A Martian Odyssey
toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship."
"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of yours and
thought you were its brother!"
"Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my gun and said
'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort, and the thing came
over and we were pals.
"By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I'd better build a
fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the fire. I picked a spot
at the base of the Thyle cliff, where the rock could reflect a little
heat on my back. I started breaking off chunks of this desiccated
Martian vegetation, and my companion caught the idea and brought in an
armful. I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and
brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it,
and the fire was blazing--and you all know what a job we have starting a
fire in this atmosphere!
"And that bag of his!" continued the narrator. "That was a manufactured
article, my friends; press an end and she popped open--press the middle
and she sealed so perfectly you couldn't see the line. Better than
zippers.
"Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort
of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick';
he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and
repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I
called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to
emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him,
'Tweel.'
"There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said
something like 'P-p-p-proot.' And that was just the beginning; I was
always 'Tick,' but as for him--part of the time he was 'Tweel,' and part
of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,' and part of the time he was sixteen
other noises!
"We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried 'star,' and
'tree,' and 'fire,' and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I
couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive
minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist! Finally I gave it
up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.
"But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple of them,
which I suppose is a great achievement if you're used to a language you
have to make up as you go along. But I couldn't get the hang of his
talk; either I missed some subtle point or we just didn't _think_
alike--and I rather believe the latter view.
"I've other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave up the
language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two plus two
equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles. Again Tweel
caught the idea, and informed me that three plus three equals six. Once
more we seemed to be getting somewhere.
"So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school education, I drew
a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and then at the last glow of
the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and Venus, and Mother Earth, and
Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars, I swept my hand around in a sort of
inclusive gesture to indicate that Mars was our current environment. I
was working up to putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.
"Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and
with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos
to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!
"Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses
telescopes--that they're civilized!"
"Does not!" snapped Harrison. "The moon is visible from here as a fifth
magnitude star. They could see its revolution with the naked eye."
"The moon, yes!" said Jarvis. "You've missed my point. Mercury isn't
visible! And Tweel knew of Mercury because he placed the Moon at the
_third_ planet, not the second. If he didn't know Mercury, he'd put the
earth second, and Mars third, instead of fourth! See?"
"Humph!" said Harrison.
"Anyway," proceeded Jarvis, "I went on with my lesson. Things were going
smoothly, and it looked as if I could put the idea over. I pointed at
the earth on my diagram, and then at myself, and then, to clinch it, I
pointed to myself and then to the earth itself shining bright green
almost at the zenith.
"Tweel set up such an excited clacking that I was certain he understood.
He jumped up and down, and suddenly he pointed at himself and then at
the sky, and then at himself and at the sky again. He pointed at his
middle and then at Arcturus, at his head and then at Spica, at his feet
and then at half a dozen stars, while I just gaped at him. Then, all of
a sudden, he gave a tremendous leap. Man, what a hop! He shot straight
up into the starlight, seventy-five feet if an inch! I saw him
silhouetted against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head
first, and land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square
in the center of my sun-circle in the sand--a bull's eye!"
"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"
"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed while he
pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I figured he'd missed
my point, and I went through the whole blamed rigamarole again, and it
ended the same way, with Tweel on his nose in the middle of my picture!"
"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.
"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We could exchange
ideas up to a certain point, and then--blooey! Something in us was
different, unrelated; I don't doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy
as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different
viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours. But--we
couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I
_liked_ Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."
"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"
"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we--"
He paused, and then resumed his narrative. "Anyway, I finally gave it
up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any
too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes
after I closed myself in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some
eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant
little frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my
rocket.
"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I
woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I
heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that
three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to
myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the
south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.
"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing
through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He
seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in
beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and
stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come
shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his
coming at me like a spear, but he always ended in the sand at my side.
"So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same sort of
place as this--same crazy plants and same little green biopods growing
in the sand, or crawling out of your way. We talked--not that we
understood each other, you know, but just for company. I sang songs, and
I suspect Tweel did too; at least, some of his trillings and twitterings
had a subtle sort of rhythm.
"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words.
He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and point to a pebble and
say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then repeat it.
He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing
twice in succession, or that the same word could apply to two different
objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the
primitive speech of some earth people--you know, Captain, like the
Negritoes, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food
or water or man--words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea
water, or strong man and weak man--but no names for general classes.
They're too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are
just different aspects of the same thing. But that wasn't the case with
Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different--our
minds were alien to each other. And yet--we _liked_ each other!"
"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two were so
fond of each other."
"Well, I like _you_!" countered Jarvis wickedly. "Anyway," he resumed,
"don't get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact,
I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human
intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I
guess; but don't overlook the point that he managed to understand a
little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."
"Because he didn't have any!" suggested the captain, while Putz and
Leroy blinked attentively.
"You can judge of that when I'm through," said Jarvis. "Well, we plugged
along across the Mare Chronium all that day, and all the next. Mare
Chronium--Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to agree with Schiaparelli's
name by the end of that march! Just that grey, endless plain of weird
plants, and never a sign of any other life. It was so monotonous that I
was even glad to see the desert of Xanthus toward the evening of the
second day.
"I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for all I never
saw him drink or eat. I think he could have crossed the Mare Chronium in
a couple of hours with those block-long nose dives of his, but he stuck
along with me. I offered him some water once or twice; he took the cup
from me and sucked the liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted
it all back into the cup and gravely returned it.
"Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it, one of those
nasty sand clouds blew along, not as bad as the one we had here, but
mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent flap of my thermo-skin
bag across my face and managed pretty well, and I noticed that Tweel
used some feathery appendages growing like a mustache at the base of his
beak to cover his nostrils, and some similar fuzz to shield his eyes."
"He is a desert creature!" ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.
"Huh? Why?"
"He drink no water--he is adapt' for sand storm--"
"Proves nothing! There's not enough water to waste any where on this
desiccated pill called Mars. We'd call all of it desert on earth, you
know." He paused. "Anyway, after the sand storm blew over, a little wind
kept blowing in our faces, not strong enough to stir the sand. But
suddenly things came drifting along from the Xanthus cliffs--small,
transparent spheres, for all the world like glass tennis balls! But
light--they were almost light enough to float even in this thin
air--empty, too; at least, I cracked open a couple and nothing came out
but a bad smell. I asked Tweel about them, but all he said was 'No, no,
no,' which I took to mean that he knew nothing about them. So they went
bouncing by like tumbleweeds, or like soap bubbles, and we plugged on
toward Xanthus. Tweel pointed at one of the crystal balls once and said
'rock,' but I was too tired to argue with him. Later I discovered what
he meant.
"We came to the bottom of the Xanthus cliffs finally, when there wasn't
much daylight left. I decided to sleep on the plateau if possible;