Lieutenant Agnew

Lieutenant Agnew is the Champion expedition’s junior medical officer, remembered through the account of Captain Willem van Tromp as a brilliant doctor and a well-liked crewman whose unexplained disappearance altered the captain’s view of the Martians. Agnew never returns from a walk among the rocks. The official explanation is that he became lost and died, but the circumstances leave open the possibility that he vanished in an instant—and the captain admits that he still wakes at night wondering what happened.

Identity and Background

Agnew served as the expedition’s junior medical officer. Van Tromp describes him as exceptionally capable in his profession and says he had no other complaints about him; he was well liked. The one disturbing exception was a latent xenophobia directed not at humans but at Martians. That hostility matters because the expedition had already concluded that the Martians were peaceful, and Van Tromp had ordered the crew not to carry weapons when leaving the ship, to reduce the risk of an incident.

Agnew’s disappearance therefore begins against a background of two unheeded dangers: his prejudice toward the Martians and his possible defiance of orders intended to protect both the crew and their hosts. Van Tromp could not establish that Agnew had gone armed, but the missing personal sidearm and the testimony that Agnew wore it when last seen made disobedience seem likely. He also appeared to have gone out alone, which would have been a separate and flagrant breach of discipline.

The Disappearance on Mars

Two crewmen saw Agnew enter a narrow passage between two large rocks, a kind of terrain that Van Tromp noted was uncommon on an otherwise monotonous Mars. A Martian went into the same passage afterward. Because Agnew’s hostility was known, the two men hurried toward the opening. Both reported hearing a gunshot.

Their accounts diverged at the crucial moment. One crewman said he reached the opening in time to glimpse Agnew behind the Martian, which nearly filled the space between the rocks, and then Agnew was no longer visible. The other arrived as the Martian was coming out. It continued past the men without acknowledging them, a behavior Van Tromp regarded as characteristically Martian when it had no business with someone. Once it had passed, both crewmen could see that the passage ended at a dead end and was empty.

Van Tromp could imagine a mundane escape from the passage: under Mars’s low surface gravity, Agnew might have jumped over the rock wall, driven by fear. But Van Tromp himself tried and could not clear it. He also stressed that the crewmen had to wear breathing gear outside, and that hypoxia could make a person’s perceptions unreliable. The possibility that the first witness had suffered oxygen deprivation offered an explanation easier to accept than his report that Agnew had disappeared in a blink. Van Tromp told the man to inspect his demand valve and the rest of his breather equipment before going outside again.

Search and Official Explanation

Van Tromp initially expected Agnew to turn up. He looked forward to reprimanding him and putting him under restriction for carrying a weapon, if he had done so, and for going out alone. But Agnew did not return. The ship’s company searched, and neither Agnew nor his body was ever found.

The captain did not suppress the fact that Agnew was missing; he suppressed the suggestion that the disappearance was mysterious. He presented the absence as a likely accident: Agnew had become lost among the rocks, died when his oxygen ran out, and perhaps been buried by drifting sand. Van Tromp pointed to the wind at Martian sunrise and sunset, which could move the sand, as a plausible reason a body might remain undiscovered. He did not order the first witness to keep quiet. Instead, he emphasized that the report was hard to believe and that the second witness could not corroborate its most extraordinary detail. He believed the official account prevailed.

The disappearance also became a practical warning. Van Tromp tightened the rules requiring crewmen to travel in company, remain in radio contact with the ship, and check their breathing equipment. Agnew’s case could thus be explained to the crew as the consequence of isolation and carelessness, even as its unresolved details continued to trouble the captain.

Consequences and Significance

Before Agnew vanished, Van Tromp had regarded the Martians as large, gentle, harmless, and even rather comical. The expedition had experienced no trouble with them, and they had given the humans whatever they wanted once Sven Nelson worked out how to ask. Yet Van Tromp’s private misgivings dated from the incident. The Martian’s presence in the narrow passage, the shot, and the empty dead end did not prove that it had harmed Agnew, but together they made the easy image of harmlessness harder for the captain to sustain.

Van Tromp kept that uncertainty to himself and Sven, partly because panic would have been dangerous so far from home. When he recounts the episode in a private conversation among water brothers, he still cannot resolve it into either a supernatural event or a conventional accident. Mahmoud says the official explanation is the only one he had heard and that he prefers it to a superstitious account. Van Tromp agrees that this is what he had hoped for, then reveals the cost of the explanation’s success: despite the official version, he still wakes at night and asks himself what became of Agnew. The missing officer remains an absent figure whose unexplained fate marks the boundary between the expedition’s public discipline and the captain’s private doubt.