Not physically but spiritually, I guess. There was this guy Spender from the fourth expedition who somehow managed to read Martian books and figured out what happened. He considered his duty to stop the human conquest and proceeded to kill his comrades with the idea that after so many perils people would abandon the project. He was not successful though and his commander killed him. But that commander also changed, they all changed. There's a story there about a man who came there to build a house inhabited by the characters from Edgar Poe's stories.
- Poe? The one who wrote The Golden Bug?
- Yes, only he wrote many other stories too, many of them rather morbid. Bradbury describes a society where such stories were prohibited on Earth as the ones which emanated too much emotions and undermined the rationalization. So that man, he called him Stendhal"
- Wait, I heard that name before. Stendhal, the French author from the 19th Century, the mystificator..
- Yes, but that one wrote social novels. I believe, Bradbury knew about him and decided to give his name to the protagonist who built that house full of robots, each of which resembled the character from Poe's. Then the demolition commission arrived tio inspect the house because it was prohibited to build such places. He then announced a costume ball for one night for all the members of that commission so that they could have fun before the house was destroyed. During that fun every member of the commission could witness how a robot resembling him or her would be killed through one of the ways described in the Poe's stories. It was very real. At the end only the chairman of the commission remained to see his demise and in the basement Stendhall chained him to the wall and revealed the truth: those were real people who were killed while the robots resembling the members of the commission watched the deaths. He then put a brick wall around a guy and left the house for demolition.
- Well, that sounds like those Martians..
- Exactly. Stendhal said that he punished those people for militant ignorance; they did not even bother to read Poe's stories, otherwise they would have figured things out. Don't we have such things happening here?
We sat silent for a while. Yes, we had such things happening. We were kids but we knew. We knew about books prohibited and even burned. We knew about opinions tramping the essence. We knew about branches of science proclaimed "decadent and useless'. We knew about people destroyed. And all those commissions, we knew about them too.
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