A Martian Sends another Postcard Home
Authors: Warren Jason
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2004)

All in all, they are not much changed. Since I last thought to you, there are many more of them. Even the ozone window has not (so far) affected their surprising fecundity. The loud ones, the makers of television, have grown larger. The rest are small and quiet, and rarely seen. It is possible that they are ingested by the television-makers: you will recall that I modestly proposed a similar solution when I was last here, though (like my scheme for controlled nuclear fusion involving cucumbers) it may not have been adopted. I have finally seen inside one, and it is as our scouts (the ones in Florence and Padua) transmitted. Each one has a clock; when it stops, they always finish, and I have not seen one start again. The carapace is a delicate crystal but they do not really care about it; after it breaks, it makes itself new again. Often they break it on purpose. They care about the jellies inside, particularly the one at the front end. I have not yet discovered how it works, and they still do not seem to know. They have a new name for it: the babbage. They have even learned how to take its picture, by bending the dance of protons, in a great maxwell that roars. Some of them want to make their own babbages, but I think this must be harder than it looks, because the ones they make (of sand and glass) can only count to two, and their conversation is limited. Now I want to think to you about the galens; for of all the television-makers, they have changed the least, though it is true that they no longer put cloves at their front ends. I have still not discovered what they do. The galens have ever caused others’ eyes to melt and their bodies to shriek, with what they call pain; but they have no other discernible consequences. If ever one of their race finishes, a galen is sure to be close by, but it makes no obvious difference; whereas, when one begins, there is frequently no galen to be sensed, and that also makes no difference. My first hypothesis was that the galens might be engineers, but this was disproved during my third visit, at the time of the first Great Finishing, in the place they call Bartholomew’s. My next hypothesis was that they might be scientists; but they rarely perform experiments, for above all things they admire the deeds of the galens that have gone before them. They are not priests, for they do not reverence the Water—their word for the Holy Substance, Oxygen Dihydride, Which is as common in their world as rust is in ours. (Why they are so careless of this, their greatest Treasure, is an impenetrable mystery; but it is the way of all the television-makers. There was the galen Snowjohn that lived in Bartholomew’s in the time before television, who did love the Water and taught them to purify It; but the television-makers paid him no heed, they have filled It with their excrement and other abominations, until It breeds plagues, and they have tried to own It; truly, a barbarous race.) Nor can the galens accurately be called artisans; most of their machines, like the leeuwenhoek and latterly, the hounsfield, have been given to them. The first machine they themselves made was the laennec, which grows from their front ends and makes a booming sound when it walks. They all keep a laennec now; but a good many laennecs must be lame, for I have never seen them walk. Also, they have learned how to make a perfect stillness, much better than their old sort of stillness that came in a bottle or a flower. This stillness is brought by volatile hydrocarbons, and it is very like their finishing, except it begins with a kiss, and usually the one who is kissed starts again after. The galens are thanked for the stillness with a jelly or perhaps a piece of carapace. They have untwisted the sugars of their own histories. You will recall how surprised we were when they first deciphered the crickwatson. Now they have finished making their own Book of Spirals, and it is read in all their lands; but their understanding is still very imperfect. They have guessed the beginnings of the story; and they have dreamed many endings, though not even we know which is true. They have also started to recombine the sugars—so far, P E R SO N A L P A P E R