The Angry Planet

by John Keir Cross

  Well, I really must stop, Mummy darling—it’s time to go to bed. I can’t wait till I see you. I hope you’re very much better—Daddy says you are, that you are almost on your feet again, and that probably seeing us will complete the cure altogether. Oh Mummy, I hope so! All our love till we meet—

  Your loving daughter,

  JACKY

  Script of an interview in the B.B.C. radio magazine series, In Britain To-night.

  (Fade up signature tune and opening sound sequence. Fade slowly out as announcer speaks.)

  Announcer: In Britain To-night! One of the most thrilling stories of recent times has been told in the Press these past few days—the story of the flight to Mars by Dr. McGillivray, of Aberdeen University, Mr. Stephen MacFarlane, the writer, and three children, Paul and Jacqueline Adam and Michael Malone. The three children are in the studio with me now, making a brief microphone appearance. Dr. McGillivray and Mr. MacFarlane will be giving talks in our programs in the course of the next few days, describing life on Mars and what it was like to travel through space. Meantime, we thought you would be interested to hear the voices of the children. Here they are.

  Interviewer: Well now, children, perhaps you had better introduce yourselves to begin with.

  Jacqueline Adam: My name is Jacqueline Adam and I come from Dorset.

  Paul Adam: And I am Jacqueline’s brother. My name is Paul.

  Michael Malone: I’m Mike Malone, of London. I’m the youngest of the party.

  Interviewer: It’s true, isn’t it, that you stowed away on board Dr. McGillivray’s space-ship?

  Jacqueline Adam: Oh yes. It was Mike’s idea, really. You see, we didn’t really know that Dr. Gillivray was going to Mars.

  Michael Malone: My idea was just to have a look round the rocket, you see, and then before we knew where we were, we had started off and were thousands of miles into space.

  Interviewer: And what was it like to travel in space?

  Paul Adam: It’s very difficult to say. Actually, that’s one of the things that Mr. MacFarlane will be able to talk about much better when he comes to the microphone. As far as we were concerned, I think the really exciting thing was not having any weight.

  Interviewer: Not having any weight? Why, what do you mean?

  Paul Adams: I can’t explain it technically, but the thing is that once you get outside the gravity pull of earth, you are as light as a feather. We had to wear magnetic boots in the rocket to keep ourselves from floating about in the cabin.

  Interviewer: That must have been grand fun.

  Michael Malone: Oh it was! We very often took the boots off for a lark, and went for little flights in the air.

  Interviewer: It sounds like something out of a fairy tale. And then, when you landed on Mars itself, what was it like?

  Jacqueline Adam: Quite different from anything we could ever have imagined.

  Interviewer: You met some of the Martians, of course?

  Jacqueline Adam: Oh yes. We were with them in one of their cities for more than a week.

  Interviewer: What were they like?

  Jacqueline Adam: We got on very well with them. Of course, it isn’t possible to describe them in the few moments we have on the air, but we have told the newspapers all about it—you can read about it in them. And Dr. McGillivray will be describing them when he talks over the air. But they were really very charming and kind to us.

  Interviewer: Well, Miss Adam, it has been most interesting to chat with you, and I’m sure our listeners will have enjoyed hearing your voices. What are your plans now that you are back on earth?

  Jacqueline Adam: We have to go on a lecture tour with Dr. McGillivray, but before that Paul and I are going down to Dorset to spend a few days with our mother.

  Interviewer: I’m sure your mother will be very proud of you. And after the lecture tour, what then?

  Paul Adam: I think we shall all deserve a holiday then.

  Interviewer: Hear, hear! Does that go for you too, Michael?

  Michael Malone: Well—to tell you the truth, if it’s a matter of a holiday, I wouldn’t mind going back to Mars to have one there!

  (They all laugh. Fade into music.)

  A letter from Mrs. Duthie, of Pitlochry, to Mr. Stephen MacFarlane:

  Dear Mr. MacFarlane,—I was very relieved to get your letter for which I thank you and to know that you and the children will be coming up to the cottage for a wee rest after all your stravaiging up and down the country lecturing to this one and that one. I read all about your trip in the papers and heard you talking on the wireless it really was very like your voice it was exactly as if you was in the room with me and it was a real relief to hear you although I thought you sounded a bit run-down, I expect you have not been looking after yourself and it will be the food in those hotels too, it’s never what it should be, and them charging the earth for it—I tell you it is exactly what my Mother used to say when she was alive, these hotel people are like the Gordon Highlanders, they know how to charge. Well, Mr. MacFarlane, you are to take care of yourself and you are to look after the children, poor little things, imagine them going all that way to those outlandish parts and not having anyone proper to take care of them—and then eating leaves off trees too, it can’t be good for anyone all that sort of thing. But it is a real relief to know that you are all safe and sound, I can tell you we were real worried about you, losh me it caused a terrible stir in the town when you went missing, and McIntosh had search parties out in the hills for days. The Doctor’s labritary assistants, if that is how you spell it, they said when we heard an explosion and then they saw that the rocket thing had disappeared, well they said that you had all gone to the moon or that something had exploded, but we thought they were daft and went on looking all the same, but of course we did not find anything and it has been a mystery ever since and in all the papers too till suddenly we heard that you had turned up again. Well, I shall close now, and tell the children I shall be having a lot of special bakings for them when they get here, and that will do them good and fatten them up a bit, there is not any doubt that growing youngsters need their food, that is what my Mother always used to say.

  Well, let me know what train you will be arriving on and I shall see that McIntosh meets you at the station with the trap, Yours Truly,

  ELSPETH DUTHIE.

  An entry in Paul Adam’s notebook:

  . . . Well, it’s all over. In a few days we will be finished with this tour, and then it will be Pitlochry and a long rest. By Jove, a bit different from the last time we went to Pitlochry! Uncle Steve has suggested that while we’re there we might all club together and write a book—a chapter each, sort of thing, while it’s all fresh in our minds. Not a bad idea, I must say—I won’t mind having a whack at an occasional chapter. Funny, I never thought of myself as anything of a writer, but take this notebook, for example. I started it as something to do on the journey out to Mars, and now I’ve got used to the idea of jotting things down from time to time—a sort of diary, like that chap Pepys they tell us about at school. Well, this is the last entry I’m going to make in it—we’re almost back to normal now. It will certainly be something to show my grand-children (that is, of course, if I ever have any!).

  Well, that’s the lot. I don’t quite know how I ought to finish—maybe I should take a solemn oath that everything contained herein is truth. I think it would be best just to say cheerio, so that’s what I’ll do. This is the end of Paul Adam, his Notebook.

  A letter from Michael Malone to Mr. McIntosh, gamekeeper, Pitlochry:

  Dear Mr. McIntosh,—Mrs. Duthie will likely have told you that we are coming to Pitlochry in a few days. I’m looking forward to seeing you again, but before I do there is something I have got on my mind, and that is why I am writing this letter. I’ve had a guilty conscience about it all the time we have been away on Mars, and I kept on wishing I could get in touch with you somehow. Do you remember that just before we left I borrowed one of your salmon gaffs—an extra big o
ne it was. As a matter of fact, this whole adventure would probably never have happened if you hadn’t lent me the gaff. You see, we used it for climbing over the wall of the stockade at Dr. McGillivray’s laboratory. And then, when the rocket started off, there it was, still hanging on the wall, with the rope fixed on to it. So I never had a chance to return it to you. I hope you didn’t need it too much and that you weren’t angry with me.

  I thought I would just drop you this little note of apology before we met, so that maybe you wouldn’t feel too sore about the gaff and not speak to me or something when we come to Pitlochry.

  Hope your rheumatism is not troubling you too much these days. Yours sincerely,

  MIKE MALONE.

  A letter from Hamish McIntosh, gamekeeper, Pitlochry, to Michael Malone:

  dear Mr. Mike,—i am not good at the writing so this is to say do not wory about the gaff she was an old one indeed when you come you can keep her as a suvener i am glad you are well i found the gaff on the wall, when i was looking for you. i shall meet you with the punny at the station i am not ofended about the gaff i remain your obedient servant

  HAMISH MCINTOSH.

  3. Concluding Remarks by Stephen MacFarlane. There is one more thing to be said, and this I have kept deliberately to the last, because it seems to me to be the one episode that gathers up symbolically in itself the whole evanescence, as it were, of our story. As I sit at my desk here writing, chewing over the cud of our crowded reminiscences, this above all is the image that haunts me—even more potently than the image of that first fight between the Beautiful People and the Terrible Ones, I think, or the flaming mind’s-eye picture of the last great battle in the Shining City.

  In all our interviews with the Press, with distinguished scientists, with representatives of the various film companies and the B.B.C., the one thing we were invariably asked was, had we brought with us any relics of Martian life. You who know by this time the extraordinary and sudden circumstances under which we left the Angry Planet, will realize that there was no time for us to collect anything—even a sample of soil—to bring back with us. Had we been left to our own devices we would have laden the Albatross with relics, as you can well imagine—it is inconceivable that a scientist of Dr. McGillivray’s acumen would have omitted to do this. He was, indeed, engaged, as I well know, in compiling a huge stock of samples during the period while we were waiting for the Beautiful People to assemble themselves to attack the Terrible Ones. In our tent by the dome there were neatly labeled articles of every sort—leaves from the trees, small specimens of the cactus plants, pieces of the glass-like substance the domes were made of, even some seeds of the Beautiful People, and two very young sprouts from the great nursery-cave among the hills—in short, every conceivable thing likely to be of interest to enquiring minds on earth.

  But our tent, and all its contents—these were overwhelmed by the lava. Nothing at all was conveyed to the Albatross—all we had stored in it, against a possible sudden emergency, was some water from the well.

  Of our cameras, all but two were destroyed by the lava—and when we reached earth, and set about having the films in these two developed (they were of the 36-exposure-per-spool type, so allowing for the few exposures not made, there would have been some 60 odd photographs of the Martian scene available—a goodly number)—it was only to find, to our chagrin, that some deleterious quality in the rare atmosphere of Mars had rendered the sensitized emulsion quite useless—the films were absolutely blank. Dr. McGillivray has written extensively and learnedly on this unfortunate aspect of our adventure in the Photographic Journal—I mention the circumstance here only by way of explaining why the obvious course of illustrating these writings with actual authentic photographs has not been taken. Another thing that was destroyed by the lava, incidentally, was our portable recording equipment: but since, as we have said so often, there was no actual sound on Mars—no speech—this apparatus had been entirely useless to us: we did not make one single disc with it.

  No, we had nothing to show—absolutely nothing.

  But—and here’s the rub—I can hear you say: But Nuna—Nuna was in the rocket with them—Nuna was a specimen better than any other—an actual Martian.

  Nuna, alas, never reached earth with us. Nuna exists no more—the body of Nuna has been disintegrated beyond all hope of reconstruction—Nuna has vanished, has become an imperceptible dust, scattered in the enormous wastes of space. It is the dissolution of Nuna—the last glowing moment—that haunts me in the way I have already mentioned. Let me, quite simply and detachedly, describe how it happened—let me set it out here as the last scene of our book. . . .

  Nuna never recovered from the shock of our start-off from Mars—this I have already given an account of: how he was strapped to the floor of the cabin when we found that he had died. On the third day of the journey, we began to notice a sickly heaviness in the atmosphere of the Albatross. It intensified. On the fifth day it was so potent as to fill us with nausea—and we could no longer disguise from ourselves the fact that we all had realized secretly in our hearts but had been unwilling to mention to each other: the body of the little Martian was decomposing—was, in doing so, poisoning our precious air. . . .

  There was only one thing we could possibly do. Mac and I, with heavy hearts, steeling ourselves to the effort, unstrapped the frail limp body and took it to the inner door of the cabin. Jacky and Paul turned away, so as not to have to watch us, but Mike kept his face in our direction, though I could see that he was biting his lip, poor boy. We opened the inner door and laid Nuna against the outer one. Mac had contrived, at the outset, a device for getting rid of things from the rocket while it was traveling in space, though there had been no occasion to use it on the journey out. It consisted of a heavy spring between the inner and outer walls of the Albatross that could be attached to the object to be ejected and controlled in its release from the inside of the cabin once the inner door had been closed and the outer door opened (the movement of the outer door could also be controlled from inside the cabin while the ship was traveling).

  We set the spring in position, and closed the inner door. Mac touched the lever that opened the outer door, and then immediately set the spring in operation that would push Nuna into space. Then, with a sigh, he closed the outer door again. Nuna was no longer with us.

  And now I come to the amazing part. When I looked through the port-holes beside the doors, it was to see, to my utter horror, that Nuna was still there—traveling alongside us a few yards away from the Albatross!

  “Mac,” I gasped, “what has happened? Look—look! He’s there—outside!”

  Mac spoke quite softly and simply. “Steve,” he said, “it can’t be otherwise. Don’t you realize, man, that there isn’t any gravity in space—there is nothing to pull Nuna away from us. By the process of inertia, any object we put out from the rocket while we travel will travel with us—on and on—Nuna will go with us like that, where the spring pushed him, until—”

  “Until what, Mac?” I asked, as he hesitated.

  “Until we reach the atmosphere belt of the earth. And then,” he lowered his voice still further, “well, Steve, although he seems quite motionless, Nuna is traveling as fast as we are, and you know what an incredible speed that is. You know what a shooting star is—a particle of matter traveling in space that suddenly comes within the gravity pull of earth, and then, as it shoots towards it, is made white-hot for a moment by the friction of the atmosphere, then is burned up. Nuna is not protected as the outer shell of the rocket is. When we reach the outer atmosphere—”

  “My heavens, Mac,” I said, “you mean . . . ? Oh, it’s horrible, it’s horrible!”

  But however we felt, the thing had to be faced. If we had kept Nuna with us, the gases of his decomposition in the strong air of the cabin would have poisoned us all. As it was, with no air to continue the process of decay, he traveled there in space, a few yards away from us, in the same state of preservation as when we put him o
ut. It was impossible to believe he was moving at all—he seemed motionless, just outside the window, staring in at us, as it were, with his glazed jelly-fish eyes.

  And so he remained. As our journey neared its end I told myself I would not look through the port-hole to watch the inevitable happen—and yet I knew, in my heart, that I would. When we were within the gravity pull of earth, and were preparing for the landing, with its bout of unconsciousness, I lay on the bed with my head on one side, staring out at the still figure of the little Martian. My heart was beating, I remember, and I trembled.

  The end, when it came, was very sudden. And it was—and it is the only word, in spite of all the unpleasant associations of the thing—very beautiful too.

  Mac looked at me significantly.

  “It’s almost time, Steve,” he said quietly.

  And a moment of two after that, it happened. For a diminutive fraction of a second the figure of Nuna glowed absolutely incandescent—every fiber of his tendrils, his whole outline, burned with unbelievable brilliance against the darkness of space. Only for a flash—and then . . . he was gone! Where he had been, there was nothing.

  Our last contact with Mars had gone. Perhaps, on earth, some dreamer gazing skywards had seen, that night, a brief trail of fire—a shooting star, as he would think, gone out of his knowledge almost before he had time to register it. . . .