The Mind Creative
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
63