The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  “But, Mac,” I protested, “it’s fantastic—it’s unholy! Does that mean they’re listening-in now up there to all this conversation of ours—these ideas that are flying to and fro between us in the form of language?”

  “I doubt it,” he replied. “I think we may take it that the thought has to be consciously projected in a certain direction—otherwise we would have known that the plants out there were busy summoning the Martians to our hollow here.”

  “Do you mean that the plants have it too—this power?” I gasped.

  “Undoubtedly. You heard what he said—or rather, what he thought at us. Probably they only have it in a primitive way—they could only transmit thoughts of danger, say, or fear—they couldn’t express any coherent thought to us, for example, because they have not got coherent thought. But a message that strangers were among them—a possible source of danger—such a simple thought could be passed from clump to clump till it reached our friends up there and summoned them.”

  I was beginning to understand.

  “And that scream we heard—it was the plant after all?”

  Mac nodded.

  “A really intense thought like that—a protest against pain—that would ‘get over’ because it’s simple enough for the plant to direct, even to such imperfect receivers as us. My dear Steve, it’s beautiful—it’s perfect and beautiful in its sheer simplicity and economy! Language is a clumsy thing—half the trouble in the world arises from people not understanding each other because language expresses thought so imperfectly. These creatures don’t have to use a clumsy tool like language—they can exchange pure ideas!—think of it—sheer thought!”

  He was excited again. In the glow of a scientific discovery he seemed totally oblivious to our situation. As far as I was concerned, I had the drift of what it was all about—I did not understand in detail yet, but I realized at least that communication with the Martians was possible, and that the thing to do now was to establish friendly relations with them, and go into the whys and wherefores later.

  I looked up at the creatures on the ridge. Throughout the whole long conversation between Mac and me they had not moved—they still stood staring down at us quietly. One of the most disconcerting things about them (I found it so even later, when I knew them better) was this gift of theirs of complete immobility.

  I addressed the leader, putting all my concentration into the thought I was projecting.

  “We are friends,” I said (for convenience’s sake I shall use words like “said,”

  “replied,” etc., in reporting our conversations—our exchanges of thought, rather). “We do not mean any harm to you.”

  And, rather surprisingly, the response came:

  “We know. If there had been evil intention in you we would have felt it at the first when you looked at us. But you have not yet explained. Who are you? You are not like us. Where do you come from?”

  I was puzzling in my mind how this question could possibly be answered simply and satisfactorily, when Mac said to me:

  “It’s no use, Steve—we can’t explain anything as complicated as that at this stage: we shall have to wait to find out how much these creatures know of the universe—there will have to be some common ground of knowledge before we can exchange thoughts about the earth and so on. Leave it to me for the moment—I’ve got a suggestion to make to them. I might as well speak aloud—that gets the thought over just as well, and it means we all know what is being said.”

  He turned to the Martian leader and addressed him in these words:

  “Where we come from and who we are are difficult things to say. We shall be able to tell you in time, when we know you better, and when you know us better. What we would like to do now is to go with you to see the rest of the Beautiful People—you know we are friends, and so we want to see you and the places where you live. Will you let us come?”

  There was a short pause, then the rustling and quivering again. This, we learned later, was all we could perceive of thoughts being exchanged among the Martians—a vague disturbance in the atmosphere, as it were. Finally the leader said to us:

  “Yes. You can come. We shall welcome you as our friends. And we shall hear in time who you are and what you do among us.”

  “Good,” said Mac. Then he pointed to himself and added:

  “I am McGillivray. That,” pointing to me, “is MacFarlane. That is Jacqueline, that is Paul, and that is Michael.”

  At this there was a disturbance—Mike plainly was overcoming his sense of awe and strangeness, and was almost himself again, for he said now, in some indignation:

  “It isn’t Michael—I hate Michael! It’s Mike!”

  The leader extended the long crystalline spear he held in his front tendrils and gravely pointed it at each of us in turn.

  “McGillivray—MacFarlane—Jacqueline—Paul—”

  He hesitated for a moment.

  “Mike,” cried my redoubtable nephew fiercely.

  “Mike.”

  Then he gestured with the spear to himself, and we heard, clearly and slowly in our heads:

  “I am Malu—I am Malu the Tall, War Prince and Counselor of the Beautiful People.”

  And in some way this seemed to set the seal on this, our first encounter with the Martians. Our nervousness went—even Jacky confessed that she no longer was afraid, only timid and (her own word) “shy.” We mounted into the rocket to fetch some necessities—some tins of food, lest, as the Doctor explained, we should find nothing edible among the Martians. We also took some water, some coats and blankets, cameras, and a small compact recording equipment the Doctor had brought from earth. It was easy for us to carry all these things, we found, because of the reduced weight they had on Mars.

  Thus laden, we descended the ladder, Mac taking care to lock the door of the Albatross behind us. We climbed the slope and confronted Malu—Malu the Tall, who was barely a foot bigger than Mike! And so, surrounded by the strange and silent, but no longer sinister Beautiful People, we set out on our second Martian journey of exploration—Mike occasionally, as he gained confidence, leaping high into the air, even laden as he was, just to show what he could do.

  Appendix to Chapter VI by Dr. McGillivray. Mr. MacFarlane has suggested I should add a footnote to this chapter by way of amplifying his remarks on thought transference. There is little I can say: I consider that he has given a reasonable, balanced and clear account in the preceding pages of how we first learned to communicate with the Martians (an account somewhat flattering to myself, albeit: I deserve no credit for what was, after all, a simple process of deductive ratiocination, wedded to the type of instinctive perception a scientist is almost bound, by his training to acquire). It occurs to me, however, that it might be relevant for me to make a few parenthetical remarks on the subject of thought transference as we know it on earth.

  It has been believed for a long time that there are good scientific grounds for assuming that such a thing as thought transference—telepathy, as it has been called—is possible. We all know the simple, almost everyday experience of suddenly thinking of something at the same time as someone else—very frequently two people, apropos of nothing, will start on the same sentence together in a conversation. Even allowing for coincidence, the number of well-authenticated cases of this sort is such as to suggest that thought occasionally can be transferred direct from one mind to another.

  Unfortunately, in the past, telepathy has been allied to such doubtful subjects as clairvoyance and second sight—even fortune telling—and so has got surrounded by a mass of superstitious beliefs, legends, and exaggerations, thus precluding the possibility of a proper assessment of its validity. However, towards the end of the last century, several unbiased scientific minds set to work to examine impartially the arguments for and against. Unfortunately, although some extraordinary experiments were conducted, and remarkable results obtained, at that time there were not enough operatives involved for the findings to be considered general in application—moreover,
the experiments, it was considered, were not conducted in such a way as to rule out all chances either of coincidence or deliberate fraud.

  Not long ago, however, a group of workers allied to and subsidized by an American University, set about tackling the subject in an absolutely true scientific way. They collected first a great mass of evidence for telepathy and sifted it to the roots. They then devised a series of very simple and fool-proof experiments. These consisted of preparing a set of cards, like playing cards, with certain clearly printed symbols on them—a circle on one, a square on another, a cross on a third, and so on. There were five such clearly differentiated symbols, and ten cards to each symbol—thus fifty cards to a pack.

  Two people are now arranged—say in separate rooms—so that they have no obvious way of communicating with each other. One of them thinks to the other a certain symbol, and the recipient chooses a card from the pack. Now it follows that since the number of symbols is known, and the recurrence of each symbol in the pack is known, the mathematical law of averages can be used to calculate the number of times when the right card would be chosen by sheer chance. A regular score of “right guesses” above that number would seem to suggest—even to the most skeptical and impartial scientific mind—that the card-choosing subject is being controlled by the symbol-thinking subject: and if this score goes on through a vast number of experiments—each one carefully checked and notated by detached observers—then it can fairly be assumed that thought is being transferred from one mind to another.

  This is a sketchy description of only one of the experiments that have been conducted over a considerable number of years—are, indeed, at the time of writing, still going on. After a vast amount of research, and the ruthless rejection of anything not 100 per cent proven, the scientific group to which I have referred are of the opinion that there is definitely such a thing as thought transference.

  So far, on earth, no real success in deliberately transferring coherent ideas has been achieved—experiments have been confined to simple things like symbols on cards. On Mars, as we have seen, thought transference of a very highly-developed type is the normal means of communication. It seems obvious that because of their evolution along these lines, the Martians have developed super-efficient transmitting and receiving faculties—hence their ability to communicate with minds like ours not normally adapted to this mode of converse. It is significant that we humans on Mars, although we grew expert in communicating with the Martians, were quite unable to communicate by means of thought transference with each other. We frequently tried projecting thought among ourselves in the same way as we did to Malu and his companions, but always without success. In the end, we got into the habit simply of speaking to the Martians aloud. This meant that we humans understood what was going on, and the thought behind the speech still got over as thought to the Martians.

  As far as the ability the Martians seemed to possess of being able to understand the elementary thought processes of the plants is concerned, I hope to be permitted to contribute to this volume at a later stage a paper setting forth my own theories as to what the Martians were—theories that may seem outrageous, but which you may be prepared to accept when you have heard more about the general mode of life on our sister planet from the gifted pens of the other writers of this book.

  I hope these few notes may help to make clear and acceptable to skeptical minds Mr. MacFarlane’s remarks in the previous pages.

  CHAPTER VII. FIRST SIGNS OF AN ENEMY, by Paul Adam

  IT’S MY turn again to do a chapter, but to tell you the truth I’m not very confident about this one. There’s so much about the Martians and their city and so on to describe at this point, and I’m not really awfully good at description. However, for the sake of not letting Uncle Steve down, I’ll have a shot at it—and anyway, I’ll get Mike to do an occasional paragraph, just to help out. So here goes.

  Well, now, I’ll start at the point where we left the good old Albatross to go with Malu and his friends to see the rest of the Beautiful People (that’s what we’ve all decided to call them in this book, though as you know, Jacky and Mike and I really thought at the beginning that they were called the Lovely Ones). The first thing I want to say is that those Martians could certainly move at some speed when they tried. Uncle Steve has described their feet—sort of forking tentacles or tendrils (by the way, I’ve got to hand it to Uncle Steve for his description of the B.P. in the last chapter—considering how difficult it is to give anyone a clear idea of what Malu and Co. looked like without just sounding crazy, I think he’s done marvelously). Well, when they’re getting about, the Martians move these hundreds of tentacle things one after the other at a great rate—it looks like a quick sort of flailing movement at a little distance. And when they do this they simply scoot across the sand, whipping up little clouds of it as they go. It’s really a most curious sight—their bodies stay quite upright and still, you see, so that it looks as if they were on wheels.

  As far as we were concerned, well, we had no difficulty in keeping up a pretty good pace ourselves. Walking and running were dead easy on Mars, because of the lower pull of gravity and all that sort of thing. Each step was worth about three on earth, so we could go at a reasonable, easy trot and cover the ground in no time—and it wasn’t in the least bit tiring either.

  As we went (we were making for the hills on the other side of the plain, by the way), Doctor Mac was having a conversation with Malu. I don’t quite know what they were saying, because we were a little bit behind, but I think the Doc was trying to explain something about us and where we came from and so on. Anyway, you’ll learn all about that sort of thing later on: the Doc has got another chapter all about his conversations with the Martians. I’m only concerned with the actual adventure part of what happened to us.

  Jacky and Mike and myself were speeding along right in the middle of the Martians (Uncle Steve was in front with the Doc). Curiously enough, although I suppose there was a lot we could talk about, we hardly said a word. Somehow the Martians didn’t seem very communicative, and after all you must admit that it was a bit shy-making being with such odd creatures. We weren’t frightened in the least—it’s very difficult to describe, but we didn’t feel that the B.P. would do us any harm—there was no sort of distrust or suspicion at all. I suppose this feeling of things had something to do with the business of thought and so on being transferred. On Mars you always knew if anyone meant harm before they even spoke—you didn’t have to rely on things like facial expressions and so on. Actually, the Martians didn’t have any facial expressions—they never changed at all in appearance. If they were happy about something, then you just knew it—you felt it in your bones, sort of thing. And if they were miserable or afraid, then you knew that too, although there wasn’t the slightest bit of difference in the way they looked.

  Anyway, as I say, we felt a bit shy and strange during the journey. Very occasionally Mike had a shot at saying a word or two, but that was really all that happened till we got to their city.

  Insert by Michael Malone: There was one quite small Martian traveling alongside me and I thought I’d have a shot at drawing him out a bit. So I said sort of chattily after a time:

  “We’re children, you know.”

  There didn’t come any answer (I found out later that this Martian’s name was Nuna, by the way—they mostly had short names like that). So I said:

  “Don’t you know what children are? Not grown—the same as Mr. MacFarlane and Dr. McGillivray, only not so big or old. Young, you know—aren’t there any young Beautiful People?—before they grow as big as you?” (It seemed a bit comical to be saying this, because Nuna wasn’t any bigger than me.)

  Anyway, this time the answer came back: “Yes—there are young among the Beautiful People. You shall see the young. They do not move.”

  “Gosh,” I said. “Don’t move?—that must be awkward. How do you mean don’t move?”

  “It is not possible to explain,” said Nuna. “You shall s
ee, and then you will understand.”

  It was a bit of a whack in the eye, this, but anyway I waited for a bit and then I said:

  “Don’t they go to school or anything?”

  “What is school?” says Nuna.

  Well, there wasn’t any easy answer I could think up to that, so I just left it there.

  Well, that’s all I’ve got to say at the minute. I thought I’d chime in here while old Paul was writing about our journey from the Albatross. I’ll leave it to him now to carry on for a bit. Here he goes:

  At the rate we were traveling, it took us a little under an hour to reach the hills (a distance of some nine or ten miles, we reckoned). As we approached the lower slopes we saw that growing on them there were trees—unmistakably trees. They were taller than most earth trees, although the trunks were quite slender (the wood was very hard and strong, we discovered later, yet quite light). Where they differed most from our trees was in the leaves: these were large and bulbous, with dark green spikes at the ends of them. Doctor Mac told us later that the thick fleshy quality of the plants on Mars was probably due to the very dry nature of the soil. It was necessary for them to store moisture in their leaves—sort of vegetable camels, you know.