Ray Bradbury’s The Earth Men

Ray Bradbury’s (1920-2012) “The Earth Men” is a short story included in The Martian Chronicles. The stories in The Martian Chronicles are not in chronological order but it is clear that “Ylla”, “The Earth Men” & “The Third Expedition” are tightly connected. I want to focus on “The Earth Men” because it sheds light on psychiatry and psychopathology, in particular. In this story, Bradbury has a mischievous tone with the most subtle hint of irony.

Captain Williams and three of his men arrive on Mars and walk into the closest town, knocking on doors and announcing their arrival but are surprised and saddened to discover that no one seems impressed at what they believe to be a momentous event, travelling from Earth to Mars by rocket. They are passed from one person to another before they end up with Mr Iii who gets them to sign papers and gives them a key to a room down the corridor.

On route to Mr Iii, they had stopped to talk Mrs Ttt, who had informed them that what Humans call Mars was actually Tyrr and that she was not speaking, as usually understood, and certainly not speaking English but thinking and communicating, using telepathy! Mrs Ttt sent them away with a piece of paper to Mr Aaa who lived on the next farm by a blue canal. Mr Aaa was sitting in his library sipping electric fire, like we might sip tea, from a metal cup! Mr Aaa was unimpressed by the fact that Captain Williams and his men had travelled 60 million miles from Earth, to get to Mars. Indeed, he corrected them, by saying that at this particular time, Earth is a mere 50 millions away from Mars!

In town, they found that Martians wore ‘gold masks and blue masks and crimson masks for pleasant variety, masks with silver lips and bronze eyebrows, masks that smile or masks that frowned, according to the owners’ dispositions’ There, their encounter with a little girl was revealing because they discovered that she could read their minds and knew already what they were going to say, namely, that never before in history had anybody come across space in a big rocket ship, and she did not seem surprised or impressed by this fact. She sent them off to see Mr Iii. Mr Iii ‘was a tall, vaporous, thin man with thick blind blue crystals over his yellowish eyes’ who got them to sign papers but was surprised that the captain wanted his men to sign the papers, too. This strange and perplexing attitude of Mr Iii became clear much later when they came to know that the Martian had assumed that the three men were the captain’s hallucinations. Perhaps more unbelievable was that he wished them to sign an agreement for euthanasia in the event that this was required. He gave them a key to a room at the end of the corridor and asked them to wait to see Mr Xxx in the morning.

Now, for the first time since their arrival on Mars, people in this room, responded with interest and jubilation on Captain Williams announcing that he was from New York City, on Earth:

‘Immediately the hall exploded! The rafters trembled with shouts and cries. The people, rushing forward, waved and shrieked happily, knocking down tables, swarming, rollicking, seizing the four Earth Men, lifting them swiftly to their shoulders. They charged about the hall six times, six times making a full and wonderful circuit of the room, jumping, bounding, singing’.

But all this sense of triumph and celebration was a prelude to tragedy. They quickly came to the realisation that this room housed mentally ill people. Many of their roommates also claimed to come from Earth and some said they came from Jupiter and Saturn. Later that night they came to see how the hallucinations of their roommates materialised, an example of the concretisation of hallucinations that could be seen by others:

A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapours of cobalt light, whispering and sighing. The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar, then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of polished cedar, and back to a woman.

The real peril lay elsewhere, and the captain understood this very well:

‘Yes. If hallucinations can appear this “real” to us, to anyone, if hallucinations are catching and almost believable, it’s no wonder they mistook us for psychotics. If that man can produce little blue fire women and that woman there melt into a pillar, how natural if normal Martians think we produce our rocket ship with our minds’.

In the morning Mr Xxx, a psychologist, came to see them and he said

‘Let me check your papers to be sure they’re in order for a “cure”.’ He checked a file. ‘Yes. You know, such cases as yours need special “curing”. The people in the hall are simpler forms. But once you’ve gone this far, I must point out, with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort to euthanasia.’

The tragic unfolded as the Earth Men take Mr Xxx to their rocket ship and he examines the ship and finds that it is extraordinary in its detail and design. He says:

‘This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I’ve ever encountered. I went through your “rocket”, as you call it.’ He tapped the hull. ‘I hear it. Auditory fantasy.’ He drew a breath. ‘I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy.’ He kissed the ship. ‘I taste it. Labial fantasy!’ He shook the captain’s hand. ‘May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible.

He concluded ‘Your insanity is beautifully complete!’ He went on:

‘Yes, yes, what a lovely insanity. Metal, rubber, gravitizers, foods, clothing, fuel, weapons, ladders, nuts, bolts, spoons. Ten thousand separate items I checked on your vessel. Never have I seen such a complexity. There were even shadows under the bunks and under everything! Such concentration of will! And everything, no matter how or when tested, had a smell, a solidity, a taste, a sound! Let me embrace you!’

The tragic conclusion was that Mr Xxx concluded that the captain was incurable and had to be killed. Mr Xxx had ideas of writing up the case as a monograph for the Martian Academy. He shot the captain with the expectation that the rocket and the three men would disappear. To his dismay after the killing of the captain, the rocket and the three men persisted, a superb example of persistence of hallucinations with time and spatial persistence, no less! To Mr Xxx’s consternation even after killing the three men, their corpses remained material and so did the rocket persist.  There was only one explanation, that Mr Xxx had himself been contaminated, infected by contagion by this most unusual form of psychosis. There was nothing else for it but to kill himself, so as to make the materialised hallucinatory forms disappear. Mr Xxx shot himself but nothing changed, the rocket ‘reclined on the little sunny hill and didn’t vanish’.

Bradbury is in this story playing on the absence of independent markers of disease, even in the most severe psychiatric disorders. Psychiatrists are reliant on description of subjective experience and diagnosis ultimately depends on the authority of the expert and therefore is liable to error and sometimes error that can result in fatal conclusions.

Photos by Jan Oyebode