Stowaway to Mars

by John Wyndham

  The second repulse was almost a duplication of the first.

  ‘It’s easy. We’ll be all right as long as the shots and the air hold out,’ he decided, ‘but God knows what’s happened to Joan.’

  Joan’s captor sped over the desert with scarcely a sound save the scraping of its metal feet on the coarse sand and an occasional clink as they struck fragments of stone. Only the faintest low-pitched hum told of the machinery at work within the casing; machinery which was acting with a flawless accuracy and judgment beyond the capacity of any animal creation. Not once did it hesitate and not once did it err in placing the six hurrying legs. The smooth, relentless perfection of its progress over the rough ground was uncanny; every climb and every descent was made without a suggestion of a slip or stumble.

  After her first shock she had struggled desperately, but, held as she was, it was impossible for her to reach the pocket where her pistol lay. In her panic she battered on the casing until her hands became sore even in their thick gloves, but upon the machine it had no effect whatever. After that, she relapsed into a fatalistic acceptance of the situation. At the rate they had travelled it would take her hours to find her way back over the desert. As far as she could, she resigned herself to face whatever fate the machine intended for her.

  Once in the journey she had caught sight of a group of machines to the west: and they had seen her captor, too. They came scuttering awkwardly but speedily to investigate. Her machine swerved and put on speed. It left them behind easily. But the sight of them bewildered her even as, had she known it, a similar sight was bewildering Dale and the rest. The queer, distorted mechanisms which she had glimpsed did not fit in at all with the logical world she had pictured. And her machine had avoided them as if it were-well, afraid was obviously a foolish word to apply to a machine, but it had certainly made off with a speedy discretion, not dropping back to its earlier pace until they were out of sight. Was it one of such things, she wondered, which had so narrowly missed her in the bushes? The sun sank, and a brief twilight quickly gave way to a star-pricked darkness. It was strange to gaze up and see the stars looking again as they had looked from Earth: twinkling points in a bed of darkest blue, no longer flaring sparks in the utter blackness of space. The fading of the daylight seemed to have no effect upon the machine’s judgment, for their pace was undiminished. Daylight, darkness or, subsequently, the cold deceptive rays of the Martian moons made no difference to its accuracy. But into Joan’s mind that moonlight, flooding across the waste of shining sand and throwing clear-cut purple shadows beneath the rocks, drove still deeper the sense of desolation and decay.

  It seemed to her that already they had been travelling for several hours, but there was no sign that this nightmare journey would ever finish; she began to fear that, for her, it would end in the air in her pack giving out. She would die, gasping for breath, and this metal monster would go rushing on across the desert, bearing only her corpse. She had not thought to ask Dale how long the air would last, and every moment became haunted by the fear that she might even now be drawing her last breath. Then, like a sudden message to rouse her out of her despondency, there came the glint of lights somewhere ahead. They showed only for a few seconds before the next rise blotted them out, but they gave her new hope. She thanked God that something somewhere on Mars had need of artificial light….

  A few more miles of desert fell behind and the machine’s feet began to click upon a hard, level surface. A high, black bulk rose in front of them, cutting an increasing patch of darkness in the moonlit sky. The machine held straight on into the shadows. Tall walls reared up on either hand, shutting them into a trench of darkness. The sky overhead was suddenly blotted out. Of the lights she had seen there was now no trace. Not the faintest glimmer broke the pressing blackness. Yet there was a pervading sense of movement all about, of things which were stirring close by in a gloom which her frightened eyes tried in vain to penetrate. From time to time something would brush gently against her in passing and in her ears was a continuous pattering of metal upon stone, but try as she would, she could discern no more than an occasional deeper darkness-as likely as not, a trick of her straining eyes.

  Then, at last, she saw the lights again. A turn brought them face to face with a tall building, its facade studded with glowing windows. At ground level a large open doorway poured a fan-shaped beam over the open space in front. By its light she was able to see a number of machines, similar to that which held her, hurrying to and fro. Without a pause she was hurried into a group of several others which was approaching the doorway. Just across the threshold she was set down. A few metallic sounds issued from her machine’s speaker, then it was gone, scurrying away into the outside darkness. A moment later massive doors slid together, cutting off all hope of escape.

  Joan, stiff and giddy from her imprisonment in the constricting tentacles, leaned weakly against the wall while her circulation painfully restored itself. She looked about her with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The room was some thirty feet square, bare and cold.

  Two sides of it were formed of smoothly dressed, reddish stone, another by the doors through which she had entered, and the fourth, opposite them, by a pair of similar doors. For company she had some half-dozen of the six-legged machines. None of them paid any attention to her, and when after an apparently purposeless interval, the doors on the far side opened, they at once scurried busily away. Joan followed, wonderingly.

  Her first impression was of a city of light within the city of darkness-an impression which, she was to find later, fell but little short of the truth. She entered a vast circular hall filled with light from sources which she could not detect. The high roof was slightly domed and must, she thought, have been fully three hundred feet above her at its centre. The width of the place was fully twice its height. Broad balconies, interconnected in some places by staircases and in others by slopes, circled the walls at even intervals. From them arched openings led back into unseen passages or rooms. Round the ground-floor level a series of similar though larger arches was spaced, and between them in constant streams moved machines seeming perpetually in a hurry. She watched them a while as they passed, some burdened, others with their tentacles coiled in rest, but all moving at a constant speed upon their unguessable errands. The only sounds were the scuttering shuffle of their feet and the aggregate purring of the instruments within the casings. She watched them with a kind of absent wonder, at a loss to know what she should do next. The object which had driven her on to the Gloria Mundi had been accomplished. Now that she was free of the tentacles her fear of the machines had subsided, but she felt stranded and forlorn. She wondered why they had brought her here, but because they were machines they were alien, and their motives were likely to be un-understandable. She was tempted to accost one and make it understand what she wanted. But what did she want? Not, certainly, to be carried back across those miles of desert with an ever-increasing fear of her air giving out….

  Then, abruptly, her decision was taken out of her hands. A touch on her arm caused her to turn, and she found herself face to face, not with a machine, but with a man.

  For several seconds she stared at him without moving. So far from wearing protective clothing, he was clad only in a pair of kilted shorts made from some gleaming material and fastened about his waist by a worked metal belt. His skin was of a reddish tinge, his chest broad and deep, and he was but little taller than herself. His head, beneath its covering of black hair, was of quite unusual size, and the ears, though they were not unsightly and grew closely, were decidedly bigger than those of any Earthman. The rest of his features were unusual only for the fineness of their formation without suggesting weakness and their regularity without loss of character. The eyes were dark and yet penetrating. They seemed to suggest a faint long melancholy, yet they were not truly sad. A queer creature, she thought, but with a kind of charm…. Then, as she watched, there came a slight crinkling at the corners of the eyes and a friendly smile about
his mouth. She never again thought of him as a ‘queer creature’….

  He lifted one hand and signed that she should take off the oxygen mask, but she hesitated. It might be safe enough for him, but her lung capacity could scarcely compare with that beneath his great chest. He repeated the sign insistently, pointing back towards the doors through which she had come. It occurred to her for the first time that the purpose of the double doors must have been that of an airlock. She lifted her mask experimentally. It seemed all right; moreover, as she breathed with out its assistance she realised that the air was not only denser within the building, but warmed. She slipped the mask right off with a sigh of relief. It became the man’s turn to stare, and hers to return the friendly smile. He spoke. She guessed that he was using the same language as the machines, but his voice was full and pleasing. She shook her head, still smiling, but it was clear that the gesture was as unfamiliar to him as his words were to her. She ripped open the fastener of her suit impatiently and felt in her pockets. No pencil nor pen, but among other femininities almost unused during the voyage she found a lipstick: that would have to serve. She crouched down and explained her difficulty in carmine characters on the floor. The man understood: he took the lipstick from her and wrote an instruction for her to follow him.

  Chapter 18. Newcomers

  The sun sank lower and the shadows stretched long distorted fingers across the desert as though the powers of darkness were reaching out to grasp the land. Desert and sky were repainted by the reddened glow, and even the bushes to the west lost for a few short minutes their dreary reality and underwent a fiery glorification. Presently the last arc sank below their tops; a few fugitive red gleams escaped between the swaying branches, and then night came. Through their padded suits the men from the Gloria Mundi felt something of the chill which crept across the Martian sands.

  Four times the rank of machines had made a suicidal advance, and four times it had retreated to re-equip itself with parts of the fallen. Now it stood inactive, but ominous; a line of grotesque shapes in dim silhouette against the darkening sky.

  The situation was telling on the four men. The very inhumanity of their enemies, their uncanniness and, above all, their unknown potentialities made it impossible for them to maintain the front they might have shown to normal dangers. Their minds seemed to alternate between contempt for mere undirected mechanism, and an exaggerated fear of it. The predicament was getting on their nerves.

  ‘Damn the things,’ muttered the doctor. ‘I believe they know we’re caught.

  They’re only machines. They don’t need food and drink, and if they need air at all, they’ve got enough. Standing there like that, using no fuel whatever their fuel may be they’re good for a century if they like. We’ve got to move sooner or later and, damn them, they know we’ve got to move.’

  ‘No good getting the wind up,’ Dale advised curtly. ‘We can last a good many hours yet. Something may happen before then.’

  Froud agreed. ‘A planet capable of producing things like that is capable of making anything happen. How long is the night in these parts?’

  ‘Not much longer than at home. We’re pretty near the equator.’

  The first moon, Deimos, slid up from the ragged horizon, and the sand turned silver beneath it. The polished hull of the ship glittered under it, seeming tantalisingly close, but the rank of machines also gleamed, drawn across the way. The moonlight seemed to invest the metal shapes with a harsher relentlessness, and the sharp shadows it cast from them were even more uncouth than the originals. The men lay silent, each racking his brains for a plan. Nearly two hours passed, and the night be came brighter still.

  ‘Lord, isn’t that glorious?’ Froud said.

  The second moon, the smaller Phobos, raced up the sky, rushing to overtake Deimos. They looked up at it.

  ‘What a speed! You can see it go.’

  Dugan was the least impressed.

  ‘You’d show speed, too, if you had to do the round trip in seven and a half hours,’ he said practically.

  Dale rose suddenly to his feet.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to make a break for it. You can cover me. Those machines must have packed up for the night. They’ve not moved since before sunset.’

  But he was wrong. He had gone less than a dozen yards before the rank stirred, clanking faintly in the thin air. He hesitated and advanced a further couple of paces.

  ‘Come back,’ Dugan called. ‘You’ll never be able to rush it at that distance.’

  Dale recognised the truth of it. Even with the increased speed and agility which Mars gave he would not stand a chance of escaping all the tentacles which would grope for him. He turned reluctantly and came slowly back.

  Phobos overtook its fellow moon and disappeared. Before long Deimos had followed it round to the other side of the world. In the succeeding dimness the machines were scarcely distinguishable. The four men depended on their ears to give them the first warning of movement, but there was nothing to hear save the faint singing of the wind stirred sand. They began to suffer from hunger and thirst particularly thirst. The small quantities of water in their bottles had long ago given out, and their only food, hard cakes of chocolate, had increased their desire for drink. More than an hour passed without anyone speaking.

  ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ Dale said at last. ‘We shall have to do the attacking. If our ammunition holds out we may have a chance, if it doesn’t, well, it can’t be as bad as what will happen if we stay here. The orders will be: “Shoot for their lenses, and keep clear of their tentacles”.’

  In his own mind he had not much doubt that he was suggesting the impossible, but with a choice between a quick end and lingering asphyxiation he preferred the former both for himself and for his men.

  ‘You, Dugan and Froud, take the sides.’

  ‘Wait a minute! What’s that?’ The doctor held his head a little on one side, listening. The others caught the sound. A deep throbbing, growing momentarily louder. They placed it somewhere beyond the canal. Evidently the diaphragms of the machines had picked it up too. The line could be seen faintly stirring.

  Low in the western sky a gleam of red light became visible. The throbbing grew quickly to a thunderous roar. Dugan was the first to see the effect on the machines. He looked down in time to see them scampering for the cover of the bushes.

  ‘Now’s our chance,’ he cried, and with the others behind him he ran down that side of the Sandhill which was closest to the Gloria Mundi.

  The noise from the sky became a crashing, deafening din. Whatever was up there seemed to be making straight for them. Dale and Froud flung themselves flat on the sand with their hands clamped over their ears, and a moment later the other two did the same. The whole world seemed to be cracking and trembling with a noise which split the very sky asunder. Louder and yet louder until noise could be no louder. A sheet of flame like a long fiery banner trailed across the sky bathed the desert with a queer, unnatural light. There was a tremor of the ground. Abruptly the noise stopped, leaving behind it a shocking silence. A scorching breath as hot as a flame itself swept over the sand. A rush of cooler air followed, raising a miniature sandstorm. Froud rolled over on his side, blinking at Dale through the dust. Dale was temporarily deaf from the uproar, and though he saw Froud’s mouth moving, he could hear nothing. But he guessed the question.

  ‘That,’ he bawled back, ‘was another rocket.’

  Dale looked out of the window. The other rocket lay perhaps two miles away, her after part just visible above the curve of a Sandhill.

  ‘But where the devil can she have come from?’ he asked at large for approximately the tenth time.

  The four of them were safely back in the living room. The Gloria Mundi was intact. The machines they had seen moving about her had either been unable to open her or uninquisitive enough to be satisfied with an exterior examination. In her crew, curiosity about the new arrival was warring with a desire for sleep. In any case th
ey must wait before finding out more, for the oxygen cylinders needed recharging a process which would normally have been Burns’ job, but which now fell to Dugan.

  ‘Heaven knows,’ said Froud. ‘Bigger than the G.M., isn’t she?’

  ‘Difficult to tell. She may be nearer than she looks. Distance is so damned deceptive here.’

  The doctor joined them.

  ‘What next?’ he asked. ‘Do we look for Joan, or do we investigate the stranger?’

  Dale frowned. ‘If we had any clue at all, I’d say look for her, but as it is, what can we do? We’ve not the slightest idea what happened to her, we daren’t split up to search, in fact we can’t even risk searching all four of us together. Honestly, I don’t think there’s much hope.’

  ‘I see.’ The doctor nodded slowly. ‘You think she’s gone the way Burns went?’

  ‘Something like that, I’m afraid.’

  They all stared out over the inhospitable desert, avoiding one another’s eyes.

  ‘A very brave lady. I’m glad she was right,’ said the doctor.

  There was a long pause before Froud said, with unwanted diffidence:

  ‘May I suggest that rather than investigate the stranger, as Doc puts it, we let the stranger investigate us? To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to feel that this place is far less healthy than we suppose; certainly it’s not as empty as we thought, and it seems to me that if anyone is to be caught in the open either by the machines returning or by anything else that may show up, it would be better if it were the other fellows.’

  Dale hesitated. He was actively anxious to find out more about the other rocket, yet Froud had made a point.

  ‘You think the machines will come back?’

  ‘If the arrival of one rocket interested them, the arrival of two should interest them still more,’ Froud fancied. The doctor supported him

  ‘I don’t see that we are justified in exposing ourselves to unnecessary risks. After all, our trip here will have been of no use to anyone if we don’t make the trip back again.’