The Red Journey Back

by John Keir Cross

  “The Canals,” I said. “It was Schiaparelli who discovered the Canals—”

  “Quite so—but he used the word canali to mean only lines or markings—veritable channels on the Martian surface which he thought he saw. That was the other word which came into my head during my session with the Center: canali, Steve—the creeping canali.”

  “But Mac, it doesn’t make sense!”

  “It might—it might make devilish sense before we’re done! Steve, tell me—you can see, old friend, and I cannot—as you look out across the plain sometimes—”

  He broke off—a look of bewilderment came across his face. I recognized the symptoms too well. The old lethargy was returning, the lingering effect of his immersion in the deadly Cloud—perhaps in the association between his conversation with the Center and his terrible experience. Desperately I tried to bring his thoughts back to the moment.

  “Mac—Mac! The third image—you said there was a third image from the Center—”

  But all that came from him was the one word from his old nightmare: Discophora . . . and a sudden impression in my own mind once more of something monstrous—white—jellylike . . .

  I looked out through a porthole in the dying evening light. Did I imagine it? Or was there, far out on the plain, verily on the horizon, a new strange tinge of darker green—a kind of ridge . . . ?

  So little time, so little time! When morning came I saw indeed that there was, on the far plain, a belt or band of some dark green substance—and that it was larger a little than I had supposed the night before.

  Mac’s illness worse—no sign of recovery from the new bout that had assailed him. Two days . . . and in those two days, before he did recover, and I could tell him, the darkness on the horizon had intensified—was something that moved—and moved nearer and nearer toward us. . . .

  Among the Beautiful People a rising sense of uneasiness—a continuing quivering fear from the cactus plants nearby.

  Mac’s recovery at last; and an intensification of our experiments to contact you on Earth. The exposed seam of mineral deposit in the foothills: our hastily rigged transmitter here in the cabin of the Albatross, the leads going down to the seam . . . night after night—my messages into space, as always and always the menace approached across the plains. At last the first imperfect return messages—the fabulous coincidence of the airstrip . . . and so I have told you our story as always It has drawn nearer . . .

  We have not dared to move from the ship. Malu now with us—but Malu is able to move outside on occasions, through the double air-lock door, for the yellow spores have no effect upon him other than in an attempt to control him mentally. The others gone—the city in the hills abandoned. Only Malu and ourselves . . . only—The Creeping Canal! The dark green, viscid line approaching across the plain, nearer and nearer! They control—they control it: the Vivores . . . !

  The Canal—the long serpentine line of it, the waving traveling swamp . . . closer and closer and finally surrounding us. And at last, the first of Them . . . the swamp now all around, all around, and we dare not move from the cabin. As it has been this past ten days while I have struggled to continue contact with you. I dare not relax, dare not. They control—they can control . . . !

  I saw the first—some days ago I saw the first. There, in the swamp surrounding, in the hot steam of it . . . white, monstrous. Discophora! The great white monstrous jelly—and waiting, waiting for us, waiting for us, waiting . . .

  I will not—will not!—the children, the children . . . !

  (Message broken, and nothing for four nights; then some further disjointed gibberish, quite unintelligible; and at last, suddenly clear, one final desperate cry across the silent void of space, the broken, helpless message as I have already described it in my own first chapter:)

  . . . Save us—in heaven’s name try to save us! There is one way—one way only. We are lost—you must save us. Somehow—come somehow. Bring the children—the three children. It is the only way to save us. I cannot, cannot, cannot explain. Only bring the children, somehow. That will save us, that alone. It does not matter how long. We are safe, safe, for many months, years perhaps. But we will perish at the last if you do not bring them. Do not ask why. Find some way—some way. Kalkenbrenner—try perhaps Kalkenbrenner. Bring Paul and Jacqueline and Michael. Ask no questions—no time, no time to answer; but bring those three to Mars or we are lost . . . !

  Then silence. From that moment onward, silence absolute. Never again did our small receiver by the airstrip chatter its thin rare messages from across the void.

  In the chill of the early dawn we regarded each other, white-faced—Mackellar and Archie, Katey and myself, the two young people who had joined us and attended the few final sessions when the broken messages were coming through.

  We regarded each other, the silence filled by the low sullen roar of the Atlantic beyond the moonlit airstrip. Our thoughts were full of indefinable nightmare—a sense of intolerable danger to our friends so many millions of miles away. And of resolution. We did not understand—how could we?—what could it mean that only the presence of the three young people could save MacFarlane and McGillivray? But we knew that the desperate message would never have come unless indeed, in some alien manner connected with the unutterable strangeness of life on the Angry Planet, it was the only way.

  We trusted MacFarlane; and therefore we had to act—somehow we had to act—so that the travelers might be saved from whatever monstrous creatures menaced them—of whose nature we had no true conception.

  And MacFarlane had given us the hint himself as to how the impossible journey might be achieved a third time in human history.

  Dr. Kalkenbrenner.

  CHAPTER VI. THE COMET: A Contribution by Paul Adam

  WELL, it’s my turn. I don’t know why—they always seem to saddle me with tricky chapters, with a lot happening in them, and the thing is, of course, that I’m not a writer at all, really. Still, maybe that’s just as well—I can get on with things without bothering about descriptions and atmosphere and “style” and all that. The way I do it is to try to imagine I’m simply writing you a letter and telling you out straight. So here goes:

  Dear Reader: I’d better start, I think, at the point when we were all stuck there in Scotland when Uncle Steve’s messages broke off.

  You can imagine the excitement. We didn’t understand things in the slightest bit (it’s maybe just as well, in view of all that happened afterward); all we knew was that somehow we had to get back to Mars—Jacky and me, that is, and Mike, who was in America. And the only hope was to contact Dr. Kalkenbrenner, for we knew he’d been working on a rocket too, and it might be almost ready for the trip.

  I can’t begin to tell you the tremendous amount of to-ing and fro-ing that went on. J.K.C. went into a kind of frenzy. He wrote letters and sent them whizzing across to America, and the place was thick with cablegrams and telegrams, and talk about the telephone!—I got to the stage when I was hearing it in my sleep. Calls to our mother and father, calls to travel agencies to book flight passages for all of us to go to the U.S.A., trans-Atlantic calls to Mike’s mother and father and Dr. Kalkenbrenner himself that must have cost a fortune.

  And, of course, the pay-off was when J.K.C. did finally contact Dr. K., that he knew a great deal about it all already! For as you know, there was old Mike, in his usual way, spilling the beans and nosing in! We’d known he was in America, of course, but not that he’d actually reached Chicago and had looked up Dr. K. (he would!) and was right in the thick of it all.

  Well, to cut a long story short, as they say in books (although this is a book, so I might as well say it), we got everything taped as far as we could in Scotland, and then we set off for the south—the whole crowd of us.

  And in London we met our own mother and father, who had come up specially, and there were tremendous scenes in a big hotel.

  “No, no,” said poor old Mum, “my children my poor children! etcetera—I can’t let them go a
ll that dreadful distance again, and so on, oh dear, I shall worry terribly, I worry if they go off for an afternoon by the sea themselves. Oh dear, to think of them all the way up there on Mars, etcetera.”

  “But what about Mr. MacFarlane?” says J.K.C.

  “Yes, what about him?” I chime in myself, and Jacky doesn’t say very much at all, for although she wants to come, of course, there’s another part of her that doesn’t want to leave Mother either, and she’s almost in tears too. . . .

  Anyway, talk, talk, talk, and in the end, with Father joining in on our side, it’s all agreed—although maybe not just quite as easily as perhaps I’ve made it seem: it was, in fact, a real fight to get permission.

  “Only,” says Mother, “I do hope they are looked after this time. Miss Hogarth, do please promise that you will go too to look after them—they need the Woman’s Touch.”

  And of course Katey was all for going—had been from the start; and she nodded; and then all three women (I mean Katey and Mother and Jacky) dissolved into floods of tears, floods and floods of them, and all us men went off to the lounge and had something to drink.

  Now of course it’ll maybe seem crazy, but even though we’d been to Mars and through all those marvels, Jacky and I were really just as excited at the notion of flying to America! We’d never been, you see; and there was Mike, nearly two years younger than me, and he’d been—we could just picture him boasting and swaggering about the place thinking he’d put one over on us.

  So wham!—off we go: zoom!

  I wish I’d time to tell you all about this part of it—I mean the flight to America, and America itself. But it isn’t part of the story, really, so I’ll have to keep that for another time. Suffice it to say etc., etc. (as they put it in books), that we got there without any trouble—that is, the whole bunch of us except Mr. Mackellar, for he wasn’t coming. We had to leave him behind in England for he was all tied up with the airstrip job for the Government. The last we saw of him he was standing on the runway with Mum and Dad as we went out to the big American plane at Northolt, and he was positively stuffing himself with snuff, clouds and clouds of it, and offering some to Dad and Mum, and Dad was even absent-mindedly taking some and then sneezing like mad, but I think it was just a good excuse to pretend that that was why there was just a hint of tears in his eyes, and I don’t mind confessing (off the record) that I could have done with a small pinch of snuff myself for the same reason.

  Ah well.

  We got there—I mean America—and we met Dr. Kalkenbrenner, and there was Mike, beside him, strutting about like a young peacock! You’d think he’d invented Dr. Kalkenbrenner. (It’s an awfully long and queer name to write down every time, and I refuse to be as vulgar as Mike and call him “old Kalkers,” so I’ll simply say “Dr. K.” from now on and you’ll know who I mean. His other names were “Marius Berkeley,” so taking it all in all he was a bit of a mouthful—but a really decent chap all the same: about forty-five, and very tall and distinguished-looking, with a little pointed beard and a deep voice and a nice friendly smile. We took back all we had ever thought about him in the days when he wasn’t “on our side” after we came back from Mars last time. . . .)

  As for the Comet . . . !

  I’ve got to confess that fond as I was of the old Albatross, it really wasn’t a patch on Dr. K.’s job. Of course, it’s understandable enough—Dr. K. had had much longer to work on it than poor old Doctor Mac had had, and he had bags more money. There were what are called “Very Big Interests” behind Dr. K., and he had much of Doctor Mac’s research to build on and improve on. We know all that, and it doesn’t take away one whit of poor old Mac’s achievement, but the Comet really was something all the same. If you can picture the Albatross as, say, a good solid seagoing tramp, with just a bit of a homemade touch about it, then the Comet was almost a full-fledged liner.

  To begin with, it was a different shape altogether from our old craft. The Albatross had a kind of bulbous nose, then tapered away to the tail—we used to say it was like a fish, and so it was, of course, but maybe it would be better to compare it to a kind of gigantic tadpole. The Comet wasn’t a bit like that: it was very long and slender, and went to a most delicate point at the nose end, then bulged out very slightly in the middle and went to another long slope- away at the back—like a cigar, really. In fact, it was much more like the usual idea of a rocket than the Albatross ever was, and with three huge fins, set like arrow feathers, which had enormous extending brackets, I suppose you could call them, which folded out when you weren’t in space, and made it possible for the whole affair to stand up on end on a kind of gigantic tripod.

  That was the other thing, you see: the old Albatross had rested at an angle on a huge launching ramp, but the Comet stood right up on its tail, as it were—straight up into the air. On Earth, when we first saw it, it was held in a kind of framework of steel girders—a kind of scaffolding. But Dr. K. explained that that was only for additional strength—it was quite possible, because of the smaller gravity pull on Mars, for the Comet to take off from its own resting position on the tripod for the return journey. You see, the beauty of it all was that as you were approaching Mars (or anywhere else for that matter—the Moon or Venus or what have you), you could turn the whole rocket around in space and land on the surface very gently (braking like mad, of course, with the jets) tail first.

  One other thing I ought to say (without being technical, for I don’t know enough—it’s only that I couldn’t help being kind of interested), and that is that the Comet used the idea, same as Doctor Mac had, of two separate fuels, but in a rather different way. In the Albatross, the two fuels were fired off through the same sets of tuyères, with one auxiliary set of tuyèresto start off the second fuel, of course, once you were out a bit in space, but then everything going through the main set once the first fuel had cut off. In the Comet there were really two distinct rockets altogether. Fixed to the tail, on top of the Comet’s own jets, and underneath the tripod, was a huge “booster” rocket, as Dr. K. called it. This could be fired off by remote control from the spaceship’s cabin—and it was this that whipped up the colossal power to make the Comet rise from the ground—and even quite slowly, at first, again unlike the Albatross, which whizzed off zoom from the word go. Then, when you were well away from Earth’s surface, and the booster fuel had burned itself out, in one operation the whole contrivance fell away from the Comet’s tail and back down to Earth, and the Comet’s own jets came into action and there you were—on your way.

  I should maybe add, lest you’re worrying about a great chunk of spent booster rocket coming wham out of the sky one day and biffing you on the head (R.I.P.), that as the spent booster fell away a special mechanism released a fairly sizable parachute, so that the whole thing floated down and there were no chances of serious accidents—at least you had time to see it, I mean, and could jolly well get out of the way pronto!

  And the other thing was—just to complete the whole picture—that the Comet carried inside her all the component parts of a second booster, so that when you landed on Mars and were happily perched up on the tripod, the very first thing you did was fix this whole prefabricated contrivance onto the tail again, and there you were—all set for a take-off the moment you wanted to. And since it was Mars we were going to on this trip, and it had the smaller gravity pull, this booster didn’t have to be anything like as big and powerful as the one needed to shift us from Earth, so that was all right, and cut down on the weight the Comet had to carry.

  So that’s that. (Phew! my hand’s all tired and cramped from writing all this—the trouble is that you get carried away and go on for longer than you first meant. Yd better stop now and pick up again later on. . . .)

  Here we are, then—next day, and in fine fighting trim, all ready for another spell at the desk.

  You know all about the Comet now—at least, maybe not all about it, but enough to be going on with: later on, Dr. K. will be publishing a book of his own goin
g into all the real technical details. He’s also going to explain how it was that just about the time when we were due to set off, Mars was fortunately coming around toward one of its “nearest-to-earth” positions. We were jolly lucky in this, I must say—otherwise the journey would have taken much longer than the one in the old Albatross, even allowing for the improvements in the Comet. As it was, it still was a little longer, because of all kinds of complicated difficulties about the orbits of Earth and Mars being elliptic and not absolutely circular, and things like “aphelions” and “perihelions” nosing in to mess things up a bit. . . . Anyway, I don’t really know anything about all this, except that I’ve heard Dr. K. and the others talking about it and seen them working the whole business out with adding machines and such (and I looked up the words themselves in a scientific dictionary, so the spelling’s all right at least).

  We had a hectic time getting ready. There were endless conferences and sessions with Dr. K., who had, of course, agreed wholeheartedly to the rescue expedition idea, once all the facts had been put before him, and was almost as excited as old J.K.C. himself, both by the thought of seeing his rocket in full blast and by the thought of going to Mars for the first time. For our part, we were desperately keen to get started for the sake of Uncle Steve and poor old Doctor Mac: it wasn’t as if we knew what was what up there in Mars, you know—we had simply no idea; except, of course, that something pretty serious was afoot, and that somehow we were the only ones who could do anything about it. Maybe it was even too late—we didn’t know that either: we just felt we had to get going.

  And because we were all so eager, things were arranged in double-quick time. We had barely a week in Chicago before the whole business was cut and dried and we were ready to start. Dr. K.’s men had been working all around the clock on the last touches to the Comet—the place was such a den of activity as I’d never seen in my life before. Of course, because of the rush and turmoil, there were a hundred and one little improvisations—Dr. K. didn’t have time, for instance, to complete his own apparatus for feeding us on the journey (he’d worked out a real master plan for dealing with this side of things), so we had simply to make do again with Doctor Mac’s old “toothpaste” method—that is to say, normal food being impossible to handle in a spaceship because of the lack of weight, we had to feed from concentrates which were made up into paste form and packed into plastic tubes, just like toothpaste tubes, and you simply put the nozzle thing into your mouth and squeezed . . . ! Still, we didn’t mind this in the least: it was like old times for one thing, and for another it made us feel that Doctor Mac was somehow with us in spirit at least on this bigger job than his own old pioneering effort.