The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (53 page)

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

George chuckled.

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

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

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

“Chlorophyll?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” said Mayor Whittaker, “in addition to storing the oxygen we’ve got to keep the air pressure at the correct value and to get rid of the CO2. You realize, don’t you, that the dome’s kept up purely by the internal pressure and hasn’t any other support at all?”

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

“Exactly. We keep 150 millimeters pressure in summer, a little more in winter. That gives almost the same oxygen pressure as in Earth’s atmosphere. And we remove the CO2 simply by letting plants do the trick. We imported enough for this job, since the Martian plants don’t go in for photosynthesis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think that’s enough for one day,” said Whittaker, “but I wanted to show you round because we’ll all be busy tomorrow and I won’t be able to spare much time. The Chief’s away, you know, and won’t be back until Thursday, so I’ve got to look after everything.”

“Where’s he gone?” asked Gibson, out of politeness rather than real interest.

“Oh, up to Phobos,” Whittaker replied, with the briefest possible hesitation. “As soon as he gets back he’ll be glad to see you.”

The conversation had then been interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Whittaker and family, and for the rest of the evening Gibson was compelled to talk about Earth. It was his first, but not by any means his last, experience of the insatiable interest which the colonists had in the home planet. They seldom admitted it openly, pretending to a stubborn indifference about the “old world” and its affairs. But their questions, and above all their rapid reactions to terrestrial criticisms and comments, belied this completely.

It was strange to talk to children who had never known Earth, who had been born and had spent all their short lives under the shelter of the great domes. What, Gibson wondered, did Earth mean to them? Was it any more real than the fabulous lands of fairy tales? All they knew of the world from which their parents had emigrated was at second hand, derived from books and pictures. As far as their own senses were concerned, Earth was just another star.

They had never known the coming of the seasons. Outside the dome, it was true, they could watch the long winter spread death over the land as the Sun descended in the northern sky, could see the strange plants wither and perish, to make way for the next generation when spring returned. But no hint of this came through the protecting barriers of the city. The engineers at the power plant simply threw in more heater circuits and laughed at the worst that Mars could do.

Yet these children, despite their completely artificial environment, seemed happy and well, and quite unconscious of all the things which they had missed. Gibson wondered just what their reactions would be if they ever came to Earth. It would be a very interesting experiment, but so far none of the children born on Mars were old enough to leave their parents.

The lights of the city were going down when Gibson left the Mayor’s home after his first day on Mars. He said very little as Whittaker walked back with him to the hotel, for his mind was too full of jumbled impressions. In the morning he would start to sort them out, but at the moment his chief feeling was that the greatest city on Mars was nothing more than an over-mechanized village.

Gibson had not yet mastered the intricacies of the Martian calendar, but he knew that the week-days were the same as on Earth and that Monday followed Sunday in the usual way. (The months also had the same names, but were fifty to sixty days in length.) When he left the hotel at what he thought was a reasonable hour, the city appeared quite deserted. There were none of the gossiping groups of people who had watched his progress with such interest on the previous day. Everyone was at work in office, factory, or lab, and Gibson felt rather like a drone who had strayed into a particularly busy hive.

He found Mayor Whittaker beleaguered by secretaries and talking into two telephones at once. Not having the heart to intrude, Gibson tiptoed away and started a tour of exploration himself. There was not, after all, any great danger of becoming lost. The maximum distance he would travel in a straight line was less than half a kilometer. It was not the kind of exploration of Mars he had ever imagined in any of his books….

So he had passed his first few days in Port Lowell wandering round and asking questions during working hours, spending the evenings with the families of Mayor Whittaker or other members of the senior staff. Already he felt as if he had lived here for years. There was nothing new to be seen; he had met everyone of importance, up to and including the Chief Executive himself.

But he knew he was still a stranger; he had really seen less than a thousand millionth of the whole surface of Mars. Beyond the shelter of the dome, beyond the crimson hills, over the edge of the emerald plain— all the rest of this world was mystery.

CHAPTER

9