Stowaway to Mars (13 page)

Jealousy,' Froud murmured, addressing no one in particular; 'green eyed monster, et cetera.'

'I thought you'd been silent for a long time. What exactly do you mean by "jealousy" in that cryptic tone?' the doctor asked.

'The highest duty of woman is motherhood,' Froud said. 'It is the crown of her existence. No woman can say she is fulfilled until she has created life with her own life, until she has felt within her the stir of a new life beginning, until she has performed that holy function which Mother Nature has made her glorious task, her mystic joy, her supreme achievement down the echoing ages '

'What on earth is all this about?' asked the doctor patiently.

Froud raised his eyebrows.

'Don't you like it? My readers love it. It seems to console them a bit for all the actual messiness of reproduction, somehow makes them forget that cats, rats and periwinkles do the same thing so much more efficiently and easily.'

'Well, just forget your readers for a bit, if you've got anything to say. Try ordinary prose.'

'My art is spurned. All right, at your request, I strip off the rococo. Listen. No one can deny that woman's greatest urge (like you, Doc, I generalize) is creative. If he did try to deny it he would come up against the fact of the race's survival, the life force, George Bernard Shaw and other phenomena. So let us admit that she embodies this intense creative urge.

'So far, so good. But Nature, that well known postulate, has taken great care that for all its power, its direction shall be severely limited. In other words she has said to herself="Let woman be creative, but let her create the right things she mustn't go footling about creating omnibuses, tin openers or insurance companies let her creative instinct be concentrated on producing children and on the matters connected therewith."

'I, personally, think it was a mean trick. It has resulted in vast quantities of women in a vastly interesting world being shut into vastly uninteresting compartments. Because, you see, Nature's little scheme necessitated a curtailment of the imagination to keep them on the job. Hence the average woman; history means nothing to her; the future means less (although her children will have to live in that future); world catastrophes are far less interesting than local mishaps. Nature has given her an ingrowing imagination, working chiefly in a bedroom setting. So monotonous.'

'Very quaint,' agreed the doctor, 'but what's all this got to do with?'

'Ah! I'm just coming to that. The point is this: they simply have not got the imagination to see the machines as we see them, but they have the power to be jealous of them. Women are creators: The Machine is a creator: in that they are rivals. They are afraid of it, too. What is it they fear subconsciously? Is it that man may one day use The Machine to create life? to usurp their prerogative? They do not know why they fear it, but they resent it. They resent having to share their men with it they're sulkily jealous. They try to minimize it as though they were dismissing a rival's charms. There is nothing good they can say for it. It's noisy, it's dirty, it's ugly, it's oily, it stinks: and, anyway, it is only a jumble of metal bits what can be really interesting in that? It is not human and sentient. There you have the crux: the new inhuman creator confronts the human creator.'

'I suppose all that means something,' Dugan said reflectively as Froud stopped.

'Certainly,' agreed the doctor; 'it means that men are more interested in machines than women are.'

'But hadn't you already said?'

'I had.'

Froud waved a casual hand. 'Oh, go ahead, don't mind me. I merely tried to shed a little light on the troubled waters.'

'Oil,' said the doctor. He turned to Joan.

'Speaking as a woman, what did you think of that mouthful?' he asked.

She smiled. 'Not much.'

'That was only to be expected,' Froud said. 'Now if it were possible for her to speak as a neuter '

'All the same,' Joan went on, 'most of the women I know who dislike machines dislike them actively. I mean that they dislike them differently from the way in which they dislike, say, an inconvenient house. But then, I should say that such women have resented men's toys all through the centuries, just as men have resented the same type of woman's absorption in domesticity.

'But we seem to have got off the subject. Dale was telling us what he felt about machines, he only instanced Mrs. Curtance to show us what he didn't think, but we haven't let him finish.'

'I don't know that I can, very well. It is, as you say, a feeling. When I think about it, it's difficult to find the words. But I can tell you something of what I don't feel. I don't feel that a good machine is an utterly impersonal thing a jumble of metal bits, as Froud was saying just now any more than I feel that a musical composition is a jumble of notes. And it can't be impersonal. Something of the ingenuity, skill and pride of work that went into the making of it remains in it just as something of the sculptor remains in carved stone.

'And there is a delight in machines, a kind of sensuous delight that derives from smooth running, swiftly spinning bars and wheels, sliding rods, precise swings and the perfect interaction of parts. And, behind it all, a sense of power. Power which, coupled to men's brains, knows no bounds.' Power to do what?' Joan asked.

'To do anything to do everything perhaps not to do anything. I don't know. Sometimes it seems as if power is the goal in, itself: as if a force drove one to master force.'

His words were followed by a silence during which Dugan looked as if he supposed all that also meant something. Joan, noticing his frown, wondered if he disagreed. He shook his head.

'I don't know. You people all make it sound so frightfully complicated. I mean, I like machines all right, they're grand fun to play about with, but I'm hanged if I can see half of what you're talking about. They've just been made for us to use: and a mighty dull world it would be without them. I'd hate to have been born a couple of centuries ago or even one century ago. Think of not being able to fly! It'd have been well, I mean to say, what did they do then? Honestly, I don't see what you're getting at. We've got machines; we couldn't get on without them. Naturally, we use them. I don't see what more there is to be said.'

An unexpected voice chimed in for his support. Burns for once was paying some attention to the rest.

'Aye, you're right, lad. Use your machines and use them decently. Don't overdrive them and break their hearts. Look after them an' they'll not let you down which is more than you can say for some human beings.'

THIS is not the place to lecture upon the details of the inter planetary journey. If you want the figures of the quantity of explosives used, of the changes consequent upon extra load, rates of acceleration and deceleration, necessary corrections of course, divergencies between theory and performance, etc., you will find them, together with a host of other details, carefully considered in Dale's book, The Bridging of Space, and some of them, more popularly arranged, in Froud's Flight of the 'Gloria Mundi'. Here, one is interested chiefly in the aspect which neither of these gentlemen saw fit, for one reason or another, to include in his book. And though I believe that Froud toyed for a time with the idea of a less impersonal story of the flight, it is unlikely now that it will ever be written. Almost twelve years have passed since the Mount Wilson observatory lost sight of the Gloria 11. Whether Dale, Froud and the rest of their party ever reached Venus in her we cannot tell but she has never returned.

Therefore, if I do not tell you this story as I had it, partly from Joan and partly from the rest, it is likely that it may never be told. But in case you should say to yourself 'these people seem to have talked a great deal, but one feels that they might have done that anywhere. They seem singularly unmoved by the fact that they are taking part in one of history's greatest adventures': in case you say that, let me point out that though travelling through space may be an exciting adventure in prospect and in retrospect, yet in actual accomplishment, I am assured, it is extremely tedious.

It was Dr. Grayson, I think, who said:

'Fancy buying undying fame merely at the cost of six months' close confinement.'

While Froud quoted the classic words of an earlier intrepid flier:

"It was a lousy trip and that's praising it."'

But looking back on the journey they get it in perspective and agree that it was not a monotonous whole. The longer view reveals that it fell into distinct phases, each with its own particular complexion. One of the most marked of these was the period which followed Joan's announcement of her belief in a sentient machine.

Whether she timed it by skill or luck, there is no doubt that the moment was well chosen. Four weeks before, with the memories of everyday life clinging more closely, it would have met with immediate ridicule. But now, from a mixture of motives, it was not airily dismissed. For one thing, they knew the girl better and their attitudes towards her had changed, and, for another, one could not afford, with the threat of a deadly boredom overhanging, to dismiss any subject which showed possibilities of interesting discussion. Her fantastically improbable suggestion had, therefore, a more kindly reception than it deserved, though it is doubtful if any one of the rest took it as more than a basis for entertaining speculation. But, certainly, at this time their interest in the conditions they expected to find upon Mars became sharper.

Dale's anticipations were modest, but he admitted that he would be disappointed to find only a waterless world, incapable of supporting life, though he had started with just that expectation.

'You may have thought so,' the doctor said, 'but in reality that was just a check you put upon yourself to avoid the possibility of a painful disillusionment. You wouldn't have insisted on bringing me along as a biologist if you had no hope of finding any form of life. As I told you, I consider life as a stage in the decay of a planet, and I fully expect to find it. Probably it will have gone through the whole cycle and exist only in lowly forms as it did in the beginning, but it will surprise me very much if we find no living structures at all.'

'Pretty poor look out for me,' Froud thought. 'Depressing. Here's the world public, egged on by Burroughs and the rest into thinking that the place is crammed with weird animals, queer men and beautiful princesses, expecting me to go one better; and, according to you, I shall have to make thrilling, passionate romances out of the lives of a few amoebae and such like. It's going to be hard work.'

Dugan looked at the doctor disappointedly.

'Do you really think it will be as dull as all that?

Surely life won't have sunk right to the limit. Won't there be animals of any kind?'

'Or crabs?' Froud added. 'Do you remember the monstrous crabs which Wells' time traveller found in the dying world? Nasty chaps I used to dream about them when I was a kid. If there are many of them, I doubt whether my devoted public will get a story at all.'

The doctor shrugged.

'It's all guesswork. There may be only protozoa; there may be crustaceans '

'And there are machines,' Joan said.

'Superb example of the one track mind,' Froud remarked largely. 'I must say, I'm beginning to hope you're right; it'd give me plenty of material. But the point arises who builds the machines? And what for? After all, as one of us said before, a machine is meant to do something.'

'If we could understand what machinery or The Machine implies,' Joan said, 'we might know more what to expect. Dale sees it as a work of art. His wife, from what he tells us, holds the very common opinion that it is opposed to art: that it stamps out individuality and personality. Dugan see it as a kind of huge plaything. Doctor Grayson' she paused 'well, though you didn't actually say so, Doc, it seems to me that you are just content to use it because it is there. Like my father, you tend to disregard it and its effect except when you need to use it for practical ends?'

'Yes, I think that is fair. Man was not made for the machine: the machine was made for man to use or not, as he chooses.'

'And Froud's view of it is very little different, save that he is even more directly dependent on it for his living. But the fact remains that not one of you has really looked at the implications of the thing.'

'Don't get you. How does a machine "imply" anything?' Froud said.

'A machine doesn't. The existence of The Machine implies a great deal.

'Look here. Less than two centuries ago man began to use power driven machinery for the first time. There had, of course, been watermills, windmills and things driven by a horse going round in a circle, but they were not true ancestors of our machines, they were isolated discoveries, remaining essentially unchanged for centuries. When the power driven machine arrived, it was something entirely new dropped into a world which was getting along quite well without it. Nobody saw its implications then beyond immediate profit, and they don't see them now: But we can look back over a hundred and fifty years and see what it has done.

'It was hailed as the creator of a new age, a kind of liberator of mankind, on one hand; and decried and frequently broken up by those who feared it as a competitor, on the other. Both of them were right, for it ultimately brought us leisure and a new world to enjoy in that leisure. The implication which everybody seems to have missed at the time was that those who would get a new world to enjoy and those who would get the leisure were not necessarily the same people.

'It seems to me as if at that stage of development a new Pandora's box was opened, and the whole human race was so excited at opening it that it took no precautions to net the troubles. The machine was just dropped into a world which was expected to go on working in the same old way as before. Obviously, it couldn't any more than one's body could if the cook suddenly took to including large quantities of laxatives in every dish.

'Though it came as a slave, fifty years later it was the master. We had to support it in order that it might support is the world population could not exist without it, and yet we had not learned to control it. It has given us innumerable blessings, and it has got us into countless messes and still we cannot control it. We cannot predict more than its simplest and most obvious effects: and then we are often wrong.