The Red Journey Back

by John Keir Cross

  I waited a little longer. On the plain outside there still hovered an occasional drifting wisp of Cloud, speeding low-lyingly. One or two of the big cactus plants were yellowly tinged for a moment; but gradually the clinging spores seemed to detach themselves and make off. The same had happened to the thinning film of them which had clung to our rocket windows—as if they were spies, indeed, peering inward—exploring the mysteries of the strange shape on the plain.

  So at last—very cautiously at first, lest there might be a trap, lest even some poisonous effect from the Cloud still lingered—I prepared to leave the rocket. I lowered myself slowly down the small metallic rope ladder, my free hand ready at the oxygen-control switch of my mask, if there should be any breathing difficulty. But all was well. On the ground I very gently exposed for a moment a small skin area at my wrist—waited for any sign of irritation—then joyously, when I felt no effect at all, took off both gloves and ventured to remove my mask altogether.

  For a moment I stayed silent, then called out, “Mac—Mac—where are you, Mac?”

  And my voice went thinly, dispersingly, across the vast silent plain.

  I called again, took a step forward—and found myself instantly rolling clumsily over the shifting red soil a good twenty feet from the rocket. I had forgotten again the weaker gravitational pull! (The actual ratio to the Earth’s gravity pull is in the nature of .38), as I remember from our previous experiments: thus, a man weighing 150 pounds on Earth would weigh only 57 on Mars, yet be muscularly equipped to move his full 150. . . .

  I steadied myself—called again—ventured farther and farther from the rocket in the direction I assumed Mac might have taken when he seemed to have been snatched into the Cloud.

  Then suddenly, as I stumbled forward, still unaccustomed a little to the different gravitational conditions, I became aware—more and more powerfully aware—of a strange urge to change direction, to move obliquely to the right. It was as if I knew, entirely confidently, that I would find him there; and, at the very moment of turning in my tracks, the solution broke over me: the plants—the clustering groups of the cactus plants on all sides—they were guiding me!

  We had landed on a different part of the planet, many, many miles from the site of our previous landing. In spite of all our careful calculations, our attempt to revisit the home territory of the Malu group of the Beautiful People, that had been inevitable. But nevertheless, as we afterward discovered, the plants here knew us—or knew of us; for we had grown, it seemed, in the interval between the two trips, to some kind of legend among these strange sentient creatures: we were the “strangers from across the skies”—the friends of the plant masters, the Beautiful People.

  You will know that the static, leathery cactus plants of the Martian plains are too primitive to be capable of coherent thought. From them, either to us or to the Beautiful Ones, there come only general impulses of a telepathic nature—broad messages of danger, of discovery, of disturbance and the like. The Beautiful People themselves are much more highly developed. They had, in the distant past, uprooted themselves from the enchaining soil—and so are capable of movement on the clustering tendrils at the base of their slender trunks, in a broad resemblance to walking or shuffling. They had also developed their original sensitivity to light. (Many Earth plants are noticeably sensitive to light—the sunflower, for an example—and many can move on detached root tendrils—the iris, the convolvulus, even the humble vegetable marrow.) So, after many years of evolution, certain cellular areas near the “flower” on the top of the Martian trunk stem have become virtually “eyes.” And the smaller side tendrils, like the snaky “arms” of an octopus, have been developed so as to be able to grasp and hold external objects, like weapons. Thus, the Beautiful People have a physical resemblance, although only distantly, to the human frame itself; and, like us, they have a tradition, a science—they have a whole way of life not without its alien beauty. . . .

  But this is an unwarranted digression. Now, under the impulse of the crude directions from the more primitive cactus plants, I leaped and ran joyously across the plain; and found my friend at last—broken, sick unto the very death.

  I thought at first that he was dead when I saw him huddled in the shelter of one of the taller plant clusters. I had the impression, as I leaped forward, that he had positively been sheltered there—had been caught in his flight in the Cloud by the great writhing fingerlike leaves of this group of Martian plants, and so had fallen to the ground and been protected from the evil onslaught of the yellow spores. And this I later found to be correct. . . .

  I carried him back to the Albatross—it was an easy enough task with my increased strength and his diminished weight.

  I tended him—brought him back to life. For many, many days—I lost all count—he lay motionless in the little cabin, staring sightlessly straight ahead. Once or twice he talked incoherently, and in a soft, barely audible voice. And as time went on I formed the impression that he was reliving a kind of dream, a kind of communicated vision which had come into his mind as he had been swept along enwrapped in the evil spore cloud. The one word that kept recurring was: Discophora. Over and over again he muttered it, shudderingly. It was as if a coherent picture of some kind had built itself up within his head, communicated by the trillions of hurrying spores—for they too, like all else on Mars, perhaps had certain broad telepathic powers. He might even have “seen,” in his mind’s eye, something of the source of emanation of the Cloud itself.

  “Discophora—discophora . . .”

  And one day—suddenly—it recurred to me that as a scientific man he always thought and spoke in scientific terms. We had even joked about it in the past—his habit of referring even to the simple rabbit of the Pitlochry Hills as lepus cuniculus, for example.

  Hastily I searched through his small library of scientific books in the cabin.

  I found it—yet it made little sense, except for one small particular.

  Discophora: the common jellyfish; a hydromedusan or some similar coelenterate; sea-jelly; sunfish. They consist of a whitish, translucent, jellylike substance. Their tentacles bear stinging cells, the effect of which is to benumb, if not kill, any living creature which they touch. . . .

  It made little sense indeed—except for that one strange particular. Before me, on the mattress on which he had slept during the long interplanetary journey, was a living creature indeed benumbed—blinded—stunned to mental helplessness by some deadly stinging agency. And I remembered my own brief physical sufferings from the flying particles before I managed to close the cabin doors. . . .

  I shuddered and set the book aside. And for a moment it was as if I too had a sudden vision, conveyed to me perhaps from the obsessed mind in the cabin with me, of a gigantic nightmare white jelly, swaying and quivering against a dark tortuous background of . . . of what?

  One word more Mac uttered in those first days of his illness. One day he raised himself suddenly, his blinded eyes staring in sudden awe and terror—but with a strange triumph in them too, a triumph I had seen in his healthy eyes many times before when he had made some startling, half-instinctive discovery.

  “The Brain,” he cried. “Discophora! The Brain—the Brain!”

  There is no way in which I can describe the potent menace he managed to convey in his tone.

  The time went on. We had enough food in the cabin for many months if necessary. Gradually, as the days passed, my patient came back to physical health at least, if not yet full mental awareness. But there were signs of improvement even in this direction too.

  I seldom ventured outside the rocket—there was no purpose in doing so until Mac should be capable of full movement with me. You who listen to me across the interminable void can have no far notion of the desolate loneliness of those long, long weeks of utter isolation. I was alone in an alien world with a sick, a desperately sick man. The very silence was a source of nightmare—I longed even for one of the rare Martian storms to break it, for at least
an eruption, however dangerous, from one of the great volcanoes in the distant mountain ranges.

  It was at this time, while I mooned haplessly in the little cabin, that I formed the first wild idea perhaps to make contact with you, my dear John, on distant Earth. The notion was not so fantastic as it may at first appear. It was something that Mac had been contemplating quite seriously, even at the time of our first Martian visit. In the course of his researches among the foothills, he had discovered vast seams of a curious kind of mineral deposit which he suspected to be radioactive in a manner not known upon Earth—in no way dangerously, as in the case of atomic radioactivity. . . . It is not possible—or even necessary—for me to explain more in the course of the present narrative; we can discuss it later—we may even, if we ever meet again (God grant that it may be so!), be able to talk about it face to face. For the moment, the fact remains that we have achieved contact, as you know; at our end here, through the agency of one of those very exposed mineral seams I have mentioned—a great directional aerial, as it were, beaming our messages to you—and picked up by its equivalent, your friend Mackellar’s airstrip.

  It was, as I say, in those early days of our return that I first had the notion to explore further the possibilities of such communication—of experimenting at least with some of the complex radio mechanisms which Mac had brought with us in the rocket. I realized that I would have to wait until he himself had further recovered from his illness before any true attempt could be made, for he knew infinitely more of such scientific subjects than I . . . but I did at least spend much time in research among the books of his small library, and even studied his own fairly comprehensive notes on the subject.

  And it was one morning when I was sitting in the sunshine beside the rocket, examining those notes, that our long period of loneliness came to an end.

  Poor Mac was beside me—he had recovered sufficiently to be able to descend the ladder and take the sun in the little hollow in which the Albatross rested. He had been sitting very quietly for a long time, staring as always straight ahead of him; but suddenly he gave a small strange cry—rose up to his feet with an expression of pleasure such as I had never hoped to see on his face again.

  I rose also—followed the direction of his sightless gaze. His arms were outstretched as if in welcome—he moved forward unsteadily across the sandy floor of the saucer.

  I saw nothing—was aware of nothing beyond a curious inner excitement in my mind, a sense of waiting—of forthcoming pleasure indeed.

  For a long moment nothing happened. I prepared to mount to the rim of the small hollow—to seek out across the plain for any sign of unusual disturbance there.

  But before I had progressed more than a few steps, a figure appeared on the sky line above us—a figure slender and familiar for all its strangeness.

  It stayed for a moment motionless. The smooth greenish trunk quivered slightly—the bifurcated tendrils at its base were still and poised. Then, swiftly, it came down the sandy slope toward us; and into my head there came the thin, friendly, telepathic “voice” I knew so well.

  “Malu,” I cried. “Malu—Malu!”

  And the Voice came: “Malu the Tall, Prince of the Beautiful People! Welcome—welcome, O Strangers! Welcome again from the skies! You have come, as we knew you would come. Welcome—oh, welcome!”

  In the Voice itself there was no expression—it was one of the features of telepathic communication that there never was. But accompanying the impersonal “words” was such a wave, a sense, of utter warmth and affection as to fill our very hearts with joy after all we had suffered.

  So, at last, we came home to Mars!

  CHAPTER IV. IN THE MEANTIME . . . A Contribution by Various Hands

  1. Michael Malone

  WELL!—here goes! I said that we three “young people” would turn up in Chap Four, and here we are.

  I reckon myself it’s high time we had something to cheer us up at this point. I mean, I’m all for Steve MacFarlane—don’t think for a moment I’m not. But these professional writing chaps do fuss on a bit when they get going; and by the time J.K.C. has edited Uncle Steve’s own stuff, well, it’s grand, I know, and I daresay there are chaps who will come along and read it all and say, “Whizzo, this is Literature this is—big words and commas and all that,” and I won’t say there hasn’t been any action either, for there was the Yellow Cloud, and Malu turning up that way, just at the right minute (trust old Malu), but all the same, we could do with a change, and besides, it’s all a bit sad-making about poor old Doctor Mac, so there will be no harm in a chapter stuck in here mainly by Paul and Jacky and me, just to let you know how we were getting on at the time when Steve’s messages were coming in from Mars, and old J.K.C. was sitting up there in Scotland as excited as an old hen (I wish I’d seen him—Paul said he was so fussed and pompous you’d think it was him and Marconi had invented wireless between them, with Marconi as the little fellow holding J.K.C.’s jacket while he got on and did the important work).[1]

  So here we are—Paul and Jacky and me. And I’m starting off with a few comments to remind you all about us (except you’ll know already that we were the stowaways—quite by accident—when the Albatross first went to Mars).

  Well then: I’m Uncle Steve’s nephew. (Of course! I can hear you say—but what I mean is that the others only called MacFarlane Uncle Steve, whereas he actually is my uncle: my mother is his sister Marian.)

  Paul and Jacqueline are kind of distant cousins of mine. Their family name is Adam. Paul is the oldest of the three of us, and I’m the youngest. They live in Dorset and I live in London—some of the time at least: my father’s a Business Man, and he has to do a lot of traveling about, sometimes all over the world, and sometimes Mother and I go with him. Got it?

  Right. So now I pass over to Jacky and Paul for a bit, ’cos they were in on the messages part with old J.K.C. up in Scotland. I wasn’t, worse luck—or rather worse luck only in one way—jolly good luck in another. You’ll see why in a minute, when I start in again myself later on in this Chapter. Cheerio for now.

  2. Jacqueline Adam

  In taking up my poor pen once more, on the invitation of our genial editor, to inscribe some thoughts and impressions connected with the period before our return to the Angry Planet, I do so indeed in all humility.

  If I may quote the Immortal Bard of Avon, this brief essay will be “a poor thing—but mine own.” I trust it will be received in that spirit of kind condescension we know to have been exercised by our readers toward our previous efforts in the field of literary composition.

  Almost a year had elapsed since our return across limitless space; and my brother P— and myself had once more accustomed ourselves to our normal mode of existence after the many excitements attending our adventure.

  You may judge of our surprise, therefore, when the postman one morning delivered into our hands a bulky envelope bearing a Scottish postmark!

  With ill-concealed curiosity we set to an examination of its contents; and you can judge of our further surprise when they were revealed as a letter from our friend Mr. John Keir Cross in which he apprised us of the remarkable train of circumstances which had led to the establishing of communication with our erstwhile companion, Mr. S— MacF—: viz, the circumstances already known to the reader concerning the wireless messages received via Mr. Mackellar’s airstrip. (What a piece of work is a man! How infinite in faculties, etc.—W. Shakespeare.)

  We acquainted our parents at once with the turn events had taken; and passed on to them the request embodied in the author’s epistle, namely, that if they were agreeable, and since in any event the school holidays were imminent, my brother and myself should travel to Scotland to participate at first hand in the latest stage of the adventure. He argued that in view of our previous association with Mr. MacF— we might indeed be interested in hearing from him; and added that, as a purely practical consideration, we would, by being “on the spot,” so to say, be in a position to verify the auth
enticity of the messages received.

  I need hardly say that with their usual understanding, our parents instantly expressed their agreement; our mother adding only the injunction that “we were to take care not to be carried away once more to Mars ourselves in the event.” (Little did she know the subsequent course the adventure would take! so that indeed we were, for a second time, involved in a voyage through space. But I anticipate.)

  Thus it was, then, that one sunny day in the year 19—, my brother and I traveled to Scotland and there made the acquaintance of Mr. Mackellar, his assistant Mr. Archibald Borrowdale, and the distinguished performer of stage and screen, Miss Catherine Hogarth.

  No words of mine can hope to convey the deep emotion which assailed us when first we heard the faint whispering messages in Morse. It was “The voice, the very voice!” (RLS)

  It was with feelings equally profound that we read the narrative so carefully built by Miss Hogarth from the disjointed fragments of Mr. MacF—’s communications. The messages went on, of course, from the point that you yourselves have reached; and so gradually the narrative was built further—as you will see in due course. And they finally broke off, while we—even we—were listening to them one night, with the high dramatic announcement which took us once more across the starry wastes ourselves, on a mission of rescue.

  What happened thereafter will be related in its proper place. For the moment, I feel I have performed the initial function outlined to me by our editor: viz, to reintroduce ourselves into the chronicle and so prepare the way for all that lies ahead. With this thought I momentarily suspend composition, and will ask my brother P—to add any brief comments of his own before the resumption of the Martian narrative as transcribed from the “Mackellar Messages.”