"That silver hawk gives you a Colonization Board clearance that’s a little on the special side...you’ll have to admit. The first man who wore it got a little angry when anyone addressed him as ‘General’ because that’s a strictly military title, and military titles haven’t been in common use for forty years. There’s not supposed to be any army anymore—on Earth or on Mars. But I’ve always sort of liked ‘General’ and that insignia is practically the equivalent of five stars.”
“I’m afraid I don’t like ‘General’ at all,” I said. “The title is...Ralph.”
It is the future--the year 2020! A colony has been founded on Mars, and its existence has galvanized human society, given people hope, ignited a spirit of adventure!
Man had lived too long in a closed-circuit that had almost destroyed him. The great barrier that was no longer there had brought the world to the brink of a universal holocaust, and just knowing that it had been shattered forever was enabling men and women everywhere to lead healthier lives, set their goals higher.
Woah, is this Frank Belknap Long the optimist singing the gospel of manifest destiny? Well, there is a fly in the ointment. Millions of people--fifty mil in the USA alone!--want to move to Mars to participate in the grand adventure of setting up a new civilization there, but the government isn't building its fleet of rocket ships fast enough to meet demand, and only a small number of carefully selected people can be taken to the red planet every month, and the way the feds pick and choose who can go is giving rise to widespread envy and a popular belief in corruption and favoritism.
The title of Mars is My Destination reminds us of Alfred Bester's critically lauded 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, which I read many years ago. I recall Bester's novel having a sort of hard-boiled, noirish style and Long brings this sort of style to Mars is My Destination, our narrator, Ralph Graham, telling his tale in a cynical, somewhat sarcastically jocular, voice like you might find in a detective novel. Long's novel is full of elements that remind us of those detective stories; Ralph spends the first five chapters of Mars is My Destination moving around Chicago, the world's leading spaceport, trying to figure out various mysteries and getting himself into a fist fight in a bar, engaging in a flirtation with a gorgeous blonde femme fatale, and surviving multiple attempts to murder him (one of these involves a robotic snake.) The mysteries include: why has Ralph been selected to go to Mars?, who is trying to kill him?, and who is the femme fatale?
Making the novel feel even more like a detective story in its early chapters, the narrator withholds information from readers, for example only telling us he is happily married after the flirtation with the femme fatale and that he is actually a high level employee of the Colonization Board after making us think the reason is being permitted to go to Mars is some kind of mystery. When Long springs such basic and essential information—old to the narrator but new to us readers—on us it is a surprise that changes our whole perception of what is going on, like a plot twist.
If memory serves, The Stars My Destination was one of those stories in which big powerful private companies whose influence rivals that of the government are fighting private wars with each other, and Long makes just this sort of thing a central element of Mars is My Destination--I guess this type of material comes natural to Long, who, in the 1930s at least,* was a supporter of the Soviet Union. The idea raised early on that the common people don't trust the government is dismissed and discarded--those who doubt the Colonization Board are villains or fools, and Long's book is a vindication of government authority, which Ralph comes to embody in himself.
*See H. P. Lovecraft's June 19, 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, Nov 26, 1932 letter to August Derleth, and early December 1932 letter to Derleth; also Robert E. Howard's Jan-Feb 1935 letter to Lovecraft.
Ralph reports to his boss to find out why he is being sent to Mars and gets a lecture on the conflict between the company that runs the atomic reactor on Mars, Wendel Atomics, and the fuel company that brings to Mars the radioactive fuel Wendel needs, Endicott Fuel. The two companies are manipulating the colonists to take sides in their dispute over the price of fuel and forming their own heavily armed police forces and so forth. Ralph’s vaguely defined mission is to save the colony from this strife, and to achieve this lofty goal Ralph is given unmatched authority, basically made dictator of Mars, but he is supposed to stay undercover until he needs to wield this authority, and he won't be accompanied by any official associates who can enforce his authority. Ralph's authority is represented by a silver insignia in the shape of a hawk--when people see it, it is assumed, they will obey Ralph's orders. We just read a book by Long all about sex roles and sexual relationships, The Mating Center, and Mars is My Destination is also chock full of gender stuff, with many female characters and with lots of dialogue in which Ralph and other men offer their theories about women and their behavior. This material on women essentially puts women on a pedestal, in a way that by today's standards is sexist, patriarchal and condescending, Long and his characters setting up sharply distinct gender roles and double standards.
One of the obstacles facing Ralph in the early pages of Mars is My Destination is that his wife Joan doesn't want to go to Mars--he was in that bar drinking whiskey because he was upset about an argument with his wife over their future. Ralph loves his wife, but he is also feverishly eager to participate in the Mars venture (even before he knew that he had been appointed secret king of Mars.) Ralph's boss has the idea that a man without a woman at his side is not a man who can accomplish great things, expressed in one of Long's bizarre and difficult to parse metaphors:
"You've got to go to Mars and if you went alone you'd be about as useful to us as a celibate kangaroo, all packaged and ready to be sent on a journey to the taxidermist."
This is sort of an old fashioned way to praise women, the hackneyed idea that behind every great man is a great woman, and it is accompanied by a somewhat less flattering diagnosis of how women think--the boss tells Ralph that Joan will probably be eager to go to Mars once she sees his new silver hawk insignia, even suggesting that, while he has to keep his authority a secret for now, he can wear the badge around the house to impress Joan. While I suspect that the stereotype that women admire men of high status has some truth to it, when Ralph told us readers that the last four men who wore this famous insignia were all killed, I was reminded of “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” and all those civil rights movies in which the spouse wishes the activist lead wouldn’t endanger their family by crusading for the marginalized. Will your wife really be thrilled to know the government just put a huge target on your back, Ralph?
(The whole issue of Joan's reluctance to move to Mars fizzles out in anti-climax--when Ralph gets home she has already changed her mind and packed their bags.)
On his way home on the futuristic subway (Long fills up some pages describing this technological marvel) Ralph almost becomes the fifth bearer of the silver hawk to be killed! (One of the loose ends in Long's novel is the matter of who told the bad guys Ralph was being sent to Mars to bring them to justice before even Ralph knew it.) While this super-advanced train that moves at half the speed of sound is in a dark tunnel somebody tries to knife Ralph but instead kills the innocent civilian standing next to him! Ralph grabs the wrist of the knife-wielding hand in the dark, and before it slips away Ralph discerns it is the hand of a woman!
The sixth of Mars is My Destination’s 21 chapters sees Ralph and Joan on the rocket to the red planet. Ralph hears a noise from what I would call the bridge but Long calls "the chart room" and goes to investigate—right there among the four robots who pilot the vessel he sees a brutish crewman wrestling down the blonde woman Ralph met in that bar back on Earth! Ralph is afraid the woman will be hurt so he strikes the man, who falls into one of the robots and is killed when the machine goes haywire. Ralph feels no remorse, he so abominates men who treat women badly.
The idea that the robots responsible for the safety of the ship are so fragile as to be liable to breakdown from simply being bumped into gets even harder to accept when the blonde, whom we learn is named Helen, explains that she stowed aboard the Mars ship by hiding inside one of the four robots and has been repeatedly climbing out of and back into it when she thought the chart room otherwise unoccupied. Why is Helen so desperate to get to Mars that she is willing to break the law and take up residence in the narrow gaps between the electronic components in a robot's interior? She says that her brother, some kind of engineer or something, is in trouble; bro works for Wendel Atomics and is dying from radiation poisoning. As for the now deceased crewman who caught her, Ralph and the ship’s captain (whose title is "Commander" instead of "Captain") learn from looking at documents found on his corpse that he was a Wendel spy.
Ralph and the Commander are still discussing the Helen issue when the ship is again menaced—some guy with a bomb is outside on the hull, making his way slowly to the engines! The bomber is eliminated in perhaps the craziest and most impenetrable scene of the novel. It seems communication between Earth and Mars is facilitated by millions upon millions of needle-thin wires or shards of filaments left floating around in space! Somehow these filaments can be moved by controls on the rocket and a bunch of them are directed to converge around the Mars-bound vessel and they somehow annihilate the bomber. This scene is so vaguely described and the idea behind it so counterintuitive it is impossible to visualize or understand what is going on, and the fact that Long uses the word "interstellar" when one would expect "interplanetary" and "airframe" when one would expect "hull" does not give the reader much confidence that he knows what he is talking about.
On his way home on the futuristic subway (Long fills up some pages describing this technological marvel) Ralph almost becomes the fifth bearer of the silver hawk to be killed! (One of the loose ends in Long's novel is the matter of who told the bad guys Ralph was being sent to Mars to bring them to justice before even Ralph knew it.) While this super-advanced train that moves at half the speed of sound is in a dark tunnel somebody tries to knife Ralph but instead kills the innocent civilian standing next to him! Ralph grabs the wrist of the knife-wielding hand in the dark, and before it slips away Ralph discerns it is the hand of a woman!
The sixth of Mars is My Destination’s 21 chapters sees Ralph and Joan on the rocket to the red planet. Ralph hears a noise from what I would call the bridge but Long calls "the chart room" and goes to investigate—right there among the four robots who pilot the vessel he sees a brutish crewman wrestling down the blonde woman Ralph met in that bar back on Earth! Ralph is afraid the woman will be hurt so he strikes the man, who falls into one of the robots and is killed when the machine goes haywire. Ralph feels no remorse, he so abominates men who treat women badly.
The idea that the robots responsible for the safety of the ship are so fragile as to be liable to breakdown from simply being bumped into gets even harder to accept when the blonde, whom we learn is named Helen, explains that she stowed aboard the Mars ship by hiding inside one of the four robots and has been repeatedly climbing out of and back into it when she thought the chart room otherwise unoccupied. Why is Helen so desperate to get to Mars that she is willing to break the law and take up residence in the narrow gaps between the electronic components in a robot's interior? She says that her brother, some kind of engineer or something, is in trouble; bro works for Wendel Atomics and is dying from radiation poisoning. As for the now deceased crewman who caught her, Ralph and the ship’s captain (whose title is "Commander" instead of "Captain") learn from looking at documents found on his corpse that he was a Wendel spy.
Ralph and the Commander are still discussing the Helen issue when the ship is again menaced—some guy with a bomb is outside on the hull, making his way slowly to the engines! The bomber is eliminated in perhaps the craziest and most impenetrable scene of the novel. It seems communication between Earth and Mars is facilitated by millions upon millions of needle-thin wires or shards of filaments left floating around in space! Somehow these filaments can be moved by controls on the rocket and a bunch of them are directed to converge around the Mars-bound vessel and they somehow annihilate the bomber. This scene is so vaguely described and the idea behind it so counterintuitive it is impossible to visualize or understand what is going on, and the fact that Long uses the word "interstellar" when one would expect "interplanetary" and "airframe" when one would expect "hull" does not give the reader much confidence that he knows what he is talking about.
(Another crazy thing about this component of the novel is that Long never explains who the bomber was or where he got his bomb, something you think the commander could figure out easily enough.)
Chapter 11 begins with the unwelcome news that Ralph is changing narrative strategies and will be giving us an account of stuff he himself did not witness. We spend two chapters looking in on a typical Mars family of six, the Lyntons, observing with growing boredom as father John mansplains the economic situation on Mars to his wife and wifey periodically responds with exasperation that "I know all that, John," and "We've gone over this a hundred times." Wendel Atomics needs fuel for their power plant, but Endicott Fuel, as part of their resistance to domination by Wendel, doesn't want to sell to Wendel and so sells fuel on margin to the colonists so the colonists can speculate on fuel prices--some of these colonists get rich thereby and others lose their shirts. (There are hints that Long is basing the economic situation on the frontier of Mars with that of America in the 19th century when many small wildcatters extracted oil from their own land.) John has brought home some cylinders of fuel he didn't buy outright but on margin, and his wife is worried they will explode and kill them and their four children and everybody for miles around. In Chapter 12, Wendel agents sneak onto John's land and tinker with one of the fuel cylinders, turning it into a time bomb. John realizes what has happened and decides, after a discussion with his wife (people in Long novels who should be in a rush often stop to have long conversations), to drive the cylinder to the spaceport in hopes somebody there can fix it before it goes boom.
With the spaceport saved and Ralph now wearing his silver hawk insignia for all to see, Ralph sets out to solve the problem of Mars by arresting Wendel and breaking up his atomic power company. John drives him to the installation where all the nuclear weapons on Mars sit ready for launch. Long never mentioned this arsenal before, and, in fact, has been suggesting throughout the book that there is no more military on Earth or Mars. (You have to wonder if Long was making up his story as he went along, conceiving of plot obstacles and writing passages setting them up with no idea how he would later resolve them.) Ralph briefs the guy who is in command of these weapons of mass destruction and then has John drive him to Wendel's office at the atomic plant. The Wendel guards have all been given orders to shoot Ralph on sight, but when they see he wears the silver hawk they all stand down, except for one guy who assaults Ralph from behind with a weapon Long calls a "heavy metal thong." Long employs his own idiosyncratic lexicon in this book that sometimes left me at a loss, and even though Long says this thing is metal and "gleams," I visualized it as a blackjack or kosh. When this guy is disposed of, Ralph and John seize Wendel and put him on the video phone with the nuclear weapons guy and Ralph threatens to nuke the atomic plant--with him in it--unless Wendel surrenders. Wendel has every reason to doubt Ralph will do it, but then Joan appears on the screen next to the missile commander and says that she knows her husband and she knows he'll do it out of his sense of duty! Wendel surrenders, his company is disbanded, and Mars is saved, thanks to Joan, just as Ralph's boss might have predicted. We don't ever learn who shot the dart or who tried to blow up the space ship on its way to Mars, and we don't get any insight into who will now run the atomic power plant and the fuel deliveries the plant needs--maybe we are to assume all these essential services are to be nationalized?
In Chapter 9, Ralph and Joan step out of the rocket and onto the ramp that descends to the Martian surface three hundred feet below. Long, who gave short shrift to the outré idea of wires in space, spends a lot of time talking about the "corkscrew" shape of this ramp and its construction and people's natural fear of heights and how to overcome them. Poor Ralph doesn't even make it to the surface on his own two feet as someone shoots him in the back with a poison dart and he immediately suffers convulsions and has to be rushed to the hospital. A feverish Ralph looks out the window of the ambulance and gets his first view of the Mars he has come to save, and here we have some of Long's best and most interesting writing as he describes the colony with metaphors that actually work and indulges in some philosophizing about cycles of history. Chapter 10 has more philosophizing, this time about sexual relationships, as Ralph lays in his hospital bed and his doctor and nurse flirt with each other. Oy.
Chapter 13 returns us to Ralphie boy, who wakes up to find somebody from Wendel Atomics in his room. This guy wants to interrogate our hero and threatens Ralph with Big Image torture, offering Long a chance to talk about the power of the cinema for a few pages. Long suggests that watching films alters one's brain and makes real life seem puny and lame in comparison, and describes how in the world of his novel police interrogators figured out how to create movies that function as torture devices that so disorient people that they will provide all the answers the cops want--prolonged exposure to these films is likened to a lobotomy that erases your personality. Throughout Mars is My Destination, Long suggests that the current government on Earth is competent and admirable--the armed forces have been abolished, for example--and Ralph assures us that on Earth movie theatres are strictly regulated by the government and thus safe, and that the Earth police no longer use Big Image torture, but the story is different here on Mars where the government can't rein in Wendel--Big Image torture is a credible threat to Ralph's psyche!
Luckily, Ralph isn't as weak as he and his interrogator think he is, and he jumps out of the bed and beats up the man from Wendel Atomics, who turns out to be no mere flunky, but none other than the president of Wendel Atomics, Wendel himself! Ralph is too much of a gentleman to exercise the legitimate authority conferred upon him by the silver hawk and just kill Wendel, and so, with the help of a nurse of whom Ralph sings encomiums, our hero sneaks out of the hospital and heads to the spaceport on foot, expecting to find there that the commander of the space ship will have under his protection Joan and the little insignia that will inspire obedience to Ralph across Mars. Ralph figures every Wendel employee and sympathizer will be gunning for him so he doesn't try to find transport. As Ralph walks between the towering machines that oxygenate the Martian atmosphere for the benefit of the human colonists we get Long's descriptions of this system, some of the better passages in this crazy and uneven book.
There is a huge explosion some miles away--one of the fuel cylinders in colonist hands that the ruthless agents of Wendel Atomics have turned into bombs has detonated! The blast knocks Ralph over. A vehicle stops and an old guy jumps out to check on Ralph, and spends some time chatting about the explosion, the fuel cylinders, and that guy John Lynton, the first to alert the people of the red planet of Wendel's sabotage of the cylinders. Then this chatty Cathy says he has to get to the spaceport as fast as possible to defuse the fuel canister John brought there, because probably there is nobody at the spaceport that can do so. If time is of the essence to protect the spaceport from blowing up, why did this old codger stop to shoot the breeze with a stranger? Anyway, this guy turns out to be the president of Endicott Fuel, who, like his mortal enemy at the head of Wendel, apparently just flits hither and thither without assistant, entourage or bodyguard!
The fuel company prez drives to the spaceport with Ralph in the passenger seat; being old, his heart can't take this excitement and he keels over just as they reach the port, so now there is nobody capable of defusing the fuel cylinder-turned-bomb. So Ralph has the cylinder put in the space ship that brought him to Mars and the ship is launched into space without any human passengers...or so he thinks! Ralph and the ship's commander decide to watch the robots in the chart room of the doomed ship via screen and are amazed to find that Helen the stowaway has stowed away on the ship again! She explains that she sneaked aboard to retrieve a document that would prove she was a Wendel spy--she was working for Wendel so she could infiltrate the Wendel operations and help her dying brother or get revenge or something. Helen admits that she murdered the man on the subway, but says it was some other agent who shot Ralph with the poison dart. The commander tells her to get in a space suit and abandon ship--she gets off before the ship explodes and is eventually rescued. One of the recurring themes of Mars is My Destination is Ralph's chivalrous treatment of women and another example of the book's sympathetic but perhaps condescending view of the fair sex is Ralph's promise that he will use all his vast authority to help Helen when she has to go on trial for all her crimes, which of course include that subway slaying.
This book is obviously a mess, full of poorly written passages and superfluous descriptions that add nothing to the plot or atmosphere. However, it is only rarely boring, and Long's strange pro-government and pro-woman politics are fascinating in their oddity, and lend the story a sense of purpose. I think I'm going to call Mars is My Destination barely acceptable.
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