The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey DoddGratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Science
The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd
Gratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
"The landscape about us was wonderfully illuminated by the two
satellites, Deimos and Phobos, which, as you well know, were made known
to astronomers on the earth by Prof. Asaph Hall in 1877. What a
marvellous spectacle they presented, moving almost sensibly at their
differing rates of revolution through a sky sown with stellar lights.
The combined lights of these singular bodies surpassed the light of our
terrestrial moon, by reason of their closeness to the surface of Mars,
while the more rapid motion of the inner satellite causes the most weird
and beautiful changes of effect in the nocturnal glory they both lend to
the Martian life.
"We were sailing in a broad river-like canal, perhaps one mile or more
wide. On all sides the undulating ground, covered with cultivation,
varied with thick patches of trees, with here and there shining lights
from villages and isolated homes, carried the eye onward to a rising
hill country, beyond which, again, silhouetted against the shining sky
where Phobos began to rise mountain tops were just discernible.
"Deimos, the outer moon, was already shining, and its pale, sick light
imparted a peculiar blueness impossible to describe upon all surfaces it
touched. Here was the phenomenon we witnessed with increasing pleasure.
Phobos was emerging from a cloud and its yellow rays possessing a
greater illuminating power, mingled suddenly with the blue and spectral
beams of Deimos and the land thus visited by the complimentary flood of
light from these twin luminaries seemed suddenly dipped in silver. A
beautiful white light, most unreal, as you mortals might say, fell on
tree and water, cliff, hill, and villages. The effect was not unlike
that instant in photography when a developing plate shows the outlines
of its objects in dazzling silver before the half tints are added, and
the image fades away into indistinguishable shadow.
"It was a print in silver, and while we gazed in mute astonishment the
sharp shadows changed their position as Phobos, racing through the
zenith, changed the inclination of its incident beams. The effect was
indescribable. I walked the deck in an agitation of wonder and delight.
Chapman, to whom the novelties of this Martian life were still
wonderful, followed me, and was the first to speak.
"'Dodd, you know that the strangest thing about this whole place is your
body. It's body all right enough, but I can't quite understand what sort
of a body it is. It hurts in a way, and is pleased in a way, but it
seems a better made affair in texture and parts than anything we
possessed on earth. Exertion is so easy.'
"'Well, Chapman,' I answered, while my eyes rested on the water, through
which an approaching barge rose like a vessel of frosted or burnished
white metal, 'we were taught on the earth that, with gravitation reduced
one-half, the same weight on Mars would seem only half as heavy as on
the earth, and that the effort which there carried us eight feet would
here send us sixteen.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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