The Angry Planet (13 page)

IT’S MY turn again to do a
chapter, but to tell you the truth I’m not very confident about this one. There’s
so much about the Martians and their city and so on to describe at this point,
and I’m not really awfully good at description. However, for the sake of not
letting Uncle Steve down, I’ll have a shot at it—and anyway, I’ll get Mike to
do an occasional paragraph, just to help out. So here goes.

Well, now, I’ll start at the
point where we left the good old
Albatross
to go with Malu and
his friends to see the rest of the Beautiful People (that’s what we’ve all
decided to call them in this book, though as you know, Jacky and Mike and I
really thought at the beginning that they were called the Lovely Ones). The
first thing I want to say is that those Martians could certainly move at some
speed when they tried. Uncle Steve has described their feet—sort of forking
tentacles or tendrils (by the way, I’ve got to hand it to Uncle Steve for his
description of the B.P. in the last chapter—considering how difficult it is to
give anyone a clear idea of what Malu and Co. looked like without just sounding
crazy, I think he’s done marvelously). Well, when they’re getting about, the
Martians move these hundreds of tentacle things one after the other at a great
rate—it looks like a quick sort of flailing movement at a little distance. And
when they do this they simply scoot across the sand, whipping up little clouds
of it as they go. It’s really a most curious sight—their bodies stay quite
upright and still, you see, so that it looks as if they were on wheels.

As far as we were concerned,
well, we had no difficulty in keeping up a pretty good pace ourselves. Walking
and running were dead easy on Mars, because of the lower pull of gravity and
all that sort of thing. Each step was worth about three on earth, so we could
go at a reasonable, easy trot and cover the ground in no time—and it wasn’t in
the least bit tiring either.

As we went (we were making for
the hills on the other side of the plain, by the way), Doctor Mac was having a
conversation with Malu. I don’t quite know what they were saying, because we
were a little bit behind, but I think the Doc was trying to explain something
about us and where we came from and so on. Anyway, you’ll learn all about that
sort of thing later on: the Doc has got another chapter all about his
conversations with the Martians. I’m only concerned with the actual adventure
part of what happened to us.

Jacky and Mike and myself were
speeding along right in the middle of the Martians (Uncle Steve was in front
with the Doc). Curiously enough, although I suppose there was a lot we could
talk about, we hardly said a word. Somehow the Martians didn’t seem very
communicative, and after all you must admit that it was a bit shy-making being
with such odd creatures. We weren’t frightened in the least—it’s very difficult
to describe, but we didn’t feel that the B.P. would do us any harm—there was no
sort of distrust or suspicion at all. I suppose this
feeling
of things
had something to do with the business of thought and so on being transferred.
On Mars you always knew if anyone meant harm before they even spoke—you didn’t
have to rely on things like facial expressions and so on. Actually, the
Martians didn’t have any facial expressions—they never changed at all in
appearance. If they were happy about something, then you just
knew
it—you felt it in your bones, sort of thing. And if they were miserable or
afraid, then you knew that too, although there wasn’t the slightest bit of
difference in the way they looked.

Anyway, as I say, we felt a bit
shy and strange during the journey. Very occasionally Mike had a shot at saying
a word or two, but that was really all that happened till we got to their city.

Insert by Michael Malone:
There was one quite small
Martian traveling alongside me and I thought I’d have a shot at drawing him out
a bit. So I said sort of chattily after a time:

“We’re children, you know.”

There didn’t come any answer (I
found out later that this Martian’s name was Nuna, by the way—they mostly had
short names like that). So I said:

“Don’t you know what children
are? Not grown—the same as Mr. MacFarlane and Dr. McGillivray, only not so big
or old. Young, you know—aren’t there any young Beautiful People?—before they
grow as big as you?” (It seemed a bit comical to be saying this, because Nuna
wasn’t any bigger than me.)

Anyway, this time the answer
came back: “Yes—there are young among the Beautiful People. You shall see the
young. They do not move.”

“Gosh,” I said. “Don’t
move?—that must be awkward. How do you mean don’t move?”

“It is not possible to explain,”
said Nuna. “You shall see, and then you will understand.”

It was a bit of a whack in the
eye, this, but anyway I waited for a bit and then I said:

“Don’t they go to school or
anything?”

“What is school?” says Nuna.

Well, there wasn’t any easy
answer I could think up to that, so I just left it there.

Well, that’s all I’ve got to
say at the minute. I thought I’d chime in here while old Paul was writing about
our journey from the
Albatross
. I’ll leave it to him now to carry on for
a bit. Here he goes:

At the rate we were traveling,
it took us a little under an hour to reach the hills (a distance of some nine
or ten miles, we reckoned). As we approached the lower slopes we saw that
growing on them there were trees—unmistakably trees. They were taller than most
earth trees, although the trunks were quite slender (the wood was very hard and
strong, we discovered later, yet quite light). Where they differed most from
our trees was in the leaves: these were large and bulbous, with dark green
spikes at the ends of them. Doctor Mac told us later that the thick fleshy
quality of the plants on Mars was probably due to the very dry nature of the
soil. It was necessary for them to store moisture in their leaves—sort of
vegetable camels, you know.

We plunged into a thickish
forest of these trees and started to climb. During this part of the journey we
were aware of a sort of tension among the Martians—a curious vague sense of
danger, and of being on the alert against it. The flank members of the group
raised their long crystal lances and kept them pointed outwards.

However, nothing happened. And
presently we burst clear of the trees. We had, during our ascent through them,
rounded the shoulder of one of the hills, and now we were on a kind of plateau,
looking down on a wide shallow valley. And in it—well, here is where I’ve got
to make a shot at a bit of description, and as I’ve said I don’t consider
myself very good at it. However, here goes.

Below us, spread out on the
floor of the valley, were about forty or fifty huge domes of what looked like
glass—at any rate, a transparent substance of that nature. They were
huge—gigantic oval humps, or bubbles, sparkling in the sun. They were of
varying sizes. The smallest, I should say, was about the size of the dome of
St. Paul’s Cathedral: the largest—which was right in the middle of the valley,
towering above all the rest—covered an area easily as large as Olympia in
London. In color the glass was a mild sea-green, though in one or two of the
smaller domes there were long streaks of milky blue.

Inside these domes, and also
moving about on the ground all round and between them, we could see hundreds
and thousands of the Beautiful People. As we descended from the plateau and
moved towards the domes, scores of them formed in lines to stare at us with
those queer fishy eyes of theirs. And
at
closer quarters like this we
saw that many of them were smaller than Malu and Co., and of a different color,
being a very light and pleasant yellow, merging to a gentle pink at the top. In
these smaller ones, too, the crown on the top of the head was much
larger—sometimes quite six inches tall—and much more brilliant in color. We
even saw one or two that were a flaming, very lovely scarlet. These smaller
Martians, we found out later on, were the females. Malu and Co. were males,
though, being apparently the picked warriors of this particular group of the
B.P., they were taller even than most of the males.

Malu led us through the crowds
and past several of the great glass domes until we reached the big dome in the
center. Here we stopped for a moment while Malu went into a sort of tunnel
entrance just outside the wall of the dome. Through the glass we could see him
reappear from a similar tunnel entrance inside and move forward among the
crowds of B.P. inside the dome.

We put down our various bundles
and waited.

“How do you feel, you children?”
asked Uncle Steve.

“I feel fine, personally,” said
Mike. “Boy, this is wizard! I never expected anything like this!”

“Nor did I,” chuckled Uncle
Steve. “I remember back on earth, before we set out, saying something about
life on Mars, if there was any at all, being different from life as we knew it.
But I never thought it would be different in quite this way.”

“Do they know we come from
earth?” asked Jacky. “Were you able to explain, Doctor Mac?”

“Partly,” said Doctor Mac. “I
think our friend Malu understands roughly what it’s all about—the Martians do
have some sort of knowledge of the universe, apparently, and I was able to get
one or two general ideas over to him. But he’s a soldier, as he said. He’s
going to take me to their Wiser Ones, as he calls them—I expect that means
their scientists.”

“Is that where he’s off to now?”
I asked.

“No. He’s gone in to what he
calls The Center—we’ve to meet The Center first, whatever that is. And then the
rest—these Wiser Ones—have to be summoned by what he calls The Voice.”

“It’s these houses I can’t get
over,” said Jacky. “At least, I suppose they are houses. They’re huge! How
could they ever make them?”

“That’s just one of the many
things we’ll learn as time goes on,” said Uncle Steve. “I must admit they are a
bit of a mystery—there aren’t any frameworks to them, as far as I can see—just
huge bubbles. It must have been the sun shining on one of these that I saw
through my binoculars this morning.”

We were still talking along
these lines, surrounded by a big staring crowd of the Martians, when Malu came
back through the tunnel entrance.

“You are to come,” he said. “You
are to follow me to The Center.”

So now it was our turn to go
through the tunnel. It was quite short—a slight slope down and a slight slope
up. And then we were inside the glass dome.

Seen from the inside, it was
enormous—a huge huge tent all over us. The glass was not so transparent as it
seemed, for there was quite a twilight inside—not dark, but at least the bright
sunlight was diffused. But the odd thing was that it was so warm inside the
dome—there was a kind of oppressive clammy heat, rather damp and steamy; it was
like one of the milder hot-air chambers in a Turkish Bath my father once took
me to in London.

There were crowds of the
Beautiful People inside the dome, most of them males, though this lot were
quite considerably smaller and rather paler in color than the Malu bunch—they
were sickly-looking and somehow a little repulsive. They were standing in lines
converging on the center of the huge dome, and we advanced, led by Malu,
through a lane of them.

Presently we stopped before a
closely-packed wall of the B.P.—bigger ones again, of the Malu type.

Malu turned to face us. Then he
said:

“The Center.”

—and stood to one side.

Immediately the wall of
Martians parted, and we saw, before us, on a heaped-up mound of the red sand,
the biggest Martian we had yet encountered. He was not particularly tall—only
very slightly taller than Malu; but somehow there was an impression of a sort
of vastness about him. His trunk, shorter than Malu’s, was very thick—as thick
as an oak-tree on earth. It was his head that gave the real impression of size,
though—it was an enormous pinkish bulb. And it was surmounted by a crown rather
like Malu’s round the edges—yellowish and tufty
—
but mounting towards the
center to a huge cockscomb
—
a brilliant waving
plume of deep poppy-red. The little bunches of tendrils on each side of the “face”
were longer than usual, and they seemed all the time to be wavering slightly in
the air. The “face” itself was very strange. It was somehow almost transparent,
and its substance did not seem as fleshy as on the other Martians. It was kind
of soft and jellyish, and it too seemed all the time to be quivering slightly—a
sort of pulsation, it was, just under the surface.