Authors: John Keir Cross
Old What’s-his-name put me
down—well, chucked me down, rather—and there I was, in the middle of all those
ugly great things—hundreds of them—all staring at me and sometimes prodding at
me with their feelers. Uncle Steve has described them, so you can imagine I
didn’t feel too good. The one that had been carrying me—the one I call old What’s-his-name—he
pushed me along with his feelers through the crowd, and suddenly I was in front
of a sort of mound, like the one The Center lay on back in the glass city, and
on it there was a huge thing like a toadstool—one of the Terrible Ones, but
much bigger than any of the ones I’d seen so far, and absolutely dead white and
sort of clammy-looking. He was horrible—the inside of his jaws wasn’t red, the
way the jaws of the others were, but a pale kind of pink, like the underside of
a mushroom.
Well, he looked at me for a
long time, and then I realized that he was speaking to me. It was the same sort
of thing as went on among the B.P.—you know, thinking it in your head kind of
thing—but there was
something
different about it. I don’t know what—it
isn’t at all easy to describe, but it was a sort of coldish thin voice you
heard and there was a sense of badness in you all the time it was going on—it
was almost as if the thought had a
smell
, if you know what I mean, like
that awful decayed sort of smell I’ve been talking about.
So this big white fellow said
to me:
“What thing are you? Why were
you with the Enemy?”
(I found out later that these
things always referred to the B.P. as the Enemy.)
So I said:
“I’m a human being, if you want
to know—I don’t suppose you’ll have any idea what that means, but it’s what I
am all the same. And I come from the earth, which is millions and millions of
miles away. I don’t expect you’ll understand that either, but I came from there
with some friends of mine in the
Albatross
—and, if you want to know what
the
Albatross
is, well that’s out on the plain, and your friends were
nosing about at it.”
Well, he must have understood
me a bit, because he said:
“What is the thing you call
Albatross
?
What is its function? Our foraging party found it, as they have told me, when
exploring on the plain.”
“It’s no use me trying to
explain it all,” I said, sort of bored (Jacky says “resigned” is a better word.)
“You wouldn’t really understand. The
Albatross
is a space-ship—for
flying through space. And I can’t tell you any more than that—maybe the Doctor
could, but he isn’t here.”
There was a pause, and a sort
of disturbance among all the things round about. And then the big one said,
starting off on another tack:
“Did you come from the city of
the Enemy?”
“Yes,” I said, “if you want to
know, I did.”
And then a strange thing
happened. They laughed—all those great hulking ugly things laughed! It was one
of the most terrible things I’ve ever come across. You see, you somehow didn’t
imagine Martians laughing—laughing’s something you
do
, it makes a
noise
,
you know. And we hadn’t had any experience of the B.P. laughing—it somehow didn’t
seem possible to laugh when you did all your talking and so on by thinking. But
here they were—laughing. They didn’t move—there wasn’t any change in their
faces. But in my head were those hundreds of thin, sort of
snaky
voices,
all in a sort of nasty chuckling. And the big one said:
“In a little time the city will
be no more. We are almost ready to attack it—it will be no more, and the Enemy
will be broken. They cannot stand against us—in the past we have been too small
in number. But now we have joined together—all of us who used to fight among
ourselves. And we shall swallow them up!”
And they laughed again—on and
on, for a long time. I felt disgusted with them, and frightened too, I don’t
mind saying. And besides, I was still a bit sickish from the journey, and then
there was the heat, and the awful smell of them, too.
* * * * * *
(These asterisks across a page
mean passage of time—I learned that at school once. So I’m putting them in
here, quite professional-like. In this case they also mean that the Author got
a bit fed-up with writing for the minute—and he was hungry too, so he stopped
and had some of Mrs. Duthie’s pancakes. On we go then—and being professional
again, I’m going to start this new part of the chapter in what my English
master at school calls the “historic present.”)
I am in a small cave just off
the main cavern. It’s quite darkish, and the heat is terrible. There’s one of
the great things that captured me lying across the entrance to the cave, so I
can’t get out. He just lies there like a great lump, but sometimes he turns
round and stares at me with those eyes of his, sort of on stalks—he just
stares. Once or twice I try saying something to him—what do they think they’re
going to do with me, and all that—but he never answers. Twice some others of
the things come for me and take me to the big toadstool chap, and he asks me
some questions—who I am and where I come from—all that sort of thing all over
again. The second time, after I’d done my best to explain about earth, and so
on, I decide it’s my turn to ask him some questions. I reckon that by now
almost two days have passed—I was able to tell, anyway, that I’d spent one
night in the place, by the way the cavern got dark, as I could see from my
smelly little cave. I had had some sleep but they hadn’t made any attempt to
feed me—what was worse, they hadn’t given me anything to drink, and what with
the awful steamy heat in the cavern I needed some water pretty badly.
So I said to him—the big
chap—that I was hungry and thirsty. At first he didn’t seem to get the idea, but
then after a time he did, and he and the others laughed again in that rotten
way I mentioned before. And he says to me, how would I stop my hunger? Well,
that was a poser—I just didn’t know what to say to that. I thought of saying to
them, what did they eat?—maybe I could eat the same; and then I remembered the
B.P. and thought that if these chaps had the same sort of habits, that wouldn’t
be much good. And then suddenly I remembered the Doc saying something about the
leaves on the big trees—how he was going to try them for food for us. And I
thought, well—I might as well take a chance. If they’re poisonous, that’s just
too bad—even dead I couldn’t be much worse off than I am now, I thought, and if
you’re dead you aren’t hungry—at least, I don’t think you are—it doesn’t seem
likely, anyhow. So I said it was leaves I ate. They just couldn’t get the idea.
It seemed to be the word “eat” that was the difficulty—they could understand
being hungry, and they could understand stopping hunger by taking something in,
but actual eating, with your mouth (I pointed to my mouth and tried to explain
with signs)—they couldn’t understand that at all (I found out afterwards, by
the way, that they did feed the same way as the B.P.—from plants, through
little feelers, so that explains that). Anyhow, in the end I said, sort of
desperately, that if they didn’t let me have some leaves from the trees
outside, I would die. And if they didn’t let me have some water to drink I’d
die.
And then they said—drink?—what
was that?
Honestly! I felt like bashing
their great silly faces in!
In the end I thought the idea
of
well
, or
spring
, very hard in my head—I tried to get a picture
of a well in my mind and project it (that’s the word the Doc uses for this
business of thinking things
to
people). And after a time it seemed to
click. Old What’s-his-name pushed me with his feelers down to the far end of
the cavern and into a little sort of alcove. And there there was a small slow
spring oozing out of the rock—only a very tiny trickle, but it was enough. I
licked at it with my tongue while they all stood staring at me. It was
horrible—quite warm, and it had a flat, sort of limey taste, but it was water,
you know, and oh boy, did I need water!
Well, the next thing was the
leaves. When I’d finished drinking, old What’s-his-name prodded me back to the
Big White Chief, and I found that while we’d been away he’d sent one of his
chaps up to the open air for some leaves—there was a pile of them on the ground
in front of him. So I picked up one of them and had a nibble at it—and I
thought to myself, well, Mike, old chap, maybe this is the end of you, and if
it is, well, Three Cheers for Old England and God Save the King. But it wasn’t
the end of me after all. The leaves had a sweetish, mushy sort of taste, like
sleepy pears, in a way, and nothing happened—they didn’t seem in the least bit
poisonous. So I tucked into them good, and then I felt a little better (still a
bit hungry, of course—fruit and leaves and things are all very well, you know,
but not a patch on a big plate of bacon and eggs, for instance). All the time I
was eating, all those huge things just stood around and stared at me again—it
was uncanny. I suppose they were quite curious and interested to see me busy at
it in such a different way from them, but you see they didn’t
show
they
were curious or interested. They didn’t have any kind of facial expression.
Paul has said somewhere that that was one of the queerest and most
uncomfortable things about the folk on Mars—this business of no facial
expression: and it was even worse with these smelly toadstool fellows than with
the B.P., because, you see, the Terrible Ones had more recognizable actual
faces
than the B.P. had, and so you expected some sort of smile or sneer or surprise
or something on them.
Well, that was the eating and
drinking problem solved, at least—not very satisfactorily, but well enough to
get by. Old What’s-his-name pushed me back to my little cave, and the guard
flopped down with a soggy sort of thud in the entrance to it again. After this,
every day they brought me a fresh bundle of leaves into the cave, and twice a
day I was led down to the little well at the far end of the cavern so that I
could get a drink.
And so the time passed—the “days
and nights slipped into one another,” as they say in books. I slept or dozed a
lot—I expect it was the heat. Altogether I felt pretty rotten, I must say—I
used to have bad dreams—and in the gloom of the cave I sometimes didn’t even
know if I was asleep or awake while I was having them. Oh, all sorts of
things—too long to write about here. Besides, I doubt if I
could
write
about them; nightmares are beastly things-—it isn’t so much what happens in
them (sometimes you can’t even remember that next day) it’s the atmosphere of
them, somehow. There was one I remember particularly—some sort of huge beast
(it was a dragon, actually—it came from a picture in a school reader I once had)
had caught me up in its jaws and was going to bite through me. It never got to
the point in the dream where it
did
bite through me, but I could feel
its hot breath all round my middle, and it was that that was the real nastiness
of the dream. Ugh! I hate to think of it, even now.
Mind you, all the time the one
thought that was uppermost in my mind was to work out some sort of plan of
escape. Apart from just
wanting
, for my own sake, to get away
from the Terrible Ones, there was another thing that was beginning to worry me
quite a lot. Every now and again—on an average about once a day—I was led out
to the mound in the cavern to be cross-questioned by the Big White Chief. He
was always on at me about the earth, what it was like, and all that, but what
he seemed to me to be really after was somehow to taunt me about the attack he
and his followers were planning on the city of the B.P. They all seemed to get
some sort of queer comic pleasure just from telling me about it, and boasting
what they were going to do; they would laugh and laugh in that beastly
mirthless way. As far as I could gather, as those conversations went on, the
attack wasn’t very far off. Foraging parties went out almost every day to spy
out the land. It seemed to me that their plans were pretty nearly complete—the
Big White Chief actually told me once that they were waiting for some “special
fighters” to come in from some far-off caves, and then they’d set off through
the hills to have their whack at Malu and Co. Well, as I saw it, if only I
could escape and warn the B.P. of just how dangerous the situation was, it
would be a good thing all round. I was worried about the Doc and Uncle Steve
and Paul and Jacky, to say nothing of the B.P. themselves. There were hundreds
and hundreds of these great nasty things in the cavern, and the Big White Chief
had told me there were thousands more, in other caves close at hand.
The problem was
how
to
escape? All the time I was in my own little cave, the guard was slumped across
the entrance, and when I was in the cavern it was always crammed to overflowing
with the monsters. To make any sort of dash for it would be right out of the
question—I wouldn’t get more than a few yards. Even if, by a miracle, I got
into the passage-way leading down to the cavern, they would overtake me in no
time—I remembered from the time of my capture just how fast they could move.