Produced by Greg Weeks, Joel Schlosberg and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber’s Note:

This eBook was produced from the 1949 book _A Martian Odyssey and
Others_ by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not
uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.

A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped
general quarters of the _Ares_.

“Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the
thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching
flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of
the port.

The other three stared at him sympathetically–Putz, the engineer,
Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the
expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the _Ares_
expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of
the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less
than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic
blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad
Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of
the _Ares_. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated
de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the
first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first
successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that
success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts–the months
spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the
air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny
rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century,
and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.

Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his
frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

“Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened?
You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peep
for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap
with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!”

“Speel?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?”

“He means ‘_spiel_’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.”

Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile.
“That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “_Ich spiel
es!_” He grunted comfortably and began.

“According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the
North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You’ll
remember, Cap–we had orders not to land, but just scout about for
points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along,
riding pretty high–about two thousand feet–for a couple of reasons.
First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets
travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up
dust if you move low.”

“We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the
films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how
the public mobbed the first moon pictures?”

“The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I
buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings
haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and
even then I had to use the under-jets.

“So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the
under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though,
to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain
that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing–same blobby
growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or
biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my
position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard
me.”

“I did!” snapped Harrison.

“A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the
surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and
orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then,
and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which
would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right,
I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple
of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so
I did.”

“Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the
captain. “Let’s get to the point.”

“Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle–believe it or
not–I crossed a canal!”

“Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!”

“And did he also see a city?”

“Twenty of ’em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!”

“Well,” observed Jarvis, “from here on I’ll be telling a few things Putz
didn’t see!” He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. “I knew that I
had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours–eight
hundred miles–from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over
Thyle, whether I or II I’m not sure, not more than twenty-five miles
into it. And right there, Putz’s pet motor quit!”

“Quit? How?” Putz was solicitous.

“The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and
suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed
my nose on the window, too!” He rubbed the injured member ruefully.

“Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?”
inquired Putz. “Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation–“