Their foster mothers may not even have had an egg in the incubator, as
was the case with Sola, who had not commenced to lay, until less than a
year before she became the mother of another woman's offspring. But
this counts for little among the green Martians, as parental and filial
love is as unknown to them as it is common among us. I believe this
horrible system which has been carried on for ages is the direct cause
of the loss of all the finer feelings and higher humanitarian instincts
among these poor creatures. From birth they know no father or mother
love, they know not the meaning of the word home; they are taught that
they are only suffered to live until they can demonstrate by their
physique and ferocity that they are fit to live. Should they prove
deformed or defective in any way they are promptly shot; nor do they
see a tear shed for a single one of the many cruel hardships they pass
through from earliest infancy.
I do not mean that the adult Martians are unnecessarily or
intentionally cruel to the young, but theirs is a hard and pitiless
struggle for existence upon a dying planet, the natural resources of
which have dwindled to a point where the support of each additional
life means an added tax upon the community into which it is thrown.
By careful selection they rear only the hardiest specimens of each
species, and with almost supernatural foresight they regulate the birth
rate to merely offset the loss by death.
Each adult Martian female brings forth about thirteen eggs each year,
and those which meet the size, weight, and specific gravity tests are
hidden in the recesses of some subterranean vault where the temperature
is too low for incubation. Every year these eggs are carefully
examined by a council of twenty chieftains, and all but about one
hundred of the most perfect are destroyed out of each yearly supply.
At the end of five years about five hundred almost perfect eggs have
been chosen from the thousands brought forth. These are then placed in
the almost air-tight incubators to be hatched by the sun's rays after a
period of another five years. The hatching which we had witnessed
today was a fairly representative event of its kind, all but about one
per cent of the eggs hatching in two days. If the remaining eggs ever
hatched we knew nothing of the fate of the little Martians. They were
not wanted, as their offspring might inherit and transmit the tendency
to prolonged incubation, and thus upset the system which has maintained
for ages and which permits the adult Martians to figure the proper time
for return to the incubators, almost to an hour.
The incubators are built in remote fastnesses, where there is little or
no likelihood of their being discovered by other tribes. The result of
such a catastrophe would mean no children in the community for another
five years. I was later to witness the results of the discovery of an
alien incubator.