The Angry Planet (15 page)

Well, there wasn’t a way. I
fell asleep at last, with Jacky curled up beside me with her head resting on my
shoulder. All was quiet—terribly quiet. I thought of the strange silent
Martians all around us, standing so erect in their big bubble-like houses. The
Beautiful People, they called themselves
 . . .
and they were, I could see, a beautiful people: not
to look at—we found them too strange to look at yet to be able to think of them
as beautiful in that way—but somehow they were beautiful in
themselves
.
They were sort of simple, somehow, and innocent. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t
really know what I’m trying to say. This is only what Mrs. Duthie would call “havers”—“blethering.”
And Mike would call it “sissy talk.” Well, perhaps it is; but it’s somehow what
I honestly felt in my heart at the end of that first strange day of ours on
Mars
.
 . . .

I woke suddenly. The light was
streaming into the tent. All round me there was excitement and activity. Uncle
Steve and the Doctor were up already, completely dressed, and Malu was with
them too, together with Nuna and all the Martians that had been with them when
they found us—the warriors, the picked men.

“What’s the matter?” I cried. “Is
anything wrong?”

“Nothing that need worry you,”
called back Uncle Steve. “We’re going out on an expedition, that’s all. We won’t
be long.”

“Where are you going?” (This
from Mike, who had sprung to his feet and was rapidly buttoning the clothes he
had loosened before going to sleep.)

“Nowhere in particular. Just
out—into the forest.”

“I don’t believe you,” said
Mike. “What are you checking up on the ammunition in that rifle for if it’s
only into the forest? There’s something in the wind, Uncle Steve
—
you needn’t think you can kid
us.”

Uncle Steve came nearer. His
face, we could see, was very serious.

“Listen, children,” he said. “Malu
has just brought us a message—from the plants outside, in the plain. There’s—well
 . . .
there’s danger.”

“It’s the
Albatross
!”
cried Jacky. “Uncle Steve—it’s the
Albatross
! Something’s happened to
it!”

“Yes, Jacky, it’s the
Albatross
,”
said Uncle Steve gravely. “Nothing’s happened to it yet, but it may do. That’s
what we’re going out to prevent.”

“And we’re coming with you,” I
cried.

“No, Paul—you can’t—you
children must stay here. The danger is too great.”

“But what
is
the danger?”
demanded Mike.

“Listen, Mike—I know very
little more than you do. But apparently there are, here on Mars, other things
besides the Beautiful People. The Doctor heard about them last night from The
Center, and Malu has been telling me about them this morning. I don’t know what
they look like. All I do know is that these things are evil and beastly—they’re
the deadly enemies of everything in this city. Malu calls them the Terrible
Ones—and at this minute a group of them—a small foraging party—is at the
Albatross
.”

There was silence for a moment.
Then Mike said, in quite a different kind of voice, for him—very serious and
slow:

“Uncle Steve—whatever you say,
we’re coming with you. If there’s anything threatening the
Albatross
, we
have as much right to fight it as you have. Paul has a gun—Doctor Mac gave him
one. And as for me—well, I’ve got one of these!”

As he spoke, he snatched up one
of the long crystal spears that we had been using as a tent-pole. Uncle Steve
looked at him—at all of us—helplessly. Then he shrugged his shoulders and
turned towards the Doctor, who was coming across to us, looking strained and
excited.

“Steve, are you ready?” he
asked breathlessly. “Man
—
we must hurry, we must hurry!”

“I’m ready, Mac,” said Uncle
Steve. Five minutes later we were speeding through the forest, traveling in
gigantic leaps as fast as we could go. Across the plain we went, silently, Malu
and the warriors raising little red clouds with their flailing tendrils. We
reached the hollow where the
Albatross
lay. We quietly, quietly mounted
the ridge. We looked down into the hollow, our guns and spears grasped firmly,
our hearts beating. And we saw—we saw—

What we saw—what happened—these
things are beyond me to describe. I end my chapter here. I leave it to Uncle
Steve to tell you about
—

The Fight for the
Albatross
. . . .

AS I sit here quietly writing
in Pitlochry, with the dark shapes of the hills before me, and above them the
star-studded sky, I think of that first encounter of ours with the Terrible
Ones on Mars as the one unreal episode in our entire fantastic
adventure—unreal, I think, because it was so unutterably horrible—too horrible
for one to
want
to remember it.

What caused the horror? Not
altogether the appearance of the Terrible Ones, hideous though that was (the
Beautiful People, after all, had accustomed us to strange appearances). No, it
was the
silence
in which the battle was fought; there was no sound
throughout the entire encounter—no actual
sound
, although our ears were
full
of a
violent, edgy, ghostly screaming all the time. It was impossible to tell who
was screaming—friend or foe; it was simply that all about us, through and
through us, were running those deep and beastly
thoughts
of conflicts
and pain and revenge and death. It was a nightmare—a nightmare in different
terms from any nightmare I have ever known, or ever hope to know.

Paul has described how we heard
the news that the
Albatross
was in danger early in the morning of our
second Martian day, and how we armed ourselves and sped across the plain to the
hollow where our space-ship lay. We had half-expected that the enemy, whatever
it was, might come to meet us, or would at least be visible as we neared our destination.
As it was, however, we crawled right to the top of the ridge without
interruption, and were thus able for a few moments to gaze down on the Terrible
Ones in the hollow before we were discovered
—
in much the same way as Malu
and his companions had gazed down on us the morning before.

Our first impression was that
the
Albatross
was surrounded by gigantic yellow-and-red spotted eggs—or
that, in the night, some huge clammy toadstools—fungoids
—
had formed in the hollow.
There was an odd score of the things, pulpy-seeming and glistening in the
sunlight, each the size of a small ox. They were moving silently backwards and
forwards along the tail part of the rocket (it lay, naturally, on a slope, with
the nose high up in the air at an angle), and they seemed, as far as we could
judge, to be feeling and nosing at it with long tube-like tentacle things that
grew, writhing, out of their sides. One of the creatures had twined his
tentacles round the flexible steel ladder, and was swinging it backwards and
forwards. They seemed somehow like octopuses—bulbous and jelly-like—with
unusually long and slender suckers.

As we stared, two of the
things—the two nearest us
—
turned round in our direction, and it was then that the full
hideousness of their appearance broke over us. They had faces! In the front
part of their yellow, shell-like coverings there were unmistakable features;
two bright protruding eyes—seemingly on short stalks, like crabs’ eyes—hard and
unblinking, and beneath them two small, nostril-like cavities. But it was the
mouth that caused us to grip our rifles more tightly. It was a huge gash,
vertical in the face, with great flabby jaws on each side—yellow on the
outside, a raw damp red inside. These jaws were held wide open, and the strange
thing was that we could not see anything in the nature of a throat-opening
inside the mouth, although we were staring full into the great gaping cavity of
it. Nor did there seem to be anything resembling teeth; only, lining the inner
surface of the jaws, some layers of protuberant lumps that seemed to be, so to
say, large taste-buds, as on the human tongue. To complete this brief
description, I may say that the egg-like bodies of these monsters were mounted
on forking tendrils of the same type as the feet of the Beautiful People.

We had no more than a few
moments to take in the appearance of the enemy, for almost immediately after
the two nearest us had turned round, there was a sudden cessation of movement
at the rocket. One by one the hideous creatures veered slowly to face us—forty-eight
hard and unblinking eyes stared up at us. And at the same time I became aware
of a terrible sense of evil—there was an atmosphere of sheer malignancy all
around us. I realized what it was that Malu had meant by saying earlier that
the Beautiful People would have known if we had meant them any harm. By means
of the strange Martian telepathy, we were made aware in our very souls that the
things in front of us were deadly enemies—they were
thinking
ill to us
as we clustered round the ridge-top staring down at them.

For perhaps half-a-minute there
was no movement, and then the Doctor acted. He was standing beside me on the
ridge, and I knew by looking at his face that he was an angry man. The
Albatross
was his all—and the
Albatross
was in danger from these terrible,
evil-meaning things. Sweat stood in little shining drops on his brow as he
raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired at the creature that stood at the
foot of the steel ladder. What followed was nightmarish.

The Doctor, in his anxiety and
excitement, had not paused to aim properly. He had meant to strike between the
eyes of the creature. What happened, however, was that immediately on top of
the explosion a long deep furrow appeared across the back of the thing by the
ladder, as the bullet tore open the flesh of it. There was no blood—only the
sudden mysterious gash. And simultaneously, in our heads, a long drawn-out
scream of pain and fury. The Doctor fired again, and this time the bullet
struck squarely home a little above the nostrils—we saw a sudden hole punched
in the face, round and clean. But again no blood. And, to our horror, no
seeming harm to the creature! Screaming even more hideously he started to
advance across the hollow towards us—they all started to advance, slowly, and
in some sort of formation.

“What in the devil’s name are
they, Steve?” gasped Mac. “You saw me firing—you saw the shots go home! Why
doesn’t it fall? The Center told me last night about these things, but I had no
idea they were anything like this! What are they?”

“Lord knows,” I answered
grimly. “We’re up against something this time, Mac—by heaven we are!”

I looked round wildly at Malu.
He and his warriors stood perfectly still—but I saw that they held their long
glass swords in readiness before them. Meantime the things below were almost at
the foot of the ridge. I wished with all my heart that I had forbidden the
three children to come with us. I looked at them as they stood in a little
group between Mac and me.

“Paul,” I said, “you shouldn’t
have come! Go back, for heaven’s sake—take Jacky back!”

Paul looked doubtfully at his
sister—I could see he was a little unnerved, and that, as the eldest, he felt a
sense of responsibility, and was inclined to do as I asked. But before he, or
any of us, could do or say anything more, Malu and the warriors went into
action.

How can I describe the fight
that followed?—there is nothing, nothing at all on earth to which I can compare
it. We, in our amazement, stayed on the top of the ridge, gazing down as if
hypnotized, doing nothing—nothing, that is, until
 . . .
but let me take it all in order.