A Martian Odyssey (Stanley Weinbaum)

One of the expeditionary team crash-lands his jet on Mars and walks back eight hundred miles back to the base in order to get there in time for take-off. He relates his journey, which includes rescuing a Martian which is probably more intelligent than he is. They communicate by mathematics, and the Martian is able to communicate concepts very briefly, but effectively. They encounter a silicon being, which builds pyramids with silicon dioxide waste bricks which it excretes through its mouth. They encounter a black tentacled being which projects a vision around itself of what you most desire, then grabs you and eats you when you get close. (The teller initially rescues the Martian from this, and then the Martian prevents the teller from the same encounter.) Finally, they find a race of beings which push trolley carts of stuff and pile it into a machine which crushes it. Occasionally one of them jumps in and is crushed itself. The teller takes a glowing thing (which healed his frostbite and other injury) and they pushcart creatures attack the two of them. Fortunately, this is when the rescue ship finds him.

Twilight (John Campbell)

A time traveler who overshot his return trip into the past (the contemporaneous present), tells of his experience several million years in the future. Hundreds of thousands of years earlier, humanity was in its prime, and created wondrous cities tended by machines that worked flawlessly, repaired themselves, and transferred resources from other planets. But humanity had essentially destroyed most life by focusing on what was needed for what they wanted. And later, they lost the understanding of the machines, and forgot how to turn them off. Most of the cities were abandoned, with people living in only two (although the other cities functioned flawlessly). The traveller noticed that the people of that time had lost the light in their eyes: they had lost curiosity. He said that humanity had learned how to make things that lasted forever, but forgot that things need to die.

Helen O'Loy (Lester del Rey)

An engineer and doctor order the latest humanoid robot (female, beautiful) and the doctor fit it with glands for emotional hormones, then left for a couple of weeks. When he came back, the robot, named Helen O'Loy was in love with the engineer and cannot understand why he didn’t want to marry her, because she’d be the perfect wife. (This was the 1930s, and she was a perfect cook and housewife.) The roboticist avoided her and all her emotions, eventually leaving town. The doctor tried to help the distraught Helen, but eventually decided he needed to remove the glands and reset her circuitry, something she even agreed with. But when he phoned his engineer partner, he said NO! and immediately came back and married her. They had a happy life together, and he more or less forgot she was a robot, and nobody else suspected. When he died, Helen told the doctor, who had remained a family friend, to destroy her and bury her next to her husband, and keep her secret. The doctor, however, never married, because “there was only one Helen O'Loy”.

The Roads Must Roll (Robert Heinlein)

The roads in the US (in particular, for this story, California) were conveyor belt lanes, each 5 or 10 mph faster than each other, up to 100 mph. This was an essential service, and much care was taken to check the condition of the machines and the flywheels that moved the belts to ensure that no stoppages happened, which was dangerous (since the belts were next to each other, so if they were running there would not be a large speed differential, but if one stopped, the speed differential would be deadly). The high speed belt even had a restaurant on it. As the chief engineer was dining at the restaurant with a visiting Australian considering implementing rolling roads, the high speed belt stopped. Upon some investigation, it turned out that one of the engineers had agitated and organized the Sacramento workers, and they had stopped the road because he was trying to take power, since the roads were essential. They had shut down the one lane (which caused quite a few deaths when objects/people from that lane (stopped) and the 95 mph lane next to it collided and ricoched) to demonstrate that they had power and would use it. The chief engineer organized a strike team and took back the road.

Microcosmic God (Theodore Sturgeon)

A New England scientist bought an island to do research on it. He was a brilliant scientist, and regularly invented amazing things. He casually told some of them to his banker on a call, which patent them and sold them, increasing both it’s and the bank’s accounts. The scientist realized that he as limited in how fast he could investigate things by his own intelligence, so he evolved a race of small, intelligent beings and put thing in a large room. They had evolved in an atmosphere different from Earth’s, so they could not survive in the outside (which he demonstrated every few generations or so). He installed a teletype and gave them orders for things to invent; if they did not work on it, he killed some of them. Eventually they came up with their own rules of obedience to make sure they stayed alive. They created a limitless energy source which could beam power for transportation and other uses. He told the bank about it, and the banker decided he was interested in power. He forced the scientist to let them build a large installation on his island, and then held the government hostage by means of extremely potent bombs powered by the beams. The scientist had his creatures research an impenetrable shield, which, after some problems communicating (it was truly impenetrable), he made one around the whole island. This cut off the power beams, so the government ousted the banker, and then attacked the island. However, the shield was impenetrable, so the scientist (and the banker’s engineer who had built the power installation, and who was going to be killed by the banker) spent the rest of their lives comfortably researching.

Nightfall (Isaac Asimov)

Historical records showed that every 2500 years civilization was destroyed and had to rebuild from scratch. Only recently had the astronomers discovered that every 2500 years, the six suns ended up in a position such that the last remaining one experienced a long eclipse. They attempted to prepare people by trying to acclimate them to darkness on a ride at the recent world’s fair, but it did not work well. Everyone was very uncomfortable, and some people went crazy. There was a Cult which had some information about this process, and they said that the stars (considered mythical by everyone else) took the souls of people up during the eclipse. The astronomers prepared 150 people in a bunker with the newly discovered candles to rebuild civilization, but some stayed behind to photograph the stars. A journalist looking for an interview on the day of the eclipse is the means for the explanation. A Cultist tried to prevent them from photographing the stars. Despite the journalist’s scoffing, when the darkness came, he was as uncomfortable as the rest. The stars came out. Crowds emerged from the city, seeking the destruction of the Observatory (which was built like a fortress), and they started burning everything they could to get light.

The Weapon Shop (A. E. von Vogt)

A gaudy weapon shop appeared in the middle of a picturesque town. The owner of an atomic motor repair shop tried to galvanize opposition to the weapon shop, which was a chain that was not loyal to the empress (he was quite the royalist). The shops’ entrance doors only let those in who were safe, and despite his opposition, surprisingly the door let him in. He argued with the shopkeeper for a while, and then was shown out the side entrance. After that, his life slowly fell apart. A constable did manage to open the door, but ended up on Mars (normally a six week journey). His son, whom he had not treated well, was part of a swindle that took his life savings and left him in debt. He put up his shop for collateral, but the bank sold the loan to his competitor, who immediately collected on it, and since he couldn’t pay, he had to give up his shop. His mother-in-law said that they could not move in with her, and suggested that he go to the weapons shop. In debt and considering suicide, he finally went to the weapons shop that he abhorred. He purchased a gun for four credits (a shockingly low price). He was forbidden to do violence with the gun, and although ending his life was his option, the shopkeeper suggested he exit through the side door (“it is more discreet”). Upon doing so he discovered he was somewhere else, in line in a long building. He told his story to the clerk who asked, then waited until his name was called. Then he went into the designated room, where they told him that his case was multiple illegal activities by businesses tied to the Empress, and that they had been fined 36,000 credits, of which they gave him half. (“Do not ask us how we get the money.”) They informed him of the true situation of the Empire, and that the weapons shops were legal in a detente with the Empress. They told him not to be violent, but to simply resist. This he did, and ended up buying back his shop and the debt for half off, which put him in the same financial situation as he was originally. It also turned out that his mother-in-law was a weapons shop supporter, but needed to be discreet, so it came across like she thought he was a lousy son-in-law (her husband had been killed and she had found justice in the weapons shops).

Mimsy Were the Borogroves (Lewis Padgett)

A man experimenting with a time machine sent his child’s toys on two different trips, which were supposed to return and he could analyze them to see if he had succeeded. He did succeed, but the machines did not return because they were found by children. Two contemporary children played with several of the toys, which were strange. For example, the beads on one toy did not move along the wires like it seemed they should, and the children could make them disappear and reappear. The younger daughter was more adept at things, and had created a writing system to express concepts from the toys. The older son kept trying to arrange various objects, and asking her questions about it, via slips of paper. Now the other box was found by a girl in nineteenth century England, and she had a seemingly nonsense verse that she said told one how to get there, and although she never found a way to get there because she was too old and therefore too conditioned in Euclidean assumptions, it was included as the first verse in “Jabberwocky”. The contemporaneous children understood the verse to be an equation, and found a way of placing their simple objects as markers along the path to traverse, and just as their father came into the room, they were finishing their journey there and he saw them vanish—salmon whom the toys of the future have instructed in the path to reach the ocean.

Huddling Place (Clifford Simak)

A man buried his father, his family standing around. He became head of the family, a distinguished doctor who had written a definitive treatise about Martian diagnosis and treatment, informed from his time on Mars. His son left for Mars shortly afterwards, and the doctor struggled in the presence of other people, and had his robot butler charter a flight back because he was so anxious to return to his comfortable estate in New England, where for several generations his family had become intertwined with the place. A good Martian friend took ill, and he received several requests to come to Mars and operate on him, as he was the only one who could. At first he said he could not possibly leave his estate, but upon slow reflection he realized that he had done that when he was younger, and that although people like his family had escaped the huddling places of the city, he had simply created his own huddling place. So he resolved to take the personal rocket that one of the men had sent (despite his refusal). However, when it arrived, his good butler had already seen to the situation, persuading the crew that it was simply unthinkable for his master to leave the estate, and so he was stuck in his own personal huddling place.

Arena (Frederic Brown)

A pilot of an Earth fighter saw the alien fleet at the very beginning of the decisive battle. Then he found himself on a beach, and a voice in his mind told him that the two species cannot coexist, and that it is likely that the battle will result in neither of the species fulfilling it’s potential of becoming godlike (like the speaker), and so two individuals have been selected to combat on behalf of their race. The voice told him that accidental advantages of strength, etc. had been negated, so the contest was about wits. The alien was a red sphere that rolls around, with tentacles that come out of the top to manipulate things. There was an invisible barrier between them. The human discovered that the barrier is only impervious to living things, so he throws rocks at the creature. It withdrew and created a catapult. He responded by throwing burning pieces of a nearby bush, burning the catapult. He was getting more and more thirsty, and also injured from a cut from a rock that the alien threw, so he had to do something. He eventually discovered that the barrier was impervious to things that think that they are alive, so he created a harpoon, made a rope from the fibrous leaves of the bush, and tied the end to himself. He harpooned the alien and pulled it toward him. Then he tried to knock himself out. This apparently worked, because he ends with the alien pulling flesh from his chest with its tentacles and he knifing it with the stone knife. He woke up back in his fighter—his chest wounds merely scars that were barely visible—to the sound of his squad leader calling him that the battle was over. The alien fleet had completely disintegrated after the first missile fired into it. He never told anyone what had really happened, since he knew no one would believe him.

First Contact (Murray Leinster)

A scientific ship from Earth and an alien ship discovered each other in the middle of the Crab Nebula. They could see each other except up close, due to the nebula, so they had no idea what direction the other had travelled. [NB: nebula are quite diffuse and would not be at all opaque if one is in a nebula] They each realized that they could not trust the other, regardless of whether the other was friendly, because if they were not, they could trail the other back to its homeworld and then launch a surprise attack. The aliens saw in the infrared (therefore their homeworld was around an small star) and did not use sound to communicate, but the scientists managed to create a translation turned typed words into a transmission that the aliens could understand, and vice-versa. The other captain was friendly, and desired to find a solution to the problem, but none presented itself. Finally the earth captain found a solution, and they met in person on the other ship. The earth captain attempted to force the other captain to switch ships; the aliens just laughed (their equivalent), because they had been planning to do the same thing. So each crew destroyed its scanning devices, and showed the other how to use the controls, and they went back their home, agreeing to meet in a year in the same location in the nebula.

That Only a Mother (Judith Merril)

A joyful mother gives birth to a child knowing that, despite the dangers of radiation [written soon after WWII], it is a healthy baby. The father returns for a week of leave from the military and discovered that the baby had no arm. It became clear that his wife had no idea that the baby was not normal; she simply knew it was and apparently could not see otherwise.

Scanners Live in Vain (Cordwainer Smith)

Travelling in the up-and-out, that is, space, causes intense pain. So all space travel was done with the passengers put to sleep, and the ship manned by habermans—criminals who had their senses other than sight surgically disconnected. Habermans had a control plate on the front of their chest with knobs to control their vitals. They were supervised by Scanners, people who voluntarily became habermans. Habermans were disposable (and killed, when necessary, by twisting a knob into deadly range), but Scanners were high status. One Scanner was married, and had just cranched, which temporarily restored the senses and emotions, when the leader of the Scanners called a meeting. He was requested to attended, despite being cranched. The others communicated through lip reading and writing messages on a personal board. Someone had discovered a way to prevent the pain of space, which made the Scanners unnecessary, and stuck in their condition. The meeting included reciting together the Code of the Scanners, and afterwards the leader explained the situation, calling a vote on whether they should assassinate the discoverer. The vote was in favor of assassination, despite the married Scanner’s protests—being cranched, he could feel and understand that this was wrong, whereas the others were dispassionately cold and rational. The married scanner sneaked into the city where the discovered lived, managed to talk his way into meeting him, and was able to kill his friend (by twisting a knob to overload) sent to do the assassination before he was able to accomplish it.

Mars Is Heaven! (Ray Bradbury)

When the rocket landed on Mars, the crew was shocked to find a lovely American town from about 1920, complete with Victorian houses. The captain was suspicious and he and another crew member go to explore, while the rest stay inside, with instructions to launch if anything is strange. The captain met one of his parents, and found his parents and dead brother on the porch. About the same time, everyone from the ship left to reunite with their dead relatives. As the captain was drifting off to sleep he realized that if Martians were telepathic and afraid of humans, this would be the perfect way to lull them into security. He got up.

“Where are you going, brother?”

“To get a drink of water.”

“You’re not thirsty.”

The captain ran, screaming, and fell dead before he reached the door.

The Little Black Bag (C. M. Kornbluth)

In the future, before the super-intelligences could bring themselves to do “what needed to be done” with normals, any average intelligence could flatter themselves a good—the tools did all the work of diagnosing, medicating, and operating. One doctor’s black bag got accidentally sent back in a time machine onto the table of a old, washed-up, alcoholic former doctor. A girl had got an serious cut from playing with a piece of glass he had thrown her way after he dropped his wine bottle, and when her mother asked him to heal her, he took the black bag and gave her the pill the card of directions said to. (Bending the card and flicking it produced more directions, too.) Everything was clearly labeled, and the pill healed her dramatically. The doctor had been thinking of simply pawning the bag for money for alcohol, but he did recognize what had. But the girl’s sister knew his reputation, assumed that he was a quack, and wanted half of his takings. So they went into business together, she as the receptionist and he as the doctor. She was a street urchin with money, and just wanted the goods of the world, while he gotten sober and was sincerely trying to help the world. She pressured him into taking a woman whom she had promised a massage that would make her chin tighter—for an extravagant price. He did it, but said he would do no more. So she killed him, cutting the body into little pieces that fit into the small box that disappeared things that were put into it and the lid closed. The woman came back, and she promised more, but the woman wanted her to test the knife on her own throat. So she did, knowing that the scalpels somehow only cut the things that they were labeled as cutting, but nothing else. However, back in the future, the people who ran the little black bags were notified that the unit had been used in murder, so although they had left it active when it was noted as missing, now they turned it off. So just before she cut, the tools were disabled, and became all rusted, and she confidently cut her own throat.

Born of Men and Women (Richard Matheson)

A monstrous child condemned to the basement grows older and stronger, and slowly changes from confusion and hurt at the way his parents treat him to wanting to hurt them for it.

Coming Attraction (Fritz Leiber)

A Brit visiting the New York City area after the US and Russia had a nuclear war, rescued a young attractive woman from getting hit by a car with fishhooks on the back. It came so close that it tore off her skirt. Because of his accent, she asked if he would take her to England, because her boyfriend, a fighter, would beat her when he lost a fighting match with a woman, as was not unusual. She gave him a certain time and location. The police tried to chase down the car, but were not successful. They said that the drivers just wanted to collect tear the skirts off—some of them had fifty in their room when they were caught, and he warned him about the woman. He went anyway, even though he had to travel through a radioactive section of the city to get there. This guy informed the girl that he had lost tonight. She looked scared, and so he fought the man and knocked him down. But she stopped it and said that he could beat her later. American women all wore masks, and he took hers off, and realized that he had been played. He realized he was really tired of American and wanted to return to England.

The Quest for Saint Aquin (Anthony Boucher)

The Pope and Thomas met in secret at a pub, and the Pope gave him the task to find the Saint Aquin, to encourage the faithful. The Christians had come into possession of a robass (robotic donkey), which the Pope gave him to ride. The robass, while taking him where he wants to go, was constantly tempting him to abandon the search—in a flat tone of voice, indicating a question by appending “question mark”. After ascending a mountain where the saint was reputed to have lived, he finds a village and, neglecting the practice of making subtle signs like a cross with two knives, asked about the saint. Christianity was illegal, and he got no answers. Later, he was stripped and beaten. Everyone passes him by, including a Christian (non-Christians had not yet picked up on the odd fashion of ten buttons and one small button, a means of praying the rosary), but someone does put him up at his expense in the inn, and gives him directions. He tells the robass where to go, and it goes, then suddenly darts between two bushes, arriving in a cave. Saint Aquin was known to be a saint because his body was incorrupted—untouched by decay after death. The robass, a thorough skeptic, puts its foot through the body, revealing it to be a robot. But Thomas replies that Saint Aquin indeed encourages the faithful, because you (the robass and the rational-minded who made it) created a purely rational being, but that being actually decided that there must be a God and became a Christian—thus perfect reason leads to God. The robass tries to distract him by saying that if he is careful he has a good chance to be made the next Pope, but Thomas tells him to leave. The robass tells him it will be waiting for him back at the village when he returns because of his pain. Ribs broken from the beating and in pain, Thomas slowly starts on the path down the mountain alone.

Surface Tension (James Blish)

A crew of humans crash-landed on a watery planet whose only continent was marshy land barely above sea level. Their task was to seed humanity, and since it is obvious that they will die in a month, they took the seeds and used the genetic modifier to craft humans roughly the size of bacteria and paramecia, suited for living in shallow ponds. The assumption was that they would eventually evolve into more regular humanity. Some time later, the hereditary science leader talks with the hereditary engineer about the information contained on the unbreakable, uncorroded plates that the humans had left. They decide to have the paramecia get rid of the tablets, because they seem like nonsense. But the engineer does try out the idea of going above the sky, as the plates talk about. He climbs up a plant, and after much effort, manages to break the surface tension of the water. He gets a nasty sunburn and falls back in a protective cyst, his body shocked by the relative cold of the water into thinking it needed to prepare for winter. After this demonstration, they ask for the plates back, because the paramecia think that the humans will progress without them. But the young science leader had read the plates, and had some memory of the messages. They built a wooden “rocket”, using flagella for propulsion and diatoms for creating oxygen. Again, with much effort, they break out of the surface tension. Having misunderstood “sky” in the tablet to refer to the top of the water, they now see a larger sky, and think that the different worlds mentioned in the tablet are different pools, and they crawl to “rocket” over land to the nearest pool. Meanwhile, the sun sets, and the stars—a word they had thought without meaning—come out. In the new pool, they rescue a human woman from microscopic creatures attacking her. In their “world”, humans had banded together to exterminate those creatures, but in this one they never had that idea. At this point the paramecium traveling with them returns the plates, realizing that humans cannot be stopped from what they plan to accomplish.

The Nine Billion Names of God (Arthur C. Clarke)

A Buddhist monastery in Tibet buys a computer and hires some programmers to write a program that will print out all the variations of nine letters. They believe that it is their purpose to discover all the names of God, and when they have finished, the world will be finished. The monks had been working on this task for several centuries, and recognize that the computer will speed things up. Fortunately for them, the names need not be identified, merely written. The programmers, scoffing and eager to leave the remote mountain, climb down the day that the computer is projected to finish. It is night by the time they reached the bottom where the town is, and they notice that above them, the stars were quietly winking out.

It’s a Good Life (Jerome Bixby)

Everyone in the small town in Ohio is relentlessly positive, because there is one boy who can read minds, teleport, and alter reality. For some reason three years ago he separated the town from the rest of the earth (or perhaps destroyed everything except the town), and it existed on its own, with a sun of the boy’s creation. Letting him pick up your thoughts was dangerous: if he did not like you, he would harm you, or simply kill you into a grave in the corn field; if he did like you, he would try to make you happy, but generally not in a way that you would like. So people mumble when they pass by the house. And they always said that something is good, especially when they think otherwise, in case he gets any ideas. But he likes people coming over to “watch” television (there are no stations, so they just stare at the TV). They hosted a birthday party for a young man on one television night, and the young man lost his cool and got upset. The boy killed him into a grave, but it was a good gathering that evening.

The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin)

An eighteen year old girl just out of college stows away on a EDS (emergency dispatch ship) going to take medicine to her brother on a colony world. The large resource and transport ships coordinated by the government keep some EDS around, and because it would be highly disruptive for them to divert their course, when an emergency happens the closest one sends out an EDS with just enough expensive rocket fuel to go and return. (The big ships are big enough to use a different, more efficient means of propulsion.) The law is to space any stowaways, because the deceleration and return trip will burn too much fuel to return. When the pilot discovers the girl, he does everything in his power to try to avoid spacing her. She is initially upset that, while she expected to pay a fine for her transgression, she did not expect to pay with her life, and it seemed like an injustice to her. Slowly she accepted that it was not a human rule that could accommodate individual situations, but a rule by nature, which never makes exceptions. She talked with her brother until his camp rotated into the planet’s night, cutting off communication, then she accepted her fate, walked into the airlock and was spaced.

Fondly Fahrenheit (Alfred Bester)

A man’s robot occasionally and unexpectedly murdered people. It was a valuable multi-specialty robot and its owner made a living from hiring it out to work. The owner kept fleeing to a different planet to avoid it being caught and he having his livelihood taken away, for he had no skills of his own. He tried to figure out why this kept happening, and eventually ran across someone late at night in London, and his robot refused to mug him. The man was a famous mathematician, and they made a deal to live at his place. The mathematician ended up coming up with a possible solution, writing it up in a handwritten paper as both a case of projection and also a case where the malfunction happens above a certain temperature. The owner killed him, and then takes it to psychologist to ask about projection. The psychologist recognizes that he is lying about the source, due to the handwriting and various other clues, and says that it looks like the boundaries of personality between the owner and the robot are blurry. He fled with the robot to a cold planet. But it happened again, and so the diagnosis that the owner is projecting into the robot, and is ultimately the source of the killing seems to be correct.

The Country of the Kind (Damon Knight)

A man who for either because of genetic imbalance or willfulness (unclear to me which) is punished by his permissive society by being ostracized (not looking at him, speaking to him, or even acknowledging his existence); he was genetically modified to be epileptic to prevent future violence (this is done to him when he attempts violence); his sweat, breath, and excretions were genetically altered to smell very bad to everyone except him. He trashes people’s things to try to get them to acknowledge him, and he makes statues with a piece of paper trying to get people to read it, which says that you can be free, all you need to do is pick up a knife and stab someone and then they will let you do whatever you want.

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

A man with an IQ of 68 was selected for an medical study where an operating increases his IQ by a factor of three. He was instructed to write progress reports as a form of journal. Through these entries we see his progress, initially slowly, as he competed with a mouse named Algernon who had already had to operation to see who could solve a maze faster. Initially the mouse kept beating him, but his intellect improved slowly at first, and then more rapidly as he beat the mouse, started recognizing that his “friends” at the factory were not being nice to him but instead were making fun of him, then getting very good at reading. He was asked to leave the factory, because his new intelligence made everyone very comfortable. He started making all kinds of connections, and even authored a paper on a subject relating to his case of idiocy to genius. However, the mouse had started to regress, and no longer could solve the puzzles it had to solve to get food, and this suggested that the man would regress as well. Then it starts to happen, and he documents his frustration and no longer being able to understand the things he used to be able to understand. Eventually he was back at the factory, although now people did not make fun of him and they refused to allow new people to do it. He knew he had been more, but could not remember it, and he was so frustrated the he left the town, asking his favorite teacher if she would continue putting flowers on Algernon’s grave for him, if she saw the note.

A Rose for Ecclesiastes (Roger Zelazny)

A brilliant poet got the chance to go to Mars to learn the High Martian of the Temple—to be the first human to catch a glimpse of the heights of Martian culture. He rapidly learned the language and translates their important works. He even saw a dance created by one of their greatest artists. The dancer was very forward, and they started a relationship. He was rather dismissive and arrogant towards the people of his crew, even though many of them came out of respect for his work, but biology engineer there appreciated him. Since the Martians had no flowers, he asked the engineer to make a rose to give to the dancer, which the engineer said could be done, but would take some weeks to grow in the tank. One day the dancer was gone, and by this time he loved her deeply, so he drove all around looking for her. He eventually found her, and she said that she was pregnant. He had thought that impossible, because an event had made all the Martians sterile. After that, the Martian culture had sort of given up on life, since while they were long-lived, they were the last Martians that Mars would see. Apparently, only the men were sterile, and so the Martians could reproduce with humans, and perhaps even the men could be made unsterile. She returned with him to the Temple, where he had been living. But his things had been piled in a neat pile, the (female) leader said that he could not return, and a large male fighter blocked his entrance. The poet had learned some martial arts, and had a deus ex machina of a move, with which he promptly incapacitated the fighter. Then he went into the Temple, where everyone had gathered, and implored them to life. He translated Ecclesiastes on the fly and recited the whole work to them, because although the Teacher had the outlook that life was meaningless, nonetheless he saw life worth living. It turned out that their greatest artist, the one who created thousands of dances, had prophesied that this would happen, and, prophesy fulfilled, the leader signaled that they would embrace life. The dancer told him that she had not believed the prophecy, and had fled because she was afraid it might be true. And she admitted that she had failed in one part of her mission: she did not love him and refused to see him any longer. He promptly left Mars, dejected.