The Red Journey Back (15 page)

And
she soared past me again, with the others beyond, like so many figures in a
presentation of
Peter Pan
.
 . . .

On
all sides of us as we worked and played, stretched the vast reddish plain,
extending to the high-upthrusting mountains for which we had roughly aimed in
our descent. And although I was seeing a Martian landscape for the first time,
there was something truly familiar in it all, from the descriptions I had heard
from the others during the journey: the loose sandy soil, the clustering groups
of the “cactus plants” with their great fleshy fingers thrust up into the
unbelievable bluish-mauve sky.

And
I was particularly interested, indeed, in these plants, remembering all I had
heard of their primitive
thinking
faculties: I wondered, as I looked out from the working cradle, if even at that
moment strange messages were rustling among them toward the distant
hills—messages telling of the arrival of yet another uncanny shape from the
skies; and the thought for a moment was even a little eerie, for all I knew of
the fundamental friendliness of the creatures.

I
saw at one moment that Jacky, the most serious of the young people, had crossed
toward one small cluster of cacti, colored with bright spots of red and orange
on the darker green, and was standing solemnly before it with a most intent
expression on her face; and I had the notion that she was, as it were, trying
to
 . . .
send a
message, almost—perhaps to that old friend of hers, Prince Malu.

And
one strange thing was that, as I gazed down from my perch at the alien scene, I
had, myself, for the first time, a sudden
picture
of the physical appearance of the
Beautiful People. Of course, we had talked about them endlessly too—about Malu
himself, and the Center: these creatures—and the squat-shaped Terrible Ones—had
been described a hundred times to Maggie and Katey and the Doctor and me.
Jacky—who was good at drawing—had made sketches of them, so that, from all that
had been said and seen, we had an excellent idea of what they looked like. But
quite apart from this, there was an added
awareness
, almost, that first
day of our Martian landing: I had a clear kind of
vision
inside my head of Prince Malu—of his
slender trunk, a little more than five feet high perhaps, with its gentle
colorings of pale green and patchy yellow and the flaming “flower” surmounting
the bulbous upper end
 . . .
and the thought came into me
that for the first time I was experiencing—in a broad and general way as
yet—true Martian telepathy. It was as if, as Jacqueline
thought
toward the plants, they
thought
back
toward her, and the whole concentrated image from those myriads of primitive “minds”
came strangely into
my
mind.
 . . .

I
saw too, in the same way, a vision of the other species of Martian encountered
by the previous expedition: the creatures known (in the “language” of the
Beautiful People) as the Terrible Ones: great egg shapes, each the size of a
small ox, spotted yellow and red, moving also on detached root tendrils but,
unlike the Beautiful People, with the appearance at least of faces, caused by
the two huge “jaw petals.”

I
saw it all indeed before Jacky moved back from the plant cluster in front of
which she had been standing. And I saw, fleetingly, something else—but less
perfectly: a confused image of something white and yielding—a great vibrant,
pulsating
something,
against
a thick background of dark, dark green.
 . . .

The
vision lasted for only a moment—but it was a moment charged with a sense of
intolerable menace. I saw from Jacky’s face that she too had seen the vision—it
was why she had moved away from the friendly cluster of the cacti.

I
returned more soberly now to my work. It was almost complete—the unexpected
lightness of the materials I handled made it possible to assemble the booster
much more quickly than we had reckoned. With the Doctor I descended at last to
the ground to complete the work on our other equipment; and then my spirits
were restored by the sight of the excellent meal which Katey had prepared after
her exuberant jumping game.

Bacon
and eggs!—brought all the way from distant Earth. Dehydrated eggs and salt
bacon—but bacon and eggs!—and our first solid meal for almost three months. And
coffee—fresh coffee, its fragrance rising strangely in the brisk evening air.
 . . .

We
sat back when the meal was over, sighing contentedly, and suddenly weary from
the concentrated bout of exercise. Above us the little moons revolved—almost
comically in their unusual haste, to our Earth eyes. All was still—unutterably
still. And in the mood of the moment, in our relaxed weariness—the anticlimax
to all our weeks of tense endeavor and strain in the spaceship—there came over
us a strange melancholy; and—in me at least—a sudden misery of doubt and
apprehension: would we survive the nightmare lying perhaps ahead?

And
what was the nightmare? What were the creatures we knew only as the Vivores?
How did they differ, as Martians, from the Beautiful People—even from the
Terrible Ones? I recalled the thin chattering we had heard—so long before, it
seemed—from Roddy Mackellar’s airstrip; the despairing voice from great space: “The
Creeping Canals—Discophora—the Vivores—in heaven’s name try to save us from
them
 . . . 
!”

We
had, throughout our approach to Mars, made many attempts to contact MacFarlane,
wherever he was. We knew, from our calculations, his rough position—we knew the
general nature of his transmission equipment. Message after hopeful message we
sent as we speeded toward the Angry Planet. But silence—always silence. Only
once, as we journeyed in the rocket, was there anything distantly resembling
one of the old Morse messages. On this occasion, after we had been tuned for
some hours—at a distance of barely three hundred thousand miles from the
Martian surface—we had received, imperfectly, desperately imperfectly, a few
broken impulses—so faintly and confusedly as indeed to be uncertain as impulses
at all. If they spelled anything they spelled the irrelevant and impossible
words—
Guinea pigs;
and so we dismissed them as freaks—as illusions.
[4]

The
Yellow Cloud
 . . .
As we
sat there so quietly, on our own first peaceful Martian evening, I remembered
the bitterness of Dr. McGillivray’s experience—his landing so different from
our own. From the first, as we had come in to landfall, we had watched for any
sign of the mysterious Yellow Cloud. As Dr. Kalkenbrenner and I had worked,
while the others played, we both, I know, had turned anxious eyes across the
whole wide plain, ready for instant action if, even for a moment, we should see
anything presaging trouble. But the blue-mauve, cloudless sky was empty—all was
clear.

Now,
as the mauve tint deepened to pink and then to smoky red with the fall of
evening, we gazed again along the vast horizon, in particular toward the south,
where, if our guess was accurate, the
Albatross
lay—if indeed she still existed.

Was
it only imagination? Was there, hovering above a low outjutting line of
foothills, a thick ochreous
 . . .
mist,
almost? A mere coloration of the evening sky?

I
glanced uneasily toward the Doctor. He too remained with his gaze fixed in the
same direction. He turned to me and shook his head a little. And a moment
later, before the others had a chance to see anything, he gave, as captain of
our expedition, the word to retire.

We
mounted the long ladder one by one, ready indeed to rest after the unaccustomed
excitement, the sheer physical weariness of our first few hours on the Angry
Planet.

The
Doctor and I lingered by the thick plastic windows of the
Comet
long after the others had drifted to
sleep. We stared apprehensively southward, until, with a swiftness comparable
to the swiftness of tropical nightfall upon Earth, the whole sky darkened. The
little moons shone forth with an intense silvery light across the immensity
below us, and all was still.

When
we woke in the bright morning, after a night no shorter- or longer-seeming than
a night on Earth (the Martian day is very nearly equal to our own, being 24 hr.
37 min. 22.6 sec. in duration, compared with Earth’s 23 hr. 56 min. 4.1 sec.),
it was to find that the sky was empty once more of any tinge of yellow.

We
breakfasted substantially and in a mood of mounting tension; for immediately
afterward we proposed to embark on our mission of rescue—to face, with what
courage we could muster, whatever horror it was that threatened our gallant
colleagues.

I HAVE little
enough space, alas, to describe in full detail the extent of our preparations
for combating the mysterious menace of the Vivores. Much will emerge as my tale
proceeds; for the moment, I touch broadly on the general appearance of our “caravan”
as it set out across the Martian wastes—as it might have been observed,
perhaps, by some alien eye scanning the sandy desert from the distant
mountains.

All of us
(needless to say) wore heavy suits of protective “armor”—heavy, that is to say,
upon Earth, although on Mars we hardly noticed the weight—certainly welcomed
the warmth of the strange garments against the undoubted chill of the long
bright Martian autumn. The suits resembled diving suits,
tunic
and trousers (for both sexes) in one piece, the material a compound of asbestos
and flexible plastic—water-, gas- and fire-proof. The helmets were large
transparent globes of unbreakable “kalspex,” a variant on perspex patented by
our leader some years before. When not in position they could be folded back
over the shoulders to admit of free breathing. Pulled into place, they
automatically locked on an aluminum rim at the neck, and this process also
automatically brought into operation the oxygen-breathing apparatus carried
partly on the wearer’s back, partly on his chest. It was possible, for air-conservation
purposes, to switch off this apparatus, in which case breathing the free
external atmosphere was achieved through a valve.

With
the helmets in position, the members of the party could communicate with each
other by means of small microphones and short-wave radio receivers mounted
close to the mouth and ears. It was a matter simply of speaking quite normally
within the globes. Additional microphones and loudspeakers, mounted externally,
made it possible to communicate with any outside parties not wearing the
garments.

Thus
we garbed ourselves then—and must have seemed a group of strange, amorphous
creatures, indeed, as we clustered around the rocket ready to depart. Both the
entrance hatches had been closed, of course, and locked by a special method
also devised by Dr. Kalkenbrenner. In addition, an ingenious invisible
barrier—an arrangement of photo-electric cells—had been contrived to encircle
the whole ship. Any unauthorized approach to it was made known by an immediate
radio danger signal, transmissible into the helmets of the rescue expedition up
to a distance of some eighty miles.

As
to transport: we had carried with us in the
Comet
,
and assembled in readiness the afternoon before, the component parts of a small
but extremely powerful caterpillar tractor—virtually a light tank. It was large
enough to carry three—even more if necessary; for the rest (and for MacFarlane
and McGillivray once we had rescued them—even Malu) there was ample room in the
trailer attached—space also for our necessary concentrated food supplies, first-aid
gear and (in some instances considerably bulky) weapons.