Therefore, if I do not tell you this story as I had it, partly from Joan and partly from the rest, it is likely that it may never be told. But in case you should say to yourself ‘these people seem to have talked a great deal, but one feels that they might have done that anywhere. They seem singularly unmoved by the fact that they are taking part in one of history’s greatest adventures’: in case you say that, let me point out that though travelling through space may be an exciting adventure in prospect and in retrospect, yet in actual accomplishment, I am assured, it is extremely tedious.
It was Dr. Grayson, I think, who said:
‘Fancy buying undying fame merely at the cost of six months’ close confinement.’
While Froud quoted the classic words of an earlier intrepid flier:
“It was a lousy trip and that’s praising it.”’
But looking back on the journey they get it in perspective and agree that it was not a monotonous whole. The longer view reveals that it fell into distinct phases, each with its own particular complexion. One of the most marked of these was the period which followed Joan’s announcement of her belief in a sentient machine.
Whether she timed it by skill or luck, there is no doubt that the moment was well chosen. Four weeks before, with the memories of everyday life clinging more closely, it would have met with immediate ridicule. But now, from a mixture of motives, it was not airily dismissed. For one thing, they knew the girl better and their attitudes towards her had changed, and, for another, one could not afford, with the threat of a deadly boredom overhanging, to dismiss any subject which showed possibilities of interesting discussion. Her fantastically improbable suggestion had, therefore, a more kindly reception than it deserved, though it is doubtful if any one of the rest took it as more than a basis for entertaining speculation. But, certainly, at this time their interest in the conditions they expected to find upon Mars became sharper.
Dale’s anticipations were modest, but he admitted that he would be disappointed to find only a waterless world, incapable of supporting life, though he had started with just that expectation.
‘You may have thought so,’ the doctor said, ‘but in reality that was just a check you put upon yourself to avoid the possibility of a painful disillusionment. You wouldn’t have insisted on bringing me along as a biologist if you had no hope of finding any form of life. As I told you, I consider life as a stage in the decay of a planet, and I fully expect to find it. Probably it will have gone through the whole cycle and exist only in lowly forms as it did in the beginning, but it will surprise me very much if we find no living structures at all.’
‘Pretty poor look out for me,’ Froud thought. ‘Depressing. Here’s the world public, egged on by Burroughs and the rest into thinking that the place is crammed with weird animals, queer men and beautiful princesses, expecting me to go one better; and, according to you, I shall have to make thrilling, passionate romances out of the lives of a few amoebae and such like. It’s going to be hard work.’
Dugan looked at the doctor disappointedly.
‘Do you really think it will be as dull as all that?
Surely life won’t have sunk right to the limit. Won’t there be animals of any kind?’
‘Or crabs?’ Froud added. ‘Do you remember the monstrous crabs which Wells’ time traveller found in the dying world? Nasty chaps I used to dream about them when I was a kid. If there are many of them, I doubt whether my devoted public will get a story at all.’
The doctor shrugged.
‘It’s all guesswork. There may be only protozoa; there may be crustaceans ‘
‘And there are machines,’ Joan said.
‘Superb example of the one track mind,’ Froud remarked largely. ‘I must say, I’m beginning to hope you’re right; it’d give me plenty of material. But the point arises who builds the machines? And what for? After all, as one of us said before, a machine is meant to do something.’
‘If we could understand what machinery or The Machine implies,’ Joan said, ‘we might know more what to expect. Dale sees it as a work of art. His wife, from what he tells us, holds the very common opinion that it is opposed to art: that it stamps out individuality and personality. Dugan see it as a kind of huge plaything. Doctor Grayson’ she paused ‘well, though you didn’t actually say so, Doc, it seems to me that you are just content to use it because it is there. Like my father, you tend to disregard it and its effect except when you need to use it for practical ends?’
‘Yes, I think that is fair. Man was not made for the machine: the machine was made for man to use or not, as he chooses.’
‘And Froud’s view of it is very little different, save that he is even more directly dependent on it for his living. But the fact remains that not one of you has really looked at the implications of the thing.’
‘Don’t get you. How does a machine “imply” anything?’ Froud said.
‘A machine doesn’t. The existence of The Machine implies a great deal.
‘Look here. Less than two centuries ago man began to use power driven machinery for the first time. There had, of course, been watermills, windmills and things driven by a horse going round in a circle, but they were not true ancestors of our machines, they were isolated discoveries, remaining essentially unchanged for centuries. When the power driven machine arrived, it was something entirely new dropped into a world which was getting along quite well without it. Nobody saw its implications then beyond immediate profit, and they don’t see them now: But we can look back over a hundred and fifty years and see what it has done.
‘It was hailed as the creator of a new age, a kind of liberator of mankind, on one hand; and decried and frequently broken up by those who feared it as a competitor, on the other. Both of them were right, for it ultimately brought us leisure and a new world to enjoy in that leisure. The implication which everybody seems to have missed at the time was that those who would get a new world to enjoy and those who would get the leisure were not necessarily the same people.
‘It seems to me as if at that stage of development a new Pandora’s box was opened, and the whole human race was so excited at opening it that it took no precautions to net the troubles. The machine was just dropped into a world which was expected to go on working in the same old way as before. Obviously, it couldn’t any more than one’s body could if the cook suddenly took to including large quantities of laxatives in every dish.
‘Though it came as a slave, fifty years later it was the master. We had to support it in order that it might support is the world population could not exist without it, and yet we had not learned to control it. It has given us innumerable blessings, and it has got us into countless messes and still we cannot control it. We cannot predict more than its simplest and most obvious effects: and then we are often wrong.
‘And now the machine is part of us, like our arms and legs more important than either, for we couldn’t even live if the machine were amputated from civilization.
‘Yet we still have countless people who regard men and machinery as separable. They think of the machine as a mere adjunct to life, something which gives faster communication, more production, more entertainment, still failing to see it as one of the great factors in our real lives, and not realizing that our people are as they are because of it. One hears of the Industrial Revolution as though it were a mere phase, finished and done with. It is not, and it shows no sign of ever being completed. And “Industrial Revolution!” just as though it were like any little turn over of government. The machine came, and life could never be the same again: nor can it be static. But to what further changes is it leading us? That’s what I mean by the implication of the machine.’
‘I see,’ the doctor said thoughtfully; ‘then you think that if your ideas about the machine you found are right, we may be able to gather from Martian conditions some means of dealing with our own machine problems?’
Froud put in: ‘Except that these comic, presumably Martian machines don’t seem to be designed to do anything.’
‘Yours is a pretty one track mind on this subject, too,’ the doctor told him, unkindly. ‘You keep on saying that.’