The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  About this, one could write volumes. My own space, in this brief paper, has been used up—I have intruded on your patience too long. I leave you now to those who will continue the actual narrative part of our book—and I do so in the hope that these remarks, sketchy as they are, will in some degree illuminate what they have to say concerning the spectacular ending that fate gave our adventure on the Angry Planet.

  A Tailpiece to Chapter 9 by Stephen MacFarlane. Our period of anxious and impatient waiting came to an end very suddenly on the ninth evening after the capture of Mike.

  We were sitting on the sand just outside our tent, watching a group of warriors drilling. The Doctor was writing up his notes, Jacky was mending a tear in one of Paul’s shirts (we had brought needles and thread in the rocket with us), and Paul and I were commenting on the military display in front of us. Presently the Doctor looked up from his writing and called to me:

  “I say, Steve, pass me over a drink, will you—I’m thirsty.”

  Lazily I reached over for the cannikin we used for storing water.

  “Hullo,” I said, “it’s empty. Paul, you must have forgotten to go up to the well to fill it this afternoon.”

  “I’m afraid I did,” said Paul. “I was just going to go, I remember, and then I saw Malu carrying some new swords over to the big dome, so I gave him a hand instead. I’ll go up now—it won’t take a moment.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said. “I could do with a brief stretch-leg before turning in.”

  We set off through the city towards the store cave. When we reached it we set about filling the cannikin—a slow and complicated process this, since the well oozed so meagerly. We had almost finished, when suddenly, from quite close at hand, there was a hoarse shout:

  “Paul—Uncle Steve!”

  We looked up. Staggering towards us down the hill-slope from the forest was a tattered and grimy figure.

  “My heavens!” I cried, “it’s Mike! Paul, do you see—it’s Mike!”

  There was no doubt about it—Mike it was; a Mike all scratched and rather pale and haggard-looking, but still Mike. He staggered up to us, laughing and gasping a little hysterically, and shook us by the hand.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you both!” he cried, over and over again. “How are the others—how’s Jacky?—and the good old Doc?”

  “They’ll be a lot better for seeing you,” said Paul with a grin. “What in the name of Pete have you been doing with yourself? We thought you’d have been killed off twenty times over by this time!”

  “I as good as was,” said Mike grimly. “Gosh, those things! Listen Uncle Steve, we’ve got to do something, and we’ve got to do it quickly.”

  “We are doing something,” I said. “We’re almost ready to set off to attack those monsters—there’s only one more regiment of warriors to come in, and that’s due tomorrow morning.”

  “To attack them!” exclaimed Mike. “Uncle Steve—they’re going to attack us! They’re all set for it—they’ll be on the city in no time—hordes of them!”

  His eyes were wide and he trembled excitedly. I could see he was suffering from strain—was even a little feverish.

  “Listen, Mike,” I said, “don’t tell us any more just now. Wait till we get down to the city, among the others. Come on—we’ll give you a hand. You can lean on me—I’ll give you a cuddy-back, as old McIntosh calls it, if you like.”

  He laughed.

  “We needn’t go as far as that,” he said, “but I wouldn’t mind leaning on you—I must say I’m a bit done in. And if you’ve got anything solid to eat down there, I don’t mind giving it the once-over—I’m famished.”

  Supporting him, we got him down to the city, where Jacky wept all over again—this time with relief at seeing him safe. Mike repeated to the Doctor and Malu what he had told me about the Terrible Ones being about to descend on the city, and those two went off immediately to report the danger to The Center. Mike, looking better already, after an immense meal that Jacky set out for him, started to tell us the story of his adventures.

  He talked far into the night, while all about us the assembled warriors stood alert, waiting for the attack. The twin moons came up and circled the sky above our heads, and in their light we saw, on the plateau above the city, the shining, comfortable shape of the Albatross.

  Mike’s story was a strange and exciting one. You can read it in the next chapter as he wrote it himself after our return to earth.

  CHAPTER X. CAPTURED! by Michael Malone

  (N.B. It says Michael up above and everybody knows I really prefer Mike, but somehow Michael looks better than Mike when it comes to putting it down on paper like that at the top of a bit of writing, you see. So I don’t mind it for once.)

  Well, now, here goes. I’m no writer—as a matter of fact I always get low marks for composition at school—and besides, it takes so long to write a great huge thing like a chapter in a book, and it hurts your hand after the first three or four pages.

  I’ll begin at the point where I jumped across the hollow to have a whack at old What’s-his-name when he was getting ready to squash Nuna and break Malu in two. Well, the next thing I knew was being swung up into the air and then we were over the top of the ridge and tearing across the plain like mad. There’s no doubt about it we moved at some speed all right—the Doc and Uncle Steve and Co. just didn’t have a look-in, even notwithstanding (I asked Jacky about this word and she says it’s all right to use it here)—notwithstanding the way they could jump about on Mars. I saw them left right behind as we went tearing over the sand, and then I lost sight of them altogether, it was so joggly being carried away up in the air. Besides, I was being held very tight. I felt my head swimming, and then in the end I lost consciousness altogether.

  When I came to, we were among some hills and had slowed down our pace a bit. I was a bit groggy, I must say—I was sickish from the joggling and so on. We went along through some trees, and then we plunged into the mouth of a big cave. It was dark almost immediately, and very, very warm—there was quite a draught of hot wind coming along in our faces. We went down-hill for a longish time, and then suddenly it began to get quite light again and the tunnel opened out into a great big cavern—oh, huge. There was a sort of twilight in this cavern—I didn’t know where the light was coming from at first, but I found out later that there were shafts run up from the roof into the open air, and some light filtered through them. But oh the heat in this place!—and even worse than the heat was the smell. This cavern was full of great monsters like the ones that had been in the hollow, and I’m sure the smell came from them—in fact, I know it did, for any time there were a lot of the things together there was always this smell. It was a sort of flat, horrid smell—it was like when you’re walking through damp woods and you stumble on one of those big ugly yellow toadstool things and it breaks, and then there’s a sudden nasty smell like this one I’m talking about.

  Old What’s-his-name put me down—well, chucked me down, rather—and there I was, in the middle of all those ugly great things—hundreds of them—all staring at me and sometimes prodding at me with their feelers. Uncle Steve has described them, so you can imagine I didn’t feel too good. The one that had been carrying me—the one I call old What’s-his-name—he pushed me along with his feelers through the crowd, and suddenly I was in front of a sort of mound, like the one The Center lay on back in the glass city, and on it there was a huge thing like a toadstool—one of the Terrible Ones, but much bigger than any of the ones I’d seen so far, and absolutely dead white and sort of clammy-looking. He was horrible—the inside of his jaws wasn’t red, the way the jaws of the others were, but a pale kind of pink, like the underside of a mushroom.

  Well, he looked at me for a long time, and then I realized that he was speaking to me. It was the same sort of thing as went on among the B.P.—you know, thinking it in your head kind of thing—but there was something different about it. I don’t know what—it isn’t at all easy to describe, but it w
as a sort of coldish thin voice you heard and there was a sense of badness in you all the time it was going on—it was almost as if the thought had a smell, if you know what I mean, like that awful decayed sort of smell I’ve been talking about.

  So this big white fellow said to me:

  “What thing are you? Why were you with the Enemy?”

  (I found out later that these things always referred to the B.P. as the Enemy.)

  So I said:

  “I’m a human being, if you want to know—I don’t suppose you’ll have any idea what that means, but it’s what I am all the same. And I come from the earth, which is millions and millions of miles away. I don’t expect you’ll understand that either, but I came from there with some friends of mine in the Albatross—and, if you want to know what the Albatross is, well that’s out on the plain, and your friends were nosing about at it.”

  Well, he must have understood me a bit, because he said:

  “What is the thing you call Albatross? What is its function? Our foraging party found it, as they have told me, when exploring on the plain.”

  “It’s no use me trying to explain it all,” I said, sort of bored (Jacky says “resigned” is a better word.) “You wouldn’t really understand. The Albatross is a space-ship—for flying through space. And I can’t tell you any more than that—maybe the Doctor could, but he isn’t here.”

  There was a pause, and a sort of disturbance among all the things round about. And then the big one said, starting off on another tack:

  “Did you come from the city of the Enemy?”

  “Yes,” I said, “if you want to know, I did.”

  And then a strange thing happened. They laughed—all those great hulking ugly things laughed! It was one of the most terrible things I’ve ever come across. You see, you somehow didn’t imagine Martians laughing—laughing’s something you do, it makes a noise, you know. And we hadn’t had any experience of the B.P. laughing—it somehow didn’t seem possible to laugh when you did all your talking and so on by thinking. But here they were—laughing. They didn’t move—there wasn’t any change in their faces. But in my head were those hundreds of thin, sort of snaky voices, all in a sort of nasty chuckling. And the big one said:

  “In a little time the city will be no more. We are almost ready to attack it—it will be no more, and the Enemy will be broken. They cannot stand against us—in the past we have been too small in number. But now we have joined together—all of us who used to fight among ourselves. And we shall swallow them up!”

  And they laughed again—on and on, for a long time. I felt disgusted with them, and frightened too, I don’t mind saying. And besides, I was still a bit sickish from the journey, and then there was the heat, and the awful smell of them, too.

  * * * * * *

  (These asterisks across a page mean passage of time—I learned that at school once. So I’m putting them in here, quite professional-like. In this case they also mean that the Author got a bit fed-up with writing for the minute—and he was hungry too, so he stopped and had some of Mrs. Duthie’s pancakes. On we go then—and being professional again, I’m going to start this new part of the chapter in what my English master at school calls the “historic present.”)

  I am in a small cave just off the main cavern. It’s quite darkish, and the heat is terrible. There’s one of the great things that captured me lying across the entrance to the cave, so I can’t get out. He just lies there like a great lump, but sometimes he turns round and stares at me with those eyes of his, sort of on stalks—he just stares. Once or twice I try saying something to him—what do they think they’re going to do with me, and all that—but he never answers. Twice some others of the things come for me and take me to the big toadstool chap, and he asks me some questions—who I am and where I come from—all that sort of thing all over again. The second time, after I’d done my best to explain about earth, and so on, I decide it’s my turn to ask him some questions. I reckon that by now almost two days have passed—I was able to tell, anyway, that I’d spent one night in the place, by the way the cavern got dark, as I could see from my smelly little cave. I had had some sleep but they hadn’t made any attempt to feed me—what was worse, they hadn’t given me anything to drink, and what with the awful steamy heat in the cavern I needed some water pretty badly.

  So I said to him—the big chap—that I was hungry and thirsty. At first he didn’t seem to get the idea, but then after a time he did, and he and the others laughed again in that rotten way I mentioned before. And he says to me, how would I stop my hunger? Well, that was a poser—I just didn’t know what to say to that. I thought of saying to them, what did they eat?—maybe I could eat the same; and then I remembered the B.P. and thought that if these chaps had the same sort of habits, that wouldn’t be much good. And then suddenly I remembered the Doc saying something about the leaves on the big trees—how he was going to try them for food for us. And I thought, well—I might as well take a chance. If they’re poisonous, that’s just too bad—even dead I couldn’t be much worse off than I am now, I thought, and if you’re dead you aren’t hungry—at least, I don’t think you are—it doesn’t seem likely, anyhow. So I said it was leaves I ate. They just couldn’t get the idea. It seemed to be the word “eat” that was the difficulty—they could understand being hungry, and they could understand stopping hunger by taking something in, but actual eating, with your mouth (I pointed to my mouth and tried to explain with signs)—they couldn’t understand that at all (I found out afterwards, by the way, that they did feed the same way as the B.P.—from plants, through little feelers, so that explains that). Anyhow, in the end I said, sort of desperately, that if they didn’t let me have some leaves from the trees outside, I would die. And if they didn’t let me have some water to drink I’d die.

  And then they said—drink?—what was that?

  Honestly! I felt like bashing their great silly faces in!

  In the end I thought the idea of well, or spring, very hard in my head—I tried to get a picture of a well in my mind and project it (that’s the word the Doc uses for this business of thinking things to people). And after a time it seemed to click. Old What’s-his-name pushed me with his feelers down to the far end of the cavern and into a little sort of alcove. And there there was a small slow spring oozing out of the rock—only a very tiny trickle, but it was enough. I licked at it with my tongue while they all stood staring at me. It was horrible—quite warm, and it had a flat, sort of limey taste, but it was water, you know, and oh boy, did I need water!

  Well, the next thing was the leaves. When I’d finished drinking, old What’s-his-name prodded me back to the Big White Chief, and I found that while we’d been away he’d sent one of his chaps up to the open air for some leaves—there was a pile of them on the ground in front of him. So I picked up one of them and had a nibble at it—and I thought to myself, well, Mike, old chap, maybe this is the end of you, and if it is, well, Three Cheers for Old England and God Save the King. But it wasn’t the end of me after all. The leaves had a sweetish, mushy sort of taste, like sleepy pears, in a way, and nothing happened—they didn’t seem in the least bit poisonous. So I tucked into them good, and then I felt a little better (still a bit hungry, of course—fruit and leaves and things are all very well, you know, but not a patch on a big plate of bacon and eggs, for instance). All the time I was eating, all those huge things just stood around and stared at me again—it was uncanny. I suppose they were quite curious and interested to see me busy at it in such a different way from them, but you see they didn’t show they were curious or interested. They didn’t have any kind of facial expression. Paul has said somewhere that that was one of the queerest and most uncomfortable things about the folk on Mars—this business of no facial expression: and it was even worse with these smelly toadstool fellows than with the B.P., because, you see, the Terrible Ones had more recognizable actual faces than the B.P. had, and so you expected some sort of smile or sneer or surprise or something on them.
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  Well, that was the eating and drinking problem solved, at least—not very satisfactorily, but well enough to get by. Old What’s-his-name pushed me back to my little cave, and the guard flopped down with a soggy sort of thud in the entrance to it again. After this, every day they brought me a fresh bundle of leaves into the cave, and twice a day I was led down to the little well at the far end of the cavern so that I could get a drink.

  And so the time passed—the “days and nights slipped into one another,” as they say in books. I slept or dozed a lot—I expect it was the heat. Altogether I felt pretty rotten, I must say—I used to have bad dreams—and in the gloom of the cave I sometimes didn’t even know if I was asleep or awake while I was having them. Oh, all sorts of things—too long to write about here. Besides, I doubt if I could write about them; nightmares are beastly things-—it isn’t so much what happens in them (sometimes you can’t even remember that next day) it’s the atmosphere of them, somehow. There was one I remember particularly—some sort of huge beast (it was a dragon, actually—it came from a picture in a school reader I once had) had caught me up in its jaws and was going to bite through me. It never got to the point in the dream where it did bite through me, but I could feel its hot breath all round my middle, and it was that that was the real nastiness of the dream. Ugh! I hate to think of it, even now.

  Mind you, all the time the one thought that was uppermost in my mind was to work out some sort of plan of escape. Apart from just wanting, for my own sake, to get away from the Terrible Ones, there was another thing that was beginning to worry me quite a lot. Every now and again—on an average about once a day—I was led out to the mound in the cavern to be cross-questioned by the Big White Chief. He was always on at me about the earth, what it was like, and all that, but what he seemed to me to be really after was somehow to taunt me about the attack he and his followers were planning on the city of the B.P. They all seemed to get some sort of queer comic pleasure just from telling me about it, and boasting what they were going to do; they would laugh and laugh in that beastly mirthless way. As far as I could gather, as those conversations went on, the attack wasn’t very far off. Foraging parties went out almost every day to spy out the land. It seemed to me that their plans were pretty nearly complete—the Big White Chief actually told me once that they were waiting for some “special fighters” to come in from some far-off caves, and then they’d set off through the hills to have their whack at Malu and Co. Well, as I saw it, if only I could escape and warn the B.P. of just how dangerous the situation was, it would be a good thing all round. I was worried about the Doc and Uncle Steve and Paul and Jacky, to say nothing of the B.P. themselves. There were hundreds and hundreds of these great nasty things in the cavern, and the Big White Chief had told me there were thousands more, in other caves close at hand.