Vanburg looked utterly hopeless and in despair. DeLut said: "No you didn't. Go on. This is interesting. This may throw some light on things."
"I went to a great deal of trouble about it," I told him. "You know how I told that when I first saw the creatures shaped like men, I tried to fence them off my plot of ground. I used all the wire I could, but I didn't use a high enough charge to be effective. Well, in the valley there, the sort of household setdement of those bigger creatures, where they must have been bom, like the crystal plants there, from a different kind of evolution from our own, they relied on the six-monthly passage of the wave of life. Once every six months all living mobile things on Mars came pouring through. For creatures of their size, who could wait six months between meals, that was convenient. All they had to do was have a big twice-annual slaughter. But the wave of life crossed their valley on a wide front. What I wanted to do was wire off the majority of the little passes, use a sufficient charge this time, and absolve them of the necessity even to stalk and hunt."
DeLut's dark eyes had a look of fanatical intelligence. He said: "Go onl"
"I did what I could," I said. "Eii indicated that he had no objection if I wanted to do something on the lines that I suggested. So I did it, working in the daylight of course, and in the sunlight. I spent six months on it. Six Martian months, which is twice as long as that would be at home. And then I found that it was all useless."
"Useless?" Vanburg said. Despite himself, he seemed to show a momentary flash of interest.
"The things never went near my fences anyway," I said. "Naturally, when the wave of life came through, I went to see it. I felt annoyed when I saw that Eii and his fellows had pulled certain of my fences down and seemed to be using some of the lines I had closed as those on which they chose to lie in wait. They didn't even bother to conceal themselves either, which looked desperately inefficient to me, who had climbed a hillside and was looking down on them from above. But the men-like things came on, and then, for the first time, I felt my own kinship to them, and felt pity for them. Because, by some process I couldn't understand, they seemed to walk deliberately, and without reason, right into the traps that had been laid for them. It was— well, it was a slaughter. It wasn't nice. No nicer than what goes on in our slaughter-houses, though we hide them from view, and we could, if we wished, live on a vegetable diet exclusively. These creatures like Eii couldn't. They were only doing what they had to do to live at all."
DeLut said quickly, before Vanburg could interrupt again: "Why d'you think those creatures, the prey, followed the lines that were chosen for them?"
I thought about that. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe there weren't any other lines. I saw one or two start off sideways, but they did not seem to get anywhere, and they soon came back. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps they ran up against the same sort of time and space shift that we did. But if you look at it that way, you'll have to accept another thing. That this barrier, whatever it is, that they put up, isn't a new or an invented thing. It's just a natural part of life to things like Eii. Like—well, like spatial concepts are to human beings, though there is no indication that ants ever looked up and wondered what lay in the sky above them. There's no indication that they have even wondered about, or realised there was a sky or 'up' at all."
Vanburg felt he had got somewhere in that first session he had conducted without the General. He hammered away at it for a fortnight, asking me questions and getting DeLut to ask them, but he never got any farther. As the General put it, when he came in on the sessions again: "You've established another reason for thinking that these creatures can do whatever it is they did. But you didn't need to establish that. They did it. We were there."
"At least," DeLut told him, "we have Holder to take back to prove that we have been there. Otherwise we haven't much else in that line, except some photographs and some stones and moss."
The General looked at him sourly. He did not approve of DeLut. Too intelligent, and too ready, far too ready, to shoot off his mouth.
I worked steadily on my journal and it slowly became accepted throughout the ship that they had been to Mars, landed, discovered an Earth man there, and then, when they tried to walk out across the plain, got nowhere. Kept going, but made no progress. And all they were going to be able to do about it, when they got back to Earth, was to tell their story and stick to it.
After two months, when we were still in space but near-ing Earth, the General said: "I'm going to put in a positive recommendation. The next ship that goes has to have a big reserve of power and fuel endurance. She'll land, and if she comes up against- a barrier, she'll go out into space again and come down again wherever it was they were trying to get to. If necessary, we'll explore the planet that way, in hops and jumps. It'll take time. It'll take a devil of a time and a mint of money. But we'll do it in the end."
DeLut looked at me, and I looked at DeLiit. We both said nothing.
That evening we went, as we had got into the habit of doing, into the little two-man navigational astrodome that was built in near the tail. There was no navigation going on there then, and there had not been for a week or more. The sun and Earth were large on the bow, though invisible to us, and the navigators were all working where they could get sights.
It was dark with the night of space in the astrodome, and cold. Far, far away, where we could only just pick it out among the million stars, the red planet swung.
We both stood there, looking at that tiny orb, for a good long time.
"Do you think," DeLut said, "that the General and people like him will ever succeed in annoying them too much? Do you think that people like us will ever convince them of the need for action and that it isn't sufficient for them to go on, just living and dying, as they are?"
I knew DeLut by then. I looked below the surface of his words.
"You think it would be better?" I said. "Our action and their—what shall we call it?—sensibility? I doubt if in a million years we'll understand one another well enough to unify our oudooks."
"I'm a biologist," he said.
I waited until he was ready to speak. I was in no hurry. I was content to look through that jet-black sky, with its brilliant fights, to the little planet which I had never thought to leave again.
"They have no competition," he said. "That is why they are what they are. If there was competition, they'd feel the need for action. But without competition, by Earth laws, they must degenerate. They must have degenerated. They can only be a shadow of what they were."
He too was in no hurry. The spectacle of space was not one that either of us were likely to five long enough to see again. And, unlike the General he gave me time to think about my answer.
"By Earth laws, you said." I thought some more. "Maybe that was our mistake," I said.
"You mean to imagine that the same laws would apply? But science is science. What is true in one place is usually just as true in quite another."
I wondered. I said: "In the social sciences?"
He said: "Ira trying to think about it. Suppose we ceased to have wars among ourselves. Suppose we really got on top of our environment and wiped out all diseases and even made the roads safe to walk and drive upon. Suppose we had all, every one of us, all the power we needed and all the goods and comfort and convenience. At the moment, that is what we strive for. It is the goal of our sciences and our economics and our politics. And yet, biologically speaking, the achievement of that goal would be fatal to us. By Earth laws, we would degenerate. In ten generations we would be a race of morons. But they, Eii and his fellows—they seem to have begun, been bom into that situation which is at once the sum of all our hopes and the crux of all our fears. If we could only learn from them, if we could make contact, more contact than you have made in fifteen years—that is if they have not degenerated. If they have found some other occupation that is not doing, fighting, striving. . . ."
I moved my body in the astrodome so that I seemed to look 'down' on Mars. It was for t
he last time. Soon we would be within the pull of Earth's gravity and all our thoughts and hopes would be towards what lay ahead. Mars would be a rarely seen speck on the sky, direcdy overhead and obscured by cloud and smoke.
"I don't think so," I said.
He was silent. He waited for the meaning of my statement.
"I don't think well have the patience," I said. "We won't make contact. People like the General will treat it as a practical problem. They will see it that they have been opposed by power on Mars, and they will seek to overcome it with greater power. I would even go so far as this. In the end, I think we'll win. We'll conquer the strange beasts of Mars just as we conquered the strange beasts of the continents and the oceans. And, in conquering, we'll leam nothing from them. We'll not even treat them as creatures who could see or feel or know. Well kill them and use them, as I told you, for their bones or blood or oil. Perhaps righdy so. Eii and his kind have no sympathy to spare for their own Martian creatures who are shaped like men. But we will do it, and we will go on. After Mars, it will be Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, and the rest. Then other solar systems in our galaxy, then other galaxies and out beyond space itself. I think we will be, at last, a movement of life transcending time and space. I doubted it at times, on Mars, but now I think it. Only it will only be sometimes, in quiet comers, out of the main stream, in places where hope is no longer possible and when action has become futile and been seen to be futile for generations at a time. . . ."
We looked down on Mars and became conscious that she was receding from us. The ship was tilting. Already, unknown to us, the moment had come and the decision been taken to turn the vessel over, rockets down to Earth.
"Then?" DeLut said. "In backwaters, in places where conditions are like those on Mars, where competition does not exist, and the spirit can live in a material desert sufficient only to the body's needs?"
"Then," I said. I watched the stars begin to move and turn. They were moving, the whole brilliant universe of them, past the windows of the dome and seemingly against the outer darkness. "Then," I said, "the other thing will be bom. That knowledge that is of being, not of doing. Those inferences which are of actualities, not events. Those permanencies which come of a losing of the sense of time: when a moment is eternity, and eternity is a moment, and all ages are embodied in an instant. Perhaps then, for some of us, sometime, the work of our active lives, which consists of no more than moving matter around in space, will be seen to be the futility that it is, and our preconceptions about structure and dimensions will disappear . . . leaving something else."
Mars, as we watched her, disappeared. Instead, expected,
yet unexpected in its blinding glare, came a transfixing ray of sunlight and the gigantic flaming orb swung up into our heavens.
"Then," DeLut said, "all knowledge we have now will be in a crucible, in a state of disintegration and re-forming, like atoms in that furnace."
We stood there, pale white figures scorching momentarily beneath a dome of glass, and then retreated.
He crash-landed on Mars fifteen years ahead of i other Earth expedition. He was without communications, without supplies, and with nothing but the wreck of an experimental rocket for resources. What is more it was the planet Mars as astronomers know it really to be—not just a fictional fantasy background for glamorous adventure. It was barren, cold, more grimly inhospitable than the top of Mount Everest. And if it had inhabitants, they were conspicuous by their absence.
The story of how one determined man set out to survive on a world whose very air be couldn't safely breathe is an astounding science-fiction saga of the most grippingly realistic type ... a novel to be remembered.
AN ACE BOOK
Rex Gordon Page 19
