Keep Out - Fredric Brown

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Keep out by Frederick Brown. With no more room left
on Earth, and with Mars hanging up there empty of life,
somebody hit on the plan of starting a colony on
the red planet. It meant changing the habits and physical
structure of the immigrants, but that worked out fine. In fact,

(00:20):
every possible factor was covered except one of the flaws
of human nature. Dapteene is the secret of it adapt teen,
they called it first, then it got shortened to dapteen
it let us adapt. They explained it all to us
when we were ten years old. I guess they thought

(00:41):
we were too young to understand before then, although we
knew a lot of it already. They told us just
after we landed on Mars, your home children, the head
teacher told us. After we had gone into the glass
like dome they'd built for us there, and he told
us there'd be a special lecture for us that evening,
an important one that we must all attend. And that

(01:02):
evening he told us the whole story, then the whys
and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to
wear a heated spacesuit and helmet, of course, because the
temperature in the dome was comfortable for us. But already
freezing cold for him, and the air was already too
thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us
by radio from inside his helmet. Children, he said, you

(01:25):
are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you
will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians,
the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth
and another five in space. Now you will spend ten
years until you are adults in this dome, although toward
the end of that time you will be allowed to
spend increasingly long periods outdoors. Then you will go forth

(01:48):
and make your own homes, live your own lives as Martians.
You will intermarry, and your children will breed true they
too will be Martians. It is time you were told
the history of this great experiment of which each of
you is a part. Then he told us Man, he said,
had first reached Mars in nineteen eighty five. It had

(02:10):
been uninhabited by intelligent life. There's plenty of plant life
and a few varieties of non flying insects, and he
had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive
on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing
space suits. When he went outside of them, except by
day in the warmer seasons, it was too cold for him.

(02:30):
The air was too thin for him to breathe, and
long exposure to sunlight less filtered of rays harmful to
him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere, could
kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him, and
he could not eat them. He had to bring all
his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.
For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars, and

(02:51):
all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome, which had
been built for us, there was only one other outpost,
another glassite dome, much small and less than a mile away.
It had looked as though mankind could never spread to
the other planets of the Solar System besides Earth, for
of all of them, Mars was the least inhospitable. If
he couldn't live here, there was no use even trying

(03:13):
to colonize the others. And then in twenty thirty four,
thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Weymouth had discovered daptine,
a miracle drug that worked not on the animal or
person to whom it was given, but on the progeny
he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.
It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions,

(03:36):
provided the conditions were made gradually. Doctor Weymouth had inoculated
and then made it a pair of guinea pigs. They
had borne a litter of five, and by placing each
member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions,
he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity, one
of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature
of forty below zero fahrenheit. Another was quite happy at

(03:59):
one hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on
a diet that would have been deadly poisoned for an
ordinary animal, and a fourth was contented under a constant
X ray bombardment that would have killed one of its
parents within minutes. Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that
animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true,
and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under

(04:21):
those conditions. Ten years later, ten years ago, the head
teacher told us, you children were born born of parents
carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment, and
from birth. You have been brought up under carefully controlled
and gradually changing conditions. From the time you were born.
The air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned

(04:42):
and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by
becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests
are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants.
When you are fully mature and are breathing air like
that of Mars, the difference will be even greater. Your
bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the
increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would

(05:06):
kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old,
your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection
to survive conditions that seem normal to you. In another
ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars.
Its air will be your air, its food plants your food.
Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure,

(05:29):
and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of
the five years we spent in space under a gradually
decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal. To you.
It will be your planet to live on and to populate.
You are the children of Earth, but you are the
first Martians. Of course, we had known a lot of
those things already. The last year was the best by then.

(05:52):
The air inside the dome, except for the pressurized parts
where our teachers and attendants live, was almost like that outside,
and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It
is good to be in the open. The last few
months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could
begin choosing mates. Although they told us there is to
be no marriage until after the final day, after our

(06:13):
full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I
had made my choice long since, and I'd felt sure
that she felt the same way. I was right. Tomorrow
is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be martians,
the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet. Some
among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now,

(06:35):
But wiser counsel prevailed, and we are waiting. We have
waited twenty years, and we can wait until the final day.
And tomorrow is the final day. Tomorrow, at a signal,
we will kill the teachers and other Earthmen. Among us
before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it
will be easy. We have dissimilated for years now, and

(06:56):
they don't know how we hate them. They do not
know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly,
misshapen bodies, so narrow shouldered and tiny chested. They're weak,
sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our martian air,
and above all their white, pasty, hairless skins. We shall

(07:17):
kill them, and then we shall go and smash the
other dome, so all earthmen there will die too. If
more earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live
and hide in the hills where they'll never find us.
And if they try to build more domes here, we'll
smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.
This is our planet, and we want no aliens. Keep
off and of keep out. By Frederick Brown