‘If we are to explore the entire solar system and beyond, then this first step along the way must be marked by favourable omens and wise decisions. We must proceed with due humility and caution, forgetting the damaging fantasies of yesterday.
‘I beg you to set aside a whole folklore of interplanetary conquest and to vote for the preservation of Mars – White Mars, as Mr. Leo Anstruther has called it. By so doing, we shall speak for knowledge, for wisdom, as opposed to avarice.’ Gunther nodded in a friendly way to Anstruther as he strode from the podium.
Other speakers went to the podium to have their say, but now, increasingly, the emphasis was on how and why the Red Planet should be governed.
The sun was setting over the great milky lake beyond the conference hall when the final vote was taken. The General Secretary announced that the UN Department for the Preservation of Mars would be set up, and the White Mars Treaty executed.
Taking Thomas Gunther aside, the Secretary asked casually if Anstruther should be appointed head of the department.
‘I would strongly advise against it,’ Gunther said. ‘The man is too unpredictable.’
2
The Testimony of Acting Captain Buzz McGregor, 23 May ad 2041
My eyes had not been trained to see such a panorama. I was disoriented, like my entire physical body depended on my sight. Closing my eyes, I became aware of another source of strangeness. I was standing on solid ground, but I had lost pounds in weight.
Bracing myself, I tried to take account of our surroundings. Beyond the suited figures of my friends lay a world of solitude, infinite and tumbled, with nothing on which the gaze could rest. My mind, checking for something familiar, ran through a number of fantasy landscapes, from Dis to Barsoom, without relief. Grim? Oh yes, it was grim – but marvellously complex, built like a diabolical artist’s construct. I was looking at something wonderfully unknown, indigestible, hitherto inaccessible. And I was among the first to take it all in!
And suddenly I found myself flushing. Like a blow to the heart came the thought: But I am of a species more extraordinary than anything else there ever was.
One day all this desolation would be turned into a fertile world much like Earth.
We broke from our trance. Our first task was to unload the body of Captain Tracy from our vehicle and place it in its body bag on the Martian surface. Although he was in his late thirties, Guy Tracy had seemed to be the fittest among us, but the acceleration and later deceleration had brought on the heart attack that killed him before we landed.
This death in Mars’s orbit had seemed like a bad omen for the mission, but, as we laid his body down among the rocks of the regolith, a glassy effect flared into the sky as if in welcome. Low, almost beyond the visible, it was, we figured later, an aurora. Charged particles from the sun were interacting with molecules of the thin atmosphere trapped in Mars’s slight magnetic field. The ghostly phenomenon seemed to flutter almost at shoulder level. It faded and was gone as we stepped back from the body bag. For a planet receiving sunlight equivalent to only some 40 per cent of Earth’s generous ration, the little illumination show was encouraging.
Calls from base broke into our solemn thoughts. We were reluctant to talk back to Earth. They challenged us to say what had gone wrong.
‘You have to be here to understand. You have to have made the journey. You have to experience Mars in its majesty to know that to try to alter – to terraform – this ancient place would be wrong. A terrible mistake. Not just for Mars. For us. For all mankind.’
There was a long pained argument. It takes forty minutes for a signal to traverse the distance between Earth and Mars and back – and between experiences. Night came on, sweeping over the plain. The stars glittered overhead.
We waited. We tried to explain.
Base ordered us to continue with our duties.
We said – everything was recorded – ‘It is our duty to tell you that humanity’s arrival on another planet marks a turning point in our history. We should not alter this planet. We must try to alter ourselves.’