Adaptation

Adaptation John Wyndham

The prospect of being stuck on Mars for a while did not worry Marilyn Godalpin a lot — not at first, anyway. She had been near the piece of desert that they called a landing field when the Andromeda came in to a bad landing. After that it did not surprise her at all when the engineers said that with the limited facilities at the settlement the repairs would take at least three months, most likely four. The astonishing thing was that no one in the ship had got more than a bad shaking.

It still did not worry her when they explained to her, with simplified astronautics, that that meant there could be no take-off for the Andromeda for at least eight months on account of the relative position of Earth. But she did get a bit fussed when she discovered that she was going to have a baby. Mars did not seem the right place for that.

Mars had surprised her. When Franklyn Godalpin was offered the job of developing the Jason Mining Corporation's territory there, a few months after their marriage, it had been she who had persuaded him to accept it. She had had an instinct that the men who were in on the ground floor there would go places. Of Mars itself, as seen in pictures, her opinion was low. But she wanted her husband to go places, and to go with him. With Franklyn's heart and head pulling in opposite directions she could have succeeded on either side. She chose head for two reasons. One was lest some day he might come to hold the lost chance of his life against her, the other because, as she said:

“Honey, if we are going to have a family, I want them to have everything we can give them. I love you any way you are, but for their sake I want you to be a big man.”

She had persuaded him not only into taking the job, but into taking her with him. The idea was that she should see him settled into his hut as comfortably as the primitive conditions of the place allowed, and then go back home on the next ship. That should have been after a four-week stop — Earth reckoning. But the ship intended was the Andromeda; and she was the last in the present oppositional phase.

Franklyn's work left her little of his time, and had Mars been what she expected she would have been dismayed by the prospect of even an extra week there. But the first discovery she had made when she stepped on to the planet was that photographs can be literally true while spiritually quite false.

The deserts were there, all right. Mile upon mile of them. But from the first they lacked that harsh uncharitableness that the pictures had given them. There was a quality which in some way the lens had filtered out. The landscape came to life, and showed itself differently from the recorded shades.

There was unexpected beauty in the colouring of the sands, and the rocks, and the distant, rounded mountains, and strangeness in the dark deeps of the cloudless sky. Among the plants and bushes on the waterway margins there were flowers, more beautiful and more delicately complex than any she had seen on Earth. There was mystery, too, where the stones of ancient ruins lay half buried —all that was left, maybe, of huge palaces or temples. It was something like that, Marilyn felt, that Shelley's traveller had known in his antique land:

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless

and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far

away.

Yet it was not grim. She had looked to find a sour desolation; the morbid aftermath of eruption, destruction and fire. It had never occurred to her that the old age of a world might come softly, with a gentle melancholy, like the turning of a leaf in the fall.

Back on Earth, people were looking on the Martian venturers as the new pioneers attacking the latest frontier opposed to man. Mars made nonsense of that. The land lay placidly open to them, unresisting. Its placidity dwindled their importance, making them crude intruders on the last quiet drowsiness.

Mars was comatose, sinking slowly deeper into her final sleep. But she was not yet dead. Seasonal tides still stirred in the waters, too, though they seldom gave any more sign of themselves than a vagrant ripple. Among the flowers and the tinkerbells there were still insects to carry pollen. Kinds of gram still grew, sparse, poorly nourished vestiges of vanished harvests, yet capable of thriving again with irrigation. , There were the thrippetts, bright flashes of flying colour, unclassifiable as insect or bird. By night other small creatures emerged. Some of them mewed, almost like kittens, and sometimes when both moons were up, one caught glimpses of little marmoset-like shapes. Almost always there was that most characteristic of all Martian sounds, the ringing of the tinkerbells. Their hard shiny leaves which flashed like polished metal needed no more than a breath of the thin air to set them chiming so that all the desert rang faintly to their tiny cymbals.

The clues to the manner of people who had lived there were too faint to read. Rumour spoke of small groups, apparently human, farther south, but real exploration still waited on the development of craft suited to the thin Martian air.

A frontier of a kind there was, but without valour — for there was little left to fight but quiet old age. Beyond the busy settlement Mars was a restful place.

“I like it,” said Marilyn. “In a way it's sad, but it isn't saddening. A song can be like that sometimes. It soothes you and makes you feel at peace.”

Franklyn's concern over her news was greater than Marilyn's, and he blamed himself for the state of affairs. His anxiety irritated her slightly. And it was no good trying to place blame, she pointed out. All that one could do was to accept the situation and take every sensible care.

The settlement doctor backed that up. James Forbes was a young man, and no sawbones. He was there because a good man was needed in a place where unusual effects might be expected, and strange conditions called for careful study. And he had taken the job because he was interested. His line now was matter of fact, and encouraging. He refused to make it remarkable.

“There was nothing to worry about,” he assured them. “Ever since the dawn of history there have been women producing babies in far more inconvenient times and places than this — and getting away with it. There's no reason at all why everything should not be perfectly normal.”

He spoke his professional lies with an assurance which greatly increased their confidence, and he maintained it steadily by his manner. Only in his diary did he admit worrying speculations on the effects of lowered gravitation and air-pressure, the rapid temperature changes, the possibility of unknown infections and the other hazardous factors.

Marilyn minded little that she lacked the luxuries that would have attended her at home. With her coloured maid, Helen, to look after her and keep her company she busied herself with sewing and small matters. The Martian scene retained its fascination for her. She felt at peace with it as though it were a wise old counsellor who had seen too much of birth and death to grow vehement over either.

Jannessa, Marilyn's daughter, was born with no great trial upon a night when the desert lay cold in the moonlight, and so quiet that only an occasional faint chime from the tinkerbells disturbed it. She was the first Earth baby to be born on Mars. A perfectly normal six and a half pounds —Earth — and a credit to all concerned.

It was afterwards that things started to go less well. Dr. Forbes' fears of strange infections had been well grounded, and despite his scrupulous precautions there were complications. Some were susceptible to the attacks of penicillin and the complex sulfas, but others resisted them. Marilyn, who had at first appeared to be doing well, weakened and then became seriously ill.