3. He Wants To Play Speculations Again
"Thorsen wants us in his office. He wants to play speculations again."
"What's he doing here this time of day? Its only a little after eight."
"'Ours not to reason why' ", she misquoted.
Kim was already there, perched on a window sill, mountains in the background peaking over his shoulder. Thorsen sat with his feet up on the desk. Jesse sank gracefully to sit cross-legged on the carpet. I flopped into the only chair.
"All right, you've just been told that an animal about the size of a cat positively and for a fact exists on Mars. What's it look like? Hank, you start."
He was always picking on me in these sessions. The last one, a couple of weeks before, he'd wanted to know what numbering system intelligent Jovans were likely to use. I'd held out for binary, arguing that they'd most likely be built along the lines of fish, with bilateral symmetry. Everybody else held out for radial symmetry, like squids or octopus, and octal, decimal, or duodecimal. Apparently I was to be the goat again.
"Well, to begin with, the results from the Viking probes showed no lower order life, no plants, no smaller animals, no microorganisms."
"No detected microorganisms," Thorsen in tempted. "You're well aware that those experiments were neither conclusive nor in some cases even well conceived."
"No detected microorganisms," I corrected myself. "Nonetheless the TV experiments showed nothing analogous, to terrestrial plants or animals, and without those to live on, and in fact a whole ecological base to have evolved out of, more complex, larger animals are extremely unlikely."
"Correct, and Id have been extremely perturbed had you failed to bring that up. However, you've been told that such an animal exists even so. What does it look like?"
"OK, say something on the order of a turtle. Low, close to the ground so the wind doesn't bother it, hard integument so the sandstorms don't scour it to death. Black or dark brown for camouflage from predators if there are any, and to absorb what little energy is available from the sun."
"Black will make it radiate better at night," Kim put in.
"Well, maybe it can change color then, but in the daytime it'll be black."
"What about locomotion," Thorsen wanted to know.
"Well, I'd say legs, or something very similar. Wings are obviously out, and sliding or gliding like a snake or snail wouldn't work well in that fine grit. Maybe six or eight of them, with broad, paddle-shaped ends to dig in and anchor."
"Any other limbs, Jesse?"
Somebody else's turn now.
"Yes, two of those paddle-shaped feet modified to scoop sand into its mouth." She sounded certain.
Why?"
"There are only three major sources of energy available to Myrtle: direct solar radiation, which is obviously inadequate, radioactive decay, of which there ain't that much there to decay, and other life forms, our as-yetto-be-detected microorganisms. I therefore conclude that she makes her living by filtering smaller organisms out of the sand, like whales filter krill."
"You left one out," said Thorsen, and waited. Jesse looked puzzled.
"The wind," Kim helped out.
"Oh, yeah, sure, but I can't think of any likely way for an organism to use that. I mean martians with little windmills on top of their heads would never be able to reproduce. They'd be too busy laughing at each other." She giggled, and rocked back onto her elbows.
"I agree windmills are impractical," Kim said, "But how about a sessile organism with thousands of tendrils waving around in the breeze, sort of like a sea anemone?"
"How does it get energy from that," Thorsen wanted to know.
"Say its got two kinds of tendrils, one impregnated with natural lodestone, the other with some sort of conductor. The tendrils are shaped so the flow around them is veiy turbulent, so when the wind blows over them they whip around and bingo, a natural generator."
"Lodestone isn't that common even on Earth," I put in to show I was listening.
"Make him self-energizing then, like a powerhouse generator, that way it wouldn't take much."
"It sounds pretty unlikely to me."
"Have you ever seen a hermit crab? Or a human being?"
"Let's hear some more about Hank's turtle," Thorsen ordered.
"Head, sense organs, Jesse?"
I'd say a retractible cluster of sense organs. That sort of thing isn't generally very durable. Probably something analagous to eyes, so Myrtle can stay in bright sunlight and avoid stepping into puddles. . .of shadow, and a pair of antennae - feathery things, like a moth's - for detecting breezes. Probably they'd be as far apart as possible when extended to give the most directional information. Hearing would be useless, of course."
"Anything else, Kim?... Hank?"
"Well, it might be useful for it to be able to sense changes in atmospheric pressure, and maybe to smell water or whatever it uses for a solvent, but those funccions could be in the antennae."
"OK. . .anybody want to add anything else?" He waited a few seconds. "What you've come up with is substantially the same as the result of my own thoughts." He fumbled around in the papers on his desk, then came up with a pencil drawing which he passed around. It showed a creature very similar to what we'd described.
Thorsen had been staring out the windows while we examined his drawing. When I put it back on his desk, he spoke, still staring out the window:
"It has come to my attention that some members of this group may have the capability' to make alterations in the output of the television experiment on Marsman I." 'Come to his attention', indeed. I wondered how much he'd doped out for himself and how much he'd squeezed out of Ardee Weston. I was sure Ardee was our weak link and sure Thorsen knew it. He looked around at each of us in turn.
"Possibly," I admitted. Jesse glared at me.
Thorsen looked back out the window again. "I wonder if any of you has fully comprehended the power you have at your disposal. Consider what the effect would be if rather than my humble self (!) the creature I have just shown you were to be 'sighted' on Mars by Marsman. Life on Mars! And not just some boring little bacteria only people like us care about, but something big enough to see and strange enough to excite. At the least, the very least (He was beginning to sound excitedl) it would assure the launching of further Marsmen. And I think the odds are excellent that it would trigger completion of Ares and Stalin. The cold detente is just starting to heat up, and a joint manned Mars mission could be just the thing to fan the flames. But the citizens of neither country would pay for it without there being something up there to excite their interest." He had a strange look in his eyes, a dreamy look I had never seen before. All at once, I realized: I'll be damned, the Almighty wants to be an astronaut. But if he could get the manned mission revived, he probably had a pretty good chance; he was about the top exobiologist in the country. A lot of other things fell into place too. All that jogging he did, for instance, and that biplane he was so fond of buzzing football games in. But he was still talking:
"We've been tending to turn more and more inwards the last decade. There's been little in space to capture the public's imagination so appropriations have been waning. We must do something like this to turn attention outwards or mankind will remain forever earthbound." He realized he was getting uncharacteristically poetic, and turned toward Kim briskly. "Well, Kim? I think you are probably handling the nuts and bolts of this."
Kim looked at Jesse and me, then replied. "Sure, we can do it, but why not go all the way, have John Carter gallop up on a thoat?"
"Don't be ridiculous."