A Swordsman of Mars

Chapter I On Another World

My name is Jad Tedron, dator or prince of Zorad on the planet you call Mars, but which we who roam its dying surface know by the name of Barsoom.

But I was not born Jad Tedron and neither is Zorad truly the city of my birth. My story is a strange one and may indeed be unique in the annals of human experience, for aught I know. I have encountered many mysteries in my life upon the Red Planet which no one can readily explain, and I least of all. But I shall narrate here the tale of my adventure as best I can, confident in the knowledge that no one can do any better than his best . . .

To begin, then: I was born in a town called Logansville in the Texas panhandle. My father, Matthew Dexter, was a physician who moved to this town after graduating from a small medical school in St. Louis. Here he met and came to love the woman who, in time, became my mother. She was a lovely, gracious woman, the daughter of the town banker, but as she died in introducing me into this world, I am afraid that all my memories of her are merely second-hand.

My father’s practice ranged over a hundred square miles of arid, sun-baked prairie, and very often I did not see him from dawn to dusk, and in lieu of any other playmate I was forced to amuse myself not only by inventing my own games but also a host of imaginary playmates to enjoy them with.

These were lonely years, as you can imagine, but they were happy years as well. We were not poor, since my mother had inherited a comfortable income from my banker grandfather. Just before my high school graduation, however, there came upon us that phenomenon known as the Great Depression, and the doors of the Logansville bank closed forever upon the stocks and bonds my grandfather had so assiduously gathered for all those years. At one stroke my father was made penniless, and gone were all his dreams of sending me to college and then, perhaps, on to medical school, so that I might carry on in his footsteps in the practice of that profession which has always seemed to me the noblest and most useful of any known to man, the healing of sickness, the comforting of the ill or injured.

I found a job as a roustabout with a small, rundown traveling circus which carried me, in the years that followed, the length and breadth of Texas and Oklahoma and even Kansas. This unlikely profession was not one of my choosing, but I soon came to love the cheap, garish, carefree life of the circus, and with my strapping inches and rugged physique, it was a profession for which nature, if not inclination, had ably prepared me.

My father never quite recovered from the loss of his fortunes, and although I weekly sent home what few dollars I could spare from my meagre earnings, he began to fail, it was not so much a matter of bodily health, for he had always been robust and hearty, with the stamina of two men, as it was the results of the black mood of melancholy and the feeling that life itself had defeated him. He died soon after my twenty-first birthday. I made my last trip home to the small town which had nurtured me in my boyhood, to bury him . . .

He sleeps forever under the green sod of the small country church beside my mother. God bless them both, and may their eternal sleep ever be bright with joyous dreams.

The demise of my father having severed the last remaining link with the town of my birth, I resolved to travel and to see as much of the world as a man of slender means may do. I soon joined Caulfield's Flying Circus, a traveling air show which barnstormed the prairies of the great southwest, first as a mechanic and later as a stunt pilot. For I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for tinkering with machinery and an utter fearlessness of flying, both of which talents go into the making of a born aviator.

But it is not my intention to relate here the fairly exciting but basically routine life of Thad Dexter, daredevil stunt flyer, barnstorming pilot and vagabond aviator. For that life was cut cruelly short before I was thirty, during a stunt flight at a country fair in the fields outside of Baxter, Wyoming, when my parachute failed to open until it was too late to do more than barely break my fall.

That I survived that disaster, even for half an hour, is probably due to the iron strength and tireless endurance I inherited from my hardy pioneer forebears. But I did not survive for long; too many bones were broken and my flesh too terribly mangled for nature or medicine to knit.

My last sight was the worn, tired, kindly face of a country doctor whose name I shall never know, as he bent over me, murmuring quiet words of comfort. That, and a strangely prophetic glimpse through a window in the crude little one-room surgery to which the townsfolk had borne me.

For just as the odor of chloroform filled my lungs and blotted out the consciousness of Thad Dexter forever—as one would have thought— I saw beckoning like a bright beacon through the nighted skies that arched above the dusty plains of Wyoming that distant, ruddy spark that was the Red Planet, Mars, the planet of mystery.

For some reason, that red star caught and held my fading consciousness and I clung to the sight of it, blazing like the eternal enigma it is through the dark skies, until at last my consciousness ebbed and died like a candle blown in the wind.

I died there on the operating table; I know this beyond all doubt or question. But I was reborn to live again in another life on a distant world ... and that is the first of the mysteries in my story which I shall not even attempt to explain, for they have no explanation.

I had been raised in the simple faith of my mother, but my father instilled in me from my earliest years a healthy scepticism of all who pretend to be able to interpret the unknown secrets of life and death and of the world beyond. It was my father's opinion, which I came later to share, that no man can honestly claim to know for certain anything of heaven or the afterlife or the inscrutable will of God, and that all doctrines and dogmas are shallow and ultimately futile attempts to persuade the gullible otherwise.

And if I took my simple childhood faith with a grain or two of salt, you may imagine what little credence I placed in the foreign religions of alien lands. Such outlandish creeds as reincarnation and metempsychosis or the Pythagorean concept of the transmigration of souls I deemed little more than fanciful whimsies born of the fertile imagination of the East.

There was, therefore, no theory by which I could rationalize or explain, even to my own inner satisfaction, the incredible fact of my rebirth upon another planet which followed upon the termination of my earthly existence on that operating table, of which my last living memories are so clear and unequivocal. Do the dead of our world go into their graves upon this earth, to rise reborn upon the dead seabottoms of ancient and mysterious Mars? If so, in all the span of my second life upon the Red Planet, I have never met another man or woman who could recall their previous life on Earth (or Jasoom, as they call it) as can I.

Do I truly live upon this strange world amidst its myriad marvels, which floats in the vast abyss of heaven forty-three million miles from my native world, or is this second life naught more than an indefinitely prolonged and amazingly vivid dream born in the dying brain of an injured aviator, clinging desperately to the feeble and faint and flickering spark of life? Or was my former life on Earth the dream, and this strange life on Barsoom the true and only reality?

I can give you the answers to none of these questions, alas. Nor can any priest or mystic or philosopher, I somehow feel certain.

But following the rude termination of my earthly life, I was born again on distant Mars in the city of Zorad which lies in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet, on a forested plateau which was once, untold millions of years before, an island in the midst of the Xanthus, the smallest of the five oceans of ancient Mars. These oceans, the greatest of which was the mighty Throxeus in the southern hemisphere of the planet, have long since dwindled away over the inexorable passage of the ages, and at the time of my advent upon this world all of them had vanished, leaving behind only the dead seabottoms carpeted with rust-red sands broken only by those long zones of ochre moss which the Martians cultivate for food and to produce oxygen which serves to continuously replenish their thin atmosphere.

Once long ago over these ruddy plains the pounding billows of mighty oceans drove, but one by one the seas gradually receded, their waters evaporating into the weirdly purple skies of Mars, as the old planet aged and began to die, save perhaps for the legendary Lost Sea of Korus which the Martians suppose to exist in the regions of their South Pole, and which may or may not exist in actuality.

The more civilized of the inhabitants of Mars are human in every aspect, save perhaps in their remarkable longevity and in the mysterious power of telepathy which they possess and which enables them to read the thoughts of others or to project their own mental communications over remarkable distances, or to communicate to some degree even with the minds of the curious beasts with which they share their weird world. As for this matter of longevity, a life-span of more than a thousand years is considered the normal life-expectancy of the average inhabitant of the Red Planet. Their skins are red, their eyes generally lustrous black, and their hair of the same shade. In these respects they resemble the American Indians of my native world, but their features are regular and they are, virtually all of them, a remarkably handsome race.

The city of Zorad in which I began my second life is ancient beyond the dreams of Babylon or Tyre. Here once flourished a magnificent civilization ages before those splendid and imperial cities of earthly antiquity were so much as a cluster of crude mud huts built beside the Tigris or Euphrates by primitive men barely emerged as yet from the red murk of savagery. Indeed, from the evidence of the crumbling and long-deserted quays in the oldest, by now abandoned, quarter of my natal city, where once the stately galleons rode at anchor on the restless waves of the lost seas, when Mars was young and fertile, it may be assumed that Zorad was but newly built at least a million years ago.

Into this city I was born and the name of Jad Tedron was bestowed upon me by my proud parents. My station in life in this second existence is considerably more fortunate than in my first, for I was the only son of Jugundus Jad, the jeddak or king of Zorad, and his presumed and eventual heir.

As the Prince of Zorad and heir to the throne I was raised in surroundings of the most luxurious splendor, my every need or whim satisfied by a host of attendants. My tutors were the most learned and accomplished savants of which Zorad could boast, and they instilled into my young mind all that they retained of the arts and sciences of our ancient civilization, until I became almost as conversant as they in the practice of each skill or subject.

But Barsoom, as I have said, is an ancient and dying world whose resources are dwindling away, year by year, century by century, age by age. Few are the remnants which survive of that splendid and glorious civilization which once, in the planet’s youth, spanned the globe, and those few nations which linger on must struggle ceaselessly against one another for the necessities by which to sustain their survival. Thus it is that Mars, which by an odd coincidence was named on my native world for the God of War, is a world of unceasing warfare, where every nation is at eternal and unending enmity with every other, and each of the cities of the dominant red race into which I was born are constantly at war against the ferocious and indomitable hordes of savage and pitiless green men who roam the dead seabottoms in vast numbers and pose a constant threat to the lingering remnants of the more advanced and civilized red race.

Thus I was tutored in the arts of war as well as in the arts of peace, for someday when my sire, Jugundus Jad, could no longer sustain his place and departed upon that last, melancholy pilgrimage down the River Iss to that mysterious paradise the priests of Mars believe to lie in the Valley Doron the fabled shores of the Lost Sea of Korus, I must be prepared to take his place at the head of the fighting-men of Zorad, and be ready to defend our homeland against its enemies. In preparation for that day when I would become Jad Tedron, jeddak of Zorad, I was trained virtually from the cradle in the use of longsword and rapier, in the skills of marksmanship with the terrible radium rifles and pistols which have come down to us from earlier aeons and the secret of whose manufacture has long since been lost, at least in those cities which stand yet in the dead seabottoms of the lost sea of Xanthus, and in the use of yet other weapons with whose descriptions I shall not bore him who reads this account.

I became proficient, as well, in the piloting and navigation of the remarkable aircraft employed by the dominant red peoples of Barsoom. These extraordinary vessels (which are known by a word in the universal language spoken across the length and breadth of the Red Planet which translates into English as "fliers") are the most surprising and impressive of the few surviving relics of the lost scientific achievements of the ages which preceded our own. In brief, these vehicles, which vary in size from tiny, two-man scouts to gigantic aerial dreadnaughts as huge as earthly battleships, are propelled through the thinning atmosphere of Mars by powerful radium engines. But the element which renders these skyboаts truly astonishing, especially to a former aviator accustomed to rickety, flimsy aircraft little stronger than paper kites, is that they are entirely fabricated from a light, durable metal unknown to earthly science. It is difficult to imagine any engine powerful enough to lift an airship of solid metal, even one upon a world with as light a gravity as Mars, but in this skill the Martians are assisted by their possession of an advanced scientific discovery yet denied to the savants and inventors of my native world.

This discovery is concerned with the several properties of light. The savants of Mars have, thus far, ascertained that any beam of light, whether emanating from the sun or any other source, is divisible into individual "rays," each of which has different properties. Nine such divisions of light are at this time known to the savants of Mars— in fact, it is due to the remarkable properties of the ninth ray itself that the Martians are able to sustain and replenish their dwindling atmosphere. By utilization of the first ray they power their machines; by use of the second, they heat their homes, while the third ray provides illumination for their cities and the edifices which compose them. The eighth ray provides them with the mysterious ability of levitation, for the airships of Mars are weightless as a cloud, although constructed, as I have already said, of solid metal. For their science is able to produce and store the radiations derived from this eighth solar ray in buoyancy tanks which have the amazing inherent power to reduce the metal fliers to a degree of weightlessness only achieved on my native world by dirigibles and balloons filled with hydrogen or helium gas. A slight variation in their use of the eighth ray of light enables them to use it to propel their fliers through the atmosphere at speeds which would have amazed the aviators of Earth in my time.

The sixth ray is perhaps most incredible of all. By its power their projectors are enabled to dissolve matter into nothingness—a veritable death-ray such as those dreamed of by our earthly fantasists.

And thus it was that my second youth was spent in acquiring a knowledge of the arts and sciences of peace, and in training with the weapons and instruments of war. In both departments of life I achieved a degree of proficiency which was considered highly admirable by my tutors, if I may acknowledge the fact without accusations of vanity by my reader.

Having narrated this cursory account of my birth and youth and schooling, it is not my intention to burden these pages with a more fully detailed description of the education of a Prince of Mars. Suffice it to say that my youth was spent in surroundings of palatial elegance and that I enjoyed every civilized luxury that the condition of royalty affords, and gained considerable competence in the use of weapons and the piloting of skycraft.

I cannot recall a time when I was not fully cognizant of my former life upon the planet Earth. The knowledge of this first life was with me from earliest infancy, and, in my ignorance, I supposed my acquaintance with my former incarnation to be the general rule. Often, as a child, I must have occasioned severe alarm and consternation to my parents and tutors by my innocent and childish prattle of the details of a strange life upon an alien world, which may indeed have given them cause to fear for my mental stability.

Gradually, I learned to keep silent on these matters, for it was borne home to me by a thousand curious questions and puzzled glances that my knowledge of the experiences of a prior life upon a remote and unknown world were unique to the experience of those around me. At length I learned to guard my tongue, and spoke no more of animals who went about on four legs, rather than six or eight as is common with the beasts of Mars, and on fields of unlikely emerald green rather than the scarlet sward of the rare Barsoomian forests or the ochre moss which clothes the dead seabottoms. Doubtless, as I ceased troubling them with unguarded reminiscences of another life, my elders were vastly relieved and anxious to assign these uncanny “memories” of mine to the results of an overactive imagination, rather than to an unsteady grip upon sanity itself.

But never did I allow myself to forget the weird and inexplicable enigma of my former life, and when as a youth I peered through the mighty telescopes employed by the Martian astronomers, and saw again the green fields and blue hills and shining seas of the distant planet whereon I had lived my first life, it was with a sensation of nostalgia which no words of mine are potent enough to describe. And there lived ever in the mind of Jad Tedron, Prince of Zorad, as there lives to this day, the mind and memory of Thad Dexter, the vagabond pilot who had dreamed of traveling widely and of seeing strange, far-off lands and peoples.

Well, those dreams have certainly come true, for unto Thad Dexter it had been given by a mysterious and inscrutable Fate to travel further, by some forty-three million miles, than any adventurer or explorer Earth has ever borne to my knowledge, and to visit stranger lands and peoples than any that Columbus or Marco Polo ever knew.

It was in the spirit of this that I surreptitiously experimented with and trained my innate telepathic abilities, and I believe that I have honed to an acute degree the power to project my thought through space far beyond the point which any other denizen of the Red Planet has ever, or ever will, attain. In the thought that it behooves me to impart some knowledge of my discoveries on the planet Mars for the edification of my fellow Earthlings, I have striven to the very limits of my telepathic talent to transmit to the distant world of my birth this very narrative of my adventures.

I cannot know, I shall never know, whether my thought-waves have journeyed intact across the gulf of so many millions of miles of space, or whether they have been received by a terrestrial intelligence sensitive to their wavelength. Nor, for that matter, having been received, if they have ever been recorded or preserved in any manner. For it is easy for me to imagine how natural it would be for an earthly mind to dismiss this narrative of incredible marvels and mysteries upon a weird and alien world as the hysteric phantasies of a disordered brain, or the feverish inventions of sheer imagination, or the incomprehensible fruit of nightmare, or the ravings of a lunatic.

Perhaps these telepathic communications which I now, with infinite concentration, project into the void are lost between the worlds, to disperse in the depths of interplanetary space. But it pleases me to dream that my thought-waves have impinged upon an intelligence capable of their reception and not hostile to their message; an intelligence, it may be, willing to recognize the transcendent significance of the information that human life dwells among the age-old cities and dead seabottoms of a remote world, and that humanity is not alone in the breath-taking immensity of infinite and unknown space.

Only you, who read these words, if indeed you read them at all, can ever know the reality of this, my dream.