The Martian Chronicles (part 4)

Men have come to Mars like a great wave upon its alien shore. But every wave must eventually recede. The settlers, looking up at the Earth from their porches think on the rumors they have heard about a coming war, and wondering what their families back home are doing. Then they see the speck of light that is Earth flare as if the whole planet has caught fire. Some time later comes the message:

AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT ATOMIZED IN PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES, LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME. COME HOME.

 Here I have to wonder: would news of a war on Earth -- especially a nuclear war -- spur people to return there? Wouldn't it instead lead to more refugees fleeing the destruction on Earth for safety on Mars? Or would, as Bradbury has it, the call of Home draw people back?

Walter Gripp misses the news. He's a prospector with a little shack and a mine up in the Blue Mountains and only comes into town every other week to see if he can find a quiet and intelligent woman to marry. He hasn't found one so far. Walter is something of a sexist, although I daresay many readers in 1950 would have found his attitudes about women quite normal.

Then one day he comes down from the hills to discover "The Silent Towns". All the people have fled. The rockets which once stood in the field on the edge of town are all gone, save for the scorch marks left when they launched.

For a few days he hangs around the empty town, helping himself to whatever he wants; but after a week this begins to pall. He's just about made up his mind to go back to his shack when he hears a phone ring.
It takes a moment for the implications of this to sink in. He's not alone! There's someone else left on Mars! But by the time he gets to the phone, she's hung up. She? Yes, Walter is certain that whoever it is must be a woman.

He waits for her to call again, but once again narrowly misses her. Then he finds a telephone directory and begins dialing numbers. On a hunch, he tries calling up beauty salons -- after all, where else would a woman be spending her time? -- and finally he strikes paydirt.

Her name is Genevieve Selsor and she's taken up residence in the largest beauty parlor in New Texas City. He hops into a car and drives the thousand miles from Marlin Village to New Texas to meet her; the Last Woman on Mars. And he's the Last Man on Mars. And finally, they meet.

She's not what he expected.

Another writer might have made Walter and Geneveive the Adam and Eve of a New World. Bradbury plays it for comedy. The Last Woman on Mars turns out to be the last woman Walter Gripp wants to be with. Their date goes awkwardly, and when Genevieve trots out a bridal gown she's scavenged for the occasion, Walter bolts.

A better, less shallow man might have learned to appreciate her and together they might have grown to love each other. But if he had been a better man, he probably wouldn't have chosen the life of a solitary miner.
He finds another town where he can sleep in the hotel beds and eat food from the restaurant's freezers. And he never, ever answers the phone.

Gripp is wrong about being the Last Man on Mars, though. There is at least one other. Hathaway had been a scientist with the Fourth Expedition to Mars, and he like Gripp, he was out in the back country when the War broke out and missed the last rocket home. Since then, he has spent "The Long Years" with his wife and children in a small house overlooking a neaby empty city.

His house has a laboratory attached, and he occupies himself by tinkering with things. He rigged up lights and devices in the city so that at night it would seem that the city was still alive, and it's sights and sounds would soothe him. And in the evenings he would talk with his family and tell them stories about Earth.

One night he sees the red streak of a rocket's tail in the sky and realizes that after all these years, Earthmen have finally come back. He sets fire to the city to get their attention.

The rocket is commanded by Captain Wilder, Hathaway's commander from Fourth Expedition. Wilder tried to lobby the government to protect Mars from over-exploitation, and for his pains was assigned to an expedition to the Outer Planets in order to get him out of the way. That was twenty years ago. Wilder has been to Jupiter, out to Pluto and now back.

In the 1979 TV miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles, screenwriter Richard Matheson compresses the timeline, so that this story takes place shortly after "The Off Season", which wrecks some of the punch and the mystery of this story and which bugged me at the time, but the compression served the overall narrative of the miniseries in other ways, so I suppose I can give it a pass. This story is also one of the ones adapted by EC Comics and included in the collection Tomorrow Midnight. In it, artist Joe Orlando gave Hathaway and his family medieval dress, giving the story a surreal fairy tale quality.

As Wilder and some of his crew who knew Hathaway from the old days chat with him, the Captain is struck by how little Hathaway's wife has aged. She looks as young as she did twenty years ago. Stranger yet, Hathaway's three children look the same age as well. Wilder has a suspicion and sends one of his men outside the house to check on something.

The crewman confirms Wilder's suspicion. He finds four crosses out back bearing the names of the wife and the children. "Died of an unknown virus. July 2007." Nineteen years ago. "Then, who are these!" the crewman asks. Wilder doesn't know, but tells him to keep the matter quiet for now.

At dinner, Hathaway proposes a toast with wine brought from the rocket. "A toast to all of you; it's good to be with friends again. And to my wife and children, without whom I couldn't have survived alone. It is only through their kindness and caring for me that I've lived on, waiting for your arrival."

But having stayed alive for this moment, now that the moment has arrived, his life goes as well. He suffers a heart attack. With his final words he asks Wilder to say good-bye to Alice and the children for him, but not to let them see his death. "They wouldn't understand. I wouldn't want them to understand!" Hathaway dies. Nunc dimittis.

(In this reading of Martian Chronicles I'm catching bits of religious imagery that I hadn't noticed before. In last week's "The Off Season", the seven scrolls given to Parkhill by the Martians reminded me of the Seven Seals from the Book of Revelation ushering in the Apocalypse. Hathaway's death, just as he sees something long awaited, has parallels as well: Moses on Mount Nebo, and Simeon in the Temple. I don't know how much of this Bradbury intended; Bradbury didn't avoid religion in his stories by any means, but when he did he dealt more with religious themes than with religious symbolism; so it might just be me making peculiar connections. For what it's worth, there it is.)

Wilder goes to comfort Hathaway's widow. He asks how she feels.

"He didn't want us to feel badly. He told us it would happen one day and he didn't want us to cry. So we're not to know what crying is, or being sad." 

Wilder glanced at her hands, the soft warm hands and the fine manicured nails and the tapered wrists. He saw her slender, smooth white neck and intelligent eyes. Finally he said, "Mr. Hathaway did a fine job on you and your children." 

"He would have liked to hear you say that. He was so proud of us. After a while he even forgot that he had made us. At the end he loved and took us as his real wife and children. And, in a way, we are."

Wilder and his men bury Hathaway; but what of his family? Bringing them back to Earth would be useless; turning them off would seem like murder. So they leave the family were there are.

  The story ends with the small house sitting under the cold stars overlooking the dead sea in which every night four figures sit and laugh and chat and tend the unneeded fire.

Which blends smoothly into the next story, perhaps one of Bradbury's best-known short stories, "There Will Come Soft Rains." This is another of Bradbury's stories which I first encountered in the collection Tomorrow Midnight of some of the classic comic book adaptations done by EC Comics. The adaptation was drawn by Wally Wood and opens with a chilling, wide splash panel of the side of a suburban house. But let Bradbury describe it:

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in goldeness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hand flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. 

The five spots of paint -- the man, the woman, the children, the ball - remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

He's describing a phenomenon noted after the Hiroshima bombing. The flash from the atomic explosion burned the buildings of the city, leaving shadows of the people standing in front of them seared into the walls. The town is dead; devastated by an atomic blast; but the house remains.

Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! ..."Today is August 4, 2026."

The house is still alive. It is automated, and like Hathaway's family on distant Mars, it performs its programmed tasks to take care of its family, even after the people have died. The story takes us through a day in the life of that house, from the morning when the gentle voice of the clock tells the family to wake up and the kitchen appliances produces four plates of breakfast, through the other little routines of the day. Coats and galoshes appropriate for the day's weather are produced. The garage door is opened for Dad to pull out the car, then automatically closes. Tiny robots clean up the breakfast dishes.

At noon, a dog appears on the porch, which the front door recognizes and lets in. The dog has somehow escaped the bomb, but is now sickly and emaciated. It frantically searches the house for its family, as the robot mice trail behind, cleaning up the dirt its tracked into the house. At two o'clock, ill and exhausted, the dog dies. By two-fifteen, the house has cleared away the mess.

In the afternoon, card tables and martinis are produced to entertain guests who will never come. After school, the children's room comes alive like the fantastic nursery Bradbury later wrote about in "The Veldt."
At nine o'clock, the beds are prepared. The house asks which poem the family would like to have read before bedtime. Receiving no answer, the house picks one by Sara Teasdale at random, the poem from which the story takes its title, which describes nature going on after mankind has disappeared.

During the night, the wind blows a tree branch through the kitchen window. A bottle of cleaning fluid breaks over the stove and ignites, setting the house on fire.

The house calls out an alarm to rouse the family and activates its protocols to put out the fire. We witness a battle fought as if by two opposing armies: the fire, clever and relentless, and the house determinedly using every tool and device at its disposal. The flames rip through the walls; the appliances go haywire. Finally the house's structure is so weakened that the attic collapses.

The fire is defeated, but the victory is a Pyrrhic one. Only one wall of the house remains. And as the sun rises on the pile of rubble and steam, a voice repeats: "Today is August 3, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."

Mankind has not completely perished on Earth, as it has in the Teasdale poem, but the end cannot be far.

A rocket lands on Mars carrying young Timothy and his family. They are on a fishing trip, his parents said; a vacation. "How far are we going?" Timothy's brother Robert asks. Their Dad replies, "A million years." Timothy's family have embarked on "The Million-Year Picnic."

As they take their motorboat up the canal away from their rocket, little Michael wants to know if they're going to see any Martians. Dad assures him that they will. "Quite soon, perhaps. Maybe tonight."

Dad is acting funny. He keeps making these grim and world-weary comments about war and things. And he keeps watching the skies, as if afraid someone might be coming after them. And he keeps listening to the radio, for something. An explosion behind them makes him jump before he laughs at the realization that it was their own rocket. He rigged their own rocket to explode. Timothy figures it part of the game, whatever game Dad is playing, but doesn't really understand why.

Dad puts away the radio and announces that the last broadcast station on Earth has gone down. Over the last twenty years of war, civilization on Earth has become more and more ragged as cities were obliterated and the infrastructure collapsed. Now, it seems, the lights have finally gone out.

Dad shifts back to his cheerful, holiday mood. "Mike, pick a city," he says. "Pick the one you like the most. You too, Robert and Tim." There are several empty cities on the canal. Michael wants one with Martians in it, and Dad promises that he'll get them.

The family chooses a large, relatively intact Martian city, and Dad moors their motorboat on one of its piers. "This is where we live from now on."

Now Dad starts to explain. Years ago, seeing how badly things were going on Earth, he managed to hide away a rocket in a secret place against this day, so that when the time was right he could bring his family to Mars; away from the wars and the insanity of Earth; so that they could begin a new life. One of his friends has done the same and will be bringing his wife and daughters; Dad will be hooking up with them once they've gotten themselves established.

"Is this really our city?" Michael asks. "The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids," Dad replies. "The whole darn planet."

In last week's readings, I suggested that the Martians in "The Off Season" might have had a special reason for giving Parkhill the deeds to half of Mars. In Richard Matheson's screenplay for the 1979 TV miniseries adaptation, Captain Wilder visits Parkhill afterwards, and guesses that the Martians knew about the imminent nuclear war and that they were were giving the remnant of humanity permission to stay since Earth too would soon be a dead world. Bradbury does explicitly say this in the book, but I think it's a fair interpretation. In the miniseries Wilder is the one who brings his family on this picnic.

That evening, Dad brings out a stack of papers he brought with him from Earth: "GOVERNMENT BONDS; Business Graph, 1999; Religious Prejudice: An Essay; The Science of Logistics; Problems of the Pan-American Unity; Stock Report for July 3, 1998; The War Digest..." One by one, he burns them, as if performing a ritual.

"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. ... Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from."

Bradbury once told an interviewer that he wasn't trying to predict the future in his writings as much as prevent it. Some have accused Bradbury of becoming conservative in his old age, and perhaps he did. But there always has been a strain of the romantic reactionary in his writing that echoes the line by William F. Buckley about the Conservative standing athwart History yelling "Stop!" At the same time, though, the things that dismayed him about Modern Progress are precisely the things that present-day conservatives passionately embrace: militarism, the culture of disposable consumerism and the headlong chase for profit.

  The last thing Dad tosses into the fire is a map of the World. Then announces, "Now I'm going to show you the Martians."

He takes his family back down to the canal.

"I've always wanted to see a Martian," said Michael. "Where are they, Dad? You promised." 

"There they are," said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. 

The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver. 

The martians were there -- in the canal -- reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. 

The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water...

We've seen Martians becoming humans. Now the reverse happens; the Humans are now the Martians. We remember the encounter between Tomás and the Martian in "Night Meeting" in which the Martian challenges his perception of which is the Past and with is the Present, which Matheson's adaptation placed near the end to emphasize this thought.

  The book ends with a hopeful note. If the Martians had a wiser and better society, perhaps the New Martians might grow into such a culture too.

The Martian Chronicles (part 3)

Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave was different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads. and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and prairies as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes. They were the first men.

 Many have come to Mars fleeing oppression, as we saw last week. But oppression takes many forms. And it is inevitable that once the initial wave of settlers have established themselves and made the planet safe, the bureaucrats will follow.

Stendahl is an eccentric millionaire and something of a troublemaker as far as the Authorities are concerned. He has spent a sizable chunk of his fortune to construct a haunted house on Mars, populated by cybernetic ghouls, ghosts and monsters. He specifically modeled his house after the one in Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher", so we can call it "Usher II".

Such a thing would not be allowed on Earth. It has been many years since the Great Burning, in which all works of fantastic literature was destroyed, even Stendahl's own secret library. Astute readers will recognize this as the premise of Bradbury's first novel, Farenheit 451.

"They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."

But in this story, the Public Guardians were not censoring pornography, or violence or heresy, whether religious or political; they have outlawed the imagination; they have banned escapism.

  Bradbury was among the first science fiction writers to escape the ghetto of the pulps and sell his stories to the more prestigious "slick" magazines, and he felt very keenly the literary snobbishness against genre writing. And although the Senate Subcommittee investigation in 1954 into the effects of comic books on juvenile delinquency which led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority was still in the future when Bradbury wrote this story, the attitudes and environment from which the culture of censorship grew was very much evident. I don't know if Bradbury ever read J.R.R. Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy-Stories", but I'm sure that he would have agreed with Tolkien's observation that the class of people most likely to be threatened by escapism are the jailers.

When the Moral Guardians of Earth arrive on Mars, Stendahl builds his haunted house. And plans his revenge.

He holds a housewarming part and invites all the rich, respectable, upstanding citizens, who have newly arrived on the planet, now that Mars has been safely tamed. It is a costume ball -- itself something scandalous and borderline illegal on Earth -- and the entertainment is downright shocking. The guests get to watch robot duplicates of themselves being killed in grotesque and picturesque fashions: strangled by orangutans and sliced by giant pendulums.

Garrett, the policeman from Moral Climates sent to to investigate Stendahl, is revolted. Stendahl offers him another drink to steady his nerve, and invites him into the cellar to show him something. And for the Amontillado. The reader can guess where this is going, but Garrett doesn't; not until Stendahl chains him to a wall and begins bricking him in.

Garrett asks where his robot duplicate is, but Stendahl tells him there isn't one. None of the people gruesomely murdered upstairs were robots; they were the real guests, killed as the robots watched.

"Garrett," called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. "Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garret."

Or you could call it, (heh heh), Poetic Justice.

  Less melodramatic, but no less creepy is the story "The Martian." Old LaFarge and his wife Anna are an elderly couple now living on Mars. In a way, the illusory town created by the Martians in "Mars is Heaven!" has come true, as the Earth colonists have imported lumber and built new communities; as if, Bradbury says in one of the lyrical transitionary passages between the stories, an earthquake had shaken loos the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried it off to Mars.

One dark and stormy night, LaFarge thinks he sees a small boy, standing out in the rain, who looks very much like their son, Tom, who died many years ago, back on Earth. Not quite believing his eyes, LaFarge leaves the door unlatched, just in case.

The next morning he finds Tom coming into the parlor, doing morning chores, just as if he had been always living with them.

LaFarge thinks he must be dreaming. "Tom, how did you get here? You're alive?"

"Shouldn't I be? ... You do want me to be here, don't you?" LaFarge certainly does. "Then why ask questions? Accept me!" The reader will remember the grandmother from "Mars is Heaven!" who asks, "Who are you to question what happens?" And in many ways, "The Martian" is "Mars Is Heaven" turned inside-out.

Anna has already accepted Tom's presence; she has even seemingly forgotten that he had ever died. Perhaps it is better not to ask any questions; but LaFarge does wonder.

When Tom goes out that afternoon, he does not return for a long while. When he does, he explains that he went near the town and almost didn't come back. "I was almost -- trapped. ... I was almost made so I couldn't come back here ever again to see you." LaFarge doesn't understand, but the boy doesn't want to talk about it and so he lets the matter drop.

Shortly afterwards, a neighbor tells him about Normland, the fellow who lives in the tin hut down by the canal. According to rumor, Normland left Earth because he killed a man. Well about a couple hours ago, Normland came running into town claiming that he had seen the man he had killed alive and here on Mars. He begged to be locked up for his own protection, but they wouldn't; so he went back to his tin hut and committed suicide. "The damndest things happen."

That evening, Anna suggests that the family go into town. "Haven't been there in months," she says. Tom, strangely enough, seem apprehensive. He doesn't want to go; but his mother insists.

The old man looked at him steadily, wondering. Who is this, he thought, in need of love as much as we? Who is he and what is he that, out of loneliness, he comes into the alien camp and assumes the voice and face of memory and stands among us, accepted and happy at last?

In the back of his mind LaFarge has a nagging worry that it's wrong to keep him; but at the same time, Tom's seeming return has brought them so much joy, Anna especially, that LaFarge can't see how they could bear losing him again.

  Coming into the town, Tom seems afraid of the crowds, and he tries to stay close by his parents. Then they become separated in a crowd and suddenly Tom is gone.

LaFarge goes off looking for him. He meets another friend who tells him the news about Joe Spaulding and his wife. They had lost their daughter Lavinia about a month ago, she was presumed drowned; but Lavinia turned up unexpectedly, just that evening.

He hurries to the Spaulding home and sees an eighteen year old girl out on the porch. "I'm not your son anymore," the girl tells him sadly. "I'm sorry, but what can I do? I'm loved, even as you loved me." Tom has been caught. "The thoughts are too strong in this house; it's like being imprisoned. I can't change myself back."

LaFarge insists that he has to come back because Anna needs him. But the Spauldings need their Lavinia too. Is LaFarge being selfish? Yes. But he also understands now a little bit of what is going on. He argues that living as Tom with them alone out in the country will be safer for him than living with the Spauldings surrounded by other people.

Is it the argument that convinces him, or the close proximity to LaFarge's memories and emotional needs? Whichever it is, he is Tom again and with LaFarge flees the house. But they are spotted as they run, and each person who sees Tom sees somebody else: Spaulding sees his daughter, a policeman sees an escaped criminal, a woman sees her lost husband.

Let me jump briefly to a digression. In the 1979 TV miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles, screenwriter Richard Matheson inserted an interesting pause into this story, based on another Bradbury story. Tom takes refuge in the town's chapel, where Father Peregrine is praying. Father Peregrine is a priest who came to Mars hoping to bring the Gospel to the surviving Martian in "The Fire-Balloons", a story not included in the original Chronicles, but added in some later editions. In "The Messiah", a sequel to that story, Father Peregrine at his prayers sees what at first he takes to be a vision of Christ. but is actually the fugitive, taking the form of the Christ of Peregrine's imagination. But when Peregrine envisions Christ, he sees a man dying in agony on a cross -- eternally dying. The tortured apparition pleads with the Father to let him go, that he is not really what he appears to be. Intellectually, Father Peregrine understands, but emotionally he finds it difficult to let go of the physical manifestation of his God. In the end, however, he does.

Before Tom can get to the boat in the canal where Anna and LaFarge wait for him, he is overtaken and surrounded by the crowd. He is like the boggart in Harry Potter, except that instead of becoming what a person fears, he becomes what that person desires; and surrounded by so many people with so many conflicting memories and yearnings he does not know what to do next.

Tom screamed. 

Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. 

"Tom!" cried LaFarge. "Alice!" another. "William!" They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell.

Overwhelmed and overloaded, he dies. Anna and her husband return home alone.

  There are still a few Martians left. Tom was one, although he is never explicitly identified as such in "The Martian", apart from the story's title. Another one appears to Sam Parkhill in "The Off Season".

Parkhill was one of the men of the Fourth Expedition, commanded by Captain Wilder. He was kind of a boor and a jerk in that story. At the end of it, Wilder, forced by duty to kill Spender, catches Parkhill taking pot-shots at the windows of a Martian city and knocks his teeth out.

Since then, Parkhill has done pretty well for himself. Wilder, keeping his promise to Spender, had tried to lobby the government to protect the Martian cities and preserve the remains of the Martian civilization; and for his pains his superiors kicked him upstairs and assigned him to a deep space expedition to Jupiter which will keep him out of everybody's hair for decades.

Parkhill, though, was smart. He left the service, saved up his money, and now he is about to open the first fast-food restaurant on Mars: a hot-dog stand, located on the main highway connecting an important mining operation that has just opened up with the nearest town. They're expecting thousands of new workers to be coming to Mars, and Parkhill expects to hit it big. "Best hot dogs on two worlds!" His wife is less confident. There have been rumors lately about political tensions back on Earth and maybe a big war coming.

As he is preparing for his grand opening, a Martian shows up in his shop. This is the second time today the Martain has appeared. "I thought I told you I don't want you near here!" Sam yells.

The Martian insists that he means Parkhill no harm, but that he is here for an important reason. "We Martians are telepathic. ...We are in contact with one of your towns across the dead sea. Have you listened on your radio?"

Actually, Sam hasn't. His radio's busted. But he doesn't like these Martian showing up, and maybe is a little frightened of them. He tries threatening the Martian off with a gun. The Martian responds by drawing out a bronze tube.

The reader who has seen The Day the Earth Stood Still can guess what happens next. The copper tube isn't a weapon; but Parkhill shoots first just in case. The Martian collapses in a pile of bones and silvery robes. Sam killed him.

His wife examines the tube. It contains some kind of message, written in Martian pictographs. Parkhill insists that he thought it was a weapon and that he was fully within his rights to Stand His Ground. Still, he decides to bury the remains out back where no one will find them.

Then his wife spots something coming across the ancient seabed: Martian sand ships. Parkhill didn't know there were any of them left; he bought one of the few the government hadn't confiscated and has it in a shed in the back. But the ships are coming towards his hot dog stand and they're not looking for a Chicago-style chili-dog.

Parkhill try to flee the Martians in his own sand ship, but the Martians are gaining on him. One appears on his ship, quietly entreating him to listen. He shoots the Martian. He shoots at the ancient crystalline cities they pass, which shatter in a shower of broken glass and quartz. He shoots at the pursuing ships which likewise disintegrate. But there are more ships which overtake his and he finally finds himself surrounded by grim, robed figures in alien masks.

Yet the Martians have no desire to harm him. "Ready your stand ... Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight is indeed a great night!"

The Martians have a gift for him; a silver scroll, and six more, each granting claim to thousands of miles of Martian territory. Seven scrolls. Where have I heard that before? Parkhill misses the reference too; all he knows is that he now owns half of Mars. Half of Mars!

"Tonight is the night" the Martian says, "You must be ready ... We leave you. Prepare. The land is yours."
And the Martians go; just like that.

Parkhill is delighted. This can only mean one thing: thousands of rockets coming, bearing thousands of workers, thousands of settlers, thousands of tourists. He'll be rich! But his wife draws his attention to the Earth, rising over the evening Martian hills. As they watch, the blue-green speck flares in brilliance, as if the entire planet had caught fire.

The Atomic War long feared has broken out on Earth. There won't be any rockets coming anymore.
Why did the Martians do this? By itself, the story reads like an episode of the Twilight Zone where a big blowhard becomes the butt of a cosmic joke and Rod Serling stands smirking to one side; but in the greater context of the overall narrative, I think the Martians had another reason, which we'll get to next week. For now, we have Sam Parkhill sitting in an empty hot dog stand, the owner of half a planet's worth of worthless real estate.

NEXT:  The Exiles Called Back Home, The Silent Cities, The Long Years and the Return of Wally Wood. Pack your basket for the Million-Year Picnic!

The Martian Chronicles (part 2)

After several failed expeditions, man has finally reached Mars. Now come the settlers.

They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or they did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or big dreams or none at all.

And as they arrive, as Spender predicted, they set about trying to remake Mars in their own image.

Benjamin Driscoll in "The Green Morning" arrives at a Martian mining colony looking for work, but almost is sent back home. Nearly the moment he set foot on the planet, he fainted. "The air's pretty thin," the doctor who revives him explains. "Some can't take it."

But Driscoll is determined. He wants to make a life for himself on Mars, and if the air is a problem, then he'll do something about the air. There are no trees on Mars as far as he can see, and he reasons that if there were more plant life, if would produce more oxygen and make the planet more liveable.

He acquires a motorcycle and as many seeds as he can find and takes on the task of planting trees across the valley, like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed. It's a thankless task, and seemingly doomed to failure. But the Planet Mars has wonders and surprises in store for Driscoll beyond his wildest hopes.

"Everything's crazy up here,"says the old man Tomás Gomez meets at a filling station in "Night Meeting", "the soil, the air, the canals, the natives (I never saw any yet, but I hear they're around), the clocks. ... Even time is crazy up here."

Tomás finds out just how crazy that night when he parks his truck near an ancient ruined town to rest. He encounters a Martian, coming down the ancient highway. Cautiously, they greet each other; at first having difficulty understanding one another. But when Tomás offers the Martian a cup of coffee, the cup passes through the Martian's hand like mist.

Tomás can see the stars through the Martian's body; and the Martian can see through Tomás.

The Martian must be a ghost. After all, Tomás knows that all the Martians died in the plague. No, the Martian insists that he is alive and that Tomás must be the ghost. "I'm on my way to a festival now at the canal," the Martian says. "Don't you see the city there?"

"Why, that city's been dead thousands of years," Tomás says. Where the Martain sees clean streets and festival lights, beautiful women and canals flowing with wine, Tomás sees only dust and ruins; where Tomás sees rocket ships and the town built by the colonists, the Martian sees an empty plain.

There can be only one explaination. "It has to do with Time," the Martian says. "Yes. You are a figment of the Past."

"No, you are from the Past," Tomás insists. But can he really be sure?

"Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilzation one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds."

They part as friends, not knowing if they will ever meet again, or even if the whole encounter was nothing more than a dream.

This story sets up a counter-theme to Spender's view of the Martian civilization as older and wiser than ours, alien and unfathomable. Tomás and his Martian meet as equals and they have a great deal in common. Bradbury plays some more with this theme of Earthmen and Martians exchanging places elsewhere.

Although I tend to associate Bradbury with small Midwestern towns, he moved with his family to Southern California when he was a teen and he also developed a love for the Hispanic people and culture. Last week we read Spender worrying that the Earth men on Mars will act just like a bunch of clueless American tourists in Mexico. Tomás is one of several Latino characters who appear in various stories of his.

"Way in the Middle of the Air" is another oddity in the book. It's not set on Mars, it's not about Martians. It's about race relations.

In a small southern town the news spreads like wildfire: "The niggers ... them leaving, pulling out, going away." Somehow, all the blacks have managed to pool their resources to build their own rockets in secret and are all going to Mars, every last one of them.

Sam Teece, owner of the local hardware store is outraged. "Could they do that? Ain't there a law?" he demands as he and his friends watch the exodus of black folk passing by his shop. "Telephone the governor, call out the militia ... They should have given notice!"

He rails against the blacks and mocks them, predicting that their rockets will blow up and kill them all.

"I can't figure why they left now. With things lookin' up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here's the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin' anti-lynchin; bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go."

They meet his verbal abuse with quiet dignity, deferential but determined. When he sees a man who owes him fifty dollars, he tries to force the man to stay. Several other black folk pass around a hat to pay off his debt.

He tries to hold his stockboy, Silly, on the grounds of a "contract" Silly supposedly signed to work for him. The kid begs to be released from the agreement and suggest that one of the other gentlemen hanging around the porch of the hardware shop could take over his job.

Teece is outraged. "You meanin' to say you think a white man should take your place, boy?"

Teece's friends have said very little during all this. They're not necessarily any less bigoted that Teece is, but they recognize that he's just being petty and spiteful. The oldest one, Grandpa, offers to take Silly's place. The others seem embarassed by Teece, and urge him to let the boy go. "What's the use? ... Cut it out, Teece ... Let him go."

Teece relents. He mocks the blacks and their rockets. "You got one named Swing Low and another named Sweet Chariot? ... You got one named Roll Dem Bones? ... And another called Over Jordon?"

"We got names for the ships, Mr. Teece," Silly replies simply. But as he climbs into his family's car to drive off to the rockets, he has one parting shot for his former boss:

"Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what you goin' to do nights from now on? What you going to do nights, Mr. Teece?"

It takes Teece a minute or two for him to realize what he meant. No more lynching.

It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes, what will we do nights? he thought. Now they're gone, what? He was absolutely empty and numb.

The fact is that Teece needs the blacks -- firmly kept in their place -- so he can have someone to whom he feels superior. That's why he doesn't want to give Silly's job to anyone else. He wouldn't be able to bully a white man.

Teece gets out his pistol and into his car to kill the uppity kid, but he is too late. They have all escaped, hopefully for a new and better life on another world.

Bradbury wrote another story titled "The Other Foot". Although it isn't included in the original printing of The Martian Chronicles, it could be considered a sequel to this story. In it, Mars is settled largely by blacks.

One day a rocket arrives with white refugees from Earth looking for a place to live. As the title says, now the shoe is on the other foot, and some of the people consider treating the newcomers with the same racism and discrimination that their own ancestors endured in the 20th Century. But here Bradbury is an optimist, and they decide to break the pattern of racism.


NEXT: Edgar Allen Poe's Revenge, an Elderly Couple's Dream Come True, and the First Hot Dog Stand on Mars

The Martian Chronicles (part 1)

The funny thing is, Ray Bradbury didn't consider himself a science fiction writer.

"First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. ... Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy."

There's something to what he said; but Bradbury, growing up in Waukegan Illinois in the 1920s, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, and later writing for the types of magazines he had devoured as a boy, drew upon the images and devices of science fiction for many of his tales of wonder.

The Martian Chronicles is one of his best-known works. Published in 1950, it strings together several of his previously-published short stories set on the Red Planet into an overall narrative of humans coming to explore Mars, then settle it, and eventually withdraw to set the stage for a new phase of life.

The book opens with a vignette about a rocket launch. Bradbury places these scenes throughout the book; short, often lyrical interludes that serve to bridge the stories which make up the meat of the narrative. But we don't see the rocket launch from Mission Control, through the eyes of steely-eyed missile men with mathematically-calibrated crew-cuts. No, we see the impact on a small Ohio town adjacent to the launch site, where icicles hang from the roofs and children play with sleds and housewives lumber down the sidewalk in their winter coats. Then a wave of heat from the rocket's launch passes over the town, briefly turning the Ohio winter into summer.

Ohio? Who launches space expeditions from Ohio? I suppose I'm one to talk; my own home town in the Enchanted Land-O-Cheese boasts a modest aerospace and rocketry museum with the goal of someday being the nucleus of a commercial rocket site. But this is vintage Bradbury. The small Midwestern town in which he grew up is never far from his thoughts, and the Waukegan of his youth reappears in various guises throughout the book.

If Bradbury were a science fiction writer, rather than a writer influenced by science fiction, he probably would have described the first rocket to Mars; how it was built, the men who piloted it, their voyage across the depths of interplanetary space. That's what the Belgian cartoonist Hergé did with his Tintin adventure Explorers on the Moon. But having done that, he never sent Tintin into space again. He'd already told that story; a second Moon voyage for Tintin, or even a new one to Mars, would have just been repeating himself.
The Martian Chronicles isn't about how we get to Mars; it's about what happens to us when we get there; how we change it, and how it changes us, sometimes without us even going there.

Which is why we see the story of the first Men on Mars from the point of view of the Martians.

"Ylla", the first full story, is probably the most exotic of the collection. We see a Martian couple, with their cinnamon-brown skin and their gold coin eyes in their heliotropic house on the shores of the fossil sea. They have wine trees in their yard and they cook over pools of silver lava. But although the externals of their live are strange, the essentials are achingly familiar. Mrs. K. may clean the house by scattering magnetic dust to pick up the dirt, and Mr. K. may relax by passing his fingertips over the raised musical hieroglyphics on a fine metal sheet, but it's still the wife doing the housework and the husband reading the paper. More importantly, Mr. and Mrs. K. have grown apart as their marriage has settled into a dull complacency.

Then Mrs. K. begins having dreams. Strange, waking dreams about a man with unnaturally blue eyes and the preposterous name of Nathaniel York. He claims to come from the third planet -- absurd, her husband says; everyone knows that planet has too much oxygen to support life. But the Martians are telepathic, and Mrs. K. has been picking up thoughts from the human explorers on the rocket heading to Mars.

This is something that reminded me of a bit from A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle. In the "War of Nerves" story, the Beagle encountered a race of telepathic aliens, and Korita, the ship's historian, suggested that universal telepathy might make a race settled and complacent, overly-stable. The contact with the alien thoughts of the strange earthmen disturbs their ordered society. And on a smaller scale, that is what happens here.

Mrs. K. becomes fascinated by the thoughts coming from the exotic stranger from another world. It's a theme not uncommon in pulp science fiction; the Alien Female becomes attracted to the Handsome Earthman. But usually the Space Babe is an Alien Princess, not a bored and lonely housewife.

Mrs. K.'s husband becomes increasingly jealous as he hears his wife singing songs from another world -- love songs -- and catches her gazing out at the night sky. And so on the evening the rocket ship from Earth lands, he takes matters into his own hands. He arranges a pretext to force his wife to stay at home that day, and in the evening announces that he's going to go out hunting for a bit.

Bradbury does not explicitly tell us what Mr. K. does when he goes out. He does not need to. When he returns, his wife is trying to remember the strange alien song she had been singing, but it's gone; and she cannot explain why she feels a need to cry.

The First Expedition never reports back to Earth.

By contrast, the second tale, "The Earth Men," plays out as a dark comedy. It is markedly different in tone from the other stories in the volume, which I suspect is a big part of the reason why it was omitted from the TV miniseries based on the novel. It doesn't quite fit with the other tales.

The Second Expedition lands on Mars and is surprised that none of the natives take any notice of them; in fact, the natives seem annoyed. Captain Williams tries to get the locals to pay attention to this historic first meeting between the two worlds, but the Martians pass them off from one bureaucrat to another.

It takes a while for Williams and his crew to figure out what's going on. The Martians, they have learned are telepathic. But what happens when a telepath hallucinates? The Martians Williams meets simply assume that he is insane and that his non-Martian physical appearance and his rocket ship are delusions which have taken the form of telepathic illusions. Unfortunately, Williams does not figure this out until he and his men are shut up in a mental institution, along with other lunatics who think they're from the Third Planet.

He tries to persuade the psychiatrist treating them that they are not insane, that they are truly from Earth. The doctor allows Williams to give him a tour of the rocket ship, but the physical solidity of the rocket only convinces Mr. Xxx that Williams is such an advanced psychotic that the only cure is euthanasia. When the rocket fails to vanish when Mr. Xxx shoots Willliams and his crewmen, he can only conclude that he has now also been contaminated by the delusion and that he too is insane. And that there is only one cure...

I first encountered the story of "The Third Expedition" in Tomorrow Midnight, a collection of Bradbury stories that had been adapted by EC Comics, under it's original title "Mars Is Heaven!" EC published several very good adaptations of Bradbury tales. He caught them plagiarizing the first one they did, but instead of suing them, he came to an agreement to allow them to continue. EC got the prestige of having Bradbury's name associated with their comics, and Bradbury got some of his best stories illustrated by some of the best comic book artists in the business. "Mars Is Heaven!" was illustrated by Wally Wood, one of the comics legends of the 1950s and a man who could draw some incredible rockets.

Two expeditions sent to Mars had mysteriously failed. Now a third one lands and finds something completely unexpected. They find Waukegan, Illinois. Well, not by that name, but they find a small Midwestern town, right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with Victorian houses, porch swings, geraniums on the windowsill and a piano somewhere playing "Beautiful Dreamer." In fact, it looks exactly like the small town Captain Black, the leader of the expedition grew up in back in the 1920s.

Is it a case of parallel evolution? Did Williams or York from the previous expeditions build this town? Is this a colony established by a secretive group who developed space flight during the McKinley Administration? Or has Black and his crew traveled backwards in time and they actually are in Green Bluff Illinois in the year 1926? Black and his crew raise every theory they can think of, but none of them make sense.

Then one of the men sees his grandparents. Grandparents who have been dead for thirty years.

"Who are we to question what happens?" the grandma says as she offers the explorers iced tea in her parlor. ""Here we are. What's life anyway?" She lets Captain Black fell her wrist. "Solid, ain't it?" She is definitely not a ghost.

More people have come out into the town square, families and friends, long departed, of the rocket's crew. The crew has been trapped in the rocket for many long months during their voyage, and they rush out to greet them. Black has a mutiny on his hands, but before he can order his men back to the ship he meets someone from his own past: his brother Edward. Edward is just as young as he was when he died at the age of twenty-six. "Mom's waiting ... And Dad too."

Black's family welcome him warmly. They embrace him, and take him home. They spend a wonderful evening together. He goes to bed that night in his old room in his old bed, just as he and Edward did when they were little.

Lying in bed, unable to sleep for all the wonderful things that had happened, a funny thought occurs to him. What if...

What if there were Martians, and the martians watched their rocket approach with fear and hatred; and wanted to destroy the Earthmen, but could not withstand their guns and atomic weapons? What if the Martians used telepathy and hypnosis to make it appear that there was an ordinary Midwestern town here and create the illusion of all their beloved family members still alive? What better way to lull the invading Earthmen into lowering their guard?

Black suddenly decides that he really needs to return to his rocket.

But by then, it's too late. And Earth loses contact with the Third Expedition.

After three unsuccessful missions to Mars, the final one seems almost anticlimactic. In "--And The Moon Be Still As Bright" the Fourth Expedition lands on an empty world. The martians are all gone.
Their cities are there, gleaming spires of exquisite architecture, but they are all lifeless. The Martians the expedition's survey crew finds are all dead; wiped out by a virulent plague. The most recent corpses they find have been dead no more than ten days. The entire Martian civilization has been wiped out... by chicken pox.
It's hard to imagine that Bradbury wasn't thinking of the way European diseases laid waste to the Native American population in our history; and undoubtedly he had War of the Worlds in the back of his mind as well.

Obviously, at least one of the previous expeditions made it to Mars after all. "Chances are, a few of the Martians, if they were smart, Escaped to the mountains," one of the scouts says. "But there aren't enough, I'll lay you money, to be a native problem."

The men have been keyed up for landing for months, and several of them want to celebrate their safe arrival, but one of the men, Spender, feels deeply moved by the beautiful, stately, ancient civilization that now lies extinct due to a stupid accident, a child's disease, a disease that doesn't even kill children on Earth!

He watches with disfavor as his comrades party. One of them, Biggs, gets drunk and tosses his empty bottle a nearby canal. Spender loses his temper and punches Biggs, knocking him into the canal.

Captain Wilder, the expedition leader, reprimands Spender; but empathizes with how he feels. He tries to calm Spender, but Spender frets that mankind will end up ripping Mars apart, trying to change it to suit themselves.

"We won't ruin Mars," said the captian. "It's too big and too good." 

"You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose."

The party continues in a somewhat more subdued manner. Spender is moved to remember a poem by Lord Byron, from which the story's title comes, which he thinks fits the Martian city and how the Martians, if any survive, must feel. At Wilder's urging, he recites the poem.

Then Biggs ruins the moment by hurling.

Spender walks away from the camp and into the dead Martian city.

He is missing for over a week and none of the search parties Wilder sends out find him. Then one day he shows up again. "I'm the last Martian," he tells Biggs, coming across him alone by the canal. Then he shoots him.

Coming into the camp, Spender meets four more of his comrades. "I've been finding out things," he says. "What would you say if I said I'd found a Martian prowling around?"

"Let me ask you a question. How would you feel if you were a Martian and people came to your land and started tearing it up?" 

"I know exactly how I'd feel," said Cheroke. "I've got some Cherokee blood in me. My grandfather told me lots of things about Oklahoma Territory. If there's a Martian around, I'm all for him."

Spender goes on to tell a story about finding a Martian in the dead city and learning his language, and how one day the Martian appeared to him and said "Give me your boots."

"And I gave him my boots and he said, 'Give me your uniform and all the rest of your apparel.' And I gave him all of that, and then he said, 'Give me your gun,' and I gave him my gun. Then he said, 'Now come along and watch what happens.' And the Martian walked down into the camp and he's here now." 

"I don't see any Martian," said Cheroke. 

"I'm sorry." 

Spender took out his gun. It hummed softly.

He kills three of the men, and offers Cheroke the chance to come with him. Cheroke refuses. "You're crazy!"
Spender kills him as well.

The enormity of what he has done shakes him. He gathers up some supplies and leaves the camp to return to the dead Martian city.

Wilder and the others come for him soon. They find his position and surround him. After some initial gunfire, Wilder comes out under a flag of truce. The two men sit down to talk.

"Why did you do it?" Wilder asks.

"Because I've seen what these Martians had was just as good as anything we'll hope to have. They've stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'd be glad to call them my ancestors. ...
"Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez."

He intended to kill off the entire expedition, but he lost his nerve. He's recovered it now. His plan is to kill off the rest. That should delay the next expedition at least a few years. And when the next one comes, he'll be ready to meet them and kill them too. And then the next, and the next, until Earth finally decides it's not worthwhile trying to colonize Mars.

He goes on to rhapsodize on what he's learned, about how the Martians had figured out how to live in a balance with each other and with their world; how to combine their science and their religion into a harmonious whole.

Wilder does understand. But he also has a duty to his men and his mission. Spender offers him too the chance to stay with him, but Wilder declines. Wilder offers him one last chance to surrender quietly. Spender also declines.

"One last thing," Spender says. "If you do win, do me a favor. See what can be done to restrict tearing this planet apart, at least for fifty years, until the archaeologists have had a decent chance, will you?"

In the end, Spender is killed, shot by Wilder, in part to give him a clean death before his vengeful men blew Spender's brains out.

Or is he dead? The TV adaptation of the book brought up an interesting thought which I missed when I first read it as a kid. Was it really Spender, or was it a Martian posing as Spender? Looking back at the story, you can read it either way.

But whoever he is, the Last Martian is no more. Mars now belongs to Men.


NEXT:  The coming of the Settlers; a Night Meeting; the Revenge of Edgar Poe and more!

Welcome to the Red Planet

The planet Mars has always had a peculiar attraction to the human imagination and has been closely associated with science fiction for about as long as there has been science fiction. Venus is closer and brighter in Earth's night sky, but ruddy Mars, with its war-like associations gets all the attention. Personally, I blame Schiaparelli.

 The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made a series of telescopic observations of Mars during the Great Opposition of 1877, when Mars and Earth came closest to each other in their orbits. Among the most notable features of the planet's surface on the maps he drew from his observations were a network of lines, which he called "canali", meaning "channels." He figured that they were natural geological features of the planet, but when his works were translated into English his "canali" were interpreted as "canals", implying artificial waterways built by extra-terrestrial intelligences.

The American astronomer Percival Lowell was fascinated by Mars and in 1894 used his family fortune to build an observatory near Flagstaff Arizona for the purpose of studying the planet. He firmly believed that the Canals of Mars were evidence of intelligent life on Mars, and popularized the idea of Martian Civilizations and that Mars was an older, dying planet -- ideas which the new field of Science Fiction embraced enthusiastically.

Although other novels featuring the Red Planet had been written before, they fade in importance before H.G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.  We've looked at this book before, but let me repeat a couple significant points. The main theme of the novel is about imperialism; Wells imagines what it would be like if alien invaders did to England what Europeans had been doing to the rest of the world. Wells followed Lowell's interpretation of the Nebular Hypothesis that the Martians would have and older, probably dying civilization, and took it farther, imagining what evolutionary changes would have occurred in such a race.

War of the Worlds was so popular that in the same year it spawned an unauthorized sequel called Edison's Conquest of Mars, in which the noted Wizard of Menlo Park builds a spaceship of his own so that the Americans teach the Martians something about payback. The author clearly missed the point Wells was trying to make about imperialism.

Other notable Martian romances of that period include A Honeymoon In Space (1900),  and Gullivar of Mars (1905), whose hero travels to Mars on a flying carpet.

Novels such as these were the inspiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, which firmly established the Planetary Romance genre.

In the 1920s, Hugo Gernsback began publishing science fiction magazines with two guiding principles: that each story be grounded in science and that each writer be paid as little as possible. (Sometimes the science was pretty tenuous, but then his writers would say so were Hugo's paychecks). Stories about space exploration frequently involved Mars; one of the closest planets to Earth, the one science knew the most about, and the one which, according to Percival Lowell, showed evidence of alien life.

By this time, astronomy had largely discredited the canals of Mars. The lines Schiaparelli saw were the result of flawed equipment and the lines Powell saw were the result of wishful thinking. But they remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination for decades to come.

Probably the best story from this period was Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", published in 1934. It describes a space explorer who has crash landed on Mars making his way on foot to his expedition's base camp, and is notable for the imaginative martian fauna he encounters and for the friendship that develops between him and the native martian who accompanies him on his journey. Some critics consider the martian Tweel to be the first fictional alien to meet the challenge of later Astounding editor John W. Campbell: "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man."

The Northwest Smith stories by C.L. Moore written between 1933 and 1936 were also set on Mars but mixed a bit of noir -- and a bit of Lovecraft as well -- into the setting.

About the same time, a couple of stuffy Oxford professors who had a taste for fantastic literature decided there weren't enough books of the type they liked and so agreed that they would each write a science fiction story. J.R.R. Tolkien would write a story of time travel, and his friend C.S. Lewis would write about space travel. Tolkien never finished his story about psychic time travelers witnessing the destruction of Númenor, but Lewis's Wellsian pastiche became Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Lewis was influenced by H.G. Wells in his story, most notably by The First Men in the Moon, and although the story makes deprecating comments about Wells's novels, Lewis acknowledges in a preface his debt to them.

Lewis felt self-conscious about how he hand-waved the science in his tale. He included the canals in the story, but made them so freakin' huge -- as they'd have to be to be visible from Earth -- that the protagonist spends much of the story inside one and never identifies it as such until he leaves the planet and sees them from a distance.

The year 1938 brought Wells and Mars to the public attention in another way when Orson Welles produced an updated radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds that was so plausible in it's simulated news flashes that it convinced a great many people that Martians really had landed in Grover's Corners New Jersey.

In the 1940s - 1950s, Robert Heinlein wrote several novels set on or involving Mars. Heinlein never tried to shoehorn all these stories into a consistent universe -- not exactly -- but his martians all had points in common. They had three legs, they had a culture largely incomprehensible to humans, and they frequently had powers and abilities that made them terrifying when they were angered. Fortunately, for the most part humans were beneath their notice, so they rarely got that angered. They feature prominently in Red Planet (1949) and Double Star (1956) and are the source of the mystic religion/philosophy taught by Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

Ray Bradbury, who as a young boy growing up in growing up in Waukegan Illinois devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs, wrote several stories set on Mars, most of which were collected in 1950 as The Martian Chronicles. The book describes the first human landings on Mars, the enigmatic contacts with the native martians, how men settle across Mars like a tide across the dead martian deserts, and then recedes again.

By the 1950s, Mars had spread from the pulp magazines into popular culture, appearing in science fiction movies. One of the most interesting was Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), a science fiction re-working of the DeFoe classic and featuring a truly creepy performance by Adam West. No, seriously. Arguably the worst was Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) which, if you look at it the right way could be seen as a prophetic allegory about the Fall of the Soviet Empire... nah, it's still bad. Then there was Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), except that the boys never actually get to Mars; they land in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and just think it's Mars. They do go to Venus though.

Science fiction stories involving Mars also appeared on television as well, most notably on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Isaac Asimov at one point tried pitching an idea for a television space opera. Athough his brainy action hero "Lucky" Starr never made it to the small screen, Asimov adapted his idea into a series of novels starting with David Starr, Space Ranger (1952). The first novel was set in a commercial farming community on Mars and one of the characters, a martian-born human named Bigman, became Lucky's sidekick. Asimov was a little embarrassed about writing trashy space opera, and wrote the series under the pseudonym "Paul French", although by the time he started introducing positronic robots following the Three Laws of Robotics into the series, no one was really fooled.

In 1962, the Mariner space probes gave us our first really good look at the planet Mars, and much of what we thought was true turned out to be false. There were no canals; there were no gleaming cities; there were no oviparous princesses on six-legged thoats.

Something of the romance went out of Mars with the Mariner space probe, but it remains the most likely next step after the Moon if mankind is ever going to go out into space; (Venus, alas, is completely hostile; Mariner was even less kind to her). So it remains an important setting in science fiction.

And who is to say that we can't go retro? In 1998 a very good role-playing game written by Frank Chadwick was published titled Space: 1889, which hearkened back to the era of Edison's Conquest of Mars, describing a world in which the Great Powers of the 19th Century have established colonies on Mars and Venus. Alan Moore's comic The League of Extra-Ordinary Gentlemen had one issue set on the Mars of the 19th Century featuring John Carter, Gullivar and C.S. Lewis's sorns forcing Wells's tentacled martians to flee to Earth.

Percival Lowell's dreams may not have been real, but they haven't yet died.


NEXT WEEK: Who would have guessed it? Next time we're going to Mars! We begin a look at Ray Bradbury's ode to the Red Planet, The Martian Chronicles. Get ready for Rocket Summer!

A Princess of Mars: Part 4: War With Zodanga

After weeks of imprisonment by the savage Warhoons, escape, more weeks of wandering in the Martian desert, and a narrow escape from a creepy scientist in the atmosphere factory, John Carter has ended up in the city of Zodanga, a city-state currently at war with Helium, the home of the Princess Dejah Thoris. He has met Kantor Kan, a soldier of Helium whom he met earlier and from him has learned that Dejah Thoris is now a captive of the Zodangans. Carter and Kantor Kan have enlisted in the Zodangan air force hoping to get closer to wherever the Princess is being held, which may seem like a roundabout way of doing it, but it worked. Carter has managed to save the life of a member of the royal family and so has been promoted to a position in the palace guard. Now all he has to do is find the Princess.

Piece of cake.


Carter is assigned to bodyguard the Zodangan jeddak, Than Kosis. The jeddak's throne room is situated so that his guards remain concealed behind a wall of one-way tapestries, so that the guards can see everything, but no one else can see them. It is while he stands hiding like Polonius behind the arras that who should come into the room but Dejah Thoris.

The jeddak's son, Sab Than, is infatuated with the Princess, and Than Kosis has decreed that he will end his country's war with Helium if she will voluntarily marry the prince. She has come before Than Kosis to tell him she has decided to accept.

"From the beginning of time upon Barsoom it has been the prerogative of woman to change her mind as she listed and to dissemble in matters concerning her heart," she says coquettishly. "Two days ago I as not sure of his love for me, but now I am, and now I have come to beg of you to forget my rash words..."

This is the last thing Carter wants to hear. The reader will guess that she is only agreeing to the marriage for the safety of her country, but Carter has to speak to her directly to know exactly what is really in her heart.

He commented at the beginning of his narrative that he is not so much brave as that the cowardly course of action never occurs to him until he is already committed to a rash one. This usually works for him, but here his impetuousness gets him in trouble. He darts out of the throne room, his departure hidden by the tapestries, and goes looking for Dejah Thoris' chambers. This takes some time, because he still doesn't know where in the palace she's staying. When he finds her room, he tries to bull his way past her guards. Again his luck fails him and the guards aren't buying his bluff. Oh well, it was a stupid conversation anyway. He draws his sword and quickly dispatches the four guardsmen.

The Princess does not recognize Carter immediately, because he's painted his skin a Barsoomian orange and he's wearing the metal ornaments of a Zodangan soldier; and because she believes John Carter to be dead. When she does recognize him, she wails in despair: "Too late, too late... O my chieftain that was, and whom I thought dead, had you but returned one hour before -- but now it is too late, too late."

She has made her promise to wed Sab Than, the Zodangan prince, and on Barsoom that promise is a binding oath. The wedding ceremony that will follow is but a formality. Carter offers to remedy the situation by making her a widow at his earliest opportunity, but she tells him that won't help either: "I may not wed the man who slays my husband, even in self-defense." There are a lot of these Barsoomian Dating Do's and Don'ts that Carter has to pick up on yet.

She does however explain the reason for her earlier coldness to him:

"Do you remember the night when you offended me? You called me your princess without having asked my hand of me, and then you boasted that you had fought for me. You did not know, and I should not have been offended; I see that now. But there was no one to tell you, what I could not, that upon Barsoom there are two kinds of women in the cities of the red men. The one they fight for that they may ask them in marriage; the other kind they fight for also, but never ask their hands. When a man has won a woman he may address her as his princess, or in any of the several terms which signify possession. You had fought for me, but had never asked me in marriage, and so when you called me your princess, you see," she faltered, "I was hurt, but even then, John Carter, I did not repulse you, as I should have done, until you made it doubly worse by taunting me with having won me through combat."

Things were so much easier in Virginia.

Now he can't escape with his Princess, and he can no longer remain either. The bodies of the guards he killed are quickly discovered. Although the jeddak first assumes that there's some kind of hit squad roaming about his castle, his personal psychologist reads the minds of the dead men -- yes, you read that right: he reads the minds of the dead men -- to find that the carnage was committed by one man, whose description matches the new bodyguard who has gone missing. (That bit about mind-scanning the dead guards is a lovely piece of pulp; I'm surprised Burroughs didn't do more with it)

Carter tracks down his buddy Kantos Kan and explains the situation. "If I can come within sword's reach of Sab Than... I can solve the difficulty in so far as Helium is concerned, but for personal reasons I would prefer that another struck the blow that frees Dejah Thoris." They plan to steal a couple of fliers; Carter will make for Helium, while Kantos raids the palace to deal with Sab Than.

As Carter is making his escape, he is spotted and fired upon by an aerial patrol. Using a "trick of gearing, which is known only to the Navy of Helium" which Kantos Kan has taught him, Carter is able to evade and outdistance the patrol; but their fire has damaged his compass. Without navigational aids, he has to guess his general direction and hope he happens across the twin domes of the cities of Helium. (Why doesn't he just follow the canals? Perhaps his mind is too busy concentrating on Twin Domes.)

Now, given Burroughs' fondness for coincidence, one might guess that Carter does indeed happen upon the right city; but no, that would be too improbable. Instead, he happens across two armies of green Martians fighting each other, one of which is being led by his old buddy Tars Tarkas. He swoops down and helps the Tharks defeat their enemies.

Tars Tarkas offers to give John a team of thoats to flee on; Tal Hajus, the jeddak of the Tharks, has not forgotten the humiliation blow Carter dealt to him the last time they met, and will undoubtably order him killed. Helping him, however, will make Tars Tarkas a fugitive as well; and Carter would rather have it out with the Tharkish tyrant.

He tells Tars Tarkas the story Sola confided in him; about how she was Tars Tarkas's child by his long-dead lover, who had been betrayed by the vicious Sarkoja into Tal Hajus's hands. At this, Tars Tarkas agrees to confront the jeddak; but first he wants a few words with Sarkoja.

"Sarkoja," said Tars Tarkas, "forty years ago you were instrumental in bringing about the torture and death of a woman named Gozava. I have just discovered that the warrior who loved that woman has learned of your part in the transaction. He may not kill you, Sarkoja, it is not our custom, but there is nothing to prevent him tying one end of a strap about your neck and the other end to a wild thoat, merely to test your fitness to survive and help perpetuate our race. Having heard that he would do this on the morrow, I thought it only right to warn you , for I am a just man. The river Iss is but a short pilgrimage, Sarkoja. Come, John Carter." 

The next morning Sarkoja was gone, nor was she ever seen after.

Carter is brought before Tal Hajus, but before the jeddak has a chance to order his death, Carter demands the right to be heard. "Cheiftains of Thark... I have been a chief among you, an toady I have fought for Thark shoulder to shoulder with her greatest warrior. You ow me, at least, a hearing." The Tharks are a cruel people, but they pride themselves on being just. Although Tal Hajus howls, the other chieftains of the Tharkish Council agree to let Carter speak.

"You are a brave people and you love bravery, but where was your mighty jeddak during the fighting today? I did not see him in the thick of battle; he was not there. He rends defenseless women and little children in his lair, but how recently has one of you seen him fight with men? Why, even I, a midget beside him, felled him with a single blow of my fist. Is it of such that the Tharks fashion their jeddaks? There stands beside me now a great Thark, a mighty warrior and a noble man. Chieftains, how sounds, Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark?"

Tal Hajus is in a corner. The only way he can prove his fitness to lead is to fight Tars Tarkas for it; which is just the opportunity Tars Tarkas has been longing for all these years.

It's not much of a fight; it's over almost before it begins. And now Tars Tarkas is jeddak of the Tharks.
I hadn't made the connection before, but we also saw this kind of succession-by-combat in Frank Herbert's Dune, except that there Paul Atriedes was trying to establish his leadership without having to kill the existing leadership of the Fremen that he needed as allies.

Seeing that the Tharkish Council seems favorably inclined, Carter now brings up the situation in Zodanga. He wants the Tharks to attack the Zodangan capital so that he can rescue the Princess. Tars Tarkas supports him. He reminds the Council that the Princess had originally been their captive -- so there is a certain amount of pride involved here -- also that by looting Zodanga they will gain much booty and that by returning the Princess to Helium they will be able to establish an alliance that will benefit the tribe. The Council is delighted to have a leader who actually seeks to build consensus rather than rules by fiat. Or perhaps they just like the idea of a good fight. In either case, they endorse Carter and Tars Tarkas's proposal.

Traveling by night and camping during the day in the ruins that litter the martian landscape, the great Tharkish army avoided notice by Zodangan aerial patrols. Carter was able to lead a small commando team into the city and open the city gates so that the invading army could enter. While the Tharkish horde engages the city's defenses, Carter leaps ahead to the palace where Dejah Thoris is about to be wed to Prince Sab Than.

There's a big fight, involving Carter, the Princess, Sab Than and his father, lots of guards, and ultimately Tars Tarkas himself. We never do find out exactly who kills Sab Than; the narrative doesn't say. I like to think that Dejah Thoris did it herself, but then that's the romantic in me. (She does kill the prince's father at the beginning of the fight; you have to give her credit for that).

The City of Zodanga has been conquered. Carter and Tars Tarkas seize as many Zodangan airships as they can and fly to Helium. Dejah Thoris is returned to her grandfather, the jeddak of Helium; who welcomes Carter warmly, and greets Tars Tarkas courteously as a fellow-jeddak and an ally.
John Carter and Dejah Thoris marry, with the blessings of all Helium. You'd think from there it would be all Happily Ever After, and for a few years it is. Carter becomes a respected Prince of Helium and earns a respected position in its armies; he and Dejah Thoris have a beautiful egg which they put in a special incubator in the palace. All is wonderful.

Then about nine years after the rescue of the Princess a new crisis strikes Barsoom. Radio contact is lost with the keeper of the Atmosphere Factory. It is presumed that he has died. The keeper's assistant has been found in his home, murdered. Only those two men know the secret to opening the door of the Factory, and without supervision, the Factory will shut down and the the Martian air supply will begin to dwindle. Who murdered the assistant? Was there some kind of plot? Who would do such a thing, since the loss of the Factory threatens all live on Mars? The narrative doesn't say and Carter never finds out.

It isn't until the air supply on the planet is dangerously low that Carter remembers that he knows the psychic combination to the Factory doors; he was able to get it from the keeper when he visited it briefly after escaping the Warhoons. He hurries to the Factory on the swiftest flier where a team of men are laboring vainly to penetrate the Factory walls, and with almost his last gasp of air sends the nine thought waves at the unyielding door before he passes out.

He wakes up once again in the Arizona cave where his adventure started. Somehow, his unconscious body has remained unmolested there for ten years. He finds the gold mine he and his friend had dug way back when and comes back east, a wealthy man, but haunted by his experiences.

Did the Martian reach the pump room? Did the vitalizing air reach the people of that distant planet in time to save them? Was my Dejah Thoris alive, or did her beautiful body lie cold in death beside the tiny golden incubator in the sunken garden of the inner courtyard of the palace of Tardos Mors, the jeddak of Helium. 

... 

As I sit here tonight in my little study overlooking the Hudson, just twenty years have elapsed since I first opened my eyes upon Mars. 

I can see her shining in the sky through the little window by my desk, and tonight she seems calling to me again as she has not called before since that long dead night, and I think I cans see, across that awful abyss of space, a beautiful black-haired woman standing in the garden of a palace, and at her side is a little boy who puts his arm around her ans she pints into the sky toward the planet Earth, while at their feet is a huge an hideous creature with a heart of gold. 

I believe they are waiting there for me, and something tells me that I shall soon know.

A Princess of Mars: Part 3: Escape and Capture

John Carter, former Confederate cavalry officer and now interplanetary expatriate, has fallen among the Tharks, a cruel, barbaric tribe of green, four-armed Martians. By virtue of his fighting prowess he has gained a certain amount of status and respect among the Tharks, but he knows this is temporary; as soon as the tribe returns to their capital city, he will face the judgement of their jeddak, Tal Hajus, a merciless tyrant regarded as sadistic even by Tharkish standards.

He has also met and fallen in love with Dejah Thoris, the beautiful granddaughter of the jeddak of Helium, a city-state of the Red Martians; who is a captive of the Tharks. She loves him too, but because of Carter's unfamiliarity with Martian customs, he seems unable to speak to her without putting his foot in his mouth. She's mad at him and he doesn't know why.

He has also made an enemy in Sajorka, a Tharkish female who had developed an unreasoning implacable hatred towards Carter. She has persuaded a young warrior named Zad to pick a fight with Carter and he has found himself embroiled in a duel to the death. Stabbed in the chest, Carter makes one last desperate lunge at his opponent and passes out.


He is only unconscious for a trice. When he recovers, he sees that he has successfully delivered a fatal blow and his opponent lies dead upon the Martian moss. Zad's blade had driven through his chest, but has glanced off his ribs without piercing any vital organs; nothing that the remarkable medicinal techniques of the Martian women cannot take care of.

He goes to find Dejah Thoris, who lies weeping in her chariot. Sola, the Martian woman who has been acting as Carter's teacher and servant and who has been watching over Dejah, explains that she thinks Carter is dead.

"Tears are a strange sight upon Barsoom," she continued, "and so it is difficult for me to interpret them. I have seen but two people in all my life, other than Dejah Thoris: one wept from sorrow, the other from baffled rage. The first was my mother, years ago before they killed her; the other was Sarkoja, when they dragged her from me today."

Carter tells Sola to tell Dejah how he survived, but not to tell her he saw her weeping. He's on thin enough ice with the Princess; he doesn't want to risk further wounding her pride.

 
He is curious, however, about Sola's comment regarding her mother. The Green Martians generally don't know who their parents are. Their eggs are gathered and placed in communal incubators. Once the young are hatched, they will be selected by some of the tribes women who will finish raising them; but neither the child or the foster mother ever know who the actual parents were.

(Oh, and all Martians are oviparous; even the Red Martians like the beautiful Dejah Thoris. If you want to know why egg-laying creatures have breasts, take it up with Frank Frazetta).

Later, Sola tells Carter her story. Sola's mother was a sensitive woman, who detested the cruel sadistic culture of her people. Too small to be considered adequate breeding material, she nevertheless fell in love with a young warrior who shared some of her sentiments. She gave birth to his child and hid the egg in a secret place, lest she and her lover be executed for their sin. Her lover determined that he would someday challenge the jeddak, Tal Hajus, and bring about reforms. The lover was off on a military campaign far to the south when the egg hatch. Sola's mother then kept her hidden, biding her time until the next batch of hatchlings were brought to the city.

But the mother was overheard telling her daughter of her story by none other than Sarkoja, who passed the news on to Tal Hajus. The mother had just enough time to slip Sola among the newly-arrived hatchlings before she was captured. The mother died under torture without ever confessing the name of her lover: Tars Tarkas, the warrior who Sola now serves and who has been John Carter's patron among the Tharks.

The rest of the journey back to the Thark capital. Carter keeps his distance from Dejah, waiting for her to make the next move. Which she doesn't.

I verily believe that a man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.

When the caravan arrives in the City of Thark, Carter is assigned living quarters appropriate to his current warrior's status in the tribe. Now, finally he goes to talk with Dejah. She addresses him coldly: "What would Dotar Sojat, Thark, of Dejah Thois his captive?" She uses the name given to Carter by the Tharks as a pointed reminder of their relative positions.

"Dejah Thoris, I do not know how I have angered you. It was furtherest from my desire to hurt of offend you, whom I had hoped to protect and comfort. Have none of me if it is your will, but that you must aid me in effecting your escape, if such a thing be possible, it is not my request, but my command. When you are safe once more at your father's court you may do with me as you please, but from now on until that day I am your master, and you must obey and aid me."

This actually impresses her. Women. Go figure.

They bring Sola into their conspiracy and plan an escape. Sola has already heard scuttlebutt that the Princess is going to be thrown to the wild calots, and so they have little time. Carter will steal a couple thoats and come back to get the girls; then they will proceed to one of the canals near the city and follow it into territory controlled by Helium.

Stealing the thoats goes without a hitch, but when he returns to Dejah's apartment (leaping to her second-story window so as to be inconspicuous) he discovers a group of guards positioned there waiting for him. Overhearing their discussion he learns that the Princess and Sola have already been taken to the unspeakable Tal Hajus.

Evading the guards before they spot him, Carter proceeds to the palace of Tal Hajus and sneaks into the throne room where even now the loathsome jeddak is drooling over his lovely captive. Earlier, John Carter had commented on how as a rule the Tharks were quite virtuous in regards to the sexes, despite their callous contempt for the finer emotions in other respects. Tal Hajus is the exception. It's a tradition in popular fiction that you have to have the Beautiful Girl menaced by a malevolent pervert, the more ugly and obscene the better, who threatens her with A Fate Worse Than Death. Tal Hajus fits the criteria in spades.

"Princess of Helium, I might wring a mighty ransom from your people would I but return you to them unharmed, but a thousand times rather would I watch that beautiful face writhe in the agony of torture it shall be long drawn out, that I promise you ... But before the torture you shall be mine for one short hour, and word of that too shall go forth to Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium, your grandfather, that he may grovel upon the ground in the agony of his sorrow."

It turns out that one short hour was optimistic. Before Tal Hajus has a chance to lay even one of his several sweaty palms on the incomparable Dejah Thoris, John Carter leaps to her defense. He is strongly tempted to slice the foul jeddak's gizzard right there, but decides that he shouldn't rob Tars Tarkas of that pleasure and so contents himself with simply giving Tal Hajus a sock on the jaw. Now Tal Hajus is the one on the ground.

Carter, the Princess and Sola, accompanied by Woola his faithful calot, flee the city. They travel for a couple days before they spot a group of Green Martians in the distance pursuing them. Carter tells his companions to hide in the ravines of the hill country they are entering while he attempts to draw off pursuit. Dejah doesn't like this plan.

She sprang quickly from the thoat and throwing her dear arms around my neck, turned to Sola, saying with quiet dignity, "Fly, Sola! Dejah Thoris remains to die with the man she loves."

But Carter is too much of the Virginian gentleman to permit her to die like that. He dumps her back on her thoat and gives the critter a slap on the rump, (the thoat, not the Princess), to send it off. Bounding into the air with his tremendous leaps, he draws the attention of Martians and leads them away from his companions. But he is greatly outnumbered, and eventually they capture him.


These Martians are not Tharks sent to recapture him, as he first thought, but rather come from Warhoon, a rival tribe, smaller and not quite as cultured as the Tharks. Carter isn't in their clutches five minutes before the jeddak of the Warhoons is killed by his chief lieutenant in a vicious and bloody duel. He is thrown into a dungeon to keep until the next round of gladiatorial games.

For many weeks, Carter sits in that lightless dungeon, slowly losing his grip on sanity. He manages to attack and kill the guard who brings him food, but before he can find the guard's keys, the unfortunate fellow is grabbed by a creature who has been lurking in the dungeon all this time waiting for something to die. Then after a while, Carter gets another cellmate: a padwar, or lieutenant, of the Helium navy named Kantos Kan, who was captured by the Warhoons while searching for the Princess. The two prisoners become friends.

A couple days later, they are both dragged out of their cell to participate in the great games, with a great number of wild calots, mad zitidars, green men and women from other hordes and critters Carter has never seen before. They will all be pitted against each other in the arena and the last one alive will win his freedom. Carter has a plan.

With his incredible earthly strength and agility, Carter easily beats his opponents. Kantos Kan has a harder time of it, but being a skilled warrior he defeats all his foes too; until it is just Carter and Kantos Kan. Carter tells his companion to stall, drawing out their fight until evening. Then, when the light is growing dim, Carter takes a dive and Kantos Kan fakes delivering a coup de grâce. Since the custom of the Green Martians is to leave the dead lie where they are after duels, no one thinks to check to make sure he's really dead, and so Carter is able to sneak off after nightfall.

He hopes to connect with Kantos Kan again once his friend has been granted his freedom, but Kantos does not show up, so Carter proceeds onward into the desert. For two weeks he wanders, trying to navigate as best he can by the stars. Faithful Woola shows up and saves him from a wild beast. Woola's ten stumpy legs may have difficulty keeping up with Carter's leaping stride, but he always catches up eventually.

Carter comes to a huge building, about two hundred feet high and covering about four square miles. He is allowed in by an old man who explains that this is one of the Atmosphere Factories which maintain the breathable atmosphere on Mars. We get a little bit here of the science which the ancient Barsoomians possessed. The ancients had discovered two additional "rays" beyond the seven colors of the visible spectrum: the "Eight Ray" is a repulsive force which propogates light from the sun and which the Red Martians use to propel their sky ships; and the "Ninth Ray" provides power for much of their super-technology, including the Atmosphere Factories. These factories are vital to the existence of life on Mars, so all races, even the barbaric Green Martians, respect them.

The keeper of the Atmosphere Factory, has an advanced form of the telepathy all Martians have, but is incapable of reading Carter's mind. Carter, however, can see his thoughts, and sees that the keeper considers him a possible threat to the planet and is planning to kill him in his sleep. Carter slips away unnoticed before he can carry this out.

Continuing on, Carter comes to Zodangan territory, another Red Martian city-state hostile to Helium. The actual citizens of Zodanga are helpful and friendly to John. A family of farmers he stays with give him needed supplies and a riding thoat. They also help him dye his skin a martian copper so that he'll blend in better. He is careful not to mention his association with Dejah Thoris. Relations between Zodanga and Helium are tense due to attacks made on the Helium fleet by Zodanga's ruler.

In the Zodangan capital, Carter runs into Kantos Kan. These coincidences tend to happen to John a lot. Kantos brings him up to date on what has happened since they last parted. It turns out that Dejah Thoris has been captured by Sab Than, prince of Zodanga, who has fallen madly in love with the Princess. Than Kosis, the prince's father and jeddak of Zodanga, has made her voluntary marriage to Sab Than the price of peace between the two countries. Kantos Kan has infiltrated the city to try and find her.

Posing as a Zodangan citizen, Kantos Kan is going to enlist in the Zodangan air navy in order to get closer to the prince and suggests that Carter do the same. He does so and soon is learning to fly the Barsoomian sky ships.

On his first day on patrol as a sky scout he spots a band of Green Martians converging on a downed Zodangan ship whose pilot is trying to make emergency repairs. Carter is able to drive off the hostiles and rescue the pilot, who turns out to be a cousin to the jeddak. For his act of heroism, the jeddak promotes him to padwar and now has a place in the Palace Guards.

Now all he has to do is find Dejah.

NEXT:  It's Not That Easy; Lost in the Air; Tars Tarkas's Revenge; Raid on Zodanga, and the Princess At Last. It's Dejah View All Over Again!!!