twice-annual trek of the living things who must come through.

  You kill and eat and then for six months you starve. But I will build fences into which you can drive your prey, and then you will have them always, when you need them."

  He was silent, with the utter disinterest of indifference. It was only that his light came on, with a pale blue light, like an eye that sleepily opened.

  After a while, he said: "It is a pity that you cannot be what you are, instead of trying to be more or different."

  I tried to understand him. Desperately I tried to understand. For fifteen years my life was dependent on it.

  I said: "Our lives are short. We do what we can with them while we have them."

  There was a long pause then. When he flashed again it was with a concept that was strange to me. Perhaps I did not understand it. He said: "If you were to stop doing your l
ife would be as all eternity. Why do you strive? What do you strive towards?"

  I stared at him, at the darkness where he was. I tried to understand but could not. I became indignant. It seemed to me that he was decrying the value of all effort. I did not stop to think why a denial of the use of doing should so affront me.

  "We strive to know all things and to do all things. We think of the future of our race and how we will expand and deploy ourselves among the stars and fill all the spaces of the universe with ourselves!"

  He was silent—lightless—for a while. Then he answered gently:

  "I think you strive only to gain the strength and comfort that your bodies lack. I think there are too many of you already. I think that each of you feels weak and does not know why or what he is nor where he leads. You crave for power, because power means safety. You crave for strength because you are weak and uncertain of yourselves. You crave for knowledge because you know nothing. You crave to conquer the universe because it is so vast and you are so small. You think always that if you can know a little more, if you can travel a little farther, you will stumble on some secret which will transform your nature. But your nature is what it is. It is that you should try to change."

  He arose and went away. In the darkness, I was left wondering about what he said. Not, of course, that I wondered whether all our doing was not of use to us. It must be. A hundred million human brains could not be wrong. But I wondered for the first time and with despair whether anything I could do for more perfect beings, who did not need to strive, could be of any use to them. I began to sense, in his alien nature, a totally different set of values: an appreciation of the nature of things which left me cold and fearful since it was a denial that I and all I stood for had meaning or could be of any kind of use to him.

  When he came back, it seemed that he, and not I, had solved my problem. He came to the mouth of the cave and obscured the stars, and his light winked brightly, cool and blue.

  He said: "In your own world, not here, what are the things you do?"

  I thought. I was more cautious now in my replies. I seemed to be living from moment to moment in an inner anguish.

  "We make shelters," I said, "and covering for our bodies. We strive to make the climate of our world, which would be cruel to our nakedness, more suited to us. We make heat and light and warmth. We prepare our food until it is delicious to our senses. We train our offspring so that they will inherit the skills and knowledge that we have. And, beyond that, we strive to see our world and leam what we can of all there is to see."

  His cool blue light said gendy: "If you were to succeed in these things?"

  I looked into the darkness that was the shadow of his outward shape, and did not reply. How could I tell him that it was not success we hoped or even strived for—how could I admit that our stage of development was such that each generation must laboriously repeat the actions of its fathers and add so little, so very little to them? That every man bom must face the same problems, and, though he might be more skilful in his efforts, could never hand on a completed task? It would be too easy for him to say, I thought, that our hopes were'vain no matter what they were or could be, and that, before one man could travel beyond the stars, a million million other men might die.

  He said, softly it seemed, such was the quality of the light: "Suppose that some day you are entirely successful in your doing. You have active groups of men, you told me, who strive always for efficiency. Suppose their efficiency becomes quite perfect, so that like us you no longer need to do or strive, but may live without effort solely at a touch of a button on one of your constructions. Suppose, since you are creative, you can create what you will, with no greater effort, and travel freely, and acquire all knowledge. What will you do then? Have you some more perfect construction in your mind? Or do you envisage only means and not the ends? Is it simply the power to do which you lack and therefore are so jealous of, or have you a purpose in mind, which you will achieve, when you attain perfection?"

  I did not reach for the key which was in my lap, I did something that I could not conceive of myself as doing. I, a man bloodied by fate but undefeated, burst into tears. It was as though, for the first time in my life, in any life, it seemed to me that my striving was not only useless but no longer needed. I—it was an hallucination, it must have been—saw a picture of myself in that state of beatitude that he painted for me. And I knew that that, the state, was what I had craved and wanted. I had never, neither I nor any man, considered what I would do with it. I had never found it possible to populate Heaven with actual people.

  His light, his seeing, not his speaking light, played over me. He saw my distress in the cave that he had given me. He must have sensed my physical and mental wretchedness.

  He said, so gently and softly, and with a violet radiance: "If you could conceive of the end to which you would use all power, if you had it, you might find it unnecessary to have the power. The end and purpose of your existence might be accomplished by simpler means than all the complexity and trivial life-consiiming action that you tell me of. Why should I waste your time, which is shorter even than our own, in building fences for us which, for millenia, we have done without? And why, for that matter, should you strive always to make things, to achieve things for yourself?"

  I snatched at my key. With my left hand, I slammed at the switch which made my neon tube glow red. I heard my high-voltage generator hum as I turned my communication system to maximum power.

  "Why do you torture me?" I said. "Why do you take away from me the little that I have? Am I not sufficiently wretched in this cave? I tell you that my race has its sole strength in doing. We are the ones who can accomplish. We are those who will penetrate your world and all the universe. It is true we do not know how we come to live, or whyl It is true that ultimate purpose, and a knowledge of the meaning of all things are just what we lack most! But do not taunt me with itl Such talk is dangerous. When we have conquered your world, and found out what and how it is, then we will know more of the answer to your question 'why'. Or at least we hope we will. That is our faith. We have the faith that we will find a meaning. We will find a meaning not only for our own fives, such men of us as are living then, but we will find a meaning for the lives of all the men who have lived and died before us. We! We whose weakness, whose need for action, has been turned to strength! Then, then by knowledge and conquest, we will find our final purpose!"

  He answered me with a golden glow, with words he spelled out slowly:

  "But if I were to tell you your final purpose now, and avoid that effort?"

  I did not answer. His seeing beam played on me again and saw me sitting rigid in my chair. Around me the limestone sparkled with his sudden brightness.

  He said: "This code of yours is not adequate for the purpose. But you have begun to use the colours. You must watch and try to understand. You must widen those dim eyes of yours. You must cast aside your preconceptions."

  I looked. I had no alternative but to look. I saw him slowly come into illumination all about his form. I saw a transcendent multiplicity of colour that slowly began to change. And he was youngl I had that one and only shocking thought. He was but a child among these creatures, like a boy who had conversations with his pet and tried to teach it human hopes and human speechl I stared at his blue and gold and green and red, and, as he had told me, my eyes widened at his changes, at his pulses and transfiguration. I sensed, rather than thought in words, the concept that began to form.

  I cried out. I covered my eyes with both my hands. I fell down before him on my knees. I cried out, aloud, in words: "No morel Enoughl" I bent my head. I would have buried it in the sand. It seemed to me, suddenly, that a ghasdy blackness took hold of me. I screamed, and screamed again, then knew no more.

  When I came to, I was lying in my cave in daylight. My machines were softly humming. The oxygen was pouring from my mask as though someone—it must have been Eii, though I never saw him touch any mechanical contrivance befo
re or since as though he understood it—had turned it on to fulL

  I looked around me wildly. I staggered to my bed and slept. I slept one night, two days, and Eii did not come back to me until the succeeding night.

  His lights were sombre then, like a boy's face in remorse when he looks at .a puppy he has injured. Hesitantly in the darkness, he flashed the dots that were his name, then mine.

  I stirred, and he saw me stir, but I did not reply.

  He said: "I am sorry that I misled you. I have spoken to others. We would be glad if you made a fence for us. Could you do that when you feel well again?"

  I looked at him, unspeaking and unthinking.

  He said: "Let me persuade you that we really need it. You know how helpless we are at doing things. We would benefit greatly from practical assistance in our world."

  I believed him. I had to, to live at all. I did my best to believe him for fifteen years of life-in-death when the sanity of human companionship, its sense of mutual support and certainty, was denied to me. I worked steadily in and about the valley, and the question of ultimate human purpose was never raised again. It was only that when one of the Martian creatures came up to me, I would try to avoid him and go away. Even with Eii, I was glad that he did not try to talk to me as he had been doing, but merely praised me, fed me, and found practical work for me to do.

  It was like that, I doing work and Eii providing me with materials that I needed, until, by means of an instrument I had constructed on the cliff above my cave, I was able to tell Eii one day, seeking him out for the purpose since he had somewhat lost interest in me, that other men were coming. I had seen the ship circling the planet after detecting it at a range of a hundred thousand miles. In my telescope it had the aspect of a small silver cigar-shaped lozenge among the stars.