A Princess of Mars Rethroned by Edna Rice Burroughs Page A

incubator.
    Their foster
fathers may not even have had an egg in the incubator, as was the
case with Solan, who had not commenced to lay, until less than a
year before he became the mother of another man'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 mother 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 male 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.
    The community of
which the green Martians with whom my lot was cast formed a part
was composed of some thirty thousand souls. They roamed an enormous
tract of arid and semi-arid land between forty and eighty degrees
south latitude, and bounded on the east and west by two large
fertile tracts. Their headquarters lay in the southwest corner of
this district, near the crossing of two of the so-called Martian
canals.
    As the incubator
had been placed far north of their own territory in a supposedly
uninhabited and unfrequented area, we had before us a tremendous
journey, concerning which I, of course, knew nothing.
    After our return
to the dead city I passed several days in comparative idleness. On
the day following our return all the warriors had ridden forth
early in the morning and had not returned until just before
darkness fell. As I later learned, they had been to the
subterranean vaults in which the eggs were kept and had transported
them to the incubator, which they had then walled up for another
five years, and which, in all probability, would not be