Stowaway to Mars (8 page)

'That's not very lucid,' she said, and for the first time smiled faintly.

'I think he's trying to say that you don't look like a sensationalist that this is not just a bit of exhibitionism on your part,' Froud tried.

'Oh, no.' She shook her head with the curious result that the outflung curls remained outflung instead of falling back into place. Unconscious of the odd effect, she went on: 'In fact, I should think he has a far more exhibitionistic nature than I have.'

'Oh,' said Dale a little blankly as Froud smiled.

Doctor Grayson came to the door.

'Have you two finished now?' he inquired. 'Can't have you tiring my patient out, you know.'

'Right you are, Doc,' said Froud, rising, 'though I fancy you rather underestimate your patient's powers of recovery.'

'What did she say?' Dugan demanded, as they entered the living room.

'Precious little except that her name is Joan, and that she considers Dale an exhibitionist which, of course, he is,' Froud told him. Dugan looked puzzled.

'Didn't you ask her why she had done it and all that'?'

'Of course.'

'Well?'

Froud shrugged his shoulders and pushed the familiar lock of hair back from his forehead.

'This looks like being a more interesting trip than I had expected.' He looked at the other three, thoughtfully. 'Five of us and her, cooped up here for three months. If the proportion of the sexes were reversed, there would be blue murder. Possibly we shall just avoid murder, but you never know.'

DALE's anger at the finding of the stowaway had been due as much to a dread of the consequences of her presence among them as to the practical results of her additional weight. The girl, Joan, was an unknown quantity thrust among his carefully chosen crew. He saw her as the potential cause of emotional disturbances, irrational cross currents of feeling, and, not impossibly, of violent quarrels which might make a misery of the voyage. The close confinement for weeks would have been a severe enough test of companionship for the men alone, for though he had chosen men he knew well, it was inevitable that he .should know them only under more or less normal conditions. How they were likely to react to the changed circumstances, he could only speculate and that not too happily.

Ultimately it depended upon the character of the girl. If she were level headed, they might conceivably get through without serious trouble: if not ... And now, ten days out (in the Earth reckoning), he still could not make up his mind about her. To all of them, as far as he knew, she was still that unknown quantity which had emerged from the locker. She had still given no reason for her presence, and yet, in some way, he was aware from her attitude, and as much of her character as she chose to show, that it had been no light whim nor search for notoriety which had driven her into this foolhardy adventure. But if it was not that, what could it be? What else was strong enough to drive an undeniably attractive girl to such a course? She did not seem to have the sustaining force of a specialized interest such as that which had enabled the doctor to face the trip. Her general education was good and her knowledge of astronomy unusual; her comprehension of physics, too, was above the general standard, but it was not an absorbing passion urging her to overcome almost insuperable difficulties. But there must be a reason of some kind . . .

But in spite of her retention of confidence he was admitting that they might have been far more unlucky in their supercargo. As Froud had pointed out, they might as easily have been saddled with a fluffy blonde with cinema ambitions. Joan was at least quietly inconspicuous and ready to perform any task suggested to her. He wondered how long that attitude would last.

She was standing close to one of the windows, looking out into space. Most of her time was spent in this way, though after the first novelty had worn off, she did not seem to study the far off suns; rather, it was a part of her aloofness from the rest of them; as though the unchanging, starry blackness before her eyes set her mind free to roam in its private imaginings. Of the course of these thoughts no sign appeared; there was no play of expression across the sunburned, serious face, no frown as though she sought a solution of problems, no hint of impatience, only sometimes did it appear that her eyes were deeper and her thoughts more remote than at others. Generally the talk of the rest passed her by, unheard, but infrequently a remark chanced to catch her attention, and she would turn to look at the speaker. Rarely, one had the impression that secretly and privately she might be smiling.

A question of Froud's brought her round now. He was sitting at the table sitting by force of habit, since neither sitting nor lying was more restful than standing in the weightless state. He was asking Dale:

'I've meant to ask you before, but it's kept on slipping my mind: why did you choose to try for Mars? I should have thought Venus was the natural target for the first trip. She's nearer. One would use less fuel. It was the place Drivers was aiming at, wasn't it?'

Dale looked up from his book, and nodded.

'Yes, Drivers was trying to reach Venus. As a matter of fact, it was my first idea to go for Venus, but I changed my mind.'

'That's a pity. It's always Mars in the stories. Either we go to Mars or Mars comes to us. What with Wells and Burroughs and a dozen or so of others, I feel that I know the place already. Venus would have been a change.'

Dugan laughed. 'If we find Mars anything like the Burroughs conception, we're in for an exciting time. Why did you give up the Venus idea, Dale?'

'Oh, several reasons. For one thing, we know a bit more about Mars. For all we can tell, Venus under those clouds may be nothing more than a huge ball of water. We do know that Mars is at least dry land, and that we shall have a chance of setting the Gloria Mundi up on end for the return journey. If we came down in a sea, it would mean finish. Then again, the pull of gravity is much less on Mars, and this ship is going to take some handling even there. I don't know why Drivers chose Venus probably he didn't want to wait for Mars' opposition or something of the kind. But you were wrong about it needing less fuel. Actually it would use more.'

'But Venus comes about ten million miles closer,' Froud objected, looking puzzled.

'But she's a much bigger planet than Mars. It would take much more power to get clear of her for the return journey. This falling through space uses no fuel. It's the stopping and starting that count, and obviously the bigger the planet, the greater its pull that is, the more it costs to get free.'

'I see. You mean that as we are now clear of the Earth's pull we could go to Neptune or to Pluto, even, with no more cost of power than to Mars?'

'Sure. In fact, we could go out of this system into the next if you didn't mind spending a few centuries on the journey.'

'Oh,' said Froud, ' and relapsed into a thoughtful silence.

'I wonder,' the doctor put in generally, 'why we do these things? It's quite silly really when we could all stay comfortably and safely at home. Is it going to make anyone any happier or better to know that man can cross space if he wishes to? Yet here we arc doing it.'

,Joan's voice came from the window, surprising them.

'It is going to make us wiser. Don't you remember Cavor saying to Bedford in Wells' First Men in the Moon, "Think of the new knowledge!"?'

'Knowledge ,' said the doctor. 'Yes, I suppose that is it. For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living. I know I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity.'

'And finding that quite a lot of it goes bad on him,' put in Froud. The doctor nodded.

'You're right. It's far from imperishable. I suppose there is some purpose. What do you suppose will happen when one day a man sits back in his chair and says: "Knowledge is complete"? You see, it just sounds silly.

We're so used to collecting it, that we can't imagine a world where it is all collected and finished.'

He looked up, catching Dugan's eye, and smiled.

'You needn't look at me like that, Dugan. I'm not going off my rocker. Have a shot at it yourself. Why do you think we are out here in the middle of nothing?'

Dugan hesitated 'I don't know. I've never really thought about it, but I've a sort of feeling that people grow out of well, out of their conditions just as they grow out of their clothes. They have to expand.'

Joan's voice surprised them again as she asked Dugan:

'Did you ever read J. J. Astor's Journey to Other Worlds?'

'Never heard of him. Why?' Dugan asked.

'Only that he seemed to feel rather the same about it, right back in 1894, too. As far as I remember he said:

"Just as Greece became too small for the civilization of the Greeks, so it seems to me that the future glory of the human race lies in the exploration of at least the Solar System." Almost the same idea, you see.'

The doctor looked curiously at the girl.

'And is that your own view, too?'

'My own view? I don't know. I can't say that I have considered the underlying reasons for my being here; my immediate reasons are enough.'

'I'm sorry you won't confide them. I think you would find us interested.'

The girl did not reply. She had turned back to the window and was staring out into the blackness as though she had not heard. The doctor watched her thoughtfully for some moments before returning to the rest. Like Dale he was now quite certain that no mere whim had led her to board the Gloria Mundi, and he was equally at a loss to ascribe any satisfactory reason for her presence. His attention was recalled by Froud saying:

'Surely the cause of our being here really lies in our expectations of what we shall find on Mars. The doc is primarily a biologist, and his reason is easy to understand. I, as a journalist, am after news for its own sake.' 'Superficially that is true,' the doctor agreed, 'but I was wondering at the fundamental urge the source of that curiosity which has sent generation after generation doing things like this without seeming to know why. I suppose we all have our own ideas of what we shall find, but I don't mind betting that not one of those expectations, even if it is fulfilled, is a good enough cause, rationally speaking, for our risking our lives. I know mine isn't. I expect to find new kinds of flora. If I do, I shall be delighted, but and this is the point whether it proves useful or quite useless I shall be equally delighted at finding it. Which makes me ask again, why am I willing to risk my life to find it?'

Froud broke in as he paused:

'It is really the same as my reason. News gathering. The difference is that your news is specialized. We are all gatherers of news which is another name for knowledge so now we're back where you started.'

'Well, what do you expect to find?' the doctor asked him.

'I don't really know. I think most of all I want evidence of the existence of a race of creatures who built the Martian canals.'

Dugan broke in. 'Canals! Why, everybody knows that that was a misconception from the beginning. Schiaparelli just called them canali when he discovered them, and he meant channels. Then the Italian word was translated literally and it was assumed that he meant that they were artificial works. He didn't imply that at all.'

'I know that,' Froud said coldly. 'I learnt it at school as you did. But that doesn't stop me from considering them to be artificial.'

'But think of the work, man. It's impossible. They're hundreds of miles long, and lots of them fifty miles across, and the whole planet's netted with them. It just couldn't be done.'

'I admit that it's stupendous, but I don't admit that it's impossible. In fact, I contend that if the oceans of the Earth were to dry up and our only way of getting water was to drain it from the poles, we should do that very thing.'

'But think of the labour involved!'

'Self preservation always involves labour. But if you want to shake my faith in the theory that the Martian canals were intelligently constructed, all you have to do is to account for their formation in some other way. If you've got an idea which will explain nature's method of constructing straight, intersecting ditches of constant width and hundreds of miles in length, I'd like to hear it.'

Dugan looked to Dale for assistance, but the latter shook his head.

'I'm keeping an open mind. There's not enough evidence.'

'The straight lines are evidence enough for me,' Froud went on. 'Nature only abhors a vacuum in certain places, but she abhors a straight line anywhere.'

'Aye,' Burns agreed, emerging unexpectedly from his customary silence. 'She can't draw a straight line nor work from a plan. Hit and miss is her way an' a lot of time she wastes with her misses.'

'Then, like me, you expect to find traces of intelligent life?' the journalist asked him.

'I don't know, that's one of the things I'm hoping to find out. Though now you're asking me, I never did see why we should think that all God's creatures are to be found on one wee planet.'

'I'm with you there,' the doctor agreed. 'Why should they? It seems to me that the appearance of life is a feature common to all planets in a certain stage of decay. I'd go further. I'd say that it seems likely that in one system you will find similar forms of life. That is, that anywhere in the solar system you will find that life has a carbon basis for its molecules, while in other systems protoplasm may be unknown though life exists.'

'That's beyond me,' Dugan told him. 'Are you trying to lead up to a suggestion that there are, or were, men on Mars?'