Joseph Gilbert

“ But the wind always blew on Mars at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to the pole.
The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down, aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the engines.
The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect is as though something very vital had died. ”

“ They could do things better, infinitely better, than human hands. You built televisors and put them together carefully with the proud hands of a creator. With your care and skill you were able to turn out, say, some ten televisors a month, but they were the best of their kind, and you were happy in that knowledge. Then you discovered that the machines could produce those televisors of yours at the rate of some five hundred a month, and could make a better one than you could, with all your patient toil and trouble. You were a rocket builder, a constructor of homes, a monocar designer? ”

“ Finding it correct, as he had known it would be, he leaned back in his chair against the centrifugal push of the ship as it banked slightly and headed in for Mars. Then a buzzer made frantic bees' noise, and he released the automatic pilot, taking the controls himself. The buzzer had been a warning that atmosphere was close, and it takes a human hand to handle a rocket in an atmosphere.
It was possible, of course, that this trip of his was purely a waste of energy, but it wasn't his job to guess; he was the type who made sure first—if he had not been, the Patrol would never have accepted him. ”

“ There was no longer any desire to achieve in writing, in art, in music—for achievement was no longer recognized. If your writing was packed with significance, with powerful, thought-provoking originality, then it probably would not even see publication. Those who wrote and were recognized were those who could thrill with screaming action, with the forgotten danger of the old, primitive days back in the twentieth century; cheap stuff produced by men who were more mechanical than the machines. The only art that any man recognized was illustrating posters and those stories. ”

“ Beauty had become too tame. The swing, the jazz, of an earlier age had evolved into a nerve-racking bedlam of discordant sounds not even needing a composer—mechanically timed, mechanically produced, mechanically precise. ”

“ It is no good for any being to go ahead of his fellows; to dream a greater dream and to find no reality in it. I had a machine, and it should have carried me outside, should have taken me above our lost visions to finer things. ”

“ A man with sufficient stamina to be in the Patrol, plus the necessary mental and emotional stability, was practically unobtainable. Perhaps, he mused, that was why men in the Patrol married so well; they were the very cream of mankind, the finest group of its kind on earth. ”

“ The hobby system, as it has been flippantly termed, dissolved in a chaotic attack on the machines. Fortunately, the mobs were too disorganized to destroy much before they felt the effects of their attacks. For men, subject to a cold they had never known before—due to their damaging the weather towers—died from exposure, untended by smashed machines that could have saved them. Everywhere hundreds of people, deprived of the comfort of machines they had come to regard as essential, died swiftly from unaccustomed hardships to which their delicate constitutions had been too long unconditioned. ”

“ It was something that every member of the Space Patrol had to master, and was an ability fairly common among intelligent people—many of whom practiced the art as something of a hobby. The only element of surprise was the fact that it was a strain on any ordinary man to project his thoughts that way, and speech was preferable when practicable. Still, there was no reason why anyone should not use telepathy if he wished. ”

“ Like the mobs that visit us here at Science Hall and go away uncomforted, to wait until they go completely mad and are taken away to a mechanical madhouse presided over by the same magnificently futile psychologists. ”

“ He paused, and the tremendous crowd that filled the rocket-ground were weirdly silent, waiting. "No longer shall only the Space Patrol know the thrills of adventure and discovery. We, too...."
Robert Lawrence smiled whimsically and cut off the televisor. It was almost impossible to hear the speaker, anyway, for no matter how well sound-proofed a Space Patrol ship is, the noise is still deafening to one not long accustomed to it. You can't stop the vibrations of an atomic engine. ”

“ I knew that man must again find a motive for progress if he was to exist. The number of births had diminished almost to nothing. Both sexes felt that it was useless to bring children into such a world. ”

“ The frustrated creative genius of our time has found outlet shocking to more ordinary people—if any person can be called ordinary in this time and age. I do not believe there is such a person. I believe that we have all gone mad in our despair and in our lack of any intelligent goal. ”

“ What does is the fact that they are an intelligent, sensitive people, and they have a great civilization, being able to communicate by means of telepathy, as many of our own people are able to do quite well. ”

“ It is a rather horrible thing to think about. And in the last twenty-five years it has resulted in a revolt against convention and the accepted decencies in life. That has led, in turn, to orgies, to abandoned pleasure-seeking that has no parallel in our written history. ”

“ The people were advanced scientifically, and evolved from a protoplasm basis that was, not unnaturally considering the similar conditions, along our own lines. They were rather ludicrously like certain twentieth century writers' conception of Martians and other extra-terrestrial creatures, particularly considering that no intelligent life has been found on Mars or the other planets in our system. ”

“ Mankind lost its most precious possession—the sense of achievement, of being valuable, and with it lost its initiative. They suffered from a mass inferiority complex that was only too well justified by the superiority of the metal monstrosities they, the Frankensteins, had made. ”

“ The incentive to do good in this world died—there was no good to do. There were no physicians, because the machines could diagnose an ailment better than they; there were no diseases to eliminate because they had long been eliminated; there were no surgeons to operate, because the machines did it quicker, safer, better. ”

“ They realized that if machines became so perfect that they could do the work of man, without the guidance of man, then the hedonistic existence this would leave as man's only alternative, would quickly lead him back to the jungles. ”

“ He's just made the world's biggest understatement. By the God of the ancients, he should see some of the human wrecks that come to us, that pack our offices, and practically hang from the fluorescent. ”

“ We psychologists know exactly what makes us tick mentally, but we can't do anything more about our twisted emotions and impulses than we can do for those poor people who come to us for assistance we can't give them. Stanton collects old books. Never psychology, religion, or anything serious. What our ancestors called blood and thunder. Bang-bang adventure stuff. He calls it a hobby. It isn't. It's wish fulfilment."
He went on: "Look at that laughable little idiot on the televisor screen. He's the least imposing person I know of—and the happiest man on earth. ”

“ So they arranged a social pattern that would give every man something to do; you know what that pattern was as well as I. You might have an interest in constructing televisors, and you would strive to make your televisors so excellent that there would be a worldwide demand for them; others who had different hobbies would exchange the product of their hobbies for that of yours, or give them to you if the difference in value was too great. ”

“ Except for the eternal wind and its companion, the dust.
"I disassembled my atoms," the explanation echoed unexpectedly in Lawrence's mind, "and selected a lonely place on another world where they were reassembled. I watched from afar, and there, too, it was the same. The machines. The uncertain, hurt look in people's eyes, and—their lack of purpose. ”

“ And so the present system of credits for the amount of work done by each person in his own line has come into being. It has not changed the situation. Man still has no excuse for living, only for existing. ”

“ The expeditions had accumulated enough evidence from the desert to prove conclusively that the Martians had been a highly civilized and advanced people; more advanced, probably, than Earth. There were ruins of great cities in the south of the planet that must have been there for over two million years. ”