The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  I will explain later how it was that the papers came into my hands before MacFarlane could polish them. Meantime, as matter of interest, I print his notes for this chapter exactly as he left them.—J.K.C.)

  MacFarlane’s Notes:

  General coverage of Chap. 5: first impressions; experiments in jumping (possible dissertation by Mac on gravitational differences between earth and Mars?—Mac also on subject of composition of soil in hollow where we landed?)

  We climb to top of ridge. General excitement and reaction to landscape, etc., etc. Describe curious plants and so on. Work in a couple of paragraphs about distant hills—something along these lines:—

  While Mike and the others were talking about the curious plants in front of us, I was surveying the distant hills through my binoculars. It was clear from a first examination of the plain that there was no sort of human life on it. I was, in my own mind, positive that there was life on Mars—why should there not be?—we were plainly alive and comfortable on the planet: the air was breathable: there was, as the presence of the plants showed, moisture. So I searched the hills through my powerful lenses to see what traces of habitation there might be there.

  The hills were barren. They seemed, as far as I could see, to consist of huge porous red rocks—rather like sandstone as we know it on earth. I seemed to perceive, on the lower slopes, patches of green—possibly, I thought, mountain varieties of the plants immediately in front of us. Only once did I have any impression that I might be looking at something connected with human life. Just as I was lowering the binoculars from my eyes, I saw, behind the shoulder of one of the lower hills, a sudden brilliant flash. My first impression was that the sun was reflecting from a hill lake, but I soon saw that this was impossible—the flash was half-way up the hill, and seemed, as far as I could see, a sort of crescent—not lying horizontally, as a lake would, but at an angle along the hill-slope. I swept the glasses along the range to see if there might be any other such flashes, but there was nothing; and when I moved them back to the original spot, the bright crescent had gone. It had not been in my field of vision long enough for me to be able to form any real opinion as to what it had been.

  Description of plants at close quarters—write up in some detail. Extraordinary episode of far-off screaming noise, seemingly in our heads, as Mac cut into one of them. What can it have been? Plainly nothing immediately near us that could have caused it—except the plant itself!

  A bizarre, extravagant notion—but in a sense the only one that offers any real explanation. Could it possibly be so? Write up whole theory at some length.

  Various remarks—conversations, etc., as we move back to the Albatross. The party in excellent spirits—Mike enjoying his high-jumping hugely. Various points mentioned by Mac—his intention to take some photographs of the scene etc. Work in this way towards end of chapter. End chapter thus:—

  . . . and within a very short time, the boys had the Primus working (how extraordinary to see such a homely thing as a Primus here on Mars, with all its associations of picnics and alfresco outings of all sorts on earth!), and Jacky was busying herself with cooking the bacon and eggs that Mac fetched for her from the refrigerator. Soon, drifting out on the thin sharp air, there came the delicious smell of real, freshly-cooked food—real food, after all our weeks of vitamin pastes and sieved vegetables! Mike turned a good half-dozen huge cartwheels in sheer ravenous excitement.

  Jacky insisted that we did things properly, and so we set out a clean bed-sheet as a tablecloth. There were not enough plates, knives, forks, and so on, to go round (after all, we had reckoned on only two travelers in the Albatross), but since the food had to be cooked piece-meal in our one small frying-pan anyway, that did not worry us a great deal—we took our viands in turns. When the meal was eventually over, we sighed deeply and contentedly and lay back in the sand—which was now quite warm from the sun. I lit a pipe and passed my tobacco pouch over to the Doctor.

  “Well, Mac,” I said, smiling, “we’re here. We’ve made it, after all. I don’t mind confessing to you now, that in the old days back on earth, I often had my doubts—I thought sometimes that maybe your lab assistants were right and you were just a little bit mad!”

  “To tell you the truth, I thought so myself at times,” he said with a warm chuckle.

  So we puffed contentedly in the sunshine, watching the fumes of the Virginian tobacco, grown so many millions of miles away, go drifting lazily up to disperse in the clear air. I felt deeply satisfied with myself—one of the very first human beings to land on Mars! Think of it—I, Stephen MacFarlane, a writer of books, a weaver of dreams, creator (in my head) of fantastic adventures! . . . and here I was, actually engaged in the flesh in an adventure more wild and fantastic than any I could possibly imagine!

  As I lay there in the sun, relaxed and comfortable, I felt a curious drowsiness coming over me. After all, it was a long time since any of us had slept properly, in all the excitement of the landing. Perhaps the fresh strong air had something to do with it too, and the fact that we had just had a large meal—a meal that gave our digestive organs rather more work than they had had for a long time. At any rate, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. I looked round at the others. Apparently they were being affected in the same way; Paul and Jacky were already actually asleep, and Mike was not far from it. Mac’s pipe had fallen on his chest and he was making no effort to retrieve it. He smiled at me lazily.

  “Feeling sleepy, Steve, eh?”

  I nodded.

  “No harm in having forty winks, I suppose.”

  “None at all.” And he yawned. “I’m certainly going to—I feel incredibly drowsy—the excitement, I guess.”

  I sighed and yawned myself, and then closed my eyes and settled myself to doze.

  I slept deeply—we all did, as I afterwards learned. I remember—and it comes back to me with a curious distinctness, even after all this time—that I had a vivid and vaguely terrifying dream, about the huge dark green plants we had just been examining. It was as if I were walking down an immense avenue, bordered by two endless rows of them; and as I walked, on and on, there was a whispering and rustling among them, and then, slowly—almost imperceptibly—they began to stoop down towards me. Lower and lower they came, and now the rustling changed to a high-pitched far-off screaming, very faint and eerie. I started to run, but the avenue was endless. And now the plants were very low and very near—their huge fleshy fingers were reaching out to grasp at me. I had a knife in my hand, and I hacked and stabbed at the great leathery writhing fronds—and with every stroke the screaming grew more and more intense.

  I became aware of someone shaking me violently by the shoulder. I opened my eyes drowsily, and Mike’s face swam into my consciousness. Mike’s face—but it was strained and anxious.

  “Uncle Steve,” he was saying urgently, “Uncle Steve, wake up! Look—for the love of Pete, just look!”

  I sat up abruptly, on the instant wide awake, so insistent had been Mike’s command. The others were awake too, and staring, just as I was.

  And well might we stare! On the ridge above us, standing silently gazing in at us, were creatures!—creatures vastly, vastly different from anything that any of us had ever known, but living creatures—individuals—Martians!

  And as I stared at the tallest of them—the one plainly their leader—I heard him address us. And the language was English—English!

  For a moment I thought I must still be in my dream. But the sun was shining, my companions were all about me. They, as plainly as I, heard the cool, detached, far-off tones:

  “Who are you? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER VI. THE MEN OF MARS by Stephen Macfarlane

  THE NARRATIVE CONTINUED, BY STEPHEN MacFARLANE: THE MEN OF MARS

  WE ROSE to our feet. Jacky moved over towards me, and I put my hand on her shoulder to allay her nervousness. We were all nervous. Why should we not be?—there was something unutterably awesome in the very quietnes
s and immobility of the two-score odd creatures above and all around us. How long had they been standing there, gazing down at us while we slept? The vast plain had been empty—now, from nowhere seemingly, these beings had appeared, creeping unerringly to the one hollow among all the hollows in that expanse that held a secret.

  What did they look like?—what was our first impression of them? It is difficult to say. Since that first day, I have known them so intimately, have studied them at such close quarters, that I can hardly remember how they first seemed to present themselves.

  There was nothing, in the whole range of our experience of living beings on earth, to which they could quite be compared, although in general shape they were not unlike human beings. They were small, varying in height from 4 to 5 feet—their leader, to whom I have already referred as the tallest, was about 5 feet 6 inches. Their bodies were slender, smooth and round; in general dimensions comparable to the trunk of a medium-sized silver birch on earth. In color they were, in general, yellowish—a dark, patchy yellow ochre; but this deepened to green towards the foot in most cases, and sometimes merged to a fleshy pink and even red at the top. At the top, this trunk of theirs, as I have called it, bulbed out slightly into a head (I am, in this description, forced to use analogous human terms—“head,” “trunk,” “hands,” and so on; but, as you will see later, the Martians are quite different from us—the words are used only as equivalents, for the purpose of building up some sort of image, however imperfect, in your minds). This “head” was covered, on the rounded top, with a sudden fringe—a sort of crown—of small soft tufts of a vivid bright yellow color. Just below this, on the front—the “face” (although strictly speaking the Martians, as we decided later, had no faces—or rather, their faces were these tufts or crowns on the top that I have described)—there were three, sometimes four, sometimes even five, small jellyish bulbs—glaucous protuberances which glowed transparently. These were the eyes. There were no organs of hearing or smell—at least, in that first glimpse we could see nothing that might be an ear or a nose; we found out later, as we shall describe, that the Martians had a very highly-developed sense of smell, although they could only “hear” sounds of considerable loudness.

  I now come to describe the “feet” and “hands” of the Martians. At the lower extremity of the trunk—the greenish part I have mentioned—the body suddenly bifurcated. Each of the forks split again almost immediately, and so on and so on, so that on the ground, at the foot of each figure, there was a perfect writhing mass of small, hard, fibrous tentacles. About a third of the way up the trunk, in the front, there was another sudden branching of similar “tendrils,” as I might call them—only these ones were longer and lighter in color and seemingly more sensitive. These were obviously the “hands,” since they held, in their twining grasp, the Martian weapons—long spears, or swords, of some bright transparent crystalline substance—a sort of flinty glass, as it seemed. Finally, to complete this sketch of the appearance of the Martians, there were, just under the bulb of the head, and on each side of the trunk, two smaller clusters of tentacles (or “tendrils,” as I really prefer to call them). These were very short and slender, and light green, almost white in color—like small pale sea anemones.

  These, then, were the creatures that confronted us that first morning on Mars. The task of describing them properly has been almost impossible—as I say, I have had to use human terms—we think, us men, almost always in terms of ourselves (“anthropomorphically,” as Mac would say—a monstrous big word meaning, quite simply, just that—thinking of everything, the whole universe, in terms of ourselves, as being like ourselves). The Martians were quite, quite different from ourselves—it was not till we grasped that that we began to understand them. As our story goes on, and you begin to learn more about these strange creatures of another planet, perhaps you will be able to form a clearer picture of them than I have been able to give in the brief sketch above.

  The thing that astonished and unnerved us most, however, at that first meeting with the Martians, was not so much their appearance, strange as that was. It was the fact that the leader was addressing us, and that the language he was using was our own English, as I have said already at the end of the previous chapter.

  “Who are you?” he said distinctly. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  I looked wildly at Mac—it seemed, at any incomprehensible moment of our whole adventure, the only thing to do; he was the wisest of our party—a Doctor of Philosophy, no less; if anything was understandable, he surely could understand it—if he did not, what chance had we?

  Mac, alone among us, seemed to have recovered some of his composure. He looked up at the leader of the Martians and said, in a clear slow voice:

  “We are men. We come from earth.”

  There was a rustling round the top of the ridge—a mercurial quivering of those hundreds of white, wormy tendrils. And the response came immediately—seemingly from several of the Martians at the same time—in the chill, detached tones:

  “What are men? What is earth? Explain, explain, explain. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”

  The terrifying thing was that I could not see anything in the way of a mouth on the creatures. How were they talking at all, let alone talking in English? Where was the sound coming from? And yet I knew, in my bones, that there was no sound—that I was not hearing what the Martians said! The sensation was exactly the same as that that we had experienced when Mac cut into the huge cactus-like plant on the plain, and a scream seemed to come into our heads. I remembered what Jacky had said on that occasion—it was as if we were thinking the sound rather than hearing it. Now it was as if I were thinking these cold, detached, insistent questions—they were forming of their own accord in my brain! It was an uncanny experience—it was impossible not to feel uncomfortable and a little terrified. Jacky shivered at my side—I could see that the boys’ faces were pale and strained.

  “Mac,” I cried, “for heaven’s sake what is it? How are they speaking to us?—how in the Lord’s name can they be speaking to us?”

  He was curiously calm—when I look back I always think of this as Mac’s best moment throughout our whole adventure. He was, on earth, a quiet, reticent, scholarly man—the last man to possess, in any marked degree, courage as we have come to define it. But courage he did have—courage within his own terms of reference: the courage of brains, of sheer intellect—he confronted the incomprehensible with his own weapons, his brains. And he was confident in the possession of those weapons, and in their efficiency—he was confident and cool in the face of this strange enigma now, standing with one hand loosely on the pistol at his belt, the other raised to shade his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at the Martian leader.

  Without shifting this gaze for a moment, he now answered me.

  “I don’t know, Steve,” he said quietly. “I do have a glimmering notion—no more than that yet. Give me time—just a little longer.”

  Then he raised his voice again, and addressed the Martian in the same loud clear tones as before.

  “Before I explain further who we are,” he cried, “tell me who you are.”

  Again the rustling and the quivering, and again the response:

  “We are the Beautiful People.”

  Quick as a flash, Mac turned round to us.

  “Tell me, Steve—what did they say?” he asked.

  “Why—‘We are the Beautiful People,’ ” I answered dazedly.

  “And you, Jacqueline—tell me what you heard them saying.”

  “I thought they said—‘We are the Lovely Ones,’ ” said Jacky timidly.

  “Ah! And you, Paul?”

  “I agree with Jacky,” said Paul.

  “So do I,” volunteered Mike. “That’s what I heard them say—‘We are the Lovely Ones.’ ”

  Mac smiled.

  “Steve,” he cried, “I believe I’ve got it. Watch this—I’m going to ask them a question—I’m going to ask
them if they knew we were here or if they came on us accidentally. And you won’t hear me saying a word. Watch.”

  There was a silence while he gazed up at the Martian leader, with a curiously tense expression on his face. Presently there was the usual quivering among the Martians, and there floated into my head:

  “Yes. We knew you were here. We were told. We had a message.”

  “I was right, Steve!” cried Mac immediately, to me. “I know what it is! Try it yourself—look at that big fellow, the leader—ask him a question. But don’t say anything—think it to him, in your head—think it as hard as you can—put all your powers of concentration into it.”

  I did as he told me. I stared at the Martian leader and thought, in my head:

  “How did you know we were here? Who gave you the message?”

  There was no quiver—no response.

  “You’re not thinking hard enough, Steve—you’re probably a bit nervous,” said Mac. “Make an effort—throw your thought towards him.”

  I tried to calm myself, and repeated the mental question with more concentration. And this time the response came back:

  “We were told by our friends the Plants, whom you injured.”

  I stared at Mac helplessly—the whole thing was too much for me. Apart from the uncanny business of the conversations, this latest response—that the Plants had told the Martians of our presence—was bizarre and incredible. But Mac, far from seeming as baffled as I was, was actually smiling triumphantly.

  “Steve, it’s magnificent!” he cried. “Who would ever have thought it! It’s so simple, man—don’t you understand?—it’s thought transference! It isn’t speaking at all, as we understand it—it’s pure communication—what scientists back on earth have been arguing about and experimenting with for years. These creatures have got it highly developed—they can plainly communicate with each other by simply thinking a thought and so projecting it. That’s how they can speak to us—we receive the thoughts they project—and of course, we receive them in the form we are accustomed to think in—in our case English. I got the final clue when you said you heard them say ‘Beautiful People,’ while Jacqueline claimed they said ‘Lovely Ones.’ You were both right—the thought is the same in both cases. ‘Lovely’ is probably a word that Jacqueline and the boys use more frequently than ‘Beautiful,’ which is a literary word, natural to a writer like you. If a Frenchman had been with us, he would have claimed that the Martian said: ‘Nous sommes les Beaux.’ If my old rival Kalkenbrenner were here (and I bet he wishes he was!) he would have heard the thought in his own native language of German: ‘Wir sind die Schoenen Leute.’ It’s the pure thought we receive—we translate it in our heads into whatever language or form of language we’re accustomed to.”