CHAPTER I. THE AIRSTRIP: a Personal Contribution by John Keir Cross

THE FIRST MARTIAN MESSAGE reached me late on a hot summer afternoon in the year 19—; and the impact of it was so fantastic as to make me indeed doubt my senses—to suspect at the least, and until I had proof positive, a miserable hoax by some misguided practical joker.

In the year in question my friend R—, of the Scottish Office of the British Broadcasting Corporation, had telephoned to my apartment in London asking if I could travel to the small village of Larkwell, near Prestwick Airport in Ayrshire, to attend and afterward report on the trials being held there of the revolutionary new Mackellar airstrip.

Roderick Mackellar himself was an old friend. He was a man of some eccentricity but remarkable ability. I had in the past, as a radio commentator, reported at some length on his activities, which were always—partly because of the intriguing personality of the man, partly because of their own true worth—full of news value. Hence the invitation from R—to visit the site of the airstrip on which the inventor had been working for some time.

With Government backing Roderick had been experimenting with a new kind of surface for airplane landing fields. Not only was it of an almost adamantine hardness, thus requiring virtually no upkeep once it had been laid, but the metallic alloy of which it was constructed had certain remarkable properties: the whole surface was variably reactive to transmitted impulses from the planes themselves, so that, in darkness or fog, it was possible for a pilot to guide himself to a safe landing without recourse to any of the old unsatisfactory flare or chemical methods. There were many other virtues too in the Mackellar Compound—I have mentioned only these two as examples of its extreme usefulness.

The preliminary demonstrations had been totally successful. Now, near Larkwell, a full-length experimental strip had been built—a gigantic stretch of it measuring about a mile and a quarter by some 450 yards; and large-scale trials were to take place there.

I reached the village in the early morning. In this factual account I do not propose to say anything of the excitement and color of the scene. Some two dozen publicists beside myself were present—a host of officials from the various Ministries—groups of hard-faced security men—a sprinkling of society notables and a Very Distinguished Personage Indeed, whose own interest in anything pertaining to aircraft development is well-known.

Mackellar was in a haze of delight, his round, smooth face beaming continuously, his whole person, it seemed, enveloped throughout the speeches and ceremonies with a perpetual brown cloud of the snuff to which he was a confirmed addict.

The trials themselves were spectacularly successful—so much so, indeed, that the whole occasion finished much earlier than had been anticipated. The gigantic silver ribbon of the airstrip sparkled in the sun as the planes zoomed, soared and looped above it; beyond, also sparkled the huge rolling sweep of the Atlantic; in the foreground were the groups of excited spectators, clustering around the inventor, applauding almost hysterically as test after test went through with triumphant rapidity. It was as if nothing could go wrong—the whole event was enshrouded in that rare magic of entirely successful achievement: our good, innocent Roderick was for a moment as glamorous, as popular, as idealized as the most romantic of movie stars!

In the early afternoon, after a brief picnic lunch on the sand dunes beside the control hut, the speech-making began. The Important Personage paid glowing tribute to the snuff-covered eccentric and the snuff-covered eccentric himself stammered a few engaging words of thanks and gratification. One by one the limousines rolled northward as the distinguished visitors took their departures, until at last the only persons still at the airstrip were Roderick and me, with young Archie Borrowdale, his close companion and fellow-worker, and the celebrated Katey Hogarth, Archie’s fiancée.

An air of unbelievable peace hung over the scene after the piling excitement of the day. The hot, sea-laden air was suddenly full of a great silence. We felt rested and languid, full of a lingering quiet glory—talked desultorily, and in low voices, of trivialities.

We had strolled out from the laboratory to the grassy edge of the great, lonely, shining airstrip itself. Archie, his young, thin face flushed and happy, had brought some drinks from the marquee which had housed the refreshments earlier. Katey, prettily contented, her gay summer frock a last lovely touch of color against the silver of the runway surface, sat close to the beaming inventor, her arm tucked in his.

“Let’s have some music, K.C.,” she said to me dreamily. “Don’t let’s talk any more—we’ve had enough talk to last us all our lives. Let’s just sit here and think a bit, not very seriously, and listen to something quiet. There’s bound to be something somewhere.”

I unslung from my shoulder the small portable receiver I always carried with me on such outings. In itself it was a remarkable device, made for me by an amateur radio-fan friend. I am not competent to enter into technicalities, but briefly he had contrived a method whereby the casing, of a specialized material, acted as an aerial; and so reception was improved beyond all belief for a set so small. I placed this delicate instrument among us on the ground—found it difficult to balance on the tufty grass and finally established it evenly on the surface of the airstrip itself, some two feet from the edge.

“That’s it,” murmured Katey as I tuned. “Some Mozart—something quiet and nice. No—Schubert, isn’t it?”

I had indeed, after rambling through some jazz and a quiz program, discovered a small Continental orchestra playing the Rosamunda overture and ballet music. The curious thing was that however delicately I tuned, and despite the perfection of the set, there was considerable distortion—and some irritating interference.

Katey hummed gently to herself, echoing the lovely Schubertian melodies.

“Dear, gentle Schubert,” she said softly, breaking off for a moment. “If he could have foreseen that we’d be listening to him in a place like this, after all we’ve known of marvels today! Strange, isn’t it—to think how full the air always is of radio messages and music and voices talking—all the time, all around us . . . and it’s only when you tap them with a little magic box like this that they come to life. I wonder what happens to old wireless waves?—I mean, after we have picked them up like this? I wonder if they go on and on—right out into space, perhaps. I wonder if there are people on Mars, maybe, who could pick them up too if they only had the right kind of apparatus—if they had huge, huge aerials and special kinds of radio sets . . .”

Her voice went on. But at the accidental mention of Mars, my own thoughts had suddenly flown to MacFarlane—to that lost friend of mine who had, so long before, gone off to Mars and was lost there to all human contact.

“. . . I mean,” said Katey, her voice a dreamy whisper in the heat and languor of the afternoon, “—I mean, if only the Martians could. You keep on telling us that there are Martians, K.C. There were those friends of yours who went there. For all we know the air all around might be full of messages from Mars—and if only we could tap them . . .”

Her voice trailed away at a sudden exclamation from Archie Borrowdale. I saw him leaning forward intently toward the little portable, his hand raised, his head on one side.

“Wait, Katey,” he said. “Listen—listen, Roddy. That interference of yours, K.C.—listen . . . !”

I did listen—to the continual interference rather than the music itself, the thin crackling running constantly behind Rosamunda. And there was an instinctive tightening around my heart, a flash of thought and understanding quite fabulous!

“Some amateur somewhere,” said Mackellar, yawning. “It’s Morse, of course. Some amateur somewhere—or a ship out there,” with a nod toward the sea beyond the airstrip.

But I had a wild and different thought . . . ! Long, long before, when Stephen MacFarlane and I were boys together, we had experimented youthfully in wireless transmission and reception, had filled the attics of our house with primitive valves, crystals, transformers, to the despair of our parents. We had developed, as boys do, a private code call-sign in Morse. Now, on that lonely beach—as we leaned forward, all four, to listen more closely to the hazy, desperately weak “interference” behind the sweet Schubertian music—I heard, as I had not heard it for a quarter of a century, that ancient cryptic call-sign, mingling with the other chattering messages in Morse! No one, no one in all the world knew the secret of that call-sign but MacFarlane and myself . . . and MacFarlane was not, alas, even in the world at all—was millions of miles away across the blue bright sky above us, if indeed he even lived. . . .

The gigantic thought choked me. I remembered Katey’s casual words—no longer casual: “. . . if they had huge, huge aerials . . . for all we know the air all around might be full of messages . . . if there were huge, huge aerials!”

Before me, measuring a mile and a quarter by 450 yards, was a huge aerial indeed!—the metallic airstrip itself; and on it, picking up its messages through the casing, was that small specialized receiver . . . !

The air—the still quiet air of that desolate corner of our own revolving globe—was full of messages: from a man lost far in space, 35,000,000 miles away! The thought was enormous—too enormous to be grasped in that first flash of half-instinctive understanding: the coincidence was vast—too vast . . .

But—it had happened!—the coincidence that I, of all Earth’s millions, should be there, at that one spot where contact with Mars was freakishly possible. It had happened indeed; and from its happening I came to a knowledge of what had befallen my two lost friends on that “Red Journey Back” of theirs. . . .

The first Martian message, as I have said, reached me on a hot summer afternoon in the year 19—. The last came some two months later. And it was that final message which spurred us all to desperate action—which took the three young people of the Angry Planet adventure back across space. For the last message ran:

“Save us—in heaven’s name try to save McGillivray and me from them—from . . .” (message broken—an angry wave of bad reception—a pause—then finally:) “The children . . . There is only one way in which you can save us. . . . Bring the children—somehow bring the children! Paul and Jacqueline and Michael . . . Ask no questions—no time, no time to answer; but bring those three to Mars or we are lost . . . !”

So the new adventure began, then; but before it did, another adventure had almost ended: the adventure of MacFarlane and McGillivray on their own second flight to the Angry Planet. It is described in the next few chapters—but I must first, I think, in bringing this personal contribution to a close, sketch out as briefly as possible the rapid sequence of events following that initial moment of contact on the Ayrshire coast.

The excitement among us, of course, was immense. With the utmost delicacy we tuned and retuned the set—until long after dusk had fallen, when we worked on by the light of flares. When we removed the receiver from the airstrip the messages ceased; when we tried replacing the receiver on other parts of the runway, they came back in varying degrees of strength. On that first occasion the best reception was achieved on a spot some two yards to the west (nearer the sea) than the original point of contact.

Even then it must be said that the messages were desperately indistinct—a few isolated words and phrases mingling with the music which still continued from the small Continental station. We made out words like: “. . . establish contact . . . find . . . try to communicate . . .” Once, startlingly clear, there was the phrase: “. . . find John Keir Cross . . . author . . . tell him, tell him . . .” And at periodic intervals there was repeated the cryptic call-sign which I have mentioned—the one index we had at this stage that the whole business was not a hoax.

The messages stopped abruptly just after eight o’clock; and from the few fragments coherently received before the cessation, we were able to gather that the sender would transmit again two days following at the same time and for the same period—from “six until eight”—and the curious postscript phrase thereafter: “Earth time, British Summer Time, as far as we are able to calculate it here.”

We were stunned—utterly dazed indeed as we stood there regarding each other in the yellow flare light. Both Archie and Mackellar were believers in the previous history of McGillivray and MacFarlane; and it was the inventor who cried, “Depend upon it—if it’s the last thing I do we explore the thing further! We can research, Archie—you and I both. If it can work one way it can work the other! We can improve the reception—we can let MacFarlane know that he has established contact and find out how he is transmitting—and so perfect our own methods. Whatever happens we’ll pursue this thing to the end!”

And they did. When I returned from my broadcast in Edinburgh, I found that my two technical friends had already devoted much time to the problem—were confident that the reception the following night would be improved. Alas for our hopes! On that occasion, although we placed and replaced the receiving apparatus on various parts of the runway, results were poor: at only one moment was there any definite sign that MacFarlane was transmitting as he had promised, and even then the messages were broken repetitions of what we had heard on the first occasion.

But Mackellar and Archie continued their experiments. We enlisted the help of the friend who had made the portable for me—found out from him something of the composition of the metallic substance of its casing. We established a small secondary laboratory close to the runway, devoted only to research work on the radio problem. We made contact with the Continental station using the original wave band we had tuned to and persuaded them to stay off the air for brief periods during the hours mentioned by MacFarlane in his messages as forthcoming transmission hours.

And gradually, as the days went on, we achieved success. It will be known, of course, even to those of you not deeply versed in radio mechanics, that Katey’s original idea was quite wrong: the reception we achieved had little to do with the actual size of the airstrip aerial. It was not only because of its sheer dimension that we obtained results, but because of its particular composition in relation to the composition of the smaller receiving aerial in the original portable set—that, and the fact that it was an exposed and directional surface (moved by the very rotation of the Earth) of some area, capable, therefore, of receiving beam transmission with a greater likelihood of success, over such enormous distances, than a smaller but equally powerful aerial. (I am sorry if this seems muddled—it may even be scientifically inaccurate in my attempt to put it all into lay language! The truth is that I must plead indulgence in being lamentably inexpert at any kind of technical explanation. Readers who are curious about this and other technical aspects of the experiments may find enlightenment in the full scientific account of them now being prepared by Mackellar himself, with Archie Borrowdale’s assistance.

In the end, we succeeded in isolating the Martian messages. We built a transmitter with which (through the airstrip again) we hoped to make reverse contact; and toward eight o’clock one magic evening, almost three weeks after the first freak reception, there came one excited chattering sentence in Morse across the vastnesses of space to proclaim that MacFarlane knew, at last, that his own long patient endeavor had met with success—that we could receive him, could converse with him. . . .

In the next few days we went from strength to strength. It was possible now to arrange more convenient times for communication; and in periods ranging from an hour to two hours at a stretch, and mostly in the early mornings, we “spoke” from world to world. From first to last—and again for technical reasons which I am not competent to describe—communication from MacFarlane to us was clearer than it ever was from us to MacFarlane: he told us that he could hear us only imperfectly, even at the best of times—enough only to comprehend that we were listening and had understood his own communications.

Whatever all the final scientific judgments and conclusions, I only know, myself, that we established beyond every shadow of doubt that the Martian messages were genuine—I was convinced of it myself from a hundred and one small evidences long, long before our rescue expedition set out across space and found confirmation in the shape of MacFarlane and McGillivray themselves.

I know only that, indeed; and that as the weeks went by in the remote small hut beside the airstrip, we gradually pieced together the narrative which follows in the next chapter. Katey Hogarth, who once had studied shorthand-typing before embarking on a stage career, sat solemnly by our sides through the hours, noting down and transcribing every word and phrase which reached us—gave up all her professional engagements to do so.

“I was in at the birth,” she announced grimly, on one occasion when Archie commented on her pale looks after many, many sleepless nights. “I was in at the birth, my boy, and I’ll be in at the death or my name isn’t Katey Hogarth!”

She hardly knew how right she was!

So, then, I make my own bow, with apologies for having taken up so much time and space with what is, after all, no more than a prelude to the main adventure, although interesting enough, I hope, in its own right. Apart from an occasional editorial comment and some words of final summing up when all the tale is told, I pass the task of authorship to other hands.

May I say only, as a concluding comment, that although in due course MacFarlane himself worked over and even rewrote the chronicle built by Katey, I reproduce it here, in Chapter Two, almost exactly as it was revealed to us in the little hut in Ayrshire before there was any thought of a possible rescue expedition.

The Red Journey Back, then; how it was achieved and the strange creatures encountered at its end; among them—

Old Jellybags! I told you—just wait!—M.M.