Then she pushed a button on the machine and a monotone buzzing reached Hubbard's ears from the pillow where his head reclined.
"Soon you'll go to sleep," said Mura. "These disks are sensitive to the waves of your brain and conduct them to the amplifier. Can you hear a loud ticking in this receiver?
That is the high frequency of your waking consciousness. As soon as you fall asleep, slow oscillations will indicate that your conscious mind is submerged, and when the amplifier registers this, your lesson in chemistry will begin."
Five minutes of listening to the monotone sound coming from the pillow put Hubbard into a sound sleep. The amplifier ticked slower and slower. Then there was the click of a switch and the phonograph began to revolve.
An insistently persuasive voice whispered from the pillow:
"The first nine elements of the periodic system: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Flourine…
Hydrogen — Helium — Lithium — Beryllium…
Hydrogen — Helium — Lithium — Beryllium…
Boron — Carbon — Nitrogen — Oxygen — Flourine…
Boron — Carbon — Nitrogen — Oxygen — Flourine…"
For several minutes the insistent list was repeated. Then Mura shut off the machine and wakened Hubbard.
"Well Glen, can you tell us the first nine elements of the periodic system now?" laughed Holt.
Hubbard sat up with a yawn and then repeated his lesson mechanically in Martian just as he had received it from the phonograph record.
"Hydrogen — Helium — Lithium — Beryllium — Boron — Carbon — Nitrogen — Oxygen
— Flourine. If I only knew what the devil it all means in English!"
At this, Gudunek, who had been standing skeptically in the background, exploded joyously, "What a wonderful thing for my Martian language teaching!"
Holt shook his head dubiously. What was it that Oraze had said? Canned knowledge? It was an excellent tag for this horrible intervention of technology in the sacred mysteries of the human mind…
"When I was a small boy," he said, "I used to sleep with my Latin primer under the pillow because I couldn't remember the words. How many thousands of hours I put into learning mechanical things, and how difficult it was! It doesn't seem possible that it can be so simple…"
"I say, Doctor Barrett," remarked Billingsley, "doesn't this jolly well explain why our Martian friends all have outsized heads? Surely if continued overeating puts a fine round belly on a man, this stuffing the brain with wisdom must enlarge the good, old cranium if it's not to burst, you know…"
Chapter 28 — The Machinery of a Super Civilization
As Holt and his little band penetrated further and further into the details of Martian civilization and culture, the 449 days of "waiting time" which they originally contemplated with considerable dread began to fly like the wind.
Rather did they fear that the apposition necessary for the start of the return journey to Earth would take place long before they could thoroughly examine and record all the surprises offered by the extreme ingenuity of these members of an overripe civilization.
Among these surprises were great atomic power plants whose millions of horsepower kept the bloodstream of the huge, unified technical organism in circulation. Almost equally impressive was the chemical industry of Mars and the manner in which it was able to integrate the scarce but vital planetary store of water, oxygen and ore in such manner that its cycle sustained the inhabitants' general welfare.
The chemical industry was faced with three major problems:
— Air conditioning and pressurization of the subterranean cities and installations.
— Feeding the hundreds of millions of people.
— Producing enough steel to extend the underground structures and to provide for consumer goods.
To fulfill these functions, around which gravitated a whole series of other industrial activities, the managing mentalities were faced with:
— Almost entirely exhausted natural coal deposits, which had been ruthlessly exploited by earlier generations of Martians, much as Earthlings presently exploit their coal mines.
— Very limited water supplies, which were required to be pumped from the polar regions during Springtime.
— A good supply of electrical energy, generated by atomic power.
— Finally, an inexhaustible supply of relatively low-concentration iron oxide, adulterated by various minerals in the ferrous soil of the deserts.
The Martian chemists had gone about their work in the most admirable fashion, attacking the triple problem with a model degree of integration.
They electrolyzed a certain proportion of the water as it arrived from the polar regions by passing powerful electric currents through it and thus disassociating it into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen was piped to the air conditioning and pressurizing plants, and there was used to regenerate the air of respiration, a continuous process. The hydrogen was used in the steelworks, where it was passed over beds of incandescent iron oxide, combining with the oxygen in them. This converted the ferrous oxides into metallic iron, to be worked into structural and other steels by ensuing processes of varying sorts.
Simultaneously, the hydrogen burned to water vapor by taking up the oxygen from the ferrous oxide, and the water produced by condensing the vapor returned to the cycle.
In the air conditioning and regenerating plants, only half of their function was completed by the addition of oxygen to the air of respiration, for the carbon dioxide produced by breathing had to be eliminated to an equivalent extent. This was done in the same manner as in Holt's space vessels, where the exhaust air was pumped into pressure air washers and sprayed with water. Under the high pressure of these sprayers, the carbon dioxide was absorbed into the water droplets, thus separating itself from such air constituents as were insoluble in water. The carbonized water was expelled from the bottoms of the pressure washers and then, when depressurized, it rendered up its carbon dioxide in bubbles. The latter was then piped to food manufactories.
Martian food manufacture was one of the more extraordinary chemical miracles, although it was more biochemical than chemical, in the strict terrestrial sense of the word.
Here the mystery of natural vegetable growth was duplicated by artificial means in retorts.
The biochemical establishments made practical use of that marvelous process which manifests itself in the growth of every plant and which Earthly scientists, in their inability fully to explain it, have called photosynthesis, an empty and non-significant title.
Photosynthesis is the word designating the ability of plants to produce fat, sugar and protein for their nourishment from carbon dioxide, water and a few chemicals which they ordinarily extract from the ground, and they do this by the mere presence of light.
The Martians in their food factories utilized the simplest form of vegetable growth known in nature, namely microscopic algae.
The water supplied to the factories was first heat sterilized in order to destroy alien and undesired germs. Then it was "inoculated" with a relatively small amount of algae and was enriched by the necessary nutritive materials, in the main, carbon dioxide, magnesium, nitrogen and phosphorus. Water thus prepared was passed slowly under batteries of powerful artificial lights within glass tubes which allowed the ultraviolet rays to pass freely. The algae grew both in size and numbers by the mysterious process of photosynthesis, forming, in accordance with the modifications of the process by minor supplementary chemical additives, primarily fats, sugars or proteins. When the light had taken effect and the water flowed out of the transparent piping, the augmented algae growth was centrifuged from the water and taken to extraction presses where the useful products were recovered and sent on to refineries to become food for the Martians.