The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

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Title: A Martian Odyssey

Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

Release Date: December 4, 2007 [EBook #23731]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This eBook was produced from the 1949 book _A Martian Odyssey and
Others_ by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not
uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.

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 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 the
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.