The Angry Planet (21 page)

Well, I brooded and brooded.
And it wasn’t for a very long time that I began to see a faint glimmering
chance of how it might be done. When I did think of it I could have kicked
myself, because in a way it was so simple—I should have thought of it right
away. It’s funny, you get used to things you know—I’d got so used to sitting
still in that little cave, and walking about with ordinary steps in the cavern,
that I had almost forgotten I was on Mars and could
jump
. Yes, jump—and
jump pretty high at that! Thinking along those lines I suddenly remembered
something else; and I decided that next time I went out to have a chat with the
Big White Chief I would keep my eyes skinned—just to see if it was all going to
be possible.

But it wasn’t for another
couple of days that I was called out to an interview—and I’ve got a feeling it
wasn’t meant to be an interview! Before this, though, something rather curious
happened.

One morning, the guard at my
cave mouth shuffled aside and three of the Terrible Ones came in. They were
different from any of the creatures I’d seen so far; they were much smaller, to
begin with, and they were lighter in color—not yellow-and-red in spots the way
old What’s-his-name was, but almost white, like the B.W. Chief. For a long time
these three chaps just stood staring at me, then they moved quite close and
began to feel all over me with their tentacles. It was a horrible
sensation—little soft, gentle pattings and strokings. I edged away from them as
far as I could, but they followed me right over to the wall.

Quite suddenly they stopped and
stood back and stared at me again for a time. Then one of them picked up a tree
leaf from the pile that had been brought to me that morning and held it out to
me. He said:

“Eat!”

I thought it was a bit
odd—especially the word “eat,” since that was the word I’d had difficulty over
with the Terrible Ones at the beginning. But I was feeling pretty peckish
anyway, so I ate the leaf as they had asked me. And while I was chewing it,
blest if these things didn’t come close up to me, and one of them put out two
of his feelers and pried my mouth open! Then they all three peered down my
throat for a time. I didn’t like it in the least little bit, but what could I
do? When I raised my arms to take the feelers away from my mouth, one of the
other ones wrapped his tentacles round me and there I was—pinioned—and they
were as strong as horses, those things.

Well, after a time they went
away, but they came in the evening and went through the whole performance
again. This time, after I had eaten a leaf, one of them took one up himself and
put it between the two great pink jaws he had. Slowly—very very slowly—the jaws
closed. He stayed with them closed for a time, and then, just as slowly, he
opened them. The leaf fell out on to the ground, a little bit crushed but
otherwise none the worse (which isn’t surprising, considering these things had
no teeth inside their jaws only the little soft knobs—sort of taste-buds, as
Uncle Steve has called them a couple of chapters back).

Next morning these three chaps
appeared again, and then, the following morning early, they turned up with old
What’s-his-name, who immediately set about prodding me out of the cave. I was
being taken to the Big White Chief.

As we went across the cavern I
realized that old What’s-his-name was speaking to me.

“There is one more day,” he
said, “one more day, and then the city of the Enemy will be no more. This night
we shall set out, and to-morrow we shall fall upon them and destroy them.” Then
he paused, and added: “And you shall not be there to see.”

I didn’t like the sound of this
at all. What did he mean? Was it just that I was to be left in the cave, and so
wouldn’t actually see the attack, or was there something else behind it all? I
must say I felt a bit uneasy. There was another thing too. All about us as we
moved among the monsters, there was a sort of
tension
in the air—it was
as if they were kind of expectant about something. And they were bad—they were
just plain
bad
; there was just a sort of nastiness in the whole
atmosphere.

We reached the mound where the
Big White Chief lay. And now the sense of danger and badness was so great that
I could hardly bear it. Old What’s-his-name, instead of stopping me about ten
feet away from the mound, as he usually did during an interview, started
pushing me very slowly towards it. And it seemed to me that the huge pink jaws
of the big fellow were open just a little bit wider than usual.

It was all a bit too much for
me. And I decided not to postpone my plan of escape any longer but to have a
whack at it there and then.

I had remembered, you see, when
I recollected I could jump, that just above the Big White Chief’s mound there
was one of the long light-shafts that led down into the cavern from the open
air. It was about twenty feet from the ground, in the sloping roof. I had
noticed, during my interviews, that the walls of it were rocky and
irregular—there was just a chance that, with my reduced Martian weight, I’d be
able to find enough foot-hold to scramble through it to the surface.

I was barely a yard from the
jaws when a sudden panic came over me and gave me just that necessary spurt to
act. With all my energy I jumped. The height was too great for me to cover in
one leap—I had realized that from the beginning. But you see, there was the Big
White Chief, on his mound, and he was a good ten feet high.

The first jump landed right on
top of his shell. Just for a moment I felt my feet sinking into his soft pulpy
flesh, and then I jumped again—straight for the shaft entrance. It was now or
never. I scrambled and scratched desperately for knobs and crannies to cling
to, jumping and pushing all the time sort of hysterically. A little way up, the
shaft bent over in a slope, and that helped a lot. Somehow—I don’t know how—I
managed it. How long the shaft was, or what time it took to get through it, I
just haven’t the faintest idea. All I do know is that after a nightmare of heaving
and struggling I was out in the open air, on a hillside, panting and gasping
and feeling dizzy in the head.

I was free—absolutely alone
under the blue sky. And so far there was no sign of any sort of pursuit.

I was
free—absolutely alone under the blue sky

Well, that’s really the bulk of
the story—there isn’t very much more to it than that.

When I got through the top of
the shaft I made immediately downhill a little for the shelter of some trees.
Just as I reached them I saw a bunch of the Terrible Ones come pouring over the
hillside from the cave entrance below. They snuffled and peered round the shaft
for a while, then they all stopped and stared in a direction a little to my
right. That gave me the idea that that was probably the direction of the B.P.’s
city—the monsters would have assumed that I was making for it, and so were
looking for me along that line. It was the way I certainly took as soon as they
dispersed from the shaft and went down the hillside again.

Traveling through the mountains
wasn’t at all easy. The forests were very thick in places, with strange plants
in them—clumps of tall grasses, for instance, very fibrous and twiney, with an
unpleasant sticky surface. There were sudden ravines that you came on most
unexpectedly—some of these I was able to jump, others were just too wide, and
so I had to scramble down them, cross the floor, and then scramble up the other
side. Once or twice I came across foraging parties of Terrible Ones in the
early part of the journey—on one occasion I had to jump up and hide among the
thick foliage of a tree while a group of them passed right underneath. And, of
course, to crown all, I was very anxious and worried as I traveled—as I saw it,
it was up to me to get word to the B.P. as soon as possible that they were
going to be attacked. Would I make the city in time?—was I, after all, going in
the right direction?

Well, the day went on, and
then, in the evening, when I was beginning to think that it was all no good,
and that I must be miles and miles away from Doctor Mac and the rest, I
suddenly rounded a shoulder and saw, shining beneath me, the glass city! And
barely a quarter of a mile away, drawing water at a little well, were Uncle
Steve and Paul! I let out a yell and rushed down the hillside towards them.

And there we are—this is where
I came in, so to speak. This is the point that Uncle Steve had reached in his
chapter about what happened while I was in the hands of the Terrible Ones. I’ll
leave it to him again to describe what happened the day after my escape, when
the great ugly brutes attacked us—for they carried out their plan, as old What’s-his-name
had told it to me; they marched from their caves during the night, and in the
morning—But I’ll leave it to Uncle Steve, as I said. For my part, I’m glad this
long chapter of mine is over. It’s taken such a bally long time to write—and
yet I suppose you’ll only take ten minutes or so to read it. Who’d be an
author—it’s such a fag!

Well, I hope I haven’t bored
you too much. It was a bit of a nightmare, eh?—all those toadstooly chaps.
Still, in a way, I’m glad it happened to me—it’s given me something to tell the
fellows at school. Of course, I was lucky enough to escape and all that—well,
if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had anything to tell—or rather, I’d have had a lot
to tell, only I wouldn’t have been here to tell it. So that’s that.

Well, cheerio, and all the best

Yours sincerely,

M
IKE
M
ALONE
.

(A Note on Chapter 10 by Dr.
McGillivray.
When I read the manuscript of the chapter you have just perused, I
asked my young friend’s permission to add a brief postscript to it. I had two
reason for doing so: first, to congratulate him on having written a most
patient and edifying account of his adventure, and second, to offer, in all
humility, an explanation for a part of that adventure that seems to me to need
clarifying.

I refer to the strange episode
of the examining of young Malone by the three lighter-colored monsters.

My interpretation of the whole
incident is this:—You will recall, from my paper on the nature of the Martians,
that I am of the opinion that the creatures called the Terrible Ones evolved
from plants similar in type to the insect-eating plants of our own planet. I
deduced from this, if you remember, that at one time there had been animal—or
at least insect—life on Mars. As it died out, the Terrible Ones adapted
themselves accordingly, keeping their big jaw petals as lingering relics of the
days when they had subsisted on flesh (that they were just a little more than
vestigial ornaments we have seen from Michael’s description of how they could
open and close them).

Now it seems to me that it is
just conceivable that lingering somewhere in the deep race-memories of the
Terrible Ones, there was a dim, imperfect recollection of their carnivorous
days.
The sight of Michael eating probably brought this memory to the
surface
(there is a certain superficial resemblance between mouth eating
and the digestive processes of fly-catching plants). The three examiners I take
to have been scientists or priests—the equivalent among the Terrible Ones of
the Beautiful People’s Wiser Ones sect. They were examining Michael to see what
he was made of—if he was
flesh!

And I firmly believe that in
the end they decided he was of that substance their ancestors had consumed. I
believe they decided to try to consume him themselves!—or have him consumed by
their leader. What superstitious and mystic intentions of sacrifice for victory
might have lain behind the whole idea I do not know—as I have said, one of the
things I most want to explore is this whole spiritual aspect of the inhabitants
of Mars.

At any rate, if I am right—and
I am certain that I am—it seems clear that if Michael had not contrived to
escape when he did, he would have been submitted to the truly ghastly fate of
being
digested alive
in the jaws of the great creature on the mound!