Element 79

The Martians

The NASA budget in 1963 was something over 3.5 billion dollars. Twenty years later it was ten times more. Results justified the increase, not so much in spin-off to industry as in space itself. In the early days, a few prophets of disaster had openly stated their opinion, to the effect that no good of any kind would come out of the space program. By 1984 these dismal fellows had been given the lie. They were derided now as classic examples of fainthearted conservatism, the lack of broad vision which always seems to afflict the human species in some degree.

The first lunar mission achieved its objectives in 1973, only three years behind the original schedule. There were plenty of good reasons for this stretch-out. To begin with, the dust was really nasty stuff. It climbed all over you, head to toe, if you were unlucky enough to step into it. It climbed all over your equipment, into every crevice more than a few microns in size. The dust was like a liquid rising in a mass of capillary tubes, except that the forces were electrostatic, not surface tension. Unfortunately, the Moon has a lot of dust, so not too many places could be found where the first landing module might be safely set down. Indeed, the first pictures from the old Ranger project already showed only a few areas that appeared likely to be more or less free of dust. Later data from soft landings, some of them very soft, confirmed this. However, there were a few such areas, as it finally proved when the first men stepped gingerly out from their cabin. Everywhere around them was flat, hard ground, seemingly of dried-out mud.

The first landing didn’t do much more than that. Down onto the deck, a judicious peek outside, then quickly back to the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Although it had cost the best part of one hundred billion bucks, hardly anybody now doubted that it had been well worthwhile. There was the usual bitching, it was true, from the high-energy physicists, who were having difficulty in acquiring a single lone billion, but once high-energy physics moved under the control of NASA that particular moan soon died away. Getting all funds for science under a single agency began to seem more and more like a good idea. It kept things in perspective and in proportion. It was tidy. The N.S.F. was also moved over.

Since glamour was now off the gingerbread, the second lunar mission had perforce to make up in effectiveness what it lacked in sensationalism. It went to the Moon to work, to survey, to dig, and to probe. The crew on this occasion included both a scientist-astronaut and a scientist-passenger. Ironically enough, the second landing turned out far more sensationally than the first. The disaster was noticed by the men in the rendezvous vehicle. Everything was quite normal for the first two days, they said, then suddenly the landing station was gone. In its place a new crater had appeared about three hundred yards in diameter. The precise mechanism of the disaster was unclear at the time, for it must have happened while the rendezvous vehicle was orbiting on the far side of the Moon. Later research showed, however, that the second landing party had been the unfortunate victims of what came to be known as a “soda squirt.”

For a while there was discussion of cutting back the whole space program. But at length it was decided to press ahead with still greater vigor, in tribute to the space heroes, blown to perdition in some still-unexplained fashion.

Later missions very naturally proceeded with all due caution. It was discovered that ice lay below the dust and mud of the immediate surface of the Moon. There were huge glaciers shielded from space by the thin skin of dust. Wherever the skin was scraped away, the ice melted off into space very quickly. The temperature of the ice was found to increase with depth, which was natural, of course. This meant there must be liquid water low enough down. The water must be under pressure, a pressure generated by the weight of the overlying ice. Given any crack or hole in the solid glacier and, bingo, the water would stream explosively upward like an oil gusher. This was exactly what happened at places where the ice became exposed. More and more of the ice evaporated into space, until what remained became too thin to withstand the pressure of the liquid water below. So up came the water in a huge soda squirt. The water didn’t settle back, it simply fizzed off into space.

These events were watched by the later expeditions from a safe distance. The precaution was necessary, for the rush of the water was extremely violent. Usually it shot out at a speed of about one mile per second, over three thousand miles per hour, sufficient to blow a small crater. It was now easily understood how the hitherto mysterious chains of small craters had been formed; they were strung along the courses of underground rivers, they were the places where the water had managed to punch through to the surface. In the gaunt, gray world of the Moon, the emergence of billions of tons of water was a fantastic and wonderful event, not at all like a terrestrial geyser. It was the colors you were aware of, a blaze of color that filled the whole sky.

The next step was to use the Moon for developing the techniques needed in the conquest of Mars. A permanent lunar laboratory was established. The essence of the business was to achieve self-sufficiency with the aid of regenerative life-support systems. For energy in its grosser forms, an interesting multistage method was used. For a start, a compact nuclear reactor was transported from Earth. This was used to power small diameter boreholes through the ice. So long as the water was allowed up only in small quantities, through a carefully constructed pipe, the flow could be kept under control. The critical thing was pressure at the surface. Instead of the water being permitted to spurt out freely into a vacuum, the pressure was taken down in several stages, in each of which the speed of the water was adjusted to match a set of turbines. Getting everything right in the beginning was very tricky indeed. However, once the difficulties were past, abundant energy was available in practically a permanent supply. Technically it was hydroelectric power, but on the Moon the water flowed uphill, not downhill, as on the Earth.

Oxygen came in ample quantities from the dissociation of water. Ultraviolet light from the Sun produced the dissociation, yielding nearly a kilogram of oxygen per day per square meter of exposed area. Ten square meters gave sufficient oxygen for a man. Nitrogen and carbon were problems, particularly nitrogen. The water from below had a lot of carbon dioxide dissolved in it, however. Really, it was soda. Less nitrogen, but enough, also came up with the water. Photosynthesis was quick and efficient, enabling a subsistence diet to become established. Trace elements, vitamins, and so on, were still imported from Earth. Even this dependence could have been overcome in time, but the time available for research on the Moon was now running out. As a NASA spokesman succinctly put it, the nation had acquired a Martian-wise capability.

it had come as a shock many years earlier to discover how very similar the Martian surface is to the Moon. This should really have been obvious from the beginning. It should have been obvious that the general dappled appearance of Mars is the same phenomenon as the “Man in the Moon” pattern of the lunar surface. The pattern comes from an overlapping of circular patches, like the “seas” or maria of the Moon, themselves produced by the large-scale impacts of huge meteorites, craters on the biggest scale of all. The canals that many observers thought they had seen turned out to be mere chains of craters. The human eye always tends to connect together a number of dots along a line, to see them as a complete line. This became obvious from the first fly-by pictures. Mars was simply a larger-scale version of the Moon.

This was why the lunar laboratory was so important. Much the same conditions could be expected on Mars, the same glaciers, the same water problems. Apart from the sheer dynamics of reaching Mars, demanding much more powerful boosters, apart from the length of the voyage—several months instead of days—most local problems should be less difficult on Mars. There would be somewhat stronger gravity, which was an advantage. The Martian atmosphere would remove the solar X-rays against which all lunar scientist-explorers had to be endlessly shrouded. There was some oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. Compressors would therefore give an adequate oxygen supply. The Martian atmosphere would reduce electrostatic effects so that dust would not be quite such a bad problem. The Martian atmosphere seemed to be an advantage in every way.

Both the atmosphere and the white polar caps of Mars were well understood now. With water coming up occasionally from below, exactly as on the Moon, thin polar caps of hoarfrost were just what one would expect. Martian gravity is intermediate between Earth and Moon. Terrestrial gravity is strong enough for the Earth to have retained most of the water squeezed from its interior throughout the eons. At the opposite extreme, the very weak lunar gravity of the Moon permits it to retain no surface water. Mars lies between. Mars holds water, but not for long. There is always a little water on the surface, water recently come from below which has not yet had time enough to escape away into space. The oxygen comes, of course, from dissociation of the water by sunlight, and carbon dioxide and nitrogen also come up with the water. The clouds observed from time to time by early astronomers were simply occasional squirts, released by an impacting meteorite from without. Mars was more subject to bombardment than the Moon, being nearer the asteroidal belt. Protecting spacecraft from impact was a serious difficulty, one that it didn’t pay to think about too closely.

Mars was expected to be similar to the Moon in another respect, one which might well have served as a warning. A theoretical speculation dating from the 1960s was now entirely confirmed. Earth and Venus are both built from very roughly equal amounts of rock and unoxidized metals, particularly iron. The two components are largely separate, with the metals on the inside, the rocks on the outside, which raises the problem of how they got that way. Given a homogeneous, solid mixture of rock and metal in the first place, the metal would not sink to the middle. So much was realized. Perhaps when the planets were formed from a hot gas the metal was the first to condense. Then the rocks condensed later around the metal. This would solve the problem in one move. The trouble was that calculation showed rock and metal should both condense more or less together, as a mixture.

The solution came in a most surprising way. It was natural in the first calculations to assume the temperature of the cooling gases went steadily lower and lower as time went on. But this apparently reasonable hypothesis wasn’t right. The temperature first went down, then it lifted for a while, before taking a final plunge in the last cooling phase. The temperature curve had first a minimum, then a maximum, after which it declined away. Condensation of rock and metal occurred equally at the minimum. The surprise came with a calculation which showed that although the rock and metal condensed together, they would not evaporate together at the succeeding temperature maximum. The metal would evaporate, but not the rock. So in the final decline of temperature it would be the metal that would condense bodily around the rock. Earth and Venus had the metal and rock separate, all right, but the wrong way round, the metal on the outside, not the inside.

This arrangement—an inner ball of rock surrounded by a substantially more dense shell of metal, the shell with a similar mass to the ball—was quite unstable, however. The shell collapsed inward, so that shell and ball interchanged themselves. The whole Earth was turned inside out, like Baron Munchausen’s fox. The same was true for Venus, but not for the Moon or Mars. Neither the Moon nor Mars had very much metal, and what they had was still outside the rock. Their outer metallic shells had never become massive enough for the same instability to have occurred. A lot turned on the difference, on Mars having its metal on the outside.

With space technology developed to a state of planet-wise capability, and with the mass of data collected from the many telepuppets now in orbit around the planet, the stage was set for a manned mission to Mars. Although the astronauts assigned to the mission were as dedicated as ever, they were naturally much worried by the sterility problem.

The first lunar rockets had possessed no more than a certified sterility. Used for soft landings, they were dealt with by simple ethylene-oxide techniques. The priority was soon off the sterility problem, however, so far as the Moon was concerned. Cynthia turned out to be herself entirely sterile. No wonder, with the drenching of X-rays she was receiving, and with the cold on her backside and the heat on her frontside. Thereafter nobody had any worries about “ejecta” on the Moon.

Mars was another breed of cats. Twenty years earlier, Mars had already been declared a biological preserve. This had been agreed internationally. As one cognizant biologist put it, “The mere suggestion that fecal material might be jettisoned under conditions which would contaminate the surface is symptomatic of attitudes which fail to give appropriate consideration of exobiological objectives.” Such irresponsible procedures were condemned, totally and emphatically. In plain language, readily understandable to one and all, this meant you couldn’t shit on Mars.

A tremendous amount of research, it is true, had been put into the development of space suits equipped with really efficient “biological barriers,” as the pundits of NASA put it. Be this as it may, all astronauts found these things the very devil. It seemed much simpler to go chronically constipated.

Then come the problem of back-contamination, not that there seemed much chance of pathogens existing on Mars. Nobody at NASA was ever known to call a spade a spade, or to use a simple word where a complicated one would do. In plain language, again, precautions had to be taken against a “bug” being imported back from Mars. So it came about that an incredibly complex quarantine “machinery” was set up. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping the returning astronauts in isolation for some defined period. After all, any bugs that happened to be inside them had already been cooking for three months or more, throughout the return voyage. It was more that the astronauts had to be “degaussed,” that is, to have the contents of the intestinal tract entirely removed, the blood supply withdrawn and replaced, and so forth, all by glove-box techniques.

The first Martian mission was given over to glamour, just like the first lunar mission. It was a case of nipping down from orbit, nipping for a little while out onto the planet itself, nipping back into the module—a quite fat job, this time—and of nipping up again into orbit. Three months out from Earth, three months back, unconscionable thick lumps of bread enclosing an excessively thin slice of meat. Still, the first expedition already cast doubt on the “life on Mars” theory. Not a bug, not a protein, not an amino acid, or any conceivable biochemical relation thereof, was found in the samples brought back to Earth.

The cognizant biologists took a bad knock. They had pushed a lot of people around, spent a lot of money, and achieved precisely nothing. Goaded into a last spasm, they insisted that further tests be made. Although very extensive samplings were taken by the second mission, not a trace of organic material was found. Life did not exist on Mars. Thereafter the planet was given over to the scientist-explorers.

Nothing really epoch-making was expected. Yet the instinct to stand where nobody has stood before is strong in all of us. The third mission set about its task of establishing a long-term Martian station with zest and zeal. Preliminary to setting up a permanent energy supply, the same boring down through the underground glaciers was put in hand. It had all been done before, but not there on Mars. This made the mission interesting and worthwhile.

A great discovery was made during a lull in these preliminary operations. Instruments deep below the surface found sound waves propagating everywhere throughout the ice of the glaciers. Records were immediately flashed back to Earth. They were processed in the NASA laboratories. The amplitude and frequency patterns were definitely not random. Highly complex variations were repeated from time to time, making it virtually certain that the sound waves must be information-carrying. But what, and to whom, and from where? Instructions to the third mission were to keep on transmitting the sound patterns back to Earth and to “proceed” with all due caution.

Here were Martians at last. It was a good story, told with febrile intensity by press, radio, and T.V. The NASA top brass allowed themselves to be dug up for the occasion. This was the very lifeblood of their budget. It was gravely emphasized that timely and responsible decisions would be made, just as soon as the analysis now in progress had ingested the situation.

Actually, nobody was getting anywhere toward cracking the code of the sound signals, which just went on and on without cease, night and day, week after week. If only somebody could have had an idea, an idea for making one single rational contact with the stuff. Then a second contact might have been possible, followed by a third, and so on. But nothing whatsoever came of all the writhing and thrashing.

When the news media saw how the mountain labored, they dropped the whole thing like a hot potato. Time enough to wrestle with the Martian problem as soon as there was something or someone to wrestle with. So the massive-hearted, palpitating public got itself back to the latest aspects of sex-worship.

By 1984 the stories currently popular on the screen would have seemed pretty ripe material to an earlier generation. Entertainment had been enjoying an apparently never-ending boom, a boom soundly based on affluence and leisure. Yet as it grew, the entertainment industry destroyed itself by consuming, like a fantastic lotus-eating dinosaur, the very material on which it depended for its existence. By now it seemed as if every idea had been flogged to death, as indeed it had. Suspense stories were the hardest hit of all. With each succeeding year, sensation had to be piled on sensation. By 1970, the successes of 1965 seemed woefully out of date. By 1975, it was exactly the same way with the successes of 1970. The human race was steadily becoming “sophisticated,” it was burning out its natural responses, first to more or less normal situations, then to abnormal ones, then to utterly pathological ones.

Every so often someone came up with a really new gimmick. Then you always kicked yourself for not having seen it first yourself. Gimmicks no longer needed to be clever. The important thing was to be quite new. Like snow in May, they didn’t last long, but while they lasted, you did all right.

It was easy to understand why in these circumstances sex had become such an intensely marketable commodity. This was the major field of entertainment now, because it was the one field in which originality was not important. Evolution proceeded, not by increased sophistication, but by increased display, by an increased emphasis on realism, the very opposite from the suspense area. Unrelenting pressures from a wealthy industry had forced censorship into retreat after retreat, until by now all attempts at control had virtually broken down. Against sex, the Martian story barely made it as a nine-days’ wonder.

Yet there was something on Mars, something below the glaciers. It was reasonable to suppose that, whatever it was down below, there were several of them, for they seemed to be communicating one to another with the aid of the sound in the ice. They used sound in ice perhaps like we use sound in air. It made sense, so far. But continued failure to establish any kind of link with the Martians eventually set up a frustration complex, both in the scientist-explorers themselves and at NASA headquarters. Injection of man-made sound into the ice was tried at an early stage. It produced no apparent response, although it was never made clear quite what response could have been expected.

Many theories about the Martians were advanced. They were all outrageous, but of course even the correct theory had to be outrageous. Any explanation for an intricate system evolving out of an initially simple situation must always seem outrageous. Nothing could be more so than the story of biological evolution here on the Earth—to an outsider, to a Martian, say. It is usual for complex situations to collapse into simpler ones, not the other way round. Most theories were due to cranks who completely missed this point: How does one invert the usual time sense of natural events? How does one get simplicity evolving into complexity?

The importance of metals near the surface of Mars, metals below the glaciers, was first noticed by a theoretician. Not all the metal would be the same stuff. Because of the different work functions of different metals, there would be contact potentials. Next, what were the important volatiles liberated from the interior of a planet? In order of decreasing quantity: water, carbon dioxide, chlorine, nitrogen. Water and chlorine could give you hydrochloric acid. Different metals in acid gave you an electric current.

How much energy could be expected? Reckoning a depth of electrolyte, say of one hundred meters, at least an equal depth for the metallic skin, taking 109 erg for the output per gram of material, the grand energy total came out at 1031 erg, equivalent to the output of about ten trillion tons of coal and oil, not much different from the actual coal and oil reserves of the Earth. This could be a minimum estimate. The actual energy total could be one to two orders of magnitude higher still.

These ideas were first put forward at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The biologists wanted to know their relevance. Maybe there was an electrical storage battery on Mars, so what? Energy wasn’t the same thing as life, although admittedly it was necessary to life. A coal mine, or an oil well, wasn’t alive just because there was energy in it. The point seemed well taken, but the reply was also well taken—in some quarters, at least.

A coal mine wasn’t alive because for one thing the energy was in a bad form. Coal had to be burned to release the energy, and the heat was disorganized. Electricity was much better, it could be converted directly into controlled motion. Everybody knew this perfectly well. You plugged devices in the home, like a shaver, into the electric supply, not into the boiler—at least you did if you were a physicist. No cognizant biologist liked this crack. Okay, you have an “electric motor” on Mars, so what?

Well, with controlled motion the logical possibility existed for a feedback between the motion and the flow of electricity. In principle, it was possible for the system to affect itself. In view of the tremendous amount of energy that must be released on Mars, it was quite unreasonable to suppose feedback never happened. Evolution by selection was then just as possible in an electrical system as in a chemical one. It was no more unlikely for complicated surface effects to arise, complicated circuits under continuous modification, than it was for complicated molecules leading to living cells to develop. The principle of competition for the available energy supply, whether chemical or electrical, was the same. The basic logic was the same, and it was this that really counted, not the realization of the logic in practical terms. To push the argument further, it was biological evolution that was really inefficient and rather stupid. First a complex chemical system—the cell—had to be produced. Then cells were put together into what were still chemical assemblies. Only at a late stage did the interesting things happen, with the development of the brain. Wasn’t it through the brain that we think, make judgments, feel emotion? What is the brain but an electrical instrument? Terrestrial biology had evolved through a lot of cumbersome chemistry before it reached the real point, the electronics. On Mars, it had been electronics all the way.

The popular news media were back on the job now. Displaying to the full their twin characteristics, incredible persistence and incredible inability to see the point, they clamored for an answer to the absurd question: Could Martian computers be said to be really alive? The theoretician, hopelessly harassed by every newspaper from the Herald to the Calgary Eye-Opener, by gangs of men—camera men, sound men, photographers—who had descended on his home, replied that since life was no more than organized data-processing, in accordance with some preassigned program, this could be done just as well by a computer as by a human. He was asked to put it in terms that could be understood by the ordinary housewife. Well, hadn’t a computer just won the world’s chess championship? But was winning a chess game the same thing as being alive? Anyway, wasn’t it necessary to instruct a computer about how to play chess? Wearily, the theoretician explained that humans too were instructed, they had been programed by millions of years of evolution. In any case, what was the aim of a commercial on T.V., what was the aim of an ad in the newspapers? Surely to program people.

The battery and computer theory wasn’t widely believed at first, because the sound waves in the ice appeared to contradict it. Why would sound waves be used in an electrical system? Not for communication. No system of computers would communicate with each other by sound, not unless the situation on Mars was even more crazy than it seemed to be. One feature of the theory was attractive to NASA, though. It supported a step to which the scientist-administrators were already strongly inclined, to continue the borehole which had been instantly stopped when the signals were first discovered. The thing to do next, it now seemed, was to discover what kind of liquid lay below the ice, if indeed there was any liquid.

When the hole was completed, instead of a soda squirt, there came a powerful great squirt of filthy, evil-smelling stuff containing chlorine, bromine, and H₂S. This was a bad blow to the prospects of a permanent Martian laboratory, but at least it supported the electrolyte theory. Yet the sound signals were still a puzzle.

The puzzle was solved at last in a singular fashion. One morning the scientist-explorers were astonished to find a shining, cigar-shaped machine standing outside the laboratory. In one side of it they could see an opening, as if a panel had been slid back. Gingerly, in a frankly suspicious frame of mind, they examined the object as best they could without actually entering it. Nothing of any kind, no projection of any sort, was to be discovered on the exterior. It was all completely smooth, a metallic alloy of some kind. A periscopic device was used to examine the interior—so that nobody need enter the thing. Absolutely nothing could be seen. There was no control console inside. It was all completely smooth.

At least the machine looked quite harmless, unless there were more panels behind which weapons of some kind were lurking. Full information was sent immediately to Earth. Instructions came back, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should proceed with extreme caution, but that reasonable enterprise should not be eschewed.

The machine lay completely static outside the laboratory for several days. The men looked it over for the hundredth time. Obviously the damn thing had arrived with some kind of intent but had then got itself stuck. It just stood there day after day, with an opening in one side. Two men got into it together, so that if anything happened there would be two of them to deal with it. Nothing happened. There seemed nothing that could happen, since there were no controls—and even if there had been controls, there was nobody to operate them. The two got out, quite safely. The others went in and out, one after the other. It was all apparently quite safe. Yet on the very last man the door closed, without making the slightest sound, not a click or a rustle. The thing moved smoothly away. There was nothing at all that could be done to stop it. The lucky ones watched as it moved forward, at no great pace, for three or four hundred yards. Then it turned at an angle, so that it looked rather like a torpedo launched from an airplane. Like a torpedo it disappeared from sight, into the ice that lay below.

The following morning the machine was back again, the door in its side open once more. Nobody ventured into it this time. They took welding torches to it. As soon as the heat began to play on the metal, the machine moved away for a few yards, rather as a cow might step away from a bunch of flies on its rump. The men followed it for a while, trying to get their instruments to work on it. Always it moved just a little way ahead of them, as if it was playing some kind of game, or trying to lead them someplace. At last they got fed up and left it alone. Within an hour it was back on their doorstep.

All these events were transmitted to Earth, along with the record of the sound waves. Immediately following the incident in which the machine made off, Europa-like, with the unfortunate scientist-explorer, the amplitude of the sound was found to be very high. From this it was deduced that the sound waves were simply a form of sonar, used by the machine as it bored its way down through the glacier. Two other points were clear. The machine was only a slave-robot sent by the real Martians to collect samples of whatever it was that had arrived on their planet. From the complexity of the sound waves, it was also evident there must be very many such machines. Probably the interior of the glacier was honeycombed by passages along which they moved in the fashion of subway trains. The sonar was obviously used for navigational purposes and to prevent collisions of one machine with another, and perhaps to prevent them from penetrating into the intricate electronic system of the Martians themselves. Presumably the latter were quite static, like terrestrial computers, the robots being used for mechanical communication.

A warning was sent from Earth, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should expect to have to deal with more than one of these slave-machines. Caution should be exercised. The warning was superfluous. Something approaching a hundred cigar-shaped machines had already surrounded the laboratory. The urgent question now was whether the mission could extricate itself at all. On every side a mass of shining metal could be seen. Gradually, almost cautiously, the machines began to close in, a foot or two at a time, in a kind of slow, shuffling movement.

There was nothing to be done except run for it. The men waited until the gleaming monsters were quite close. At first it didn’t seem too bad, because in the weak gravity of Mars they could jump clean over the brutes. The machines responded as if it were only some kind of game. Instead of each machine searching separately for the men, the things worked in a team, apparently in accord with some master plan. They sought to block each of the men, working on data from the sound waves generated in the ground by the men in their flight, or so it seemed. Certainly the machines were not equipped with apparatus sensitive to light. They could not see. When the men stopped, the machines stopped. But as soon as a man took a single step, the machines glided into some new pattern.

Four of the men made it, three did not. From the safety of the module, the four lucky ones watched in horror as each of the three was cornered, hemmed in by packed lines of machines which could not be jumped. The things built a quadrangle about each man in turn. One machine went into the quadrangle along with the man. The last desperate struggle took a long time, but always it ended the same way, with the man pushed over, sprawling on the ground. The machine rolled over on top of him, but with a door open. The unfortunate victim found himself precipitated into the quite smooth capsule inside the monster. Inevitably, the door closed. The machine with the prize in its belly then began its journey to the depths below. The other machines opened out to make a way for it. The thing moved to a middle distance. Suddenly it tilted and disappeared.

All this came out after the return of the residue of the third Martian mission. NASA didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Everybody felt the expedition should have been armed with nuclear weapons. Yet NASA could hardly be blamed for its failure to anticipate the existence of developed Martians. Cognizant biologists had expected only to collect a few bugs or, at best, a few primitive plants.

Preparations were put in hand to plug a batch of nuclear weapons into the surface of Mars. After considerable argument, however, it was decided to wait awhile. For one thing, it wasn’t clear how the Martians, deep below their glaciers, could be harmed by surface explosions. For another, the Martians hadn’t really done anything explicitly hostile. Certainly four perfectly sound citizens had been creamed. Yet look at it from the other side for a moment. Four perfectly sound Martians had probably been sucked up through the borehole drilled by the third mission. Squirting Martians into the atmosphere in the style of a soda siphon would naturally be viewed in a grave light by the other side. Surely it would justify an examination of the situation, even to the extent of hunting down one or two of the strange creatures that had suddenly appeared out of space. We ourselves would hardly have acted in any other way. Whichever way you looked at it, nuclear weapons wouldn’t have much effect, not a kilometer or two down.

The telepuppets came into their own at this stage. They were set to watch the Martian surface by electronic camera. A stream of pictures was telemetered to Earth. It soon appeared that remarkable changes were in hand. Large structures appeared, very like radio antennae. It made sense when you came to think about it. Perhaps for millions of years the Martians had lived under their glaciers without experiencing any visitation from outside. Possibly from time to time they had taken a look at the external world, finding little of interest. It was very different now, however. At last there had indeed been a visitation from outside, and the Martians were determined to find out, what the hell. NASA had succeeded, at fantastic expense, in stirring a hornet’s nest.

Yet there was nothing to worry about when the first signals came through. Attempts were made to decode them, of course, but without the slightest success. Somebody had the amusing idea of setting up a closed loop. There seemed no possibility of it doing any harm. Signals from Mars were fed directly into a terrestrial computer, the output from which was fed back to a terrestrial transmitting antenna, back to Mars. Nobody expected much to come of it, but everybody hoped for something more than a simple return of the original message. Small changes, in fact, appeared after a few days. The terrestrial computer was not returning exactly the same signals as the ones which were being fed into it. This meant the home computer was acting as an outpost for the Martians, although of course in an apparently harmless way. The Martians must have discovered something of the home computer’s function and of its basic design.

The next step was to investigate what was going on. It was necessary now to work the closed loop through the home computer with a man-made program inside it. So the loop was set up in parallel with a straightforward mathematical problem. It was a simple matter of time-sharing, the computer being used for two apparently quite distinct purposes, much as one can run two distinct human problems in the same computer at the same time. Whereas the human problems stay distinct, however, these did not. The Martian loop stopped the mathematical problem. There wasn’t any mystery about how this could happen. The Martians stopped the mathematics in exactly the same way we ourselves would do, by instructions to the computer from without. There was no difficulty about it and apparently no harm either. Indeed, it was all very encouraging, since it implied a small area of contact with the Martians. Further experiments were tried out with varying success. Other kinds of human program were used. Chess, in which the Martians took not the slightest interest, business accountancy and general data-processing, language translation, and so forth, traffic-flow problems. A lot of stuff was put on tape and the Martians were left to sort it out as best they could.

Two things occurred in quick succession. The computer started to work in earnest, in a very different fashion from its earlier sporadic behavior. Instructions were inserted for a print-out of the contents of the computer, but the print-out proved to be on a hopelessly vast scale. There was no possibility of detecting any sense in it. The other thing was that pictures from the telepuppets ceased. A meteorite might have hit one of them, but the whole lot could hardly have been hit all at exactly the same time. The Martians had evidently knocked them off, there could be no other explanation.

Preparations for meeting an invasion from Mars were now put seriously in hand. The nuclear defense capability was weighed and not found wanting. There seemed no grounds for alarm. Nobody thought to break the computer link with Mars. The link was indeed thought of as an advantage, since it could eventually give a lead to the purposes and the nature of the Martians.

The invasion came without any notice at all. The stuff was sprinkled into the terrestrial atmosphere as if from a cosmic pepper pot. The Martians treated chemistry rather as humans treat electronics, something to be worked out by rational calculation, not a subject for crude empiricism. With their vast calculating resources, the properties of complex molecules could be definitively worked out. So they knew exactly what they were doing when the stuff was sprinkled into the terrestrial atmosphere. It took the best part of three months for it to settle to ground level and to get into water supplies all over the Earth. Then there was the devil to pay. The birth rate fell to zero within a few more weeks. The human species suddenly found itself completely sterile, in fantastic contrast to its previous cornucopian fecundity. The chemical makeup of the bodies of the unfortunate scientist-explorers had given all the necessary data. The determination of a complete inhibitor of human fertility had then been a straightforward, if somewhat tedious job.

The species was left to savor the situation for a couple of months. Everybody was by then convinced that complete biological extinction was the Martian aim. Everybody settled into this belief with a dull, resigned hopelessness. Then came the first full and lucid print-out from the computer, the one in contact with the Martians. Instructions were given for the construction of several hundred robot machines. There was nothing apparently harmful in the specifications; it was obvious these robots could be physically overwhelmed at a moment’s notice if need be. Preparations for their construction were put in hand. There was nothing else to be done. The first ones off the line turned out rather jolly little fellows, with big, square boxes on top of the short, stumpy legs. They were just mobile computers, not at all complicated, even by terrestrial standards. Yet they had one special ability, they were far more efficient intermediaries between humans and the bigger computer, the one in constant contact with the Martians, than our own input-output devices could ever have been.

No sooner did the robots begin work than babies began to be born again. The total birth rate was still extremely low, far too low for any kind of stability in the human population, but it was something to find even a ray of hope in what had appeared an impossibly black situation. The game was still not played out.

Further robots were built to new specifications. They were bigger now and there were more of them. This second generation was industrially inclined. It collected scads of data. It gave rational, clear instructions on what was to be done. More and more of the new machines moved into executive offices. In evidence of the good faith of the Martians, the birth rate continued to rise little by little. Young women everywhere were much in favor of the new situation. Not only was there a better chance now of a small family, but their husbands had been ejected from the offices in which previous decades of husbands had entombed themselves. Babies had to be worked for harder, of course, but was there anything very much wrong in that?

The third robot generation was quite different again. To the jolly little communication chaps, and the efficient industrial chaps, there was now added a policeman-robot. These fellows were literally tougher than nails, much much tougher than gangsters and F.B.I. men had been, much tougher even than the agents of pure fiction. You could certainly blow them apart with high explosive, but you couldn’t knock them off with a pistol. They were much much stronger than a gorilla. With a single blow they could explode you like a bag of water.

The policemen-robots had no sense of justice, or of mercy, or of pity. Neither had they any spirit of vindictiveness, any lust for revenge or vengeance. They were not sadistic, nor did they give themselves airs. Nor did they rape your sister. They knew and cared about just one thing, instruction and obedience. So long as you obeyed an instruction you were okay. If you disobeyed, you were given one single opportunity for reconsideration. If you then obeyed, okay, if not, wham—a heavy metal ball flew at enormous speed along an arc in the style of a medieval joust.

Nobody liked the policemen-robots, yet in some ways they turned out better than the jolly little communication chaps. As soon as plots began to hatch against the new order, the communication chaps, with their stumpy legs and big heads, showed themselves to have a real genius for sniffing out what you were up to. They were never unpleasant about it, of course, for it was apparently not their place to usurp the functions of the policemen-robots.

The policemen-robots were always pretty fair. Once they had broken a thing up, once the conspirators were scattered, the ruckus was instantly forgotten. Ringleaders were never sorted out as examples. Your past record was never held against you. There were no blacklists. To a policeman-robot there was just one single issue, whether you obeyed the current instruction or you did not. So far as anyone could tell, the policemen-robots never troubled to remember you, they simply served to distinguish obedience from disobedience. This made them surprisingly easy to take. You had no feeling of losing face when you obeyed, no feeling of the robot getting any satisfaction from your obedience. To a robot it was just as unemotional as deciding whether or not one hundred is greater than ninety-nine. If it was, okay. If it wasn’t, wham. There was indeed a curiously restful quality about the policemen-robots. In place of the appalling psychological complexities of humans, you knew exactly where you were with these big ten-foot chaps standing over you. It took you back to childhood, as if Daddy was still looking down on you.

It was in any case rather like religion. You did what the priest told you to do under pain of hell-fire. Here you did it under pain of the big black jousting ball. Like a priest, these robots had an intense devotion to right and wrong. There was no doubt about their having a vocation.

As the robots gained power, serious dissension broke out between the sexes. To women, sterility was bad enough, even on an individual basis. On a worldwide scale, it was an appalling and obscene horror, not to be contemplated if any alternative were possible. Women everywhere were wholeheartedly in favor of accepting the rule of the Martians. Nobody was being hurt by it. In any case, the men had brought it all on themselves by their incessant yap-yapping about power and progress, by their sheer smugness, in fact.

The men were not even able to diagnose their complaint, let alone cure it. The advance of technology had already made it more and more difficult to give satisfactory expression to the inherent apelike demands of the dominant male. The male ape attempts the suppression of every ape of its own kind within sight or smell. It attempts the suppression of every male ape by physical violence and intimidation, of every female ape by physical violence and sex. From the nineteenth century onward, it was known that man is an ape. Everybody knew this was so, but nobody believed it was so. It was true but it wasn’t really true. In a sufficiently primitive technological state, humans will separate themselves into groups, the size of the group being exactly determined by the criterion that the dominant male of the moment shall be able to assert his dominance in person directly over every other member of the clan. Forced by technology into larger units, the dominant male, now the king, will perforce be obliged to delegate a considerable fraction of his over-apeness to certain immediate under-apes, known as barons. This aristocracy will pass on the king’s dominance at second-hand to still lower under-apes. Second-hand is second-best, the over-ape loses satisfaction from this delegation of his dominance. To make good his losses, he engages now in violent demonstrations of his superiority, by orgies, by torture, by gladiatorial combats, by executions, and by war.

Under-apes are surprisingly happy. They can easily understand the psychology of the over-ape. Even in the interval between blows they have time to realize that they themselves would gladly wield the whip if things were the other way round. Down in the breast of even the humblest there is always the irrational hope that he too may one day become an over-ape.

With the development of industrial techniques, the basic cravings of the male were forced deeper underground. They were forced into pallid politics, and into a chase after power that was not really power. With the rise of the Martian robots, the cravings of the male were at last wholly suppressed. The robots were taking comparatively little away from the women. From the men they were taking everything of real importance. True, the men had lost nothing economically, quite the reverse, but they had lost the last shams of political power, the last shreds of boardroom—and even bedroom—dominance.

To the men, the destruction of the robots was fast becoming urgent. Early on, the men had given way in order to placate the women. Now, before it was too late, they insisted in revolting utterly and completely against Martian dominance. The robots capitulated without even a struggle, probably because a careful calculation showed they couldn’t win at that time. There was no Horatio-at-the-Bridge attitude about them, no “face” to save, no problem of “morale” to worry about. If the battle couldn’t be won, there was no point in fighting it.

Only a small percentage of the men understood the critical point, that the robots weren’t the real Martians. It had been said often enough, of course, that the real Martians were still on Mars, underneath their protective glaciers. But this was too remote and abstract for the average man. Nobody had dug up the glaciers and looked underneath, had they? So how could you be sure? It was hard not to credit a machine with intelligence, not when it showed intelligence. It may be understood, then, how it was that most men took great pleasure in the destruction of the robots. They cooked the jolly communication chaps by throwing them into a furnace, where they soon melted into “juice.” The business-robots, after dismemberment, were left outdoors to oxidize, slowly. For the policemen-robots they reserved special compactors, built after the pattern of machines used for compacting automobiles. The robots were fed in as robots at one end. They emerged at the other end as neat cubes, jousting ball and all. Before they were impelled into the compactor, the robots were shown the emerging cubes. It was always a disappointment that, while every robot continued to display an intelligent interest in what was going on, this demonstration never put a single robot in the least out of countenance. No robot was ever known to emit the smallest Petrushka-like cheep.

The bottom fell out of the birth rate, right down to zero. All along, this was what the women had said would happen. The birth rate didn’t get off the floor until the men started to build robots again. Wearisomely, the pattern was repeated, first the communication chaps, then the business tycoons, then the policemen-robots to keep everything neat and tidy. Inevitably, there was a second revolt. Inevitably, the birth rate zeroed. Inevitably, the pattern was repeated, and repeated again.

This was all part of the plan. The Martians wanted the human population down, not down to nothing at all, but to manageable proportions. This meant a reduction by a very big factor. Without establishing fantastic slaughterhouses, it was clearly necessary to wait forty or fifty years for the existing population to die off in peace and prosperity. Replacements were kept at a low level, only about one hundred thousand a year for the whole species. Even this meager yield had to be worked hard for. It became an all-out effort for the men. The Martians were clever enough not to arrange one hundred thousand pregnancies per annum, regardless. More subtly, they worked on the basis of one pregnancy per N copulations, with N adjustable to give the required annual crop of one hundred thousand babies. In the early days, N was kept fixed, so that everybody then got it firmly into their heads that the more sex, the more babies. With this belief established, the Martians increased N more and more, as manufacturers used to do in their old time-and-motion studies. Like the old manufacturers, the Martians never reduced N. Once they discovered the sexwise capability of the human species, they kept them to it.

The men were actually reduced to making a complaint, through the agency of the jolly communication chaps, when at one time things really had gone a bit far. The Martians replied in the following terms:

(1) A survey of the entertainment enjoyed by the human species throughout the second half of the twentieth century shows that sex served as the major item of human attention, pleasure, and happiness.

(2) The pursuit of happiness is the declared intent of the human species.

(3) Present policy provides for (2).

(4) The subject is closed.

The sheer physical strain of maintaining what turned out to be a stable population of some three million reduced the men to a state in which they no longer had the necessary determination to suppress the robots. A critical point was passed, separating the time when the robots might once again have been consigned to the furnace and to the compactor from the final era in which this was no longer possible. The jousting ball was now ultimate law. The human species was powerless, not only biologically, but also physically. The Martians had won the final battle, and without striking a single physical blow, if one excepts the biochemical analysis of the four unfortunate scientist-explorers sent to them at such enormous expense by NASA. Humans had themselves looked after the physical aspects of the matter, even to the extent of building the robots which now held them in bondage. It only remained for the Martians to have the robots herd the whole human species together into a reasonably spacious compound. Earth could then be cleaned up, cleaned of its horrible green slime, and at last made fit for a Martian to live in.

So it came about that the entire human species came to live in greater Los Angeles, and that true Martians arrived here to take up an abode beneath the polar icecaps. Ample water was pumped in to the humans, who kept their little patch of Earth forever verdant. There were just a few who hankered after the strident old days, but they never got much of a hearing. Life on the whole was very pleasant. Indeed, there came a time when the species attained a considerable cachet. Rather to their own surprise, the Martians found humans a distinctly exportable item. Nobody throughout the Galaxy could at first believe it possible for such astonishing creatures to exist. Nobody had ever conceived of chemical life. As far as was known, the creatures were quite unique.