The Angry Planet (3 page)

I was silent for a moment. Then I said:

“Mac, I’m with you. Whatever you say goes for me. This
is your venture from the beginning—I feel myself only too privileged to be in
on it with you at all. If you think, honestly, that we must start to-morrow, or
the next day, then we start to-morrow or the next day. There’s only one thing I
must do—I must make some arrangements about disposing of these three children
that are staying with me.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture of despair.

“Children!” he cried. “Children! You’d delay the most
remarkable journey ever made by man in the whole course of history for a covey
of giggling children!”

“Now, Mac, have patience. Don’t get over-excited and
out of perspective. I’m not suggesting we should delay
the
journey—I’m only saying that I’ve got to think up something to do with the
children, so that I can leave with you with a free conscience.”

“Give them back to their
mothers,” he said gruffly. “That’s where children ought to be—with their
mothers.”

“Their mother is ill,” I said
gently, “or rather, the mother of two of them is ill. The other one’s mother is
in South America, having dinner with the Chilean representative and his wife
.
 . . .
No. I’ll have to send them
somewhere else—not to their mothers.”

“Don’t you know anyone who is
fond of children?” asked the Doctor impatiently.

“Well—there
is
that
cousin of mine in Glasgow that I’ve often mentioned to you—Cross his name is.
He and his wife have a couple of youngsters of their own, and they’re always
filling their house up with kittens and puppies and things. They must be
reasonably attached to children.
 . . .
I believe they’d take my lot
in an emergency.”

“Good,” said the Doctor. “Then
that’s
settled. Make your arrangements straight away, and I shall work out
exactly when it will be best to launch the
Albatross.
I
suspect
it will be some time in the late afternoon either to-morrow or the day
after—anyway, I’ll let you know.”

I walked home to my cottage,
mentally composing a letter to my cousin as I went. It was full of such phrases
as “Sorry to trouble you with such a burden at this extraordinarily short
notice”
 . . .
“Called away on most urgent
and extremely important business”
 . . .
and so on.

I wrote the letter the
following morning. I had no
sooner
finished it than there was a ’phone call from the Doctor.

“Steve,” came his thin excited voice through the
receiver, “it’s this afternoon—this afternoon as ever is! We set off at 4.20.
Can you make it?”

“I can make it,” I said resignedly. “I’ll be over
about 3.”

I looked at the letter to my cousin and sighed. It was
now almost noon. The children had set off for a picnic among the hills about an
hour before, taking luncheon sandwiches with them—they were not expected back
till 6 o’clock at the earliest. As it happened, too, this was my housekeeper’s
day off (contrary to my sister’s suspicions, I did have a housekeeper—a most
amiable and sensible widow). She had gone to visit a sister at Crieff—I had no
way of getting in touch with her.

In the end, I solved the problem by writing a note to
my housekeeper and putting my letter to my cousin in the same envelope with it.

“Dear Mrs. Duthie,” I said, “I have, I regret to say,
been hastily summoned on urgent business. Will you, as soon as you can, send
the children to my cousin, Mr. John Keir Cross, at 22, North Gardner Street,
Glasgow, W.1, giving them the enclosed letter to deliver to him. Explain to the
children that I have had to go off suddenly, and give them my love, and my
apologies for having to interrupt their holiday and change their plans yet once
again. You will find, in the top right-hand drawer of my writing-desk, enough
money for the fares and for all your own immediate purposes. When this money is
done, get in touch with my lawyer, whose address you know, and he will see that
you are kept supplied.”

I added a postscript which, I knew, would cause simple
Mrs. Duthie endless speculation and worry:

“If I am not back at the cottage by six months from to-day,
my lawyer will tell you what to do about giving up the house and so on.”

I wrote one more note, to my lawyer himself. I had
already lodged with him a sealed envelope containing all instructions
concerning the disposition of my small capital and few possessions if I should
not return. This present note was to tell him to open the sealed papers if he had
not heard from me by the end of six months.

All this done, I made myself a light lunch. Then, at half-past
two, I set off for the Doctor’s laboratory. At the top of the hill I turned and
looked back at my cottage. It was impossible not to feel a little sad and
forlorn. I had been very happy in my small house, and perhaps this was the last
I would ever see of it. Indeed, I thought, as I turned to look at Pitlochry
itself, nestling among the hills to my right, this may be the last earthly
landscape I shall ever gaze on: from now on—if I do see any land at all—it will
be Martian land. And what that may be like, I do not know.
 . . .

My cousin never was burdened with the three children—he
never read my carefully apologetic letter. Mrs. Duthie—poor soul!—came back
from Crieff to find that not only had I been called away on urgent business,
but, apparently, so had the children.

What happened was simplicity itself—and yet, as you
will see, it was as wild and complicated in the end as any dream ever was.

I said, earlier, that the children have helped to
write this book. The way it has turned out is this: After our return to earth,
and when the turmoil and excitement had died down, we all—that is, myself, the
Doctor, Paul, Jacqueline, and Mike—returned to my cottage for a rest. I
suggested that during this rest, and while things were still fresh in our
minds, we might well occupy ourselves by writing down some account of our
remarkable adventures—the idea was that we were each to write various chapters
of a book, setting forth the aspects of the adventure that particularly
concerned us. Even the Doctor agreed to contribute (in non-technical language)
an occasional paper.

We did so. It is this book you are now reading. Apart
from altering an occasional spelling and punctuation fault (particularly in
Mike’s somewhat flowery manuscripts!), I have left the children’s chapters
mostly as they wrote them. All I have done is to arrange our various
contributions and fragments so as to present a reasonably coherent story.

With these words of explanation, then, I close this,
my own first contribution to our book. I pass the cloak of the narrator to Mr.
Paul Adam, who now presents to you Chapter II.

MY NAME is Paul Adam and I am the oldest of the three
of us who went to Mars with Dr. McGillivray and Mr. Stephen MacFarlane. The
other two were my young sister Jacqueline (we always call her Jacky) and our
cousin Mike Malone.

Our Uncle Steve—that is what we call Mr. MacFarlane,
though he is only Mike’s uncle really and not mine’s and Jacky’s—suggested I
should write down how we got on to the
Albatross.
Doctor Mac’s space-ship.
So here goes. (Mike and Jacky are looking over my shoulder, so they will keep
me right and see I don’t make any mistakes in the story.)

I’d better begin at the point when we got to Uncle
Steve’s house at Pitlochry for our holiday last summer. We were all very
excited. Everything had been arranged so quickly, and it was wonderful to set
out on such a long journey—over 500 miles—all by ourselves. We had once met
Uncle Steve at our Aunt Marian’s house in London and from what we remembered of
him it looked as if we would have a great holiday. For one thing, he was good
at telling stories, we remembered (he is a writer, so his head is full of
stories), and we reckoned that even if it rained all the time, the way people
say it does in Scotland, then it wouldn’t much matter, for we could sit round
the fire and listen to stories.

Well, after a good journey we reached Pitlochry and
Uncle Steve met us at the station. Then we drove to his cottage in a little
pony trap (Mike was allowed to hold the reins for part of the way) and we had a
whopping great breakfast which Mrs. Duthie, the housekeeper, had got ready for
us. There was porridge with cream—we had never tasted real Scots porridge
before, and it was wonderful—then herrings dipped in oatmeal and fried, and
then hot oatcakes with masses of fresh butter and real heather honey.

That first day we didn’t do very much but just lounge
about Uncle Steve’s garden, though in the evening we did do a little exploring
in the woods, and Uncle Steve introduced us to an old gamekeeper with a beard
and lots of bright colored fish-hooks stuck all over his hat (which had a peak
at the front and back, just like the hat that Sherlock Holmes used to wear, and
flaps that went over your ears when it was cold, though when it wasn’t cold you
folded them up and they were buttoned on the top). This old man, whose name was
McIntosh, promised he would take us out fishing and rabbit shooting and all
sorts of things like that. He had a real beauty of a double-barreled gun under
his armpit—or rather his oxter, as he and Mrs. Duthie called it—and two
wonderful dogs named Lass and Luath.

McIntosh, the gamekeeper

The next day was a Sunday, and in the morning we went
into Pitlochry to Church in the little pony trap. In the afternoon we all went
for a walk, and Uncle Steve took us to a big house which he said belonged to a
great friend of his. This was Dr. McGillivray. We liked him very much indeed
from the first go-off. On our way to see him Uncle Steve had told us that he
was not a Doctor because he went around attending to sick people, or anything
like that, but because he had studied Philosophy. So we thought, you see, that
he would be old and have a long beard, and would be absent-minded and all that
sort of thing. But he wasn’t—he was really quite young, and was great fun.
There were all sorts of gadgets in his house, and Mike and I had a wonderful
time. There was an old Wimhurst machine and we made sparks jump on to our
fingers—oh, a good two or three inches long, they were—and a little electric
shocking coil that we persuaded Jacky to try, and then we switched on the
current suddenly and sent her jumping right across the room (it was perfectly
harmless, of course—in fact, Doctor Mac said that a mild shock like that was
very good for you).

After tea in the Doctor’s study (which was full of
hundreds and hundreds of books), Uncle Steve said that he and Doctor Mac had
something very important to discuss. So they went through to a different part
of the house which they called the laboratory, and we were given permission to
go out into the grounds for a stroll.

Well, it was now we got our first impression that our
holiday was going to be exciting, and that there was something mysterious and
well worth finding out about going on between Doctor Mac and Uncle Steve.