At any rate, Netti was satisfied with my memory. His teaching methods were superb, and I made rapid progress. This helped me to make friends with the Martians, and I began traveling about the etheroneph with increased confidence, dropping in to the rooms and laboratories of my fellow passengers and interrogating them about everything that interested me.
Sterni’s assistant, a young astronomer by the name of Enno, was among my new acquaintances. He was a lively, good-natured sort of fellow, like Netti, not much more than a boy. He showed me a great many interesting things, and he was obviously carried away not so much by the measurements and formulas themselves (although in that field he was a real expert) as by the beauty of what he observed. I felt quite at ease with this young astronomer-poet, and my natural desire to acquaint myself with my new environment constantly gave me occasion to visit Enno and his telescopes.
Once he showed me a picture of the tiny planet Erot under maximum magnification. A segment of its orbit passes through that of Earth and Mars, while the remainder lies beyond Mars and continues into the region of the asteroids. Although Erot was 150 million kilometers away at the time, the photograph of its little disc under the microscope had as much detail as our maps of the moon. Like the moon, of course, the planet is lifeless. On another occasion Enno photographed a swarm of meteors passing only a few million kilometers away. Naturally, the picture showed only an indistinct nebula. It was then that Enno told me that on one of the earlier expeditions to Earth an etheroneph had been destroyed by such a swarm. The astronomers on Mars following the craft in the largest of their telescopes saw its electric lights go out, and the etheroneph vanished forever into space.
“The ship probably collided with several of these small bodies, which, due to the great difference in their respective speeds, must have pierced all its walls. The air in the craft escaped into space, and the cold of the interplanetary environment froze solid the already lifeless bodies of the voyagers. Even now the etheroneph is flying on in orbit like a comet. It has left the solar system forever, and it is impossible to say where the journey of this terrible corpse-laden ship will finally end.”
As I heard Enno say this, the cold of the ethereal wastes seemed to pierce my heart as well. I had a vivid mental picture of our bright little island in the middle of an endless dead ocean. Plunging along at a dizzying speed, we were utterly alone and completely surrounded by a black vacuum. Enno guessed what I was feeling.
“Menni is a reliable helmsman,” he said, “and Sterni never makes a mistake. As for death . . . I am sure you have seen it close up sometime in your life. Death, after all, is only that and nothing more.”
The hour would come when I would recall these words as I struggled with the agonizing pain in my heart.
I was attracted to the chemist Letta not only by the extraordinary gentleness and sensitivity of character Netti had told me about, but also by his enormous knowledge of the scientific field that interested me most, namely the structure of matter. Only Menni was more competent than Letta in this area, but I sought Menni’s assistance as little as possible, realizing that his time meant too much to both science and the expedition for me to presume to disturb him. The elderly, good-natured Letta, however, tolerated my ignorance with such inexhaustible patience and explained the rudiments of the subject to me with such courtesy and even evident relish that I felt quite at ease with him.
Letta began giving me an entire course on the theory of the structure of matter, illustrating it with a number of experiments on the decomposition and synthesis of its elements. He was forced, however, to limit himself to a verbal description of many relevant experiments, because certain of them involved a risk of explosion. On one occasion Menni happened to enter the laboratory during a lecture. Letta was just concluding a description of a very interesting experiment and was now preparing to perform it.
“Be careful,” Menni warned him. “I remember that once this experiment almost ended in disaster. The slightest contamination of the substance you are decomposing, and even a weak electric charge can detonate it during heating.”
Letta was ready to abandon the experiment, but Menni, unfailingly attentive and thoughtful toward me, offered to assist him by checking the preparations, and in fact we obtained splendid results.
The following day we were to carry out some experiments on the same substance. It seemed to me that this time Letta took it from a different jar than the one he had used the day before. He had already set the retort in the electric bath when it occurred to me to mention the fact. He became alarmed and went straight to the cabinet containing the reagents, leaving the bath and the retort on a little table next to the wall, which was also the hull of the etheroneph. I went along with him. Suddenly there came a deafening crash, and we were both flung violently against the door of the cabinet. This was followed by an earsplitting whistle and howl and metallic clatter. An irrestible force, like a hurricane, propelled me backward toward the outer wall. Letta and I both automatically grabbed hold of a sturdy strap attached to the cabinet and hung there horizontally, held in that position by a powerful rush of air.
“Hang on!” he shouted, and I could barely hear his voice above the roar of the storm. A sharp cold pierced my body.
Letta quickly glanced around him. His face was frighteningly pale, but his confused expression suddenly changed to one of lucidity and firm resolve. He uttered only two words—I could not make them out, but I guessed that he was saying goodbye forever—and he released his grip. There was a muffled thump and the howl of the hurricane ceased. I felt that I could let go, and glanced behind me. There was not a trace left of the table. Letta stood stock still with his back pressed tightly to the wall. His eyes were wide open, and his entire face was frozen. With a single bound I reached the door and opened it. I was repulsed by a burst of warm air. A moment later Menni entered the room and went straight to Letta. In a few seconds the room was full of people. Netti pushed everyone aside and rushed to Letta. The others surrounded us in alarmed silence.
“Letta is dead,” said Menni. “An explosion during a chemical experiment punctured the wall of the etheroneph and Letta plugged the breach with his body. The air pressure exploded his lungs and paralyzed his heart. Death was instantaneous. Letta saved the life of our guest, for otherwise the death of both would have been inevitable.”
Netti burst into a muffled sob.
9. The Past
Netti did not leave his cabin for several days after the accident, and in Sterni’s eyes I began to notice an expression that was at times downright hostile. There was no denying that an outstanding scientist had perished on my account, and Sterni’s mathematical mind could not help but compare the value of the life that had been lost with the worth of the one that had been spared. Menni remained as even-tempered and calm as ever, even doubling his attention and concern for me. Enno and all the others did the same.
I began an intensive study of the Martian language, and at the first convenient opportunity I asked Menni to give me a book on the history of their peoples. Menni thought that that was a good idea and brought me a handbook in which the history of Mars was presented in a popular form for Martian children. With Netti’s help I began reading and translating the work. I was astonished by the grace with which the anonymous author used illustrations to enliven and concretize general concepts and theories which were at first glance extremely abstract. This skill enabled him to present his materials in a geometrically harmonious system and with a logical consistency that no Earthly popularizer would think of using in a book intended for children.
The first chapter was thoroughly philosophical in nature and was devoted to the idea of the Universe as a single all-inclusive and self-determining Whole. This section reminded me of the writings of the worker-philosopher who first expounded the principles of the proletarian philosophy of nature in a simple and naïve form.* In the next chapter the discussion went back to the immensely remote period before the forms of life familiar to us had yet arisen i
n the Universe and chaos and indeterminacy reigned supreme in boundless space. The author told how the first amorphous accumulations of elusively delicate and chemically indeterminate matter began to separate in this environment. These accumulations served as the embryos of the vast starry worlds of the stellar nebulas. They included the 20 million suns of our own Milky Way, ours being one of the smallest.
From there the book proceeded to an account of the process by which matter, as it became more concentrated and entered into more stable combinations, was transformed into the chemical elements. Parallel to this the primary, amorphous accumulations decomposed, giving rise to the gaseous solar and planetary nebulas, many thousands of which may be observed today with the aid of a telescope. The history of the development of these nebulas and the process by which suns and planets crystallized from them has been treated in a like manner by our Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the Universe, but here it was clearer and presented in greater detail.
“Tell me, Menni,” I asked, “do you really find it advisable to start children off with these exceedingly general and abstract ideas, these pallid pictures of the world so far removed from their concrete everyday life? Is that not filling their little brains with empty, almost exclusively verbal images?”
“The point is that we never begin studying from books,” replied Menni. “The child draws his information from firsthand observations of nature and real intercourse with other people. Before he even attempts to read such a book he has already been on numerous excursions and seen various pictures of nature. He knows a great many types of plants and animals, is acquainted with the use of the telescope, the microscope, photographs, the phonograph, and has listened to many stories told to him by older children, educators, and other adults about things that are distant in time or space. Books like this one are merely intended to consolidate and reinforce his knowledge, filling in gaps in the process and suggesting to him further avenues of study. Obviously, the idea of the Whole must constantly and above all be brought out as distinctly as possible; the notion must run from beginning to end if it is not to be lost in a welter of detail. The creation of the whole man must begin in the child.”
This was all quite new to me, but I did not attempt to question Menni any further. I would in any event soon become acquainted at first hand with Martian children and the system by which they were brought up. I returned to my book.
The subject of the following chapters concerned the geological history of Mars. Although the discussion was presented in very condensed form, it abounded in comparisons with the histories of Earth and Venus. Despite the significant parallels that existed among the three planets, the basic difference lay in the fact that Mars was almost twice as old as Earth and nearly four times the age of Venus. There were exact figures of these ages and I remember them well, but I shall refrain from citing them here lest I irritate scientists on Earth, to whom they would come as quite a surprise.
Next came the history of life from its very beginnings. There was a description of the first compounds, complex cyanic derivatives, which, although they were not yet real living matter, possessed many of its qualities. This was followed by a description of the geological conditions under which these chemical compounds arose. It was explained why it was these substances, rather than other, more stable but less flexible compounds, which were preserved and accumulated. Step by step the author traced the process whereby these chemical embryos of life became more complicated and differentiated, until they finally formed real living cells and initiated the “reign of the Protista.” Life continued to develop along the evolutionary ladder or common genealogical tree of all living beings, from the Protista to the highest plants on the one side and to man on the other. There were also of course a number of side branches. In this evolution from the most primitive cells to man, the first and final links in the Martian chain differed only insignificantly from their Earthly counterparts, whereas the discrepancy in the intermediate stages was much greater. I found this to be most curious.
“As far as I know,” Netti told me, “this problem has not been given special attention. After all, as recently as twenty years ago we did not even know what the highest animals on Earth were like, and we were very surprised ourselves to discover that humans there resemble us so closely. The number of higher types that can attain the fullest degree of development is evidently limited. Even on planets as similar as ours and under nearly identical conditions, nature was able to evolve this maximum of life in only one way.”
“Also,” Menni remarked, “the highest type, the one which masters the planet, is the one which most fully reflects the entire sum of its conditions. The intermediate stages, on the other hand, are capable of embracing only a part of their environment. Consequently, their reflection of these conditions is also only partial and one-sided. Thus given the enormous similarity between the respective sets of conditions as a whole, the highest types will coincide to a greater degree than will the intermediate ones, whose very one-sidedness allows them to develop greater variations.”
I recalled that while I was yet a university student the same notion of the limited number of possible higher types had occurred to me in quite a different context. Octopuses, marine Cephalopoda that represent the highest organisms of an entire branch of evolution, have eyes which are unusually similar to those of the animals on our branch, the vertebrates. Yet the origin and development of the eyes of the vertebrates are completely different—so different that even the order of the corresponding layers of tissue in the optic apparatus of the mollusks is exactly opposite ours.
As to historical times and the first phases of human life on Mars, here there were also many similarities to Earth. The forms of tribal life were the same on both planets, individual communities detached themselves in the same way, and the same exchange of commodities led to the establishment of very similar intercommunal ties. Beyond that, however, a distinction began to emerge, although it concerned the style and character of the development more than its basic direction. The course of history on Mars was in certain respects gentler and simpler than that on Earth. Naturally there were wars between different tribes and peoples, and there was also a class struggle. However, the wars played a relatively minor role in Martian history and ceased altogether rather early, while the class struggle resulted in far fewer and much less violent clashes of brute force than on Earth. None of this was stated in so many words in the book I was reading, but it was evident to me from the entire context. Slavery was entirely unknown on Mars. There was very little militarism in their feudalism, while their capitalism surmounted the division into nation-states at a very early stage and produced nothing comparable to our modern armies.
I was forced to seek the explanation of these facts on my own. The Martians, even Menni, had only begun to study the history of mankind on Earth and had not yet made a comparative investigation of our respective pasts. I recalled one of my earlier conversations with Menni as I was preparing to study the language spoken by my fellow passengers. I inquired whether it was the most widespread of the languages on Mars. Menni explained that it was the only literary and spoken language of all Martians.
“At one time,” he added, “peoples from different countries on Mars could not understand each other either. Long ago, however, several centuries before the socialist revolution, all the various dialects drew closer to one another and merged in a single common language. This occurred freely and spontaneously. No one tried to bring it about or even gave it much thought. Certain local pecularities survived for quite some time, so there existed something akin to individual dialects, but these were fairly comprehensible to everyone. The development of literature finally eliminated them as well.”
“I can only find one explanation for this phenomenon,” I said. “From the very beginning, communication among people on your planet must have been much broader, easier, and more intimate than it was on Earth.”
“That is quite correct,” replied Menni. “Mars lacks your vast
oceans and impassable mountain ranges. Our seas are not large, nor do they at any point completely separate continents from one another. Except for certain individual peaks, our mountains are not high. The entire surface area of our planet is only one-fourth that of Earth; at the same time the force of gravity is two and one-half times less, making our bodies so light that we can move about quite rapidly even without man-made means of transportation. We can run at the same speed that you ride on horseback, and it does not tire us the more. Nature has erected far fewer walls and barriers between our peoples than she has between yours.”
This, then, was the main factor that had prevented Martian humanity from splitting into different nations and races, and such unity in turn inhibited the development of militarism, wars, and systems of mass destruction. Due to its inherent contradictions, capitalism probably still would have evolved all these distinguishing characteristics of advanced civilization, but even the development of capitalism followed a unique course which created new conditions for the political unification of all the tribes and peoples of Mars. In agriculture, for example, the small peasants were crowded out at a very early stage by large-scale capitalist farming, and the land was totally nationalized soon after. The reason for this development lay in the increasing aridity of the soil, which the smallholders were unable to remedy. The crust of the planet soaked up the surface water and did not yield it up again. This was a continuation of the natural process by which the once existing oceans on Mars shrank to become relatively small inland seas. The same process of absorption has also begun on Earth, but there it has not yet progressed very far. On Mars, which is twice as old as Earth, the situation had already become critical a thousand years ago, since as the oceans shrank there was naturally a parallel decrease in cloud cover and precipitation, which meant in turn that the rivers and streams also began to dry up. Artificial irrigation became a necessity in most places. What could independent small farmers do in such a situation?
Red Star Page 7
