The Red Journey Back

by John Keir Cross

  “As the good Archie Borrowdale almost did,” said MacFarlane, also with a rueful smile, fingering a bruise on his jaw where I had been compelled to strike him. “Still, it was the only way—and there are no hard feelings, Borrowdale—and no fear of a return bout, I hope! They had me even worse than they had the Doctor. I managed to get the door shut, so that they couldn’t send in that devilish Cloud; but it was all I could do—they had me again a moment later and made me attack you, until you mercifully knocked me out. Thank heaven you did—otherwise, if I’d had a chance, I’d have opened the door again—that was what they wanted to make me do. You would have been all right, in those suits of yours, but it might have been the end after all for poor old Mac and me. . . .”

  “We had no remote suggestion during the first trip that there were such creatures,” McGillivray continued. “You young people know that—we met only the Beautiful People and the Terrible Ones. Malu has told me that far back in Martian history, as it has been remembered by such rulers as himself and the Center, there were shadowy legends and recollections of the Creeping Canals, the deadly long lines of them spreading across the planet’s surface; and that in the Canals were creatures of some kind, even stronger in their power of enmity than the Terrible Ones. The Terrible Ones were enemies indeed—we also know that; but they were plants like the Beautiful People themselves, and could be dealt with in combat—could be hacked and destroyed by means of the long silica swords perfected by Malu and his friends. These other beings were different altogether: they caused no physical harm to the plant-folk—but they enslaved them mentally. That is why, long, long ago, the various groups of the Beautiful People tended to migrate northward and, without ever fully knowing why, to confine themselves to certain well-defined tracts of territory. The legendary Canal Creatures were known to concentrate mainly in the south, once they had made their initial journeys from the polar caps, as I shall explain later. But you see, when the volcano destroyed Malu’s settlement, at the end of our first Martian visit, his people were forced to travel, as we told you in the messages; and they traveled south, farther and farther south, in search of uninhabited bubble houses. What they did not fully understand, until almost too late, was that the bubble houses they did eventually find were empty only because they bordered on one of the deadly Canal zones.”

  “But they escaped?” said Paul, half-questioningly. And it was Malu who answered—the “voice” came into my head as he reclined strangely in the trailer with us, close to Jacqueline.

  “My people went north as the great Canal crept forward toward the hills and the spaceship,” he said. “It was better so, in order to preserve our young ones. Where they are I know not—except that I have understood, from the plain plants, that they are far away and in safety. I alone remained to help my friends; for the people you know as Discophora are not able to control such as Malu, Prince of the Beautiful People, in so great a measure as they can control such as you from across the skies.”

  “It’s true indeed,” nodded McGillivray. “They can control Malu, of course—they can control the Beautiful People just as you saw they had controlled a group of the Terrible Ones, to act as their slaves or soldiers, as it were; but to nothing like the extent they can control us—and for a very good reason, as you shall hear. It meant that they forced us to lock Malu up when you were approaching. With him concealed in that way, they were able to influence him just sufficiently for his thoughts not to reach you. It was when Jacky suddenly and intensely thought of Malu in the Albatross that his thoughts were able to break through, and so gave me the strength to speak. . . . It seems so strange—so complex a mechanism, and difficult indeed to explain. You must only take it that that is how the influence of these creatures operates. Someday we may know more about them and so be able to comprehend how their telepathic impulses do work in practice. In the meantime, as far as Discophora is concerned—” It was Paul, the practical Paul, who interrupted quietly at this stage, to ask the question which indeed engaged us all—which had lain behind all other questions as the great jigsaw fitted together.

  “In the meantime, sir,” he said, leaning forward a little toward the sightless man, “what is Discophora? What are the Creeping Canals?”

  Dr. McGillivray hesitated for a long, long moment before he replied.

  “In a word—” he said very gravely, “in a word, boy, and in so far as I understand the great inscrutable mystery of Martian nature, they are . . . Survivors!”

  And on the instant, in my own questing mind, one more small fragment of the jigsaw fitted. Again I remembered the airstrip messages—the first, the only occasion, on which MacFarlane had tried to tell us something of the nature of the enemy attacking the Albatross. I remembered the distorted reception that night—how, imperfectly, we had picked on one word and had used it ever afterward, ourselves, to describe the whole phenomenon. The Vivores! That one word, so compelling and mysterious—so suggestive indeed of living beings vastly, vastly different from ourselves in all their aspects. The Vivores . . . ! The imperfect translation, amid the interference, of the word which had truly been sent to us across space: the Survivors!

  And Dr. Kalkenbrenner, himself after all a scientist, his mind operating along the same lines as McGillivray’s, nodded seriously.

  “Yes—yes,” he said. “I guessed—I almost guessed. I had a notion from the start, but too instinctive and shadowy a notion to warrant expression. Survivors . . . from the ancient days of Martian prehistory—”

  “When there was indeed an animal as well as a plant life upon the planet,” went on McGillivray. “We knew, even on the last trip, that it must have been so, thousands, possibly millions of years ago. We knew that the Terrible Ones were descendants of a species of plant, like our insect-eating plants on Earth, which had lived on flesh. . . . Someday, long, long ago, there must have been animal life to provide the forebears of the Terrible Ones with such food. As the countless ages went on, it died away, this animal life—as the reptiles died on Earth, the great hordes of the diplodoci, the pterodactyls, the dinosaurs. All, all perished—evolved to a point of development where they became extinct. The plants like the Terrible Ones adjusted themselves to the new conditions—contrived a method of survival which made them independent. . . . I merely sketch it all, of course—I cover, in these few words, a million years and more. I only speculate that indeed it happened—although there is, as I see it, no other possible answer to Discophora.”

  “And what were these . . . animals who once lived on Mars?” asked Jacky hesitantly. “What were they like, sir?”

  “Some of them, I believe,” said McGillivray slowly, “some of them, my dear, were very like ourselves. Perhaps not in physical appearance, although that too is possible; but at least in that they had brains—most powerful brains. It was long ago, long, long ago. What I tell you now is only a gigantic guess I have made, I sketch a mighty vision I have had; but I feel it to be near the truth, and I see it thus:

  “There were, in those far times, among all other animals on Mars, some animals as highly civilized as we are upon Earth. What the nature of that civilization was it is impossible to say—there may be traces of it somewhere, somewhere: we shall someday see. But these beings, whatever they looked like, had intelligence to a high degree. They evolved, as the centuries went on—as we on Earth evolved as our centuries went on. They, however, developed their intelligences to a pitch where their bodies shrank and dwindled, where their nobler feelings, if they had ever had any, decayed and died. They became thinkers—only thinkers. The power of their brains was such that they could control all other sentient beings near to them. But their bodies were so emaciated, as the centuries marched past, that in a purely physical way they could hardly survive. They fell victim to creatures stronger than themselves, despite the power of their brains. They solved a million problems by thinking—and at last, and inevitably, they solved this one. Do not necessarily believe what I say—only take it as a speculation; but reflect whether there is a
ny other answer to the problems with which we are now confronted.

  “You know that as Mars, as the very planet itself began to die, there was an inevitable drying up of the surface. Moisture grew scarce and scarcer—and moisture is necessary for the survival of animal life. The plants solved the problem by developing as our terrestrial cacti have developed—with fleshy leaves and long, long tuberous roots, capable of finding sparse moisture in the depths of the desert soil. Malu and his people feed through these cactus plants, as we know. But for animal life there was no hope without more moisture than that; and so the creatures we know as the Discophora—those few who had survived all other ravages of nature—had to turn their great intelligences toward this single vital issue.

  “In the centuries long gone by, when Mars was as lush, as fertile, as tropical Earth is, there was, as I conceive it, a species of gigantic marsh plants, rich and fecund—something equivalent, I should fancy, to our homely alisma plantago.” (He smiled for a moment at his own incurable habit of using Latin names for common objects.) “These massive water-plantains, as tall as trees upon Earth, came under the cultural control of the last intelligent survivors of Martian animal life. You will know how we, in our human way, have cultivated many plants for our own vital purposes—have evolved the useful cabbage from the small ornamental cliff plant brassica, for an example. In similar ways, the old Martians cultivated alisma plantago. They developed two characteristics of the plant to fantastic extents: first, its ability to find moisture; second, its extraordinary reproductive capacity. In its natural state alisma, as we might call it for brevity, reproduced itself at the speed of our own little garden plant known as mother-of-millions. Under the guidance of the Martians, this ability was intensified even further: the yellow seeds, or spores, of the plant were multiplied by careful selective breeding—the plant itself was trained to eject these spores in cloudy millions. More—more than that even. Alisma, like all Martian plants, was equipped with crude thinking abilities. It was a simple enough matter for the old Martians, with their powerful intelligences, to control the activities of primitive alisma; and this had several results. As the years went on, not only did the Martians produce a blend, as I might call it, of flying spores which were not only seeds but tiny stinging cells, as a protection no doubt against any other surviving animal life at the time, but they also equipped these very seeds with some small intelligence—not in their own right, but so that they could carry messages for the Martians themselves as they sped through the air . . . !

  “Time passed and time passed. The moisture upon the Martian surface grew scarcer still. Yet, as you yourselves know, for you have seen them, there are two gigantic fields on Mars where moisture still exists in comparative abundance; and those are the two white polar caps, as we all observed them in our approach to the planet—as they can be observed even from Earth through powerful enough telescopes. Ice—or at least a heavy hoarfrost—exists on and near the two poles. And so the last survivors of the old Martians solved their final problem. By this time, as I believe, they themselves had evolved further—were physically almost helpless, so mightily had their actual intelligences developed. There were probably very few of them; but among all other problems solved was surely that also of longevity—those few were capable of survival for long, long years, even centuries perhaps, if once they could find warmth, moisture and a means of movement. They found all three—with the unwitting help of the cultivated alisma plants.

  “They concentrated on the poles—and mainly, for some reason impossible as yet to guess, on the southern pole. There, for a space, as I see it in my vision, they reared huge colonies, huge nurseries of alisma. And from there, in a gigantic network over the entire Martian surface, they traveled!

  “Yes—traveled! I have spoken of the power of alisma to reproduce its kind at a speed inconceivable to any plant, wild or cultivated, upon Earth. That, then, is how the few remaining survivors of those old animal Martians move—in the midst of what we have called the Creeping Canals, those immense green channels seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell. They are borne forward in any direction in which they wish to travel by the crowded ranks of the gigantic alisma—the Ridge plants. With them, as they go, they carry—literally manufacture in vast morasses around alisma’s thirsty roots—the moisture they need for survival. As for warmth, the warmth which is evident in the steamy vapor you have seen in the heart of the Canals themselves, that problem too has been solved. If alisma sprouts at fabulous speed, so also does it die and decay at fabulous speed; and in decay lies warmth!

  “In their traveling dens the remaining Survivors of that ancient intelligent race still lurk. They push forward across the plains in any direction they may choose. Progress is maintained by an advance guard, as it were, of sprouting alisma; behind, the long forest consolidates itself—forms a marshy bed for the Survivors, warm and dank as the expended Ridge plants die. From time to time, the Survivors communicate with each other across the desert spaces by causing alisma to ejaculate great clouds of the messenger spores—which also act as spies, as it were, to bring back news of any unusual objects encountered on the flight—objects such as ourselves in the Albatross, toward which the particular Creeping Canal out there immediately directed its track of advance. From Canal to Canal these myriad yellow messengers travel to and fro. Within each Canal, as I am convinced, there lives one—only one—of the Survivors; an intelligence controlling all things within its deadly range. They are not evil—not truly evil, as we conceive it; it is only, I believe, that in their long struggle for existence, those intelligences, once perhaps noble, are concerned now not with worthy thoughts, but with thoughts only for further survival in their extreme age. All things are subordinated to that—all objects encountered are considered only in relation to that: how can they help the Survivors still to survive? And it has become more imperative than ever that they should survive, these Vivores, as you call them; for now they are old and must find some method to replace themselves—to renew themselves. That is the final horror. And that is why—” he paused and sighed profoundly, “why you, my dears, are here!”

  Silence—a long, long silence. The gigantic vision filled me. It was fabulous—impossible; yet it was the truth—I knew it for the truth as I looked out through the little kalspex window to the silent forest of the Ridge plants—of the alisma, as McGillivray had called them. Somewhere within it, in addition to our own lost friends, was . . . what? One single Survivor—one of the terrible Vivores indeed. I recalled the white jellyish nightmare I had glimpsed in the forest’s deep heart: was that huge shapeless mass the very creature?

  The question was asked—and answered—the moment I had formulated it.

  “And the Survivors themselves?” asked Dr. Kalkenbrenner very quietly in the silence. “They are, I take it, from your descriptions, from the messages you sent us—”

  Dr. McGillivray held up a hand to arrest the question, smiling sadly.

  “When I myself was immersed in the Cloud,” he said, “there was communicated to me, from that swirling horror, even as it stung me to insensibility, a vision of its master. As MacFarlane has told you, as I gradually came back to life, this vision haunted me. The creature—as you yourselves now know—is white and jellyish indeed. It had stung me almost to death. In my confusion of mind it was likened to the only creature I knew upon earth to be jellyish and to sting: Discophora.”

  “The jellyfish,” cried Paul, jumping to his feet in his excitement. “We looked it up in the dictionary too. Discophora does mean jellyfish! A huge jellyfish! Is that what the Vivores are, sir?—monstrous jellyfish?”

  McGillivray paused once more. His eyes, for all their blindness, seemed for a moment to penetrate deeply into the far-off forest. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Monstrous—yes. And jellyish—yes. But in no other respect does this white nightmare resemble our true Discophora after all. That great pulsating mass you saw—which I saw, in the days when I could see, if only with my inner eye—that bodile
ss Survivor of a race once splendid, is one thing and one thing only: a gigantic and decaying BRAIN!”

  I thrilled with horror indeed—with a sudden horror unspeakable. I looked at the tense, set faces of my companions in the trailer tent, and saw reflected in them my own profound revulsion. I understood now, at last, the true power of the deadly Vivores—why it was that they could control other intelligences, and particularly human intelligences: because they themselves were truly nothing other than Intelligences, immobile and raw. . . .

  A thousand other questions answered themselves in the few quiet moments remaining before the last piling climax to all the adventure. Now once more I find myself confused as I look back, for many things indeed happened almost instantaneously. I remember first, however, after our initial stunned silence, a host of rapid questions and answers.

  “But the messages, sir? Why did you send the messages for us to come? You said we had to come—that we were the only ones who could save you. Yet how? Of course we’d want to try to save you; but how was it that only we could?”

  “Don’t you understand, poor boy?” (It was Paul whom Dr. McGillivray addressed, and his voice was grave and quiet.) “There were no messages from us!”

  “No messages, sir? But we heard them! There by the airstrip—”

  “Of course! We established contact—you know that. We built our transmitter, using the mineral seam as an aerial—you know all that—and MacFarlane, night after night, sent out to you the story of our journey here. Yes, yes indeed! But as the Canal came closer, as it closed around us before we fully knew what its dangers were, so did the Brain within it begin to control our brains. The process is gradual—you know that from your own experiences. We fought to retain our own intelligences; but in the end the Brain defeated us. First it made it impossible for us to send you any warnings. Then it dictated, it dictated the message you have mentioned! Even as, with one part of our intelligences, we recognized and were horrified by what we were doing, with another part, subservient to the Brain, we were asking you to come!—to almost certain destruction!”