Free Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham Page A

brought her round now. He was sitting at the table sitting by force of habit, since neither sitting nor lying was more restful than standing in the weightless state. He was asking Dale:
    'I've meant to ask you before, but it's kept on slipping my mind: why did you choose to try for Mars? I should have thought Venus was the natural target for the first trip. She's nearer. One would use less fuel. It was the place Drivers was aiming at, wasn't it?'
    Dale looked up from his book, and nodded.
    'Yes, Drivers was trying to reach Venus. As a matter of fact, it was my first idea to go for Venus, but I changed my mind.'
    'That's a pity. It's always Mars in the stories. Either we go to Mars or Mars comes to us. What with Wells and Burroughs and a dozen or so of others, I feel that I know the place already. Venus would have been a change.'
    Dugan laughed. 'If we find Mars anything like the Burroughs conception, we're in for an exciting time. Why did you give up the Venus idea, Dale?'
    'Oh, several reasons. For one thing, we know a bit more about Mars. For all we can tell, Venus under those clouds may be nothing more than a huge ball of water. We do know that Mars is at least dry land, and that we shall have a chance of setting the Gloria Mundi up on end for the return journey. If we came down in a sea, it would mean finish. Then again, the pull of gravity is much less on Mars, and this ship is going to take some handling even there. I don't know why Drivers chose Venus probably he didn't want to wait for Mars' opposition or something of the kind. But you were wrong about it needing less fuel. Actually it would use more.'
    'But Venus comes about ten million miles closer,' Froud objected, looking puzzled.
    'But she's a much bigger planet than Mars. It would take much more power to get clear of her for the return journey. This falling through space uses no fuel. It's the stopping and starting that count, and obviously the bigger the planet, the greater its pull that is, the more it costs to get free.'
    'I see. You mean that as we are now clear of the Earth's pull we could go to Neptune or to Pluto, even, with no more cost of power than to Mars?'
    'Sure. In fact, we could go out of this system into the next if you didn't mind spending a few centuries on the journey.'
    'Oh,' said Froud, ' and relapsed into a thoughtful silence.
    'I wonder,' the doctor put in generally, 'why we do these things? It's quite silly really when we could all stay comfortably and safely at home. Is it going to make anyone any happier or better to know that man can cross space if he wishes to? Yet here we arc doing it.'
    ,Joan's voice came from the window, surprising them.
    'It is going to make us wiser. Don't you remember Cavor saying to Bedford in Wells' First Men in the Moon, "Think of the new knowledge!"?'
    'Knowledge ,' said the doctor. 'Yes, I suppose that is it. For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living. I know I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity.'
    'And finding that quite a lot of it goes bad on him,' put in Froud. The doctor nodded.
    'You're right. It's far from imperishable. I suppose there is some purpose. What do you suppose will happen when one day a man sits back in his chair and says: "Knowledge is complete"? You see, it just sounds silly.
    We're so used to collecting it, that we can't imagine a world where it is all collected and finished.'
    He looked up, catching Dugan's eye, and