McAdams was returning home late one evening when he found his way barred by an impediment. It was an out-dated model Franklin stove which some local townsperson, evidently tired of it cluttering up his attic, had surreptitiously dumped. McAdams soon discovered the culprit climbing out of an inner compartment wherein he had managed somehow to secrete himself.
“Excuse me,” said McAdams attempting to be civil, “could you possibly move this thing aside? My horse can’t get past.”
“Solid ground,” the man muttered. “After three years.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. I was only talking to myself. Could you inform me if I am on the planet Earth?”
“I’m afraid you’ve missed your way. This is Harrisville.”
“Dear me.”
The man took from the stove a map covered with constellations and studied it anxiously.
“You are really very far out of your way,” said McAdams. “We are several hundred miles from the ocean.”
“What of that? Who cares for an ocean?”
“I thought you must be a sailor.”
“So I am.”
“Then I should think you’d be looking for the water.”
“Water?”
The man’s eyes gleamed.
“Where?”
“Why, in the ocean.”
“Do you mean there is water in the ocean?”
“What do you mean? The water is the ocean.”
“Then the ocean is not just a great depression?”
“Whatever are you talking about?” asked McAdams angrily.
“Is there a great deal of water in the ocean?”
“Of course there is!”
“How much?”
“Millions and millions of tons. The world is ¾ water. I should think anyone would know at least that much.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Of course! What is the matter with you?”
“Ah!” said the man, gazing raptly at the stars. “Then it is true what we have been told about the watery planets.”
“Look here,” said McAdams, “I think you are not well. Perhaps you ought to take some headache powder.”
“No, no. I am quite all right. I’ll have some of this,” said the man, taking out a small flask and swallowing a spoonful of the contents.
He looked at McAdams amusedly.
“Do you still use headache powder? Why, that is obsolete! This drug is what is in use now. It will cure anything—from corns to consumption.”
“Will it? I see now; the man is a peddler,” McAdams thought. “No doubt he will try to sell me some of his quack-medicine.”
“Yes; a late medical breakthrough. I’m afraid your planet is very backwards. What do you use for transportation?”
“Trains and steamships.”
“No airships?”
“There are dirigibles.”
“Oh. Well, we have mainly air traffic. There are three different levels of altitude to travel in and they all must be intensely regulated to avoid collisions.”
“It sounds as if everyone where you come from is in a great hurry.”
“Oh yes, we are. But even with our technology it took me three years to reach this planet, although my ship is considered the fastest—or was when I left. Would you like to see inside it?”
McAdams thought that the fellow could not possibly show him anything about a Franklin stove that he did not already know, having once worked for a company that sold them, so he politely declined.
The fellow, not at all put out, continued his questions.
“What sort of government do you have here?”
“I’m an American.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“We have a president.”
“Oh, I see. Very out-of-date. We’re communists. So I ought not to have called this ship mine: it’s the government’s really. I am on a government mission. I really ought to determine where I am, for they’ll want a detailed report.”
He dove inside his piece of junk and brought out a curious little instrument with which he proceeded to take the height of different stars in relation to the horizon.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, “I think you have been mistaken. This is Earth.”
“What is?”
“This. Where we are.”
“There is earth everywhere.”
“The planet, man; the planet!”
“Well, what about it?”
“This planet is Earth!”
“Don’t you think I know that? What do you take me for, as big a booby as yourself?”
“I’m afraid I have gotten a little too excited,” said the man, “but you see, this is a momentous discovery—a planet so near our own with water resources! Where I come from we have no water.”
“I suppose you come from Utah.”
“No; Mars.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and we have no water—occurring naturally, that is.”
He looked slyly at McAdams.
“I suppose you wonder how we survive without water?”
“Not at all. I don’t much care for the stuff, myself.”
“Yes, well, we synthesize it. By an ingenious process we take the elemental components (hydrogen and oxygen) and combine them to make a pure water—no nasty minerals.”
“How do you do it?” asked McAdams, wondering if he could get a patent.
“I can’t tell you. It’s a carefully guarded secret. There are lots of folks who would like to know the Martians’ formula, believe me. If they once had it they could begin to populate the waterless planets.”
“Just a moment,” said McAdams. “When you say that there is no water on Mars, do you mean that it never rains?”
“Oh no, it never rains.”
“Then how does anything grow?”
“Nothing grows.”
“What do your animals eat?”
“There aren’t any animals.”
“Then what do you eat?”
“Synthetic foods. We synthesize everything. We take the basic elements and put them together to form whatever we wish—chops, sardines, Yorkshire pudding—“
“I don’t suppose it tastes very good.”
“It doesn’t really, but one gets used to it. We do have a few plants in our laboratories which we use to synthesize things, but soon we will have progressed far enough as not to need them. They use up too much oxygen. That is another thing we must synthesize—air. The atmosphere has scarcely any oxygen, so we have to take it from other sources.”
“How did you get along before you learned to make everything from scratch?”
“Oh, Mars hasn’t always been this way. Hundreds of years ago it had plenty of water and air and plants and animals. Some folks say that all our experimenting with synthesis used up too many resources and that is why the planet dried out, but I say it was a jolly good thing we learned to do it, or we’d have all died out long ago.”
“What did you do all that synthesis nonsense for if you didn’t need to?”
“You wouldn’t ask that if you were a true scientist. Have you never felt the exhilaration of discovering a new substance or a new method?”
“No. I’m rather fond of the old ones.”
“So you see, you will never move forward.”
“I would be able to if you would move your property out of the road.”
“Is that what you travel in?” asked the fellow, looking in surprise at McAdams’s buggy.
“Yes,” said McAdams looking it over with satisfaction. “It’s only four years old and is in quite good condition, although the leather is wearing out in places.”
“How is it propelled?”
“My horse pulls it.”
“Oh. Is it really machinery?”
“I suppose it is—of sorts.”
“It is amazing! How does it work?”
“I say gettup when I want him to go and whoa when I want him to stop.”
“How fast can it go?”
“Faster than Dr. Smith’s automobile.”
“Oh.”
The Martian glanced around a trifle nervously.
“I suppose there are others of your countrymen about?”
“Yes, somewhere.”
“Are they as civil as you?”
“No, most of them aren’t.”
“Oh dear. Still, an explorer must take risks. What kind of weapons do you have here?”
McAdams pulled out his pocket revolver and showed it to him rather proudly. It was his prized possession.
“How does it work?” asked the fellow curiously.
“I believe it works by this hammer striking the percussion cap on the end of the cartridge which ignites the powder in the chamber and propels the bullet forward through the barrel. It is not very accurate, but it is useful in close quarters.”
“Obsolete,” said the man with relief.
He took out a similar weapon and explained its functions.
“The bullet is held in this chamber until released by the trigger. It is self-propelled by an engine on the rear. When it comes in contact with something solid it burrows several inches and then explodes. This here is a counter-espionage bullet. It does not explode, but rather releases a chemical into the bloodstream, causing intense pain. It is useful for interrogation, because after being administered slight pressure at certain points of the body produce agonizing results. We have acquired much useful information by the use of it.”
McAdams surveyed the weapon with distaste.
“We don’t use tactics like that anymore,” he said.
“Once we agreed with you. But we have since discovered that it does not pay to be too good for one’s own good. He wins who is worst first.”
“What happens to the good people?”
“They fall behind and are eventually conquered by others.”
“What do you mean by ‘fall behind’?”
“They miss chances because of silly ethical principles, like so-called ‘human decency’.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, like keeping treaties; protecting women and children; playing fair—all that sort of thing.”
“Well, what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s just another name for squeamishness. ‘Hit hard, fast and first’ is my motto.”
“Then you don’t believe in right and wrong?”
“I only believe in results.”
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“Our god is progress.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you like progress?”
“It’s the process of making things better.”
“Not always; sometimes you can have progress in the wrong direction.”
“All right, then, we worship progress in the right direction.”
“But what is there about it that would make you want to worship it?”
“Why, it is one of the finest things there is,” said the foreigner lamely. “Well anyway, it has eliminated many of the diseases you people still suffer from.”
“But it’s helped you come up with lots of new ways to kill people.”
“Well yes, but progress also helps us get places faster.”
“You only need to go faster because you have made so many more places to go.”
“It also puts us ahead of everyone else.”
“What’s the good of that?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s the good of that’?”
“What good does it do you?” asked McAdams impatiently.
“I already told you, it makes things better—better schools, better medicines, better machines.”
He had an inspiration.
“It’s the ticket to the future.”
“Why would you want to go to the future? What’s wrong with right now?”
“You are hopelessly old-fashioned.”
“What’s wrong with being old-fashioned?”
“You cannot stay in one place. You must continue to move forward or be ruled by those who do. We Martians believe in the future, and because of it our planet is the height of technological achievement.”
“Then why did you travel for three years to get to a different one?”
“Oh well, we’re running out of resources, so we need to settle new areas where resources are still abundant.”
“Didn’t you ever hear of the saying, ‘you made your bed, now lie in it’?”
“No. But I suspect you are having a joke at my expense.”
“I am, and I’m sorry. It isn’t polite. But there’s one thing I’d like to say in all seriousness: I don’t like fake, artificial things, whether it’s food, or whatever else it may be, and I’ve generally found that people are what they eat. I tell you for your own good that you’ve not only been fed a lot of synthetic food, you’ve been fed a lot of synthetic theories as well. There isn’t a shred of sense in them: you have been duped. They sound fine and splendid, but when it comes down to it, they don’t work and they never will.”
“Who says so?”
“I say so, and here’s why: they are based on the idea that progress is constantly making things better. It isn’t; it’s only making them different. And even if progress did make things better, you’d still die in the end and then what good does it do you? For myself, I’d prefer things to go back to the dark ages than to some silly ‘future’. At least one would know what to expect.”
“Old-fashioned! Backwards! Unscientific!”
“You can’t tell me what’s wrong with being all those adjectives. You repeat them like a machine. Your mind is trapped inside a little box so that all you can think about is synthetics and progress. I am a free-thinker. I know what I like. I don’t like progress if all it does is make dirty red planets with no water, no air, no trees, no grass, no horses, no food (that can be called food) and no private property—no thank you!”
“You,” said the voyager disdainfully, “will never experience the elevation of exploration, or taste the ecstasy of discovery.”
“Instead I shall taste turkey and mince pie at Christmas time.”
“You are a narrow-minded, contemptible, insignificant little fool!”
“I’d rather be a little fool than a big one,” said McAdams.
Before he could finish, the spaceman squeezed into his trap, pulled the door to, lifted off into the atmosphere with a lot of whistling and flashing electric lights and was gone.
Still, McAdams felt reasonably sure he’d gotten the last word.
END
The Scarlet Grail
Once a ridiculous journey was made
To a planet the color of rust.
Three simple spacemen the trip assayed
Led by a vision of dust.
“Why?” said the questioners, asking in vain,
“Why is the trip such a ‘must’?
“What is there for you to possibly gain
“But a handful of worthless red dust?”
“Ho ho!” the intrepid voyagers said,
“You can’t tell a pie by the crust!
“What though the planet is empty and dead—
“It’s covered in marvelous dust!”
Trouble and mishap arose; still they
Said, “we will get there or bust!
“What if it takes us a year and a day
“If we find the superlative dust?”
Till, silent, they stood on the sandy red plain
Staring in hopeless disgust.
Slowly they counted it grain by grain—
Counted the wonderful dust.
“And this is the object of our desire,
“For this we have labored and fussed—
“A great empty planet the color of fire
“And mountains of infernal dust?”
“Excuse me,” said McAdams attempting to be civil, “could you possibly move this thing aside? My horse can’t get past.”
“Solid ground,” the man muttered. “After three years.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. I was only talking to myself. Could you inform me if I am on the planet Earth?”
“I’m afraid you’ve missed your way. This is Harrisville.”
“Dear me.”
The man took from the stove a map covered with constellations and studied it anxiously.
“You are really very far out of your way,” said McAdams. “We are several hundred miles from the ocean.”
“What of that? Who cares for an ocean?”
“I thought you must be a sailor.”
“So I am.”
“Then I should think you’d be looking for the water.”
“Water?”
The man’s eyes gleamed.
“Where?”
“Why, in the ocean.”
“Do you mean there is water in the ocean?”
“What do you mean? The water is the ocean.”
“Then the ocean is not just a great depression?”
“Whatever are you talking about?” asked McAdams angrily.
“Is there a great deal of water in the ocean?”
“Of course there is!”
“How much?”
“Millions and millions of tons. The world is ¾ water. I should think anyone would know at least that much.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Of course! What is the matter with you?”
“Ah!” said the man, gazing raptly at the stars. “Then it is true what we have been told about the watery planets.”
“Look here,” said McAdams, “I think you are not well. Perhaps you ought to take some headache powder.”
“No, no. I am quite all right. I’ll have some of this,” said the man, taking out a small flask and swallowing a spoonful of the contents.
He looked at McAdams amusedly.
“Do you still use headache powder? Why, that is obsolete! This drug is what is in use now. It will cure anything—from corns to consumption.”
“Will it? I see now; the man is a peddler,” McAdams thought. “No doubt he will try to sell me some of his quack-medicine.”
“Yes; a late medical breakthrough. I’m afraid your planet is very backwards. What do you use for transportation?”
“Trains and steamships.”
“No airships?”
“There are dirigibles.”
“Oh. Well, we have mainly air traffic. There are three different levels of altitude to travel in and they all must be intensely regulated to avoid collisions.”
“It sounds as if everyone where you come from is in a great hurry.”
“Oh yes, we are. But even with our technology it took me three years to reach this planet, although my ship is considered the fastest—or was when I left. Would you like to see inside it?”
McAdams thought that the fellow could not possibly show him anything about a Franklin stove that he did not already know, having once worked for a company that sold them, so he politely declined.
The fellow, not at all put out, continued his questions.
“What sort of government do you have here?”
“I’m an American.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“We have a president.”
“Oh, I see. Very out-of-date. We’re communists. So I ought not to have called this ship mine: it’s the government’s really. I am on a government mission. I really ought to determine where I am, for they’ll want a detailed report.”
He dove inside his piece of junk and brought out a curious little instrument with which he proceeded to take the height of different stars in relation to the horizon.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, “I think you have been mistaken. This is Earth.”
“What is?”
“This. Where we are.”
“There is earth everywhere.”
“The planet, man; the planet!”
“Well, what about it?”
“This planet is Earth!”
“Don’t you think I know that? What do you take me for, as big a booby as yourself?”
“I’m afraid I have gotten a little too excited,” said the man, “but you see, this is a momentous discovery—a planet so near our own with water resources! Where I come from we have no water.”
“I suppose you come from Utah.”
“No; Mars.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and we have no water—occurring naturally, that is.”
He looked slyly at McAdams.
“I suppose you wonder how we survive without water?”
“Not at all. I don’t much care for the stuff, myself.”
“Yes, well, we synthesize it. By an ingenious process we take the elemental components (hydrogen and oxygen) and combine them to make a pure water—no nasty minerals.”
“How do you do it?” asked McAdams, wondering if he could get a patent.
“I can’t tell you. It’s a carefully guarded secret. There are lots of folks who would like to know the Martians’ formula, believe me. If they once had it they could begin to populate the waterless planets.”
“Just a moment,” said McAdams. “When you say that there is no water on Mars, do you mean that it never rains?”
“Oh no, it never rains.”
“Then how does anything grow?”
“Nothing grows.”
“What do your animals eat?”
“There aren’t any animals.”
“Then what do you eat?”
“Synthetic foods. We synthesize everything. We take the basic elements and put them together to form whatever we wish—chops, sardines, Yorkshire pudding—“
“I don’t suppose it tastes very good.”
“It doesn’t really, but one gets used to it. We do have a few plants in our laboratories which we use to synthesize things, but soon we will have progressed far enough as not to need them. They use up too much oxygen. That is another thing we must synthesize—air. The atmosphere has scarcely any oxygen, so we have to take it from other sources.”
“How did you get along before you learned to make everything from scratch?”
“Oh, Mars hasn’t always been this way. Hundreds of years ago it had plenty of water and air and plants and animals. Some folks say that all our experimenting with synthesis used up too many resources and that is why the planet dried out, but I say it was a jolly good thing we learned to do it, or we’d have all died out long ago.”
“What did you do all that synthesis nonsense for if you didn’t need to?”
“You wouldn’t ask that if you were a true scientist. Have you never felt the exhilaration of discovering a new substance or a new method?”
“No. I’m rather fond of the old ones.”
“So you see, you will never move forward.”
“I would be able to if you would move your property out of the road.”
“Is that what you travel in?” asked the fellow, looking in surprise at McAdams’s buggy.
“Yes,” said McAdams looking it over with satisfaction. “It’s only four years old and is in quite good condition, although the leather is wearing out in places.”
“How is it propelled?”
“My horse pulls it.”
“Oh. Is it really machinery?”
“I suppose it is—of sorts.”
“It is amazing! How does it work?”
“I say gettup when I want him to go and whoa when I want him to stop.”
“How fast can it go?”
“Faster than Dr. Smith’s automobile.”
“Oh.”
The Martian glanced around a trifle nervously.
“I suppose there are others of your countrymen about?”
“Yes, somewhere.”
“Are they as civil as you?”
“No, most of them aren’t.”
“Oh dear. Still, an explorer must take risks. What kind of weapons do you have here?”
McAdams pulled out his pocket revolver and showed it to him rather proudly. It was his prized possession.
“How does it work?” asked the fellow curiously.
“I believe it works by this hammer striking the percussion cap on the end of the cartridge which ignites the powder in the chamber and propels the bullet forward through the barrel. It is not very accurate, but it is useful in close quarters.”
“Obsolete,” said the man with relief.
He took out a similar weapon and explained its functions.
“The bullet is held in this chamber until released by the trigger. It is self-propelled by an engine on the rear. When it comes in contact with something solid it burrows several inches and then explodes. This here is a counter-espionage bullet. It does not explode, but rather releases a chemical into the bloodstream, causing intense pain. It is useful for interrogation, because after being administered slight pressure at certain points of the body produce agonizing results. We have acquired much useful information by the use of it.”
McAdams surveyed the weapon with distaste.
“We don’t use tactics like that anymore,” he said.
“Once we agreed with you. But we have since discovered that it does not pay to be too good for one’s own good. He wins who is worst first.”
“What happens to the good people?”
“They fall behind and are eventually conquered by others.”
“What do you mean by ‘fall behind’?”
“They miss chances because of silly ethical principles, like so-called ‘human decency’.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, like keeping treaties; protecting women and children; playing fair—all that sort of thing.”
“Well, what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s just another name for squeamishness. ‘Hit hard, fast and first’ is my motto.”
“Then you don’t believe in right and wrong?”
“I only believe in results.”
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“Our god is progress.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you like progress?”
“It’s the process of making things better.”
“Not always; sometimes you can have progress in the wrong direction.”
“All right, then, we worship progress in the right direction.”
“But what is there about it that would make you want to worship it?”
“Why, it is one of the finest things there is,” said the foreigner lamely. “Well anyway, it has eliminated many of the diseases you people still suffer from.”
“But it’s helped you come up with lots of new ways to kill people.”
“Well yes, but progress also helps us get places faster.”
“You only need to go faster because you have made so many more places to go.”
“It also puts us ahead of everyone else.”
“What’s the good of that?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s the good of that’?”
“What good does it do you?” asked McAdams impatiently.
“I already told you, it makes things better—better schools, better medicines, better machines.”
He had an inspiration.
“It’s the ticket to the future.”
“Why would you want to go to the future? What’s wrong with right now?”
“You are hopelessly old-fashioned.”
“What’s wrong with being old-fashioned?”
“You cannot stay in one place. You must continue to move forward or be ruled by those who do. We Martians believe in the future, and because of it our planet is the height of technological achievement.”
“Then why did you travel for three years to get to a different one?”
“Oh well, we’re running out of resources, so we need to settle new areas where resources are still abundant.”
“Didn’t you ever hear of the saying, ‘you made your bed, now lie in it’?”
“No. But I suspect you are having a joke at my expense.”
“I am, and I’m sorry. It isn’t polite. But there’s one thing I’d like to say in all seriousness: I don’t like fake, artificial things, whether it’s food, or whatever else it may be, and I’ve generally found that people are what they eat. I tell you for your own good that you’ve not only been fed a lot of synthetic food, you’ve been fed a lot of synthetic theories as well. There isn’t a shred of sense in them: you have been duped. They sound fine and splendid, but when it comes down to it, they don’t work and they never will.”
“Who says so?”
“I say so, and here’s why: they are based on the idea that progress is constantly making things better. It isn’t; it’s only making them different. And even if progress did make things better, you’d still die in the end and then what good does it do you? For myself, I’d prefer things to go back to the dark ages than to some silly ‘future’. At least one would know what to expect.”
“Old-fashioned! Backwards! Unscientific!”
“You can’t tell me what’s wrong with being all those adjectives. You repeat them like a machine. Your mind is trapped inside a little box so that all you can think about is synthetics and progress. I am a free-thinker. I know what I like. I don’t like progress if all it does is make dirty red planets with no water, no air, no trees, no grass, no horses, no food (that can be called food) and no private property—no thank you!”
“You,” said the voyager disdainfully, “will never experience the elevation of exploration, or taste the ecstasy of discovery.”
“Instead I shall taste turkey and mince pie at Christmas time.”
“You are a narrow-minded, contemptible, insignificant little fool!”
“I’d rather be a little fool than a big one,” said McAdams.
Before he could finish, the spaceman squeezed into his trap, pulled the door to, lifted off into the atmosphere with a lot of whistling and flashing electric lights and was gone.
Still, McAdams felt reasonably sure he’d gotten the last word.
END
The Scarlet Grail
Once a ridiculous journey was made
To a planet the color of rust.
Three simple spacemen the trip assayed
Led by a vision of dust.
“Why?” said the questioners, asking in vain,
“Why is the trip such a ‘must’?
“What is there for you to possibly gain
“But a handful of worthless red dust?”
“Ho ho!” the intrepid voyagers said,
“You can’t tell a pie by the crust!
“What though the planet is empty and dead—
“It’s covered in marvelous dust!”
Trouble and mishap arose; still they
Said, “we will get there or bust!
“What if it takes us a year and a day
“If we find the superlative dust?”
Till, silent, they stood on the sandy red plain
Staring in hopeless disgust.
Slowly they counted it grain by grain—
Counted the wonderful dust.
“And this is the object of our desire,
“For this we have labored and fussed—
“A great empty planet the color of fire
“And mountains of infernal dust?”
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