Martian Time-Slip

9

Into Leo Bohlen’s hand his son Jack put a large green seed. Leo examined it, handed it back.

“What did you see?” Jack asked.

“I saw it, the seed.”

“Did anything happen?”

Leo pondered, but he could not think of anything he had seen happen, so at last he said, “No.”

Seated at the movie projector, Jack said, “Now watch.” He snapped off the lights in the room, and then, on the screen, an image appeared as the projector whirred. It was a seed, embedded in soil. As Leo watched, the seed split open. Two probing feelers appeared; one started upward, the other divided into fine hairs and groped down. Meanwhile, the seed revolved in the soil. Enormous projections unfolded from the upward moving feeler, and Leo gasped.

“Say, Jack,” he said, “some seeds you got here on Mars; look at it go. My gosh, it’s working away like mad.”

Jack said, “That’s a plain ordinary lima bean, the same as I gave you just now. This film is speeded up, five days compressed into seconds. We can now see the motion that goes on in a germinating seed; normally, the process takes place too slowly for us to see any motion at all.”

“Say, Jack,” Leo said, “that’s really something. So this kid’s time-rate is like this seed. I understand. Things that we can see move would whiz around him so darn fast they’d be practically invisible, and I bet he sees slow processes like this seed here; I bet he can go out in the yard and sit down and watch the plants growing, and five days for him is like say ten minutes for us.”

Jack said, “That’s the theory, anyhow.” He went on, then, to explain to Leo how the chamber worked. The explanation was filled with technical terms, however, which Leo did not understand, and he felt a little irritable as Jack droned on. The time was eleven A.M., and still Jack showed no sign of taking him on his trip over the F.D.R. Mountains; he seemed completely immersed in this.

“Very interesting,” Leo murmured, at one point.

“We take a tape recording, done at fifteen inches per second, and run it off for Manfred at three and three-fourths inches per second. A single word, such as ‘tree.’ And at the same time we flash up a picture of a tree and the word beneath it, a still, which we keep in sight for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then what Manfred says is recorded at three and threefourths inches per second, and for our own listening we speed it up and replay at fifteen.”

Leo said, “Listen, Jack, we just gotta get going on that trip.”

“Christ,” Jack said, “this is my job.” He gestured angrily. “I thought you wanted to meet him--he’ll be over here any time now. She sends him over--“

Breaking in, Leo said, “Look, son, I came millions of miles to have a look at that land. Now are we going to fly there or not?”

Jack said, “We’ll wait until the boy comes, and we’ll take him with us.”

“O.K. ,” Leo said. He wanted to avoid friction; he was willing to compromise, at least as much as was humanly possible.

“My God, here you are for the first time in your life on the surface of another planet. I should think you’d want to walk around, take a look at the canal, the ditch.” Jack gestured over toward the right. “You haven’t even glanced at it, and people have been wanting to see the canals--they’ve argued about their existence--for centuries!”

Feeling chagrined, Leo nodded dutifully. “Show me, then.” He followed Jack from the workshop, outdoors into the dull ruddy sunlight. “Cold,” Leo observed, sniffing the air. “Say, it’s sure easy to walk around; I noticed that last night I felt like I weighed only fifty or sixty pounds. Must be because Mars is so small--right? Must be good for people with cardiac conditions, except the air’s so thin. I thought last night it was the corned beef that made me--“

“Leo,” his son said, “be quiet and look around, will you?”

Leo looked around. He saw a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. He saw a deep ditch of sluggish brown water, and, beside the ditch, a mosslike vegetation, green. That was all, except for Jack’s house and the Steiner house a little farther on. He saw the garden, but he had seen that last night.

“Well?” Jack said.

Being obliging, Leo said, “Very impressive, Jack. You’ve got a nice place here; a nice little modern place. A little more planting, landscaping, and I’d say it was perfect.”

Grinning at him crookedly, Jack said, “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.”

“I know that, son, and I’m exceptionally proud of what you’ve accomplished, you and that fine woman.” Leo nodded solemnly. “Now can we get started? Maybe you could go over to that other house where that boy is and get him, or did David go over? Maybe David’s getting him; I don’t see him around.”

“David’s at school. He was picked up while you were sleeping.”

Leo said, “I don’t mind going over and getting that boy, Manfred or whatever his name is, if it’s O.K. with you.”

“Go ahead,” Jack said. “I’ll come along.”

They walked past a small ditch of water, crossed an open field of sand and sparse fernlike plants, and arrived at the other house. Leo heard from within the sound of small girls’ voices. Without hesitation he ascended the steps to the porch and rang the bell.

The door opened and there stood a big, blond-haired woman with tired, pain-filled eyes. “Good morning,” Leo said, “I’m Jack Bohlen’s dad; I guess you’re the lady of the house. Say, we’ll take your boy with us on a trip and bring him back safe and sound.”

The big blonde woman looked past him to Jack, who had come up on the porch; she said nothing, but turned and went off back into the interior of her house. When she returned she had a small boy with her. So this is the skizo little fellow, Leo thought. Nice-looking, you’d never know in a million years.

“We’re going on a ride, young man,” Leo said to him. “How does that sound?” Then, remembering what Jack had said about the boy’s time-sense, he repeated what he had said very slowly, dragging each word out.

The boy darted past him and shot down the steps and off toward the canal; he moved in a blur of speed and disappeared from sight behind the Bohlen house.

“Mrs. Steiner,” Jack said, “I want you to meet my father.”

The big blonde woman put out her hand vaguely; she did not seem to be all there herself, Leo observed. However, he shook hands with her. “Glad to meet you,” he said politely. “Sorry to hear about the loss of your husband; it’s a terrible thing, something striking like that, without any warning. I knew a fella back in Detroit, good friend of mine, did the same thing one weekend; went out of the shop and said goodbye and that was the last anybody saw of him.”

Mrs. Steiner said, “How do you do, Mr. Bohlen.”

“We’ll go round up Manfred,” Jack said to her. “We should be home late this afternoon.”

As Leo and his son walked back, the woman remained where she was on the porch, looking after them.

“Pretty odd herself,” Leo murmured. Jack said nothing.

They located the boy, standing off by himself in David’s overflow garden, and presently the three of them were in the Yee Company ‘copter, flying above the desert in the direction of the line of mountains to the north. Leo unfolded a great map which he had brought with him and began to make marks on it.

“I guess we can talk freely,” he said to Jack, nodding his head toward the boy. “He won’t--“ He hesitated. “You know.”

“If he understands us,” Jack said drily, “it’ll be--“

“O.K., O.K.,” Leo said, “I just wanted to be sure.” He carefully refrained from marking the place on the map that he had heard would be the UN site. But he did mark their route, using the gyrocompass reading visible on the dashboard of the ‘copter. “What rumors have you heard, son?” he asked. “About UN interest in the F.D.R. range?”

Jack said, “Something about a park or a power station.”

“Want to know exactly what it is?”

“Sure.”

Leo reached into his inside coat pocket and brought out an envelope. From it he took a photograph, which he handed to Jack. “Does this remind you of anything?”

Glancing at it, Jack saw that it was a picture of a long, thin building. He stared at it a long time.

“The UN,” Leo said, “is going to build these. Multipleunit dwellings. Whole tracks of them, mile after mile, with shopping centers, complete--supermarkets, hardware stores, drugstores, laundries, ice cream parlors. All built by slave equipment, those construction automatons that feed themselves their own instructions.”

Presently, Jack said, “It looks like the co-op apartment house I lived in years ago when I had my breakdown.”

“Exactly. The co-op movement will be in with the UN on this. These F.D.R. Mountains were once fertile, as everybody knows; there was plenty of water here. The UN hydraulic engineers believe they can bring enormous quantities of water up to the surface from the table below. The water table is closer to the surface in these mountains than anywhere else on Mars; this is the original water source for the canal network, the UN engineers believe.”

“The co-op,” Jack said in a strange voice, “here on Mars.”

“They’ll be fine modern structures,” Leo said. “It’s quite an ambitious project. The UN will be transporting people here free, providing their passage right to their new homes, and the cost of buying each unit will be small. It will take quite a big slice of these mountains, as you might guess, and as I heard it, they expect it to be ten to fifteen years before the project is completed.”

Jack said nothing.

“Mass emigration,” Leo said. “This will ensure it.”

“I guess so,” Jack said.

“The appropriations for this are fantastic,” Leo said. “The co-op alone is putting up almost a trillion dollars. It has huge reserves of cash, you know; it’s one of the richest groups on Earth--it has greater assets than the insurance group or any of the big banking systems. There’s not a chance in the world that with them in on it the thing could fail.” He added, “The UN has been negotiating with them for six years on this matter.”

Finally, Jack said, “What a change it will mean for Mars. Just to have the F.D.R. range fertile--that alone.”

“And densely populated,” Leo reminded him.

“It’s hard to believe,” Jack said.

“Yeah, I know, boy, but there’s no doubt of it; within another few weeks it’ll be generally known. I knew it a month ago. I’ve been getting investors I know to put up risk capital . . . I represent them, Jack. Alone, I just don’t have the money.”

Jack said, “You mean, your whole idea is to get here before the UN actually takes the land. You’re going to buy it for very little and then resell it to the UN for much more.”

“We’re going to buy it in great pieces,” Leo said, “and then at once subdivide. Cut it up into lots, say, one hundred feet by eighty. Title will be in the hands of a fairly large number of individuals: wives, cousins, employees, friends of the members of my group.”

“Of your syndicate,” Jack said.

“Yes, that’s what it is,” Leo said, pleased. “A syndicate.”

After a time Jack said in a hoarse voice, “And you don’t feel there’s anything wrong with doing this?”

“Wrong in what sense? I don’t get you, son.”

“Christ,” Jack said. “It’s obvious.”

“Not to me. Explain.”

“You’re gypping the entire population of Earth--they’re the ones who’ll have to put up all the money. You’re increasing the costs of this project in order to make a killing.”

“But Jack, that’s what’s meant by land speculation.” Leo was puzzled. “What did you think land speculation was? It’s been going on for centuries; you buy land cheap when nobody wants it because you believe for one reason or another that one day it will be worth a lot more. And it’s inside tips that you go on. That’s about all there is to go on, when you get down to it. Every land speculator in the world will be trying to buy in, when they get word; in fact they’re doing that right now. I beat them here by a matter of days. It’s this regulation that you have to actually be on Mars that gets them; they’re not prepared at the drop of a hat to come here. So--they’ve missed out. Because by nightfall I expect to have put our deposit down on the land we want.” He pointed ahead of them. “It’s in there. I’ve got all sorts of maps; I won’t have any trouble locating it. The location of the piece is in a vast canyon area called the Henry Wallace. To comply with the law, I have to actually set foot on the piece I intend to buy, and place some permanent marker, fully identifiable, in an exposed spot. I have such a marker with me, a regulation steel stake which bears my name. We’ll land in the Henry Wallace and you can help me drive the stake in. It’s just a formality; it won’t take more than a few minutes.” He smiled at his son.

Looking at his father, Jack thought, He’s insane. But Leo smiled calmly at him, and Jack knew that his father was not insane, that it was exactly as he said: land speculators did this, it was their way of going about their business, and there really was such a mammoth UN--co-op project about to start. As shrewd and experienced a businessman as his father could not be wrong. Leo Bohlen, and the men with him, did not act on the basis of a rumor. They had top connections. There had been a leak, either at the co-op or the UN or both, and Leo was putting all his resources to work to take advantage of it.

“It’s--the biggest news so far,” Jack said, “regarding the development of Mars.” He could still hardly believe it.

“Long overdue,” Leo said. “Should have taken place right from the start. But they expected private capital to be put up; they waited for the other fella to do it.”

“This will change the lives of everybody who lives on Mars,” Jack said. It would alter the balance of power, create a totally new ruling class: Arnie Kott, Bosley Touvim--the union settlements and the national settlements--would be small fry, once the co-op, in conjunction with the UN, had moved in.

Poor Arnie, he thought. He won’t survive this. Time, progress, and civilization, all will have passed him by, Arnie and his steam baths that waste water, his tiny symbol of pomp.

“Now listen, Jack,” his father said, “don’t spread this information around, because it’s confidential. What we want to watch is crooked business at the abstract company--that’s the outfit that records your title. I mean, we put up our deposit, and then other speculators, especially local ones here, get tipped off and then have pull at the abstract company, so it turns out--“

“I see,” Jack said. The abstract company would predate the deposit of a local speculator, giving him seeming priority over Leo. There must be many tricks that can be played in a game like this, Jack said to himself; no wonder Leo works carefully.

“We’ve investigated the abstract company here, and it appears to be honest. But you never know, when there’s so much involved.”

Suddenly Manfred Steiner gave a hoarse grunt.

Both Jack and Leo glanced up, startled. They had both forgotten about him; he was at the rear of the cab of the ‘copter, his face pressed to the glass, staring down. He pointed excitedly.

Far below, Jack saw a party of Bleekmen threading its way along a mountain trail. “That’s right,” Jack said to the boy, “people down there, probably hunting.” It occurred to him that very possibly Manfred had never seen a Bleekman. I wonder what his reaction would be, Jack mused, if he found himself facing them, all at once. How easy it would be to arrange it; all he had to do, really, was land the ‘copter ahead of this particular party.

“What are those?” Leo asked, looking down. “Martians?”

“That’s what they are,” Jack said.

“I’ll be darned.” Leo laughed. “So those are Martians . . . they look more like aboriginal Negroes, like the African Bushmen.”

“They’re closely related to them,” Jack said.

Manfred had become quite excited; his eyes shone and he ran back and forth from window to window, peering down and muttering.

What would happen if Manfred lived with a family of Bleekmen for a time? Jack wondered. They move slower than we do; their lives are less complex and hectic. Possibly their sense of time is close to his . . . to the Bleekmen, we Earthmen may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity, expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all.

But it would not bring Manfred into his own society, to put him with the Bleekmen. In fact, he realized, it might draw him so far away from us that there would be no chance of our ever communicating with him.

Thinking that, he decided not to land the ‘copter.

“Do those fellas do any work?” Leo asked. “Those Martians?”

“A few have been tamed,” Jack said, “as the phrase goes. But most of them continue to exist as they always have, as hunters and fruit-gatherers. They haven’t reached the farming stage yet.”

When they reached the Henry Wallace, Jack set the ‘copter down, and he and his father and Manfred stepped out onto the parched, rocky soil. Manfred was given paper and crayons to amuse himself, and then the two men set out to search for a suitable spot at which to drive the stake.

The spot, a low plateau, was found, and the stake was driven, mostly by Jack; his father wandered about, inspecting rock formations and plants, with a clearly irritated and impatient frown. He did not seem to enjoy it here in this uninhabited region--however, he said nothing; he politely took note of a fossil formation which Jack pointed out to him.

They took photographs of the stake and the surrounding area, and then, their business done, they returned to the ‘copter. There sat Manfred, on the ground, busily drawing with the crayons. The desolation of the area did not seem to bother him, Jack decided. The boy, wrapped up in his inner world, drew and ignored them; he glanced up now and then, but not at the two men. His eyes were blank.

What’s he drawing? Jack wondered, and walked around behind the boy to see.

Manfred, glancing up now and then to peer sightiessly at the landscape around him, had drawn great, flat apartment buildings.

“Look at this, Dad,” Jack said, and he managed to keep his voice calm and steady.

Together, the two of them stood behind the boy, watching him draw, watching the buildings become more and more distinct on the paper.

Well, there’s no mistaking it, Jack thought. The boy is drawing the buildings that will be here. He is drawing the landscape which will come, not the landscape visible to our eyes.

“I wonder if he saw the photo I showed you,” Leo said. “That one of the models.”

“Maybe so,” Jack said. It would provide an explanation; the boy had understood their conversation, seen the papers, gotten his inspiration from that. But the photo had shown the buildings from above; it was a different perspective from this. The boy had sketched the buildings as they would appear to an observer on the ground. As they would appear, Jack realized, to someone seated where we are right now.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got something in this time theory,” Leo said. He glanced at his wrist watch. “Now, speaking of time, I’d say--“

“Yes,” Jack agreed thoughtfully, “we’ll get started back.”

There was something more in the child’s drawing which he had noticed. He wondered if his father had seen it. The buildings, the enormous co-op apartments, which the boy was sketching, were developing in an ominous direction before their eyes. As they watched, they saw some final details which made Leo glare; he snorted and glanced at his son.

The buildings were old, sagging with age. Their foundations showed great cracks radiating upward. Windows were broken. And what looked like stiff tall weeds grew in the land around. It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.

“Jack, he’s drawing a slum!” Leo exclaimed.

That was it, a decaying slum. Buildings that had stood for years, perhaps even decades, which had passed their prime and dwindled into their twilight, into senility and partial abandonment.

Pointing at a yawning crack which he had just drawn, Manfred said, “Gubbish.” His hand traced the weeds, the broken windows. Again he said, “Gubbish.” He glanced at them, smiling in a frightened way.

“What does that mean, Manfred?” Jack asked.

There was no answer. The boy continued to sketch. And as he sketched, the buildings, before their eyes, grew older and older, more in ruins with each passing moment.

“Let’s go,” Leo said hoarsely.

Jack took the boy’s paper and crayons and got him on his feet. The three of them re-entered the ‘copter.

“Look, Jack,” Leo said. He was intently examining the boy’s drawing. “What he’s written over the entrance of the building.”

In twisted, wavering letters Manfred had written:

AM-WEB

“Must be the name of the building,” Leo said.

“It is,” Jack said, recognizing the word; it was a contraction of a co-op slogan, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder.” “All men become brothers,” he said under his breath. “It’s on co-op stationery.” He remembered it well.

Now, taking his crayons once more, Manfred resumed his work. As the two men watched, the boy began to draw something at the top of the picture. Dark birds, Jack saw. Enormous, dusky, vulture-like birds.

At a broken window of the building, Manfred drew a round face with eyes, nose, a turned-down, despairing mouth. Someone within the building, gazing out silently and hopelessly, as if trapped within.

“Well,” Leo said. “Interesting.” His expression was one of grim outrage. “Now, why would he want to draw that? I don’t think that’s a very wholesome or positive attitude; why can’t he draw it like it’s going to be, new and immaculate, with children playing and pets and contented people?”

Jack said, “Maybe he draws what he sees.”

“Well, if he sees that, he’s ill,” Leo said. “There are so many bright, wonderful things he could see instead; why would he want to see that?”

“Perhaps he has no choice,” Jack said. Gubbish, he thought. I wonder; could gubbish mean time? The force that to the boy means decay, deterioration, destruction, and, at last, death? The force at work everywhere, on everything in the universe.

And is that all he sees?

If so, Jack thought, no wonder he’s autistic; no wonder he can’t communicate with us. A view of the universe that partial--it isn’t even a complete view of time. Because time also brings new things into existence; it’s also the process of maturation and growth. And evidently Manfred does not perceive time in that aspect.

Is he sick because he sees this? Or does he see this because he is sick? A meaningless question, perhaps, or anyhow one that can’t be answered. This is Manfred’s view of reality, and according to us, he is desperately ill; he does not perceive the rest of reality, which we do. And it is a dreadful section which he does see: reality in its most repellent aspect.

Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.

The poor damned kid, he thought. How can he live from one day to the next, having to face the reality he does?

Somberly, Jack returned to the job of piloting the ‘copter. Leo looked out the window, contemplating the desert below. Manfred, with the taut, frightened expression on his face, continued to draw.

They gubbled and gubbled. He put his hands to his ears, but the product crept up through his nose. Then he saw the place. It was where he wore out. They threw him away there, and gubbish lay in heaps up to his waist; gubbish filled the air.

“What is your name?”

“Steiner, Manfred.”

“Age.”

“Eighty-three.”

“Vaccinated against smallpox?”

“Yes.”

“Any venereal diseases?”

“Well, a little clap, that’s all.”

“V.D. clinic for this man.”

“Sir, my teeth. They’re in the bag, along with my eyes.”

“Your eyes, oh yes. Give this man his teeth and eyes before you take him to the V.D. clinic. How about your ears, Steiner?”

“Got ‘em on, sir. Thank you, sir.”

They tied his hands with gauze to the sides of the bed because he tried to pull out the catheter. He lay facing the window, seeing through the dusty, cracked glass.

Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.

He lay there for a hundred and twenty-three years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.

He didn’t use them anyhow. And without arms he didn’t try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.

I been at AM-WEB for a long time, he said. Maybe you can get me a transistor radio so I can tune in Friendly Fred’s Breakfast Club; I like to hear the tunes, they play a lot of the old-time favorites.

Something outside gives me hay fever. Must be those yellow flowering weeds, why do they let them get so tall?

I once saw a ballgame.

For two days he lay on the floor, in a big puddle, and then the landlady found him and called for the truck to bring him here. He snored all the way, it woke him up. When they tried to give him grapefruit juice he could only work one arm, the other never worked again ever. He wished he could still make those leather belts, they were fun and took lots of time. Sometimes he sold them to people who came by on the weekend.

“Do you know who I am, Manfred?”

“No.”

“I’m Arnie Kott. Why don’t you laugh or smile sometimes, Manfred? Don’t you like to run around and play?”

As he spoke Mr. Kott gubbled from both his eyes.

“Obviously he doesn’t, Arnie, but that’s not what concerns us here anyhow.”

“What do you see, Manfred? Let us in on what you see. All those people, are they going to live there, is that it? Is that right, Manfred? Can you see lots of people living there?”

He put his hands over his face, and the gubble stopped.

“I don’t see why this kid never laughs.”

Gubble, gubble.