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Keep Out * *
* * DAPTINE IS THE SECRET OF IT. ADAPTINE,
they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt. They explained it all to us when we
were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand
before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we
landed on Mars. “You’re home, children,” the
Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built
for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that
evening, an important one that we must all attend. And that evening he told us the
whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to
wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in
the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air
was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from
inside his helmet. “Children,” he said, “you are home.
This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You
are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and
another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in
this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend
increasingly long periods outdoors. “Then you will go forth and make
your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and
your children will breed true. They too will be Martians. “It is time you were told the
history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.” Then he told us. Man, he said, had first reached Mars
in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of
plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by
terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living
inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them.
Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too
thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays
harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him.
The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to
bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks. For fifty years he had tried to
colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had
been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome
much smaller and less than a mile away. It had looked as though mankind
could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for
of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here
there was no use even trying to colonize the others. And then, in 2034, thirty years ago,
a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug
that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the
progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation. It gave his progeny almost limitless
adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made
gradually. Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then
mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing
each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions,
he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those
guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero
Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was
thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal
and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have
killed one of its parents within minutes. Subsequent experiments with many
litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred
true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those
conditions. “Ten years later, ten years ago,”
the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully
selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you
have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing
conditions. “From the time you were born the air
you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content
reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity,
which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and
attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of
Mars, the difference will be even greater. “Your bodies are growing fur to
enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under
conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four
years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to
survive conditions that seem normal to you. “In another ten years, at maturity,
you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food
plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure
and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five
years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the
gravity of Mars seems normal to you. “It will be your planet, to live on
and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first
Martians.” Of course we had known a lot of
those things already. The last year was the best. By then
the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers
and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for
increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open. The last few months they relaxed
segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told
us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full
clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long
since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right. Tomorrow is the day of our freedom.
Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take
over the planet. Some among us are impatient, have
been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting.
We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day. And tomorrow is the final day. Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill
the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not
suspect, so it will be easy. We have dissimulated for years now,
and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and
hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered
and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry
in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins. We shall kill them and then we shall
go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too. If more Earthmen ever come to punish
us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if
they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do
with Earth. This is our planet and we want no
aliens. Keep off! |
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Fredric Brown authored
more than 200 short stories in the mystery and science fiction genres between
the late-1930s and the 1960s. He was especially adroit at crafting tales of
less than 1,500 words with humor and ironic twist endings. Mr. Brown died in
1972 at the age of 65. |
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©
1954 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. |
