The Angry Planet (17 page)

We turned around and made for
the city, traveling in silence. Jacky’s eyes were red from weeping when we
reached the hills, and my own heart was heavy. I tried to keep cheerful, to put
on an optimistic front for the sake of the others, but in my bones I felt that
our hopes of ever seeing Mike again were very, very low indeed.

FROM now on our story must
begin to move rapidly towards its dramatic climax. So much happened, and
happened in such rush and confusion that we cannot hope to give very much more
than a general impression of it all—a description in any sort of detail would
lengthen this book beyond all endurance.

But at this particular point
there is a natural pause in the action—the inevitable calm before the storm.
After the capture of Mike, and before his reappearance (you
are bound to know, by the mere
fact of his having contributed to this book, that he
did
reappear—though
it was not without much danger and excitement, which you shall hear of
anon)—during this time there was a period of preparation: more than a week,
indeed, went by before there was any more positive excitement. And so this
seems the natural chapter in which to insert Dr. McGillivray’s interesting
theory about the Martians and what they were—indeed, it seems to me that a
knowledge of this theory is almost
essential
to a full understanding of
all that follows. Before presenting the Doctor’s paper, however, I want to
write a few pages myself about what we did in the city towards preparing to
attack the Terrible Ones—an attack which, as you will see, never developed,
because of a sudden startling turn in events.

The first thing we did, then,
after our return from the
Albatross
battle, was to seek an audience with
The Center. Malu, Nuna, the Doctor and myself entered the huge central dome and
moved respectfully to the mound where the controlling power of the Beautiful
People lay. Malu began the interview by telling him of the battle and the
capture of Mike (we did not “hear” this conversation, of course—all we knew of
it was the slight sense of disturbance I have talked of as signifying, to us,
an intercourse among Martians: but we knew from what The Center said to us
later that this was what Malu had been describing to him).

When Malu had finished, there
was a long pause while The Center looked at each of us in turn. The strange
transparent flesh of his face was quivering, his small side tentacles writhed
sensitively towards us. At length he said:

“It is bad that the Terrible
Ones have come among us—it is bad that they have captured your friend, whom
along with yourselves, you strangers from another world, we had welcomed to our
city. Last night you, McGillivray, told me and the Wiser Ones something of your
world: we, in turn, told you something of ours. Among other things we told you
of our enemy, the Terrible Ones, who for so long have wished us evil. Now that
you have seen the Terrible Ones for yourself, it must be clear to you why we
fear them. Their presence near our city can mean one thing—they are assembling
to destroy us. Before they can do that, it is our duty to destroy them; and
therefore, The Voice will be instructed to assemble here, in the chief city of
the Beautiful People in this part of our world, the warriors and picked men
from all the other cities among and beyond the hills. And we shall march
against the Terrible Ones in their deep hill caves and rout them out and end
them—and rescue your comrade, too, if he has not been destroyed. Tell me now,
McGillivray, is there anything that you want from us, so that you too can
prepare for the attack?”

Mac took a step forward.

“Yes,” he said. “I have told
you of the vessel in which we came to you from our own world. It lies in the
plain, as you know—it was because of the interest the Terrible Ones took in it
that we went forth to fight them this morning. It must be brought here to the
city to safety. I cannot bring it without the help of your people. May I have
that help?”

There was a slight pause, then
The Center said:

“If it can fly—and you have
said that it flew here through the skies—why may it not fly to the city from
its resting place in the plain?”

“I cannot explain that to you,”
answered Mac, “until we have exchanged more thoughts with each other and know
more of the sciences of our two worlds. But, speaking briefly, it is because
the vessel will not fly for short distances—it is not built so. You must
believe me when I say that I cannot move it here without the help of your
people.”

“You shall have that help,”
came the response, after another slight pause. “You shall instruct Malu in what
you require, and he shall provide it if he possibly can. From time to time you
will come back here to report to me on all that happens concerning your
arrangements. For the moment, that is all.”

Immediately, the wall of guards
closed round the still, squat figure. We went out into the open air and set
about our work at once.

The removal of the
Albatross
was our first consideration. The rocket was provided on the underside with huge
steel skids, and it seemed to us reasonable to suppose that it could be dragged
on them across the loose sand of the plain to the hills—even, if we could get
enough labor, up through the forest (the track among the trees was wide enough)
to the city itself. We explained the idea to Malu as well as we could, and
tried to find out from him if there was anything in the nature of a rope on
Mars. He led us outside the city to the hills, and there showed us the entrance
to an enormous cave. When we went into it we found, to our astonishment, vast
coils of a powerful fibrous cable, and—mystery of mysteries!
—
some huge wooden trolleys, low
slung, mounted on rollers consisting of trimmed logs of the hardwood from the
trees. These trolleys were shaped like gigantic T’s, the long center bars being
some seventy or eighty feet long, the cross bars perhaps fifty. To cut a long
story short, I may say that we discovered eventually that these trolleys
existed for the purpose of transporting the huge crystal domes from the place
of their molding among the hills to whichever spot the Beautiful People chose
for a city. I shall say no more of this for the moment—it is one of the things
the Doctor will be writing about in some detail later on in this chapter.

The removal of the
Albatross
took us two days. An immense group of the Beautiful People, led by Malu and
Nuna, came across the plain with us, dragging one of the biggest of the
trolleys to the hollow where the rocket lay (I might mention, in passing, for
the sake of being thoroughly circumstantial in this account, that the ropes or
cables, we discovered, were woven from the leaves of a coarse kind of grass
that grew deep in the hills). We spent the first day in getting the
Albatross
out of the hollow. With the ropes noosed over it we found that it was possible
for it to be dragged, on the skids, right across the floor of the hollow and up
the slope of the ridge. The Beautiful People were magnificent
workers—exceptionally strong for their size—and, after all, the rocket weighed
little more than a third of what it had done on earth (a fact the Doctor had to
take into reckoning later on when it came to setting off from Mars,
incidentally—not nearly so much fuel was needed for the initial start-off from
the surface). As the nose of the space-ship rose above the top of the ridge, we
were able to maneuver the trolley underneath it, and so, gradually, with the
help of levers, and cables pulling in counter directions, we got the whole
Albatross
on to the great T-shaped carriage, ready for transportation across the plain.

We left it beside the hollow
overnight, with a guard, and then, next morning—the fourth of our sojourn on
Mars—we went out across the plain again with our great army of Martian
laborers. Long cables were fixed to the cross-bar of the trolley, the Martians
coiled their hand-tendrils round and round them, and so we set off. In spite of
the great strength we were able to bring to bear because of our numbers,
progress across the plain was slow: it was mid-afternoon before we reached the
hills, and late evening before the
Albatross
finally came to rest on the
little plateau overlooking the shining city of the Beautiful People. The scene
during its transportation had been fantastic—hundreds of the small, energetic
Martians pulling at the long, taut cables across the desert—it was like the
paintings one has seen of the building of the ancient Egyptian pyramids: there
too the transport had been by hand, and the great blocks of stone had been
mounted on logs or rollers of wood.

The Doctor’s next task was to
build, beneath the
Albatross
, on the plateau, a cradle, or launching
ramp. He explained to me, privately, that he wanted this done lest by any
chance the situation between the Beautiful People and the Terrible Ones should
become so dangerous for us that we would have to escape suddenly. With the help
of Malu’s laborers he built up, from the tough trunks of the trees (great piles
of these were lying, ready cut and trimmed, in the store cave in the hills), a
sloping slipway on top of the great trolley—in other words, the launching ramp
was built up gradually
underneath
the
Albatross
, so that we were
not faced with the problem of having to move the heavy space-ship
on to
the structure. The job was a rough and ready one—the Martians had no very
advanced ideas on engineering—but it was adequate. And the fact that the whole
thing was mounted on rollers meant that every day the Doctor could make
calculations apropos the relative positions of earth and Mars, and have the
cradle constantly changed so that the nose of the
Albatross
always
pointed in the right direction.

While all this was going on,
there was great activity in the city. Groups of males were to be seen, armed
with the long crystal swords, practicing leaping and slashing—a sort of militia
drill, one might say. From time to time small regiments of warriors like Malu’s
contingent arrived from the hills, summoned presumably by The Voice. The Voice,
as far as I understood it from the Doctor, who had had the whole thing
explained to him during his first interview with The Center and the Wiser Ones,
was the means by which communal or regional communication was carried out among
the Beautiful People. How exactly it was done—whether The Voice was an actual
being, like The Center—we never discovered: but somehow powerful telepathic
messages could be sent almost any distance—they were so strong that they took
precedence over any other thoughts going on in the minds of the particular
group of the Beautiful People they were aimed at.

All the time, during the
preparations for the attack, we humans went on living in the tent we had built
just outside the dome assigned to us. The Doctor had ascertained that the
leaves and spikes of the trees were quite edible—indeed, were extremely
nourishing; and by dint of eking these out with an occasional tin of meat or
fish from our store, we were able to feed ourselves quite satisfactorily. Just
outside the trolley cave in the hills we found a small well of rather flat-tasting
water, and so were well supplied on this count, too. In our leisure hours,
sitting quietly in the evenings in our tent, we thought and talked about Mike,
wondering where he was and what he was doing—if he were safe, or if the
dreadful creatures who had captured him were maltreating him in some way—had
killed him, perhaps, altogether. Yet somehow none of us could believe that Mike
was dead—he was, as we remembered him, too vital and resourceful a character.
We longed, above everything else, to set to work to rescue him, but however
much the Doctor urged action at his meetings with The Center, he was told that
the time was not ripe—all the regiments had not come in from the outlying
cities.

So we waited. Gradually the
city filled up. There was, in the atmosphere all round us, a sense of
concentrated tension and anxiety—a mounting, subtle excitement. One night, just
before we went into our tent, there was a sudden rumbling—as it seemed, in the
earth beneath our feet. It lasted perhaps five minutes, and when we asked Malu
what it was, he said: