The Angry Planet (12 page)

“I doubt it,” he replied. “I
think we may take it that the thought has to be consciously projected in a
certain direction—otherwise we would have known that the plants out there were
busy summoning the Martians to our hollow here.”

“Do you mean that the plants
have it too—this power?” I gasped.

“Undoubtedly. You heard what he
said—or rather, what he thought at us. Probably they only have it in a
primitive way—they could only transmit thoughts of danger, say, or fear—they
couldn’t express any coherent thought to us, for example, because they have not
got coherent thought. But a message that strangers were among them—a possible
source of danger—such a simple thought could be passed from clump to clump till
it reached our friends up there and summoned them.”

I was beginning to understand.

“And that scream we heard—it
was the plant after all?”

Mac nodded.

“A really intense thought like
that—a protest against pain—that would ‘get over’ because it’s simple enough
for the plant to direct, even to such imperfect receivers as us. My dear Steve,
it’s beautiful—it’s perfect and beautiful in its sheer simplicity and economy!
Language is a clumsy thing—half the trouble in the world arises from people not
understanding each other because language expresses thought so imperfectly.
These creatures don’t have to use a clumsy tool like language—they can exchange
pure
ideas!—
think of it—sheer thought!”

He was excited again. In the
glow of a scientific discovery he seemed totally oblivious to our situation. As
far as I was concerned, I had the drift of what it was all about—I did not
understand in detail yet, but I realized at least that communication with the
Martians was possible, and that the thing to do now was to establish friendly
relations with them, and go into the whys and wherefores later.

I looked up at the creatures on
the ridge. Throughout the whole long conversation between Mac and me they had
not moved—they still stood staring down at us quietly. One of the most
disconcerting things about them (I found it so even later, when I knew them
better) was this gift of theirs of complete immobility.

I addressed the leader, putting
all my concentration into the thought I was projecting.

“We are friends,” I said (for
convenience’s sake I shall use words like “said,”

“replied,” etc., in reporting
our conversations—our exchanges of thought, rather). “We do not mean any harm
to you.”

And, rather surprisingly, the
response came:

“We know. If there had been
evil intention in you we would have felt it at the first when you looked at us.
But you have not yet explained. Who are you? You are not like us. Where do you
come from?”

I was puzzling in my mind how
this question could possibly be answered simply and satisfactorily, when Mac
said to me:

“It’s no use, Steve—we can’t
explain anything as complicated as that at this stage: we shall have to wait to
find out how much these creatures know of the universe—there will have to be
some common ground of knowledge before we can exchange thoughts about the earth
and so on. Leave it to me for the moment—I’ve got a suggestion to make to them.
I might as well speak aloud—that gets the thought over just as well, and it
means we all know what is being said.”

He turned to the Martian leader
and addressed him in these words:

“Where we come from and who we
are are difficult things to say. We shall be able to tell you in time, when we
know you better, and when you know us better. What we would like to do now is
to go with you to see the rest of the Beautiful People—you know we are friends,
and so we want to see you and the places where you live. Will you let us come?”

There was a short pause, then
the rustling and quivering again. This, we learned later, was all we could
perceive of thoughts being exchanged among the Martians—a vague disturbance in
the atmosphere, as it were. Finally the leader said to us:

“Yes. You can come. We shall
welcome you as our friends. And we shall hear in time who you are and what you
do among us.”

“Good,” said Mac. Then he
pointed to himself and added:

“I am McGillivray. That,”
pointing to me, “is MacFarlane. That is Jacqueline, that is Paul, and that is
Michael.”

At this there was a
disturbance—Mike plainly was overcoming his sense of awe and strangeness, and
was almost himself again, for he said now, in some indignation:

“It isn’t Michael—I hate
Michael! It’s Mike!”

The leader extended the long
crystalline spear he held in his front tendrils and gravely pointed it at each
of us in turn.

“McGillivray—MacFarlane—Jacqueline—Paul
—”

He hesitated for a moment.

“Mike,” cried my redoubtable
nephew fiercely.

“Mike.”

Then he gestured with the spear
to himself, and we heard, clearly and slowly in our heads:

“I am Malu—I am Malu the Tall,
War Prince and Counselor of the Beautiful People.”

And in some way this seemed to
set the seal on this, our first encounter with the Martians. Our nervousness
went—even Jacky confessed that she no longer was afraid, only timid and (her
own word) “shy.” We mounted into the rocket to fetch some necessities—some tins
of food, lest, as the Doctor explained, we should find nothing edible among the
Martians. We also took some water, some coats and blankets, cameras, and a
small compact recording equipment the Doctor had brought from earth. It was
easy for us to carry all these things, we found, because of the reduced weight
they had on Mars.

Thus laden, we descended the
ladder, Mac taking care to lock the door of the
Albatross
behind us. We
climbed the slope and confronted Malu—Malu the Tall, who was barely a foot
bigger than Mike! And so, surrounded by the strange and silent, but no longer
sinister Beautiful People, we set out on our second Martian journey of
exploration—Mike occasionally, as he gained confidence, leaping high into the
air, even laden as he was, just to show what he could do.

Appendix to Chapter VI by
Dr. McGillivray.
Mr. MacFarlane has suggested I should add a footnote
to this chapter by way of amplifying his remarks on thought transference. There
is little I can say: I consider that he has given a reasonable, balanced and
clear account in the preceding pages of how we first learned to communicate
with the Martians (an account somewhat flattering to myself, albeit: I deserve
no credit for what was, after all, a simple process of deductive ratiocination,
wedded to the type of instinctive perception a scientist is almost bound, by
his training to acquire). It occurs to me, however, that it might be relevant
for me to make a few parenthetical remarks on the subject of thought
transference as we know it on earth.

It has been believed for a long
time that there are good scientific grounds for assuming that such a thing as
thought transference—telepathy, as it has been called
—
is possible. We all know the
simple, almost everyday experience of suddenly thinking of something at the same
time as someone else—very frequently two people, apropos of nothing, will start
on the same sentence together in a conversation. Even allowing for coincidence,
the number of well-authenticated cases of this sort is such as to suggest that
thought occasionally can be transferred direct from one mind to another.

Unfortunately, in the past,
telepathy has been allied to such doubtful subjects as clairvoyance and second
sight—even fortune telling—and so has got surrounded by a mass of superstitious
beliefs, legends, and exaggerations, thus precluding the possibility of a
proper assessment of its validity. However, towards the end of the last
century, several unbiased scientific minds set to work to examine impartially
the arguments for and against. Unfortunately, although some extraordinary
experiments were conducted, and remarkable results obtained, at that time there
were not enough operatives involved for the findings to be considered general
in application—moreover, the experiments, it was considered, were not conducted
in such a way as to rule out
all
chances either of coincidence or
deliberate fraud.

Not long ago, however, a group
of workers allied to and subsidized by an American University, set about
tackling the subject in an absolutely true scientific way. They collected first
a great mass of evidence for telepathy and sifted it to the roots. They then
devised a series of very simple and fool-proof experiments. These consisted of
preparing a set of cards, like playing cards, with certain clearly printed
symbols on them—a circle on one, a square on another, a cross on a third, and
so on. There were five such clearly differentiated symbols, and ten cards to
each symbol—thus fifty cards to a pack.

Two people are now arranged—say
in separate rooms—so that they have no obvious way of communicating with each
other. One of them
thinks
to the other a certain symbol, and the
recipient chooses a card from the pack. Now it follows that since the number of
symbols is known, and the recurrence of each symbol in the pack is known, the
mathematical law of averages
can be used to calculate the number of times
when the right card would be chosen by sheer chance. A regular score of “right
guesses” above that number would seem to suggest—even to the most skeptical and
impartial scientific mind—that the card-choosing subject is being controlled by
the symbol-thinking subject: and if this score goes on through a vast number of
experiments—each one carefully checked and notated by detached observers—then
it can fairly be assumed that thought is being transferred from one mind to
another.

This is a sketchy description
of only one of the experiments that have been conducted over a considerable
number of years—are, indeed, at the time of writing, still going on. After a
vast amount of research, and the ruthless rejection of anything not 100 per
cent proven, the scientific group to which I have referred are of the opinion
that
there is
definitely such a thing as thought transference.

So far, on earth, no real
success in deliberately transferring coherent ideas has been
achieved—experiments have been confined to simple things like symbols on cards.
On Mars, as we have seen, thought transference of a very highly-developed type
is the normal means of communication. It seems obvious that because of their
evolution along these lines, the Martians have developed super-efficient
transmitting and receiving faculties—hence their ability to communicate with
minds like ours not normally adapted to this mode of converse. It is
significant that we humans on Mars, although we grew expert in communicating
with the Martians, were quite unable to communicate by means of thought
transference with each other. We frequently tried projecting thought among
ourselves in the same way as we did to Malu and his companions, but always
without success. In the end, we got into the habit simply of speaking to the
Martians aloud. This meant that we humans understood what was going on, and the
thought behind the speech still got over as
thought
to the Martians.

As far as the ability the
Martians seemed to possess of being able to understand the elementary thought
processes of the plants is concerned, I hope to be permitted to contribute to
this volume at a later stage a paper setting forth my own theories as to what
the Martians were
—
theories that may seem outrageous, but which you may be prepared
to accept when you have heard more about the general mode of life on our sister
planet from the gifted pens of the other writers of this book.

I hope these few notes may help
to make clear and acceptable to skeptical minds Mr. MacFarlane’s remarks in the
previous pages.