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The Ambassadors 127
The Ambassadors
Nothing so much amazed the First Martian Expedition—no, not even the
answer, which should have been so obvious from the first, to the riddle of the
canals—as the biological nature of the Martians themselves.
Popular fiction and scientific thought alike had conditioned the members
of the expedition to expect either of two possibilities: a race more or less like
ourselves, if possibly high-domed and bulge-chested; or a swarm of tentacled
and pulpy horrors.
With either the familiar or the monstrously unfamiliar we were prepared
to make contact; we had given no thought to the likeness-with-a-difference
which we encountered.
It was on the night of the Expedition’s official welcome to Mars, after that
exchange of geometrical and astronomical diagrams which had established
for each race the intelligence of the other, that the zoölogist Professor Hunyadi
classified his observations.
That the Martians were mammals was self-evident. Certain points concern-
ing their teeth, their toes and the characteristic tufts of hair on their cheek-
bones led Professor Hunyadi to place them, somewhat to the bewilderment
of his non-zoölogical colleagues, as fissipede arctoids. Further technicalities
involving such matters as the shape of the nozzle and the number and distribution
of the nipples led him from the family Canidae through the genus
Canis to the species Lupus.
“My ultimate classification, gentlemen,” he asserted, “must be Canis lupus
sapiens. In other words, as man may be said to be an intelligent ape, we are
here confronted with a race of intelligent wolves.”
Some Martian zoölogist was undoubtedly reaching and expounding
analogous conclusions at that same moment; and the results were evident
when the First Interplanetary Conference resumed its wordless and symbolic
deliberations on the following day.
For if it was difficult for our representatives to take seriously the actions of
what seemed a pack of amazingly clever and well-trained dogs, it was all but
impossible for the Martians to find anything save amusement in the antics of
a troupe of space-touring monkeys.
An Earthman, in those days, would use “You cur!” as an indication of
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