The problem was how to escape? All the time I was in my own little cave, the guard was slumped across the entrance, and when I was in the cavern it was always crammed to overflowing with the monsters. To make any sort of dash for it would be right out of the question—I wouldn’t get more than a few yards. Even if, by a miracle, I got into the passage-way leading down to the cavern, they would overtake me in no time—I remembered from the time of my capture just how fast they could move.
Well, I brooded and brooded. And it wasn’t for a very long time that I began to see a faint glimmering chance of how it might be done. When I did think of it I could have kicked myself, because in a way it was so simple—I should have thought of it right away. It’s funny, you get used to things you know—I’d got so used to sitting still in that little cave, and walking about with ordinary steps in the cavern, that I had almost forgotten I was on Mars and could jump. Yes, jump—and jump pretty high at that! Thinking along those lines I suddenly remembered something else; and I decided that next time I went out to have a chat with the Big White Chief I would keep my eyes skinned—just to see if it was all going to be possible.
But it wasn’t for another couple of days that I was called out to an interview—and I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t meant to be an interview! Before this, though, something rather curious happened.
One morning, the guard at my cave mouth shuffled aside and three of the Terrible Ones came in. They were different from any of the creatures I’d seen so far; they were much smaller, to begin with, and they were lighter in color—not yellow-and-red in spots the way old What’s-his-name was, but almost white, like the B.W. Chief. For a long time these three chaps just stood staring at me, then they moved quite close and began to feel all over me with their tentacles. It was a horrible sensation—little soft, gentle pattings and strokings. I edged away from them as far as I could, but they followed me right over to the wall.
Quite suddenly they stopped and stood back and stared at me again for a time. Then one of them picked up a tree leaf from the pile that had been brought to me that morning and held it out to me. He said:
“Eat!”
I thought it was a bit odd—especially the word “eat,” since that was the word I’d had difficulty over with the Terrible Ones at the beginning. But I was feeling pretty peckish anyway, so I ate the leaf as they had asked me. And while I was chewing it, blest if these things didn’t come close up to me, and one of them put out two of his feelers and pried my mouth open! Then they all three peered down my throat for a time. I didn’t like it in the least little bit, but what could I do? When I raised my arms to take the feelers away from my mouth, one of the other ones wrapped his tentacles round me and there I was—pinioned—and they were as strong as horses, those things.
Well, after a time they went away, but they came in the evening and went through the whole performance again. This time, after I had eaten a leaf, one of them took one up himself and put it between the two great pink jaws he had. Slowly—very very slowly—the jaws closed. He stayed with them closed for a time, and then, just as slowly, he opened them. The leaf fell out on to the ground, a little bit crushed but otherwise none the worse (which isn’t surprising, considering these things had no teeth inside their jaws only the little soft knobs—sort of taste-buds, as Uncle Steve has called them a couple of chapters back).
Next morning these three chaps appeared again, and then, the following morning early, they turned up with old What’s-his-name, who immediately set about prodding me out of the cave. I was being taken to the Big White Chief.
As we went across the cavern I realized that old What’s-his-name was speaking to me.
“There is one more day,” he said, “one more day, and then the city of the Enemy will be no more. This night we shall set out, and to-morrow we shall fall upon them and destroy them.” Then he paused, and added: “And you shall not be there to see.”
I didn’t like the sound of this at all. What did he mean? Was it just that I was to be left in the cave, and so wouldn’t actually see the attack, or was there something else behind it all? I must say I felt a bit uneasy. There was another thing too. All about us as we moved among the monsters, there was a sort of tension in the air—it was as if they were kind of expectant about something. And they were bad—they were just plain bad; there was just a sort of nastiness in the whole atmosphere.
We reached the mound where the Big White Chief lay. And now the sense of danger and badness was so great that I could hardly bear it. Old What’s-his-name, instead of stopping me about ten feet away from the mound, as he usually did during an interview, started pushing me very slowly towards it. And it seemed to me that the huge pink jaws of the big fellow were open just a little bit wider than usual.
It was all a bit too much for me. And I decided not to postpone my plan of escape any longer but to have a whack at it there and then.
I had remembered, you see, when I recollected I could jump, that just above the Big White Chief’s mound there was one of the long light-shafts that led down into the cavern from the open air. It was about twenty feet from the ground, in the sloping roof. I had noticed, during my interviews, that the walls of it were rocky and irregular—there was just a chance that, with my reduced Martian weight, I’d be able to find enough foot-hold to scramble through it to the surface.
I was barely a yard from the jaws when a sudden panic came over me and gave me just that necessary spurt to act. With all my energy I jumped. The height was too great for me to cover in one leap—I had realized that from the beginning. But you see, there was the Big White Chief, on his mound, and he was a good ten feet high.
The first jump landed right on top of his shell. Just for a moment I felt my feet sinking into his soft pulpy flesh, and then I jumped again—straight for the shaft entrance. It was now or never. I scrambled and scratched desperately for knobs and crannies to cling to, jumping and pushing all the time sort of hysterically. A little way up, the shaft bent over in a slope, and that helped a lot. Somehow—I don’t know how—I managed it. How long the shaft was, or what time it took to get through it, I just haven’t the faintest idea. All I do know is that after a nightmare of heaving and struggling I was out in the open air, on a hillside, panting and gasping and feeling dizzy in the head.
I was free—absolutely alone under the blue sky. And so far there was no sign of any sort of pursuit.
I was free—absolutely alone under the blue sky
Well, that’s really the bulk of the story—there isn’t very much more to it than that.
When I got through the top of the shaft I made immediately downhill a little for the shelter of some trees. Just as I reached them I saw a bunch of the Terrible Ones come pouring over the hillside from the cave entrance below. They snuffled and peered round the shaft for a while, then they all stopped and stared in a direction a little to my right. That gave me the idea that that was probably the direction of the B.P.’s city—the monsters would have assumed that I was making for it, and so were looking for me along that line. It was the way I certainly took as soon as they dispersed from the shaft and went down the hillside again.
Traveling through the mountains wasn’t at all easy. The forests were very thick in places, with strange plants in them—clumps of tall grasses, for instance, very fibrous and twiney, with an unpleasant sticky surface. There were sudden ravines that you came on most unexpectedly—some of these I was able to jump, others were just too wide, and so I had to scramble down them, cross the floor, and then scramble up the other side. Once or twice I came across foraging parties of Terrible Ones in the early part of the journey—on one occasion I had to jump up and hide among the thick foliage of a tree while a group of them passed right underneath. And, of course, to crown all, I was very anxious and worried as I traveled—as I saw it, it was up to me to get word to the B.P. as soon as possible that they were going to be attacked. Would I make the city in time?—was I, after all, going in the right direction?
Well,
the day went on, and then, in the evening, when I was beginning to think that it was all no good, and that I must be miles and miles away from Doctor Mac and the rest, I suddenly rounded a shoulder and saw, shining beneath me, the glass city! And barely a quarter of a mile away, drawing water at a little well, were Uncle Steve and Paul! I let out a yell and rushed down the hillside towards them.
And there we are—this is where I came in, so to speak. This is the point that Uncle Steve had reached in his chapter about what happened while I was in the hands of the Terrible Ones. I’ll leave it to him again to describe what happened the day after my escape, when the great ugly brutes attacked us—for they carried out their plan, as old What’s-his-name had told it to me; they marched from their caves during the night, and in the morning—But I’ll leave it to Uncle Steve, as I said. For my part, I’m glad this long chapter of mine is over. It’s taken such a bally long time to write—and yet I suppose you’ll only take ten minutes or so to read it. Who’d be an author—it’s such a fag!
Well, I hope I haven’t bored you too much. It was a bit of a nightmare, eh?—all those toadstooly chaps. Still, in a way, I’m glad it happened to me—it’s given me something to tell the fellows at school. Of course, I was lucky enough to escape and all that—well, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had anything to tell—or rather, I’d have had a lot to tell, only I wouldn’t have been here to tell it. So that’s that.
Well, cheerio, and all the best
Yours sincerely,
MIKE MALONE.
(A Note on Chapter 10 by Dr. McGillivray. When I read the manuscript of the chapter you have just perused, I asked my young friend’s permission to add a brief postscript to it. I had two reason for doing so: first, to congratulate him on having written a most patient and edifying account of his adventure, and second, to offer, in all humility, an explanation for a part of that adventure that seems to me to need clarifying.
I refer to the strange episode of the examining of young Malone by the three lighter-colored monsters.
My interpretation of the whole incident is this:—You will recall, from my paper on the nature of the Martians, that I am of the opinion that the creatures called the Terrible Ones evolved from plants similar in type to the insect-eating plants of our own planet. I deduced from this, if you remember, that at one time there had been animal—or at least insect—life on Mars. As it died out, the Terrible Ones adapted themselves accordingly, keeping their big jaw petals as lingering relics of the days when they had subsisted on flesh (that they were just a little more than vestigial ornaments we have seen from Michael’s description of how they could open and close them).
Now it seems to me that it is just conceivable that lingering somewhere in the deep race-memories of the Terrible Ones, there was a dim, imperfect recollection of their carnivorous days. The sight of Michael eating probably brought this memory to the surface (there is a certain superficial resemblance between mouth eating and the digestive processes of fly-catching plants). The three examiners I take to have been scientists or priests—the equivalent among the Terrible Ones of the Beautiful People’s Wiser Ones sect. They were examining Michael to see what he was made of—if he was flesh!
And I firmly believe that in the end they decided he was of that substance their ancestors had consumed. I believe they decided to try to consume him themselves!—or have him consumed by their leader. What superstitious and mystic intentions of sacrifice for victory might have lain behind the whole idea I do not know—as I have said, one of the things I most want to explore is this whole spiritual aspect of the inhabitants of Mars.
At any rate, if I am right—and I am certain that I am—it seems clear that if Michael had not contrived to escape when he did, he would have been submitted to the truly ghastly fate of being digested alive in the jaws of the great creature on the mound!
Let us be thankful that through his youthful energy and resourcefulness he managed to get away in time.—A.McG.)
CHAPTER XI. ATTACK, by Stephen Macfarlane
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold . . .
IT FALLS to me now to describe the last tragic day of our sojourn on Mars. It is impossible not to feel sad in writing of it, as the spectacle rises in my mind’s eye of the crude destruction of so many hundreds of the Beautiful People. We had not been with them for long—little more than a week of our earth time; but somehow, in that space, they had endeared themselves to us. Their way of thinking, their whole approach to life—these things were utterly charming and simple. Paul has used the word “innocent” in describing them, and that indeed does seem the only suitable adjective. Their unthinking benevolence (which one felt all the time one was with them), their acceptance of things—these were characteristics that made a profound impression on us. Why they called themselves “the Beautiful People” it is impossible to say—it was things like their definition of such an epithet as “beautiful” that we were on the brink of exploring when we had to leave. But that they were beautiful—in our sense of the word—there was no doubt at all in our minds.
And so many of them were annihilated!—utterly swamped and destroyed! It has often seemed to me strange that we arrived on Mars so shortly before the desolating of the Shining City. If we had set out, for instance, when we first intended to, how different our impressions would have been, with no Beautiful People to welcome us—perhaps only a few remnants of the Terrible Ones, lurking in the hill caverns or among the ruins of the glass domes. No doubt eventually we would have found our way to one of the other cities, deeper among the mountains. But that would have taken a long time—the shape of our visit would have been totally different.
For a brief spell we lived in a pastoral and delightful way; and then, in one day—one morning—we saw that sister world of ours live up to its name of the Angry Planet.
We stayed awake right through the night of Mike’s reappearance. We sat quietly in the tent after he had finished the account of his adventures, the Doctor and I smoking endless pipefuls of tobacco, the boys feeding a low smoldering fire we had built for comfort in the sand. Jacky, I remember, sang softly to herself. There was something unutterably strange in the thin plaintive sound of her voice going drifting among the quiet domes and losing itself in the hills. She sang many songs—the old ones we have all been accustomed to since our cradles—songs that are so familiar that we forget that someone once actually wrote them: songs like Barbara Allen, John Peel, Swanee River, and Sally in our Alley. But over and over again she came back to a song that was her own favorite—the haunting old nursery song:—
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey,
And plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note . . .
All the time, in the light from the two moons, we were aware of the still shapes of Malu’s warriors all round us. The females and the ordinary males had gone into the domes as usual to spend the night, but the warriors were awake and on guard, standing in silent groups with their long crystal swords outstretched in readiness. The atmosphere was full of a sense of expectancy—the tension was unbearable. Malu, close to us, seemed to lean forward slightly as he strove to catch a message from the plants ringed all round the city that the danger was close.
The night passed. The moons grew dim and sank out of sight behind the hills. Now the landscape was flooded with the gray twilight of the Martian dawn, and presently the sun rose over the horizon—exactly as we had seen it on the first morning of all. The sky grew clear and blue, the warmth came back to our slightly chilled limbs.
Mike yawned and rose to stretch himself.
“Well, it seems as if I was mistaken,” he said. “Either that or they’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have warned everybody and so called off the attack. I vote we have something to eat, and then—”
He got no further. At that moment there came a su
dden stiffening in the ranks of the warriors. And we, in our nervousness—our feeling for the community in which, for better or worse, we found ourselves—heard in our heads, swamping every other thought in them, the insistent message:
“Danger—danger—danger! The path by the store cave—danger!”
It was our only experience of The Voice. It came to us, I am sure, because in that moment we were exceptionally highly strung and sensitive. And because too, in a mystic sense, we had that day become part of the Beautiful People.
Malu and the warriors turned and stared towards the hills at the point where Mike had appeared the evening before, and we too—all five of us—strained our eyes in that direction. For a long time nothing happened, and then, suddenly, there was a movement among the trees. And a moment later there came into view a huge white shape, sickly in the sunlight—a monstrous swaying toadstool, it seemed.
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