Chapter 25 — How the Martians Live
When Hubbard and his caterpillar crews debarked from their machines in the roomy freight station of Ahla, Holt, Billingsley and Gudunek were on hand to greet them beside the Martian reception committee. The new arrivals were honored, with but little less ceremony than had been proffered their commander. Gudunek's uncanny semantic sense had already breached the difficulties caused by the lack of a common language, and he was able to distribute a rudimentary glossary in which he had reproduced as closely as possible the musical sounds of the single Martian language in Earthling phonetics. He himself could already chatter easily with the people of Ahla, while Holt and his two original companions were no longer limited to the sign language, although they were by no means as fluent as the linguist.
Preparations had been made for the weary Earthlings to be lodged in Ahla's finest hotel, on one of the upper levels of the circular, subterranean city. Although daylight never penetrated their apartments, they soon lost the pallor they had acquired during their wide voyage through space, for the luminosity produced by the miraculous Martian interior paint in no way lacked health-giving invisible rays.
Invitations to the visitors from the distant planet poured in upon them and the hospitable Ahlians spared no pains to make them feel the sincerity of their welcome. The strangeness of their whole surroundings, and the puzzling inability of the Earthlings to grasp the nature of the truly inconceivable three-dimensional city, were mitigated when they were invited to the underground office building which fulfilled the functions of a city hall.
Here was displayed a model of the amazing, bright, cheerful catacomb in which they were to live for more than a year. It was a huge, circular, conical mass of drifts, stopes, halls and galleries, some twenty miles in diameter and half a mile deep in full scale. The central shaft held forty round, open levels, one above the other, each about one thousand feet in diameter. Around them were ranged the spacious quarters of the Martian government and the administration offices of the important companies.
The tubes of the metropolitan high-speed transit system proceeded radially from each of these levels to the sections of the city devoted to dwellings. From whatever level he happened to be occupying, the homeward-bound Martian had but to walk around the circle of the spacious shaft level where he was, and enter the station which served the sector to which he wished to go. One after the other, small, six-seat cars continued to pass the platform at a walking pace. Selecting an unoccupied car, the Martian would step into it and dial a three-letter combination on a device not unlike a telephone. The residence of each Ahla-dweller had such a letter combination. The little car would continue to move slowly to the end of the platform from which unoccupied cars were switched back into the column passing the platform. Any car with one or more passengers and a dialed combination would fly down the open tunnel ahead of it to the circular gallery corresponding to the first letter of the dialed combination. Here it slipped into an elevator which carried it up or down to the level prescribed by the second dialed letter. Then the car would slide right or left within its sector until it stopped at the dwelling coded by the third letter. The Martian would step out onto the tiny platform in front of his home door, while the car returned automatically to the central station.
Should the Martian or some member of his family wish to make a visit somewhere in Ahla after the departure of the car, he had but to push a button beside the doorbell. Within three minutes an automatic mechanism at the central station would dispatch the same or similar car, after which dialing the appropriate three-letter combination would take them to any desired destination on any level and in any sector.
There were no streets, automobiles, pedestrians, traffic lights, collisions, parking problems or crowded trains. Ahla suffered from none of the nerve-wracking imperfections of an Earthly metropolis. When a Martian family desired a walk, the button near the door would summon a car in which they could ride in comfort to one of the many beautiful subterranean parks in which grew the most amazing, never-wilting trees and shrubs, and through whose maze of branches the Sun shone by day and the stars by night.
A most immaculate cleanliness was the hallmark of the huge, underground metropolis. There was no such thing as dust, for the air was cleaned, refreshed and even given the qualities of different times of year by a central air conditioning system.
Individual preferences as to temperatures could be catered to if that selected by the operators of the municipal plant failed to please. Each dwelling had its own supplementary heating and cooling system, which could be adjusted to suit the occupant.
Water, televisephone, news, purchases — everything was done by wall plugs, spigots or cabinets in which the articles desired were taken out of one of the walls.
It had required some time for Holt and his companions to accustom themselves to this automatically operating subterranean existence, but as soon as they mastered it and became sufficiently familiar with the language to communicate without undue difficulty, they began to take part in the private social life of the great city.
The dean of Martian astronomers was an elderly scientist named Oraze who took great pleasure in extending to Holt one of the first invitations to a Martian home. The Orazes, with their two daughters and a grown son, lived in a handsome, capacious apartment in one of the exterior Ahlian sectors. For many years Oraze had devoted himself to research of Earth's conditions; indeed, his devotion to that type of discovery greatly resembled that of a kindred spirit on Earth, Percival Lowell.
When Holt and Hubbard, to whom the invitation had also been extended, arrived at the Orazes' hospitable door in their little car, they were greeted by the whole family with the cordiality which had marked all their contacts with Martians. The old gentleman adorned them with the customary chain-like decoration about the neck while Holt returned the compliment in the shape of a fine, large, terrestrial globe. Hubbard presented the ladies with flowers he had ordered from one of the large forcing greenhouses.
Chattering as gaily as their still limited knowledge of the language permitted, Holt and Hubbard took their seats with the family around a bare, but graceful table in the living room. No sooner were they seated than the lady of the dwelling — for "house" it could not be called — extinguished the light and flipped on the television. One after the other, a procession of delectably prepared dishes flowed past their hungry eyes. When the final dish had melted into the darkness, the procession was repeated; this time a little faster, and during the second presentation, the diners pushed a button handed to them on a long cord as each course of which they desired to partake passed upon the screen. The screen became blank and the room again was bathed in the soft Martian interior light.
For the space of five minutes, Holt and Hubbard were given an opportunity to exercise their growing knowledge of Martian, then there was a clicking sound from somewhere and the lady of the dwelling arose and removed from a cabinet door in the wall seven shining silver containers, which she graciously placed before the diners. Cooking and serving was a lost art in Ahla, for the huge catering firms of the city were able to display their wares by television and to accept orders at the simple push of an electric button. Whenever such a button was pushed, the dwelling letter-combination appeared upon the order board of the company patronized, at a moment corresponding to the passage of a given dish across the television screen. Electronic cookers prepared it in a flash and, together with the trimmings, it was rushed into vacuum jars which were in turn loaded, complete with utensils, into metal containers and forwarded to the diner via the pneumatic tube delivery system which connected all portions of the city. Nor did dish washing plague the lives of Martians, for the remnants of the meal were simply replaced in the containers and pneumatically returned to the caterers.