“Race has nothing to do with it. Two hundred years ago our life expectancy was only half of what it is now. Better living conditions? Yes, that is a part of the answer, but only a part. The main factor is the method we use to renew life.”
“What is that?”
“It is actually very simple, and although it will probably seem strange to you, your science already has the knowledge needed to apply this method. You know that in order to increase the viability of cells or organisms, nature constantly supplements one individual with another. Thus when the vitality of unicellular beings is impaired by a lack of variation in the environment, they fuse together, two becoming one; this is the only way they have of recovering the ‘immortality of their protoplasm, that is, their ability to procreate. The crossing of higher plants and animals does the same thing. In such cases as well vital elements of two different beings are united in order to obtain a more perfect embryo of a third one. Then of course, you are acquainted with blood serum transfusions and the way in which they transmit elements of vitality from one being to another. For example, they can increase resistance to different diseases. We go even further and perform mutual blood transfusions between human beings, whereby each individual receives from the other a number of elements which can raise his life expectancy. Such an exchange involves merely pumping the blood of one person into another and back again by means of devices which connect their respective circulatory systems. If all precautions are taken, it is a perfectly safe procedure. The blood of one person continues to live in the organism of the other, where it mixes with his own blood and thoroughly regenerates all his tissues.”
“Are you able to rejuvenate old people by introducing young blood into their veins?”
“To an extent, yes, but not altogether, because there is more than just blood in the organism, and the body in its turn also has an effect upon the blood. That is why, for example, a young person will not age from the blood of an old one. The age and weakness in the blood are quickly overcome by the organism, which at the same time absorbs from it many elements which it lacks. The energy and flexibility of its vital functions also increase.”
“But if this is all so simple, how is it that our medicine on Earth does not yet employ the method? If I am not mistaken, after all, blood transfusions have been known for hundreds of years.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps there are organic factors which render the method ineffective on Earthlings. Or perhaps it is merely due to your predominantly individualistic psychology, which isolates people from each other so completely that the thought of fusing them is almost incomprehensible to your scientists. Also, on Earth there are many common diseases which poison the blood—diseases of which even those who have them are often unaware or which they sometimes simply try to conceal. The blood transfusions presently performed by your medicine somehow smack of philanthropy: people who have a lot of blood give some of it to others who need it desperately due to, say, injuries. We, of course, do the same, but we do not stop there. Quite in keeping with the nature of our entire system, our regular comradely exchanges of life extend beyond the ideological dimension into the physiological one.”
6. Hallucinations
The stormy torrent of impressions that engulfed me during my first few days on Mars gave me an idea of the enormous task confronting me. First of all, I had to comprehend this world and its immeasurably rich and original vital harmony. I then had to enter into it, not as a curious museum piece, but as a man among men, a worker among workers. Only then would I be able to accomplish my mission, only then would I be able to serve as the initial link of real mutual communication between our two worlds. As a socialist I stood on the border between them, like a split second of the present between the past and the future.
As I was leaving the hospital Netti told me not to be in such a hurry. It seemed to me he was wrong—hurry was exactly what I had to do. I had to throw all my strength and energy into the enterprise, because the responsibility on my shoulders was so terribly great! What colossal benefit our old, suffering humanity would derive from the living, vigorous influence of a higher, mightier, and more harmonious culture; how greatly this contact would accelerate its development and prosperity! And each moment I delayed my work might postpone that influence. No, there was no time for waiting or resting.
And I worked hard. I acquainted myself with the science and technology of the new world, I observed intensely its social life, I studied its literature. Yes, much of it was difficult. Their scientific methods bewildered me. I learned them mechanically, and while I knew from experience that they could be applied easily, simply, and infallibly, I did not really understand them—I did not understand why they worked, I could not see their essence, their connection with real phenomena. I was like those mathematicians of the seventeenth century whose static thought was organically incapable of comprehending the living dynamism of infinitely small quantities.
I was struck by the intensely businesslike character of the Martian’s public meetings. Whether they were dealing with scientific topics, questions relating to the organization of work, or even artistic problems, their reports and speeches were extremely concise and brief, their argumentation rigorous and precise. No one ever repeated himself or others. The resolutions of the gatherings were usually adopted unanimously and with incredible swiftness. If a meeting of experts in some field decided that it was necessary to organize a scientific undertaking, or if a conference of labor statisticians concluded that a new enterprise must be created, or if a gathering of the residents of the city wanted to decorate some building or other, new figures on the amount and types of labor that would be needed were immediately published by the Institute of Statistics, hundreds and thousands of new workers were flown in, and in a few days or weeks the whole project was completed and the workers had disappeared heaven knows where. All of this impressed me almost as a peculiar kind of magic, it was quiet and cold and had no incantations or mystical embellishments, but its superhuman might made it seem all the more mysterious.
The literature of this world, even pure fiction, afforded me neither rest nor relaxation. Its images seemed simple and clear, yet somehow they remained alien to me. I wanted to penetrate them more deeply and understand them more intimately, but the result of my efforts was wholly unexpected; instead of opening themselves to me the images faded into fog-shrouded shadows. I was plagued by this same incomprehensibility when I went to the theater. The plots were simple, the acting superb, but reality eluded me. The speech of the protagonists was so reserved and gentle, their behavior so calm and tactful, their feelings so seldom expressed, that it seemed as though they were trying to avoid evoking any emotional response whatever in the spectator. They all seemed to be merely philosophers—very much idealized ones at that, in my opinion. Only the historical plays from the distant past conveyed any familiar impressions to me, for in those productions the acting was as vigorous and the expression of personal feelings as candid as I was accustomed to seeing in our theaters.
All these considerations notwithstanding, the theater in our little town had one feature that held particular fascination for me, namely the fact that no actors performed there at all. The plays were either transmitted from distant large cities by means of audiovisual devices, or—more usually—they were cinematic reproductions of plays performed long ago, sometimes so long ago that the actors themselves were already dead. The Martians have mastered the technique of instantaneous color photography and use it to capture life in motion, much as in our cinema theaters. But not only do they combine the camera with the phonograph, as we are thus far rather unsuccessfully beginning to do on Earth, they also employ the principle of the stereoscope to give the moving pictures natural depth. Two images, the two halves of the stereogram, are projected simultaneously onto the screen, and in front of each seat in the auditorium is fastened a set of binoculars which combines the two flat pictures into three-dimensional ones. It was eerie to watch people moving, acting, and expressing their
thoughts and feelings as vividly and distinctly as in real life and yet know that there was actually nothing there but a plate of frosted glass in front of a phonograph and an electric light operated by a clockwork mechanism. It was a weird, almost mystical phenomenon that filled me with a vague sense of unreality.
None of this, however, aided me in my task of understanding the alien world of the Martians. Obviously I needed help from someone else, but I was less and less inclined to turn to Menni for instructions and explanations, for I was embarrassed to reveal the full extent of my difficulties. Besides, Menni was terribly busy at the time with some very important research on the extraction of minus-matter. He worked untiringly, sometimes not sleeping for nights in a row, and I was hesitant to Jistract him from his work. At the same time, his zeal was a living example which inspired me to keep going on my own.
Meanwhile, I had temporarily lost contact with my other friends. Netti was several thousand kilometers away in the other hemisphere of the planet supervising the construction and organization of a giant new hospital. Enno and Sterni were busy in their observatories with measurements and calculations for new voyages to Earth and Venus and expeditions to the moon and Mercury to obtain better photographs and mineral samples. My relations with other Martians were not very close, my conversations with them being limited to inquiries and factual matters. It was strange and difficult to become friends with alien beings, whom I moreover felt to be superior to myself.
As time went on I began to feel that my work was in fact progressing rather well. I needed less and less rest and even less sleep. The subjects I studied poured into my brain with a kind of mechanical ease and facility; it felt as though my head was completely empty and had room for much, much more. True, I usually failed when I reverted to my old habit and tried to formulate clearly what I had learned. I did not attach much importance to this, however, convincing myself that all I lacked was the means of expression and certain trivial details. I had grasped general notions, and that was the main thing.
Although they were going well, however, my studies no longer afforded me any keen pleasure. Nothing aroused in me the spontaneous interest I had felt earlier. Well, what of it, I thought; that is all quite natural. After all I have seen and learned, there is little that can astonish me any longer. I was not here to have a good time, but to learn what must be learned. The one unpleasant experience was that I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on any one subject. My thoughts were constantly flying off in different directions. Vivid memories, sometimes very unexpected and distant ones, would flood my consciousness, blocking out what was going on around me and robbing me of precious minutes. I would notice this, come to my senses, and attack my work with renewed energy, but after a little while fantasies or the hovering images of the past would once again invade my brain, and I would be forced to check myself abruptly in order to repress them. I was increasingly troubled by a strange, uneasy feeling that I had failed to accomplish something important and urgent, something that I kept forgetting and had to strain to remember. This feeling would be followed by a swarm of familiar and unfamiliar faces and past events that would sweep me up in an irresistible torrent and spirit me away, further and further back through my adolescence and youth to my earliest childhood, where the images finally disappeared in a haze of vague sensations. After one of these experiences my lack of concentration would become particularly difficult to overcome.
This inner block that prevented me from concentrating for very long on any one thing finally got the better of me, and I began leaping rapidly from one subject to another. Trying to make the best of the situation, I deliberately brought to my room whole piles of books opened beforehand to the right place, tables, maps, stereograms, phonograms, and so on. I hoped in this manner to save time, but my absentmindedness crept up on me anyway, and I would catch myself staring for a long time at the same thing, understanding and accomplishing nothing. When I went to bed and gazed through the glass ceiling at the dark night sky, on the other hand, my brain would start working with incredible speed and energy. Whole pages of figures and formulas would appear in my minds eye with such clarity that I could read them line by line. These images would soon disappear and yield to others, however, and then my consciousness would become a panorama of astonishingly distinct and lifelike pictures which no longer had any connection at all with my studies or problems. Landscapes from Earth, theatrical scenes, and fairy-tale images would appear deep within me like calm reflections in a mirror, only to vanish and give way to others. I felt no alarm, though, only a mild and even somewhat pleasant interest and curiosity. At first these reflections arose only in my mind and kept their distance from the surrounding reality, but soon they began crowding out the real world, and I would sink into a light, uneasy sleep full of vivid and confused dreams that robbed me of the rest I needed above all else.
I had been bothered for some time by a noise in my ears, but now it became so constant and loud that it interfered with listening to phonograms and deprived me of the little sleep I was able to get at night. From time to time the noise would become more articulate and I would distinguish familiar and unfamiliar human voices. At times someone seemed to be calling me by name, sometimes I thought I heard conversations but could not make out the words above the noise. I began to understand that I was not altogether well when my absentmindedness finally got complete control over me and I became unable to read more than a few lines at a time.
This, of course, is simply due to exhaustion, I thought. All I need is more rest. I have probably been working too much. But Menni need not know what is happening to me—it might look as though I had failed from the very start.
On the few occasions when Menni would visit me in my room I would pretend to be studying diligently, but he remarked to me that I was working too hard and was in danger of becoming exhausted.
“Today you look particularly unwell,” he said. “Look in the mirror, how glazed your eyes are, how pale you are. You need a rest—you will benefit by it in the long run.”
I myself very much wanted to rest, but I could not. Although I was actually accomplishing almost nothing, even the slightest exertion tired me. The world around me faded away and became almost unreal beneath a raging and never ceasing torrent of lifelike images, memories, and fantasies. I was finally forced to give up. I realized that my will was succumbing to inertia and apathy, and I found myself increasingly powerless to cope with my condition. One morning as I was getting up everything suddenly went black, but I quickly recovered and went to the window to look at the trees in the park. All of a sudden I felt someone was staring at me. I turned around, and there before me stood Anna Nikolaevna. She was pale and sad, and there was a look of reproach in her eyes that was painful to see. Not even stopping to think how odd it was that she should be there, I took a step in her direction and wanted to say something to her. But she disappeared, vanished into thin air.
From that moment on I was overwhelmed by a veritable orgy of phantoms. I had forgotten a great deal, of course, and now my mind was as confused when I was awake as when I slept. All kinds of people I had met in my life and even some I did not know came and went or simply appeared for a moment and vanished. There were no Martians among them, however; they were all from Earth, mostly people I had not seen for a long time—old schoolmates, my younger brother who had died as a child. Once I glanced out the window, and there on a bench in the park a familiar police spy was staring at me with a look of malicious contempt in his shifty, rapacious little eyes. The phantoms did not speak to me. At night, however, when all was quiet, my auditory hallucinations continued and intensified into coherent but absurdly vapid conversations, usually between people I did not know. A passenger would haggle with a cab driver, or a salesman would urge a customer to buy some cloth; once I found myself in the middle of a noisy university lecture hall, and I could hear the voice of an administration official telling everyone to quiet down, because the professor would be there any minute. The visual
hallucinations, at least, were interesting, and they did not bother me as much or as often.
After my vision of Anna Nikolaevna I naturally told Menni everything. He immediately put me to bed, summoned the nearest physician, and telephoned Netti, who was six thousand kilometers away. The doctor said that he did not dare begin any treatment, because he knew little about the organism of an Earthling, but that the best thing for me was peace and quiet, and that if I had that there was no danger in waiting a few days until Netti arrived. Netti came a couple of days later, having entrusted his assignment to someone else. When he saw the state I was in he gave Menni a look of sad reproach.
7. Netti
Even with the expert treatment of a doctor like Netti, the illness continued for several weeks. I lay in bed, quietly contemplating reality and my specters with equal apathy. Even Netti’s constant presence afforded me only a faint, scarcely noticeable pleasure. It seems strange now to recall my reactions to the hallucinations. Although their unreality became obvious to me on dozens of occasions, each time they appeared I seemed to forget the fact. Even when my mind was clear and steady I took them for real persons and things. It was not until they were about to disappear or had already vanished that I realized they were only illusions.
Netti’s main strategy was to get me to sleep and rest. He did not prescribe any medication for the purpose, however, as he feared it might prove poisonous to my alien organism. For several days his usual method of putting me to sleep was unsuccessful, for hallucinatory images intruded themselves into the process of suggestion and rendered it ineffective. Finally he succeeded, and when I awoke after two or three hours of sleep he said:
“Your recovery is certain now, although the illness will continue to run its course for some time yet.”
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