Experiments -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Not that I seemed to find time for more than exhausted sleeping there.
To see what would be going on at the various field sites where tests
were to be run meant the cameras had to be installed at those spots.
In spite of the purported rigid tests for expedition personnel, my two
assistants must have been somebody's nephews. Somehow each installation
seemed to require I be there.
Be there, and usually without some little piece of equipment which
would have helped so much, but which had been deleted from the lists we
submitted by clerks who were more concerned with making a big showing
on how much weight they could eliminate than in helping us.
Somehow we managed.
But I have made a little list of guys I'm going to ferret out and poke
in the nose once I get back to Earth. Maybe those Hollywood producers
who think the only way to solve a problem is to beat up somebody or gun
him down have something, after all. Right on top of that list, in big
bold letters, is the spacesuit designer who thinks a man can handle the
incredibly fine parts of miniaturized electronic equipment with those
crude instruments they give us to screw into the arm ends of spacesuits.
Somehow we managed. Somehow, out of chaos, order came. Somehow tests
got made. Sometimes the theories worked; sometimes, more often, there
was only the human sigh, the gulp, the shrug, and back to the drawing
board.
Big surprise at the end of the first three months. A supply ship
landed. Mostly food and some champagne, yet! Stuff the folks back home
thought they'd like to have if they were out there. Even some pin-up
pictures, as if we weren't already having enough trouble without being
reminded. But none of the equipment we'd radioed for in case the
taxpayers could forego a drink and a cigarette apiece to raise money
for sending it. The public couldn't understand our need for equipment,
so they didn't send any. Miracles aren't supposed to need any equipment
or effort; they just come into being because people want them.
The packages of home baked cookies were welcome enough after our
diet of hydroponic algae, but I'd still rather have had a handful of
miniature transistors.
Some of the guys said they'd have been willing to substitute their
cookies for an equal weight of big, buxom blonde; but that's something
the cookie bakers probably preferred not to think about.
The little three man crew of the supply ship, as they were taking
off for their return journey, promised they'd tell 'em what we really
wanted when they got back, but I doubt the message ever got broadcast
over the home and family television sets. Anyway, scientists are
supposed to be cold, unfeeling, inhuman creatures who wander around
looking noble, wise, and above it all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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