The quandary in which the President found himself was indeed no light one. To undertake trade relationships with another planet could have unforeseeable consequences.
It might open infinitely rich fields of knowledge of incalculable benefit to suffering humanity, but it might also carry the microbe of possible future cosmic conflict.
Holt's fateful question was, therefore, tossed into the ravening maw of a special session of the United Congress, which flung it from one tongue to another in impassioned debate. The elder politicians viewed it with alarm and were strongly supported by the lobbies of some of the major industrial concerns, in mortal fear that the comfortable practical monopolies they enjoyed might be threatened by revolutionary methods descending on them like a blight from Mars. Some few of the more progressive and openminded interests publicly announced that they proposed to organize a joint, private expedition in order that various technical advances described in Holt's radio messages might be studied in situ by their own experts. Lobbying flowered as never before and the representatives of both persuasions exerted gigantic efforts to win legislators to their points of view.
The debate raged for month after month until the Congress uttered its historic decision that cosmic isolation could be no more successful than terrestrial isolation had proven in the past. If Mars had developed an advanced situation, it would simply be the worst form of retardationism not to enter into full relations with the representatives of this civilization. The approval of the scheme contained very few reservations, carefully masked in some of the minor clauses.
In the meantime, Holt became aware that desire for a permanent relationship with Earthlings and their science and industry was anything but one-sided. Oraze's hopes that the "young heroes from Earth" would shake some of the Martian mentalities out of their lethargic channels of thought seemed to have been granted. A new spirit seemed to pervade them and to blow away the cobwebs from their rigid minds, revealing that there was another and a different world outside the pressure locks of their underground culture.
They began to sense that in a free and open world with a free and open sky, simple human happiness might be more attainable than in their troglodytic existence of gadgets and tawdry ornamentation.
Holt telecast to the entire population a series of pictures and explanations of the technical advances of Earth, but the Martian engineers and chemists displayed little more than an extremely patronizing interest. Certainly the great liners plowing the seas were to them an amazing prehistoric manifestation and aroused their admiration, as did the skyscrapers of terrestrial cities, although it seemed to them somewhat illogical to build upwards when an underground structure could so easily be expanded indefinitely simply be digging and bracing another stope or tunnel.
Their disdain, however, of the primitive mechanical art which still drove wheels by diesel and turbine power was unbounded, and human mining methods seemed to them but little advanced beyond the Neanderthal man's scratching for minerals with a fire-hardened stick. They thought very little of a race which depended for its food upon surface agriculture and the breeding of edible animals. Their final conclusion, reached with many expressions of self-appreciative sympathy, was to the effect that they had little to learn from any fledgling civilization, as curious as it might be in its primitive way.
Other branches of Martian science adopted a radically different point of view, particularly those who saw in Holt's pictures much of value and interest, although not contributing to any immediate advancement of their planet. For them, Earth was a planet in the first flush of youth; a planet populated by people of natural intelligence who had mobilized all the mighty forces God had given His favorite creatures, men. And those forces varied from the farmer rooted on his land to the spacefarers plumbing the depths of the Heavens. On Earth, they might still see the plant and animal life which had long since been extinct upon their own planet. Fossil forms of life in a Martian museum could still be studied as it lived and breathed upon the sister planet. Martians knew that their globe had once rejoiced in mountains, seas, swamps and forests; their natural histories told them so with an abundance of colorful detail. But such phenomena were now as remote from their own days and times as the Pliocene era is to an Earthling of the 20th century. If they could study Earth in the flower of her development, well might they discover the source of that monotonous artificiality which was the bane of their own poverty-stricken planet.
The mainspring of any true scientist is curiosity, and the Martians were no exceptions.
Holt wound that mainspring to its utmost limit and held before them an Olympic torch of truth-seeking from which they caught the fire of enthusiasm.
There were many factual discussions with Woolf, McRae, Bergmann, Ross and others, and no Martian ever departed without an aroused interest in an exchange of experiences. Societies in support of scientific cooperation with Earth grew like mushrooms. During the most bloody wars on Earth, scientists had always found a common denominator on which they could heartily concur and agree, irrespective of their national loyalties. Theirs was a community of soul in the search for the Truth in God's own nature, and it was now to extend its unifying bond across the vastnesses of space. Holt was overjoyed when the radio message containing Earth's decision to take up interplanetary relations with Mars reached him in the office he occupied in the Martian government lodgements around the deep, central plaza of Ahla. Without delay, he communicated to the President of the Martian Academy his desire to lay before the outstanding men of science of the planet an offer to have three of them accompany the expedition on its return to Earth. These men would be guests of the government of Earth for the duration of their stay and would be returned to the satellitic orbit around Mars at the next suitable apposition between the two planets and to their subterranean civilization by a landing boat carried by a cargo vessel to be built for the purpose.
A special session of the Martian Academy of Science was called to select from the huge number of candidates those who should be distinguished by making the voyage.
Election to, or even a call to speak before, the Academy of Science was the highest honor within the aspiration of any Martian scientist, for the significance of the Academy far exceeded that of a mere association of honorable graybeards distinguished in their chosen fields. The Academy was, in point of fact, a sort of General Staff of Research, set up with the perfected skill in organization which characterized Martian civilization. It organized and planned all-embracing and systematic campaigns against ignorance wherever found. It discovered breaches in the linked chain of knowledge and forged new links. It appointed liaison officers whenever it discovered that some advance in one branch of science might be of importance to another branch. It offered training to any scientist whose position at the forefront of research required that his work be correlated with the general welfare. When some new horizon was discovered in any field of knowledge, the Academy immediately proceeded to evaluate not only its practical application, but also the effects it might have on social, hygienic, psychological, economic or other circumstances. In its studies, the Academy was some fifty or one hundred years ahead of the present, and it planned the strategy of research accordingly.
Notwithstanding the regimentation and systematization of Martian scientific thought, the Martian Academy was fully aware that basic research must wither and die without freedom. It was the custom of centuries that the Academy should be apportioned some fifteen per cent of the public budget for research purposes. Oddly enough, this figure was astoundingly close to that devoted to armament by terrestrial nations before they settled their differences, even in piping times of peace. Much of this money went to research institutes and universities without strings as to its disbursement and without an accounting. All that was required of the beneficiaries was that they should report with the minimum of delay to the Academy any new discoveries made by them.