CHAPTER IX
The earth and the moon had been left more than a hundred million milesbehind in the depths of Space, and the _Astronef_ had crossed thisimmense gap in eleven days and a few hours; but this apparentlyinconceivable speed was not altogether due to the powers of theSpace-Navigator, for her commander had taken advantage of the passage ofthe planet along its orbit towards that of the earth. Hence, while the_Astronef_ was approaching Mars with ever-increasing speed, Mars wastravelling towards the _Astronef_ at the rate of sixteen miles a second.
The great silver disc of the earth had diminished until it looked only alittle larger than Venus appears to human eyes. In fact the planet Terrais to the inhabitants of Mars what Venus is to us, the Star of theMorning and the Evening.
Breakfast on the morning of the twelfth day--or, since there is neitherday nor night in Space, it would be more correct to say the twelfthperiod of twenty-four earth-hours as measured by the chronometers--wasjust over, and Redgrave was standing with Zaidie in the forward end ofthe deck-chamber, looking downwards at a vast crescent of rosy lightwhich stretched out over an arc of more than ninety degrees. Two tinyblack spots were travelling towards each other across it.
"Ah," she said, going towards one of the telescopes, "there are themoons. I was reading my Gulliver last night. I wonder what the old Deanwould have given to be here, and see how true his guess was. Are wegoing to land on them?"
"I don't see why we shouldn't," he said. "I think we might find themconvenient stopping places; besides, you know this isn't only apleasure-trip. We have to add as much as we can to the sum of humanknowledge, and so of course we shall have to find out whether the moonsof Mars have atmospheres and inhabitants."
"What, people living on those wee things!" she laughed. "Why they'reonly about thirty or forty miles round, aren't they?"
"About," he said, "but then that's just one of the points I want tosolve; and as for life, it doesn't always mean people, you know. We areonly a few hundred miles away from Deimos, the outer one, and he istwelve thousand five hundred miles from Mars. I vote we drop on himfirst and let him carry us towards Phobos. And then when we've examinedhim we'll pay a visit to his brother and take a trip round Mars on him.Phobos does the journey in about seven hours and a half, and as he'sonly three thousand seven hundred miles above the surface, we ought toget a very good view of our next stopping-place."
"That ought to be quite delightful," said Zaidie. "But how commonplaceyou are getting, Lenox. That's so like you Englishmen. We are doing whathas only been dreamt of before, and here you are talking about moons andplanets as if they were railway stations."
"Well, if your Ladyship prefers it, we will call them undiscoveredislands and continents in the Ocean of Space. That does sound a littlebit better, doesn't it? Now I think I had better go down and see to myengines."
When he had gone, Zaidie sat down to the telescope again and kept itfocussed on one of the little black spots travelling across the crescentof Mars. Both it and the other spot rapidly grew larger, and thefeatures of the planet itself became more distinct. Soon even with herunaided eyes she could make out the seas and continents and themysterious canals quite plainly through the clear, rosy atmosphere, and,with the aid of the telescope, she could even see the glimmeringtwilight which the inner moon threw upon the unlighted portion of theplanet's disc.
Deimos grew bigger and bigger, and in about half an hour the _Astronef_grounded gently on what looked to Zaidie like a dimly lighted circularplain, but which, when her eyes became accustomed to the light, was morelike the summit of a conical mountain. Redgrave raised the keel a littlefrom the surface again and steered towards a thin circle of light on thetiny horizon.
As they crossed into the sunlit portion it became quite plain thatDeimos, at any rate, was as airless and lifeless as the moon. Thesurface was composed of brown rock and red sand broken up into miniaturehills and valleys. There were a few traces of bygone volcanic action,but it was evident that the internal fires of this tiny world must haveburnt themselves out very quickly.
"Not much to be seen here," said Redgrave, as he came up thecompanion-way, "and I don't think it would be safe to go out. Theattraction is so weak here that we might find ourselves falling off withvery little exertion. Still, you may as well take a couple ofphotographs of the surface, and then we'll be off to Phobos."
Zaidie got her apparatus to work, and when she had taken her slides downto the dark-room, Redgrave turned the R. Force on very slightly andPhobos began to sink away beneath them. The attraction of Mars now beganto make itself strongly felt, and the _Astronef_ dropped rapidly throughthe eight thousand miles which separate the inner and outer satellites.
As they approached Phobos they saw that half the little disc wasbrilliantly lighted by the same rays of the sun which were glowing onthe rapidly increasing crescent of Mars beneath them. By carefulmanipulation of his engines Redgrave managed to meet the approachingsatellite with a hardly perceptible shock about the centre of itslighted portion, that is to say the side turned towards the planet.
Mars now appeared as a gigantic rosy moon filling the whole vault of theheavens above them. Their telescopes brought the three thousand sevenhundred and fifty miles down to about ten. The rapid motion of the tinysatellite afforded them a spectacle which might be compared to therising of a moon glowing with rosy light and hundreds of times largerthan the earth. The speed of the vehicle of which they had takenpossession, something like four thousand two hundred miles an hour,caused the surface of the planet to apparently sweep away from belowthem, just as the earth seems to glide from under the car of a balloon.
Neither of them left the telescopes for more than a few minutes duringthis aerial circumnavigation. Murgatroyd, outwardly impassive, butinwardly filled with solemn fears for the fate of this impiously daringvoyage, brought them wine and sandwiches, and later on tea and toast andmore sandwiches; but they took no moment's heed of these, so absorbedwere they in the wonderful spectacle which was swiftly passing undertheir eyes.
The main armament of the _Astronef_ consisted of four pneumatic guns,which could be mounted on swivels, two ahead and two astern, whichcarried a shell containing either one of two kinds of explosivesinvented by her creator.
One of these was a solid, and burst on impact with an explosive forceequal to about twenty pounds of lyddite. The other consisted of twoliquids separated by a partition in the shell, and these, when mixed bythe breaking of the partition, burst into a volume of flame which couldnot be extinguished by any known human means. It would burn even in avacuum, since it supplied its own elements of combustion. The guns wouldthrow these shells to a distance of about seven terrestrial miles. Onthe upper deck there were also stands for a couple of light machine gunscapable of discharging seven hundred explosive bullets a minute.
Professor Rennick, although a man of peace, had little sympathy with thelaws of "civilised" warfare which permit men to be blown into rags offlesh and splinters of bone by explosive shells of a pound weight andupward, and only allow projectiles of less weight to be used against"savages." There was no humbug about him. He believed that when war_was_ necessary it had to _be_ war--and the sooner it was over thebetter for everybody concerned.
The small arms consisted of a couple of heavy ten-bore elephant gunscarrying three-ounce melinite shells; a dozen rifles and fowling-piecesof different makes of which three, a single and a double-barrelled rifleand a double-barrelled shot-gun, belonged to her Ladyship, as well as adainty brace of revolvers, one of half a dozen braces of variouscalibres which completed the minor armament of the _Astronef_.
The guns were got up and mounted while the attraction of the planet wascomparatively feeble, and the weapons themselves therefore of verylittle weight. On the surface of the earth a score of men could not havedone the work, but on board the _Astronef_, suspended in Space, her crewof three found the work easy. Zaidie herself picked up a Maxim andcarried it about as though it were a toy sewing-machine.
"Now I thin
k we can go down," said Redgrave, when everything had beenput in position as far as possible. "I wonder whether we shall find theatmosphere of Mars suitable for terrestrial lungs. It will be ratherawkward if it isn't."
A very slight exertion of repulsive force was sufficient to detach the_Astronef_ from the body of Phobos. She dropped rapidly towards thesurface of the planet, and within three hours they saw the sunlight, forthe first time since they had left the earth, shining through anunmistakable atmosphere, an atmosphere of a pale, rosy hue, instead ofthe azure of the earthly skies. An angular observation showed that theywere within fifty miles of the surface of the undiscovered world.
"Well, we shall find air here of some sort, there's no doubt. We'll dropa bit further and then Andrew shall start the propellers. They'll verysoon give us an idea of the density. Do you notice the change in thetemperature? That's the diffused rays instead of the direct ones. Twentymiles! I think that will do. I'll stop her now and we'll prospect for alanding place."
He went down to apply the repulsive force directly to the surface ofMars, so as to check the descent, and then he put on hisbreathing-dress, went into the exit-chamber, closed one door behind him,opened the other and allowed it to fill with Martian air; then he shutit again, opened his visor and took a cautious breath.
It may, perhaps, have been the idea that he, the first of all the sonsof Earth, was breathing the air of another world, or it might have beensome property peculiar to the Martian atmosphere, but he immediatelyexperienced a sensation such as usually follows the drinking of a glassof champagne. He took another breath, and another, then he opened theinner door and went back to the lower deck, saying to himself: "Well,the air's all right if it is a bit champagney; rich in oxygen, Isuppose, with perhaps a trace of nitrous-oxide in it. Still, it'scertainly breathable, and that's the principal thing."
"It's all right, dear," he said as he reached the upper deck whereZaidie was walking about round the sides of the glass dome gazing withall her eyes at the strange scene of mingled cloud and sea and landwhich spread for an immense distance on all sides of them. "I havebreathed the air of Mars, and even at this height it is distinctlywholesome, though of course it's rather thin, and I had it mixed withsome of our own atmosphere. Still I think it will agree all right withus lower down."
"Well, then," said Zaidie, "suppose we get below those clouds and seewhat there really is to be seen."
"As there's a fairly big problem to be solved shortly I'll see to thedescent myself," he replied, going towards the stairway.
In a couple of minutes she saw the cloud-belt below them rising rapidly.When Redgrave returned the _Astronef_ was plunging into a sea of rosymist.
"The clouds of Mars!" she exclaimed. "Fancy a world with pink clouds! Iwonder what there is on the other side."
The next moment they saw. Just below them at a distance of about fiveearth-miles lay an irregularly triangular island, a detached portion ofthe Continent of Huygens almost equally divided by the Martian Equator,and lying with another almost similarly shaped island between thefortieth and the fiftieth meridians of west longitude. The two islandswere divided by a broad, straight stretch of water about the width ofthe English Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Instead of thebright blue-green of terrestrial seas, this connecting link between thegreat Northern and Southern Martian oceans had an orange tinge.
The land immediately beneath them was of a gently undulating character,something like the Downs of South-Eastern England. No mountains werevisible in any direction. The lower portions, particularly along theborders of the canals and the sea, were thickly dotted with towns andcities, apparently of enormous extent. To the north of the IslandContinent there was a peninsula, which was covered with a vastcollection of buildings, which, with the broad streets and spacioussquares which divided them, must have covered an area of something liketwo hundred square miles.
"There's the London of Mars!" said Redgrave, pointing down towards it;"where the London of Earth will be in a few thousand years, close to theEquator. And, you see, all those other towns and cities are crowdedround the canals! I daresay when we go across the northern and southerntemperate zones we shall find them in about the state that Siberia orAntarctica are in."
"I daresay we shall," replied Zaidie; "Martian civilisation is crowdingtowards the Equator, though I should call that place down there thegreater New York of Mars, and--see--there's Brooklyn just across thecanal. I wonder what they're thinking about us down there."
Phobos revolves from west to east almost along the plane of itsprimary's equator. To left and right they saw the huge ice-caps of theSouth and North Poles gleaming through the red atmosphere with a palesunset glimmer. Then came the great stretches of sea, often obscured byvast banks of clouds, which, as the sunlight fell upon them, lookedstrangely like earth-clouds at sunset.
Then, almost immediately underneath them, spread out the great landareas of the equatorial region. The four continents of Halle, Galileo,and Tycholand; then Huygens--which is to Mars what Europe, Asia, andAfrica are to the Earth, then Herschell and Copernicus. Nearly all ofthese land masses were split up into semi-regular divisions by thefamous canals which have so long puzzled terrestrial observers.
"Well, there is one problem solved at any rate," said Redgrave, when,after a journey of nearly four hours, they had crossed the westernhemisphere. "Mars is getting very old, her seas are diminishing, and hercontinents are increasing. Those canals are the remains of gulfs andstraits which have been widened and deepened and lengthened by human, orI should say Martian, labour, partly, I've no doubt, for purposes ofnavigation and partly to keep the inhabitants of the interior of thecontinents within measurable distance of the sea. There's not theslightest doubt about that. Then, you see, there are scarcely anymountains to speak of so far, only ranges of low hills."
"And that means, I suppose," said Zaidie, "that they've all been worndown as the mountains of the earth are being. I was reading Flammarion's'End of the World' last night, and he, you know, describes the earth atthe last as just one big plain of land, no hills or mountains, no seas,and only sluggish rivers draining into marshes.
"I suppose that is what they're coming to down yonder. Now, I wonderwhat sort of civilisation we shall find. Perhaps we shan't find any atall. Suppose all their civilisations have worn out and they aredegenerating into the same struggle for sheer existence those poorcreatures in the moon must have had."
"Or suppose," said Redgrave rather seriously, "we find that they havepassed the zenith of civilisation, and are dropping back into savagery,but still have the use of weapons and means of destruction which we,perhaps, have no notion of, and are inclined to use them? We'd better becareful, dear."
"What do you mean, Lenox?" she said. "They wouldn't try to do us anyharm, would they? Why should they?"
"I don't say they would," he replied; "but still you never know. Yousee, their ideas of right and wrong and hospitality and all that sort ofthing may be quite different to what we have on the earth. In fact, theymay not be men at all, but just a sort of monster with perhaps asuperhuman intellect with all sorts of extra-human ideas in it.
"Then there's another thing," he went on. "Suppose they fancied a tripthrough Space, and thought that they had as good a right to the_Astronef_ as we have? I daresay they've seen us by this time if they'vegot telescopes, as no doubt they have, perhaps a good deal more powerfulthan ours, and they may be getting ready to receive us now. I think I'llget the guns in place before we go down, in case their moral ideas, asdear old Hans Breitmann called them, are not quite the same as ours."
A Honeymoon in Space Page 10