The Mind Creative
With no more room left on Earth, and with Mars hanging up there
empty of life, somebody hit on the plan of starting a colony on
the Red Planet. It meant changing the habits and physical
structure of the immigrants, but that worked out fine. In fact,
every possible factor was covered—except one of the flaws of
human nature....
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.
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