The Space Trilogy (37 page)

For once it was a live program, beamed to Mars from somewhere on the night side of Earth, punched across space by heaven-knows-how-many megawatts, then picked up and rebroadcast by the station on the low hills to the south of the city. Reception was good, apart from a trace of solar noise—static from that infinitely greater transmitter against whose background Earth was broadcasting. Gibson wondered if it was really worth all this trouble to send the voice of a somewhat mediocre soprano and a light orchestra from world to world. But half Mars was probably listening with varying degrees of sentimentality and homesickness—both of which would be indignantly denied.

Gibson finished the list of several score questions he had to ask someone. He still felt rather like a new boy at his first school; everything was so strange, nothing could be taken for granted. It was hard to believe that twenty meters on the other side of that transparent bubble lay a sudden death by suffocation. Somehow this feeling had never worried him on the
Ares;
after all, space was like that. But it seemed all wrong here, where one could look out across that brilliant green plain, now a battlefield on which the hardy Martian plants fought their annual struggle for existence—a struggle which would end in death for victors and vanquished alike with the coming of winter.

Suddenly Gibson felt an almost overwhelming desire to leave the narrow streets and go out beneath the open sky. For almost the first time, he found himself really missing Earth, the planet he had thought had so little more to offer him. Like Falstaff, he felt like babbling of green fields—with the added irony that green fields were all around him, tantalizingly visible yet barred from him by the laws of nature.

“George,” said Gibson abruptly, “I’ve been here awhile and I haven’t been outside yet. I’m not supposed to without someone to look after me. You won’t have any customers for an hour or so. Be a sport and take me out through the airlock—just for ten minutes.”

No doubt, thought Gibson a little sheepishly, George considered this a pretty crazy request. He was quite wrong; it had happened so often before that George took it very much for granted. After all, his job was attending to the whims of his customers, and most of the new boys seemed to feel this way after their first few days under the dome. George shrugged his shoulders philosophically, wondering if he should apply for additional credits as Port psychotherapist, and disappeared into his inner sanctum. He came back a moment later, carrying a couple of breathing masks and their auxiliary equipment.

“We won’t want the whole works on a nice day like this,” he said, while Gibson clumsily adjusted his gear. “Make sure that sponge rubber fits snugly around your neck. All right—let’s go. But only ten minutes, mind!”

Gibson followed eagerly, like a sheepdog behind its master, until they came to the dome exit. There were two locks here, a large one, wide open, leading into Dome Two, and a smaller one which led out on to the open landscape. It was simply a metal tube, about three meters in diameter, leading through the glass-brick wall which anchored the flexible plastic envelope of the dome to the ground.

There were four separate doors, none of which could be opened unless the remaining three were closed. Gibson fully approved of these precautions, but it seemed a long time before the last of the doors swung inwards from its seals and that vivid green plain lay open before him. His exposed skin was tingling under the reduced pressure, but the thin air was reasonably warm and he soon felt quite comfortable. Completely ignoring George, he ploughed his way briskly through the low, closely packed vegetation, wondering as he did why it clustered so thickly round the dome. Perhaps it was attracted by the warmth of the slow seepage of oxygen from the city.

He stopped after a few hundred meters, feeling at last clear of that oppressive canopy and once more under the open sky of heaven. The fact that his head, at least, was still totally enclosed somehow didn’t seem to matter. He bent down and examined the plants among which he was standing knee-deep.

He had, of course, seen photographs of Martian plants many times before. They were not really very exciting, and he was not enough of a botanist to appreciate their peculiarities. Indeed if he had met such plants in some out-of-the-way part of Earth he would hardly have looked at them twice. None were higher than his waist, and those around him now seemed to be made of sheets of brilliant green parchment, very thin but very tough, designed to catch as much sunlight as possible without losing precious water. These ragged sheets were spread like little sails in the sun, whose progress across the sky they would follow until they dipped westwards at dusk. Gibson wished there were some flowers to add a touch of contrasting colour to the vivid emerald, but there were no flowers on Mars. Perhaps there had been, once, when the air was thick enough to support insects, but now most of the Martian plant-life was self-fertilized.

George caught up with him and stood regarding the natives with a morose indifference. Gibson wondered if he was annoyed at being so summarily dragged out of doors, but his qualms of conscience were unjustified. George was simply brooding over his next production, wondering whether to risk a Noel Coward play after the disaster that had resulted the last time his company had tried its hand with period pieces. Suddenly he snapped out of his reverie and said to Gibson, his voice thin but clearly audible over this short distance: “This is rather amusing. Just stand still for a minute and watch that plant in your shadow.”

Gibson obeyed this peculiar instruction. For a moment nothing happened. Then he saw that, very slowly, the parchment sheets were folding in on one another. The whole process was over in about three minutes; at the end of that time the plant had become a little ball of green paper, tightly crumpled together and only a fraction of its previous size.

George chuckled.

“It thinks night’s fallen,” he said, “and doesn’t want to be caught napping when the sun’s gone. If you move away, it will think things over for half an hour before it risks opening shop again. You could probably give it a nervous breakdown if you kept this up all day.”

“Are these plants any use?” said Gibson. “I mean, can they be eaten, or do they contain any valuable chemicals?”

“They certainly can’t be eaten—they’re not poisonous but they’d make you feel mighty unhappy. You see they’re not really like plants on Earth at all. That green is just a coincidence. It isn’t—what do you call the stuff—”

“Chlorophyll?”

“Yes. They don’t depend on the air as our plants do; everything they need they get from the ground. In fact they can grow in a complete vacuum, like the plants on the Moon, if they’ve got suitable soil and enough sunlight.”

Quite a triumph of evolution, thought Gibson. But to what purpose? he wondered. Why had life clung so tenaciously to this little world, despite the worst that nature could do? Perhaps the Chief Executive had obtained some of his own optimism from these tough and resolute plants.

“Hey!” said George. “It’s time to go back.”

Gibson followed meekly enough. He no longer felt weighed down by that claustrophobic oppression which was, he knew, partly due to the inevitable reaction at finding Mars something of an anticlimax. Those who had come here for a definite job, and hadn’t been given time to brood, would probably by-pass this stage altogether. But he had been turned loose to collect his impressions, and so far his chief one was a feeling of helplessness as he compared what man had so far achieved on Mars with the problems still to be faced. Why, even now three-quarters of the planet was still unexplored! That was some measure of what remained to be done.

The first days at Port Lowell had been busy and exciting enough. It had been a Sunday when he had arrived and Mayor Whittaker had been sufficiently free from the cares of office to show him round the city personally, once he had been installed in one of the four suites of the Grand Martian Hotel. (The other three had not yet been finished.) They had started at Dome One, the first to be built, and the Mayor had proudly traced the growth of his city from a group of pressurized huts only ten years ago. It was amusing—and rather touching—to see how the colonists had used wherever possible the names of familiar streets and squares from their own far-away cities. There was also a scientific system of numbering the streets in Port Lowell, but nobody ever used it.

Most of the living houses were uniform metal structures, two stories high, with rounded corners and rather small windows. They held two families and were none too large, since the birth-rate of Port Lowell was the highest in the known universe. This, of course, was hardly surprising since almost the entire population lay between the ages of twenty and thirty, with a few of the senior administrative staff creeping up into the forties. Every house had a curious porch which puzzled Gibson until he realized that it was designed to act as an airlock in an emergency.

Whittaker had taken him first to the administrative centre, the tallest building in the city. If one stood on its roof, one could almost reach up and touch the dome floating above. There was nothing very exciting about Admin. It might have been any office building on Earth, with its rows of desks and typewriters and filing cabinets.

Main Air was much more interesting. This, truly, was the heart of Port Lowell; if it ever ceased to function, the city and all those it held would soon be dead. Gibson had been somewhat vague about the manner in which the settlement obtained its oxygen. At one time he had been under the impression that it was extracted from the surrounding air, having forgotten that even such scanty atmosphere as Mars possessed contained less than one per cent of the gas.

Mayor Whittaker had pointed to the great heap of red sand that had been bulldozed in from outside the dome. Everyone called it “sand,” but it had little resemblance to the familiar sand of Earth. A complex mixture of metallic oxides, it was nothing less than the debris of a world that had rusted to death.

“All the oxygen we need’s in these ores,” said Whittaker, kicking at the caked powder. “And just about every metal you can think of. We’ve had one or two strokes of luck on Mars: this is the biggest.”

He bent down and picked up a lump more solid than the rest.

“I’m not much of a geologist,” he said, “but look at this. Pretty, isn’t it? Mostly iron oxide, they tell me. Iron isn’t much use, of course, but the other metals are. About the only one we can’t get easily direct from the sand is magnesium. The best source of that’s the old sea bed; there are some salt flats a hundred meters thick out in Xanthe and we just go and collect when we need it.”

They walked into the low, brightly lit building, towards which a continual flow of sand was moving on a conveyor belt. There was not really a great deal to see, and though the engineer in charge was only too anxious to explain just what was happening, Gibson was content merely to learn that the ores were cracked in electric furnaces, the oxygen drawn off, purified and compressed, and the various metallic messes sent on for more complicated operations. A good deal of water was also produced here—almost enough for the settlement’s needs, though other sources were available as well.

“Of course,” said Mayor Whittaker, “in addition to storing the oxygen we’ve got to keep the air pressure at the correct value and to get rid of the CO
₂
. You realize, don’t you, that the dome’s kept up purely by the internal pressure and hasn’t any other support at all?”

“Yes,” said Gibson. “I suppose if that fell off the whole thing would collapse like a deflated balloon.”

“Exactly. We keep 150 millimetres pressure in summer, a little more in winter. That gives almost the same oxygen pressure as in Earth’s atmosphere. And we remove the CO
₂
simply by letting plants do the trick. We imported enough for this job, since the Martian plants don’t go in for photosynthesis.”

“Hence the hypertrophied sunflowers in Oxford Circus, I suppose.”

“Well, those are intended to be more ornamental than functional. I’m afraid they’re getting a bit of a nuisance; I’ll have to stop them from spraying seeds all over the city, or whatever it is that sunflowers do. Now let’s walk over and look at the farm.”

The name was a singularly misleading one for the big food-production plant filling Dome Three. The air was quite humid here, and the sunlight was augmented by batteries of fluorescent tubes so that growth could continue day and night. Gibson knew very little about hydroponic farming and so was not really impressed by the figures which Mayor Whittaker proudly poured into his ear. He could, however, appreciate that one of the greatest problems was meat production, and admired the ingenuity which had partly overcome this by extensive tissue-culture in great vats of nutrient fluid.

“It’s better than nothing,” said the Mayor a little wistfully. “But what I wouldn’t give for a genuine lamb-chop! The trouble with natural meat production is that it takes up so much space and we simply can’t afford it. However, when the new dome’s up we’re going to start a little farm with a few sheep and cows. The kids will love it—they’ve never seen any animals, of course.”

This was not quite true, as Gibson was soon to discover: Mayor Whittaker had momentarily overlooked two of Port Lowell’s best-known residents.

By the end of the tour Gibson began to suffer from slight mental indigestion. The mechanics of life in the city were so complicated, and Mayor Whittaker tried to show him
everything.
He was quite thankful when the trip was over and they returned to the Mayor’s home for dinner.