The Angry Planet (24 page)

We looked over the side. The
hideous thing had not been dislodged by the jerk of the falling ladder. He
clung with his tentacles and feet-tendrils to the rungs—and slowly, inexorably,
he was mounting the swaying steel cables towards us.

“Mac,” I cried, “is there no
way to release the ladder—does it unfasten?”

“No,” he shouted. “It’s fixed
securely—I never thought there’d be any need for it to be detachable. Oh my
heavens!—my heavens!”

“Shut the doors,” I yelled. “We
can start even if the monster is hanging on.”

“The weight will pull us out of
direction. Steve, we’ve got to get rid of it—we’ve got to!”

Wildly he pulled the revolver
from his belt. He fired six shots into the face of the thing below—six clean
round holes appeared in the pulpy flesh. But still the creature mounted.

Then suddenly the end came. We
saw something hurtle through the air in a great leap and land on the back of
the monster. It was Malu!—Malu, who had seen our danger and has rushed to save
us!

For a moment the two Martians
clung together on the swaying ladder. But Malu’s sword had bitten deeply into
the Terrible One as he leapt, and the great flabby creature loosened his grip.
As they fell to the plateau a message flashed into our heads—with one
superlative effort, Malu—our first friend on that strange and terrible world—projected
a last thought to us in that high dramatic moment. Not one of us but heard it
clearly, cutting through every other thought in our crowded brains:

“Farewell, strangers—good
journey! Remember Malu the Warrior—Malu the Tall, Prince of the Beautiful
People
.
 . . .
”

We slammed the doors. Mike, his
face and clothes burned by some of the rain of lava that had fallen on him, had
collapsed in a heap on the floor of the cabin beside the still form of Nuna—but
he was smiling happily, unconscious as he was. Jacky was sobbing—Paul stood
dazed beside her.

Mac staggered to the control
panel. He raised his hand to touch the lever that would launch us into space
again. I looked through one of the lower port-holes for a last glimpse at the
terrible scene. I saw, in that moment, that Malu had disentangled himself from
the creature of the ladder—he stood swaying on the plateau, his sword swinging.
Even as I stared I saw two more of the monsters advancing towards him
menacingly. He was indomitable as he faced them
.
 . . .

The Doctor pressed the lever.
There was a rushing, explosive sound, drowning all else. The scene faded from
my view—I knew no more than I know now of the fate of Malu. Did he escape?—or
was he swamped by the monsters that rushed to overwhelm him?

For a moment a red mist swirled
about the portholes. Then I felt myself losing consciousness. As I sank into
oblivion my last thought was that even in these few seconds we were hundreds
and hundreds of miles away from the Angry Planet
.
 . . .

1.
Stephen MacFarlane.
And so it is finished—“like an old wife’s story,” as the playwright has it. In
that high moment, when Malu flung himself on the great yellow-and-red monster,
our adventure on Mars came to an end. What follows is anti-climax—and must
necessarily be so. In books, in plays, there is the contrived “curtain”—the
dramatic peak of action, when all the threads are gathered together in one
great explosive point: in life there is no great point—the curtain never falls.
We have our moment of drama; we stand poised—but not for ever. Life goes on: we
turn a corner, and eat, and sleep, and tie our shoe-laces, and it is all the
same as before.

That is the way it was with us.
There was the jerk as the
Albatross
leapt from the heaving surface of
Mars, and there was, immediately, for each one of us in the cabin, the sense of
unbearable pressure I have described already in talking of our flight from
earth. We lost consciousness—and one of us, alas, never recovered from the
sudden shock of that desperate start. Nuna, weakened already under his wounds,
and in any case much frailer than we were, and probably with organs of
respiration less easily adaptable than ours, lay immovable on the floor of the
cabin long after we had recovered and were shakily adjusting ourselves for
another long spell of inter-stellar flight. Mike—none the worse for his
collapse, and the slight burns he had received from the raining lava—moved
shakily over to the limp shape of his friend, whom he had risked so much to
save, and called him by name. There was no reply—no thought came into our heads
from the still figure. Mike put out a hand to touch the little Martian, and
immediately he went floating up into the air and stayed against the steel wall,
bouncing gently against it. And we saw, unequivocally, that he was dead—he had
died quite simply in the moment of acceleration. Mike’s effort had been in
vain. That Nuna had been alive when Mike brought him into the rocket there was
no doubt—we had seen him moving before his collapse. But he was no longer
alive—he bounced and floated in the cabin with the same air of forlorn
helplessness I have seen in a goldfish that has died in its bowl; his tendrils
waving limply, his glaucous eyes all dulled. There was nothing we could do.
With sorrow in our hearts we laid him gently in a corner of the cabin, strapping
him to the floor.

This done, we stayed quiet for
a while, our heads full of unspeakable thoughts. We did not look at one
another, but sat or stood with our heads bowed, preoccupied with the visions we
were seeing. We were, I believe, a little crazed in the first hour—the impact
of the horror of that last scene on Mars had been too great—intolerable in its
effect on us and our reactions. It was already a thousand miles and more behind
us, but still I seemed to see it, stark and brilliant before my eyes—the
spouting lava, the great shining bubbles collapsing and melting, the writhing
limbs and agonized bodies of the Martians
 . . .
above all, the terrible spectacle of the leaders of
the two great species confronting each other: the squat, flaming figure of The
Center, the monstrous, jelly-like bulk of the chief of the Terrible Ones, white
and evil, pulsing with sheer malevolence.

It passed—in time it passed. We
returned to normal. We were once more, in outer space, weightless—but this time
there was no joy, no sense of adventure. It gave us no pleasure to be able to
bounce round the cabin, to undergo the curious experience of eating from the “toothpaste
tubes.” In short, the long return journey had a weariness in it—some sort of
sense of defeat and frustration. There was so much we had wanted to do—so much
we had not done. All about us was infinite space—a great velvet expanse,
immeasurable, full of terror and mystery. The sun shone golden against the
deep, deep azure, the stars were silver buttons, unwinking, in a vast and ever-subtly-changing
kaleidoscope. But somehow this—yes, this unutterable glory—was old, old news to
us. We longed only for the journey to end—although all the time we were haunted
by the thought that perhaps it never would end; perhaps, in all the trembling
of the plateau on which the
Albatross
had rested, the launching ramp had
changed position sufficiently to throw us out of course—perhaps we would travel
forever, never resting till the end of things—going nowhere
.
 . . .

But in time this terror passed
too. We saw, behind us, the great shining disc of Mars, which, at the outset,
had loomed hugely over our whole range of vision—we saw it dwindle till it
seemed no more than a red, glowing tennis-ball—till eventually it was a mere
speck, a star among the rest. And we saw the other star—the one we knew for
earth—grow proportionately larger, shining in silver like the moon, a burnished
sphere against the dark velvet of space. It grew till we saw its shining
poles—till we vaguely perceived the outlines of the continents. And we knew
that we were safe.

Almost four weeks elapsed
between our departure from Mars and the moment when Mac told us that we were
well within the gravity-belt of earth, and that he would soon be switching on
the nose
tuyères
to retard our flight, and pushing out the
Albatross’s
wings so that our landing would be smooth. Quite where we were going to land he
could not say. In the limited time at his disposal for maneuvering he would be
able to make roughly for Britain, but he was not altogether sure if there would
be enough fuel to get us there (if you remember, we did not switch off the
engines when we ought to have done on the journey out, because of all the
turmoil and excitement of discovering the children, and we had therefore used
up some of our precious fuel; and although this had been counteracted, to an
extent, by the fact that we had not needed a great deal of fuel in starting
from Mars, because of the smaller gravity-pull, the two things had not quite
cancelled each other out—we were just a little on the debit side).

We entered the swirling white
mist I described when writing of our outward flight. The Doctor and Jacky
adjusted their masks—Paul, Mike and myself strapped ourselves to the beds and
waited, as stoically as we could, for our brief bout of unconsciousness. The
Doctor reached up to touch the control levers. Beneath us, dim through the
swirling mists, I saw indistinct patches of green and blue, and, for a moment
before my senses left me, a corner of earth—a map, as it were—that seemed like
the northern coast of Africa, with Gibraltar jutting out as a stubby finger
from Spain towards it.

And then all went blank once
more. When I regained consciousness it was to the realization of a great
sliding bump and tremor. Then all was still—for a moment, painfully still. We
had arrived—we were back home—on earth. We were among our friends again
.
 . . .

*     *     *     *     *     *

As the world knows, we landed
in the
Albatross
in Northern France, at a small village not far from
Cherbourg, called Azay. The story of our sudden appearance out of the blue, and
our landing in a field in which three old peasants were working, is altogether
too well known to require any repetition here. The old people were
simple-minded, honest souls who accepted the
Albatross
quite willingly
as some new type of airplane, but were utterly astonished to see five
people—two adults and three children—descend from it and go rushing round their
familiar field like lunatics. Jacky was laughing a little hysterically, I
remember, and crying too, at the same time, and as for me, well, I confess it
unashamedly—I got down on my hands and knees and actually kissed the good brown
earth, digging my nails into it deeply and letting the loose damp soil, so
different from the remorselessly dry soil of Mars, go running through my
fingers! All this is old news now—there have been endless accounts of it all in
the papers, with photographs of the
Albatross
resting in the field with
ourselves beside it, with the old peasants—the Picaults—beside it, with the
Mayor of Azay himself beside it; photographs of the Picaults giving us wine and
milk after our arrival (specially posed the following day, actually, but
counterfeiting quite successfully, as far as the Press and its readers were
concerned, the real occasion); photographs of the
Albatross
being
dragged by huge tractors from the little farm, being swung by great derricks at
Cherbourg docks on to the ship that brought it, and us, to England.

We landed
the Albatross in Northern France

All this has been told and
retold a hundred times, and would be stale in the re-representation here. We
have, all five of us, broadcast our accounts of the arrival, our impressions on
landing on earth again after so many weeks in space. We have addressed meetings
up and down the country, we have been banqueted and fêted—particularly the
children; we have been filmed and televised—we have even made gramophone
records for a well-known company, complete with sound effects supposed to
represent (not very successfully, I fear) the swishing, explosive sound made by
the motors of the
Albatross
.
At the beginning of this book—this
holiday task of ours—I said we would write only of the things not properly
covered so far in the various accounts of our adventures that have appeared:
that, in short, we would set down our honest impressions of the journey as it
affected us individually. That task is done—our holiday after the great (and
embarrassing) welcome we were given is at an end. We have not, in any sense, in
the preceding pages, attempted to explain anything: we have simply, each in his
own manner and style, set down our thoughts, our accounts of our reactions and
experiences. Inevitably this book is sketchy. How can it be otherwise, being so
short? Inevitably, too, it is merely the prologue, the harbinger of others. As
I have already said, the Doctor is engaged in the compilation of a volume of
some bulk that will set out, for the more scientific reader, an account of his
innumerable valuable findings, both in space and on Mars—that will, among other
things, provide an amplification of the theory on the nature of the Martians he
has sketched for us in these pages. I may add that I myself am beginning work
immediately on a much fuller version of the entire adventure than these present
jottings present you with, and I have a feeling that Jacqueline, who is, by
general consent, the most literary-minded of the children (although, by a
paradox, she has contributed least to this volume), will be embarking on a long
personal essay on the whole episode. She, during the memorable days of waiting
on Mars, had much intercourse with the two little females we were introduced to
by Malu—Lalla and Dilli. I know that she has much of interest to communicate on
the subject of the domestic life of the Beautiful People. She also was able to
collect, and note down, one or two of the haunting folk tales of these strange
creatures—it is possible that she may be in a position soon to publish these
separately in book form, either as a collection or individually.