A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum

Book Details

A Martian Odyssey – Jarvis, on a scouting mission for the first expedition to explore Mars, finds himself shipwrecked and must walk back to his base. On his journey he meets a variety of new lifeforms. Much like a modern Odysseus, Jarvis must survive the unknown, the harsh climate, and the monsters that would devour him, on his quest to return to his base.

A Martian Odyssey (1934)
Chapter II Tweel of Mars
Chapter III The Pyramid Being
Chapter IV The Dream-Beast
Chapter V The Barrel-People

Valley Of Dreams (1934)
Ibis-Headed Thoth
Paradise and Hell

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum’s (1902–1935) first story, “A Martian Odyssey“, was published to great acclaim in July 1934, but he died from lung cancer less than a year and a half later.

Weinbaum was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, first as a chemical engineering major but later switching to English. On a bet, Weinbaum took an exam for a friend, and was later discovered; he left the university in 1923 and did not graduate.

A Martian Odyssey has 2 illustrations.

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1. Weinbaum-MartianOdyssey.epub

Excerpt: A Martian Odyssey

A Martian Odyssey

• JARVIS stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.

“Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.

The other three stared at him sympathetically— Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis, of course, was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts— the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.

Jarvis stretched again and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

“Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!”

” ‘Speel’?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?”

“He means ‘spiel’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.”

Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile. “That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “Ich spiel es!” He grunted comfortably and began.

“According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You’ll remember, Cap— we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high— about two thousand feet— for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.”

“We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?”

“The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.

“So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing— same blobby growths and same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me.”

“I did!” snapped Harrison.

“A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did.”

“Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the captain. “Let’s get to the point.”

“Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle —believe it or not— I crossed a canal!”

“Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!”

“And did he also see a city?”

“Twenty of ’em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!”

“Well,” observed Jarvis, “from here on I’ll be telling a few things Putz didn’t see!” He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. “I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours— eight hundred miles— from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II I’m not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right there, Putz’s pet motor quit!”

Qvit? How?” Putz was solicitous.

“The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!” He rubbed the injured member ruefully.

“Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?” inquired Putz. “Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation—”

“Naw!” said Jarvis disgustedly. “I wouldn’t try that, of course— not more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working— what then? Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I’d have melted the floor from under me!” He rubbed his nose again. “Lucky for me a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I’d have been mashed flat!”

“I could have fixed!” ejaculated the engineer. “I bet it vas not serious.”

“Probably not,” agreed Jarvis sarcastically. “Only it wouldn’t fly. Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or trying to walk back— eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,” he concluded, “I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy.”

“We’d have found you,” said Harrison.

“No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out.”

Excerpt From: Stanley G. Weinbaum. “A Martian Odyssey”