Oraze fell silent for a space. Then he added contemplatively, "perhaps the arrival of you young heroes may shake our languid minds awake one more. Perhaps…"
"So you believe that this spiritual lassitude was caused by the necessities of life being satisfied in too great a measure by the perfection of the means of production?" inquired Hubbard. "On our own Earth we are now attempting to fight poverty along identical lines.
And hitherto we've held to the belief that when dire need is banished, mankind will be able to turn to higher and nobler things than the fight for bare existence."
"Natural laws are inexorable," returned Oraze. "You Earthlings too will enter a period of wonderful cultural development, once the political unification of your planets is complete — and I envy you. But you will also have to pay the piper. It is impossible to satisfy the demands of the millions unless you adopt methods of production which produce identical goods likewise by the million, and true mass production means not only the standardizing of the goods produced, but also the standardization of requirements and tastes.
As an example, the identical dishes we ate this evening were eaten at the same time by millions of others here in Ahla, and identical tablecloths lie upon millions of identical tables. Even the shoes my daughter wears…"
"Father, you know Eve cut my initials in the heels!" objected the young woman.
Oraze smiled bitterly. "You've just seen a very tiny example of what represents our greatest tragedy. It presses upon us all like a horrible nightmare, and those of us who have any feeling are fighting tooth and nail against an ever-increasing, gray uniformity which besets our lives. That uniformity is, I fear, too powerful ever to be overcome.
"Throughout thousands of years our people battled for personal freedom. Usurper after usurper who attempted to suppress freedom in the name of his own conceit was overthrown, and a free political system was established which covered the entire planet and has provided an unheard-of degree of stability for more than five thousand years.
"Our technicians liberated us from bodily need. That's right… But their methods, the horrible uniformity with which they invest everything, has literally scorched our souls."
The old man choked in his excitement. "My son Imo, there, is a physician. Mura, my eldest daughter is a teacher. Our hospitals are no more that anatomical repair shops and the schools simply pack minds as mechanically as machinery fills and seals food cans!
You will have to see them to understand what I mean!"
Chapter 26 — All Hands Ashore on Mars
Woolf and Hempstead set about their task of preparing the landing strip for the boats from the Goddard and Ziolkowsky within a few days of the termination of the welcoming festivities. With Gudunek's able linguistic assistance, they agreed with the Martian authorities upon a location exactly on the equator and just north of the great vegetated Aurorae Sinus. The crews of the space ships which still circled in their orbits had been kept informed of all the exciting events on the Red Planet below them and were eager to escape the narrow confines of their inflated nacelles, and experience for themselves the wonders of the fairy, subterranean existence of which they had heard so much.
The site of the landing strip had the advantage of lying only 1,600 miles from Ahla, and was distant but 430 miles from Suguli, a large city hidden beneath the verdant carpet of Aurorae sinus. Woolf and Hempstead shipped the Panther to Suguli by underground freight and drove her around the region in the company of several Martian employees of the Ministry of Irrigation. Near the Jamuna Canal, and just west of it, where it connects Aurorae Sinus with Lacus Niliacus, they found an open plateau with satisfactory ground consistency where they proposed to lay out the landing strip. The Martian Irrigation authorities provided earth-moving machinery with which the work was accomplished within a very few days.
One of the aspects of life in Mars which had astounded Holt was the relative unimportance of aviation, despite the tremendous progressiveness of the highly technological civilization. It was not that aviation was unknown or unpracticed on Mars, for the museums were full of all sorts of highly developed transport aircraft which once had been in extensive use. Subterranean existence and the increasing perfection of the bullet-fast underground transportation system had banned the aircraft as obsolete and no longer adapted to modern transit problems. It was occasionally used to observe the waters of the polar melts and for surveying, but almost all remaining aircraft were helicopters, requiring no landing strips. Hence there were none available for the high landing speeds of the eagerly awaited boats.
In the course of the explorations in search of suitable landing terrain, Sam Woolf was able to throw considerable light upon the secret Martian vegetal regions and canals.
Nowhere did he discover any signs of farming or plantation. It was simply that a sort of moss proceeded to grow anywhere sufficient moisture was provided, and to cover the bare ground with a carpet of varying thickness. The Martians themselves paid not the slightest attention to any utilization of this moss.
Sam found himself before an apparent enigma, for it hardly seemed reasonable that the vast and complicated system of irrigation had been engineered and developed merely to further the growth of unharvested moss over enormous areas. The thousands of miles of "canals" were also covered with moss, and Sam Woolf kept expecting that he would discover plantations from which the Martian would derive vegetable nourishment.
Slowly there awoke in him a realization that there must be some other solution to the riddle than could be suggested to him by his Earth-trained mentality. In Ahla he had become aware of the great synthetic food manufactories which shot appetizing, torpedo like meals into the swellings. There could, of course, be no farm industry! Highly developed chemicals satisfied the Martian hunger just as synthetic fertilizers nourished plant life on Earth!
But any industry calls for a certain amount of raw material, of which the most elemental is water, and water on Mars came only from the poles. Thence it was pumped during the vernal melts. How did the water return to the polar regions? Of course, snow fell there during the Winters, but whence came the snow? Nowhere but from the atmosphere's moisture — and how could the atmosphere gather moisture, if industry and the cities consumed all the water pumped to them?
Nothing is lost in nature even when she is abused after the manner of modern chemistry; therefore, what once was water must again become water. It was quite plain that the subterranean cities must drain away the same amount as was pumped to them. If this were not so, they would drown in their hermetic capsules.
Sam Woolf discovered that the city sewage was distributed to an extensive net of porous tubes which ran slightly below the surface in the vicinity of the population centers.
Thus the liquid soaked the ground and caused the moss to sprout. Millions of tiny roots absorbed it, through which it rose above the surface as sap and returned to the air sucking greedily at the stems and leaflets of the plants. By the grace of autumnal winds, the moisture returned to the poles, where it again began its cycle. This insignificant moss played an important role in the life of the whole planet!
Woolf was also able to explain why the green of the vegetal areas wilted in Winter, although the urban water consumption did not vary the year around, the flow being constant into the drains. The ground froze solid during the Winter season and thus was unable to absorb. The cities accordingly stored their sewage and waster water in enormous sumps from which it was pumped when the warmth of Springtime softened the ground once more. Then the life-giving moss awakened again.