There was death in the camp.
I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light. There was a prickling at the base of my scalp and I was drenched with cold sweat.
I had an impulse to leap up and go stumbling about in the darkness. But I disciplined myself. I crossed my arms and waited for the sky to grow bright.
Daybreak on Mars is like nothing you’ve ever dreamed about. You wake up in the morning, and there it is—bright and clear and shining. You pinch yourself, you sit up straight, but it doesn’t vanish.
Then you stare at your hands with the big callouses. You reach for a mirror to take a look at your face. That’s not so good. That’s where ugliness enters the picture. You look around and you see Ralph. You see Harry. You see the women.
On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of early dawn, but if she’s really beautiful she doesn’t look too bad. On Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack and turn it into a real home for a man.
You have to make allowances for a lot of things on Mars. You have to start right off by accepting hardship and privation as your daily lot. You have to get accustomed to living in construction camps in the desert, with the red dust making you feel all hollow and dried up inside. Making you feel like a drum, a shriveled pea pod, a salted fish hung up to dry. Dust inside of you, rattling around, canal water seepage rotting the soles of your boots.
So you wake up and you stare. The night before you’d collected driftwood and stacked it by the fire. The driftwood has disappeared. Someone has stolen your very precious driftwood. The Martians? Guess again.
You get up and you walk straight up to Ralph with your shoulders squared. You say, “Ralph, why in hell did you have to steal my driftwood?”
In your mind you say that. You say it to Dick, you say it to Harry. But what you really say is, “Larsen was here again last night!”
You say, I put a fish on to boil and Larsen ate it. I had a nice deck of cards, all shiny and new, and Larsen marked them up. It wasn’t me cheating. It was Larsen hoping I’d win so that he could waylay me in the desert and get all of the money away from me.
You have a girl. There aren’t too many girls in the camps with laughter and light and fire in them. But there are a few, and if you’re lucky you take a fancy to one particular girl—her full red lips and her spun gold hair. All of a sudden she disappears. Somebody runs off with her. It’s Larsen.
In every man there is a slumbering giant. When life roars about you on a world that’s rugged and new you’ve got to go on respecting the lads who have thrown in their lot with you, even when their impulses are as harsh as the glint of sunlight on a desert-polished tombstone.
You think of a name—Larsen. You start from scratch and you build Larsen up until you have a clear picture of him in your mind. You build him up until he’s a great shouting, brawling, golden man like Paul Bunyon.
Even a wicked legend can seem golden on Mars. Larsen wasn’t just my slumbering giant—or Dick’s, or Harry’s. He was the slumbering giant in all of us, and that’s what made him so tremendous. Anything gigantic has beauty and power and drive to it.
Alone we couldn’t do anything with Larsen’s gusto, so when some great act of wickedness was done with gusto how could it be us? Here comes Larsen! He’ll shoulder all the guilt, but he won’t feel guilty because he’s the first man in Eden, the child who never grew up, the laughing boy, Hercules balancing the world on his shoulders and looking for a woman with long shining tresses and eyes like the stars of heaven to bend to his will.
If such a woman came to life in Hercules’ arms would you like the job of stopping him from sending the world crashing? Would you care to try?