Martian Time Slip

"Why should I mind?" Arnie said. "You're still there, aren't you? Awake or asleep--you're plenty there in the flesh, and how."

"Ouch," she protested.

"Sorry." He kissed her on the mouth. "Didn't mean to hurt you."

Her head lolled; she actually was going to sleep. Arnie felt offended. But what the hell--she never did much anyhow.

"Put my nightgown back on me," Doreen murmured, "when you're through."

"Yeah, well I'm not through." I'm good for an hour more, Arnie said to himself. Maybe even two. I sort of like it this way, too. A woman asleep don't talk. That's what spoils it, when they start to talk. Or make those moans. He could never stand the moans.

He thought, I'm dying to get results on that project of Bohlen's. I can't wait; I know we're going to hear something really downright wonderful when we do start hearing. The closed-up mind of that kid; think of all the treasures it contains. Must be like fairyland, in there, all beautiful and pure and real innocent.

In her half-sleep Doreen moaned.

9

Into Leo Bohlen's hand his son Jack put a large green seed. Leo examined it, handed it back.

"What did you see?" Jack asked.

"I saw it, the seed."

"Did anything happen?"

Leo pondered, but he could not think of anything he had seen happen, so at last he said, "No."

Seated at the movie projector, Jack said, "Now watch." He snapped off the lights in the room, and then, on the screen, an image appeared as the projector whirred. It was a seed, embedded in soil. As Leo watched, the seed split open. Two probing feelers appeared; one started upward, the other divided into fine hairs and groped down. Meanwhile, the seed revolved in the soil. Enormous projections unfolded from the upward moving feeler, and Leo gasped.

"Say, Jack," he said, "some seeds you got here on Mars; look at it go. My gosh, it's working away like mad."

Jack said, "That's a plain ordinary lima bean, the same as I gave you just now. This film is speeded up, five days compressed into seconds. We can now see the motion that goes on in a germinating seed; normally, the process takes place too slowly for us to see any motion at all."

"Say, Jack," Leo said, "that's really something. So this kid's time-rate is like this seed. I understand. Things that we can see move would whiz around him so darn fast they'd be practically invisible, and I bet he sees slow processes like this seed here; I bet he can go out in the yard and sit down and watch the plants growing, and five days for him is like say ten minutes for us."

Jack said, "That's the theory, anyhow." He went on, then, to explain to Leo how the chamber worked. The explanation was filled with technical terms, however, which Leo did not understand, and he felt a little irritable as Jack droned on. The time was eleven A.M., and still Jack showed no sign of taking him on his trip over the F.D.R. Mountains; he seemed completely immersed in this.

"Very interesting," Leo murmured, at one point.

"We take a tape recording, done at fifteen inches per second, and run it off for Manfred at three and three-fourths inches per second. A single word, such as 'tree.' And at the same time we flash up a picture of a tree and the word beneath it, a still, which we keep in sight for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then what Manfred says is recorded at three and threefourths inches per second, and for our own listening we speed it up and replay at fifteen."

Leo said, "Listen, Jack, we just gotta get going on that trip."

"Christ," Jack said, "this is my job." He gestured angrily. "I thought you wanted to meet him--he'll be over here any time now. She sends him over--"

Breaking in, Leo said, "Look, son, I came millions of miles to have a look at that land. Now are we going to fly there or not?"

Jack said, "We'll wait until the boy comes, and we'll take him with us."

"O.K. ," Leo said. He wanted to avoid friction; he was willing to compromise, at least as much as was humanly possible.

"My God, here you are for the first time in your life on the surface of another planet. I should think you'd want to walk around, take a look at the canal, the ditch." Jack gestured over toward the right. "You haven't even glanced at it, and people have been wanting to see the canals--they've argued about their existence--for centuries!"

Feeling chagrined, Leo nodded dutifully. "Show me, then." He followed Jack from the workshop, outdoors into the dull ruddy sunlight. "Cold," Leo observed, sniffing the air. "Say, it's sure easy to walk around; I noticed that last night I felt like I weighed only fifty or sixty pounds. Must be because Mars is so small--right? Must be good for people with cardiac conditions, except the air's so thin. I thought last night it was the corned beef that made me--"

"Leo," his son said, "be quiet and look around, will you?"