The Angry Planet (22 page)

Let us be thankful that through
his youthful energy and resourcefulness he managed to get away in time.—A.McG.)

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold . . .

IT FALLS to me now to describe
the last tragic day of our sojourn on Mars. It is impossible not to feel sad in
writing of it, as the spectacle rises in my mind’s eye of the crude destruction
of so many hundreds of the Beautiful People. We had not been with them for long—little
more than a week of our earth time; but somehow, in that space, they had
endeared themselves to us. Their way of thinking, their whole approach to
life—these things were utterly charming and simple. Paul has used the word “innocent”
in describing them, and that indeed does seem the only suitable adjective.
Their unthinking benevolence (which one
felt
all the time one was
with
them), their acceptance of things—these were
characteristics that made a profound impression on us. Why they called
themselves “the Beautiful People” it is impossible to say—it was things like
their definition of such an epithet as “beautiful” that we were on the brink of
exploring when we had to leave. But that they were beautiful—in our sense of
the word—there was no doubt at all in our minds.

And so many of them were
annihilated!—utterly swamped and destroyed! It has often seemed to me strange
that we arrived on Mars so shortly before the desolating of the Shining City.
If we had set out, for instance, when we first intended to, how different our
impressions would have been, with no Beautiful People to welcome us—perhaps
only a few remnants of the Terrible Ones, lurking in the hill caverns or among
the ruins of the glass domes. No doubt eventually we would have found our way
to one of the other cities, deeper among the mountains. But that would have
taken a long time—the shape of our visit would have been totally different.

For a brief spell we lived in a
pastoral and delightful way; and then, in one day—one morning—we saw that
sister world of ours live up to its name of the Angry Planet.

We stayed awake right through
the night of Mike’s reappearance. We sat quietly in the tent after he had finished
the account of his adventures, the Doctor and I smoking endless pipefuls of
tobacco, the boys feeding a low smoldering fire we had built for comfort in the
sand. Jacky, I remember, sang softly to herself. There was something
unutterably strange in the thin plaintive sound of her voice going drifting
among the quiet domes and losing itself in the hills. She sang many songs—the
old ones we have all been accustomed to since our cradles—songs that are so
familiar that we forget that someone once actually wrote them: songs like
Barbara
Allen
,
John Peel
,
Swanee River
, and
Sally in our Alley
.
But over and over again she came back to a song that was her own favorite—the
haunting old nursery song:—

The Owl and the Pussycat
went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green
boat.

They took some honey,

And plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound
note . . .

All the time, in the light from
the two moons, we were aware of the still shapes of Malu’s warriors all round
us. The females and the ordinary males had gone into the domes as usual to
spend the night, but the warriors were awake and on guard, standing in silent
groups with their long crystal swords outstretched in readiness. The atmosphere
was full of a sense of expectancy—the tension was unbearable. Malu, close to
us, seemed to lean forward slightly as he strove to catch a message from the
plants ringed all round the city that the danger was close.

The night passed. The moons
grew dim and sank out of sight behind the hills. Now the landscape was flooded
with the gray twilight of the Martian dawn, and presently the sun rose over the
horizon—exactly as we had seen it on the first morning of all. The sky grew
clear and blue, the warmth came back to our slightly chilled limbs.

Mike yawned and rose to stretch
himself.

“Well, it seems as if I was
mistaken,” he said. “Either that or they’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll
have warned everybody and so called off the attack. I vote we have something to
eat, and then—”

He got no further. At that
moment there came a sudden stiffening in the ranks of the warriors. And we, in
our nervousness—our feeling for the community in which, for better or worse, we
found ourselves—heard in our heads, swamping every other thought in them, the
insistent message:

“Danger—danger—danger! The path
by the store cave—danger!”

It was our only experience of
The Voice. It came to us, I am sure, because in that moment we were
exceptionally highly strung and sensitive. And because too, in a mystic sense,
we had that day become part of the Beautiful People.

Malu and the warriors turned
and stared towards the hills at the point where Mike had appeared the evening
before, and we too—all five of us—strained our eyes in that direction. For a
long time nothing happened, and then, suddenly, there was a movement among the
trees. And a moment later there came into view a huge white shape, sickly in
the sunlight—a monstrous swaying toadstool, it seemed.

A huge
white shape—a monstrous swaying toadstool

“The Big White Chief!” yelled Mike. “It’s the Big White
Chief himself! And there’s old What’s-his-name beside him—I can tell him by
that whack that Nuna gave him in the side!”

Surely enough, beside the white
monster, there now appeared one of the Terrible Ones, his bright yellow-and-red
coloring standing out vividly against the sandstone brown of the hillside and
the somber green of the trees. And presently another appeared, and another, and
another, until there was a closely-packed wall of them, staring down at us.

“My heavens!” muttered Mac at
my side, “what beasts they seem—what unutterable beasts! It’s impossible to
believe they’re plants, Steve—cabbages!”

“What are we going to do, Mac?”
I asked. “There are hundreds of them—we hardly seem to have a chance.”

“We can’t do anything but
defend ourselves,” he said grimly.

“With what?” I demanded. “Our
guns don’t seem any good.”

“No, our guns are no
good—bullets are too small for these things—they’re plants, and haven’t any one
set of vital organs. The only way to destroy them is to shear away the tissue, the
way we saw Malu and Nuna do. We’ll have to arm ourselves with swords, Steve.”

“But the children, Mac?—what
are we going to do with them? We can’t expose them to this danger.”

“We’ll have to make for the
rocket,” he said. “Jacky and the two boys can go up into that, and you and I
will stay at the foot of the ladder, to help Malu as much as we can. We’ll have
to rely on the warriors—and the only thing is, they’re not quite so helpless as
they look beside these monstrous things, as we saw out on the plain.”

He spoke grimly, and his jaw
was set. I was finding hidden depths in this quiet and reticent character!

We moved towards Malu, and I
explained briefly to the children as we went what our plans were. We had just
reached the central group of warriors, and were choosing swords from the great
pile that lay near them, when suddenly there was a wave of movement all along
the enemy line high up on the hillside. At an incredible speed the front rank
of the monsters rushed down towards the city, their tendrils flailing. And
behind them came other ranks, dividing in two streams on either side of the
white leader. There was no end to them—they came up in masses through the trees
and poured towards us like a liquid, their pulpy bodies glistening in the
sunlight. It was a terrible, a freezing sight.

Malu’s warriors stood
motionless. And then, at the moment when the enemy reached the foot of the
slope, the front line of them—arranged in a huge arc before the outermost domes
of the city—rushed forward and joined battle with the advancing monsters. From
where we stood, we saw nothing but a mêlée of flashing swords, of writhing
tendrils, of green and yellow-and-red bodies. And as in the fight for the
Albatross,
our heads were full of a high, terrifying screaming.

This first phase of the battle
lasted no more than a few seconds. The impact of the onrushing monsters was too
great for Malu’s slender fighters. They went down beneath the wave, struggling
valiantly but uselessly. The enemy advanced into the city—and still, behind the
front ranks, more and more of them poured down the hillside, the white swaying
leader moving more slowly in their midst, a ponderous and implacable
Juggernaut.

On the level ground within the
city the monsters slowed their pace. Moreover, they had now encountered Malu’s
second line of defense—a thick wall of warriors packed tightly among the outer
domes. The very density of this line withstood the shock of the attack,
powerful as it was. For a moment the antagonists seemed interlocked—it was body
to body—then suddenly the various statuesque groups of the fighters
disintegrated, and the scene became violent and contorted, with warriors
leaping high into the air to deliver the death blows to the monsters, and the
monsters in their turn striving to get their tentacles round the slender trunks
of the Beautiful People.

All the time, females and non-fighting
males were pouring out from the domes on all sides of us. They ran, in panic-stricken
herds, behind the central group of warriors. We, in our position, were in
danger of being jostled and crushed by them as they fled.

“Make for the
Albatross,”
yelled Mac in my ear. “It’s all we can do!”

I nodded, and seized Jacky by
the hand. Then, signaling the boys to follow, I started to struggle through the
seething mass of the Martians.

The
Albatross
lay on the
little plateau above the city—fortunately for us, in the opposite direction
from the point where the Terrible Ones had appeared. We heaved
and fought our way past the
domes, occasionally jumping high over the heads of the Beautiful People when we
encountered a knot of them too compact in their panic to be broken through.
Eventually we reached a point where the crowd was thinner, and then, in great
strides, we leapt forward and started to mount the slope towards the plateau.

When we were halfway up we saw
a sight that made our hearts sink. The rear ranks of the Terrible Ones, on the
opposite slope, were no longer pouring into the city. They were splitting into
two huge arcs and were moving
round
the city. In a few moments we would
be caught, as it were, in the jaws of a gigantic pair of pincers!