Next came the calculations room, which was crammed with strange machines bristling with dials and needles. Sterni was working at the largest device, out of which flowed a long tape that evidently showed the result of his calculations. The signs on the tape and dials, however, were all strange to me. I did not want to disturb Sterni or even speak to him. We quickly went on to the last side compartment, the oxygen chamber, which contained supplies of oxygen in the form of 25 tons of potassium chlorate, from which up to 10,000 cubic meters of oxygen could be separated. Such a quantity was sufficient for several voyages like ours. Equipment for breaking down the potassium chlorate was also kept here. Other supplies included barites and caustic potash for the absorption of carbon dioxide and stores of sulfuric anhydride used to absorb excessive moisture and volatile leucomaine, a poison far more dangerous than carbon dioxide that is produced in the body and exhaled into the air. Doctor Netti was in charge of the room.
We returned to the central engine room and then ascended in a small elevator directly to the top story of the etheroneph. The middle room there housed a second observatory, identical with the one below except that the instruments were larger and its ceiling rather than floor was of crystal. From this observatory we could see the other half of the celestial sphere and our destination, Mars, which glowed a dull red off to one side of the zenith. Menni trained the telescope on it, and I could distinguish clearly the contours of the continents and the seas and canal networks, which I recognized from the maps of Schiaparelli. Menni photographed the planet, and soon we had a detailed picture of it under the microscope. It meant nothing to me without Menni’s explanations, however, for the spots that were cities, forests, and lakes were distinguished from one another by details which I found elusive and incomprehensible.
“How far off is it?” I asked.
“We are relatively close at the moment—about 100 million kilometers.”
“But why isn’t Mars at the zenith of the dome? Does this mean that we are flying off to one side rather than directly toward it?”
“Yes, and we have no other choice. Due to the force of inertia, as we left Earth we retained the speed of its movement around the sun—30 kilometers a second. The speed of Mars is only 24 kilometers, so that if we were to fly perpendicularly between the two orbits we would strike the surface of Mars with the remaining lateral velocity of 6 kilometers a second. That would be most uncomfortable, so we must take a curvilinear trajectory in order to counterbalance the excessive lateral velocity.”
“In that case, how long is our total journey?”
“Approximately 160 million kilometers, which is going to take at least two and one-half months.”
Had I not been a mathematician, these figures would have left me unmoved. As it was, however, they evoked in me a sensation that reminded me of my nightmare, and I hastened to leave the astronomy room.
The six side compartments of the upper section surrounding the observatory in a ring had no windows, and their ceiling, which was part of the spherical hull of the craft, sloped all the way down to the floor. Near the ceiling were two large reservoirs of minus-matter, whose repulsive force was calculated to neutralize the weight of the entire etheroneph. The intermediate second and third stories were occupied by conference rooms, laboratories at the disposal of individual members of the expedition, their cabins, bathrooms, libraries, a gymnasium, and so on. Netti’s room was next to mine.
7. The People
My loss of weight was now more perceptible, and the growing sensation of lightness, accompanied by an element of uncertainty and a vague uneasiness, had ceased to be pleasant. I went to my cabin and lay down on the cot. I lay there quietly engrossed in thought for a couple of hours, and before I knew it I had dozed off. When I awoke, Netti was sitting at the table in my room. Arising from the bed with an unintentionally abrupt movement, I was flung upward and hit my head on the ceiling.
“When you only weigh 20 pounds you have to be a little more careful,” Netti remarked, with a good-natured, philosophical air.
The specific reason he had come to my cabin was to tell me what to do in the event my weightlessness should make me feel seasick. I was in fact already experiencing such symptoms. There was a special signal button in my room connected to a buzzer in his room so that I could always call for him if I again needed his help.
I took advantage of this opportunity to talk with the young doctor. In spite of his great erudition, he was a good-natured and likeable young fellow, and for some reason I felt involuntarily attracted to him. I asked him why, of all the Martians on the etheroneph, only he and Menni spoke my native language.
“It is quite simple,” he explained. “When we were searching for someone Menni chose himself and me to go to your country, where we spent over a year before we accomplished our mission by finding you.”
“So the others were ‘searching for someone’ in other countries?”
“Of course, among all the major peoples of the world. But, just as Menni expected, we found him first in your country. The pulse of life throbs stronger there, and, more than anywhere else, people are forced to look to the future. When we found our man we notified the others, they returned from their assignments, and here we are on our way.”
“What exactly do you mean when you say that you were ‘searching for someone’ and that you ‘found your man’? I understand that you wanted an individual suited to a certain role, and Menni explained to me just what it is. I am very flattered to observe that you have chosen me, but I would like to know why you think I am so deserving of the honor.”
“I can tell you in the most general terms. The person we were looking for represented an ideal combination of sound physical health, flexibility, a capacity for intellectual labor, few or no personal attachments on Earth, and as little individualism as possible. Our physiologists and psychologists reasoned that the transition from the eternally discordant conditions of your society to what you would call the socialism of our system would be a difficult ordeal. The person chosen for the mission, therefore, would have to be well qualified psychologically and physically, and Menni felt you were better suited than the others.”
“And Menni’s opinion was good enough for the rest of you?”
“Yes, for we have complete confidence in his judgment. He has an exceptionally powerful and lucid intellect and is very seldom mistaken. He has more experience than any of us in dealing with Earthlings. In fact, it was he who first established such relations.”
“Who developed the means of communicating with other planets?”
“That was the work of many people. Minus-matter was obtained as early as several decades ago. At first, however, we could produce only insignificant quantities of it, so the efforts of a great many factory teams were required to find and develop the means of manufacturing it on a large scale. After that it was necessary to perfect techniques for obtaining and decomposing the radioactive substances used as fuel for the etheroneph, and that also demanded enormous research. Furthermore, there were a great many difficulties connected with the conditions of the interplanetary environment. We had to find ways of protecting ourselves both from the terrible cold and from the sun, for in space there is no atmospheric envelope to filter its scorching rays. Computing the course also proved to be fraught with unforeseen difficulties and errors. A number of earlier expeditions to Earth were completely annihilated. It was Menni who finally managed to organize the first successful voyage. And now, using his methods, we even succeeded in reaching Venus recently.”
“In that case, Menni must be a truly great man,” I said.
“Yes, if that is what it pleases you to call someone who has indisputably done a great deal of valuable work.”
“That is not what I meant. Even quite ordinary people, the executors, can make valuable contributions. But Menni is obviously in an entirely different category; he is a genius, a creator, a pioneer leading mankind forward.”
“I find your expressions rather vague and eve
n incorrect. Every worker is a creator, but what does the creating is mankind and nature. After all, Menni had at his disposal the experience amassed by preceding generations and contemporary researchers, and he based each step of his work on that experience. Nature provided him with the raw materials and germs of his ideas, and the struggle between man and nature furnished the necessary stimuli. A man is an individual person, but his work is impersonal. Sooner or later he will die and take his joys and suffering with him. His accomplishments are his lasting contribution to life, and life will go on developing forever. In this respect there is no difference between workers. The only inequality is a quantitative one determined by how much they have experienced and how much they leave behind them.”
“But surely the name of a man like Menni will outlive him and remain in human memory when the names of countless others have disappeared without a trace?”
“A person’s name is preserved as long as those who knew and lived with him are still alive. But mankind needs no dead symbols of an individual once he is no more. Our science and our art preserve impersonally the collective accomplishments of all. The ballast of names from the past is useless to the memory of man.”
“Perhaps you are right, but our sense of reality rebels against such logic. To us the names of the leaders of thought and action are living symbols which are indispensable to our science, our art, and our entire social life. In the struggle offerees and ideas it often happens that a name on a banner means more than an abstract slogan. And the names of geniuses are not mere ballast in our memory.”
“That is because the common cause of mankind is not yet really a common cause among you. It has become so splintered in the illusions generated by the struggle among men that it seems to belong to individual persons rather than to mankind as a whole. It used to be as difficult for me to understand your point of view as it is for you to comprehend ours.”
“Well then, for better or worse, none of our party is immortal. The mortals here, on the other hand, must belong to an elite, do they not? They must be among those who have ‘done a great deal of valuable work,’ as you put it?”
“In a way, yes. Menni chose his comrades from among thousands of applicants.”
“After him I suppose the most outstanding would be Sterni?”
“Yes, if you really must insist on measuring and comparing people. Sterni is a prominent scientist, though of quite a different type than Menni. Mathematicians of his caliber are very rare indeed. He discovered a number of errors in the calculations upon which all the previous expeditions to Earth were based and proved that certain of these mistakes in themselves were sufficient to doom the enterprises. He developed new methods of making these calculations, and thus far his findings have proved accurate.”
“That is just how I imagined him on the basis of my first impressions and what Menni has told me. And yet I cannot understand why the sight of him inspires me with a certain alarm, a vague uneasiness, a kind of unmotivated antipathy. Would you happen to have an explanation for this, doctor?”
“You see, Sterni has a very powerful but cold and mainly analytical intellect. He tears everything apart, logically and implacably, and his conclusions are sometimes one-sided, sometimes extremely severe, because an analysis of the parts of something, after all, yields not the whole, but something less than the whole. You know that wherever there is life the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, just as a living human body is more than just its combined organs. Consequently, Sterni is less capable than many of entering into the moods and thoughts of other people. He will always willingly help you with anything you yourself bring to him, but he will never guess your needs for you. Another inhibiting factor here, of course, is that he is almost always entirely engrossed in his work, for his head is constantly full of some difficult problem or other. In this respect he is quite unlike Menni, who is always aware of everything around him and has more than once been able to explain even to me what it is I want, what is troubling me, what my mind and feelings are groping for.”
“In that case I should imagine that Sterni’s attitude toward us contradictory and inadequate Earthlings must be rather hostile.”
“Hostile . . . no. That emotion is alien to him. But I do think he is more skeptical than he need be. He had been in France only six months when he telegraphed Menni that there was no point in searching there. Perhaps he was partly right, because Letta, who was with him, did not find a suitable candidate either. But his descriptions of the people he saw there are much more severe than Letta’s, and of course they are also much more one-sided, even though they do not contain anything that is actually incorrect.”
“Who is this Letta you mentioned? For some reason I do not remember him.”
“A chemist, one of Menni’s assistants. He is an elderly man, the oldest among us here. You will find it easy to make his acquaintance, and it would be useful to you to do so. He has a gentle temperament and is an excellent judge of human nature, although he is not a psychologist like Menni. Drop in and see him sometime in his laboratory. He will be happy to see you and can show you many interesting things.”
At that moment I remembered that we were far away from Earth, and I wanted to take a look at it. We went to a big window in one of the side rooms.
“Won’t we have to pass close to the moon?” I asked on the way.
“No, unfortunately the moon is far off to one side. I should also like to take a closer look at it, because it appeared so strange to me from Earth. Huge, slow, mysteriously serene, it does not resemble at all our two little moons, which dash across the sky and constantly change their faces like lively, capricious children. On the other hand, of course, your moon is much brighter and its light is most pleasant. Your sun is also brighter than ours, and in this respect you are much more fortunate than we. Your world is twice as bright, which is why you do not need eyes with large pupils like ours to catch the feeble rays of our day and night.”
Looking back at Earth
We sat down by the window. Earth shone far off in the distance like a giant sickle. All that could be distinguished on it were the contours of the western part of America, the northeast of Asia, a dull patch which was part of the Pacific, and the white spot of the Arctic Ocean. The entire Atlantic and the Old World lay shrouded in darkness. The only reason I could guess they were there at all was that the invisible part of Earth eclipsed the stars, leaving a stretch of empty black sky. Our oblique trajectory and the rotation of Earth on its axis were responsible for this change of view.
As I gazed I felt sad that I could not see my native land, where there was so much life, such a struggle and such intense suffering, where only yesterday I was still in the ranks of my comrades, and where now someone else had probably taken my place. Doubt began to arise from deep within me.
“Back there blood is being spilled,” I said, “yet here stands yesterday’s revolutionary in the role of a calm observer.”
“Blood is being shed for the sake of a better future,” replied Netti. “But in order to wage the struggle one must know that future. And it is for the sake of such knowledge that you are here.”
In an involuntary burst of emotion I squeezed his tiny, almost childish hand.
8. New Friends
Earth receded further and further into the distance, and, as if it waned thin from the pain of parting, it shrank to a moonlike sickle accompanied by the now very small crescent of the real moon. By now my fellow passengers and I were all becoming fantastic acrobats, able to fly without wings and make ourselves comfortable in any position, with our heads toward the floor or the ceiling or the wall—it made practically no difference which. Gradually I got to know my new comrades and felt more at ease with them.
Already on the second day after our departure (we continued to use this time measure, although for us, of course, there no longer existed either days or nights), I took the initiative myself and changed into Martian dress in order not to stand out so sharply from the others. True, I lik
ed the attire for its own sake: simple, comfortable, without any superfluous conventional items such as ties or cuffs, it afforded the wearer the maximum freedom of movement. The individual parts of the costume were joined together by small clasps in such a way that the entire suit was a single whole, yet if need be one could easily unfasten and take off, say, one or both sleeves or the entire blouse. The manners of my fellow passengers resembled their dress, being marked by the same simplicity and absence of anything superfluous or conventional. They never greeted one another, never said goodbye or thank you, never dragged out a conversation just to be polite if its immediate goal had already been reached. At the same time they were very patient when it came to giving explanations, painstakingly adapting themselves to the level of their interlocutor and entering into his psychology, however little it might resemble their own.
Naturally, from the very first days aboard I set about learning their language. Everyone, but in particular Netti, was most willing to teach me. The language is a very original one, and despite the great simplicity of its grammar and rules of derivation, there are certain peculiar features which I found difficult to master. Its rules have no exceptions whatever, nor are there any limitations such as the masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. At the same time, however, the names of all objects and qualities are declined according to their temporal status. I simply could not get this into my head.
“Tell me, what is the point of having such forms?” I asked Netti.
“I am surprised you should ask such a question, considering that you understand the much less logical morphology of your languages. When you name something you are careful to designate whether you consider it masculine or feminine, which is not very important and even rather odd in the case of inanimate objects. The difference between objects or persons which exist and those which no longer exist or have yet to come into being is far more significant. The word for ‘house’ in Russian is masculine and that for ‘boat’ feminine, whereas in French it is the other way round, but the essence of the matter does not change a jot for that. Yet when you speak of a house which has already burned down or a house which you are still planning to build, you use the word in the same form you employ to designate the house in which you are living. Is there in nature a greater difference than that between a man who is alive and a man who has died—between that which is and that which is not? You need whole words and phrases to express this distinction. Is it not better to indicate it simply by adding a single letter to the same word?”
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