Rex Gordon by First on Mars

Author:First on Mars
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-09-05T23:27:43+00:00

20

I WAS WORKING on my tanks and vats. The thing to do was to collect and store the fruit within my fortress and behind my wire as soon as it was ripe. Just how I would process it I did not know. I had tried my laboratory' process on specimens of the unripe fruit and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Sometimes I got a sweet-tasting result with the flavour of pineapple and the consistency of dough, and sometimes I got a pullulating mass. But what I thought of, all the time, was of how a creature could have conscious purpose but not the consciousness that went with it. Even ants and bees, if you injured them, became conscious of you and ran away or turned round to attack. Or was I being too provincial and parochial in my thinking? I ran my electric welding iron slowly down a seam. Because Earth was a crowded planet, with a good supply of oxygen and an infinite variety of species of every order, was it simply that I, born in that environment, could not conceive of a creature that was not competitive and never went to war?

But the thing had looked almost like a man, round-headed, two-legged, two-armed, two-eyed. Did not that imply a similar line of development to that which had produced humanity on Earth? Or, if not humanity, then at least, say, squirrels or kangaroos or apes, or any other of the creatures which on Earth had learned to walk on two legs and to use two others for the purpose of transferring food from earth to mouth? Did the very existence of the thing imply that at one time one part of Mars at least had been covered by trees and forests, while the actions of the thing implied that at least there had been intelligence, once?

I looked at the plain around me, desolate and empty as it was, though at that time it was in fact producing the utmost phase of food and life the planet ever knew. I think it was that, the sight of the plain of which by now I knew every fold and stone in my vicinity, which convinced me. Mars had been like that for such countless ages that whatever preceded it was irrelevant. It was not the creature that was strange but I who was jumping to conclusions.

I looked away to the south, where, beyond a region of utter desert, the southern polar cap must be collecting the moisture from the air, laying it down in layer on layer of frost, ready to release it again in six months' time, after the elapse of a quarter of the Martian year. I had decided already that whatever mobile life there was on Mars, at this stage of the planet's development, regardless of what had gone before, must be capable of crossing that desert, of starting again in the south when the new spring came. The creatures, I had thought, must be

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