The Martian Chronicles

The Fourth Expedition lands on Mars in the middle of a cold night. Jeff Spender, the archaeologist, collects scattered wood and starts a small fire while Captain Wilder, Hathaway, and Sam Parkhill—who will all reappear in later stories—explore the landing zone on the “dead, dreaming world” (63). Other crew members question why Spender isn’t using the chemical fire from the ship, but Spender refuses to answer. Instead, he thinks, “it would be a kind of imported blasphemy” (64). The rest of the crew is raucous in their landing, celebratory after surviving the long space voyage.

A secondary rocket lands after an exploratory fly-over and reports that most Martian cities appear to have been abandoned for centuries but several bear fresh Martian corpses dead from chicken pox brought by the previous expeditions. The disease “burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes” (66).

Spender grows increasingly annoyed with the crass celebration of the rest of the crew, and the evening culminates with him punching a man named Biggs who is tossing empty bottles into a Martian canal. Captain Wilder chastises Spender and fines him but indicates that he shares Spender’s sympathies with the vanished Martian culture. Wilder guesses that there aren’t enough Martians left to cause any trouble to the expedition.

Later that evening, Wilder leads several men, including Spender and Biggs, into a Martian city, and the party is awed at the vanished grandeur. Spender recites a Lord Byron poem—"So We’ll Go No More a Roving”—which touches the other men, but the moment is broken when Biggs vomits alcohol over a Martian mosaic. Afterwards, Spender disappears for a week.

When Spender returns to camp after studying Martian literature that he finds, he claims he is a Martian and shoots six members of the crew, including Biggs. He retreats to the hills, and Wilder leads a vengeful group of men after him. Once they have Spender cornered, Wilder attempts to talk him into giving himself up. Spender suggests the Martians were superior to humans because “they knew how to blend art into their living” (84). Spender suggests that he killed the others because they were crass Americans, reminding him of his father during a visit to Mexico City. He states that he plans on killing the entire Fourth Expedition and any others who arrive to preserve Martian culture.

After another shootout, Wilder kills Spender. He commands the others to bury Spender and create a tomb. Later, when Sam Parkhill uses one of the Martian cities for target practice, Wilder punches him.