Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘If that is a fair specimen of their architecture, I don’t think much of it.’

  ‘Be patient,’ Carmen said. ‘That warren houses only these brute types. The place to which we are being taken may be very different.’

  They could see now why the trolley had zigzagged so erratically when bringing them to the giants’ warren the previous night. At intervals of every few hundred yards the parched, red-brown earth was severed by great cracks, and some of these dangerous crevasses were a hundred feet long by ten feet wide. Evidently they had been brought across country, for the track on which they were running now was as smooth as a billiard table and, except in places where drifts of sand had blown across it, showed an actual polish which could only have been acquired through constant and prolonged use.

  The sky made an inverted bowl of fleckless pale blue, broken only about twelve degrees above one horizon by a sun so glaring that it was difficult to look at, and, nearly overhead, by a single Saucer. They had no means of estimating the Saucer’s size or altitude. Owing to the extraordinary clarity of the atmosphere it appeared to be quite low down, but nevertheless, they had a feeling that it was many miles up; and if that were so it must be of the same type as the great 500-foot-wide space-ship that had created such excitement over Fort Knox.

  After the trolley had carried them about a mile, Kem asked Escobar, ‘Have you any idea how this trolley works?’

  ‘By magnetism, I suppose,’ replied the scientist briefly. ‘I know of no other force which could keep the balls on which it runs from careering away in all directions instead of remaining in contact with the grooves in its under-surface.’

  On topping a low ridge a new flat vista opened out, but in the distance a belt of greenery broke the monotony of the arid waste. As they approached they saw that it stretched from horizon to horizon and that here and there groups of figures protruded waist-high above it. The figures were soon distinguishable as giants and the vegetation as row upon row of some plant that was uniform in height, colour and appearance. The track entered the plantation and continued in a dead straight line across it.

  ‘Beans!’ exclaimed Kem disgustedly as he got a nearer view of the plants. ‘Look, there must be thousands of tons here and those awful brutes are harvesting them.’

  As the trolley passed, the groups of giants paused in their work to stare at its passengers. Many of the monsters were children and females, but the latter were distinguishable from the males only through being somewhat shorter and having breasts the size of pumpkins. Both sexes were naked, bald, wore eye protectors, and had reddish hair flaring out from their nostrils. The children and young ones ranged from six to eighteen feet in height. They could easily be picked out by their skinny, undeveloped figures; but they neither laughed nor frolicked as human youngsters would have done while helping their parents in the fields. Until the trolley approached them, old and young alike seemed completely absorbed in their toil.

  They were picking the beans into big floppy baskets of the same colour and texture as the mats under which the captives had spent the night, which, as could be seen, was woven bean fibre. Here and there trolleys, on which the monsters presumably came to work, were parked and some of them were loaded with baskets of beans, but there was no other evidence of mechanisation.

  At a speed of about forty-five miles an hour the trolley rolled smoothly on through the bean-fields, until its passengers sighted what they took to be a solid barrier some twelve feet in height across the road ahead. As they neared the object at reduced speed they saw it was a covered way, crossing the road at right angles and extending to either side of it as far as the eye could see. In form it resembled a huge drain-pipe, the lower half of which was buried in the earth, and its convex upper surface shining brightly in the sun. But it did not prove to be a barrier, as it was spanned by a parapetless bridge, the ramps of which were made of the same material, and so not perceptible until the trolley was within a hundred yards of it. As they shot up the short slope and ran down the other side, Escobar murmured:

  ‘That must be one of their canals.’

  ‘Or a huge drain,’ suggested Kem.

  ‘No; they don’t seem to have any sewers. That was a canal all right. You may be sure they would have built covers for them all to protect them from the sun, and so reduce to a minimum the loss of water by evaporation.’

  ‘I simply can’t understand it,’ Carmen said. ‘How could anyone resembling these primitive brutes possibly know about such things, or achieve great feats of engineering like that miles-long pipe, and the Saucers?’

  ‘Why not?’ replied her husband. ‘If you were shown the skeleton of a man like Einstein and another of a cave-dweller I doubt if you would be able to tell which was which. Anyhow, it seems probable that these two are about to deliver us to whoever gave the orders that samples of humans should be brought from Earth; so, with luck, we shall learn the answer to the riddle.’

  On the far side of the great conduit there were more bean-fields to a depth of several miles, with more groups of giants labouring tirelessly in them. Carmen waved to some of them, but they made no reponnse and looked up only for a few moments to stare at the trolley as it passed.

  Seven or eight minutes later it emerged from the bean-fields and entered another area of desert. Here again there were only harsh brown rock and parched reddish sand, split in places by long, jagged crevasses. There was no form of life to be seen anywhere, and they commented on it as, even in the bean-fields, they had not seen anything resembling cattle, poultry, a dog or a rabbit, but only a few small birds hovering, on the look-out for dropped beans, over the groups of pickers.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they have exterminated all the other species in order to save the water they would consume,’ Kem suggested.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Escobar agreed. ‘Water is the key to every form of luxury; and as these people are vegetarians, keeping either wild or tame animals alive would certainly be one of them. To manufacture nearly everything also requires the use of water, and there can be no doubt that its scarcity accounts for the exceptionally hard conditions which we have so far had to share with the slave race of Mars.’

  He had hardly finished speaking before they were confronted with another phenomenon, which was to make life on Mars for them still harder.

  15

  The Great Revelation

  One moment the desert had been still and empty. The next what looked like a small eddy of sand appeared on the horizon. With incredible swiftness it gained in bulk and height, until it became a huge whirling dust-devil. Towering to the sky, it came swooping down on them with the speed of a race-horse. Before they had time to grasp its full significance the whole desert was in a ferment. Winds of extraordinary force screamed through the wilderness, tearing the loose sand from the ground as they passed and hurling dense clouds of it in all directions. The blue sky turned to yellow; a reddish fog seemed to rise from the earth; the light faded; the sun showed for a few moments as a hard-rimmed orange ball, then was blotted out. Black night descended and, in it, every perception was banished except that of howling wind and stinging, blinding, choking, driven sand.

  Escobar shouted a belated warning, then threw himself flat with his arms wrapped round his head. Kem pulled Carmen down beside him, so that her face was pressed to his chest and his own buried in the fur of her coat. The trolley slackened speed but did not stop. Through the raging, pitiless sandstorm it continued on its way.

  Kem wondered how its driver could possible continue to control it; then he remembered the eye protectors that the giants always wore, and with which they had also provided their captives that morning. Evidently the dust-storms on Mars must be so frequent, and arise with such suddenness, that it had long been customary for everyone to go about in them.

  He was now most thankful that he had made no attempt to prevent one being affixed to his own face; as the driven sand penetrated everywhere, and his eyes alone were kept free from it by a transparen
t mask. The sand stung his hands and forehead, rustled sharply through his wind-blown hair, was borne on swift gusts up the openings of his trouser legs and down the the back of his neck. Firmly as he kept his face pressed to Carmen’s coat, it somehow forced a way through the fur into his mouth and nostrils every time he took a breath.

  It was as he attempted to spit out the sand that was forming a film upon his teeth, and to clear his nose by snorting down it, that he recalled the fans of hair that sprouted from the giants’ nostrils. The reason for them was now obvious. Through the course of many generations Nature must have caused them to develop and become a normal feature of the species, for use as an air filter and protection against suffocation during sandstorms.

  When, some ten minutes later, the trolley halted, its passengers were half-choked and half-stupefied. The violence of the storm had lessened slightly, but it was still blowing gustily, and the air continued to be so thick with particles that it was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. In consequence, they could form no idea of the outer appearance of the place to which they had been brought.

  They knew only that, gasping for breath, they were lifted off the trolley, carried a short distance, and pushed into what seemed to be a hole in another cliff-face. A tunnel lay before them that was lighted at its far end, but it was less than a third of the height and breadth of the tunnel into the giants’ warren. They could stand upright in it comfortably, but the two giants, who followed them in, had to crawl down it on their hands and knees.

  At the end of the tunnel the air was comparatively clear. Breathing more easily, they looked about them and saw that, unlike the chamber in which they had passed the night, its walls were smooth and highly polished. Urged on by the giant behind them, they turned left along another tunnel that ran at right angles to the one down which they had come. It was from the second tunnel that the light had penetrated, and they now saw that it came from three Thinking Lights that floated some way along it near the ceiling. At intervals on both sides were doorless archways, varying in height from three to five feet, but none of the rooms beyond them was lit; so nothing could be seen of them except a small area of highly polished stone floor just inside each arch.

  As they advanced, the Lights flitted through an archway about thirty feet ahead of them, and somewhat larger than any they had yet seen. Proceeding through semi-darkness again, they reached the now glowing arch; then the giant was crawling along in the rear pushed them through it. Beyond was a long, rather narrow room, about ten feet in height. Its walls and floor were of smooth stone and spotlessly clean. It was lit only by the three Thinking Lights, which now hovered at its far end, and was empty but for one thing; yet that one thing had a curious effect upon them. At the sight of it their hearts beat a little faster from the momentary feeling that they were back on Earth again. Very nearly the whole of the wall at the end of the chamber where the Lights hovered was occupied by what might have been a cinema screen.

  They had hardly taken in their surroundings when the three Lights dived down behind the screen, plunging the room in shadow except for a bright band of light which, coming from behind the screen, illuminated the strip of ceiling above it. The screen itself, however, remained unlit. In the meantime, on hands and knees, the two giants had followed their captives through the arch. As the room was nowhere near lofty enough for them to stand upright in it, they squatted down with their backs against the wall and their heads nearly touching the ceiling.

  Curiosity having overcome every other feeling, Kem and his companions looked eagerly about them, wondering what was going to happen next. The room in which they were, and the corridors of this underground habitation, being so much nearer to human proportions than those of the giants’ warren, they were hoping that some being approaching their own size and mentality would soon appear through the archway; but for several minutes nothing happened at all. Then the screen lit up and, without any preliminaries, a roving picture appeared on it.

  The picture was very sharp, in black and white, and had obviously been taken from an aircraft that was circling above the scene portrayed; but it conveyed nothing of any special significance to its audience. Neither, at first, did others which followed it at short intervals. Each of them lasted for only a few minutes, and they were all variations of two themes. Some were of ancient, mud-walled cities; the others of great terrestrial upheavals, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. That they were shots of Earth seemed certain, but there was nothing about them to indicate any recognisable part of it. A few were momentarily exciting, as they combined the two themes: showing densely populated metropolises dissolving into ruin through fire and flood, or small ships being whirled about, then engulfed by great tidal waves; but none of them lasted long enough to tell a story.

  This strange, disjointed travelogue had been proceeding for over half an hour when a shot was shown of a flattopped pyramid with a broad ramp running round it from it’s base to its summit. Pointing at it Kem said, ‘I’ve seen pictures like that of the star-gazing towers built by the Chaldeans.’

  Escobar nodded. ‘And that’s probably what it is. It seems fantastic, but I believe all these shots were taken of actual happenings on earth that occurred thousands of years ago.’

  After a scene of a tropical island fringed with palm trees suddenly being submerged in a boiling, steaming sea, his belief was confirmed. The shot that followed was unquestionably of the Great Pyramid, for the Sphinx could be seen nearby.

  From that point their interest quickened, as they guessed then that they were being shown a potted history of the development of civilisation on Earth, interspersed with visible records of the great calamities that had befallen its peoples. They recognised Alexandria as it must have been in its heyday by the Pharaohs and Lake Meotis, and Athens crowned by her Acropolis. Shots that they thought were probably of Carthage and Syracuse followed, then one that Escobar identified by the Forum, the Capitol and the splendid buildings on the Palatine Hill as the Rome of the Caesars. Next came Vesuvius in eruption, with the lava pouring down its sides to engulf the terror-stricken people of Herculaneum, who could be seen as tiny dots fleeing from it. Pompeii was also shown, but showers of floating ashes obscured the final phase of its destruction.

  From time to time the series moved to Central America or the Far East, to show the great temples of the Incas, the pyramids of the Aztecs, the Boro Budur in Java and the triumphs of architecture achieved during the long-dead civilisation that had produced the Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

  They were brought back to mediaeval Paris, renaissance Venice, and London being consumed by the Great Fire. There were more shots of tidal waves and eruptions, apparently in Asia, Africa and America, then one that Escobar thought must be of the terrible earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755.

  So fascinated were they by watching this extraordinary review that they gave no thought to time, but it had been going on for the best part of three hours when the pictures taken in comparatively modern times began to be shown. The ascent of a balloon—they thought from Paris about the time of the Revolution—marked the beginning of a new era. There were others, including one from Hyde Park in which the Crystal Palace erected there for the great exhibition of 1851 could be seen. A shot of New York, showing its first skyscrapers, was followed by a close-up of an early dirigible. After the San Francisco earthquake came various types of airships and the first aeroplanes.

  From then on progress in aeronautics became the main theme. Zeppelins had been recorded flying over their great base on Lake Geneva, and the smoke of a battle in the First World War with aeroplanes fighting above it. The types of airliner used in the nineteen-twenties and thirties followed, then the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940. Unknown to its personnel, the armada that had sailed from Britain to North Africa had been photographed more clearly than was yet possible with lenses made on earth; and, as though moving with them, the little audience saw the flying bombs falling on London.

  None of them had spoken
for a long time when Escobar exclaimed, ‘Nom de Dios! That’s Peenemünde, where I worked for the Germans during the War,’ and from a group of carefully camouflaged buildings they saw an experimental long-range rocket go hurtling up into the stratosphere.

  The next shot was of the devastation caused at Hiroshima by the first Atom bomb. Apparently no Martians had been about when it was dropped, but their cameras had caught the second one, at Nagasaki, and registered from various angles the huge mushroom of dirt and debris it had thrown up. They had also been present at Bikini, and had since secured photographs of the principal rocket testing-grounds, although there was nothing to show which were in the United States and which in Russia, or elsewhere.

  For another ten minutes the audience was shown the latest types of aircraft, both civil and military, and a number of the latter fighting over Korea. Then, for them, the film came nearer home. A distant view of Escobar’s plant dissolved into a close-up. Next moment all three of them gasped. By some scientific wizardry a photograph had been taken through the roof of one of the buildings. They were looking down into Escobar’s private laboratory; and there he was in it, fingering one point of his upturned moustache as he studied a graph pinned to the wall.

  On that the show ended, although it was not to be the last of their surprises for that day.

  Kem was the first to speak, and he grinned at the others. ‘Well! Even if it was a documentary, I’ve never seen a better five bob’s worth.’

  ‘I think the way these people have been spying on us is disgusting,’ Carmen declared emphatically.