The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  To crown all, Marian had said that the children were arriving on Saturday morning. It was Wednesday before her letter reached me at Pitlochry. There was hardly enough time to put the whole thing off without causing grievous disappointments. And so, in the end, on the Thursday, I wired to Marian:

  “O.K. for children to stay. Will meet them Pitlochry station Saturday morning. Love to the Chilean representative and wife. Steve.”

  The children came. They came not only to Perthshire, but, as the world knows, with me and the Doctor to Mars!

  This introductory chapter has turned out to be longer than I had intended it to be. I would bring it to a quick end now, but there is one thing it strikes me I must explain, and that is why the Doctor and I set out on our adventure while the children were still in Scotland, thus making it possible for them to stow away with us on the Albatross.

  One evening, about a week after the arrival of the children at Pitlochry, I went up to have a chat with the Doctor at his laboratory. I found him greatly agitated, pacing backwards and forwards among the apparatus with a scientific journal rolled up angrily in his hands.

  “Why, Mac,” I cried, “what’s the matter? You look furious.”

  “I am furious,” he barked, stopping in his pacing and confronting me. “Look at this, Steve—just look at it!”

  He thrust the rolled-up journal into my hands. While I glanced through the article he indicated in bewilderment, not understanding in any detail the quaint farrago of symbols and algebraic signs it contained, he stormed on:

  “Do you realize what it means, Steve? Kalkenbrenner’s on the track—Kalkenbrenner of Chicago, you’re bound to have heard of him. He’s been doing some rocket experimenting for years—at one time I even had correspondence with him about an improved design in tuyères he was developing. And now, as you can see from that, he’s busy along the same lines as I have been on the question of fuel—judging by that article he might even hit on my own principle at any moment. It’s monstrous—monstrous!”

  “My dear Mac,” I remonstrated, “what will it matter if he does? It will only mean that you’ll have confirmation that your idea is a good one.”

  “What will it matter?” he cried. “What will it matter? My dear Steve, where is your soul? Doesn’t it mean anything to you that we should be first in the field? Haven’t you any sense of the prestige of being one of the first men to leave the earth and go to another planet? If Kalkenbrenner does find my fuel principle his next step is obvious—he’ll do what we have done and build a rocket—and set off to make a flight in it. . . . No, Steve, my boy, there’s only one thing that all this means—it means that instead of waiting till our original date, you and I are setting off as soon as we can—to-morrow if it can be arranged—in any case, no later than the beginning of next week.”

  “Mac,” I gasped, after a moment of dazed silence, “we couldn’t—it’s impossible! I mean—think of all those calculations of ours. You know as well as I do that we chose our original date because the orbits of earth and Mars brought the two planets to a suitable relationship for the flight at that time.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But look here, Steve, I’ve been revising the calculations.” He waved to an immense sheet of paper on the laboratory table which was covered with diagrams and equational calculations. “If we set out now, instead of three months hence, there’s very little difference in the distance between us and Mars. As you know, Mars is 35 million miles away from us at her nearest, and something like 265 million miles away from us when her orbit takes her to the other side of the sun. She revolves in an orbit outside ours, don’t forget. In a quarter of a year the arc of her orbit in relation to ours would place her the same distance from us, only on the other side of us! It’s merely a matter of changing the direction of the rocket and adjusting one or two of the instruments—we can do that in a couple of hours. The only thing is—,” and he looked at me solemnly, “we daren’t wait too long—as I say, we must be off sometime between now and the beginning of next week.”

  I was silent for a moment. Then I said:

  “Mac, I’m with you. Whatever you say goes for me. This is your venture from the beginning—I feel myself only too privileged to be in on it with you at all. If you think, honestly, that we must start to-morrow, or the next day, then we start to-morrow or the next day. There’s only one thing I must do—I must make some arrangements about disposing of these three children that are staying with me.”

  He threw up his hands in a gesture of despair.

  “Children!” he cried. “Children! You’d delay the most remarkable journey ever made by man in the whole course of history for a covey of giggling children!”

  “Now, Mac, have patience. Don’t get over-excited and out of perspective. I’m not suggesting we should delay the journey—I’m only saying that I’ve got to think up something to do with the children, so that I can leave with you with a free conscience.”

  “Give them back to their mothers,” he said gruffly. “That’s where children ought to be—with their mothers.”

  “Their mother is ill,” I said gently, “or rather, the mother of two of them is ill. The other one’s mother is in South America, having dinner with the Chilean representative and his wife. . . . No. I’ll have to send them somewhere else—not to their mothers.”

  “Don’t you know anyone who is fond of children?” asked the Doctor impatiently.

  “Well—there is that cousin of mine in Glasgow that I’ve often mentioned to you—Cross his name is. He and his wife have a couple of youngsters of their own, and they’re always filling their house up with kittens and puppies and things. They must be reasonably attached to children. . . . I believe they’d take my lot in an emergency.”

  “Good,” said the Doctor. “Then that’s settled. Make your arrangements straight away, and I shall work out exactly when it will be best to launch the Albatross. I suspect it will be some time in the late afternoon either to-morrow or the day after—anyway, I’ll let you know.”

  I walked home to my cottage, mentally composing a letter to my cousin as I went. It was full of such phrases as “Sorry to trouble you with such a burden at this extraordinarily short notice” . . . “Called away on most urgent and extremely important business” . . . and so on.

  I wrote the letter the following morning. I had no sooner finished it than there was a ’phone call from the Doctor.

  “Steve,” came his thin excited voice through the receiver, “it’s this afternoon—this afternoon as ever is! We set off at 4.20. Can you make it?”

  “I can make it,” I said resignedly. “I’ll be over about 3.”

  I looked at the letter to my cousin and sighed. It was now almost noon. The children had set off for a picnic among the hills about an hour before, taking luncheon sandwiches with them—they were not expected back till 6 o’clock at the earliest. As it happened, too, this was my housekeeper’s day off (contrary to my sister’s suspicions, I did have a housekeeper—a most amiable and sensible widow). She had gone to visit a sister at Crieff—I had no way of getting in touch with her.

  In the end, I solved the problem by writing a note to my housekeeper and putting my letter to my cousin in the same envelope with it.

  “Dear Mrs. Duthie,” I said, “I have, I regret to say, been hastily summoned on urgent business. Will you, as soon as you can, send the children to my cousin, Mr. John Keir Cross, at 22, North Gardner Street, Glasgow, W.1, giving them the enclosed letter to deliver to him. Explain to the children that I have had to go off suddenly, and give them my love, and my apologies for having to interrupt their holiday and change their plans yet once again. You will find, in the top right-hand drawer of my writing-desk, enough money for the fares and for all your own immediate purposes. When this money is done, get in touch with my lawyer, whose address you know, and he will see that you are kept supplied.”

  I added a postscript which, I knew, would cause simple Mrs. Duthie endless speculation and worry:


  “If I am not back at the cottage by six months from to-day, my lawyer will tell you what to do about giving up the house and so on.”

  I wrote one more note, to my lawyer himself. I had already lodged with him a sealed envelope containing all instructions concerning the disposition of my small capital and few possessions if I should not return. This present note was to tell him to open the sealed papers if he had not heard from me by the end of six months.

  All this done, I made myself a light lunch. Then, at half-past two, I set off for the Doctor’s laboratory. At the top of the hill I turned and looked back at my cottage. It was impossible not to feel a little sad and forlorn. I had been very happy in my small house, and perhaps this was the last I would ever see of it. Indeed, I thought, as I turned to look at Pitlochry itself, nestling among the hills to my right, this may be the last earthly landscape I shall ever gaze on: from now on—if I do see any land at all—it will be Martian land. And what that may be like, I do not know. . . .

  My cousin never was burdened with the three children—he never read my carefully apologetic letter. Mrs. Duthie—poor soul!—came back from Crieff to find that not only had I been called away on urgent business, but, apparently, so had the children.

  What happened was simplicity itself—and yet, as you will see, it was as wild and complicated in the end as any dream ever was.

  I said, earlier, that the children have helped to write this book. The way it has turned out is this: After our return to earth, and when the turmoil and excitement had died down, we all—that is, myself, the Doctor, Paul, Jacqueline, and Mike—returned to my cottage for a rest. I suggested that during this rest, and while things were still fresh in our minds, we might well occupy ourselves by writing down some account of our remarkable adventures—the idea was that we were each to write various chapters of a book, setting forth the aspects of the adventure that particularly concerned us. Even the Doctor agreed to contribute (in non-technical language) an occasional paper.

  We did so. It is this book you are now reading. Apart from altering an occasional spelling and punctuation fault (particularly in Mike’s somewhat flowery manuscripts!), I have left the children’s chapters mostly as they wrote them. All I have done is to arrange our various contributions and fragments so as to present a reasonably coherent story.

  With these words of explanation, then, I close this, my own first contribution to our book. I pass the cloak of the narrator to Mr. Paul Adam, who now presents to you Chapter II.

  CHAPTER II. A HOLIDAY IN SCOTLAND, by Paul Adam

  MY NAME is Paul Adam and I am the oldest of the three of us who went to Mars with Dr. McGillivray and Mr. Stephen MacFarlane. The other two were my young sister Jacqueline (we always call her Jacky) and our cousin Mike Malone.

  Our Uncle Steve—that is what we call Mr. MacFarlane, though he is only Mike’s uncle really and not mine’s and Jacky’s—suggested I should write down how we got on to the Albatross. Doctor Mac’s space-ship. So here goes. (Mike and Jacky are looking over my shoulder, so they will keep me right and see I don’t make any mistakes in the story.)

  I’d better begin at the point when we got to Uncle Steve’s house at Pitlochry for our holiday last summer. We were all very excited. Everything had been arranged so quickly, and it was wonderful to set out on such a long journey—over 500 miles—all by ourselves. We had once met Uncle Steve at our Aunt Marian’s house in London and from what we remembered of him it looked as if we would have a great holiday. For one thing, he was good at telling stories, we remembered (he is a writer, so his head is full of stories), and we reckoned that even if it rained all the time, the way people say it does in Scotland, then it wouldn’t much matter, for we could sit round the fire and listen to stories.

  Well, after a good journey we reached Pitlochry and Uncle Steve met us at the station. Then we drove to his cottage in a little pony trap (Mike was allowed to hold the reins for part of the way) and we had a whopping great breakfast which Mrs. Duthie, the housekeeper, had got ready for us. There was porridge with cream—we had never tasted real Scots porridge before, and it was wonderful—then herrings dipped in oatmeal and fried, and then hot oatcakes with masses of fresh butter and real heather honey.

  That first day we didn’t do very much but just lounge about Uncle Steve’s garden, though in the evening we did do a little exploring in the woods, and Uncle Steve introduced us to an old gamekeeper with a beard and lots of bright colored fish-hooks stuck all over his hat (which had a peak at the front and back, just like the hat that Sherlock Holmes used to wear, and flaps that went over your ears when it was cold, though when it wasn’t cold you folded them up and they were buttoned on the top). This old man, whose name was McIntosh, promised he would take us out fishing and rabbit shooting and all sorts of things like that. He had a real beauty of a double-barreled gun under his armpit—or rather his oxter, as he and Mrs. Duthie called it—and two wonderful dogs named Lass and Luath.

  McIntosh, the gamekeeper

  The next day was a Sunday, and in the morning we went into Pitlochry to Church in the little pony trap. In the afternoon we all went for a walk, and Uncle Steve took us to a big house which he said belonged to a great friend of his. This was Dr. McGillivray. We liked him very much indeed from the first go-off. On our way to see him Uncle Steve had told us that he was not a Doctor because he went around attending to sick people, or anything like that, but because he had studied Philosophy. So we thought, you see, that he would be old and have a long beard, and would be absent-minded and all that sort of thing. But he wasn’t—he was really quite young, and was great fun. There were all sorts of gadgets in his house, and Mike and I had a wonderful time. There was an old Wimhurst machine and we made sparks jump on to our fingers—oh, a good two or three inches long, they were—and a little electric shocking coil that we persuaded Jacky to try, and then we switched on the current suddenly and sent her jumping right across the room (it was perfectly harmless, of course—in fact, Doctor Mac said that a mild shock like that was very good for you).

  After tea in the Doctor’s study (which was full of hundreds and hundreds of books), Uncle Steve said that he and Doctor Mac had something very important to discuss. So they went through to a different part of the house which they called the laboratory, and we were given permission to go out into the grounds for a stroll.

  Well, it was now we got our first impression that our holiday was going to be exciting, and that there was something mysterious and well worth finding out about going on between Doctor Mac and Uncle Steve.

  At the back of the Doctor’s house, just beyond the part they called the laboratory, there was a little wood, or copse, of fir trees. We were strolling here “quite joco,” as Mrs. Duthie would say, when suddenly the trees stopped, and there in front of us was an enormous high wooden enclosure—a sort of palisade, like the one in Treasure Island, only much much bigger. It was as high as a good-sized house, and at least two hundred feet square (Mike paced it out, and each side was 110 paces, and we always used to reckon one of Mike’s measuring steps as a little over two feet).

  “Hullo, what’s this?” said Mike.

  “It’s some sort of house,” said Jacky.

  “House my foot,” I chimed in. “Whoever built a house that size? Besides, it hasn’t any roof—and where are the windows?”

  “Well, they might be going to add a roof—you never know,” said Jacky sulkily. “And maybe it’s a special new type of house without windows. They’re up to all sort of experiments these days.”

  While we were arguing like this, young Mike was searching all over the palisade for some gap or knot-hole to peer through. He now gave a cry to indicate he had found one.

  “I say, just come and have a look at this,” he yelled. “What on earth do you suppose it can be?”

  We went over beside him and I bent down and looked through the hole. Unfortunately, it was a very little hole, but I was able to see enough through it to thoroughly whet my curiosity. (Jacky has ju
st stopped me to say I’ve used a split infinitive and that that is bad grammar. I should have written “thoroughly to whet my curiosity,” or “to whet my curiosity thoroughly.” Well, it doesn’t much matter—you’ll know what I mean, and that’s the main thing.)

  Now, where was I?—oh yes, the thing inside the enclosure. It was, as far as I could see, an immense sort of shell, like the fuselage of a huge aeroplane, and it was made of some sort of metal, very highly polished, so that it shone in the sunshine. Every now and again, in the wall of it, there were small round windows, like port-holes in a ship, only they seemed of enormously thick glass, and bulged a great deal, like Mrs. Duthie’s spectacles. It was lying, as far as I could judge, on a big wooden platform that was inclined at an angle of about forty degrees. I could not see far enough to my left or right through the knot-hole to be able to get any sort of glimpse of the ends of the thing.

  “It looks like a boat, almost,” I said, looking round at Mike, while Jacky had a turn at the knot-hole.

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” nodded Mike. “And it’s on a sort of big slipway, like a kind of launching ramp. But where’s the water? There isn’t any water for miles.”

  “If only we could see properly,” grumbled Jacky. “This knot-hole is no good. Can’t you find a bigger one, Mike?”

  Mike stood looking thoughtful for a moment. He has a way of standing with his arms akimbo, seeking what he calls “inspiration.” Then, when it arrives, he hits his brow a great smack. This is what he did now.

  “I’ve got it,” he cried. “Paul, I’m going up one of these trees. Then I’ll be able to see in over the top of the wall. Give me a hoist up, will you?”

  We chose one of the highest of the trees, and Mike was up it in an instant, like the young ape we have always said he was. We could see him from below clinging on to one of the slender top branches of the fir, and craning his neck to peer into the enclosure. He gave a long low whistle of excitement.