The Angry Planet (23 page)

Malu saw the danger. It would
be fatal if the enemy once got into a position to attack on all sides—to pour
into the city as if into a saucer. With part of the central group of warriors,
the leader of the Beautiful People started to rush to the point where we
ourselves were standing.

“Get to the rocket,” yelled
Mac. “Steve—for the Lord’s sake!—we must get to the rocket!”

We jumped forward, and in a
moment we were on the plateau, with the whole confused and terrifying scene
spread out below us. Mac sprang to the swinging ladder and swarmed to the top
of it to unlock the door. Then he descended again, and at the moment when Malu’s
group and the first of the Terrible Ones to circle the city joined in furious
conflict on the slope just beneath us, Jacky hastened up the ladder and
disappeared into the safety of the
Albatross
.

“You next, Paul,” I shouted.

“Not me,” yelled Paul, “I want
to stay. I haven’t had a whack at these brutes yet!”

“Don’t be a fool,” cried Mac. “This
isn’t any time for heroics, boy—get into the
Albatross
when you’re told.”

Before any of us could say
another word there came a sudden pause in all the seething activity in the city
below. We looked down—and there, in the very center of the scene of conflict,
we saw a sight the memory of which haunts me terribly to this day.

Out of the vast dome in the
middle of the city had crawled the creature we knew as The Center. He stood
with his flaming crown a stab of vivid color even among the violent colorings
of that scene, and he held in his front tendrils a huge crystal sword—a twelve-foot
streak of light, like a great electric spark, as it glistened in the sun.
Facing him—towering above him—was the white and evil shape of the leader of the
Terrible Ones.

The two great creatures faced
each other. And on all sides the battle seemed to die, as deadly enemies paused
in their struggles to watch the symbolic duel being fought. The fleeing crowds
stopped dead and turned to stare.

For a moment there was no
movement. Then suddenly, with an energy that seemed out of all proportion to
his bulk and flabbiness, The Center jumped. High into the air he soared, and as
he fell he brought down his sword with terrible force straight across the face
of the great thing facing him. One of the huge pink jaws fell clean away, and
into our thoughts, even from that distance, there came a scream, icy and
penetrating, of rage and pain and sheer malevolence.

The Center, with surprising
agility, slewed sideways to avoid the tentacles that now shot out from the side
of the white monster to encircle him. He shuffled and gathered his feet-tendrils
for another leap, but before he could execute it successfully, the white
monster, with another beastly scream, slithered in a pulpy heap from before
him.

Too late The Center tried to
adjust his aim. He lost his balance and stumbled. And in that moment the white
monster acted. It was his turn to leap. He hurled his enormous bulk into the
air, soaring like a monstrous and obscene bird. And he fell with a terrible
squelching thud, horrible to our physical ears in all the silence of the scene,
full on top of The Center.

And then, before any more
movement could be made—before any of the contestants could resume the
struggle—there came another sound—another actual sound,
in
our ears.
Muffled and terrible in that supreme moment, it was a vast rumbling explosion.
And all around us the ground shook and trembled, so that we had, in a sudden
panic, to cling to each other for support.

Simultaneously the sky, which
up to now had been blue and pellucid above the scene, grew suddenly dark, and a
great gust or wave of heat seemed to rush in the air all round us. And from the
top of the biggest of the mountains which overhung the city there poured a
sudden fountain of flame.

“My heavens!” yelled Mac, white
and staggered in the unexpected gloom, “it’s an eruption! Lord help us, Steve—the
volcano!—the volcano!”

I did not answer. My eyes were
fixed in horror and fascination on the slope down which the Terrible Ones had
rushed to attack us. Pouring down it now, swift and menacing, was a seething,
glowing tide of lava. And all round us were falling vast smoking boulders—some
of them thudding among the bodies of the close-packed Martians, some crashing
through the great glass domes, leaving huge jagged holes in the curved
surfaces, through which poured volumes of smoke—presumably from the deep-dug
heating shafts that led now, not to gentle subterranean draughts of warm air,
but to a raging inferno of molten rock.

I saw once, in Italy, a live
volcano: but there was nothing in its slow eruption that could compare with the
violent agony of this great hot sore in the body of the Angry Planet.

How to describe the terrible
scene that followed? The lava, sizzling and bubbling as if it were alive,
poured into the doomed city. As it lapped round the bases of the great domes,
one by one they seemed to melt and sink into nothingness—immense shining
bubbles, red in the reflected light, subsiding and vanishing in the tide.
Contorted figures, caught in the molten fingers of this implacable
beast—Beautiful People and Terrible Ones alike—poised for a moment in a brief
agony, and then sank into the stream. The dreadful liquid crept and oozed over
the entire floor of the city—the saucer of the valley became a seething
cauldron—a vast and terrible witch’s brew.

All this—this first part of the
eruption—lasted only a few seconds. When it was over, the second phase began.
Enormous tremors shook the earth, and the boulders began to fall more densely.
Beneath us, on the slope leading up to the plateau, were some hundreds of
Martians who had escaped from the lava—warriors and Terrible Ones, females and
non-fighting males of the Beautiful People; and they all were struggling, as
well as the heaving earth would permit them, to clamber up to where we
ourselves stood by the
Albatross.
The awful thing was, that even now the
lust to destroy in the Terrible Ones had not been satiated; even while
struggling to save themselves they rushed among the Beautiful People, wrapping
their tentacles round their slender trunks and either breaking them in two or
casting them down into the hissing lava at the foot of the slope. Even as I
looked at the scene, I saw one small hapless creature being swung high into the
air and then cast far out in an arc to fall into the tide—and I recognized her,
with a stab, as Dilli, the little female whom we had met when first entering
the city.

Enormous
tremors shook the earth

“Steve,” yelled Mac, “we’ll have to get into the rocket. We’ll
be hit by one of those boulders—we’ll be destroyed. Get the boys up the
ladder—and hurry!”

I nodded. Paul and Mike had
heard him too, and in an instant Paul had started to mount. Mike followed, and,
when he was half-way up, I jumped on to the lower rungs myself.

As I climbed, a boulder shot
past me—I felt the terrible heat of it in my face, and heard the thud as it
buried itself in the sand of the plateau. I looked down. Mac was just mounting
the ladder—the boulder had missed him by inches.

“Mac,” I yelled, “are you all
right?”

“Yes,” came his answer. “Hurry,
Steve—hurry or we’re lost!”

I jumped the last few feet and
staggered into the cabin. Jacky, white-faced, was crouching on one of the beds.
Paul and Mike stood by the doorway, staring at the ghastly scene below. The
whole rocket was vibrating beneath the trembling of the ground—it was a miracle
that the improvised cradle on which it rested had not collapsed long before.

The Doctor swung himself over
the lip of the doorway. His face was pale, his hair flew wild, his eyes stared
in horror.

“Oh my heavens,” he groaned, “this
is dreadful—dreadful! These poor creatures!
 . . .
”

“What are we going to do, Mac,”
I cried, shouting at the top of my voice to be heard above the crash of the
explosions. “Are we going to go back to earth?”

“There’s nothing else we can
do,” he moaned. “I hadn’t wanted to, yet. There’s so much to do here—so much
work! But we’re lost if we don’t go—there isn’t any other way to escape. We
must pray that this ghastly shaking hasn’t changed the direction of the cradle.”

“Mac,” I yelled, “couldn’t we
expend only a little fuel—enough to take us into the stratosphere—and then stop
and land somewhere else where there isn’t any danger?”

“You know as well as I do that
that isn’t possible, Steve—the
Albatross
can’t be controlled for short
flights—once we start we’re into space, and once we’re in space we’ve got to
travel on till we reach earth—if we ever do reach earth. It’s the one——”

He got no further. At this moment
there was an explosion louder than any we had heard so far—it was as if the
entire mountain were blowing up. As I staggered under the terrific impact I saw
that the whole scene was suffused with a red and angry glare—an immense spout
of flame shot skywards from the big mountain-top.

And immediately after the crash
there was a yell from Mike.

“Nuna—Nuna,” he cried, “I’m
coming—hold on!”

And he was over the side of the
rocket again, scrambling down the ladder. In horror the Doctor and I rushed to
the doorway and stared out. Below us, hideous in the glare, a dreadful scene of
conflict was in progress. Nuna and one or two others of the warriors had
reached the plateau, and swarming on to it after them were some half-dozen of
the Terrible Ones. One of these—a gigantic creature with an entire jaw and an
eye missing—had twined his tentacles round Nuna’s trunk, and in the implacable
way we knew, was bending him back and back to break him.

It was this the quixotic Mike
had seen—he was rushing to try to save Nuna, as once before he had rushed to
try to save Nuna.

“Mike—Mike—comeback!” I yelled.
“It’s useless, Mike—it’s useless!”

But he paid no attention—I
doubt if he even heard me. With his sword flashing red he was across the
plateau in one great leap. Once—twice—the red blade flashed—the first time it
severed the long cruel tentacles, leaving Nuna free to stagger backwards and
collapse in a heap a few yards from the foot of the ladder; the second time it
bit deep into the shell of the monster. With the haft sticking out of him like
the haft of Excalibur from the anvil, he reeled to the edge of the plateau and
went tumbling into the lake of lava.

Mike in an instant leapt back,
and, catching Nuna round the trunk, dragged him desperately to the foot of the
ladder. Somehow he got the slender limp form over his shoulder and started to
climb—we, above, staring down at him in a helpless amazement. The whole episode
had taken only a few seconds—we had hardly had time to recover from the first
shock of Mike’s sudden action.

Mike, struggling and
breathless, was half-way up the ladder. And now—final horror—we saw that under
the pressure of the last huge spurt of flame, the lava was being forced into
the air and was falling over the entire scene as a fine deadly rain—the volcano
had become a veritable fountain of lava. And simultaneously with our noticing
this, we saw that one of the Terrible Ones had reached the foot of the ladder
and was gathering himself for a spring—a spring that would carry him full on to
Mike’s back and drag him down to a certain death.

It was Jacky that woke us from
our fascinated immobility.

“Pull,” she screamed, “pull the
ladder! Uncle Steve—save him, save him!”

The Doctor and I jerked into
action. We seized the end of the ladder and, exerting a desperate strength,
pulled it towards us. Thank heaven for the weaker force of gravity on Mars! Our
first great heave brought Mike and Nuna to the door. Paul and Mac grasped them
and dragged them into the cabin. I stood back a little, the ladder still in my
hand—and suddenly it ripped out of my grasp, searing and tearing the flesh of
my palms. The monster below had jumped!