[19] Reprinted from the Nov. 1946 issue of Fortune Magazine. Machines Without Men by E.W. Leaver and J.J. Brown, by special permission from Editors, p. 165.
[20] Ibid., p. 204.
CHAPTER VI
Auri Sacra Fames
"The accursed thirst for Gold"
A week after our first meeting, we again met in Sun-Rank Banard's library. Addressing Mr. Galoway, he said, "I am very sorry to hear that you have failed to find the missing element for the proposed radio transmitter. You certainly tried hard enough. But don't let this discourage us. In a conference with several of our Supreme Council members, we decided that it might be a good plan to take Lieutenant Balmore back to Earth and let him parachute down right over his home. He can disseminate the experiences he has had on our planet and, at the same time, acquire an airplane with the best high frequency radio transmitter. Then he can contact us on our airship at a prearranged time and place.
"Before he leaves, it may be a good idea to take down in shorthand notes and memorize a convincing lecture with illustrations which may succeed in influencing and possibly converting terrestrial men to our way. I am now going to show you television and moving pictures of some of the gruesome happenings on Earth. I may find it necessary to offend many of your people on Earth by exposing their grim way of living and I will even have to exhort them; but I feel that my method may be the best way to arouse serious attention. You will have to steel yourselves against not only what I am going to tell you but what you will see with your own eyes of the horrible ordeal on Earth in both past and at present. These pictures were shown only to a few Martians. I certainly would like to show them to your Earth peoples, or at least to your ruling class. Your economic system is so strongly entrenched that I doubt your living generations can or will even try to take advantage of my findings or counsel. I will have made a start if the coming ones will benefit. Our combined talks, and suggestions will be recorded and translated into each of your different languages. When the occasion arises, you may reach your people in your own language.
"It will be important for each one of you to be able to give the history of your adventures, the details of your landing experience. Vividly contrast our way of living on Mars with the way of living on Earth; then you may in your own way tell them of the lecture I shall give you now.
"We have found that human beings here and on your Earth have potentially the same physical and mental caliber. Nature implanted in all of us the primitive instincts of selfishness, acquisitiveness, and brutality. By some good fortune our primordial ancestors on Mars started to cast off and definitely curb these instincts and aversions by good judgment, reason and repression, and have forcibly continued to do so until evolution has eliminated our undesirable traits.
"Our early progenitors ingrafted in us high ideals, thus developing in us a high mentality; fortunately we have not inherited your instinct to desire wealth and power for individual self. We, like yourselves, require good health, love, happiness, good nourishment, warm and fashionable clothing, sanitary, and comfortable homes, safety against want and old age, dependence, medical care, luxuries, and honors.