The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  Mike had yelled at the moment when Nuna had lost his balance. Now, as the enemy poised himself, he was half-way across the floor of the hollow, moving in gigantic jumps and shouting at the top of his voice. The rest of us gazed for a moment, too astonished by Mike’s sudden action to be able to do anything. Then the Doctor shouted:

  “Michael—Michael—for heaven’s sake come back, boy!”

  The flying figure did not pause. All we heard, coming back to us as he took the last few gigantic steps, was:

  “It isn’t Michael—it’s Mike! Whoopee! Hold on, Nuna—I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  The action was so quick that we hardly realized what was going on. We ourselves, I should say, were half-way across the hollow by this time, rushing to keep Mike out of danger. We saw him stand for a moment facing the monster, then he jumped high into the air and brought down his glass sword—the one he had snatched from the tent back in the city—across the tentacles that held Malu. In doing so he lost his balance for a second or two, and immediately the creature’s remaining tentacles were round his waist, and he was swung up into the air, kicking and shouting furiously. Simultaneously the creature shuffled sideways, flailing at the ground with his feet-tendrils, and in a moment was over the top of the ridge and had disappeared from view, with Mike still a prisoner in the monstrous suckers.

  Mike was swung up into the air, kicking and shouting furiously

  We rushed forward, overtaking Malu and Nuna, who had recovered themselves, and, with the other warriors, were slithering over the top of the ridge. Already the remnant of the enemy force was some hundreds of yards away, Mike’s struggling figure held high in the air above them. Shouting insanely we ran after them, the Doctor and I to the fore, Paul and Jacky a little behind. We exerted ourselves to the utmost, taking huge, twelve-feet strides. But the Terrible Ones moved at an extraordinary speed, their tendrils flailing, raising a red cloud as they threaded among the huge clumps of cactus-plants.

  The Doctor suddenly stopped. He raised his rifle to his shoulder. But I flung myself sideways and knocked it up in the nick of time, so that he fired harmlessly into the air.

  “Don’t shoot, Mac!” I cried, “don’t shoot! You’ll hit Mike. And even if you don’t, you know that bullets make no difference to those things.”

  He lowered the gun and looked at me, his eyes wild.

  “Steve,” he cried, “what can we do? We can’t leave the boy to the mercy of these monsters—we simply can’t.”

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” I said, trying to sound optimistic, though my heart was full of despair. “We’ll have to consult with Malu—these things are too devilishly fast for us.”

  He nodded. Paul and Jacky had made up on us by this time. Jacky was crying, Paul was white, with quivering lips. Presently Malu and Nuna joined us, the rest of the warriors with them.

  “Malu,” cried the Doctor, “is there anything we can do? What are these monstrous things—where are they going?”

  “They go to the big caves in the mountains,” said Malu. “They move fast—too fast for the Beautiful People.”

  “But they’ve got Mike,” cried Jacky, “Malu—Nuna—they’ve got Mike! We must do something to rescue him!—please, please!”

  “There is nothing we can do now,” said Malu, “nothing. We must go back to consult The Center and the Wiser Ones. And if they permit it, The Voice will call together our people from the other cities among the hills, so that we can build an army to march against the Terrible Ones.”

  “Surely they will permit it,” said Mac impatiently. “Mike is our friend—he is one of us. We must help him. They must permit it!”

  “I think they will,” said Malu slowly. “Not only because of Mike, but because it is bad that the Terrible Ones have been seen near our city. We have known for a long time that they have been assembling in the hill-caves to destroy us—now that they have begun to send out foraging parties they must be almost ready. We must strike before they strike—they are full of evil.”

  Mac and I looked at each other, then turned to stare across the plain. The receding enemy was almost out of sight, making for the hills far to the south of the glass city. All we could see, at that distance, even through binoculars, was a small red cloud. . . .

  “Yes,” said the Doctor, quiet again after his outburst of wild excitement. “We must go back—we must go back to prepare. We must get the Albatross to the city—we can’t leave it unprotected in the plain here. And we must make arrangements to attack these hideous things somehow—we must help Mike. Oh my heavens, the poor boy to be with those unutterable creatures!—and the whole thing my fault, too!”

  “Nonsense, Mac,” I said. “It was one of those things—it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  “I brought him from earth,” said the Doctor grimly.

  “You what! Mac, you know perfectly well that he and the others stowed away! And by the same token, if anybody can do anything to help Mike in this mess, it is Mike himself!”

  He smiled wryly.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But we’re the adults, Steve—we’re the responsible ones. Come—we’re wasting time. Let’s go. . . .”

  We turned around and made for the city, traveling in silence. Jacky’s eyes were red from weeping when we reached the hills, and my own heart was heavy. I tried to keep cheerful, to put on an optimistic front for the sake of the others, but in my bones I felt that our hopes of ever seeing Mike again were very, very low indeed.

  CHAPTER IX. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

  Part 1. A THEORY OF MARTIAN LIFE by Stephen MacFarlane

  FROM now on our story must begin to move rapidly towards its dramatic climax. So much happened, and happened in such rush and confusion that we cannot hope to give very much more than a general impression of it all—a description in any sort of detail would lengthen this book beyond all endurance.

  But at this particular point there is a natural pause in the action—the inevitable calm before the storm. After the capture of Mike, and before his reappearance (you are bound to know, by the mere fact of his having contributed to this book, that he did reappear—though it was not without much danger and excitement, which you shall hear of anon)—during this time there was a period of preparation: more than a week, indeed, went by before there was any more positive excitement. And so this seems the natural chapter in which to insert Dr. McGillivray’s interesting theory about the Martians and what they were—indeed, it seems to me that a knowledge of this theory is almost essential to a full understanding of all that follows. Before presenting the Doctor’s paper, however, I want to write a few pages myself about what we did in the city towards preparing to attack the Terrible Ones—an attack which, as you will see, never developed, because of a sudden startling turn in events.

  The first thing we did, then, after our return from the Albatross battle, was to seek an audience with The Center. Malu, Nuna, the Doctor and myself entered the huge central dome and moved respectfully to the mound where the controlling power of the Beautiful People lay. Malu began the interview by telling him of the battle and the capture of Mike (we did not “hear” this conversation, of course—all we knew of it was the slight sense of disturbance I have talked of as signifying, to us, an intercourse among Martians: but we knew from what The Center said to us later that this was what Malu had been describing to him).

  When Malu had finished, there was a long pause while The Center looked at each of us in turn. The strange transparent flesh of his face was quivering, his small side tentacles writhed sensitively towards us. At length he said:

  “It is bad that the Terrible Ones have come among us—it is bad that they have captured your friend, whom along with yourselves, you strangers from another world, we had welcomed to our city. Last night you, McGillivray, told me and the Wiser Ones something of your world: we, in turn, told you something of ours. Among other things we told you of our enemy, the Terrible Ones, who for so long have wished us evil. Now that you have seen the Terrible Ones fo
r yourself, it must be clear to you why we fear them. Their presence near our city can mean one thing—they are assembling to destroy us. Before they can do that, it is our duty to destroy them; and therefore, The Voice will be instructed to assemble here, in the chief city of the Beautiful People in this part of our world, the warriors and picked men from all the other cities among and beyond the hills. And we shall march against the Terrible Ones in their deep hill caves and rout them out and end them—and rescue your comrade, too, if he has not been destroyed. Tell me now, McGillivray, is there anything that you want from us, so that you too can prepare for the attack?”

  Mac took a step forward.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have told you of the vessel in which we came to you from our own world. It lies in the plain, as you know—it was because of the interest the Terrible Ones took in it that we went forth to fight them this morning. It must be brought here to the city to safety. I cannot bring it without the help of your people. May I have that help?”

  There was a slight pause, then The Center said:

  “If it can fly—and you have said that it flew here through the skies—why may it not fly to the city from its resting place in the plain?”

  “I cannot explain that to you,” answered Mac, “until we have exchanged more thoughts with each other and know more of the sciences of our two worlds. But, speaking briefly, it is because the vessel will not fly for short distances—it is not built so. You must believe me when I say that I cannot move it here without the help of your people.”

  “You shall have that help,” came the response, after another slight pause. “You shall instruct Malu in what you require, and he shall provide it if he possibly can. From time to time you will come back here to report to me on all that happens concerning your arrangements. For the moment, that is all.”

  Immediately, the wall of guards closed round the still, squat figure. We went out into the open air and set about our work at once.

  The removal of the Albatross was our first consideration. The rocket was provided on the underside with huge steel skids, and it seemed to us reasonable to suppose that it could be dragged on them across the loose sand of the plain to the hills—even, if we could get enough labor, up through the forest (the track among the trees was wide enough) to the city itself. We explained the idea to Malu as well as we could, and tried to find out from him if there was anything in the nature of a rope on Mars. He led us outside the city to the hills, and there showed us the entrance to an enormous cave. When we went into it we found, to our astonishment, vast coils of a powerful fibrous cable, and—mystery of mysteries!—some huge wooden trolleys, low slung, mounted on rollers consisting of trimmed logs of the hardwood from the trees. These trolleys were shaped like gigantic T’s, the long center bars being some seventy or eighty feet long, the cross bars perhaps fifty. To cut a long story short, I may say that we discovered eventually that these trolleys existed for the purpose of transporting the huge crystal domes from the place of their molding among the hills to whichever spot the Beautiful People chose for a city. I shall say no more of this for the moment—it is one of the things the Doctor will be writing about in some detail later on in this chapter.

  The removal of the Albatross took us two days. An immense group of the Beautiful People, led by Malu and Nuna, came across the plain with us, dragging one of the biggest of the trolleys to the hollow where the rocket lay (I might mention, in passing, for the sake of being thoroughly circumstantial in this account, that the ropes or cables, we discovered, were woven from the leaves of a coarse kind of grass that grew deep in the hills). We spent the first day in getting the Albatross out of the hollow. With the ropes noosed over it we found that it was possible for it to be dragged, on the skids, right across the floor of the hollow and up the slope of the ridge. The Beautiful People were magnificent workers—exceptionally strong for their size—and, after all, the rocket weighed little more than a third of what it had done on earth (a fact the Doctor had to take into reckoning later on when it came to setting off from Mars, incidentally—not nearly so much fuel was needed for the initial start-off from the surface). As the nose of the space-ship rose above the top of the ridge, we were able to maneuver the trolley underneath it, and so, gradually, with the help of levers, and cables pulling in counter directions, we got the whole Albatross on to the great T-shaped carriage, ready for transportation across the plain.

  We left it beside the hollow overnight, with a guard, and then, next morning—the fourth of our sojourn on Mars—we went out across the plain again with our great army of Martian laborers. Long cables were fixed to the cross-bar of the trolley, the Martians coiled their hand-tendrils round and round them, and so we set off. In spite of the great strength we were able to bring to bear because of our numbers, progress across the plain was slow: it was mid-afternoon before we reached the hills, and late evening before the Albatross finally came to rest on the little plateau overlooking the shining city of the Beautiful People. The scene during its transportation had been fantastic—hundreds of the small, energetic Martians pulling at the long, taut cables across the desert—it was like the paintings one has seen of the building of the ancient Egyptian pyramids: there too the transport had been by hand, and the great blocks of stone had been mounted on logs or rollers of wood.

  The Doctor’s next task was to build, beneath the Albatross, on the plateau, a cradle, or launching ramp. He explained to me, privately, that he wanted this done lest by any chance the situation between the Beautiful People and the Terrible Ones should become so dangerous for us that we would have to escape suddenly. With the help of Malu’s laborers he built up, from the tough trunks of the trees (great piles of these were lying, ready cut and trimmed, in the store cave in the hills), a sloping slipway on top of the great trolley—in other words, the launching ramp was built up gradually underneath the Albatross, so that we were not faced with the problem of having to move the heavy space-ship on to the structure. The job was a rough and ready one—the Martians had no very advanced ideas on engineering—but it was adequate. And the fact that the whole thing was mounted on rollers meant that every day the Doctor could make calculations apropos the relative positions of earth and Mars, and have the cradle constantly changed so that the nose of the Albatross always pointed in the right direction.

  While all this was going on, there was great activity in the city. Groups of males were to be seen, armed with the long crystal swords, practicing leaping and slashing—a sort of militia drill, one might say. From time to time small regiments of warriors like Malu’s contingent arrived from the hills, summoned presumably by The Voice. The Voice, as far as I understood it from the Doctor, who had had the whole thing explained to him during his first interview with The Center and the Wiser Ones, was the means by which communal or regional communication was carried out among the Beautiful People. How exactly it was done—whether The Voice was an actual being, like The Center—we never discovered: but somehow powerful telepathic messages could be sent almost any distance—they were so strong that they took precedence over any other thoughts going on in the minds of the particular group of the Beautiful People they were aimed at.

  All the time, during the preparations for the attack, we humans went on living in the tent we had built just outside the dome assigned to us. The Doctor had ascertained that the leaves and spikes of the trees were quite edible—indeed, were extremely nourishing; and by dint of eking these out with an occasional tin of meat or fish from our store, we were able to feed ourselves quite satisfactorily. Just outside the trolley cave in the hills we found a small well of rather flat-tasting water, and so were well supplied on this count, too. In our leisure hours, sitting quietly in the evenings in our tent, we thought and talked about Mike, wondering where he was and what he was doing—if he were safe, or if the dreadful creatures who had captured him were maltreating him in some way—had killed him, perhaps, altogether. Yet somehow none of us could believe that Mike was dead—he was, as we remembered him,
too vital and resourceful a character. We longed, above everything else, to set to work to rescue him, but however much the Doctor urged action at his meetings with The Center, he was told that the time was not ripe—all the regiments had not come in from the outlying cities.

  So we waited. Gradually the city filled up. There was, in the atmosphere all round us, a sense of concentrated tension and anxiety—a mounting, subtle excitement. One night, just before we went into our tent, there was a sudden rumbling—as it seemed, in the earth beneath our feet. It lasted perhaps five minutes, and when we asked Malu what it was, he said:

  “It is the omen of the mountain—the mountain tells us that it knows we are in danger, and will help us.”

  I looked at Mac in bewilderment.

  “It’s all right, Steve,” he said with a smile. “It’s a volcano, I think—a mild earthquake caused by a volcanic disturbance among the hills. This whole district is volcanic in the extreme—you can tell that by the shape of that big mountain overhanging the city—and there are great layers of lava all over the ground up by the store cave. Interesting, though, that they should think of it as an omen—it’s the first sign we’ve encountered of superstitious belief among the Beautiful People. . . . I must remember to talk to The Center about it at our next meeting. . . .”