The Red Journey Back (2 page)

Anyway, the
real reason why I wanted to add this postscript to old J.K.C.’s preface is just
this: I reckon that one or two of you will maybe wonder as you go on reading
just when we three “young people” are going to turn up in
this
adventure. I know we had bags of letters saying: jolly good
show! How did you feel on Mars first time you went?—all that kind of thing; to
say nothing of people wanting to know what happened to Malu after the eruption
of the Martian volcano (Malu was the Prince of the Beautiful People we got so
friendly with on the good old Angry Planet).

So you might
say, “Here—when are Mike and the chaps coming in?”

O.K. Don’t
worry. We’ll be there—even Malu, although he doesn’t have much to do in this
adventure—maybe not quite so much as in the last one, although what he does do
sure is important. Oh, we’ll be there all right—back on Mars!—only not for a
little while yet. You’ll see why as you go on. Hold your horses, that’s all I
say. There’s all the stuff about Steve and Doctor Mac first—what happened to
them when they popped off so suddenly without telling any of the rest of us;
that’s enough to be going on with, I reckon. What about the Yellow Cloud?—and
the Canal Zone?—and Old Jellybags, eh? Have a sniff around Old Jellybags before
you start worrying about
us
—Old Jellybags is something, I can
tell you! Of course, that wasn’t his real name—he didn’t have anything as
simple and decent as a Name—oh no! Poor old Dr. McGillivray called him
Discophora, and said he was “a hydromedusan or some similar coelenterate”
(!)—all of which was fine and dandy (and I’ve copied the spelling out of one of
Steve MacFarlane’s notebooks), but it didn’t alter the fact that . . .
ugh! I prefer Old Jellybags for a name myself: it makes him
sound
a bit more comfortable at least—and he was one kind of
Martian who was far from comfortable . . . !

Anyway, on
with the washing: jolly old Chap One. We crop up in Chap Four or so—I mean
Jacky and Paul and me. So we’ll be seeing you then. All the best!

Yours,

Mike

P.S. What
price Malone’s Conducted Cosmic Tours Inc.?—Founder and President Michael
Malone Esq., the Only Boy to have made the Interplanetary Martian Flight Twice
before he was Fourteen! Join the Malone Stardusters, the Old Original Galactic
Sports Club: Football, Baseball, Cricket Matches, etc., arranged between
Planets: Founder and Captain, Michael Malone Esq., etc., etc., etc. Ah well . . .
Better let old J.K.C. push on to Chap One before I get carried away!—M.M.

THE
FIRST MARTIAN MESSAGE reached me late on a hot summer afternoon in the year
19—; and the impact of it was so fantastic as to make me indeed doubt my
senses—to suspect at the least, and until I had proof positive, a miserable
hoax by some misguided practical joker.

In
the year in question my friend R—, of the Scottish Office of the British
Broadcasting Corporation, had telephoned to my apartment in London asking if I
could travel to the small village of Larkwell, near Prestwick Airport in
Ayrshire, to attend and afterward report on the trials being held there of the
revolutionary new Mackellar airstrip.

Roderick
Mackellar himself was an old friend. He was a man of some eccentricity but
remarkable
ability.
I had in the past, as a radio commentator, reported at some length on his
activities, which were always—partly because of the intriguing personality of
the man, partly because of their own true worth—full of news value. Hence the
invitation from R—to visit the site of the airstrip on which the inventor had
been working for some time.

With
Government backing Roderick had been experimenting with a new kind of surface
for airplane landing fields. Not only was it of an almost adamantine hardness,
thus requiring virtually no upkeep once it had been laid, but the metallic
alloy of which it was constructed had certain remarkable properties: the whole
surface was variably reactive to transmitted impulses from the planes
themselves, so that, in darkness or fog, it was possible for a pilot to guide
himself to a safe landing without recourse to any of the old unsatisfactory
flare or chemical methods. There were many other virtues too in the Mackellar
Compound—I have mentioned only these two as examples of its extreme usefulness.

The
preliminary demonstrations had been totally successful. Now, near Larkwell, a
full-length experimental strip had been built—a gigantic stretch of it
measuring about a mile and a quarter by some 450 yards; and large-scale trials
were to take place there.

I reached the
village in the early morning. In this factual account I do not propose to say
anything of the excitement and color of the scene. Some two dozen publicists
beside myself were present—a host of officials from the various Ministries—groups
of hard-faced security men—a sprinkling of society notables and a Very
Distinguished Personage Indeed, whose own interest in anything pertaining to
aircraft development is well-known.

Mackellar was
in a haze of delight, his round, smooth face beaming continuously, his whole
person, it seemed, enveloped throughout the speeches and ceremonies with a
perpetual brown cloud of the snuff to which he was a confirmed addict.

The trials
themselves were spectacularly successful—so much so, indeed, that the whole
occasion finished much earlier than had been anticipated. The gigantic silver
ribbon of the airstrip sparkled in the sun as the planes zoomed, soared and
looped above it; beyond, also sparkled the huge rolling sweep of the Atlantic;
in the foreground were the groups of excited spectators, clustering around the
inventor, applauding almost hysterically as test after test went through with
triumphant rapidity. It was as if nothing could go wrong—the whole event was
enshrouded in that rare magic of entirely successful achievement: our good,
innocent Roderick was for a moment as glamorous, as popular, as idealized as
the most romantic of movie stars!

In the early
afternoon, after a brief picnic lunch on the sand dunes beside the control hut,
the speech-making began. The Important Personage paid glowing tribute to the
snuff-covered eccentric and the snuff-covered eccentric himself stammered a few
engaging words of thanks and gratification. One by one the limousines rolled
northward as the distinguished visitors took their departures, until at last
the only persons still at the airstrip were Roderick and me, with young Archie
Borrowdale, his close companion and fellow-worker, and the celebrated Katey
Hogarth, Archie’s fiancée.

An air of
unbelievable peace hung over the scene after the piling excitement of the day.
The hot, sea-laden air was suddenly full of a great silence. We felt rested and
languid, full of a lingering quiet glory—talked desultorily, and in low voices,
of trivialities.

We had
strolled out from the laboratory to the grassy edge of the great, lonely,
shining airstrip itself. Archie, his young, thin face flushed and happy, had
brought some drinks from the marquee which had housed the refreshments earlier.
Katey, prettily contented, her gay summer frock a last lovely touch of color
against the silver of the runway surface, sat close to the beaming inventor,
her arm tucked in his.

“Let’s have
some music, K.C.,” she said to me dreamily. “Don’t let’s talk any more—we’ve
had enough talk to last us all our lives. Let’s just sit here and think a bit,
not very seriously, and listen to something quiet. There’s bound to be
something somewhere.”

I unslung from
my shoulder the small portable receiver I always carried with me on such
outings. In itself it was a remarkable device, made for me by an amateur radio-fan
friend. I am not competent to enter into technicalities, but briefly he had
contrived a method whereby the casing, of a specialized material, acted as an
aerial; and so reception was improved beyond all belief for a set so small. I
placed this delicate instrument among us on the ground—found it difficult to
balance on the tufty grass and finally established it evenly on the surface of
the airstrip itself, some two feet from the edge.

“That’s it,”
murmured Katey as I tuned. “Some Mozart—something quiet and nice. No—Schubert,
isn’t it?”

I had indeed,
after rambling through some jazz and a quiz program, discovered a small
Continental orchestra playing the
Rosamunda
overture and ballet music. The curious thing was that however delicately I
tuned, and despite the perfection of the set, there was considerable
distortion—and some irritating interference.

Katey hummed
gently to herself, echoing the lovely Schubertian melodies.

“Dear, gentle
Schubert,” she said softly, breaking off for a moment. “If he could have
foreseen that we’d be listening to him in a place like this, after all we’ve
known of marvels today! Strange, isn’t it—to think how full the air always is
of radio messages and music and voices talking—all the time, all around us . . .
and it’s only when you tap them with a little magic box like this that they
come to life. I wonder what happens to old wireless waves?—I mean, after we
have
picked them up like this? I wonder if they go on and on—right
out into space, perhaps. I wonder if there are people on Mars, maybe, who could
pick them up too if they only had the right kind of apparatus—if they had huge,
huge aerials and special kinds of radio sets . . .”

Her voice went
on. But at the accidental mention of Mars, my own thoughts had suddenly flown
to MacFarlane—to that lost friend of mine who had, so long before, gone off to
Mars and was lost there to all human contact.

“
. . . I mean,” said Katey, her
voice a dreamy whisper in the heat and languor of the afternoon, “—I mean, if
only the Martians could. You keep on telling us that there are Martians, K.C.
There were those friends of yours who went there. For all we know the air all
around might be full of messages from Mars—and if only we could tap them . . .”

Her voice
trailed away at a sudden exclamation from Archie Borrowdale. I saw him leaning
forward intently toward the little portable, his hand raised, his head on one
side.

“Wait, Katey,”
he said. “Listen—listen, Roddy. That interference of yours, K.C.—
listen
 
. . .
 
!”

I did
listen—to the continual interference rather than the music itself, the thin
crackling running constantly behind
Rosamunda.
And
there was an instinctive tightening around my heart, a flash of thought and
understanding quite fabulous!

“Some amateur
somewhere,” said Mackellar, yawning. “It’s Morse, of course. Some amateur
somewhere—or a ship out there,” with a nod toward the sea beyond the airstrip.

But I had a
wild and different thought . . . ! Long, long before, when
Stephen MacFarlane and I were boys together, we had experimented youthfully in
wireless transmission and reception, had filled the attics of our house with
primitive valves, crystals, transformers, to the despair of our parents. We had
developed, as boys do, a private code call-sign in Morse. Now, on that lonely
beach—as we leaned forward, all four, to listen more closely to the hazy,
desperately weak “interference” behind the sweet Schubertian music—I heard, as
I had not heard it for a quarter of a century, that ancient cryptic call-sign,
mingling with the other chattering messages in Morse! No one, no one in all the
world knew the secret of that call-sign but MacFarlane and myself . . .
and MacFarlane was not, alas, even in the world at all—was millions of miles
away across the blue bright sky above us, if indeed he even lived. . . .

The gigantic
thought choked me. I remembered Katey’s casual words—no longer casual:
“. . . if they had huge, huge
aerials
 . . .
for all we know the air all around might be full of
messages
 . . .
if
there were huge,
huge aerials
!”

Before me,
measuring a mile and a quarter by 450 yards, was a huge aerial indeed!—the
metallic airstrip itself; and on it, picking up its messages through the
casing, was that small specialized receiver . . . !