The Angry Planet (11 page)

“Who are you? Who are you? What
are you doing here?”

THE NARRATIVE CONTINUED, BY STEPHEN MacFARLANE: THE MEN OF MARS

WE ROSE to our feet. Jacky
moved over towards me, and I put my hand on her shoulder to allay her
nervousness. We were all nervous. Why should we not be?—there was something
unutterably awesome in the very quietness and immobility of the two-score odd
creatures above and all around us. How long had they been standing there,
gazing down at us while we slept? The vast plain had been empty—now, from
nowhere seemingly, these beings had appeared, creeping unerringly to the one
hollow among all the hollows in that expanse that held a secret.

What did they look like?—what
was our first impression of them? It is difficult to say. Since that first day,
I have known them so intimately, have studied them at such close quarters, that
I can hardly remember how they first seemed to present themselves.

There was nothing, in the whole
range of our experience of living beings on earth, to which they could quite be
compared, although in general shape they were not unlike human beings. They
were small, varying in height from 4 to 5 feet—their leader, to whom I have
already referred as the tallest, was about 5 feet 6 inches. Their bodies were
slender, smooth and round; in general dimensions comparable to the trunk of a
medium-sized silver birch on earth. In color they were, in general, yellowish—a
dark, patchy yellow ochre; but this deepened to green towards the foot in most
cases, and sometimes merged to a fleshy pink and even red at the top. At the
top, this trunk of theirs, as I have called it, bulbed out slightly into a head
(I am, in this description, forced to use analogous human terms—“head,” “trunk,”
“hands,” and so on; but, as you will see later, the Martians are quite
different from us—the words are used only as equivalents, for the purpose of
building up some sort of image, however imperfect, in your minds). This “head”
was covered, on the rounded top, with a sudden fringe—a sort of crown—of small
soft tufts of a vivid bright yellow color. Just below this, on the front—the “face”
(although strictly speaking the Martians, as we decided later, had no faces—or
rather, their faces were these tufts or crowns on the top that I have
described)—there were three, sometimes four, sometimes even five, small
jellyish bulbs
—
glaucous protuberances which glowed transparently. These were
the eyes. There were no organs of hearing or smell—at least, in that first
glimpse we could see nothing that might be an ear or a nose; we found out
later, as we shall describe, that the Martians had a very highly-developed
sense of smell, although they could only “hear” sounds of considerable
loudness.

I now come to describe the “feet”
and “hands” of the Martians. At the lower extremity of the trunk—the greenish
part I have mentioned—the body suddenly bifurcated. Each of the forks split
again almost immediately, and so on and so on, so that on the ground, at the
foot of each figure, there was a perfect writhing mass of small, hard, fibrous
tentacles. About a third of the way up the trunk, in the front, there was
another sudden branching of similar “tendrils,” as I might call them—only these
ones were longer and lighter in color and seemingly more sensitive. These were
obviously the “hands,” since they held, in their twining grasp, the Martian
weapons—long spears, or swords, of some bright transparent crystalline
substance—a sort of flinty glass, as it seemed. Finally, to complete this
sketch of the appearance of the Martians, there were, just under the bulb of
the head, and on each side of the trunk, two smaller clusters of tentacles (or “tendrils,”
as I really prefer to call them). These were very short and slender, and light
green, almost white in color—like small pale sea anemones.

These, then, were the creatures
that confronted us that first morning on Mars. The task of describing them
properly has been almost impossible—as I say, I have had to use human terms—we
think, us men, almost always in terms of ourselves (“anthropomorphically,” as
Mac would say—a monstrous big word meaning, quite simply, just that—thinking of
everything, the whole universe, in terms of ourselves, as being
like
ourselves). The Martians were quite, quite different from ourselves—it was not
till we grasped that that we began to understand them. As our story goes on,
and you begin to learn more about these strange creatures of another planet,
perhaps you will be able to form a clearer picture of them than I have been able
to give in the brief sketch above.

The thing that astonished and
unnerved us most, however, at that first meeting with the Martians, was not so
much their appearance, strange as that was. It was the fact that the leader was
addressing us, and that the language he was using was our own English, as I
have said already at the end of the previous chapter.

“Who are you?” he said
distinctly. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

I looked wildly at Mac—it
seemed, at any incomprehensible moment of our whole adventure, the only thing
to do; he was the wisest of our party—a Doctor of Philosophy, no less; if
anything was understandable, he surely could understand it—if he did not, what
chance had we?

Mac, alone among us, seemed to
have recovered some of his composure. He looked up at the leader of the
Martians and said, in a clear slow voice:

“We are men. We come from
earth.”

There was a rustling round the
top of the ridge—a mercurial quivering of those hundreds of white, wormy tendrils.
And the response came immediately—seemingly from several of the Martians at the
same time—in the chill, detached tones:

“What are men? What is earth?
Explain, explain, explain. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you
doing here?”

The terrifying thing was that I
could not see anything in the way of a mouth on the creatures. How were they
talking at all, let alone talking in English? Where was the sound coming from?
And yet I knew, in my bones, that there was no sound—that I was not hearing
what the Martians said! The sensation was exactly the same as that that we had
experienced when Mac cut into the huge cactus-like plant on the plain, and a
scream seemed to come
into our heads.
I remembered what Jacky had said
on that occasion—it was as if we were
thinking
the sound rather than
hearing it. Now it was as if I were
thinking
these cold, detached,
insistent questions—they were forming of their own accord in my brain! It was
an uncanny experience—it was impossible not to feel uncomfortable and a little
terrified. Jacky shivered at my side—I could see that the boys’ faces were pale
and strained.

“Mac,” I cried, “for heaven’s
sake what is it? How are they speaking to us?—how in the Lord’s name can they
be speaking to us?”

He was curiously calm—when I
look back I always think of this as Mac’s best moment throughout our whole
adventure. He was, on earth, a quiet, reticent, scholarly man—the last man to
possess, in any marked degree, courage as we have come to define it. But
courage he did have—courage within his own terms of reference: the courage of
brains, of sheer intellect—he confronted the incomprehensible with his own
weapons, his brains. And he was confident in the possession of those weapons,
and in their efficiency—he was confident and cool in the face of this strange
enigma now, standing with one hand loosely on the pistol at his belt, the other
raised to shade his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at the Martian leader.

Without shifting this gaze for
a moment, he now answered me.

“I don’t know, Steve,” he said
quietly. “I do have a glimmering notion—no more than that yet. Give me time—just
a little longer.”

Then he raised his voice again,
and addressed the Martian in the same loud clear tones as before.

“Before I explain further who
we are,” he cried, “tell me who you are.”

Again the rustling and the
quivering, and again the response:

“We are the Beautiful People.”

Quick as a flash, Mac turned
round to us.

“Tell me, Steve—what did they
say?” he asked.

“Why—‘We are the Beautiful
People,’ ” I answered dazedly.

“And you, Jacqueline—tell me
what you heard them saying.”

“I thought they said—‘We are
the Lovely Ones,’ ” said Jacky timidly.

“Ah! And you, Paul?”

“I agree with Jacky,” said
Paul.

“So do I,” volunteered Mike. “That’s
what I heard them say—‘We are the Lovely Ones.’ ”

Mac smiled.

“Steve,” he cried, “I believe I’ve
got it. Watch this
—
I’m going to ask them a question—I’m going to ask them if they
knew we were here or if they came on us accidentally.
And you won’t hear me
saying a word.
Watch.”

There was a silence while he
gazed up at the Martian leader, with a curiously tense expression on his face.
Presently there was the usual quivering among the Martians, and there floated
into my head:

“Yes. We knew you were here. We
were told. We had a message.”

“I was right, Steve!” cried Mac
immediately, to me. “I know what it is! Try it yourself—look at that big
fellow, the leader—ask him a question. But don’t say anything—
think
it
to him, in your head—think it as hard as you can—put all your powers of
concentration into it.”

I did as he told me. I stared
at the Martian leader and thought, in my head:

“How did you know we were here?
Who gave you the message?”

There was no quiver—no
response.

“You’re not thinking hard
enough, Steve—you’re probably a bit nervous,” said Mac. “Make an effort—
throw
your thought towards him.”

I tried to calm myself, and
repeated the mental question with more concentration. And this time the
response came back:

“We were told by our friends
the Plants, whom you injured.”

I stared at Mac helplessly—the
whole thing was too much for me. Apart from the uncanny business of the
conversations, this latest response—that the Plants had told the Martians of
our presence—was bizarre and incredible. But Mac, far from seeming as baffled
as I was, was actually smiling triumphantly.

“Steve, it’s magnificent!” he
cried. “Who would ever have thought it! It’s so simple, man—don’t you
understand?—it’s
thought
transference! It isn’t speaking at all, as we
understand it—it’s pure communication—what scientists back on earth have been
arguing about and experimenting with for years. These creatures have got it
highly developed—they can plainly communicate with each other by simply
thinking a thought and so projecting it. That’s how they can speak to us—we
receive the thoughts they project—and of course, we receive them in the form we
are accustomed to think in—in our case English. I got the final clue when you
said you heard them say ‘Beautiful People,’ while Jacqueline claimed they said ‘Lovely
Ones.’ You were both right—the thought is the same in both cases. ‘Lovely’ is
probably a word that Jacqueline and the boys use more frequently than ‘Beautiful,’
which is a literary word, natural to a writer like you. If a Frenchman had been
with us, he would have claimed that the Martian said: ‘Nous sommes les Beaux.’
If my old rival Kalkenbrenner were here (and I bet he wishes he was!) he would
have heard the thought in his own native language of German: ‘Wir sind die Schoenen
Leute.’ It’s the pure thought we receive—we translate it in our heads into
whatever language or form of language we’re accustomed to.”

“But, Mac,” I protested, “it’s
fantastic—it’s unholy! Does that mean they’re listening-in now up there to all
this conversation of ours—these ideas that are flying to and fro between us in
the form of language?”