Galloping off to suns and systems far outside our poor little earth.—Author, chap. i.
An altogether new era of enterprise now opens upon our world. My old friend White dashes into the new scene with characteristic spirit, and Dame Fortune, in spite of her reputed fickleness, walks steadily by his side. His were the earlier chances. Brown and I, being of a rather younger generation, were not quite ready at the first start, and so the first and richest cream of the great new milk-pail had mostly been skimmed off ere we entered upon the game. But, after all, with the huge enlargement of business that followed, we have, both of us, done pretty fairly, notwithstanding all obstacles.
One of the earliest incidents was a challenge from Venus, as to which should be the first to visit personally the other. We accepted, of course, and forthwith strained every effort to secure victory. What a grand opportunity for both Black and White, who were at once engaged, by our authorities in this matter, for the public account. It speaks volumes for the interworld courtesies of the time, that we had already so fully communicated all our discovery to Venus—in common, indeed, with the universe generally—as to enable our active neighbour and rival to challenge us, even, so to say, in our own proper wares. But the strain was full upon us for victory, and victory was our due reward. At the same time we were only just ahead. When we launched our ship for this first voyage to Venus, that of our rival was still on the stocks. But it descended thence within a few hours, and each vessel, crowded with its respective passengers, was then advancing towards the other with a speed of travel beyond all precedent. The two planets being then in comparatively near proximity, this first voyage was so much the shorter and less costly.
In spite of a strict look-out, neither party had detected the other, in passing upon the wide ether ocean—a fact which does not say much for the calculations of those primitive ether-navigation times, and compares strikingly with the precision nowadays. The voyage occupied either party about eight days, so that we were already in command of the higher speeds. Speed was already, in fact, mainly a question of courage, in facing, in this as yet unaccustomed way, the risks of the encounter of meteoric bodies—a danger from which, as previously remarked, we are now, by experience and a still more advanced science, better protected. This speed was, of course, vastly greater than that of our first lunar voyage; but, as we shall presently see, we can now do still better than that.
We extended a cordial greeting to our Venusian visitors, and they, on their part, gave to our people an equally loyal welcome. Our party stepped out upon Venus with much the feeling as though it had been their own familiar earth, the air and gravity pressure being nearly the same in both worlds, while the temperature at the place purposely selected for landing—namely, upon an elevated plateau within the planet's arctic latitudes—was found extremely congenial, protected, as it was, by the thick clouds of the Venusian atmosphere, from the blaze of the comparatively huge sun. The party from Venus, on the other hand, as we might have expected, had made for our tropics, where they found themselves fairly comfortable, so far as climate was concerned, although complaining that the reduced size and brilliancy of the sun gave a blank character to our skies.
Venus, although rather smaller than our earth, had probably not started any sooner under dynamic equilibrium, seeing she was in the warmer zone of the two. She had, however, with her stronger light-supply, made rather better scientific progress, while we of earth had admittedly taken the business lead. Partly on that account, Venus had altered her natural scenery less than we had done, under the pressure, common to both, of a rapidly increasing population. We, in this operation, had more of an eye to mere business and profit than our sister, who, like other of the fuller-light worlds, was given rather to science pursuit. But then Venus's surface had originally an extremer variety of hill and dale, much of which still remained over the surface; so that, amongst elevations of twenty miles or upwards, we found we could very fairly acclimatize ourselves. The somewhat different composition of her atmosphere was really our only trouble, causing us a sickish feeling, especially for a time at first; as, in fact, our own atmosphere occasioned in turn to the Venusians. But even that is braved by many on both sides, for the sake of being free of the perpetual bother of the usual protective apparatus, even under all latest improvements. The Venusian man is hardly different from ourselves, excepting some little in the physical composition, and the hue of the flesh and skin—a rather pretty violet tint, due to the higher average temperature, together with the difference of composition in the atmosphere. From Venus let us now pass to the neighbours on the other side of the way celestial, namely—
Although our first steps had been directed, as just related, to Venus, much greater curiosity was aroused by the prospect of our nearly simultaneous visit to Mars. What delayed us chiefly here was the sufficiently near approach of the red planet's opposition, so as to give us a shorter, safer, and less costly voyage. In visiting Venus we had felt comparatively at home, because we had been so long before in communication, mentally, if not yet corporeally, with her people. But, as regarded the Marsians, we were still perfect strangers to such intercourse. We knew already, indeed, the general aspects of their world, and even of their own personal appearance, because our duplicative photography had long ago given us, by its marvellous perfection, every particular, so far as pertained to the physical Marsian landscape. But beyond all this, and whatever we might infer from the expression of their faces and the works of their hands, we knew nothing of the Marsian people. Nor could we doubt that they, for their part, knew still less about us, and would be inconceivably amazed by our intended visit. We had good reason to infer from all our observation of the photographic transfers of the Marsian surface, that a certain very considerable progress had been made there in art and science. Amongst other signs of progress, we knew that they had telescopes, apparently of a fair power, for we actually saw their astronomers looking through them, and often at our gibbous earth, as we approached the nearest conjunction. We saw also the busy life of their larger towns, and their mode of navigating their seas, which, in the thin cold air of the planet, were usually frozen far down towards the equator. But the thinness and clearness of the air saved Mars from much snow-fall, so that his poles, relatively, were hardly so extensively white as our own, or rather as ours used to be until we had latterly mopped up so much of our old aqueous surface.
The story of the first landing on Mars has inexhaustible freshness for all time. Our party, of course, steered for his equatorial region; and cold enough they found themselves even there, the nights being, to our feeling at least, intensely sharp, although, during the day time, the sun had even an unpleasantly hot blaze.
The good common-sense expression of the Marsian face, as previously familiar to us, had inspired sufficient confidence as to our reception; and, therefore, we descended right into their midst, to their unutterable astonishment. Having soon explained, to the great crowd that quickly surrounded us, by signs and sketches, whence we had come, our party got a warm greeting, and were conducted to the best accommodation afforded by the neighbourhood.
The Marsian atmosphere we found so nearly to resemble our own, that we could breathe it quite comfortably and safely; but it was rather thin to our lungs, resembling our own in fact, as it used to be, at the height of a good many thousand feet from the old level of the ground. Mars has a history, physical and organic, differing in some important respects from ours. Being both smaller, bulk and mass, as well as colder-zoned, his dynamic balancing was attained earlier; but, for the like reasons, his subsequent progress was slower, so that both Venus and ourselves have since quite passed him in the race. And it is for us of his advanced sister Earth now to watch him with even parental eye, as he toils, slowly perhaps, but steadily withal, upwards to that higher life which we have happily already entered.
Knowing that Mars was thus our special charge, we have, of course, felt from the very first of our trust position, the greatest possible interest in his procedure and prospects. Nor can we doubt that our visit, and all the grand new prospect it opens, has proved the dawn of a fresh life to the little planet; for we everywhere see over his surface what a busy scene of scientific and general progress the last fifty years have been to Mars, as compared with any like period preceding. Railways were just only beginning fifty years ago. So was gas-lighting. There were not yet any telegraph lines, and electric science was quite in its infancy. The vast spectroscopic field had not yet opened to view. How different in all these subjects now! And happily it is all mainly the Marsians' own attainment, as we, as well as other higher-life visitors from outside, have studiously acted upon the higher-life rule of leaving the lower worlds to make their own way in science, in order that social and moral gradations may naturally accompany the scientific. Prior to Black's discovery, which now enables the higher and lower life worlds to intermix, this due graduation in general human progress was undisturbed and uninterfered with in each case. But now there is danger of unduly precipitating the condition of the latter; and consequently a higher-life rule had been already enjoined, to the effect that there should be all possible reserve towards the lower worlds upon the great scientific questions involved in our higher life.
But leaving, for the present, science and such like, which are all well enough at their time, let us turn to the main chance. Evidently much solid business was to be done with Mars, when we each knew the other's ways and wants, and could manage to speak to each other. All this required time; and so all White's companies, with their mail packets and other great liners, as we have them to-day, did not spring at once into being. We found the Marsians to be good common-sense people, notwithstanding the peculiarity of many of their institutions. They had, indeed, curiously mixed characteristics; for while they were a progressive people, ever disposed to learn, and to profit by what they learnt, they at the same time cherished and vigorously clung to many odd old customs and prejudices.
There were, in that respect, two great opposing political parties in the planet: the one, called the Old Party, whose instincts were mainly with the traditional conditions, and who very grudgingly allowed of the disturbance of change; the other, called the New Party, whose views and instincts lay entirely the other way, and who welcomed all new and progressive ideas, and very often, to the great scandal of their opponents, treated a good many odd but venerable old institutions of the planet with but scant ceremony. This latter party welcomed us with open arms; and for that very reason, if for no other, there was always something of a grudging and suspicious feeling towards us from the other side. But unquestionably, as both sides admitted, a grand era had opened to the planet by this personal communication with his great neighbour and brother, the Earth.
Let me offer here still a few more words on Marsian characteristics, preparatory to the personal visit which I and my young friend are now on our way to pay to the planet. The whole of this small world is under one Government; and the character of that Government, prior to the first arrival of our people, had been in a state of slow transition, to meet the altered circumstances of its advancing society. The government lies in the great Assembly of the Pobb-Likk—a body which was composed of two chief divisions of the population, named respectively the Principles and the Accidents. The Principles were there, as the rule, by right only of personal merit as to ability or public usefulness; the Accidents were there by the chancemedley of the lot, quite irrespective of any personal considerations. Happily for the planet's progress there were many more Principles than Accidents. The Principles, in short, were those who turned the world round, and the Accidents were those who were turned round with it.
But the curious part of the arrangement was that the Accidents took precedence of the Principles. The former occupied the highest seats of the Assembly, whence they, in a leisurely and dominating way, surveyed the energetic and striving crowd of Principles beneath. Many of these latter sought, not unsuccessfully, certain minor honours and precedence amongst themselves, which lifted them a little above the indiscriminate mass of their own body, and a step or two upwards towards the high and special elevation of the Accidents. But the pure Accidents up there rather looked down upon these intermediate upstarts, and, in the past especially, had been extremely jealous and exclusive as regarded the admission of mere Principle to the sacred ranks of Accident. But latterly, the growing needs of the State, and the help it wanted from the ability, vigour, and general usefulness of the Principles, had more and more forced up the latter towards the Accident ranks. Still there was much Marsian pride in the purity of Accident. The maintenance of the independent self-superiority of Accident over Principle was the foundation stone of Old Party sentiment.
By certain adaptations of the public law, the Accidents, as a body, were insured an adequate provision, without having to depend on any mere personal qualities or exertions; this provision being, in many cases, something of quite enormous magnitude. The head of the great Pobb-Likk, in particular, was always a pure Accident. Any attempt to introduce Principle in that high quarter—any proposition to select personal suitability for the high office in question, would have at once convulsed the planet over its entire circumference.
Such was the political condition of Mars about the time of the first visit from our earth. A great struggle had recently taken place between the two parties, on the question of admitting a much larger, and more equally adjusted, section of the Principles into the Pobb-Likk. This ended in the subsequent measure known as the great "Tca Mrofer," if I may thus attempt to lay down the difficult Marsian jargon. The New Party had been able just barely to carry this great change, the opposition of the Old Party having been most bitter, vehement, and protracted. And yet already, even at the time of the first visit from our earth, it was held, by common Marsian consent, to have been a proper and wise step, from which retreat was now as undesirable as impossible. And such has been, in fact, the mingled peculiarity and commonsense quality of these Marsians, in all their great steps of progress since. The Old Party has ever met each successive step by a loud note of opposition and alarm; but the step once taken, all parties seem to compose and adjust themselves to the new order, and freely to admit that, one thing with another, it suited the planet's actual condition better than what preceded it.
We found ourselves in a general accord with the views and aims of the New Party, and the latter were not slow to use that fact to some purpose in their battle for progress and the new ideas. The Old Party did not deny an abstract superiority to some of the new ideas, which, with vexatious incessancy, were dinned into their unwilling ears; but they would ever plead that Marsian conditions were suited to Marsian circumstances, and that Marsian peculiarities, even allowing that they were such, ought to be left alone, more especially by outsiders, like us of the earth, who were differently circumstanced.
Amongst odd peculiarities they have happily got rid of in these recent years, none was more striking than the old and prevalent Marsian idea that food should never cross a boundary. They could readily see the advantage of freely sending one place's superabundance to another's scarcity; but if a boundary happened to intervene, that, as they thought, could no longer be done with advantage. When we advised them simply to shut their eyes to the existence of any boundary-line, as though not present, and so to go on freely exchanging, they shook their heads, or stared alternately at us and the boundary in blank amazement. But a dozen years later a decided change began to come over Marsian views and counsels in this respect, chiefly at the instance of a leading Marsian statesman of that time, by name Leep-Trebor-Ris, whose somewhat sudden conversion was doubtless attributable to our influence. I recollect meeting this distinguished Marsian, when upon a business trip to the planet, in the interests of my then commencing provision trade. I marked his extreme attention to my argument, and also that, shortly afterwards, he introduced and carried his great measure for allowing food always to pass freely, boundary or no boundary.
But this, to us, simple-looking measure, produced a political convulsion in the planet, which was hardly equalled even by that of the preceding great Tca-Mrofer. The Old Party, to which Leep had belonged, was rent to its very foundation, one section of it emerging, on this special food question, and joining another and larger section from the New Party, under the name of Leepites, a party which lasted for some years. And even now, although all parties have been long agreed as to the propriety and benefit of this great measure, by which the planet's food-distributing policy has ever since been guided, and although its author has been a whole generation dead and gone, yet the strong feeling of the time partially survives, and the extremer sections of the Old Party have hardly yet forgiven the renegade, as they call him, and arch-betrayer of their party's anti-change and anti-progress principles and efforts.
Another old Marsian peculiarity regarded the police protective arrangements. These were in some respects fairly good, but the effect was ever liable to be sadly marred by the want of a directing head. Consequently, the most curious, troublesome, and absurd ways had crept into practice. For instance, if any one had committed a wrong upon another, the police, instead of making straight for the wrong-doer, arrested first the injured party, and compelled him to secure and punish the other. This was such additional expense and suffering to the victim, that the one would dread and shun the authorities almost as much as the other, and thus the wrong-doer could often make a clean escape. The New Party had been long urgent to end this anomaly. Indeed, both parties had long admitted it as such; and at last, but only the other day, the step in the right direction began to be taken, by appointment of what was called the Rotucesorp-Cilbup, or direct catcher and trier of the wrong-doer.
Amongst peculiarities which still reign, in spite of all efforts of the New Party, the most striking, perhaps, is the very ancient custom and law of giving the whole of a family inheritance to some one member only, instead of dividing equally amongst the whole. On the death of the head of a family, the State Lottery Box, which is called in, determines, by the cast of the dice, which individual of the family is to enjoy the whole property; while all the other members, so far at least as the public law is concerned, may be at once turned out destitute upon the highway. Although this ancient custom seems now at last tottering to its fall, it is still a most tender point with a formidable section of the Old Party, which would fain maintain its existence, in spite of the ever-increasing force of opposing argument and opinion. The Old Party feel, in fact, that they are thus losing one of the main props of their fundamental political sentiment—the supremacy of Accident over Principle.
Naturally enough, some little time elapsed ere our excursion enterprise extended beyond Venus on the one hand, and Mars on the other. Not only was the greatly increased distance a heavy expense in both time and money, especially to our earlier inexperience, but the excessive heat in the one direction, and the excessive cold in the other, involved, to our particular frames and feelings, much further costs, as well as our being habilitated in most cumbrous apparatus, with the adaptation and management of which we were not at first by any means so familiar as we are to-day. After a further interval, however, our adventurers of the earth did set foot upon Mercury; and this successful effort was followed by our reaching, in spite of navigation dangers, one of the larger of the countless planetoids circulating between Mars and Jupiter; to be happily followed, after a further time, by our advance outwards, through all that rather intricate planetoidal archipelago, as far as the magnificent system of Jupiter. There we soon picked up acquaintance with the first satellite, lo, rather larger than our moon, with whose fairly intelligent people we have since carried on a regular and profitable trading, only second in importance to that carried on with Mars and Venus. Some interesting features of "the first Jovian," as we call this his nearest moon, I shall have presently another opportunity to narrate.
We did not experience from Mercury the same vigorous rivalry in the new navigation as had come to us from Venus. The rule bore here, as it is inferred to do in general, that the stronger the solar light, the less does business, and the more does science and other such high consideration, influence the mind and purpose. It was ever, at bottom, business purposes and business prospects that supplied the chief vigour to our progress. Mercury was comparatively deficient in this kind of vigour, and more addicted to purely scientific and other mental progress, carried on independently for its own sake.
Let me only add, in conclusion, that we have, since these earlier efforts, successively reached all the members of our system, even, many times over, to far outside Neptune, and even, some few times, at science's instance, to the smaller planet still outside of Neptune, and outside of all in the system, whose discovery dates only within the last thousand years, and whose remarkable conditions—the gathering up, as it were, of the outer margin of our original nebula, are already so well known to our science. So much for the outer voyaging, while inwards we have penetrated as far as the sun himself, as I shall have to tell further on. The interests of science, even with us Earthians, have at times risen above business considerations, seeing it is difficult to make a voyage to these far extremities, even to Neptune, or indeed even to Uranus, commercially profitable, in the want of human population in either planets or moons, to help us with their labour in the way that we find so advantageous with Mars, the First Jovian, and some others.